Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 166: Not the intern and fighting at work

Episode Date: July 15, 2019

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I’m so glad I discovered your podcast last week! You guys are hilarious (I laugh to myself in the car) and you talk about issues that I have thought about since coming into the “adult world”. I’m a new CS grad and have started as a new hire at the company I interned with last summer. I’m on my third week of full-time employment but I still feel like an intern. One of my supervisors even jokes and calls me an intern. I know it is a joke, but I feel degraded. I’m the youngest (at 22) and the only woman on my team surrounded by people who have been on the program for 5+ years. The people around me are VERY technical. I have slowly been getting information about what the program does, but it still isn’t clicking as fast as I want it to (compared to what I had experienced in my time at university). I have no experience in and have not learned any of the concepts they have been talking about. I feel that my CS degree does not matter and I feel that I am not competent enough and don’t deserve my place at this company; I’m not as technical as the other employees. I feel that since I have said I have my degree in CS, people expect me to learn fast and be “technical”. Am I setting myself up with unreasonable expectations? How can I prove to myself and to others that I deserve to be a part of the team and the program as a full-time employee? My team works closely with another team, and the manager of that team is…difficult. Most of my interactions with him have resulted in him getting defensive and frustrated, and nearly become arguments. I try pretty hard to remain polite, but we usually don’t accomplish anything. I’m not sure that I want to mention this to my manager, or to his, because I’m worried that word will reach him that I ““tattled””, which will just make things worse. He’s also more senior than me and has been at the company longer, so if this conflict does escalate, I feel the company would probably take his side. I otherwise really like this job, so the age old advice of quitting is not an option here. Besides just trying to avoid any interactions with him, what can I do? Thanks for much for the help.

it takes more than great json indentation skills to be a great engineer this is episode 166 of the soft skills engineering podcast 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 did some json indentation the other day by hand i felt like a craftsman and then i remembered i could have just hit save in my editor and had it happen automatically and i felt like a wastrel wastrel how do you say that word i don't know that word i've never said it out loud wait wastrel probably it's like a lazy bones a vagabond oh not someone who types things on their keyboard unnecessarily wastrel no well but yes in the end yes people who type too much are wastrels that's not what

this show is about it's not a jameson pronounces words out loud for the first time in his life show it's it's other stuff let me talk about our wonderful patrons really quick thank you so much to the folks who are donating at the level where we shout them out every single episode thank you to matthew voidovich the agile ventures charity zach grannon tails the weird orange squirrel thing i guess louis santos nick cantar sean ivor robotnik sunny tie sonic the hedgehog marie russo chris hogan and stanley tactical radio thank you to all those folks and other folks who have donated or are donating you help make the show possible and you get to join our slack team or ignore a slack team invitation one or the other that's right you pay for the privilege of ignoring our invite

yeah most people get paid to ignore me do you want to dive into our first question sure this comes from a listener named isa or isa isa or wastrel wastrel isa okay the pronunciation guide said isa oh okay thank you i apologize for mispronouncing your name here we go it says I'm so glad I discovered your podcast last week. You guys are hilarious. I laughed myself in the car. I wonder if that's safe. As long as it's not that funny. Yeah. We'll try to dial it down for the automotive audience. All right. And you talk about issues that I have thought about since coming into, quote, the adult world. I'm a new CS grad and have started as a new hire at the company I interned with last summer on my third week of full-time employment, but I still feel

like an intern. One of my supervisors even jokes and calls me an intern. I know it's a joke, but I feel degraded. I'm the youngest at 22 and the only woman on my team surrounded by people who have been on the program for five plus years. The people around me are very technical. I have slowly been getting information about what the program does, but it still isn't clicking as fast as I want it to compared to what I had experienced in my time at university. I have no experience in and have not learned any of the concepts they have been talking about. I feel that my CS degree does not matter, and I feel that I am not competent enough and don't deserve my place at this company. I'm not as technical as the other employees. I feel that since I have said I have my degree in CS,

