Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 151: Where are all the old developers and Do I not ask enough questions?

Episode Date: April 1, 2019

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I have a lot of software developer colleagues who are 20 - 35 years old but none 50+. At what age does a software engineer’s career end? Hi Dave and Jamison, thanks for the great podcast. I recently started a new position on a small remote team. The co-founders are increasingly dismayed by my lack of Slack-question-asking, although I have reassured them that I’m not too shy and I will ask when I’m stuck. I have daily one-on-one meetings with one co-founder, where I do ask questions about the code base, story requirements, potential side effects of my solutions etc. It’s an open-source project with comprehensive and Googable developer docs, so between those and my debugger I can figure everything else out with a bit of research. A co-founder told me that he expects to see me asking one or two questions per hour, and strongly implied that I need to do this if I want to survive my probation period. I was actually let go from my last job at the end of my probation period due to “brisk communication style” and “not asking enough questions”, so I’m freaking out now. I don’t want to annoy my colleagues with a constant stream of inane RTFM-style questions, but I’m stumped on how else to hit my question target! Can you help me come up with ideas? Is there some big picture reason for this obsession with question-asking that I’m missing?

It takes more than nested subs like Skills and SQL to be a great engineer. This is Soft Skills Engineering episode 151. 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 SQL. Soft query language. Soft and fluffy query language.

Yeah. I want to thank our wonderful patrons. Thank you so much to the folks who are supporting us at the level where they get shouted out in every episode. thank you to matthew voitovich the agile ventures charity zach grannon louise santos nick kantar sean clayton sonic the hedgehog marie rousseau and chris hogan and thank you so much to everyone else who has contributed or who will contribute in the future future contributions yeah if you want to help us out you can go to softskills.audio and click support us on patreon and the money you

contribute goes towards editing the show design hosting all those things all right shall i read our first question please do this comes from blonde viking 87 which is a great just a great name okay blonde viking 87 says i have a lot of software developer colleagues who are 20 to 35 years old but none that are 50 plus at what age does a software engineer's career end i have some bad news for you what is it it's 36 what's that isn't there some book about no it's have you heard of fallout 3 the video game no there's a town in it called i think it's lamplight or it's run by kids and as soon as you turn 15 i think you get exiled or killed or something like that so software is basically like that just a bunch of 0 to 15 year olds yep what could possibly go wrong trying

to think if i've worked if i've worked with a software developer who is still kind of writing code who's 50 plus i don't think i have i've worked with folks in their 40s i'm 32 so i've got three good years left in me before you voted out yeah or killed and i've begun to vote myself out because i'm an engineering manager so i do some coding but i do lots of like spreadsheeting too yeah so if it's a little competition what did you say was the oldest developer you've worked with i don't know i mean i'm trying to think oldest developer it's hard to know how old they are because they don't want to tell you so you have to actually cut them in half and count the rings i i have heard people saying that they try to look younger because they're afraid of age

discrimination yeah probably 40s probably mid mid late 40s how old are you i'm 32 oh you're you're prime developer you're a spring chicken i am yep so the oldest you think is mid 40s i actually worked with an engineer who was 65 he was great a fantastic engineer he actually just retired last year he actually worked with alan k back in the day yeah and i got to work with him a little bit in my current job which is great and i know a few in their 50s as well i feel like most of the time most of the people i work with have been roughly my same age and there's just a cohort that have all moved through jobs with me where everyone is basically the same age yeah i was gonna say that's probably not a coincidence that's probably a selection like an actual active selection on

your part and their part of you know people you know happen to be your age and happen to be the people you get employed with. Yeah. I work at a very large company right now, Walmart, and there are certainly engineers who are 50 plus here. I don't work with them directly though. I guess I'm thinking of folks that I collaborate with actively. Yeah. I know they exist. I was, you know, when I was younger, so I'm 40 as of recently. Happy birthday to me. Yeah. We just found out we almost have the same birthday. Yeah. We both had birthdays in the last couple of weeks. Apparently we're not that close anyway happy birthday to you you too thanks and for the first i don't know five years of my career i worried about this a lot because i'm like where are all the 50 somethings

you know and after about 10 years i stopped worrying about it completely because i realized what was happening was we have an industry that is exploding and people aren't joining the industry who are already experienced in other fields. Instead, they're coming in at a young age, you know, 20s is most typical. And so it's growing at the bottom of the age curve a lot more, probably 100 times more than it's growing at the top end of the age curve. The result is we're surrounded by a bunch of 20 and 30-somethings, you know, like 99%. Yeah, and everybody hates 30-something.

