Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 146: What to do with sick co-workers who come into the office and dealing with weird performance review feedback

Episode Date: February 25, 2019

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Hi guys! I was faced with quite a dilemma recently. A few days ago one of my co-workers said he was sick and worked from home. But the next day he came to office, constantly sneezing and looking terrible, and for some reason finished the day in the office. The same happened the day after that. I didn’t want to be rude and I felt for this guy, but I didn’t want to get sick either cause I have some important tasks this week. What could have I done? I could not just tell him “go home you fool, you’re contagious!” I could say “Hey! I noticed you’re not feeling very well, why don’t you come to the manager and ask to work from home this week?” But I didn’t have the guts to do this. Besides, what if he couldn’t work from home for some reason? I solved this by lying to my manager that I’m ill too, and worked from home. What is the best solution here? Hi, I recently went through my company’s annual review process. The review went pretty much as expected, with things that I was doing well and things that I could improve on. However, I received some negative feedback which I disagreed with. I asked for additional detail and examples of this, but neither my manager, or his manager (our site lead) could give me any concrete examples. After some further discussion they agreed to remove the comment from my review, but I’m now left wondering why this feedback was added in the first place if there were no examples they could give me. Their explanation for this was that it was feedback for our team, am I wrong or is an annual performance review the wrong place for that kind of feedback? Should I be concerned that they actually do have feedback for me, but were unwilling to do so given my reaction? Is this enough of a red flag to maybe consider looking for a new job?

It takes more than templating out templates that template other templates to be a great software engineer. This is episode 146 of the Soft Skills Engineering podcast. I'm your host, Jameson Dance. I'm your host and human template, Dave Smith. Soft Skills Engineering is a weekly advice show

where we answer all of your non-technical questions about the technical field of software development. And we don't talk about templates. Nope. Not anymore. Dave, do you want to thank our wonderful patrons? Yes, I do. I'd like to thank this week

those who are contributing at the level where they get a shout out on the show. every week chris hogan the agile ventures charity zach grannon david jackson sean clayton nick kantar and sonic the hedgehog thank you so much if you'd like to contribute to the show jameson tell them where to go go to soft skills.audio click the ask a nope nope click the support us on patreon button twist yeah pretend like it was a twist not a mistake and then you can do that from their wonderful website thanks again to everyone contributing all right let's just dive into the questions i think do you want to read our first one sure this comes from an anonymous

listener who says hi guys i was faced with quite a dilemma recently a few days ago one of my co-workers said he was sick and worked from home but the next day he came to the office constantly sneezing and looking terrible and for some reason he finished the day in the office the same happened the day after that i don't want to be rude and i felt for this guy but i didn't want to get sick either because i have some important tasks this week what could i have done i could not just tell him go home you fool you're contagious i could say hey i noticed you're not feeling very well why don't you come to the manager and ask to work from home this week but i didn't have the guts to do this besides what if he couldn't work from home for some reason i solved this by lying to my

manager that i'm sick too and worked from home what is the best solution here oh i love this question there's so many things like okay if you're sick why are you working if you're saying you're too ill i mean i don't know maybe it's maybe it's to make it a white lie instead of a dark black lie well i don't know what the opposite of a white lie is a bad one instead of a good lie right but i don't know i just think that's funny that you'd say i'm too sick to work so i'm gonna go home and work i guess the question asker mentioned they have some important projects to get done yeah i also like the go home you fool you fool fly you fool yeah I feel like that's an effective tactic that doctors use sometimes just like you fool don't get sick