people expect me to learn fast and be, quote, technical. Am I setting myself up with unreasonable expectations? How can I prove to myself and to others that I deserve to be a part of the team and the program as a full-time employee? Oh man, this is a great question, but it like breaks my hard to hear it so first of all there's this undercurrent of do i really deserve to be here and good news you interned there and passed the job interview so yes like they explicitly evaluated you and said uh given what we know about this person about isa from from her time interning with us and how she does on the interview do we want to hire her yes and the fact that you intern there means they have a lot more information about you than the average person that gets hired at a

company oh yeah like an extended multi-month interview yeah yeah there's some pretty strong external evidence that yeah you deserve to be here because they knew what they were getting when they hired you because they know you pretty well based on past internships and experience i can relate to this story because my first job out of college was also at a defense contractor and i was also the youngest by probably a good 10 or 15 years and the other people on the team used to make fun of me because i was not old enough to rent a car when we went on work trips just sick burns i think the key is to flip it around and make fun of them for getting sore when they like play beach volleyball or move in a way that isn't standing up or sitting down

or uh how they're closer to death or how they don't know what tiktok is okay what's that oh is that that app dave i'm sad to be the bearer of this news to you that marks you as old is that one of those newfangled smartphone applications it is yeah it's a new video social network thing i think i saw an advertisement for that in the newspaper well the fact that we're talking about it as as grown adult men probably means that teens are fleeing it in droves now exactly oh no yeah you've got some ammo tell them that they're getting closer and closer to that point in their career where age discrimination kicks in and they'll never be able to get a job again just turn those tables around yeah don't do that that would be mean yeah yeah i wonder how much of this

is like generational pain being passed on where there's a time-honored tradition of new young people being crapped on by older experienced people and it just it just flows through the universe that way that's that's what happened to them someone probably made fun of them for i don't know not being able to like split their own wood with an axe to fire up their wood-fired stoves or whatever and so now they learned this is what you do you make fun of new people who are young for not knowing things that you know or being as old as you are from the very early days when we were all living in caves trying to make fire by rubbing sticks together you don't even know how to rub sticks together to make fire ha you're not technical oh man they don't even know

how to make their own flint arrow heads look at them with their fancy iron arrows you need to get back to their roots this sucks and it shouldn't happen but i'm not shocked that it is happening it's not great behavior but i think some of it is like not deliberate to be hostile but just kind of oh we just kind of we just joke with the new person haha and it feels light to them but heavier to you maybe right i bet that's true you're newer and less secure and in your career and in the company and i don't know it's amazing how you can be sensitive about those things and i've been in this situation and to them it probably feels like they don't even remember making the comment yeah and yet it's like daggers yeah but now wait hold on a second you're telling me this person

has a computer science degree from a university and doesn't know everything how is that how is that even possible oh boy yeah i have an almost computer science degree yeah everything but calculus too so unless there's some secret like deep knowledge about how to work together on teams with projects with vague requirements and ui development and networking concepts and docker and unless all of that was hiding inside calc 2 it's there okay okay shoot yeah i mean i really should have prioritized it yeah there's just there's just a lot of stuff that will never be taught in a CS degree that is very important for industry. And I guess there's a wide range of styles of CS degrees. But I think generally, my experience from talking to other people and going

through my own is that it's heavy on theoretical concepts, lots of math, lots of exposure, broad exposure to theory, and then kind of a wide array of things like networking, operating systems, like one little dabble with each thing kind of. And then the actual details of how you do this for a job are completely unknown yeah many of the professors who teach these classes have never actually had a job in industry yeah or if they have it's been a real long time ago and my professors were great but they weren't like fresh out of careers in industry yeah like you said some of them had worked in industry but lots of them hadn't and it hadn't been for quite a while i had one professor who taught like intro to software engineering or

