Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 168: Self-snooping and work from home jeopardy

Episode Date: July 29, 2019

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Hey there. I don’t program I administrate in IT but you’re my favorite podcast, awesome job, never stop. I ran into a crazy situation that is WAY above my soft skills ability to deal with so I am seeking wisdom. I was working with someone from HR on a OneNote syncing problem. I asked someone to log in and let me look at the notebook in question that was causing an issue. I saw what I needed and then randomly clicked on another notebook so the problem notebook wasn’t open as I was trying to fix it. Later I approached the HR person to show me how they do something in OneNote. They opened OneNote and the page that opened up was MY employee records! OneNote syncs which page was opened last, which means the page I randomly clicked on when they were logged in on my computer was my employee record, and they knew it! They confronted me about it (not making too huge a deal about it). I tried to explain how I just clicked randomly and I wasn’t snooping, but it felt like everything I said only dug me deeper. I’m having trouble staying in the same room with them because of the shame (entirely internal) and I’m worried if I ever need to look at their PC again they will want full visibility to make sure I’m not snooping (not ideal). I want to make this right, but all I can come up with is honor based suicide rituals. What do I do? Your faithful listener, Stefan I’m an engineer in a small start-up. I work half of each week remotely, half in-person, as do the other engys. One of the other engineers is exceptionally skilled and experienced, way more so than I, but they are not very communicative when working remotely. The leader (understandably) becomes quite nervous as a result, especially since minor health issues have kept this engineer from working full throttle for a couple of weeks. What, if anything, can I do to help the leader trust this engy who doesn’t like to chatter on slack? I think they whole-heartedly deserve trust, and their work is already the backbone of this product. Part of the reason this matters to me is that the leader has expressed wanting to reduce work from home days to alleviate this issue. I love my wfh days, and I have been told that I communicate plenty well when working remote. How can I help alleviate the leader’s fears to protect another engineer’s independence and protect my precious precious remote time?

it takes more than reading documentation for the wrong version of the library you're using to be a great engineer this is episode 168 of the soft skills engineering podcast i'm your host dave smith i'm your host jameson dance soft skills engineering is a weekly advice show for software developers about non-technical topics such as reading documentation for the wrong version of library you're using i have never done that and i would be ashamed to know anyone that has ever done that just kidding definitely done it let's talk about our wonderful patrons thank you so much to these folks who are supporting the show thank you to matthew voitovich the agile ventures charity zach grannon tails the weird orange squirrel thing i guess louis santos nick cantar sean

i have a robot nick sunny tie sonic the hedgehog marie rousseau chris hogan and stanley tactical radio thank you to those folks who are supporting us at the level where we shout them out every week thank you to everyone else who's supporting the show you pay for stickers design hosting mic stands mine whacked me in the face last time we recorded so i might have to replace it the well we need a few more supporters to replace my face plus it's perfection and why would i want to be a less perfect face well that's what i was thinking if you want a less perfect face we could do real life face swap there's a movie about that oh if you want to support the show you can go to our website softskills.audio and click support us on

patreon if you support at any level for any amount of time you get access to our slack which is great full of kind smart people and we have engaging discussions there so come join us yes all right should we jump into our first question let's do it this comes from a listener named stefan who says hey there i don't program i administer in it but you're my favorite podcast awesome job never stop i ran into a crazy situation that is way above my soft skills ability to deal with so i am seeking wisdom i was working with someone from hr on a one note syncing problem i asked someone to log in and let me look at the notebook in question that was causing an issue i saw what i needed and then randomly clicked on another notebook so the problem notebook wasn't open as i was trying to

fix it later i approached the hr person to show me how they do something in one note they opened one note and the page that opened up was my employee records one note sync switch page was open last which means the page i randomly clicked on when they were logged in on my computer was my employee record and they knew it oh man they confronted me about it not making too huge a deal about it i tried to explain how i just clicked randomly and i wasn't snooping but it felt like everything i said only dug me deeper i'm having trouble staying in the same room with them because of the shame entirely internal and i'm worried if i ever need to look at their pc again they will want full visibility to make sure i'm not snooping i want to make this right but all i can

