Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 165: I don't play videogames and quarter-career burnout

Episode Date: July 8, 2019

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I recently joined a startup. After joining I realized most of the engineers are gamers. They play games during the lunch hour, and if we end up having lunch together, everyone is talking about the game that they are playing or some news in the gaming circle. As a non-gamer and introvert, I find it different to join in their conversation. How can I join in, or bring the talk back to something else? I’ve been working as an Android Engineer for 7 years from the beginning of my career. I loved my profession but things started to go not so well with reaching of the senior level. Coding tasks became boring because I knew how to solve them before starting. Most of the time I was helping less senior engineers but it didn’t give me satisfaction. I tried to solve the problem by quitting my job. I joined a company with a team of only senior engineers hoping that it meant more challenging tasks. Things did not improve. Tasks are still boring and I don’t learn anything new from my colleagues because they are around the same tech level as me. I don’t think I’m burned out because I still enjoy programming when I need to use my brain for solving a problem. I don’t want to move to management because I like coding more than people. I don’t want to switch to another tech stack because it means a pay cut and I think that I’ll get bored again in a year or so. Is it some kind of quarter-career crisis? Is there a way to be an expert at the field and still like your job?

it takes more than sitting around a campfire with a flashlight under your chin reading scary post-mortems to be a great software engineer this is episode 165 of the soft skills engineering podcast i am your host jamison dance i'm your host dave smith soft skills engineering is a weekly advice show where we talk about all the non-technical things that go into the technical field of software development and also tells scary ghost stories i i love the idea of like printing out the latest cloudflare blog post about how someone pushed a bad regex and it destroyed the internet yeah just reading that with a flashlight under your chin and it could happen to you we're like three months early for halloween though yeah i'm always scared

of breaking stuff though that fear exists all the time it's that would be scarier right like if it's halloween you expect it true of course scary stuff happens but but not in july the least spooky of months it really sneaks up on you yeah do you want to talk about our wonderful patrons yes thank you to those that are contributing and where they get a shout out every month they are matthew voidovich the agile ventures charity zach grannon tails the weird orange squirrel thing i guess luis santos nick cantar sean iva robotnik sunny tie sonic the hedgehog marie rousseau chris hogan stanley tactical radio and one-time shout outs this month dylan mulroy melos smoyka rafael machado thank you though to everyone contributing if you'd like to support

the show you can go to softskills.audio and click support us on patreon yeah thank you so much and just a reminder if you support the show for any amount for any amount of time then we will invite you to our slack team and maybe maybe you don't even want to join you just want that feeling of saying no to this invitation and that can be worth something to you too i guess yeah i i continue to enjoy the discussion that happens there it's great i learn stuff from people both asking questions talking about other people's questions it's fun yeah it's really cool all right i'm gonna read our first question i recently joined a startup after joining i realized most of the engineers are gamers they play games during the lunch hour and if we end up having lunch together everyone

is talking about the game that they are playing or some news in the gaming circle as a non-gamer and introvert i find it different i think that means difficult i find it difficult to join in their conversation how can i join in or bring the talk back to something else it doesn't say what kind of games and i i read it and assumed video games but i think i like it better if they're just way into like rummy cube or i was thinking twister twister they get so into freeze tag every lunch talking about all the strategies pinochle anything they'll bet on who's ci build finishes first games nice all kinds of games greco-roman wrestling so i've been on the other side of this when i was 23 i played a lot of video games and i still do but i did when i was 23 and i played

them at work then because there were some other people i played with and i think looking back on it i wasn't trying to exclude anybody but there was certainly like a handful of people that all had similar interests that we talked about games together we played them together and i don't think i would do that again as a more mature person both because i want to go outside during my lunch break and not sit inside on the computer and also it'd be super distracting to everyone in an open office which it was and also i would be worried about leaving people out but which the point is yeah it happened and i did it too and i don't think anyone said anything but i'm pretty sure there were some there were people that chose not to participate and it wasn't like everyone did it

but this one person but i don't think it was great i don't know it felt weird it feels weird looking back on it yeah i feel the same i've worked at two companies where video games were part of the culture like the lunchtime and after hours culture and i think it can be really fun but it can also be really distracting setting i think we should set aside like the productivity stuff and focus on you know feeling left out but just like you like looking back i can't really imagine now bringing that to my present employment or any company i've worked for recently just feels it feels wrong i don't know why i wonder if it's a i mean it wasn't a startup for me too was it like that when you were in this culture uh one was a startup one was a much more established company okay but it was a

really small company and and at first when i joined literally everyone did love video games and that was when there are 10 people at the company they can all share one single interest and except the ceo who was like 45 and it's kind of like the company's dad i guess rolling his eyes at you every time you play games yeah yeah oh that was the company where i started a formal friday as a joke and we did it for two days or two weeks and then we forgot about it the third week and our CEO hates dressing up, despises ties, and wore a tie to formal Friday to participate in the hijinks and then got so mad at us because we made him wear a tie and we forgot about it. Yeah. Sounds like there was no shortage of hijinks at this company.