something like that and it was he was fresh out of industry uh had his phd but then went to work in industry for a good decade or so and then came to be a professor and his class was awesome like he was so pragmatic had so much insight it was just a very different feel from the other professors who had been doing nothing but teaching and research for the last 20 years i think i took that same class from the same professor dave and i went to the same school and i agree that it felt the most pragmatic of any of my CS classes. That and a class in a totally unrelated part of a, it was an IT class. Those were the two classes that felt the most directly related to what I do every day. Huh. Interesting. But I do feel like it gave me a broad exposure and base that

has kind of been helpful over the long run, even though it isn't that I'm like, oh, let me pull up my lecture notes and remember how I did like the Kalman filter in my AI class to help me use this library to move buttons around the page or whatever like but but just just knowing that that exists can be helpful yep and if you don't have a cs degree there's this whole other feeling of imposter syndrome of like but if i had a cs degree wouldn't i know all this stuff wouldn't this stuff be easy for me so you at least know like no it wouldn't i do have the cs degree and this is still hard but you know isn't that amazing that whether you get the cs degree or not when you come in this industry to begin, you're going to have imposter syndrome. Yeah, I feel like I learned

some stuff, but it was definitely on my own where kind of like poking around at open source or in these programmer communities, Hacker News, like 10 years ago, before it became the Hacker News of today, and stuff like that. I feel like I got exposure to what the real world of a working developer was like, but none of that except very small glimpses through a CS degree. What I think is interesting about a CS program is that even in the upper division classes, most of the course titles have the word introduction in them. And what that tells me is that a bachelor's of computer science is designed to give you exposure to a broad array of topics. And then if you want to go deep into one of those topics, you can either get an advanced degree or you can choose to focus

on one of those areas in your profession after you graduate. But you don't come out of a computer science program with a bachelor's degree with expertise in any one area typically not enough expertise to be like a valuable new hire who someone could say well this person took three networking courses let's hire them as our you know network engineering expert yeah right it's just not like that and i was surprised about that i remember being surprised at what real code written by real people over a long period of time looked like because all the code that i wrote i just wrote it myself except for one class where it was three people writing it over a period of three months and that was our big code base you know with like lots of tricky things to understand and

and a long history but besides that history of a few weeks of three months yeah three months okay three months dave it was serious experience but there's just real world code evolves very differently and and is understood very differently and work happens on it very differently than when you're just staring at an editor thinking, okay, how do I implement like an AVL tree in Java or whatever the assignment is? I guess we're kind of hammering the point home a little bit, but it's true. There's lots of stuff that you do not learn from a CS degree. So you're feeling of, wait, there's all this stuff I don't know. I think that's very normal and is just part of jumping into full-time employment in the industry. And everyone would have that. The people that

start coding from when they're nine on their calculators or whatever, those people might know a lot more about kind of like the background of computing than i did when i started but they still have the same growing pains of like wait source control and like planning meetings and oh how do i collaborate on code with other people like that happens sometime no matter how deep your technical experience is and there's so much of that right like deployment schedules qa processes you know regression testing like all this stuff you've never even thought to do in a computer science class because you've never had code that was old enough or customers. Yeah. I also want to talk about my onboarding at my last, not my last job, my current job. So I'd been working for about

a decade when I joined, maybe a little less, but not new to the industry. And I felt utterly lost technically when I first started this job because it was in a new problem domain in a moderately new to me tech stack i had some experience but not a ton and a whole new team whole new company whole new industry and i think it was about probably a year before i really felt pretty comfortable technically and culturally like i know who people are i know what the code does broadly as a whole i know what problems we're trying to solve or we should be trying to solve so maybe i'm slow probably i'm slow but also it's possible that your expectations of how quickly you should be able to pick up something might be a little too high where it happens over a period

of time and you just start with this little tiny keyhole view of the problem and and the problem domain and it just kind of expands slowly as you work more on it and and being very confused and not knowing what's going on is normal and that will expand to not knowing what's going on about other parts of things as you learn more but i think that's pretty normal that doesn't seem weird and i don't think that means you're not technical enough or not qualified or don't understand or aren't capable of doing good work. 100% agree. This listener has been at the job for three weeks, which is basically zero time. Yeah, especially depending on the industry that that could mean like you just barely got access to the code or yeah, or you just barely resolved

