Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 143: Dealing with meeting interrupters and setting work limits

Episode Date: February 4, 2019

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I have noticed one of my coworkers, a fellow senior software engineer, often interrupts people during their meetings with his comments and thoughts. While I’m not against voicing opinions during a meeting, he does it so often that he takes over meetings. Some of his points are off-topic. He’ll cut off the presenter or another colleague (who displayed good etiquette) mid-sentence, not letting them finish their thought and derailing the flow of the meeting. In our last meeting I tried to quickly respond to his interjections rather than let him finish so we can keep the meeting moving. I thought he would take the hint to think a little more before interrupting. Ineffective so far. I think next time I will recommend that all questions and concerns be held to the end so we can get through all the meaningful content before letting him speak. Any other suggestions on how to deal with people like this? Hi guys! I have a question about setting limits to your work. I hear that its a common practice among developers to set restrictions to their work like turning off slack notifications when at home, not staying late at work, etc. This seems like a healthy approach, and I like it. But I can’t bring myself to do it. I’m a successful developer, I love my job, and I love the work communication in our chat. I have no problems struggling through the workday, but I have problems not falling into work in my free time. I have a lot of friends, a lot of hobbies, I’m definitely not bored outside of work. But still I always have this inner desire to open and read the workchat when I have a free minute, or finish an interesting feature in the evening instead of reading an interesting book. I can’t say it makes me unhappy in some way or affects my private life - I still will go and see a friend if I’m invited and still will attend my yoga class on a normal schedule - but this ““desire”” distracts me sometimes and that’s not normal either. Am I right?

It takes more than great unit test mocking skills to be a great engineer. This is Soft Skills Engineering episode 143. I'm your host Dave Smith. I'm your host Jameson Dance. Soft Skills Engineering is a weekly advice show for software developers about non-technical topics and occasionally unit testing. Only at the very beginning though. We have a couple, not a couple, we have several wonderful patrons to thank. Thank you so much to these folks for supporting the show. Thank you to Chris Hogan, Nick Kantar, Zach Granin, Matthew Wodewicks, David Jackson, Arnout Engelen, Fedor Rusik, Agile Ventures Charity, good old Sonic the Hedgehog, and Sean Clayton. They are contributing at the level where we give them a shout out every single

episode. So thank you so much. And thank you to everyone else who has contributed or is contributing at a lower level. We still appreciate it. If you want to contribute, you can go to softskills.audio and click support us on Patreon. All right. Should we read our first question? Let's do it. Let's just get right into it. Should we read it together at the same time, or should only one of us read it? I think you should start, and then I'll cut you off partway through. Okay. Just for flow. All right, this comes from an anonymous listener who says, I have noticed one of my co-workers, a fellow senior software engineer, often interrupts people during their meetings with his comments and thoughts. While I'm not against voicing opinions during a meeting, he does it so

often that he takes over meetings some of his points are off topic he'll cut off the presenter or another colleague who displayed good etiquette mid-sentence not letting them finish their thought and derailing the flow of the meeting in our last meeting i tried to quickly respond to his interjections rather than let him finish so we can keep the meeting moving i thought he would take the hint to think a little more before interrupting ineffective so far dave i'd really like to talk about unit tests right now i know you're saying words but i don't care about the words you're saying i would like to address those comments jameson but i won't okay i think next time i'm going to by the way i'm going to continue quoting the listener here i think next time i will

recommend that all questions and concerns be held to the end so we can get through all the meaningful content before letting him speak any other suggestions on how to deal with people like this have you worked with someone like this or been around someone like this yes every team every team this does feel like a trope in software i don't know if it is in the world in general even but it does feel like it's pretty common to have someone who isn't uh doesn't doesn't respect conversational etiquette and i feel like i've seen it it all it takes is one person to lower the the quality of conversations because you have to fight back against them and the most common way of fighting back is interrupting even more and then it just

becomes this interruption battle and and quiet people who aren't willing to interrupt just don't say words ever yeah but that's fine because everyone knows quiet people are dumb don't have anything important to say if they were smart they would have said something yeah you just you asked me if i've ever known anyone like this or seen this happen but you forgot one very important question are you this person yes to which i say sometimes yeah that's a good point i don't know if i interrupt people but i definitely derail meetings sometimes with random thoughts me too it's just so fun