Why why do you think this person came in anyways? Is it just I feel like there's an etiquette to not come in when you feel like you're contagious There is but i'll tell you what there are some companies with some really crappy incentives around their vacation and sick time you know, like i've worked for a company where they were combined into one pool and so Taking a sick day meant taking one less vacation day yeah if i come into work then i get to stay at disneyland one day longer exactly yeah i could see that being a strange incentive that's probably what's going on here

yeah huh or or maybe they just maybe they want to get everyone sick like why would they maybe okay i read i read a sci-fi novel recently it was about giant life-size like human-sized spiders that become sentient and in the end they have to inject all the humans or infect all the humans with this bacteria that basically makes them not terrified of giant human-sized spiders okay so maybe your co-worker has a benevolent illness that is going to i don't know make you keep your jira tickets up to date or help you write better unit tests make you not feel feel so mad when they take down prod yeah just give you greater empathy for your fellow man and his approach to doing that is just walk over and sneeze right on your mouse and then look up at you and

then sneeze right on your keyboard and then say you're welcome yeah you'll thank me later when you have the antibodies the jira antibodies well i mean that is that does paint jira as a disease which i think it is so yeah so what what do you do if you're worried about catching something from sick people that have come into work well i mean you just bug out this is like he nailed it i'm like well just get the heck out of there that place is a is should be on lockdown and you should not be inside everybody run there's a sick person flee oh yeah you could pull the fire alarm and then slip out in the crowd yeah you need a flu alarm one that rings all the bells but doesn't summon the fire department waste their valuable time good point yes that's it it's a

little button right next to the fire alarm yeah it's maybe it's it's got a moisture detector or something you have to sneeze on it and trigger it i i think i i think your point is valid where this seems pretty reasonable the only weird thing is you felt you felt like you had to lie about it and say, hey, I'm sick, so I'm going to work from home instead of just saying, hey, I don't want to get sick, so I'm going to work from home. That, I don't know. Yeah, that's a little weird thing to say. Yeah. This is also another one of those cases. I feel like we often run into questions which are solved by having a less socially conscious person available that you can sick on the problem. You don't want to say, go home, you fool, you're contagious. But if you

have a coworker who's known for being blunt and people are just like, oh, that's, there goes blunty the person with no tact then you just you just need to the problem transforms into one of you convincing blunty to tell the sick co-worker go home you fool you're contagious this sounds like a job for blunty yeah blunty is very useful blunty is very useful and i feel like one thing i've learned over the past while in my career is it can be useful to be able to transform into i really don't like that name but i i'm stuck with it now it can be useful to transform into plenty at some times like it's not comfortable you don't like it it's it feels a little weird and and outside of the normal bounds of etiquette but i don't know it's it's not outrageous if if they

say i have this thing i really have to get done then maybe you say hey try working on that from home like there i i can think of a bunch of potential objections around why it might be awkward like you also mentioned they don't have a place to work from home potentially right yeah Yeah, but I still feel like this is a valid, that doesn't necessarily mean there's no way you can say anything about it ever. It just might mean the answer might be complicated, especially if you're talking to them as a peer. But if Jameson can be blunty, that should give anyone in the world hope that they too can sometimes say things that make them uncomfortable, but feel important and are not rude. Yes, absolutely. Yeah, I think, you know, I think I would probably approach this

person and ask oh geez i don't know you know frankly i would just keep my distance i think if it's multiple days to ask them you have to get close to them right exactly i i guess you could send them a message yeah send them a slack and that has the advantage of being less less difficult to exactly hey look i need to chat with you for a minute but please just stay at your desk i'll just yell it from here yeah i i think this is a pretty clear case where it it doesn't feel super risky it it might feel a little bit scary but i don't know i don't feel like they're likely to blow up on you like what are you afraid of when you confront someone sometimes it's of them getting angry or sometimes it's of being wrong or sneezing in your face yeah or or literally

dying of a disease but i feel like a lot of those concerns don't i don't see how they necessarily apply to the situation yeah yeah i think i think you're right i mean the risk here i think is that you'll hurt someone's feelings or reveal something about their personal life that they don't want to share like i live somewhere yeah maybe it's a sensitive maybe maybe it's like a i don't know a chronic thing that they're really sensitive about i could see that yeah like i you know like i live in a very small house with thin walls and my neighbors are loud and i and i don't know so that's that's the risk but you know not not a huge risk but i would probably peel this onion back one more layer and say what incentive system prompted this person to come in who was clearly