all my permissions issues so I can read. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, three weeks is no time at all. And what's more is I wouldn't feel too bad about the situation like, oh, I'm so I should be fully productive. No, I mean, companies operate on longer timescales than I think you're used to as a college student. For a company, a six-month ramp-up period is pretty normal, right? These people have been working on this program for five years plus. And so for them to be like, well, after three weeks, you should know everything I know, they don't have that expectation. Very likely, they see you as the new person, which is fine, and they don't expect you to know anything yet. And I would say it's probably a good six months before they even

expect you to to really be able to contribute meaningfully especially given that you're brand new fresh out of school and brand new to this company yeah so having said that and said i think it's perfectly reasonable for you to feel like you're not productive at this point now what do you do and the one thing i would say don't do is i would not raise an issue about this this uh playful prodding assuming it's playful prodding that they're doing i would not say like please don't call me the intern. That will fade very likely. But if you call it out, it's likely to become stuck in their minds and it could create more problems, I think. This is my assessment. What do you think, Jameson? I was going to say the opposite. I was going to say you should probably

ask your manager to stop calling you the intern because you're not the intern. And it depends a lot on the relationship you have. I think if you have a relatively comfortable relationship with them I think it's worth bringing up and saying hey I already I already feel a little out of place because I'm the youngest I'm the newest member of the team I'm kind of getting up to speed on everything that makes it harder for me to feel motivated and accepted by the team okay and and I think I mean you could ignore it and it would go away probably eventually but also it doesn't mean you just have to suffer in silence and let this happen to you that yeah this thing happened to you that makes you feel bad. It probably depends on how bad you feel and how often it's

happening, whether you want to bring it up or not. Yeah. I mean, I can only give advice that I think makes sense to me and I don't have your experiences exactly, but I feel like probably at 22, I would not have done it, but like 32 Jameson living in 22 Jameson's body would go back and do it. So I don't know how helpful that is for you, but I think it's the right thing to do. And I think you could, you could do it and improve the situation. I guess I wouldn't blame you for feeling uncomfortable doing it because I definitely would have at that age too. Cool. Let me throw out one other comment that I think might help. At my current company and at other companies I've worked at, there is a general understanding that new grads, new college grads

who have just started at the company are generally expected to produce negative value for the company. They are an investment. And we know that over time they will grow and start producing positive value for the company. In other words, they'll produce more value than they cost. But for the first few months and sometimes even for the first year or two, we know that we take a long view of these employees. And we think, you know, over time they will become so super valuable with the right opportunities and mentoring and training. But for the first while, they are not so productive and they are not able to produce so much value that they can actually offset what we're paying. And that's just a given in the industry. And so this may or may not be true for you.

and the time it takes to work out of this net negative timeframe varies by person. But I think your expectations for yourself are probably a lot higher than the expectations your company has for you. Yeah, that leads into one last comment I wanted to make, which was you have this expectation of, am I setting myself up with unreasonable expectations?

I think you should ask your supervisor or supervisors, whoever your management is, you should ask them to clarify to you, what do you expect me to be doing right now? How much do you expect me to be contributing? How fast should I be going? And get it explicitly from them what is good for your level of experience and exposure to the problem domain. Because if they say, oh, you're doing great, like you should finish these two tickets in the next month or whatever metrics or numbers or measure they give you, that's a much more concrete thing to measure yourself against than I feel like I'm going too

slow yeah which you can always feel that no matter what the reality is that's true so i think you should you should definitely press for that if you're not comfortable pressing that or pushing back on the the kind of intern jokes you should definitely at least seek out clear expectations that's part of your manager's job is to provide those to you so you can gently help them by asking for them if they're not doing it so expectations are great and then also feedback on how you're meeting those expectations or whether you're meeting them but i think three weeks is a little too premature your manager probably doesn't even know yet how well you're performing and it takes a few months to really observe yeah give it but not not premature to ask for expectations yes