come up with is honor-based suicide rituals what do i do your faithful listener stefan oh my gosh oh he didn't stefan didn't say what he read what on the employee record yeah i guess he didn't realize it was his own but man what a missed opportunity yeah i mean i'm assuming that's where the fabled permanent record lives in one note that i've been hearing about since grade school yes it's been in one note all this whole time on your employee record yeah okay so i think what you you missed an opportunity here which was to randomly click on their employee record and get all the dirt on them it says here you played hooky in fourth grade you brought a pack of smokes to class wouldn't want anybody to know about that now would you

sure would be a shame if your co-workers found out that you skipped class in the fourth grade That one time you brought a cap gun to school. Yeah, that's wild. What are the chances, do you think? I know. And it sounds like, like you said, they didn't even look at it. I know. They didn't even get the benefit of it.

Exactly. So now you have all the shame and none of the benefit. I would be tempted to go back in, find my record, and see if they added an item that said, employee caught snooping their own employee record. Have you seen Ferris Bueller's Day Off? Oh, yes. Do you remember the part where he hacks into the computer system at the school and changes his days of unexcused absences to be low enough that he doesn't get failed? I feel like there's a situation here, too, where you just like, do-ba-do-ba-do, let's just add a zero here and swap these fields around.

And add a note about how this employee is known for never snooping. Oh, I was listening to this podcast called Darknet Diaries. maybe it's taboo to mention other podcasts exist i can acknowledge it on the show we trust you listeners you'll stay faithful to us there was an episode about this person who got hired as an it tech and was so toxic that they wanted to get them out of the company but they were really passive aggressive so they couldn't just fire them although they could have they just didn't want to so they promoted them to head of security in the hopes that their job would be so hard and painful that they would quit and instead what they did was monitor everyone

in the company record all the phone calls play them back learn all this personal detail about people put back doors in everywhere and and like take over oh my gosh the peter principle has failed yeah it has failed they were promoted to their level of like dictatorship not incompetence so you missed your chance to do this i guess you missed your chance to just change in one note what your job title is change it to ceo and then you're the ceo now oh man oh i i don't know if this is a universal human thing but i feel like if i feel uncomfortable about a thing uncomfortable things happen around that more like if i have an awkward interaction with someone and then i worry about oh it's awkward around them now i just turn into like banana peels show up under my feet i just

slip and fall on my butt around them or like yep i don't know yep yeah it's like it's like there are cycles in your brain that are normally dedicated to things like balance which now have to be dedicated to how nervous you should be around this person or like making sure that when you stare off into the distance you're not just staring into their eyes for like five minutes in a row yeah yeah it's it's all that stuff that goes haywire so i imagine that's going on where you're like thinking really hard about a problem then you realize you've just been staring at their nose for five minutes straight and they've noticed and they've been like what is going on like yeah okay so now question did the the awkward things actually happen with a higher frequency

or are you just hyper aware i think awkwardness is partially being hyper aware i think if i could live in blissful ignorance then i would not be awkward at all i'd just be like what a weird nose that i've been staring at for the past five minutes just so strange and fascinating yeah i have nothing i have nothing but curiosity yeah so maybe they're both maybe i can see that maybe it's the awareness that causes the awkwardness and awkwardness that causes the awareness oh man huh yeah what do you do about it i'll tell you what i would do tell me well i'm a nervous laugher so so you would laugh a lot i'd be like hey janet wasn't it funny that one time that you

gotta go exactly exactly wait that's my employee record what ha ha ha ha oh man it would be it would be bad it was some hilarious japes in there huh yeah honor-based suicide ritual yeah i don't know that would solve it that would cause an hr problem i believe so you would make this hr person's life worse yeah trouble staying in the same room oh go ahead let's just say that if you did go through with it your file would become a little more interesting yeah it would by the way our official recommendation is to not go down that path we're gonna go on the yeah please don't yeah we'll make the implicit explicit we'll let you know when you do something so egregious that that becomes the most valuable option yeah this is not this is not it yet i mean you have