My parents used to watch a TV show in the 80s or 90s called 30-something. Did you ever hear of that? Never. never in my life well there you go okay that's all i know about it the end so i i wonder if part of this could be dependent on the industry as well like i've spent lots of my career at startups and there the average age was certainly much younger for the developers it was it was much younger than here where i would say the average age of the folks i work with is probably mid to late 30s it definitely skews older and and i don't think it's a coincidence that it's at a larger

your company some of that might be maybe different appetites for risk where if if you're in your 50s you you have like a life to pay for you know like you might have family you might have a mortgage and so there might be different trade-offs around stability that you're looking to make i don't know if blonde viking 87 told us where they work but they did accidentally reveal their age yeah 32 yeah wait 30 or 31 i guess yeah i was born in 87 that's the only reason i know i'm not i'm not some savant wait what do you think i am genius i think i can look at years and calculate ages i'm wondering if you actually wrote this question blonde viking 87 well i'm five foot eight and i have black hair so nope you're like i'll conceal my identity by changing

my hair color and my screen name. I forgot to change my age. Maybe. Oh no. I might be five foot nine. I don't know how tall I am. I wish I had some hard numbers on this to like be able to say exactly what is the breakdown by age. But anecdotally, and I've been at a lot of companies now for about 15 years. Anecdotally, I can say it's like 99% are less than 50. You know, we should have done this real quick, but I'm going to take a second to do it now and look up the Stack Overflow oh yeah give me some credentials here huh what's our sample size so we're talking about 65 000 responses and this is this is people who responded to the stack so they opted in so it's it's basically a bell curve uh 25 are between 0 and 24 years old 50 25 to 34 years old

there's 18 35 to 44 5 45 to 54 and then it trails off so yeah there's there's a big a big uh spike kind of in the 20s and 30s 20 to 35 i do not think that is a reflection of what happens to engineers as they age i think it is a symptom of a middle-aged industry the the industry itself is about that age in terms of mainstream job opportunities you know i mean obviously computers have been around since the 60s and people were writing weird lisp code on pdp 11 devices with richard stallman you know in the 60s to to protest that the printer had closed source firmware but but uh but you know they were very very rare as an act of bravery i'm not making that up actually that is a true story anyway but now you know here we go fast forward i'd say like the dot-com boom

in the late 90s early 2000s was really when the industry kind of had its big opening to a lot of people getting getting their eyes open to the fact that this industry is a reasonable place to go and make a career for yourself and i think it's just been a steady climb since then but industries only grow from the bottom when they require expertise like that because the opportunity cost for leaving an already trained up skill set uh at an you know if you're 20 years experienced with it is high it's very high yeah to start over as a junior developer once you're a senior accountant or whatever it does happen though we hear about it all the time but for every one of those we hear about there's probably a hundred people coming in fresh yeah that that makes a lot of sense to me i

think there's also an escape valve at the top where some percentage of folks move into different careers that are technical but not necessarily programming every day so more engineering management or technical leadership it's not everyone that does it but that that's that's a common path as you get more experience in your career you move a little bit away from the day-to-day coding and some people really want to do it some people don't but it is a thing that happens i think what's going to happen is in 10 years so mark my words the year 2029 someone's going to write into our podcast and yes we will still be going someone's going to write in and say where are all the 45 to 55 year old developers everyone i know is 35 to 45 you think there's a there's like a

baby boom no i don't actually i don't think that's true i don't think there's like a swell and it's gonna die off on the back end but i just think that you know we're riding a wave here it's not that people stop programming when they turn 35 or 40 or 45 yeah it will be very interesting to watch though all right are you gonna be a 50 year old programmer dave you know that's a that's a great question i think uh i think probably not you know my long-term career goals are more aligned with people management and leadership, I think, than they are with writing code every day. But if I am still writing code every day at age 50,

I think I would be just fine with that. I have this idea in my head of just the wise elder nerd where they're 50, right? So they're not, they know how to work with people. They've seen a lot of stuff. They're just, I don't know, maybe it's because I haven't worked with someone who's 50 or older who still programs.

