Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 155: What do you think about employee monitoring software and how do I get un-demotivated after losing interest in software dev?

Episode Date: April 29, 2019

This episode is sponsored by the O’Reilly Velocity conference. Register today and use discount code SKILLS for a 20% discount: http://velocityconf.com/skills. In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Hello! Thank you for the show! What do you think about employee monitoring software? I received a message from a company about a job position and they use such software. It seems weird for me to make screenshots on my computer and to see what software I’ve use and what websites I’ve open. How do you feel about it? I’m a software engineer with about 2 years of professional experience. When I started working, I was motivated to learn all the things. I consumed technical blogs and podcasts in my personal time and proactively identified and solved problems for the team. Things recently changed. I can’t bring myself to care about work anymore. Curiosity used to come naturally to me but I can no longer summon curiosity about anything related to software development. A few things lead to this. 1) I got a lower than expected rating on my performance review due to an issue with my soft skills. I thought the feedback was valuable but didn’t think such a rating was warranted, considering my overall contributions. 2) Our team has spent the past few months writing code that didn’t ship. 3) I took the Soft Skills Engineering advice and got a new job. In order to do that, I spent many mornings and weekends preparing for technical interviews. After accepting the offer, I felt totally burned out. I very much want to be back to my previous, curious self by the time I start my new job. Unfortunately, I can’t take a long break before the start date. How can I get to a place where I feel motivated again?

This episode is sponsored by the amazing O'Reilly Velocity Conference coming to San Jose, California, June 10th through June 13th. It takes more than procrastinating real work by fixing minor bugs to be a great software engineer. This is episode 155 of the Soft Skills Engineering podcast. I'm your host, Jameson Dance. I'm your host, 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 uh is this a thing i procrastinate or due to procrastinate other stuff i think i procrastinate other stuff by doing this work so this is a minor bug fix that's how i'll classify it we have some wonderful patrons do you want to talk about those folks yes thank you to those who are supporting the show on patreon at the level where they get a shout out every week we have matthew voidovich the agile ventures charity zach grannon luis santos nick kantar sean clayton sunny tie sonic the Hedgehog, Mireille Rousseau, and Chris Hogan. Thank you so much. If you'd like to support the

show, go to softskills.audio and click support us on Patreon. Yeah, thank you. I am just going to read our first question. I'm not going to ask. I don't need permission. Well, you have it anyway. Well, I reject your permission and read it by myself. This is from a listener named Alexi. Hello. Thank you for the show. You are welcome, Alexi. What do you think about employee monitoring software i received a message from a company about a position and they use this software it seems weird for me to make screenshots of my computer and to see what software i've used and what websites i have opened how do you feel about it well i can't every time i think about employee monitoring software all i can think of is like devops culture where we monitor our software

and this is just like the same thing but for people right yeah i think they've learned lessons which is that every node needs to have a bunch of different metrics on it and we're just human nodes observability people ops yeah hey cool apple watch you got there why don't you just connect your step counter to our dashboard i there's got to be some creepy dystopian company that's trying to combine health kit data about heart rate and all that stuff with like employee performance and predict who's gonna flip out and that's why i attach my my apple watch to a blender and just like let it vibrate really rapidly you took four million steps today congratulations jameson is spinning in a circle at 500 revolutions a second

wow the deploy must be going worse than i thought so alexi asked us how i feel about it i can do him one better and tell him how dave feels about it thanks to all the handy employee monitoring software i have on his computer and whenever you visit a website it has the little feedback button saying do you feel good or bad about jameson knowing what website you visited so happy and frowny face actually i i wonder how much of the benefit you could get i mean like air quotes benefit right how much of the effect you could get of this by just installing fake software that just tells people you're monitoring them but you're not like yeah and then you don't have to have all this server infrastructure and i don't

know you could probably have an intern whip it together in a in a week it's just an icon on your desktop that says you know employee surveillance software yeah yeah just sitting there inauspiciously every so often the icon has a little blinking red dot on it the software is displeased apparently this software really doesn't like automotive tutorials on youtube i cannot fathom a world in which you trust software developers enough to build the core technology powering your business and yet somehow distrust them enough to monitor everything they do in that way i i don't know maybe trust doesn't scale though because this seems like a big company thing yeah i was just thinking and if yeah if there are enough people

