Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 135: Publicly Correcting Speakers and Forced Into a Dev Role as a Product Manager

Episode Date: December 10, 2018

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I went to an internal company developer meetup recently. The speaker was really new at the topic they were presenting and shared some incorrect information. I didn’t want to correct the speaker in front of a bunch of people, but I also didn’t want everyone at the meetup to leave with incorrect information. How can I be respectful to the speaker while making sure attendees aren’t misinformed? Thanks for doing the podcast! I think it’s great! I recently joined a new company as a Product Manager, this is my first non-development role after 5 years of development. It took me a lot of time to get to this role. During the interview they said I would be involved in development at the beginning of my role to get to know the system and not implementing my own features. After ramping up a bit, I was able to define a bunch of features, but management kept telling me that they are finding it hard to find people and they want me to implement the features myself. I have no problem doing it for my first project but I feel this is going to continue and 6 months from now I will still be working a as developer again. I can leave and get another Dev role but I am really excited about product and I want to continue in this career transition.

It takes more than great continuous deployment skills to be a great engineer. This is Soft Skills Engineering, episode 135. I'm your host, Dave Smith. I'm your host, Jameson Dance. Soft Skills Engineering is a weekly advice podcast for software engineers about non-technical topics. But we do release it every time we record it, so... That's true.

I mean, I guess there's some lag, so never mind. I take it all back. Hey, no, continuous deployment allows lag. It's just, you know, every code change slash audio recording gets released to production. okay well we're doing it we don't batch them all up in like every six months you know ship out 26 episodes yet it'll yeah it'll be our season we have some patrons to thank thank you so much to matthew woodwicks agile ventures charity zach grannon david jackson nick cantar sean clayton and chris hogan these are all of our wonderful patrons who are donating at the level where we thank them

every episode if you too want to be thanked or just to support the show financially you can go to softskills.audio and click the support us on patreon button or you can just do it directly on patreon go to patreon.com soft skills engineering i don't know click the button that way you don't have to remember the link we really appreciate your support sorry you made me cough it just occurred to me that you don't donate to your own show so no how would you know like what the button is i don't know maybe i do under an assumed name wait half of these people are me that explains it i just really want to support patreon and help them get their cut instead of paying for stuff directly but yeah the money that you that you give us helps pay for hosting and editing and

design and stickers and there's actually more stuff to pay for because we do a little bit more than just like put it on the internet so thank you you're responsible for us being slightly more professional yes thanks very much this episode is sponsored by plural site plural site is hiring software engineers data scientists and machine learning engineers in boston and salt lake city go to pluralsight.com slash soft skills to see what job openings are available i think we have a comment from a listener to read today yes do you want me to read it i can read it this is where you read it sorry i went off script on accident okay back on script this comes from a listener named anne anne says hi guys just to comment on episode 125 about slack you can actually disable

the at channel if you are a creator of the workspace or something like that just fyi that was the one about chat etiquette that's right and this is great unless the administrator has disabled the ability to disable it it just makes me sad but thank you and so yeah because i think ann just basically obsoleted that entire episode so thanks for your help yeah compression we're gonna delete episode 125 from the just replace it with that comment yeah all right i'm gonna read our first question this is from a listener named alex i went to an internal company developer meetup recently the speaker was really new to the topic they were presenting and shared some incorrect information i didn't want to correct them in front of a bunch of people but i

also didn't want everyone at the meetup to leave with incorrect information how can i be respectful to the speaker while making sure attendees are not misinformed thanks for doing the podcast i think it's great this reminds me of a time when i started at a new company and went to the hr like intro day you know like the intro session on your first day and the hr person made a clearly false comment that i knew was false even though i wasn't an employee yet but i knew something about the history of the internet and uh i didn't say anything it sounded really snooty i know i'm sorry yeah you're right that's okay i'm sorry i didn't mean to be snooty but it was something i knew that this person didn't and um what i did was i just waited two years and then i asked a

