Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 160: Non-manager 1:1s and throwing away dev learning

Episode Date: June 3, 2019

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Is it weird to have 1-1s but not with my ‘manager’? Management is planning to start holding ‘1-1s’ every 6-8 weeks for the development team. The purpose of these 1-1s: ~ ‘So you can talk about non-technical things, any issues with the team or things that are making you unhappy.’ But these 1-1s be with someone who is nominally ‘HR’, not our manager. Since it’s a tiny company, their responsibilities cover things like accounting and sales support. This person doesn’t have any people management or software product development experience, nor any experience in our product domain, and won’t really be our ‘manager’ going forward. Maybe I should just 🎶 quit my job 🎶 🕺. Then I’ll have new and unfamiliar problems to worry about 😅 Hello Jamison and Dave, I have a question on career progression, tech skills and moving into a new role. I’m a career switcher who has spent the last four years studying to move into a developer role. Over the last year I’ve been working on a technical project that has been delivered on time, under budget and ahead of schedule, a huge win for me and the team. However, now that it’s done my manager’s manager is looking at how the team is structured and who we need to hire. He has come to me and my manager to ask if I would like to move in to more of a Project Manager / Business Analyst role as I have done such a good job of the project roll out this year. I’m good at that kind of work, I do get a kick out of it, but if I don’t push forward to move into a developer role have I wasted the last four years retraining? Should I take the role and continue to push to be a full time developer on the team, or accept my fate but use the skills I’ve gained to be a better BA?

it takes more than declaring jira ticket bankruptcy to be a great engineer this is soft skills engineering episode 160 i'm your host dave smith i'm your host jamison dance soft skills engineering is a weekly advice show for software developers about non-technical topics i declare bankruptcy oh man i'm just trying to think what would happen if i did that if you yelled out loud i declare bankruptcy yeah no if i just deleted all our jira backlog like what would life be better or worse having groomed thousands and thousands of issues in the past i can say life would probably be about the same yeah that people would kind of generally know what to do and all those issues that are there because you're afraid to say we're never going to do this would just go away uh-huh at my

last company i had this little technique where i set up like i i wanted to delete these tickets so bad but there was always someone who was like oh i don't want to lose track of that i'm like okay so i would set up a dedicated project which i eventually called the graveyard and i would just put it in there one called the reaper it's like i like i know that no one is ever going to look at these but to make you feel better and to let me effectively delete them i'm just going to put them in the graveyard yeah the reaper comes for all tickets eventually well that's not what this show's about nope anyways let's thank our wonderful patrons thank you so much to matthew voidovich the agile ventures charity zach grannon

louise santos nick cantar sean clayton ivo robotnik sunny tie sonic the hedgehog marie rousseau chris hogan thank you so much to those folks and thank you to everyone else who's contributing if you want to contribute to our patreon you can go to soft skills.audio and click support us on patreon and you get something for it now you get to join our slack team and chat with us and other soft skills listeners you can be on the team on join our team yeah we'll extend firm handshakes to y'all do you want to read our first question dave you bet this comes from an anonymous listener who says is it weird to have one-on-ones but not with my manager my management is planning to start holding one-on-ones every six to eight weeks for the development team the

purpose of these one-on-ones is quote so you can talk about non-technical things or any issues with the team or things that are making you unhappy close quote but these one-on-ones will be with someone who is nominally, quote, HR, not our manager. Since it's a tiny company, their responsibilities cover things like accounting and sales support. This person doesn't have any people management or software product development experience, nor any experience in our product domain and won't really be our manager going forward. Maybe I should just musical notes emoji quit my job. And then is that the disco guy? That's a dancer emoji. Yeah, that's a dancer. then we'll have new and unfamiliar problems to worry about drop of sweat emoji