yeah huh well how would you fight yourself well see i am i am simultaneously a meeting derailer but i am also hypersensitive when someone ever says hey guys i think we're a little off topic i am just like insta shamed and i just shut down completely go right back on topic you have a highly tuned sense of shame oh yeah very sensitive yeah so all it takes is a swift day that's off topic and then and then you're gone if you so much as raise an eyebrow at me someone reaches for their drink on their desk and you interpret it as them pointing at you i i just i love a good meeting tangent though oh man usually mine are usually my tangents are all

comedy driven oh man uh that doesn't sound like this guy no probably not sounds like this guy's not easily shamed yeah clearly and maybe they're hilarious and the question asker just forgot to state that but yeah so there are two suggestions one is interrupt them even more and just hint in your interruption of their interruption that it's bad to interrupt people and then the other suggestion is kind of like passive aggressively say hey please no one no one no one interrupt this meeting while staring right at the guy yeah this person and then have a meeting without any questions or comments bob this includes you yeah and then you snap in front of their face while they're not paying attention

that part or something yeah eyes on me bob yeah oh my gosh okay so i am while i am also guilty of derailing meetings with great comedy and fun that everyone loves and really they're happy to be derailed because your brains are refreshed and the ideas are better after. Yes. So while I am that guy on occasion, I am also a fairly fearless meeting restorer. I can bring meetings back on track. And sometimes I get a little angry because, you know, it's actually very easy when you have a bunch of senior opinionated people for a conversation to go off track. And even two times this week, I've done this at work. And one time I did it pretty forcefully and said some things in heat that I probably shouldn't have. And I actually reached out to

a couple of the people involved later and apologize just to say, you know, I'm sorry I shut you down so hard. I was feeling frustrated and I shouldn't have done that. And I think it was okay. I don't think they hate my guts too badly. I think that both of the ideas that have been proposed here, which is telling everyone in the meeting that they have to wait to make comments until the very end, and the other one where you just quickly respond to the interjections and try to answer them subtly, I think these are both really bad ideas. The first one is it just makes everyone suffer, pushing it all to the end. And the second one, obviously this person doesn't take subtle hints. And so the way I do it is I just say, hey, we're off track here. I want to

bring us back to the point of the meeting. And if there's something important that needs to be covered, I give assurance that we'll come back to it or schedule some other time to go through it and give my personal commitment to arrange that. And that tends to work. People tend to get the message pretty quickly yeah i agree that makes a lot of sense and i've seen it work pretty effectively to just say hey let's stay on track because you probably have the backing of every single other person in that meeting besides the person doing the interrupting everyone wants to stay on track everyone wants to get through it no one wants to hear this person's random digressions and interruptions so and and if they're a senior you mentioned senior software engineer it means

they've been working for a while that means they should kind of know how it works and and you're probably not super likely to offend them deeply by saying hey can you stop interrupting can we stay on track yeah they've come this far you're not gonna crush their soul yeah yeah and and i suspect that people like this i mean there are lots of cues that they are ignoring by doing this and one reason for that could be that they just don't read subtle social cues well or another reason could be that they they just need they need direct communication to understand i guess that's the same reason so you saying directly like hey please stop interrupting is maybe less likely to offend someone that thrives on direct communication and struggles with subtle things

yeah for sure i think we've talked about that before kind of how some people who are more forceful are less sensitive right yeah yeah they need a little they need a little high amplitude signal okay all right i want to see you in action dave can we practice wait i mean this whole podcast is a derailing like tangent yeah but i'd like to change gears and talk about unit tests again and mocking and i don't really know a ton about it but i'm sure i can say words about it and i will i'll keep saying more and more words um and not stop no matter what you say dave i could listen to you all day jameson oh okay so you just you just go along for the ride i love it yeah i mean what what would you say specifically would you just say