new hire if the hr person said the same thing the new hire said no they didn't mention that and i was like mission accomplished you're welcome now they're only gonna remember that you asked them about it i think dave said something about like uh liquid internet that was part of the early history he asked me a question about it so i think that's how it worked huh okay that's one way to solve it yep this is it's interesting because it's an internal like i would say at a conference talk never do this ever ever ever ever ever ever i run a conference and this is one of the primary reasons why we do not have q a after our talks is because there's just there's just a well actually just if you get 500 people in a room one person will be like my job is to fix all the things they

said wrong in front of this group and then yeah that that sucks for everybody yeah it does especially the speaker yeah it yeah it's no fun i guess i can talk about that for a while but that's a slightly different question this is more like because it's a smaller group because it's internal to the company i could see there being a greater chance that you might want to somehow correct things i think it still depends on what the information is though if it's like i've been playing with this new framework and like here's the api calls and you call them in this order and i don't know it's it's the results of experimentation that's much more informative that feels like an easier thing to let slide that someone would probably reasonably figure out if it's about some core internal system

and it's like here are the semantics of transactions and and you're like no that will make us lose all our data like yeah there's there's some balance of of urgency of information here that maybe there's a point where you you need to gently correct things but i think you could probably let a lot of things slide especially if this is more of an opportunity for someone to kind of practice presenting and just show off new things that they're learning that aren't core like you have to understand this or our business will be in trouble problems yeah definitely there's a spectrum of you know on the one hand trivial unimportant misinformation and high severity take down the system misinformation and i think i would approach this by saying to myself or you

know trying to think to myself what would happen if someone kept this misinformation with them and used it day to day like what's what's the bad outcome and if that bad outcome is something that is like tangibly and obviously bad then i would go about correcting it otherwise i would just let it sit probably yeah it feels like the rules are different for a meeting because it's a presentation it feels like the balance is a little bit more towards uh not publicly correcting someone but if you're just in a meeting and you're throwing out design ideas i think the understanding there is you're you're discussing things you might not understand and you're trying to figure out things that are right and things that are wrong about the ideas yeah for sure but more more of a

discussion format yeah and especially like project work might come out of meetings so you might try and create a plan and then you have to go implement it for six months and some problem with that unrecognized would have longer consequences but i don't know if it's if it's something that they're learning that they're interested in it it'd be especially if they're new to the topic i think it'd be hard to correct them and not have it smoosh them a little bit a little smooshy yeah you could tell them privately yeah i would i would almost definitely do that you know just a matter almost approach it as a matter of personal curiosity and just say hey i heard you say this can you double check that i had a different understanding but i'm not sure i could be wrong

you know and then i think it could be a great discussion yeah i'd be respectful to the speaker making sure they aren't misinformed i don't know they're definitely at odds it probably also depends on how core the misunderstanding is if they got some little details wrong it feels a lot easier to say hey great job i understood it this way for these few things like in the moment you mean yeah or or in q a afterwards or when you're discussing things or whatever but if it's if it's like a core tenant that they have misunderstood then you're kind of just torpedoing their whole presentation and yeah i don't think there's an easy way to do that without making them feel like you're torpedoing their whole presentation

you think it's hard to torpedo someone's presentation without making them torpedo of the presentation you're saying you have secret techniques stealth torpedo it hits the enemy ship and the enemy ship doesn't sink uh so like a nerf torpedo or exactly just a little nudge a nudge pedo i think some of this is a personality thing too because i know that i would not be inclined to do this surprise surprise right dave yeah not surprised at all i think there are people that are more blunt and that are that are more concerned with the absolute facts than people's feelings maybe and they might just be like hey i think that's wrong and because i have to be in the middle of everything a part of me thinks like i don't know maybe that's okay maybe you need

somebody to say hey this thing is wrong um i would say you got to be pretty sure that it's not a difference of opinion yes you're that you're not saying like well i believe that i don't know this iteration approach is is better and you were wrong about suggesting this other thing if if it's not a factual incorrect thing then you're just trying to pick a fight that's what meetings are for fights yeah that's when you bring up tabs versus spaces not in the presentation i you know i worked with an engineer long time ago who you could not give a presentation without getting a well actually from this engineer yeah and it just happened so much it probably happened i don't know 10 times a year 20 times a year and i just remember getting so tired of it and