am i getting better at saying the names of the emojis just tell me be honest yeah they're really rolling off the tongue okay good is it weird to have one-on-ones but not with my manager yes that's weird the way that the question asker says it management is planning to start holding one-on-ones every six to eight weeks for the development team. That kind of sounds like they're going to get everyone in a room and then put this HR person in the room with everyone and say, all right, it's time for your bi-monthly one-on-one all together now. Your semi-quarterly one-on-one. Yeah. This looks like someone that dug up a hieroglyphic of a management book and read

something about one-on-ones and is trying to decipher it through a language barrier or something. Yep. I've had one-on-ones not with my manager, like with peers and other people on other teams I want to stay connected to and stuff like that. That's just hanging out, though. That's not a one-on-one, right? I don't know. I guess I call them catch-ups or sync-ups or something.

Okay. But there are two people on either side of a table, which, you know, when you write one-on-one with a little colon between the two number ones, that's what that represents. Okay. Two people sitting at a table. Yeah? Yeah, I think so. Okay.

did you ask them if there were any issues with their team like it just seems really weird if some random co-worker from the same team or different team that'd be equally weird yeah you know i used to think it was weird too it's a big company thing though i think so the the first person that ever did this to me was a former googler and we were at a startup together and he set up like a monthly recurring one-on-one on my calendar and i was like huh that's that's weird and then we did them every month and it was like oh this is this is great we get to just talk about you know what's on your mind what are you working on what's going on on your team and we just stayed connected and it was awesome and then I joined a big company and I now do I've got probably four

or five people that I have monthly events on my calendar where I just sit down with them just just to make sure I make time to meet with people that I think are important to stay connected to and we just talk about what's going on with our jobs and you know what problems we're facing and once in a while we find things we can help each other out with it's great i laughed dave and then when you said that i realized that i did that too and it was great it was up here i think ours were weekly because our teams worked really closely together and we just talked about what was going on but it wasn't this there there was no mentorship or yeah yeah it wasn't i will solve your problems for you or tell me all your cares it was more like our teams work together let's kind of talk about how

that's going yeah and i have mentoring one-on-ones as well where i've like specifically entered into a mentoring relationship with someone but that's not really what i'm talking about here it sounds like you and i are doing the same things yeah is that at your current job or previous it wasn't my current job person and who i did that with left though so i don't know where to go maybe i should yeah it drove them away maybe i should start it up again yeah but it wasn't this situation where it's it's someone kind of random who has no real insight into what i'm doing but it seems like there's some amount of authority conferred by management saying hey do one-on-ones with this person i have not had that happen to me before me neither thank goodness sounds like it's time

to start maybe i should maybe i should reach out to someone in hr or someone in sales and just be like hey um it's time for our monthly one-on-one yep call up the customer service people it's just yeah huh yeah that's weird i mean why why are they doing this i'm gonna guess that i mean i'm gonna put on my very generous hat and i'm gonna guess that they are trying to make sure everyone has an opportunity to report issues that they would not be comfortable reporting to their manager who signs their paycheck or to their peers, you know, or other management in their chain, but to make sure that everyone has access to HR and HR is kind of an air quotes here. Cause it sounds like this is a diffuse HR responsibility or diluted a little bit by

other responsibilities. We left this out, but the company's pretty small too. I think they said 20 or so people. So small company, probably growing, probably making sure that everyone has a good vehicle for reporting issues that's what i'm gonna guess so you're saying that's their intent do you think this accomplishes that intent i think the question behind that question is have i ever had a positive outcome from a situation involving hr oh poor hr the only time they show up is as the bad guys in stories i know it's too bad but In real life, too, in my experience. Wow, these stories just really jump off the page.

Yeah, my experience has matched the stories I've heard, I guess, is how I'll put it. Well, no, that's not true. I worked at a startup where there was a guy who, he roughly did like operations stuff, but that involved some amount of HR. And he was really great. I really enjoyed talking to him. But I don't think I ever talked about HR things with him. It was like expense reporting and like everything plus some HR stuff.