hey can we stay on track so i i usually break my comments into two parts the first one is i validate the person's comments that they're an important topic and then i assert that they are a topic for a different meeting with a different audience and so i'll say something like yes i i do think that mocking skills in your unit tests is very important and valuable part of a complete unit testing package. And I would like to talk about that at a different time. Is it okay if we table that and now get back to the topic for this meeting? And I'll set up some time for us to go through that other thing later. What about the interruption part though? So that smoothly handles the derailment, but it doesn't handle just talking over people. I mean, you could just

say hey can you not interrupt people so i would have to see this one i was thinking more yeah i was just thinking i was focusing mostly on just the derail tangent but i haven't really thought about a chronic interrupter like how do you shut them down i mean i guess duct tape do the job i think you have to address that one directly i don't know that you can subtly hint not to interrupt people like yeah just see it happen and say hey please don't do it and and like in the moment or later i think you could do it in the moment i think because that's that's when it affects the meeting right and maybe you talk about it with them later but you sir are interrupting halt

yeah jump up on the table hold up your laptop like a talisman shake it in their face say be gone no but there's some power dynamics probably in play here where presumably there are people less senior in the meeting maybe there are people uh that don't look the same way you do or or feel a little out of place already and they're probably very unlikely to stop interruptions so you have i think you almost have a responsibility to make sure that people's voices get heard equally and to rein this in and i think you could just say hey can you stop interrupting people and let them finish their thoughts before you talk over them yeah i mean it is a little spicy but i don't know they shouldn't be interrupting people i would yeah i

agree with you but i would probably handle it offline i would probably say hey i want to talk to you in person and then and then say something like i've noticed a pattern of interrupting and i think you're preventing some of the other team members from sharing because they're afraid of getting interrupted yeah you could say you could just say like hey i'd like to hear them finish their thought to instead of hey you stop interrupting yes and i have done that when i've noticed that someone gets cut off by someone else i'll usually wait for them to finish and then i'll say oh so and so i think you were i don't think you finished your thought can you let us hear that now because a lot of times interrupters don't know they're interrupting it's like that

same sensitivity thing that makes them an interrupter i've also seen it in people that just generate ideas and they're they're they love solving problems and so they'll often jump in because they have an idea right then they have the solution and like they want to share it with people now you're hitting a little close to home there jameson am i an interrupter or am i just really good at generating new ideas and they expire they have just a really short half-life if you don't get them out there if i don't get them out there they're gone yeah i am a talker though i'll tell you that boy i gotta i gotta be a little more reflect yeah what's the word introspective now great i'm gonna go to go to work next week and be all self-conscious

this is just a master class of my subtle way of of answering the question you you start a podcast with someone that has this problem you wait until a question three years later directly hits at them and then you answer it together hoping to trigger some self-realizations well you did it nice you did it wow all right hanging up yeah i i think the broad agreement we have is that you need to be direct and don't punish everyone else by saying no one else can talk oh for sure this is a this is a classic example of creating a process to solve a problem and then the process becomes a new problem that's actually worse than the original problem yeah because it turns all the meetings into presentations and that's some of them are probably presentations but not every

meeting is a presentation okay here's what we're gonna do we're gonna do the powerpoint then everyone's gonna clap for 10 seconds and then after the clapping we'll have a brief q a yeah all right well did we answer the question i think i think so good luck you need to be armed with confidence i'd say rush in there and do what needs to be done with vigor and yelling you want Yeah. And oh, we forgot to mention, make yourself taller. That's so important, right? I mean, in these meeting settings, you want to take the room back, stand up on something. Booster seat. Oh, I did say stand up on the table. You did. You did.