very ill and contagious such that the rest of the team was put at risk and that incentive system needs to be addressed because i mean imagine the the productivity loss if one person comes in because of a bad incentive system and ends up crippling the productivity of like 10 other people who get sick as a result yeah i think to to go back to the sensitive potential potential sensitive issues thing i feel like intent and communicating good intent goes a long way so if you can make it clear like hey i'm doing this out of concern for my health and the health of the team i'm not mad at you or accusing you i just want to suggest you work from home sometimes if you're feeling sick or maybe go home so that you don't get the rest of us sick like i feel like if you approach

it with the right tone then it feels less likely to explode in your face even if there are some issues behind why they came into work for the other part of it i think you could also cure them okay and then they won't be sick anymore all right like maybe some essential oils or something yeah i think that would definitely cure them of whatever the ailment is beyond having too much money yeah wait no that's not what i meant okay the other thing you have friends who sell essential oils don't you no no i don't not that i know of yeah i think if i mean maybe their humors are off their internal pressures maybe they have too much blood they need to be leeched i mean software engineering is hard so we're probably pretty

good as doctors you know yeah i mean if we could i was gonna say it feels like it feels like witchcraft already so it's so fuzzy and vague and full of tradition that maybe you're prepared to tackle this problem of curing diseases you don't understand i fix bugs i don't understand with work all the time all we have to do is uh add one to their liver and looks like that worked in production yep and by the way there is only prod yeah throw an index on their kidneys i guess problem solved well has this helped i don't know i don't know it's it's like we almost always end our questions with this is a tricky situation this one doesn't sound terribly tricky unless

you're going to tackle the root cause here of why does your company have a perverse incentive system around their vacation policy yeah i don't want to answer that question though i mean well i do the answer is to save them money right but but it probably doesn't in the long run yeah maybe maybe then you have to show that and that sounds like a bigger problem than saying hey can you please not come into work when you're feeling sick so you don't get us all sick yeah i think i actually do think it's perfectly fine to reach out to someone and say hey when you're sick please don't come in you don't even have to broach the subject of work from home or whether they have a good place to do so you know just say hey please please don't come in when you're sick you know i

i'd appreciate it i have a weak immune system and i don't want to be out for a week my humors are also out of balance so i'm vulnerable exactly that's all you gotta say all right i will read our next question this is uh this is from another anonymous listener hey i recently went through my company's annual review process the review went pretty much as expected with things that i was doing well and things that i could improve on however i received some negative feedback which i disagreed with i asked for additional detail and examples of this but neither my manager or his manager our site lead could give me any concrete examples after some further discussion they agreed to remove the comment from my review but i'm now left wondering why this feedback was

added in the first place if there were no examples they could give me their explanation for this was it was feedback for our team am i wrong or is the annual performance review the wrong kind of place for that feedback should i be concerned that they actually have feedback for me but were unwilling to give but were unwilling to do so given my reaction is this enough of a red flag to maybe consider looking for a new job so okay so there was some feedback they they pushed back to get more detail on it and the manager's answer was oh actually this is feedback for the whole team not just for you is that your understanding here yeah that's how i read that sounds weird yeah that sounds a little weird yeah so maybe it's like i accidentally pasted that in there

i guess i should read these things before i share them with you yeah i mean do you do you feel like it is a reasonable expectation that your manager should have concrete examples for critical feedback they give you? Only if they want you to fix it. I mean, do you feel like they shouldn't be able to say anything to you unless they have an example of a specific incident or behavior or time? Oh, not for me. I mean, my preference would be give me the feedback, even if you're not able to exactly describe an example. You know, I just want to know what the feedback is. But I think that the best managers will take the time to collect the facts and share with you specific examples to make it crystal clear to you what

yeah this feedback is about yeah i feel like there's a balance in feedback in general between having proof and sharing impressions and and proof is probably more not probably it's more objective and there's a lot more of it but it also means that the problem or the issue is is such that it can be proven right where there's a lot of things that are fuzzy and have feelings or impressions associated with them. And I feel like you don't want to never hear that because you reject anything that is below a certain standard of proof

that it means you miss out on valuable things. But yeah, I guess this is a long-winded way of me saying that I agree with you, that it feels like your manager should be striving to provide proof for things because that is better feedback in general. Yeah, but they're still allowed to say things without proof, I guess.