But I didn't have one-on-ones with him to talk about my experience about problems and things that were making the team unhappy. Was this person able to do anything about it? No, I didn't. Oh, sorry. That would be a twist. Everything I've said so far is a lie. I've been in this exact situation.

he probably would have been able to listen and nod sadly i mean we were friends we would like kind of gripe about stuff or talk about things that were going on but it was it was as friends not as an official reporting relationship or anything okay presumably there's some kind of technical leadership why wouldn't you just have it with that person what's the point of putting someone who isn't technical in that role i don't know i don't know i guess we're trying to justify it and the answer is no it's weird there's there's no justification but the other question is maybe i should quit my job is this weird enough that the question asker should bounce or should they just deal with it and and kind of make it through some awkward times every two months well to be clear

that wasn't exactly the question the question was musical notes emoji should i quit my job musical notes boogeyman boogie dance guy maybe i should just quit my job and in that case yes i mean if dancing and singing is involved i would say go for it you'll make memories and then you do the west side story like snap yes exactly snap march out the door exactly i would not leave my job over this this is like totally no big deal and first of all this arrangement that they've created will absolutely not scale as your company grows and these will just naturally fizzle out there's just no i mean this thing is going nowhere okay so that's a good point one-on-ones get canceled all the time and you're saying that

when the motivations are this weird they're just gonna that's interesting yeah yeah this is not gonna be permanent the bureaucratic machine will grind to a halt yes and no one will ask how come we don't have those one-on-ones anymore that was the best part how are we going to solve all the problems that we're experiencing on a dev team without talking to someone in hr sales support slash accounting yeah every six to eight weeks i just feel a hole in my heart so i wouldn't worry wouldn't worry about it i'm sure they're a talented individual and yeah i think you've convinced me okay all right well hold on i'm not worried let's get to the really hard-hitting crux of this question when you send a calendar invite for someone to

have a one-on-one with them what do you write do you write one colon one one hyphen one one slash one o-n-e dash o-n dash o-n-e i mean what do you do or 11 if you're an anarchist just send him an invite that says 11 11 11 what i can tell you let me check my calendar i do one colon one see and i read that as one to one it's a ratio which is true oh well someone okay this is my boss my boss does one hyphen one which could be one minus one which is zero exactly could mean every week i get fired i read a sci-fi book a long time ago and i don't remember which one it was but one of the twists was that the hero always gets out of these inescapable situations but really he doesn't he dies and then they just spin up a new clone and like somehow download memories onto him

so maybe that's what's happening maybe i am this week's jameson and then next week a new jameson will arise cool so you're saying there's like malevolent undertones depending on which punctuation you use yeah yeah exactly like you can read into it and know is this person sending up a one-on-one with me to criticize me or to support me yeah based on the calendar invite well have we answered the question i think so i'd say good luck it's probably fine i wouldn't worry one bit about it best of luck all right i will read our next question this is from an anonymous listener hello jameson and dave i have a question on career progression tech skills and moving into a new role i'm a career switcher who has spent the last four years studying to move into a developer role

over the last year i've been working on a technical project that has been delivered on time under budget and ahead of schedule a huge win for me and the team however now that it's done my manager's manager is looking at how the team is structured and who we need to hire he has come to me and my manager to ask if i would like to move into more of a project manager business analyst role as i have done such a good job of the project rollout this year i'm good at that kind of work i do get a kick out of it but if i don't push forward to move into a developer role have i wasted the last four years retraining should i take the role and continue to push to be a full-time developer on a team or accept my fate but use the skills i've gained to be a better ba or you could take

another role that's not on the table on the menu right now which is ceo that's yeah that'd be some judo where your manager's manager says hey do you want to have this job and then you yank their arm use their weight against them and switch places and now they're the business analyst and you are their boss's boss i think that's a coup isn't it yeah a mutiny accept my fate you know all my best life decisions started with me saying i accept my fate right that's just a sign that that's what i was meant to do it's my calling in life to what's like the most boring thing i've done in my life i know that's what i was just thinking like reviewing all my bad decisions i really i really should have kept going with okam