I guess you should have some, you have nowhere else to go to get taller if you're already on the table though. So maybe you need, yeah, you need some gradients in between. Yeah. Now we've answered the question. Okay, great. I'm going to read the next one. This is from another anonymous listener. hey guys i have a question about setting limits to your work i hear that it's a common practice among developers to set restrictions to their work like turning off slack notifications when at home not staying late at work etc this seems like a healthy approach and i like it but i can't bring myself to do it i'm a successful developer i love my job and i love the work communication

in our chat i have no problems struggling through the workday but i have problems not falling into work in my free time i have a lot of friends a lot of hobbies i'm definitely not bored outside of work but i still always have this inner desire to open and read the work chat when i have a free minute or finish an interesting feature in the evening instead of reading an interesting book i can't say it makes me unhappy in some way or affects my private life i will still go and see a friend if i'm invited and will still attend my yoga class on a normal schedule but this desire distracts me sometimes and that's not normal either am i right hmm so basically this person works a lot outside of work even and doesn't feel bad about it but feels like they should

feel bad about right yes okay you should feel bad but you don't i absolve you of feeling bad there that was easy yeah hmm yeah this is interesting so i am this person maybe dave this is the flip side of the last question where you started a podcast with me to get me to have some introspection that was i don't go to yoga but yeah i work more than i feel like i should but i like it huh i'm this person too i i'm a compulsive oh no i mean i check my email all the time i check the chat all the time and i don't know does it make me bad i mean okay i think it could be bad because it could be having negative effects on you that

you're not seeing or it could later have negative effects on you but you could also probably do it and have it be fine i mean the standard advice is like go have a life and and stop working so much but if you i mean what if you your life choice is that you want to work more that's fine Yeah. I mean, one way to find out would be to say, do a little trial where you completely shut off work communication and have strict rules about when and where you work. And then, you know, try to measure the difference in some way. And these things can be hard to quantify, but you can usually make a qualitative statement about how you feel or how your friends, or you could even bring your friends and family in on it and say, I'm going to make some changes, but I'm not going to tell you what they are. I want you to see if you observe any difference in me. That could be pretty cool. That'd be fun. So my dad used to work six days a week when I was a really little kid and worked really long hours. And then he went on a two week vacation and he said he could just never work as much when he came back home. He just, I think that was the most disconnected he had been from work. And it just kind of like shook something loose in him where he got out of the routine of working so

much and then he came back and was like wait why am i doing this um so you could try stepping away for a while on a long uninterrupted vacation and see how that affects you and obviously like probably don't work while you're on that vacation i hope that goes without saying well where did where did your dad go and what did he do for two weeks that's what i want to know nothing he didn't do anything he stayed in idaho he stayed home i mean we went we went to like visit parents and cousins and stuff okay but it wasn't it wasn't like hike the himalayas or some epic adventure it was just like i'm gonna not do work stuff for two weeks what should we do instead and it's just gonna like hang out with extended family yeah just hang out hang out with extended

family yep well i mean this you could go you could go hang out with my extended family actually i was gonna say the specifics don't matter but maybe they do and in that case uh yeah come visit my grandma yeah she'll change your worldview my grandma is amazing she's she's this fiery fierce grandma lady she's awesome who's also a career coach different well yeah indirectly different podcast though so part of it for me is management sometimes doesn't involve a lot of creation or coding or accomplishing technical tasks. And that's a lot of what I do during the day. So sometimes I will work during other times where no one can bother me. No one can schedule a meeting with me. No one can ask me to work on this plan or whatever. It's just like, what would I do if I

had no one telling me what to do? And sometimes that's go off and make something. And sometimes I do that for work, but sometimes it's on personal projects too. And I don't think that's bad. Maybe it's bad because it's setting an expectation for productivity that isn't reasonable like if work depends on me getting this stuff done but there's no time to do it in the day then maybe there's an expectation that i'll get as much done as i do by including extra time yeah that could be you wouldn't want to set yourself up for with an unsustainable pace yeah yeah that's yeah like what if i stopped doing that and then suddenly people are like oh jameson your performance is way down this chart here shows that yeah hmm huh i don't know i feel like i'm having a hard time

like doing the soft skills engineering make a bunch of jokes about this because this is me and i'm i'm like wrestling with it i don't know you know i i have kind of an unpopular view on this which is i've been doing this for 15 years basically you know i have very fuzzy boundaries between when work begins and ends and there have been times when it has actually hurt my my personal life a little bit and times when it has been no problem at all and I think actually and this is I think again pretty unpopular thing to say but I think it's actually overall made me a lot more successful at work than I would have otherwise been because I'm available like people know they can reach me and and yeah people could abuse that but at the same time they also know that I'm