But I just imagine they would be so chill and easy to get along with and great to work with where they've seen so much, they know so much, they're not rattled, they just get stuff done, low maintenance, great talent team. Or, I have seen the opposite of that, where they've experienced... Where they're the crusty old person?

They've experienced so many problems caused by short-sighted, by either their own short-sightedness or that of others, that when you say an idea, they're just like, stop, stop, I already know what's at the end of that trail. And my scars are still tingling from that one. But I will say this, as I have aged, Because, you know, I am outside of the band of this question. This question says, everyone I know is 20 to 35.

I'm five years outside of that. And I will say that I am way more chill about a lot of technology choices, which 15 years ago, I would have been like, well, this is very important that we carefully discuss brace placement, you know? Yeah, it's interesting. I feel like I'm getting more strongly opinionated about culture and process things and less strongly opinionated about technical things too. So maybe I'm equally cremated.

originally just you know it's interesting like i used to have very strong opinions about programming language choice based on the language aesthetics itself and now my opinions about programming language choice are much more informed by the community that surrounds that language and the types of people i can hire to work in that language than it is about the language's aesthetics itself weird well you heard it first getting old is weird so at what age does a software engineer's career end at the death age yeah i think there's no there's no set age i i've heard enough reports of age discrimination though to know that it's a thing yeah so there are there are probably places that you could not get hired if you were 50 or older and it turns out you probably don't want

to work for those places it might suck so yeah like i said i'm 32 so i have no actionable advice for what to do if you're a 50 year old or older software developer looking for work but i'm pretty sure blonde viking 87 is not 50 yeah otherwise he would be blonde viking 67 i bet the job market is different though and it does take a little bit you're you're looking for different kinds of opportunities you are and the fit is more careful like you're a more complicated puzzle piece at at my age than you were when you were 20 you know you're at age 25 you're a puzzle piece that can fit into any puzzle but now it's like you have to have a very specific set of requirements to hire me into your team such as the ball pit of course all right have we

answered the question oh no yeah almost there's one more thing as a signal that the industry is aging what i think we should observe in order to track this is not asking people what their age is that would be way too easy instead we should monitor twitter for accounts by software developers of hand injuries and back pain and other things that come from like two decades of sitting in front of a computer. Eye strain, you know? Like when we see the Twitterverse

start to like describe these things, then we know the industry is aging and they're still here. I thought you were going to say monitor for usernames that have years in them and try and calculate age based on that. That's probably predictive. all right good luck good luck may you program another 20 years yes all right okay will you

read our next one i will yeah hi dave and jameson thanks for the great podcast you're welcome i recently started a new oh this is from an anonymous listener that that was not their name that their parents gave them i dub you hi dave and jameson thanks for the great podcast i thought i thought it was i thought the name was anonymous listener 87 oh yeah i recently started a new position on the small remote team. The co-founders are increasingly dismayed by my lack of Slack question asking, although I've reassured them that I'm not too shy and will ask when I'm stuck. I have daily one-on-one meetings with one co-founder where I do ask questions about the code-based story requirements, potential side effects of my solution, etc. It's an open

source project with comprehensive and Google-able developer docs, so between those and my debugger, I can figure everything else out with a bit of research. A co-founder told me that he expects to see me asking one or two questions per hour and strongly implied that I need to do this if i want to survive my probation period i actually got let go from my last job at the end of my probation period due to brisk communication style and not asking enough questions so i'm freaking out now i don't want to annoy my colleagues with a constant stream of inane rtfm which stands for read the friendly manual style questions uh but i'm stumped on how else to hit my question target can you help me come up with ideas is there some big picture reason for this obsession with question