Hijinks abounded. VC funding abounded. I sure learned a lot. We sure didn't build a product that anybody wanted. Those investors never got that money back, I'm guessing. They did not. They did not. But thank you for paying my paycheck. All right. So that helped. All of that really helped our question asker.

What should they do as the person left out? Feeling left out is the worst. I hate it. Yeah. And I'm sorry that you feel left out by the situation. I assume that's what's going on behind this. The question, it's like, it's not like you have this irrational hatred towards video games. It's that there's this thing that is making you feel like not a part of the group, which would be hard.

Which is hard. Yeah, for sure. ah how do you i mean aside from joining the group and getting into the same things they're into how do you break into this group i mean there and there are so many that's the plot of a thousand sitcoms of like person who isn't into that hobby pretends like they are and then it goes poorly surprise surprise yeah yeah i don't think you should do it if you don't want to i mean i think you need to find one ally someone who you can talk to who isn't just going to be bored because you're not talking about video games. You have interests and hobbies. You can bring those to work and talk

about stuff you do outside of work. Talk about, I don't know, a book you're reading that's interesting or whatever things you do that aren't playing video games. You could, have you tried scolding them and telling them that they're wasting their lives and video games are rotting their brain? Works for parents. Every time. Yeah. Set up monitoring software, turn off their their internet after an hour of playing video games or just keep track of how much time they spend and then produce a weekly report to their manager yeah that'll be great everyone loves a tattletale have you tried yeah all i can think of are dumb ideas what would be good ideas to help with this i like your idea of changing the conversation because there are topics that

are more inclusive than this niche interest this niche interest hobby and you know i see people sitting around all the time at lunchtime having great conversations about general topics that aren't like totally narrowed in on one very esoteric thing and i think it would be really healthy for these people to expand a little bit if all they ever talk about is video games then i think they are missing out on some opportunities and they might enjoy someone to come in and start talking about say greco-roman wrestling poetry perfect finances that's all those are the only topics i'm trying i'm just looking at my desk poetry and finance cuisine oh yeah food i have a bag of cheese it's on my desk and i think that loosely qualifies as cuisine very loosely

i would say i was gonna say well there's one go-to topic you can always pull which is what's everyone gonna do this weekend got any fun plans but you already know the answer why we're going to play some video games yeah i'm trying to think so that this culture did change eventually at the startup i worked at but part of it was people just got older and the company grew and so people matured and interest changed and then more people were added to the group who brought other interests and they were still a part of the culture but it became a much more balanced culture and we would go outside and i don't know take walks and just we did a lot more than play video games during lunch breaks okay and no one stayed late anymore to play video games which is partially because

people got older and had families and didn't want to hang out at work after work was done jameson was at this startup for an entire lifetime i was grew old retired children's children yeah here this is your grandfather's playstation 4 controller play video games are you kidding i gotta go see my grandchildren uh the the problem is the question asker said they're an introvert and it's already hard enough to go up to a group and be like, hey, you know this thing that you all share that you like and want to talk about? What if we talk about my thing instead?

That none of you share. Yeah, and add that to the discomfort that already exists from being an introvert. Well, one thing you could do is you could get a little more formal and I've seen this actually work pretty well. This team probably needs to get outside themselves a little and I know that this is kind of a trope

or maybe even, I don't know, maybe even a meme. But what about like a team building exercise where you coordinate with management to organize some kind of team building exercise where everyone can participate? Some kind of fun thing? There are so many of these things. I mean, there's like ropes courses and there are escape rooms and there are deep water fishing off the coast of Alaska. But there really are lots of things you can do. And some of them sound a little bit more cheesy than others. but they all have a pretty good effect of getting people to kind of change their paradigm a little

bit and enjoy each other and get to know each other outside this narrowly confined window of video game interest yeah you could also try and do like a i don't know like a book club or some some kind of lunch activity thing that's scheduled that people can participate in so you have a little bit more influence over the topic yeah what about setting up lightning talks like monthly lightning talks or something yeah that's a pretty common thing and then i think done well that could that could add some diversity to the topics in the culture done poorly it could just be like more work yeah well let's talk about work more instead of non-work things i've seen it done in a really cool way where the topics are completely wide open they don't have to be technical and what