if you hire a million people then one percent of i don't know what the percentages would be point one percent of them doing something horrible means there's still a lot of people doing horrible things so you're saying there's like literally two companies in the world that need this yeah i think we both work at them i yeah i i work for a large megacorp and i don't have a there's some stuff going on on my computer it's kind of like it'll just rumble suggestively sometimes the fans will just spin up and i assume that's like uploading the video of what i did over the last week i mean there there are like compliance things too about monitoring employee behavior oh really but i i believe there are i mean in space law there are so i assume that

applies to earth law space computer maybe maybe they're not about monitoring behavior it's more about monitoring access and monitoring behavior is one way you can do that like there's also the innocent behavior where your computer has been infected and is now transmitting proprietary documents to some oh yeah that's true yeah you get phished or something and yeah i i think what i want is to clearly know what is going on i feel like that would feel okay if someone was like here's what we do here's why we do it here's the expectation you should have a privacy that would feel reasonable i think especially if it's work provided equipment i mean it's their stuff you're usually on their network and you probably if you work in the u.s at least you probably signed

a thing saying they own everything you do related to technology in any way even if it's on your own hardware or not so like i guess it kind of makes sense it does feel weird and if it ever got used this is funny i started this question thinking i hate this and think it's the dumbest idea ever and i'm arguing for it wow the thing that i don't like is the ability for someone to abuse this right or or the unc the lack of clarity around how it's used if if there's some automated scanner running checking to make sure i'm not installing viruses or something like that that feels fine but if a manager somewhere in hr gets an email every day that's like here's how much time jameson spent on youtube on this laptop like that would feel bad right right if it's about productivity

i would not oh that would that would make me feel bad yeah yeah like productivity is always is already hard to measure. And it feels like if someone is measuring what you do as a proxy for productivity, they've already kind of missed the boat a little bit. Not putting that how I want to. The feeling I don't like is this idea of we cannot trust them to do a good job. So we have to check up on them. That's the productivity part that feels sketchy to me. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So let me ask you this. What if your IT department said, we're going to take screenshots of your computer every five seconds. We're going to keep track of all the websites you go to, but we're only going to use it to protect you from nefarious websites or other behavior that might harm you or

the company. In other words, we promise not to use it for productivity measurements or comparing employees to each other. How would you feel about that? I would feel bad because just having it means there's a chance that it gets used for other stuff yeah i think the overarching point i should make though is that you should be pretty strict about separating church and state keeping your your personal life off of your work stuff because if you do that then it doesn't matter as much i guess i say i feel weird about this whole question i don't know we've made a huge mistake yeah this is strange shut the podcast down this is over i'm arguing for the totalitarian surveillance employer and then and then giving tips on how to work around it by doing all your personal

stuff on a different computer well i mean it's not working around it right it's just like i don't know if you're gonna go work on your side project or browse reddit or whatever like i don't know maybe some people don't have another computer that they can use but i feel like lots of developers do and just do work stuff on your work computer well you know it's interesting because nowadays a lot of employers will require you to install basically back doors on your phone even you know just connecting your phone to the corporate exchange server or whatever will give them control remote access on your phone yep that is why i do not have work stuff on my phone because the trade-off it feels like a pure negative like great i get work emails on my phone

and they can remotely wipe my phone like both of those sound bad to me i don't want either of these i think if i really needed it i could try and get a work phone and it'd be a similar situation of this is my work phone this is not where i like browse twitter or take my random notes or take pictures of my family or whatever this is like for work for getting pages for handling work stuff so just like my work laptop is for work exactly so you have a work laptop personal laptop work phone personal phone so next time jameson shows up to hang out with you and his pockets are bulging and he has this huge backpack with like multiple power supplies

and laptops hanging out of it and all these extra cords. Or, you know, just because he cares about privacy. The other thing you could do is look at the laptop I'm using and try and judge, is this like for fun or for work, this conversation right now?