asking that i'm missing oh whoa this is so weird yeah this is really weird first of all there's a lot of weird things question asking target yeah like what i i don't have any questions but you must how can you hit your target if you don't have questions question target just yeah that i have a lot of speculation here but all we can go on is what's the question it sounds like so the team is all remote maybe the question asking is a proxy for kind of prove that you're getting work done since everyone is remote you know show some activity in chat show something because the manager co-founder can't walk around and and look at all the minions typing so maybe that's a signal that you are progressing somehow or getting stuff done um

it also i mean attention from bosses is is nice but it does seem a little weird that you have daily one-on-ones with the co-founder yeah maybe they just have a really intense hands-on probation program or something yeah maybe that that sounds yeah i don't know that's weird i'm you know i mean if if daily one-on-ones are good maybe we should yeah if they're helpful maybe we should step it up and do like hourly one-on-ones i mean if a little is good a lot is better right i heard someone talk about daily sprints whoa the other day okay sprint planning meeting at the beginning and then a sprint review at the end with like a demo and a shipping ceremony i think so yeah wow all right well i mean to do that you would need also like daily retrospectives

you would and then you do hourly standards i guess every hour gather around team what did you accomplish in the last hour what are you going to do in the next hour is anyone blocked time for our weekly quarterly planning yeah this this seems weird and bad and so i can only speculate that something funky is going on yeah i agree asking enough questions there is a pretty simple solution to this problem though it says here you're having daily one-on-ones with the co-founder where you're asking questions about the code base and requirements and etc why not just post those questions in slack and you can walk away from this mess and let the co-founder answer in slack so when they when when you do your daily one-on-one you just say see the one

to two questions an hour i've posted in slack yeah actually that's not a bad idea you could say hey can you just check out the questions i asked yeah you could also do like a cron job where you just just crank out a bunch of questions maybe your monday morning is like all right i'm gonna write 4 000 questions how many hours 40 40 questions so 80 40 to 80 questions for my week and you just write them all down and then have have a bot slowly trickle them into the channel I love it. And maybe there's some subtle philosophical deep questions in there occasionally. Yeah. So I want to speculate even more. In the past, I was managing a remote team and there was a developer on the team who I had some concerns about their productivity and output.

And one of the ways that manifested is they were very quiet in chat. They didn't really say anything ever. And there were other concerns too, but I approached it by asking them to communicate a little bit more what they were doing. But really, what a smarter, wiser, more mature current Jameson would do is say, hey, I have concerns about your productivity, and I'm not seeing the output, and then talk about that. But I was a wuss, so I just talked about being more communicative in chat. It's possible that this request to ask more questions is a concern about productivity. And if it's not, then you should be able to push back and say, look, I'm getting all my stuff done why does it matter that i'm not asking questions if if you have concerns

about my productivity let's talk about that but yeah that's really that's a good insight yeah i mean it's it'd be hard to do especially if you're in a probation and you're feeling like the the pressure is on but i mean the probation should not be about how many questions you ask in chat it should be about can you do a good job right so if you can reframe it as like look at my productivity if that's not good tell me and i'll i'll do whatever it takes to fix it but if it is this focus on questions is making it harder for me to do my job um not asking enough questions yeah it could be i would see that as a problem if it's leading to you getting stuck for a long time but if you're not getting stuck and you're able to demonstrate that through getting stuff done then

that's bizarre that that it would be such a yeah it'd be such a point of contention yeah maybe the issue here is these people that hired you you're actually much more skilled than they are and and things that would stump them and cause them to ask questions don't stump you Yeah, yeah, that's very possible, too. Is there anything about here? Do I annoy my colleagues with a constant stream of inane questions? How else to hit my target? Yeah, that's just I don't understand how I would really try and reframe it to be about your performance, not about asking questions. Because the second you say, how do I hit my question target? That's questions should be to serve a purpose and the purpose shouldn't be, how do I get my co-founder to get off my back and like, let me do my job. And plus one or two questions an hour.