ends up happening is you learn interesting things about people like for example this one person in my building had i think he had built he had built some kind of like koi pond in his backyard like a self-sustaining ecologically friendly natural feature in his backyard and he kind of just walked gave a lightning talk about how he built this thing and suddenly now you have something to ask this person how's your koi pond you know it's it's really cool so it doesn't necessarily fix the problem immediately but it creates this network of knowledge where people know things about each other that they can then use as seeds for conversations besides just dude did you see that sweet kill total headshot yeah yeah i like that that's that's kind of how we do call them

the learning extravaganza on my team and it's it doesn't have to be technical they mostly have been but it's basically something that you have learned there's been a threatened topic of how to hang drywall for a while and i think that'd be pretty rad yeah we did one about text adventure games which was cool and i like the idea of using these to get to know people with more depth because that lets you have better conversations with them where if all you know about them is they're this group that you see as kind of a whole group not even necessarily individuals and and they all like video games that's a pretty surface level thing and it'd be hard to get past that surface without some kind of nudge so i like that all right cool there's a few ideas for you anyway

i i'm also remembering your idea that you propose about setting up just random one-on-ones with people and uh again it'd be hard as an introvert introvert it'd be hard as a startup maybe where they don't have a ton of culture. But if you could, I don't know, just opportunities to get to know people. I found that that helps break down groups. Maybe there's something there about just saying like, hey, I'm trying to go out to lunch with each person on the team or something like that. That's a good idea. One-on-one might actually work pretty well for an introvert. It's way better for me. I wilt in these circles of like 10 people talking about a topic. I just turn into a wallflower. But if I'm hanging out with just one or two people, it's a lot easier

to get to know folks and have a conversation. And you could even expand it, like you said, one or two maybe even three people now you are a much bigger percentage of the group and so the topics may actually be a little bit more conducive to what you like yeah i think the last idea is to try and uh learn about video games by changing your environment so that your your tickets are like missions you go on and you track like your i don't know damage numbers instead of points in a sprint and your health just really yeah your your health yeah uh your paycheck is going to be your gold points i don't know what that would be your yeah your level is still your level right you can level up yeah you can just tweak your title to be a dark wizard or whatever

you can already do that on linkedin though so you can start today okay have we helped maybe all right good luck and i hope it works out do you want to read our next question dave yes i do this comes from roman who says i've been working as an android engineer for seven years from the beginning of my career i loved my profession but things started to go not so well with reaching the senior level coding tasks became boring because i knew how to solve them before starting most of the time i was helping less senior engineers but it didn't give me satisfaction i tried to solve the problem by quitting my job. Hey, good job. I joined a company with a team of only senior engineers hoping that it meant more challenging tasks, but things did not improve. Tasks are still boring and I don't

learn anything new from my colleagues because they are around the same tech level as me. I don't think I'm burned out because I still enjoy programming when I need to use my brain for solving a problem. I don't want to move to management because I like coding more than people. I don't want to switch to another tech stack because it means a pay cut and I think that I'll get bored again in a year or so. is it some kind of career quarter career crisis is there a way to be an expert at this field and still like your job this is a fascinating question to me because it is so different from from my life experience i just i stumble through the world like a like a child just slack-jawed and dumbfounded by all the magic that i see people doing around me so there are times where i feel

like yeah i got this problem but it never feels boring or bad and then i still feel like i just have so much to learn from people i work with or people i interact with online or whatever so this is the this is like what's the opposite of a silver lining sounds like you're great technically and the arsenic lining i don't know of the cloud is that tech problems are boring just trying to think what it would be like i've had i've had exactly this experience two times in my career the first time was actually right around the seven year mark just like this listener and I got to the point where I was like okay I'm solving the same problems over and over I already kind of know how to do this there's not a lot of challenge or interesting things

and then I actually the way I solved that problem was I did what this listener says they can't do which is changing industries changing tech stacks which is what I did so I completely quit a tech stack rebooted totally from scratch and it was just a huge breath of fresh air for me started over all new programming languages all new tooling all new frameworks it was great and then after five years of that i did it again and now did you have to take a pay cut when you did this no i see that's the thing i didn't so i do wonder if the smartphone app development world android engineer is what it says here might be a little bit harder to do without taking a pay cut because we've talked about this on the show before but mobile app developers seem to be kind of in a

special category and they don't they don't funge as much between like stacks and between roles like you know web or front end web or or some other kind of web it's nothing but web right i believe so there is only web anyway for whatever reason they kind of get locked in so it could mean a pay cut in this situation but you know for me i'll take that back i did take maybe like a five percent pay cut i think when i transitioned but oh it was totally worth it and no problem at all. So you said you felt like you were solving the same kinds of problems over and over again. Do you feel like you had any ability to solve the meta problem, which is why are we solving these same kinds of problems over and over again? If I had had that kind of vision,