definitely cool have we answered the question i think so good luck good luck i feel like snapchat is the is the that's like the badge that proves i'm old that's when i was like yeah i don't get it snapchat and youtubers becoming pop culture celebrities i can give you one extra that makes me seem even older okay what's that the nintendo 64 controller huh completely just bumped me out of console video games i couldn't i couldn't manage it but that was the worst one they got way better after that okay well i haven't gone back come back in i mean it was cool to have the little thumbstick that was that was an that was the relatively innovative thing that was the thing that killed me well they all have thumb there's thumbsticks everywhere exactly and that's why i'm

out they multiplied okay i'm gonna read the next question this is from an anonymous listener my team works closely with another team and the manager of that team is difficult most of my interactions with him has resulted in him getting defensive and frustrated and nearly become arguments i try pretty hard to remain polite but we usually don't accomplish anything i'm not sure that i want to mention this to my manager or to his because i'm worried the word will reach him that i tattled which will just make things worse he's also more senior than me and has been at the company longer so if this conflict does escalate i feel the company would probably take his side otherwise i really like this job so the age-old advice of quitting is not an option here besides

just trying to avoid any interactions with him what can i do thanks so much for the help whoa whoa whoa that's a pretty big assumption there there will be help provided wait a minute yeah i didn't realize that was part of the deal back up there what have i gotten ourselves into huh i'm kind of assuming this but it sounds like this the question asker might be managing their team and they work with another team and they the two managers conflict that feels like the most likely thing i guess i i feel like it would be it'd be harder to as an individual contributor on a team where the two teams are collaborating feel like you have a lot of conflict with the other manager maybe that's true though i don't know conflict can spread up all over the place true so maybe

i shouldn't assume that one of these would result in less conflict than the other i don't think conflict respects the org chart if only it did then our problems would all be solved right then you'd resolve conflict by saying look this number next to my name is bigger than the number next to your name so conflict resolved you have lost glad we helpfully resolved it we can both walk away friends now it sounds like that's what the question asker is saying would probably happen though it's like they're more senior than i am so if it came down to a battle that escalated then they would look at the numbers next to our name and their number is bigger than mine but then what like would you get fired i assume you wouldn't get fired i assume they'd say like let's do his

idea instead of yours yeah but i sense this is like an ongoing thing where it's like every idea turns into this fight yeah consistent conflict so they might say like back off and generally do his idea instead of yours for all of his ideas do all his ideas now and forever yeah are we good here good oh man this is a tough one i have gotten into arguments with a personality that i conflicted with on a few occasions. And one time it even turned into a borderline shouting match. This is probably about 10 years ago. And I think when this happens, we often feel like we're the only one who is perceiving or experiencing the pain of the conflict. But in reality, I think often the other person, unless they're a sociopath, also feels the pain of the conflict. So that's one

thing I would say is be careful that you might think you're the only one internalizing this, but there's a good chance they are too. How does that change what you do? well what it means is that you both acknowledge that there's a problem and so if you are willing to talk to the person about the conflict they might be willing to come to the table and work on it because they also have pain oh so you're saying instead of kind of bubble it up and deal with this escalating fight just say hey talk to them talk to the other manager and bring up the fact that it seems like you conflict a lot in the case in the case where i had this near shouting match with this one person it was actually a program manager and i was an engineer at the time

In the case of that situation, I could tell they felt really disturbed by the arguments, and we had had a few. And they actually did go to a manager, and I don't think it was with the purpose of tattling. It was more like for the purpose of coaching. And that manager advised them, and I know this because then they came to me and said, not the manager, but the original conflict person came to me and said, Hey, I'm sorry that got unprofessional. Let's talk through this and figure out how we can resolve this. And we did. We talked through it, resolved it, and we never had another conflict again, mostly because I shouted louder than him. so he was too afraid. Just kidding. But in other words, I thought I was the only one experiencing pain. It turns out they were experiencing pain to the point that they actually went to management,