to engineer a situation where they log into your computer again and you then click on something what would you click on that proves that you're clicking randomly that i'm a random clicker like the thing that is the most embarrassing for you to have clicked on like yeah i don't know what's what even is embarrassing nothing's embarrassing because liking stuff there's a fandom around everything now and nothing for good or for ill there's nothing to be embarrassed of anymore like i don't know if i were five years younger i'd say my little pony but dave i've watched a lot of my little pony with my daughter and it's great okay i wouldn't be embarrassed be like yeah what about you know the values that pinky pie espouses are admirable and we should all strive

to live up to them. Recognizing your friends and bringing joy and happiness to conversations is great. It's true. There are worse things to be fans of. Yeah. I don't know. Okay. So what about like a comprehensive plan about your personal growth to transition into HR? I think it's got to be like my 100 step process to stop constantly wetting my pants at work every day or something like that that that random thing you clicked on like oh see there's no way i would have brought that up on your computer on purpose if you were logged in yeah uh i i think only time and non-awkward interactions can heal this awkward barrier well that second thing is going to be hard to achieve though yeah that's true the first one will happen organically though we haven't said quit your job

in a while just get out of here trot it out yeah just just leave like i'm seriously though i'm sitting here thinking and when you said only time i was like yep like i can't think of anything else you just gotta let this go let time pass try to act as normal as possible and one day they'll hopefully forget probably not though i'm yeah i'm trying to think of situations where i feel like i got in this awkward cycle with someone and then pulled out of it and i can't i i i just have a a trail of awkward memories in people's brains strewn behind me you know like your little trail the james yeah in other people's minds yeah every job i leave there's five people that are like boy remember all the weird stuff you know as you were saying that it occurred to me i had something like

this happen to me oh yeah would you like to hear it oh yes at a company about 10 years ago we had a shared file server where everybody put all their shared files on and once in a while someone would consume too much disk space and fill up the server so i kind of took it upon myself to be the the file server cop so anytime someone did that i would go through figure out who had done it and then go kind of notify them hey you're consuming 80 of our disk and so one day that happened someone let a whole bunch of temp files go nuts and and i confronted him about it and said you know i'm pretty diplomatic like hey just fyi you know you're consuming x percent of the disk and it looks like a bunch of temp files can you take care of that before we run out of disk space

because then really bad things happen and he said no i'm too busy working under deadline pressure to even look at that and i was like oh okay well like i didn't understand it because it only takes a couple minutes and the risk was like basically paralyzing everyone else's workflows but whatever i let it go and then i got back to my desk and i thought you know what i'm just going to do a quick analysis and see where the files are and i'll save him the time of doing that and so i impersonated his user because we didn't have good security um and i want and i launched a app for those of you who have been using linux for a while it was uh i think it was x durstat or k durstat one of those to and it didn't show up on my screen like i was like oh that that's weird so i hit ctrl c

and then i and then i launched it again and it didn't show up again and then i was like oh my gosh and then i i killed it and then i echoed out the display variable and it was the variable the environment variable had his host name in it which means it had been popping up on his screen and then like a minute later he shows up at my office and he was like dave did you just launch this directory thing on my computer and i was like yeah yeah but it was an accident i didn't mean for it to show up and he just kind of stormed away and i was just like oh so stupid like now i look like i'm doing this passive-aggressive thing right like i was just trying to do the research so oh yeah you wouldn't have to but instead it made it look like i was sending him these like

subtle clues yeah look at all your garbage you're you're leaving behind anyway that actually would have been a pretty evil but good way to do it what's that i mean just being really passive aggressive and hacking into his computer and popping it up oh well yeah i'm just thinking like if you were doing that deliberately it'd be like that's kind of a jerk move but anyway we all admire jerks sometimes when it's not i totally oh that's that's the worst kind of shame is when i think that someone else thinks that i have been mean or rude or something when i haven't meant to be oh just jabs me with little knives me too so enjoy your job getting jabbed yep i think if you can go through some kind of like disaster together or that's a trope in movies