i knew that i would give presentations and i knew i was going to get one of these like every time you know and and in most cases it was a topic or like an it was ancillary to the topic it was like oh i just want to correct you know excuse me one thing i want to correct here you know you had you had a semicolon there just want to point out this syntax does not call for semicolons there you know um sometimes they were substantive uh but they were never gentle and i and i realized that it probably created an environment that was hard for less thick-skinned people to present in you know so you got to be careful i think and if you're making a habit of this if it's like every meetup i go to has misinformation that i want to correct it's not a habit dave it's that

you know all the right answers and everyone else just does it and it's weird you're just always surrounded by people that don't know the things you know and you got to fix it i know the odds are against this being the case but it is the case i don't have a problem everyone else is just wrong all the time everyone is wrong am i the only one seeing this so i mean tread lightly i would say especially if this is like the 10th time this year that you've had this idea yeah keep a counter for sure yeah you have a little introspection on it yeah you get like one that's a good point yeah that's that's actually not a bad way to think of it is like i have a quota not a quota what's the opposite of a quota i have a rate limit of one per year you know one person one per quarter

do i want to use it for this you know yeah it's like your ultimate ability in a battle arena it's like do i want to use it or save it yeah if you waste it on the semicolon then you can't use it on the the prod outage yeah actually i disagree and prod outages are bad like oh i can't say it i already i already pointed out the white space indentation issue there i think there is some truth to that though where you might become kind of a a person who cries wolf i don't know if if you're the one who's always well actually everybody it dilutes the effectiveness of your well actuallys because everyone's going to just roll their eyes and be like, there goes Dave again. I'm the boy who cried well actually. Yeah, the boy who cried

well actually. Yeah. So I think just, I would want to flip this around a little bit and say, what is it like to be in the speaker shoes? And quite frankly, when I'm given a presentation and someone does this, I really, I roll with it and I like it. I embrace it. I take corrections like that. I say, thanks for calling that out. I'll look into that. Appreciate that. And then I'll look into it. And if I was wrong, I'll report it to the group and say, hey, I was wrong. And I've made a habit of this. And the consequence of that habit is that people know that they can call me out when I'm wrong. And I really like that because I do not want to be the engineer who people are afraid to correct. So it's a little bit of a flip side view of this, but learning to deal with well

actually is actually a pretty valuable skill. It's kind of the, there's a name for that rule where you're supposed to be liberal in what you accept and conservative in what you send, some API principle. Do you know what I'm talking about? Yeah, yeah. This is the thing that ruined browsers. It's strict in what you send and generous in what you accept or something like that.

Yeah, seems like it applies here where you take well-intentioned criticism and encourage it, but you kind of have a pretty high bar for when you think it's worthy of interrupting people in their presentations. Yeah, exactly. and and actually that fits the numbers ratio too because the audience you know you might have 50 people in the audience and if everybody only comments 10 of the time then you're going to

get five well actuallys for every presentation you know yeah yeah so you have to beat out the other well actuallys in terms of relevance yeah my well actually is so much more actually yeah All right. Have we answered the question? I think so. Good luck, Alex. On to the next. We would like to bring you a message from our sponsor for this show, Pluralsight. I knew that I was not great with CSS, but thanks to Pluralsight, I got to learn exactly how not great I am with one of their skill IQ skill assessments. I was not surprised to learn that 50% of engineers are better than me at CSS. Listen, Dave, I've got some bigger numbers. 71 percent of engineers are better than me at css according to this assessment

so there's some nifty stuff going on when you take it besides the shaming it did to me the algorithm adapts the difficulty of the assessment to how you respond so if it if it's too tricky if you get a lot of answers wrong then it makes the questions easier and vice versa too and they're using item response theory bayesian stats machine learning data science that kind of stuff. I could tell it was dumbing the test down for me the more I took it. So we're talking about this, first of all, because it's kind of cool to learn where you are lacking. But also, Pluralsight is hiring to work on this kind of thing. They're hiring folks to work on machine learning, data science, and engineering. That's right. So I actually know