got some advice, came back, and we sorted it out coolly and professionally, and it worked out great. So I don't know. These things can often go in directions you don't expect, and I certainly didn't expect that one. Yeah. And it didn't feel like tattling, I think. Yeah, that's a good way to look at it is you're not saying, you're not tugging on their, I don't know, on their coat saying please help me this person's being mean to me it's more like hey i have this problem can you help me resolve it and that's also a big part of your manager's job is coaching you and helping you yes helping you work through things and resolve things you have to ask these questions right you have to say what can i do differently yeah yeah these things work better not say hey go tell them

to yeah not argue with me anymore right right right which by the way is the exact opposite of what my kids do they they come to me and it's like they only have one objective and it is to get the other kid in trouble oh your kids would get poor performance reviews dave yes they would gotta tell them to shape up if they're gonna make it in corporate america they regularly get poor quarterly performance reviews from me actually it's more like daily performance reviews i am dissatisfied with your performance right now that means you're doing a good job giving feedback i guess i guess they don't care in the moment yeah i give i give real-time 360 feedback every day they do not i like the idea of 360 feedback being a very uh literal metaphor where you're you're

just rotating yelling in all directions like stop touching him stop pulling her hair hey you like put those dishes away just yep like an alarm clacks and just spinning and oh yeah shouting out parentsly advice every time i turn my head there's a kid doing something i don't want them to do so that's pretty much right 360 is right in a couple weeks here we're going from one child to two so i'm i'm getting ready i'm getting my getting my rotation muscles ready your sprinkler head your feedback yeah i can't just i can't just stare at one child to make sure she's alive i have to switch between two at the risk of getting too off topic here two is fine because you have one parent for each child it's when you hit three that you have to go to a zone defense

and all heck breaks loose okay well maybe you can help me drop some plays when that happens i'll give you a playbook all right yeah so anyway uh tattling so problem solved you're welcome for the help yeah i i agree that you don't want to tattle but i don't think you would be tattling to say hey i'm experiencing this problem and and some options would be can we practice a conversation where you play the part of this other person and and we talk through it a little bit no no no you the listener plays the part of the other person so they can show how so you can see the okay yeah and and you're like work your magic manager yeah show me what i should

and then you just get to like torpedo them and yelling at them yeah really a moment of catharsis for you when you notice that the other manager seems to be making a lot of points about very specific projects that you have worked on and interactions that only you and your manager have had yeah your manager's gonna be like wait a minute how does he know that i rejected your promotion request why is he mad at that awesome yeah that feels like a good solution to me and i do like the idea of bringing it to the other manager directly to the to the conflict d yeah Yeah. Yeah. And saying, hey, this feels like a lot of conflicts. Can we work this out productively? What I have found is mixed results. So like I said, I've had three or four conflicts in my career

and about half the occasions I've actually gone out to lunch with the individual that I'm having a conflict with. And I've just spelled it out, like said, hey, I want to have a healthy, productive working relationship with you. But I see the following behaviors between us as being harmful to that. What can we do? And, you know, I've had one case where that did not work very well um where they basically said nothing and i've had other cases where they say yeah i appreciate you you said what can we do and they said there's nothing we can do um they basically well they didn't know they just focused on me oh they're like ah i've got a list yeah they're basically here's what you need to do and i'm like well okay i can make some changes but i didn't i

didn't say this but there's also some unhelpful behavior i mean it takes two to tango right yep And anyway, when someone comes to me and says, Dave, I have a conflict with you, I am so happy to hear that, just willing to concede and say, here's what I'll do differently. Let's talk through this, what works best for you. But not everyone is like that. So you have to be prepared for that eventuality. Yeah. But the thing that appeals to me about that is it feels like the most you can do. Like if you do that, you have tried really hard. And then it feels like it's much easier to escalate both for coaching and also for help. If you can say, I talked to them directly. It didn't go well. Here's how the conversation went. And it's still a problem that's affecting our team's productivity. That's much different than just like, this is hard. What can we do about it?