reliable and I respond when they contact me so you know if something bad is happening and it could benefit from my help like I'm usually available not always and I do detach sometimes but i think overall it's been a positive have you ever just burnt out and and and had to pull back a lot because that's one thing i worry about is i'll just flame out and just be like just get so sick of it and and not work during the day instead of yeah do extra work at night so so not only do you not work at night you also don't work during the day yep i've never had that but when i have gotten like tired or bored or those aren't the right words but uh sick of maybe sick of working on the same thing and there's no change in sight i think that's when i will just pull back because

i only do this when i'm interested you know and engaged and when i'm not interested in the work or it's monotonous then i just don't do it at all like i have no problem disconnecting from monotonous boring uninteresting work so i don't just do it to like fill my time i do it because it's like oh i want to work on that yeah that's what the question asker says they're they're finishing an interesting feature in the evening which yeah maybe that's cool i think i think it's fine i think it's maybe one question i would ask myself is if your extra contributions are being recognized or if it's yeah if it's setting the bar of of what normal work output is from you do people know that you're working on stuff are you doing it to meet deadlines are you doing it

to like push out fun fun stuff that might not be like prioritized but you think is important still or yeah you know we had one engineer like this at my last company he just worked like crazy he was always excited and always happy and just always wanted to work on the next thing and he would show up at work every day and we i would just be like wow you got so much done and of course whenever i talked to the other managers about this this engineer all the other managers were like oh i'm really worried he's gonna burn out like that was always the big concern but after like four years he never did like he never did and all i can conclude is that he likes it like it's what he wants to do so i'm not saying everyone has to be this way but i am saying

that if you are this way and you you work a bunch of extra time and stuff well surprise surprise you're going to be successful at work like leadership likes that they see that and they're like oh wow you you work really hard i'm not saying you have to do it to like meet the bar but i mean it's just kind of like a law of the universe you put more effort in you get more value out so anyway kind of weird but like he never burned out i've never burned out i actually burn out more when i'm disengaged and not working that much which is kind of maybe backwards the last sentence says this desire distracts me sometimes and that's normal either or that's not normal either i mean the desire to go work on interesting problems outside of work is that what

that part means it distracts me from from fun outside of work activities i think what he's saying is that he thinks he should have a desire to to just disengage yeah but he doesn't huh and so he's like that's distracting like i feel again it's like you absolve i mean you already saw this problem by absolving this listener from feeling bad so i don't know why we're even talking about maybe maybe one other thing to talk about is if you're doing this try to make sure you're not creating an expectation or creating extra work for other people that aren't doing this yeah so maybe don't send off a bunch of emails late at night or yeah for sure i don't know don't try and make other people work in this way even if you are there's a great gmail plugin for this by

the way where if you happen to be working at night but you don't want to put that pressure on your co-workers you can write an email to your team and you can say send this email during working hours like tomorrow at nine or something and so you can get it all off out of your system and be done but you can have it actually arrive in your co-workers inbox at a reasonable time all right yeah that sounds great have we answered the question then i think so i'd say you're not in terrible trouble be careful watch out for burnout don't put an expectation on your co-workers i i think the fact that you're thinking about this though means you you seem to be handling it in a pretty healthy way that you're at least recognizing oh i work out of work and maybe that's

bad so yeah and keep an eye on it i mean you'll you'll know if it's bad right if you have to ask if it's bad it's probably not bad but i would ask the people who are close to you if it's bad like if you if you seem distant or yeah or uh what's the word like disengaged from them sure all right question answered what can people do if they want their own questions answered dave go to the worldwide web using a web browser tool of your choice to softskills.audio and click ask a question where you can write as little identifying information as you like please keep your questions brief three or four sentences is best we get a lot of questions and it's hard to read all of them and thank you so much to the people who have written in the questions

just keep flowing in we'll i mean we think we may be able to get to them all at some point but that's becoming increasingly unlikely so thank you thank you so much and i guarantee 100 percent we'll get to all of them i'm not backing down dave podcast is gonna go forever i love it you'll have to answer them on nights and weekends though that's fine all right thank you so much we'll catch you next week