Oh. If it looks like a work laptop, this is serious business. You can tell it's a work laptop because of the racing stripes that I've installed on it to improve its performance. This is a serious professional machine.

You can tell mine's a work laptop because it's covered in stickers with names of teams and organizations that you've never heard of because they're all internal. How do I feel about it? I think here's how I feel. I would feel worse the smaller the company was. But the bigger the company is, I feel like the more my expectation is that it's just happening and I don't know, I'll just deal with it. But if this was at a small company where it was people I knew who were like,

hey, we're checking up on you, then I would feel pretty bummed about it. I think it also depends for you on how high in the management chain you are. Like if you're the one receiving all the data, it feels pretty good. This is great. I can watch YouTube at one frame every five seconds just by looking at what Dave's doing. Dave is the best YouTube curator. who needs to follow him on twitter when i can see him composing all his tweets in real time i can literally follow him

i even see the drafts that never see the light of day i'll tell you this when i joined i joined a startup about six or seven years ago oh or more seven or eight years ago and it was so refreshing and awesome to join this startup and know that they had no facility for tracking me at all because like i knew the it guy he had no idea what he was doing like you know i knew probably so overburdened exactly like yeah like it was all he could do to keep the internet up like they were not tracking anything we did so that was just great you know and then when i've worked for a few big companies that do i think uh monitor employee stuff like this and what i found is that as long as i'm not thinking about it it doesn't bother me kind of like kind of like social

media right like we know social media sites are just surveillance professionals right like they've nailed the business of surveillance on the web and yet so many people still use these sites because they just don't think about it so yeah bottom line is i think when i really engage my brain i feel bad about being surveilled but i also understand that with the right level of surveillance we can protect our company you know like secret information and things and you know some people some of us work for companies that actually have like real serious security threats against them because there's a lot of value in in getting into these companies so like i think it's a necessary evil but like like like jameson is saying i just i really would hate to find that

it's being used for productivity metrics of some kind and i think as soon as it extends outside of things you do that are directly for the company then then i then i am not waffly at all i think that would be horrible completely if they if they somehow tracked it to activity you did on personal time or personal equipment oh yeah yeah i never heard of that except on your phone yeah okay well this just this just reminds me of that uh ron swanson uh scene from parks and rec where he finds out about google maps and then after he sees it he picks up his computer and throws it and throws it in the garbage yeah yeah the the one concern i have is i believe there are probably good uses of this like you mentioned security threats internal and external but i'm sure there

are people who have just been burned by false positives in some way and and there's probably in the world someone who's been fired because their manager didn't like them and then there was a false positive and they used it against them or something that's the part that scares me it's not the the stuff scanning for vulnerabilities or whatever it's that someone could use this to to unjustly affect someone's career or life there's also the plus side where you know if your manager is tracking all your web searches they could make helpful medical suggestions like hey you know try this for athlete's foot listen i've got a kidney guy i can see you're looking for stuff about that

okay i think we've answered this question all right you know i've been thinking about which conferences to attend this year what a coincidence this episode is sponsored by the o'reilly velocity conference in san jose california june 10th through the 13th yeah i checked it out velocity looks like a great event to learn new skills for building and managing cloud native systems They have a diverse lineup of 92 speakers from companies like Spotify, Netflix, Google, Dropbox, and Cloudflare. There will be talks about cloud application development, microservices, security, and of course, the darling of the internet right now, Kubernetes. It looks incredible this year. You should come to Velocity if you want to learn about chaos engineering, cloud-native systems, and serverless.