if you can show you already tried something. And I feel like a manager's instinct is going to be to help you try to solve your own problem as well, where I think most managers, if they do what I think is right, will try to encourage you to work through it and support you in that. So showing that you're willing to do that engenders a lot of goodwill, I guess. Let's talk about strategies for in the moment, in the fight. So I think many disagreements stem from misunderstandings, And it helps in the heat of the moment to call out your common premises. And so, you know, a lot of times it's a disagreement, not about the destination, but about the path to get there. And I think when you're in the middle of one of these disagreements, you can take a step back and say,

OK, I see that we differ on how we want to proceed. Let me see what we share in common or what is our common ground here. Are we looking to reduce latency on this service call? OK, yes. Good. All right. I think we can achieve that best by this. you think we can achieve it best by that let's figure out which you know how can we know which one of these approaches is better right and i think when you kind of spell it all out like that you can disassociate your ego and their ego from the solution and say here's the problem we are jointly trying to solve let's at least agree on that and then figure out the best pathway together

that makes a lot of sense what about cases where you don't have a shared goal so what if they're both working on a project but the conflict is like how much of your team's time should be spent on this versus my team's time right and it's kind of like this zero-sum game where if they do all the work then your team is free to do all your other crushing important things and vice versa yeah that's a that's tough that's a tougher one that's when you really do need a third party to help escalate when you literally just can't see eye to eye because the incentives have pitted you against each other yeah that's when you need i think a third party or you need to invoke the org chart and say look this needs to bubble up and bubbling that up again if you couch that in

the right terms it doesn't have to be like mom yeah they won't stop hitting me it's like we disagree on what our priorities are and and this affects the priorities of two teams and and theoretically that's something that your manager should be able to weigh in and say like this team's priority is more important so the work should fall on the other team for this task or whatever like they should be able to weigh against those two priorities and and your job should be to prioritize your own team's work you know and this is where company culture plays a huge role because in some companies it's just survival of the fittest and whoever can claw their way to the top gets the resources but in other companies like there are clearly defined escalation paths and there is a

culture of disagreeing but then stepping back and accepting the decision once once it's been escalated and reconciled i will say it for you dave so you don't have to disagree and commit that's right yep that's the word i was thinking of yeah i feel like we've given some good advice that reaching out for coaching to your manager making sure it's clear you're trying to solve the problem instead of tattling is helpful trying to solve it yourself in general would be helpful and if it's really unresolvable that does feel like a case to bubble it up responsibly let me just throw out one more thing do you have a trusted mentor who is actually outside of this situation that you can go to with these confidential details dave it's us oh the question asker did

oh fat lot of good that did you and then one more thing i have found when i have conflict at work is sometimes i am blowing up the conflict in my own mind and i just need a disinterested party that i can talk to to help kind of vent and just come down and then see things more clearly and rationally and a lot of times when i do that the amplitude dials down of the intensity a little bit so just kind of talking through it helps yeah unless they're like a hype man you know where where they're just like they pump you up rubbing your shoulders pumping you up like putting the gloves on like yeah yeah don't let him talk to you like that what is he doing get back in there swinging champ yeah come on throw the knockout blow find a find a calm friend yes okay rubber

duck debugging is a thing so maybe this could be rubber duck mentorship rubber duck hype man yeah rubber duck hype man well that's the thing that the duck will probably not respond and say like yeah double down so if you just tell all your worries and cares about the situation to the duck you'll contemplate and you'll realize you'll achieve balance you know we should make a double down duck that just says yes dig in get the knives out yeah that's what it says when you squeeze it an organizational politics duck sabotage them go around their back yeah all right well have we answered the question clearly clearly we have okay good luck to you and where can people go if they want to send us their questions they could go to softskills.audio our website and click

the ask us a question button there's also a button for supporting us on patreon and any amount of donation for any period of time we'll get you an invite to our slack team which is great yep besides that you should listen to more episodes share the episodes and ask questions and come back come please come back we're so desperate and lonely we'll catch you next week