right yeah exactly trapped in an elevator for three hours yeah if you can join the military together and then and then serve in combat that really brings people together and forges relationships that's there's always these people that hate each other and then they develop this grudging respect even if they maybe they like each other maybe they don't right maybe so maybe the equivalent of that is like a high ropes course right seems pretty common you could double down too that's what i was thinking like just this you may not get an opportunity to be this embarrassed again for a long time why not like oh like the higher okay yeah this is it's relatively low cost too so you can you can use it to train yourself to not hate being embarrassed anymore and then

calibrate yeah just yeah yeah and next time something embarrassing happens you'll be like well it's not as bad as that time i pulled up my own employee record and then like came to work in clown shoes and then like spilled coffee all over myself while coming out of the bathroom holding a coffee pot in front of this person whatever your new your new baseline is like so embarrassing that anytime any day that goes by when one of those things doesn't happen you're like this was the best day of my life you're impervious but i think we've solved it oh yeah yeah congrats on your new superpower yeah congratulations uh good luck all right i'm gonna read our next question this is from

an anonymous listener i'm an engineer at a small startup i work half each week remotely half in person as do the other ngs which is the cutest way to spell engineer one of the other engineers is exceptionally skilled and experienced way more so than i but they are not very communicative when working remotely the leader understandably becomes quite nervous as a result especially since minor health issues have kept this engineer from working full throttle for a couple of weeks what if anything can i do to help the leader trust this ng who doesn't like to chatter on slack i think they wholeheartedly deserve trust and their work is already the backbone of this product part of the reason this matters to me is that the leader has expressed wanting to reduce work

from home days to alleviate this issue i love my work from home days and i've been told that i communicate plenty well with others when working remote how can i help alleviate the leader's fears to protect other engineers independence and protect my precious precious remote time i love how the truth comes out and he's just cute yeah i'm so worried about this other person it'd be such a shame i might lose it cost us our work from home days the other thing that stuck out to me that i didn't notice before is how much it sounds like a cult when you call your manager the leader it's a it's a cult of ngs leader of ngs maybe that's the new engineering manager title it's cute huh for a cult so i i it's it's a cute cult though i work remotely but i i work remotely

as a manager of a team that is all remote and my boss is all remote and that that far up the org everyone is remote so we don't quite have this problem of the split between work from home and in-person stuff among our ngs but part of the benefit of everyone working remotely is that we have very clear expectations around communication and availability. And it's not that the answer has to be you're always available and always communicate, but we've had to think about it and figure it out and talk about it as a group. And what I feel like is happening is the leader, the leader, both the T and the L are capitalized in my head, though not in the question. The leader has expectations that the leader has not communicated to the NGs and is starting to

get a little bit frustrated that their expectations are not being lived up to yep and i think you just have to you have to clarify what they are it's a bad solution to say hey this this whole work from home thing isn't working out let's just all work in person without like a single conversation saying hey how should we work effectively when we're working from home yeah and it's maybe easier for some people to just say hey no more work from home than it is to say hey i don't think you're communicating effectively let's change that because that can be uncomfortable in a different way but it would stink expectations and feedback that's the summary for this as well as most problems in management yep yeah what do you think dave well i think that if the the problem here is

it's other ng and i keep thinking like the letter n the letter g yeah this other ng doesn't communicate well on slack so why not just ask for their slack password and just do status updates for them but what if you click on their slack employment record and then end yourself up in a pickle only good things can happen from there on out we've established oh no i was just clicking randomly on the status emojis and i i accidentally set it to the one that's my face yeah i think that would work or or a slack bot that uh reminds them hey like just type i'm here or like boy how about that great that that prodigious sporting performance or whatever in slack yeah or like hey i'm doing very productive things right now yeah currently productivity is at a 94 percent