Sure, and I'm wondering what really went down in this situation where you sit down, you read all this feedback and then you're like oh tell me more about this and your manager's like oh that was never there you know i mean it kind of feels to me like the manager you know i don't know you could take the manager for face for face at face value and say yeah this really was team feedback and i gave it to everyone and don't worry about it it's not actually specific to you or you're not contributing to this particular problem on the team but it just kind of slipped in there by default you know that's possible it's also possible that the manager realized that on second

like on a deeper look, they didn't have concrete enough examples or they questioned the source of the feedback. And I have been in an annual feedback session once where I had that kind of question. I saw some feedback from an anonymous peer and I said, can you give me some more detail on this? And my manager said, well, I could, but I'm just, I'm going to give you some context here or rather, I'm not going to give you all the details around this feedback, but I think you probably don't need to worry about that one too much. And I just, I took that for granted or I took that at face value and said okay they're questioning the source of the feedback the person maybe it was a one-off instance or maybe there was a misunderstanding and so i just kind of went

on my merry way and ignored that one and maybe that's what's happening here yeah i think it's also possible that they just are worried about conflict maybe maybe they feel like this piece of feedback is it's possible that they wilted kind of instead of saying this is what i think the situation is and i know you're not going to like it maybe maybe they were trying to kind of excuse it when they sensed your your disagreement with it yeah which wouldn't be great i mean i don't think most people love conflict though so that's i don't think it's unheard of i feel like the more common thing would just be to not put it on there though if you're worried about conflict around i feel like the much more common concern is people do not get feedback from managers until

it's too late it's too late yeah so the question is am i wrong or is the annual performance review the wrong place for that kind of feedback if if the situation is accurate and this is literally feedback about the performance of the team that is it sounds negative that ended up on your performance review yeah i think that's wrong yeah i don't know quite what the consequence of that at your company is it's possible that that affects future things or it's possible it doesn't if it didn't affect the actual rating you ended up getting but that seems weird should i be concerned that they actually do have feedback for me i feel like i would push more on it yeah i feel like i would push to see if it's something they think is there but are uncomfortable saying or maybe

don't have enough data to back up. Because like you, I would want to know. You're digging. Even if you don't have the number of lines of code I've written compared with the number last year, I don't know, whatever the proof is, I feel like I would still want to know what they thought. Yeah, I agree. How did this get here? Or maybe it is just a problem with the team. I'd like to know more about that. And what can I do to help? But that's kind of a side conversation from your individual performance review right yeah but yeah i agree with you i would dig into that a little bit i wouldn't push it too far if the manager says look don't worry about it i'd probably say fine probably you have other things you can worry about yeah would it is enough of a red flag to

consider looking for a new job i don't given the description here i don't feel like it immediately is yeah me neither i mean if if your rating was drastically different because of this feedback then that seems pretty bad yeah yeah if it was like but if it was just like you're doing great you have these things to work on oh and you as a whole failed to deliver this project and you're like wait that was everyone's project i don't know if if it was like one piece of the larger puzzle instead of the thing that made you get a rating you didn't deserve yeah then i don't think i would be concerned enough to quit yeah i wouldn't i wouldn't worry about this too much either seems pretty innocuous yeah i think it it could reflect the fact that giving good feedback is really hard

and for sure is not i mean we've talked before about the path to becoming an engineering manager And it generally involves being a solid individual contributor. And then you step into this new role where you have to do vastly different things. And giving direct feedback on folks' performance is not a task that comes up in writing code very often, right? Like, and doing it in a way that they hear and understand and are willing to act on it instead of feel insulted or that comes across directly enough that they understand it instead of soft peddling it.