And you get to hear firsthand from the engineers who have built some of the world's largest scale and highest performing internet applications. My team works in this domain, and it actually looks directly relevant to the kind of stuff we're facing right now. Really cool. You can even become a certified Kubernetes application developer while there. And you get to meet a bunch of interesting people, which is one of the main reasons I attend conferences. We worked out a sweet deal with the Velocity organizers for soft skills engineering listeners. You can get 20% off when you use code SKILLS during registration. I did the math, and with that code, you can get a pass for as low as $796 right now.

go to velocityconf.com skills to register and use discount code skills oh and hurry because early pricing ends may 3rd maybe i should ask your permission to i'm gonna ask your permission to see if you're okay with me asking your permission to read the next one i approved it you should see it show up on your computer through the monitoring software in a second oh this desktop icon just turn green is that what that is yeah yeah if it ever turns into a the red grumpy face emoji get out of the house okay all right monitor this the next question comes from an anonymous listener who says i'm a software engineer with about two years of professional experience when i started working i was motivated to learn all the things i consumed technical blogs and podcasts in my

personal time and proactively identified and solved problems for the team but things recently changed. I can't bring myself to care about work anymore. Curiosity used to come naturally to me, but I can no longer summon curiosity about anything related to software development. A few things led to this. Number one, I got a lower than expected rating on my performance review. Number two, our team has spent the past few months writing code that didn't ship. Number three, I took the soft skills engineering advice and got a new job. In order to do that, I spent many mornings and weekends preparing for technical interviews. after accepting the offer i felt totally burned out i very much want to be back to my previous

curious self by the time i start my new job unfortunately i can't take a long break before the start date how can i get to a place where i feel motivated again hmm it's a really interesting question yeah two years in and you're already demotivated i'm thinking back over my timeline and i i was at my first job i think it was a little over two years and i basically went through the same cycle the in broad strokes the specifics were different where i got burned out and then i quit and i didn't have a different job um and i was burnt out so i didn't spend nights and weekends and mornings preparing for technical interviews but looking back i i was pretty burnt out how long were you between those two jobs not very long it was a couple well i

should look at LinkedIn. That's a phrase I don't say very often. I'm pretty sure I actually had my job lined up. I don't think I was between jobs. I think I just got a different job and was like, I hope this helps. Yeah, that's what happened. But I wonder if this is common for people earlier in their career, or if it's just the two of us, anonymous listener, because I did feel so excited to learn technical stuff. And I read everything and dove into every tech stack and just hopped rapidly from thing to thing trying to absorb it all at once and by the end of my first job i did not care about computers or code and i don't know i just couldn't bring myself to care about frameworks and technology and ui i don't know i just didn't care about any even haskell

this was before haskell so now my life has changed haskell cured you actually i had some exposure to haskell through a co-worker who got really into haskell and rewrote all of our javascripts to be point free so i hated it i'm trying to figure out what conclusion to draw from this besides this might be a common pattern to have these peaks and valleys how did you get back into it i mean did you did you just start the new job and everything was fine yeah i think the excitement of being in a new environment with new problems and new i don't know new everything that kind of helped kickstart me. I had some really great coworkers at my next job and that helped a lot too. But this pattern has repeated itself a few times in my life. And I've come to recognize it

as a pattern, not as just an event that happens where I got burnt out. It's more like there's these peaks and valleys. It kind of waxes and wanes. And I've gotten a lot better at dealing with it without quitting my job. The other thing I'll say is that sometimes what people call burnout is depression and i'm not a mental health expert and but you are a space mental health expert space i mean alien psychology is a little different than ours so i can only make rough approximations between the two but some of the symptoms you describe sound like they could be potentially related to depression it often results in a lack of motivation lack of interest in things that you used to be very interested in and the solution to that is much different than the

solution to like i just don't like my job right now so that's something to consider and if you're worried about that you can ask your hr department to pull your browsing history and see if there's any yeah i i bet there would be honestly for someone entering into a depression probably a bunch more time on uh on reddit yeah maybe that would cause it though yeah so i would say see if that's a thing and maybe consider talking to a mental health professional because this this depression sucks but there are ways to deal with it and it's easier if you have help if that's what it is okay but i think you know the other option is that maybe just starting a new job will bounce you right back out of it like if you're lucky maybe the newness of everything will just bring

you right back into your old self yeah i think it's okay also to not be obsessed with software you can still be a professional developer and that's where you just lean on your experience and ability instead of your passion jameson which can be weird come on you can be a professional developer but you're not going to be a quote real developer unless you're obsessed yeah i don't know yeah that that attitude is certainly out there it's coming back i've noticed there's kind of a resurgence recently at least in the twitterverse the whole quote of real passion driven development well but no just like are you a real developer do you meet the bar for real developer anyway and the bar so happens to be the things that i have or know or am right it turns