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Check it out. Thank you, Pluralsight. All right, I'll read our next question. This comes from an anonymous listener who says, I recently joined a new company as a product manager. This is my first non-development role after five years. It took me a lot of time to get to this role. during the interview they said i would be involved in development at the beginning

to get to know the system and not implementing my own features long term after ramping up a bit i was able to define a bunch of features but management kept telling me that they are finding it hard to find people and they want me to implement the features myself i have no problem doing it for my first project but i feel this is going to continue and six months from now i will still be working as a developer i can leave and get another dev role but i am really excited about the product and i want to continue in this career transition it sounds kind of like getting hired as a manager and then you show up and there's no team yeah wait we had that question once i think i think we did if it feels similar where yeah they just you get to product manage and then you get to

do that also you get to product build isn't it the best of both worlds people always love to complain about the product manager right yeah now it's you yeah if only you didn't have this product manager making you build the wrong thing you could truly do great work maybe that's the inner strife that is really the root of the problem here is ah it's all this self-loathing a project manager won't get off my back stupid roadmap i hate this thing i do that every time i make a roadmap the next week i'm like what moron said it would take two months to do this thing i i hate past week jameson planner oh man you know that is so true at the risk of waxing philosophical i often look back at myself even last year and think i was so stupid

and i keep wondering when that's gonna end well it already did because that was past you in your new day no but i mean when am i gonna stop looking back and saying last year i was stupid like at some point i'm gonna be like no last year i was fine and now i'm still fine yeah that just it just happened do you hear this noise that's the noise that okay the universe made i just crossed the bridge you mean yeah okay now you're smart and everything you do from now on will be smart and next year i'll look back and maybe the opposite will start happening last year i was so smart why am i so dumb now uh okay i tweaked it and it's just flat you will not improve or decrease from now on all right so what does anonymous listener do here product manager

slash forced into a dev role does this seem like a bait and switch move to you i guess it could be it's surprising to me that they didn't know that they have to know right i don't know it seems like it could be a bait and switch or it could just be them being bad at this but bait and switch feels like a reasonable expect or explanation it could also be that the the company decided okay we're going to launch this new product and we're going to just hire a completely new team that's going to do all functions so product manager uh technical lead engineers we're going to hire all of them and they got the pm first and now it's like well it could be an ordering thing it could be but it could be the project direction change and there was some new thing that they were going

to hire a team for and now they're not doing that. I think it's been happening for six months. I think you have to tell them this, right? You have to say, hey, I was hired to do a product manager role and I'm not doing that. What day will it happen? Yeah, I would totally support that. And that probably sounds really scary because I think as an employee, people sometimes feel nervous going to management and saying, I feel like I've been wrong. Do you need to fix it? Because sometimes they worry that the fix will be, okay, you're fired. Yeah. Oh, there's someone who's unhappy about their work at this company. That's one way to solve it then. Stamp. Don't worry. I made the problem go away. So I think that's the concern,

but if the company truly is hiring and they want to grow in this area, I wouldn't be too worried about that. And I would go after that conversation and say, I was hired as a product manager. It's what I want to do. What do we need to do to make that happen? How can I help? And the good news is you have experience as a software developer, which means you can help in the hiring process potentially. So maybe you could jump in there and help source candidates and interview them and build your own team. I would be worried about getting pushed into this and then giving off the perception that everything is fine because maybe they do need a developer for a year and then later on they're going to need a project manager or product manager sorry that was super

offensive to some percentage of you probably but and then the company will think oh anonymous listener moved into development and they're fine and we don't want to disturb them so let's go hire a product manager yeah let's hire a product manager oh that would be like the worst case outcome we can't afford to lose anonymous listeners developer productivity so yeah no one knows a new project no one knows the system we can't possibly do without their six months of knowledge oh man if you work yourself into an indispensable position that's not the position you want yeah you just cemented it yeah that's the that's one of the dangers i think i i think you do have to make it clear that you really are pumped about this product manager role and you would like to

know when you will get to move into that and i think you have to be open to the possibility that it might never happen that for organizational reasons or nefarious reasons whatever whatever the result is whatever the cause is the result could be that it'll always be six months away and it might never happen yeah i was able to define a bunch of features but they were having a hard time they want me to implement the features myself i think if worse comes to worse and you have to just leave to get a different product manager role. I think you can start to look at this as an experiment of how to get the most out of the limited product manager time that you have when you're split between that and development. So it's kind of a little lab where you get to,