That's a hard skill set. And it's possible your manager just doesn't have that yet. Yeah, it's possible. which i think a lot of people are like that i don't know that that yeah that's that feels standard to me not unheard of i guess yeah and like at the end of the day here they removed it from your review so don't i would say probably don't worry about it like good on them for reacting that way and saying oh you know what this shouldn't be part of your review anyway so let's just take it off i'm going to take it off the official record and now you're good to go so

to me i think all's well that ends well here yeah you don't think the fact that it looked a little wonky is is a cause for long-term concern at all though no i mean if this happened every year maybe but i'm not seeing it i wouldn't worry about it too much yeah i mean it is a software job this could be the only performance review they ever get at their 18 month tenure at this job that's true there could not be a next year yeah i guess for me this just underscores the importance and of being clear and being clear about how unclear I am to make it less clear. If I have stuff that's really solid that I have lots of detail and proof on, then say that. And if I don't, but I have impressions, I think it's fair to say, hey, these are my impressions. This is what I feel and

observe. Let's talk more about this. I guess maybe the performance review is the wrong time because you're enshrining things, right? There's some written documents. So maybe that's maybe the standard for general feedback is different than the standard of what goes on a performance review. I think one question I'm wondering about is whether the formal performance review is the right spot to put feedback you feel a little bit fuzzy about or a little bit vague about. Or if you should just stick to things that you feel really certain about and you feel like you have a really solid amount of evidence for. Because this is this formal written document that presumably lives on somewhere and presumably has some effects, what's the responsibility for a manager? i think we already talked about how you should you should give feedback that's vague even well don't give feedback that's fake you should be willing to give feedback even if it's based on

impressions but should you include that kind of stuff in a performance review yeah that's a really should you keep it really really just buttoned down yeah that's a really good question i'm inclined to say that an annual performance review should be super buttoned down or buttoned up i don't know which one buttoned on buttoned around yeah anyway i think i think the formal performance review should be as crisp and fact-filled as possible and then you can also give verbal feedback i think that complements that formal review yeah but yeah like you said that stuff lives on and you better be solid okay so i mean one of the one of the thoughts was maybe they weren't super sure about it so they threw it on and then pulled it off when they got pushed back

And you're saying as a manager, maybe don't do that unless you're willing to back it up with lots of detail and examples. That's what I think. And then have a verbal or offline discussion about the rest of the stuff. Yeah. Okay. That makes sense. Well, have we answered this question?

I think so. I think you're safe. Good to go. I don't see any major red flags here, but keep an eye out for other managerial incompetence. What do you, I mean, that's another question. What do you do? Like, is your only recourse to just quit and work somewhere where you have a better manager? Because it feels hard to have a conversation with your manager where you tell them, hey, I think you're bad at this.

Please do this other thing instead. Well, I think you could have a conversation where you lay out your desires for how you best receive feedback. And you could say, look, on my formal performance review, I want positive – sorry, I shouldn't. On my formal performance review, please only include good things about me. I guess that is true. I mean, you do want that. Please give me the best rating. The end.

i mean you could say like look on my on my formal my annual review i want to see very concrete clear-cut feedback and then but in person don't be afraid to share with me these off-the-cuff things that you've heard or the impressions you've had i'd love to talk to you about those and maybe together we can work on them you know and i would just spell that out for your manager and that's something i think a manager can adapt to yeah so you be clear in your feedback to your manager your feedback feedback saying okay can't get behind that all right you can button that up Yeah, and then I will button it down and then I will button it inside out because sometimes I wear clothes inside out on accident. And the fact that I'm buttoning it inside out, I guess, isn't enough of a signal to me.

What can people do if they'd like their own questions buttoned up? They can go to softskills.audio and click the ask a question button and we will review it and answer it someday. Thank you so much to all the people who are submitting questions. We really appreciate it. We enjoy reading them. we learn stuff from talking about them and they fuel the show so thank you for doing that yep thank you all right catch you next week