I don't know. I feel like I need hours of concentrated programming time. And so if I have to interrupt myself every half an hour to dump a question in Slack, so I don't get in trouble, I'm not going to get anything done. Interesting. thing i that that's just enough time to browse twitter in between questions all right so we've we've come down pretty hard on the side of the question asker and kind of poo-pooed on the culture or management style here but let me flip it around just and play the other side here just

for a moment what if okay what if there are questions that you feel like an engineer should be asking that can't be found on google that can't be found on stack overflow that can't be found in the company documentation things like hey what was the motivation for us choosing xyz you know it's like backstory that's specific to this team or project or you know why are we organized in this way or what is our coding style and how did it come to be you know things things that all are looking back a little bit so that you can plug into the kind of the legacy of what came before yeah are there one to two of those an hour for your whole tenure though i feel like yeah those pop up a little bit at the beginning and then i don't know once every week or two for a while and

they kind of taper off like i thought when you said questions you couldn't find the answer to on google you're gonna ask about like what is what is love what where did we come from dave and where do we go when we die ask yeah do that okay ask that in slack ask some really deep philosophical questions oh yeah everyone i just want to take the pulse of the room what is what is love thank you uh i've been working on this code and i just had a question come up how do you feel about our current political candidates and then you just sit back satisfied knowing that you hit your question target yep yep you got it the slack room erupts into flames around you i had a former co-worker one of my favorite co-workers who had this concept called uncivil

obedience which which is a play on civil disobedience which was a protest technique but uncivil obedience is when you do exactly what your manager asks you to the nth degree and i think this is a good example of that where you could be coming up with crap questions just to hit this target and the effect will be you will probably be fired yeah but it will call out the insanity of the request yeah it's like malicious compliance exactly yeah what so what what would you do in this situation i feel like i already laid out what i would do i actually agree with your approach where i would say it kind of depends on how confident you feel in your position now this is a probationary period so you might just want to go with the flow and just do what it takes

to get through the probation period. But if you're feeling pretty confident, I would probably try to peel the onion back one layer and ask the person, what's motivating this question target? Is there something I need to know about my productivity? Yeah, yeah. I mean, is the question target a feature of your probation?

Is it a feature of your employment at the company? If you're just trying to make it through their probation, I mean, if you feel like you're in a precarious position, pushing back will involve some risk. And if you're, but it feels like it's not going in a good direction from your description. and the current state of things doesn't feel positive. So I feel like at this point,

you kind of need to engage in a little bit of risk by pushing back a little bit and digging into the productivity concerns and what you need to do to be productive. There is a possibility that it could backfire and just be evidence of you being difficult or something like that, which I don't think it would be at all,

but this is already a weird situation. So it's not unlikely that they will react poorly to you trying to be responsible and mature about it. Yeah, I agree. the other thing you can do is you can meet your question target by asking weird questions about question targets like hey does anyone else have a question target yeah you could just have a question that's always valid like what time is it what time is it now how about now what about now hey how's the weather i love it yeah i don't know this is a weird situation and i really do think

you need to push back because hoops jumping through hoops to ask more questions when you don't need them is is weird i think if if you are going to push back and make it about productivity though you should be prepared to have strong evidence for your productivity and be prepared to answer concerns about it too because maybe this is their roundabout way of addressing what they see as a productivity problem and you should be able to understand what they're looking for and meet it yeah and the other thing besides a productivity problem that it could be is it could be a perceived engagement problem where they expect you to be talking to the team more and questions are just like the the theme they've selected but they want to see you talking more act

and taking a more active role in communicating with the team which by the way takes proactive effort in a remote situation doesn't happen naturally yeah that's true yeah some of it is just this yeah that's that's true if everyone's remote i think there are some people that tend to just go and work on their thing and that's it but there is some amount of kind of communication to keep things flowing smoothly that needs to happen so maybe maybe that requires a little bit more effort but the one to two questions an hour thing that's bizarro yeah well have we answered the question that's a good question jameson i'm glad you asked it because you were just shy of your question quota by one what are you talking about we we answered two questions in half an hour which

is our quota okay all right fine good job you are productive and engaged aha i did it i defeated you what can people do if they want to help us meet our own question quota by the way there have been a ton of questions coming in thank you so much oh yeah thank you so much uh we really appreciate it we will get to them eventually but not at the rate we're going now so thank you if you want to ask a question go to softskills.audio and click on the link that says ask a question all right we will catch you next week