I probably would have done something like that. Okay. Yeah, this is just so different from my experience that I think I'm pretty solid technically, but I'm usually not the best raw technical person in in a medium-sized group of people i work with and and those problems are interesting to me but the people and and system problems are just as interesting to me and those it turns out are never the same and and are both much harder to solve and take much longer and and are much more fascinating in some ways it's it's like an endless puzzle i guess so i haven't felt the same feeling of getting just bored because there's everything is easy like i the easy stuff is only part of my job i agree with that and i think system problems are fascinating and there

seems to be just absolutely no end in to the universe of interesting systems problems maybe we should define what that means because that's a really vague term what do you what do you think i mean and i'll tell you if you guessed what was in my head okay what i mean is where you have independent systems that interact with each other typically in over like a network to accomplish some goal which is much more uh which adds a whole bunch of crazy complexities that aren't present within like a self-contained single program that runs on one computer i regret to inform you that you failed to guess what was in my head dave i'm talking about systems as in systems thinking where it could be programs but it could be organizations or teams or companies or like

we work with a product organization and they consistently deliver us requirements that aren't vetted and so that causes us to redo a bunch of work and what are the inputs that cause that to happen and how can we tweak the process to make it so that our technical work is more effective and that kind of stuff but some of that is like that's definitely not coding and if you want to code that is taking you further away from it but even even much closer to coding i think is like system design and architecture of oh yeah and i don't mean like systems the way you're describing it but like processes and like you're talking about processes and workflows and organizational responsibilities and ownership models and things like that um which i think are also pretty

interesting but for someone who says i just want to code and i'm not interested in people i think there's a whole world of systems architecture that can be just super fascinating especially in distributed systems unfortunately moving from app development where you're strictly writing code that runs on a phone to this like distributed systems architecture role that's a pretty big jump you know what i mean yeah well no because i haven't done app development but i believe you like even even if you've done it seems like it would be a big if you've done front-end web development which i think a lot of people put in the same ballpark as app development i think it's so front-end web app development is so much closer to like distributed systems

back-end stuff because you have to be concerned about how your page gets served and it typically gets served from a fleet of hosts and there's like content distribution networks and caches and all these things whereas a mobile app kind of the ecosystem takes care of that for you right the platform takes care of a lot of that you know it delivers the code for you you don't have to do that part so anyway long story short there is an entire world here that i think would be fascinating to most engineers who are less interested in people and more interested in code but i think there's a bit of a bridge that has to be built from the app development space to get there i I don't want to switch to another tech stack because of a pay cut.

And I think I'll get bored again in a year or so. They also say, I don't think I'm burned out because I still enjoy programming. So I have felt like this, but explicitly when I've been burnt out. I haven't felt just like I couldn't be bothered to care about my technical work except for burnout. Yeah. Huh. Is this some kind of quarter year crisis or quarter career crisis? I actually think this person might be burned out.

I mean, you've basically described all the symptoms of burnout and then said, but it's not burnout, right? Yeah. I still enjoy programming when I need to use my brain for solving. Yeah, and that I think I think there's a crux right there You know you this person likes problems that are intellectually stimulating. Yeah, kind of like Algorithmically hard not not like process. Yeah, exactly Like I want I want hard technical problems and what I have found Yeah, is it when you're building products like 80% of the work is not intellectually stimulating It's just getting the pieces put together and shipped out the door. Yeah, and then there's like this 20%

that's just totally hard, stimulating, difficult, challenging in all the good ways. And I think that might just be an expectation that as engineers, we just have to calibrate for and realize that it's not all going to be this glamorous ivory tower, you know, big picture thinking. And having said ivory tower, that makes me wonder if maybe this person would be happier in an academic career. Now, I haven't done postgraduate work or graduate work in computer science, but I feel like it's a lot of not coding i mean there's some coursework and then there's a bunch of research and papers and stuff but i feel like i mean maybe i i guess it seems like if all they want to do is sit down and code there's that's not that's not the avenue but i mean if you want to sit down and think