in a way, it positions you even better because you've been a developer and now you get to see much more directly the consequences of your decisions because you're the one implementing them whereas if you just were a product manager you'd have to go through another layer to get that feedback of we decided this thing how did it work out in practice so i think you could spin it as like and this is why i'm even more qualified for my next product manager role interesting very clever way to think on the bright side jameson thanks if they ask you so does that mean you've only been doing half product management and you're half as experienced as you would have just say what in the world can that be and then hide under the desk yeah or just say what's that

over there and then when they when you regain their attention change the subject if you hide under the desk we will come and help you we'll be there yeah send us a tweet we'll be there getting on flight now i'll be there in four and a half hours to rescue you from under that desk we'll create a distraction in the lobby dave kicks the door down he's giving jameson a piggyback ride we both pop in what's going on here what is that the product manager we've heard so much about who's not a developer at all just a full-time product manager yeah hmm yeah it's tricky what what about uh trying to carve out time from other engineers at the company to work on your product maybe if you could kind of uh you know at first under the

table try to gauge interest talk to people say hey i got this cool new product no one's working on it totally greenfield it'd be really fun get a few people interested and then go to management and say hey you know i've got these three engineers they said they'd be interested in working on it could we share time maybe do 50 50 with this product and some other part of the product hey you know all that work that they were doing that their manager was really interested in them doing what if they didn't do it and they did this other thing i want them to do instead yeah i think i think going to some kind of management and presenting that as a plan is important because otherwise the knives could come out it could just be like rogue product manager is

trying to steal my developers time i think i think that's a degenerate case of product management in some orgs where they don't have any resource allocation power and so they do just have to go around hat in hand asking people to help build their thing i like that hat in hand image it's cool yeah it doesn't sound very cool it sounds horrible but it's vivid i like the old timey look though yeah i'm imagining like wingtip shoes three pieces i have some sprint allocations may i have some story points you want more just go build it yourself i mean that's what they're doing

yep i you might just have you know here's the thing as a product manager becoming a thorn in people's side is actually a very valuable skill. Learning how to like poke and prod the organization to do what you need it to do is really valuable. I mean, obviously it risks becoming that annoying product manager who's constantly bugging you, but organizations have inertia and inertia is the enemy when you're trying to build a new product. So if you learn how to go around and just poke and stab here and there, probably not stab, let's stick with poking. Sorry. Some of my internal anger just leaked out what you need to do is ambush people and and the more you can poke and prod and get things done i think the better you'll be so this is this might actually be a training

ground for you maybe this is an elaborate boot camp that you don't even know you're participating in okay so a year from now your your boss is gonna pop up and say gotcha look how qualified you are for the role now and hand you a mortarboard and a diploma you've graduated this is our secret year-long project product there's something wrong in my brain where i cannot say product manager i know it's weird uh but yeah that was it that was our that was our secret training you graduated just like some college it includes hazing so sorry about that but here you go diploma and here's your team you've earned it they were hiding behind this two-way mirror the whole time they've actually been building your features this

entire year um and we launched the product and it was great you did it oh that would be amazing if there's any company that backlog watch and then just click a button and then it all goes done yeah finished finished finished finished finished every story clicks down yeah and you cry tears of joy this this would be amazing but there is literally no company on earth that is that put together to be able to pull something off like that just not even close now i want to do it i'm raising bc funding it'll take i'd say 10 million and we have to identify the right target but we'll get them good after a year and we might even have a product at the end yeah yeah i mean bonus if you do well yeah that's how the real the real objective is a product manager

or their life is destroyed they don't trust anyone ever again that's probably true either way oh well good luck it's a tricky situation it was until we helped you're welcome oh it's a good thing you asked us because i don't know what you would have done without this gold mine all right did we answer it fully i think so all right i think i think people are pumped to find out where they can get their own questions answered and the answer to that is go to softskills.audio we have a button on there that takes you to our google form it's just called ask a question um thank you very much for listening if you enjoyed the show please please tweet about it share with people and we will catch you next week