out real developers do what i do right weird i know what are the odds i better go tell all those other people who aren't doing what i do or are not like i am so they can be real developers too yeah but yeah i think the the point is like passion can be great and it can motivate you to do a lot and learn a lot but you can still accomplish great things without this intense feeling of passion and that can feel weird if if you've had that your whole career and now you don't right it can feel like you don't have what makes you a good software developer but that's not true your brain still works and you can still think through problems and solve them you just might not want to be obsessed with it yeah just maybe not on weekends evenings and early mornings

yeah and that's fine you can yeah i would say lean on your your experience at that point and use that to get you through and and don't feel like you have to be a certain i don't know be a certain way to be a software developer it's a weak form of that statement i don't know how to say it better i will say also i think my words are no good dave your words are fine you're just not a real worder you know i actually think that this is a pretty natural cycle too not and i don't actually i don't mean cycle i think it's a pretty normal path where you start out you're energized you're on fire you're writing a ton of code at work you're coming home you're working on more code for the for a couple of years and then i think what happens is you get to a sustainable

level of coding output and you you start to value things in your life beyond just this one dimension you get interested in other things and you know maybe you get interested in relationships or maybe you have a family maybe you get new hobbies or interests or new things you want to study and that's just fine and frankly i find myself you know now i've been working for about uh 85 years now as a software engineer and what i find is that uh i don't write code hardly at all outside of work i do do it when i need to like you know just for example a few weeks ago my son and i were playing connect four and i thought how hard would it be to write a connect four solver that always picks the perfect move uh it turns out very hard even when you're copying and pasting

code that you found in an online reference but anyways you know so i but i do that like once every three to six months you know i'm not doing it every night and and i think that's just perfectly normal well said i want to get back to my previous curious self by the time i start my new job yeah i think don't worry about it that'll just come and i think if you stress about it it'll be harder to achieve yeah writing code that didn't ship i mean that sucks i could yeah that would be demotivating depending on the review getting a bad performance review or a negative performance review would be demotivating too oh yeah so i think maybe don't underestimate how big the effect of those two things are on your on your motivation for sure and good news new job yeah exactly and

that's actually really it's really good that you're in this situation because first of all you've identified a couple of problems you know this performance rating and not shipping code which are terrible it feels bad those two things are about to be completely behind you so if i were in your shoes, I would probably chill and tell myself, I'm going to give my brain a sabbatical from engineering for the week or two or whatever until I start my new job. And I'm just going to focus completely away from it. I'm not going to do anything with it because I know that it'll be recharged and ready to go when I jump into my new job. And all these things will be behind me. I have a blank slate and that'll help. That would help me to kind of set the stage for being excited

about my job again. Yeah. And there's probably something to looking into why those two events affected you so much and and seeing if if you can build up your resiliency a little bit so that maybe if if similar things happen in the future it doesn't affect you quite as bad but that seems like a problem for later when when you've got when you're just feeling good again when you get your next bad performance review no i'm saying focus on feeling good and then maybe the next step is figure out how how can i react better to these negative events you know what i like to do when of burned out which actually happened over the last uh christmas holiday vacation time what i like to you got burnt out from christmas holiday vacation what

no oh this figgy pudding they brought me too much figgy pudding no not exactly i was getting burned out on the way up to vacation and i took two weeks off and I read some fiction and it just, it was great. You know, my mind was just totally entertained and enjoyed it. I didn't really write any code or do anything work related for almost two full weeks. It was wonderful. Completely rebooted me. So gone vacation. Yeah. Use that probably unlimited PTO. That's right. Find out where the actual limit is because they won't tell you.

Find it. But there is one. There is one. It's there. well have we answered the question i think so good luck good luck i think be patient it'll come back you'll do great what can people do if they want their own questions answered go to softskills.audio and click on ask a question thank you so much to everyone who has submitted questions there's so many and we love them you guys you are keeping the show alive yeah thank you we will catch you next week