deeply about problems and then write code that's yeah that's what that is and i don't say that from personal experience but from talking to lots of friends who have done it you know and yeah you'll probably write less code in an academic career, but you will probably spend more time engaged in these kind of intellectually stimulating problems. Yeah. Do you think this could depend on the job as well? I mean, I feel like you mentioned product development and that's been the vast majority of my career. And I agree that a lot of it is figuring things out that aren't necessarily tricky algorithmic problems, but there's other domains where that's not the case, right? I mean, i don't know maybe this person should go become like a kernel hacker or something

yeah it could be yeah there there there are problem domains where really deep technical expertise is where it's probably flipped a little bit and that that is the bulk of the work i think they're probably fewer in number because reasons i don't know why i said because i don't know why so but but i feel like they're fewer in number but i think they're out there it's just you might have to look for it but i i i think you've identified something here which is that solving product problems provides challenge for a while while while this question asker tries to figure out kind of the lay of the land but once they get it it loses its challenge so maybe you need to look for it wouldn't be a different tech stack solving product problems because that would get

old quick but if it was a problem domain that was more technically focused yeah so i wonder you're saying maybe keep the tech stack the same potentially but in a more technically challenging domain i don't know if you could i don't know how much again i don't know very much about android development but but i think focusing on on that instead of the tech stack maybe it would involve a tech stack change but that wouldn't be the point the point would be to move into a role where you can purely focus on these hard technical problems you like that that bring you satisfaction i will say i think there is a lot of competition for those roles because i think there are a lot of people compared to the number of roles that prefer this kind of work what if you just switch to a

tech stack that's incredibly hard to use that's just really painful and you have to be a super human coder to get anything exactly like we're building a web app in mips assembly okay yeah what so i think that would work temporarily but then what if you just build like the ruby on rails of mips assembly you build just this beautiful framework that abstracts away a lot of the pain and makes it easy to build web applications in MIPS. Well, I mean, I'm guessing that won't happen because it'll probably take about a lifetime to build your first feature, but, you know.

Yeah, that sounds like a lot of hard technical work out of you. I do think there might be something there, though. Like, I feel like there are some folks that gear towards user-facing features and some folks that like building the tools that other people use to build user-facing features. And I feel like there's certainly a big crossover in skill,

but generally the kind of building tools for other people to build things right that seems more technical so maybe maybe there's again nothing i know nothing about android i know only space android but maybe there's a maybe there's like a gap for a good i don't know animation library or some some higher level abstraction that you can build that lets you focus more on augmenting other developers capabilities yeah maybe maybe you can go join one of these companies that produces like an android toolkit like a commercially available android toolkit that other developers build on yeah i think that could be a cool transition to leverage your experience but i will say this take if you take a little bit bigger picture view

and say in 10 years do you really think you're going to be working on an android tech stack anymore and i think the answer is probably no i think it'd be very i mean android at this point is only about 10 years old give or take a year and i think it's probably more refreshing than you might expect to switch tech stacks even if your domain is still the same level of intellectually stimulating that's a good point if this person has been on android for seven years they just say i'll get bored in a year of a new tech stack but you don't know anything else how do you know that like yeah yeah don't don't underestimate the value of switching tech stacks because it brings not only does it bring new technology you have to learn but it brings usually a whole new community

of people who see things differently and that that can be wildly different ideas about things that are important or not important and you know and like i said i've done it twice once i switched from c++ as my primary language to the python and javascript web development community which was just a complete 180 degree difference in community yeah and then i switched from that to java building voice-based systems and it's like another complete different you know if i would almost say there's like 540 degrees in a circle because i've now done multiple like 380 degree switches multiple 180 degree yes they're all exactly backwards from each other it turns out i'm in like a five dimensional hypercube yeah several dimensions yeah you're just rotating in high dimensional

space yeah boy does it bend your brain well i feel good about the answer that's what's important right who cares if it's right yeah i think we answered i think what do you think i think good luck and i think despite how you may feel at the moment you're in a very exciting point in your career because i feel like something big is about to happen for you i'm just going to give you my psychic reading right now you know i sense from beyond oblivion something new and exciting is coming to you wait a minute why don't we and and good right not like not like a meteor but you know we might want to consider pivoting the show toward like software developer psychic readings i think that would be essentially making explicit the subtext of the show which is

we take these brief little snippets of information and then try and extrapolate wildly from them so yeah i think i think that might just be a name change all right i like it well if you want to get a fake psychic reading where should they go they should go to softskills.audio and click the ask a question button and we will look at it in our queue and get to it eventually thank you so much for asking questions thank you for listening if you like the show please share it and we will catch you next week