working as an hourly employee at a dry cleaner was was my calling yep that was your god was your fate maybe i should have just left the wedgie in that the bully gave me that may have been the funniest thing you've ever said on this show good oh my gosh good hell yeah i guess my point is let's get this thing back on track i don't think you should accept your fate because it doesn't really sound like what you want to do i mean oh man so many isn't it true that in your career there's just so many options that you choose because they were there and someone is rewarding your success right it sounds like they're saying hey you did really good at this what if we just make this a thing and say this is your job

and as someone who has a hard time saying no i can see that happening to me where where my job gets shunted into wherever i get the most praise instead of what i actually want to do exactly and you usually get the most praise for doing things no one else wants to do yeah my cats do that i just hold out my hand and then they like come rub their heads on my hand i move my hand and then they move over to where my hand is so i'm just thinking like taking this to the extreme like jameson you did such a good job triaging those 4 000 jira tickets that no one's looked at for five years how would you like to do that full time i accept my fate i don't know what's worse leaving the wedgie in or taking that job yeah i mean i think the the

broad thing of there's work beyond writing the code that gets done and then you have to decide do i do that work instead of writing the code i feel like i've seen that quite a bit and i've talked about this a bunch before. There's this slide deck about being glue that talks about this a lot, about how there's all this glue work you do besides the pure technical work. And the glue work can kind of suck you in if you're not careful and if you don't want to go there. And I think it's specifically written for people who come from other backgrounds or kind of the not standard tech employee. And it recommends avoid the glue work as much as you can until you have a really solid technical background and and pedigree because otherwise you'll get pigeonholed as

someone who isn't technical and isn't able to do that work so that's a decision you kind of move over to that later in your career deliberately when you can back it up and say hey i know what i'm talking about i've delivered all these things i've done all this stuff and then that will make it easier for you to contribute in those roles instead of being dismissed as just the project manager who doesn't know how to write code or doesn't know things about the technical requirements or whatever. Yeah, totally good. And I was kind of going to come down on that side of the fence on this one, too, and say, in this case, I would recommend going go for the coding position here. You know, you spent the last four years training for this. I would say you need to get some return

on that investment. Try it. And it sounds like you've got built in really good project management business analyst skills already. And if you don't like the role of a software developer, then you can just back out and go down this path if you want i mean i don't think this door is going to close i also want to be clear that i'm not saying that being a developer is better or harder or more prestigious than being a project manager or business analyst or anything i'm not saying you should do this because those other jobs suck it's more like it sounds like you want to do this and even if you do do those other jobs it will i think you'll be better at them if you have more experience writing software also this is a change i noticed since moving more into

management as an individual contributor developer if you have good communication and organization skills and you can do the technical things you're a unicorn you you stick out people say nice things about you all the time and they're they're astonished when you say like well what would the customer think about this feature it's it's like it's like a little kid saying his first word or something like oh the developer cares about the customer that's adorable and yeah let's encourage what a precocious little child you know like it's it's it's really nice and and also helps doing the work as a developer but since moving into management no one pats me on the head anymore for saying what would the customer think about this feature you know like all these other things

beyond writing code that i enjoy they're kind of more part of the job and less of they're less multipliers on your ability to write code and more just kind of the job yeah yeah and and base expectations what's my point here i think my point is you can accomplish really great things as an individual contributor if you have strong skills that would translate to project management and then if you want to you can use those skills at that actual career later but they serve you well as an individual contributor yeah i would offer one word of caution here if you do decide to take our advice and go down the developer track, at least for a while, I'm going to guess that it's going to be a lot harder for you than you're used to. Like it sounds like with this project

management and business analyst roles, it's come quite naturally to you. And maybe that's not the case. Maybe you've spent your whole career honing those skills. But based on the question, it sounds like you're just really good at this naturally. And so given that you've spent the last four years tooling and preparing for this moment, when you jump into your first developer job, it's usually not just like smooth sailing you know yeah like there's a lot of mistakes to be made a lot of lessons you need to learn and i would say don't get discouraged if after you know six months you're just like oh i'm failing all the time this is so hard you know i'd stick with it anyway and just give it a year or two you know you've already invested four years of training why not give it

at least a couple years to to prove it out i still feel like that when i switch jobs for the first six months i just feel like i'm just drowning for a while so and that's not even switching careers that's just the same job at a different company or vaguely the same job if you squint yeah be patient yeah do the thing if you don't like it you can do the other thing perfect if you don't like that wedgie you can pull it out this is the opposite this is like put it back in oh you can put the wedgie back in except your fate i i think it might be worth talking about how you position this because the question askers no wait position what the wedgie oh dear just can't get my mind off of that get your mind off

of it the question the question askers boss is saying hey you should do this thing and it could be seen as an opportunity to step up you know like step into this new responsibility and how do you make yourself look good while saying actually i want to do this other thing not the thing you're asking me to do you know how do you sell yourself into that new role instead of that's hard messaging the one they've kind of seen you doing already successfully yes that is hard and this is this is particularly hard for people like jameson because you know here the hand has been extended and the cat wants to rub the head you know and i think that yeah you definitely want to prepare a good narrative for this so that it's clear to your boss like look i appreciate the offer that

is an interesting role to me i think i'm good at it but i want to take my career in this direction for the time being and i want to leave that door open in the future i may want to go down that path but i think right now the most valuable thing i can do for myself and for this company is to work in this capacity do you think there's some way this could turn into a negotiation like should you say i mean i don't want to do this but if you do these things i feel like you would only be able to do that if you gave your first answer and they said we're doomed without you please please please please and then you could maybe have a little bit of wiggle room to say here's what i would want to make that happen it's it's kind of like you're negotiating a job offer again because you would

be it sounds like you'd be switching jobs and when you say what i want you're talking about a private office with a nice i mean comfy chair that's what i would do with whatever they gave me i would use it to acquire that so yeah just cut out the steps in the middle money oh yeah this is that stuff i use to buy a private office with a chair health benefits that's so that my body is healthy enough to sit in this chair time to go back home to my replica office so i can sit in this chair that i have in my house yeah i i like your messaging around saying hey this is what i want to do and this is

this is where I want my career to go because it's kind of hard to argue with too if you say that there if I think that makes it clear it's not that you are unambitious or kind of shrinking away from the responsibility or incapable of it it's that you're being deliberate about it and there's things you want and you're you're trying to work towards them which I think would come off well I agree I agree and I think so many people in their careers just don't say out loud what they want and instead try to please their I had someone at an early job asked me to lead a team and I didn't have a good answer I was scared and I said I'm actually scared to do that so they said okay and then I didn't do it and I don't think I would have been good at it at that point in my career

but I didn't have a polished narrative around hey I want to focus on these skills more it was like what about that mean person on the team what's not polished about saying I'm scared that was the same meeting where i ate so much wasabi that i started crying and my nose ran a lot this was yeah this was with my ceo i really pulled out the big guns that's awesome well with that we've answered the question i think eat some wasabi eat a lot of wasabi rage cry yeah i think that'll do it good luck perfect what can people do if they want their own questions answered dave go to soft skills.audio and click ask a question and if you want to support the show click support us on patreon also please leave reviews on itunes if you know how to do that and

if you don't i don't know what to tell you because you're saying i don't know how to do it either all 25 or however many we have okay i wrote one of them oh we have a lot more than 25 there's like cool push great work keep it up yeah just on a loop i read them every day okay i'm a very well thank you so much we'll catch you next week Thanks for watching!