and you just like have a random number generator yes that's always between 90 and 100 yeah wobbles it up and down perfect there is kind of this butts in seats but from home mentality that might be behind this of if i can't see you working on stuff how will i know that you're working on stuff and the question asker says that they're the backbone of the project but there's clearly something that the leader oh she feels so good to say that the leader feels is missing so maybe the leader does not understand that their work is the backbone of the project maybe that's not enough to them and their expectations are different than just get stuff done as part of managing remote teams i've worked with someone who i felt like um just kind of would disappear for a long

time and we had a conversation about it and i don't think i explained myself very clearly because i don't know that it ever came across really well but i think to them it felt like i was saying hey just type i'm here to prove that you're working and not slacking off but what i wanted to know was it was more like we collaborate and communicate and that's one of our team's values and when you just go work for two weeks without talking to anybody um you're not collaborating effectively and and we're not the kind of team where people just go off and work by themselves for a long time like we have to interact we have to talk to customers we have to give feedback to each other and and we're not doing that you're you're not doing that effectively so there was

an underlying need not just hey i don't believe that you're working because i didn't see you type anything in slack today so i feel like you have to get that out of the leader like what what do they want out of it because the code is there they're producing stuff but what else do they want yeah yeah and it could just be a bad expectation on the part of the leader yeah who just needs to use different metrics besides slack communications yeah but i think that's why i said expectations need to be clarified because if the leader says well i just i just don't trust that you're working if you don't type a lot in slack or something that ends up translating to that then hopefully you can have a conversation about that and say your expectation is wrong that's not

yeah how we should work on this team but right now it's implicit and all you know is you're not living up to it not what it is right you're not living up to something which i will fail to specify yeah and and you could just figure out what it is and then do the least amount of work to do that thing or you could say like what would make the team work well and let's make that the expectation yeah i will say though that by default i when you're working remote you really do have to put more effort in than you are used to if you've been working in a in the office with your team locally yeah and i think this is there's i think there's probably like a baseline that most managers expect you to be communicating when you're remote that i think to most engineers feels over

overreaching and i'm saying that having worked remote myself now for the last year and seen other people attempt to work remote but have a little bit more struggle because they just aren't that chatty right they don't they don't send frequent emails or slack messages so it's just not clear when they're exactly working yeah you have to you have to push information a lot more than you do being in person so design docs or pull requests or that's that's one of the ways that you contribute by being in an office is giving feedback and you don't have that for free so you have to do it through these other channels and you have to pull information a lot more too because you don't just absorb stuff by that's right overhearing things or whatever yeah that's

right and there's even really subtle things that you might not even think about for example when you're in an office and you leave your desk to go to lunch people know you're going to lunch like you put on your jacket you step away you leave your computer there there's all these visual cues that we don't think about right and then 45 minutes later you come back you sit down at your desk you take off your jacket and you go heads down again and everyone's like oh dave's at lunch right but if i do that in a remote situation and someone's trying to reach me during that time it's like where's dave you know and and it's like oh well it's 12 30 but where is dave you know like they never they never saw me leave and so i liked it when i'm going to be away from the keyboard in

a remote situation i like to tell people hey i'm going to be afk for the next half hour or hour just heads up you know and i think that helps earn trust people know when i come and go yeah that makes sense i think there are there are some places that like to be more asynchronous and and that synchronous telling people where you are doesn't jive with them but i think some places definitely that works well and that's kind of how my employer works too where people generally say hey i'm gonna be away for a little bit there's a lot of trust that like i don't know you can be away and and not say it and people won't assume you're just playing video games or whatever but it is kind of a habit that shows up the leader has expressed wanting to reduce work

from home days to alleviate the issue i mean that would alleviate the issue yeah it would it would make it so that you never have to worry about what people are doing when they're working from home yeah it would i used to be a work from home maximalist where i felt like everything compared to working with an office was better in every way working from home and i am less like that now but i still think for me it is much better and it's a pretty big selling point still we're not at the point where it's normal enough that people are like oh work from home no big deal like people want to work from home so i think you'd be you'd be changing the culture a lot and there would be consequences to it yeah and and if you're just doing it because someone isn't typing in slack

and you don't believe they're working hard i mean that lack of trust is not going to magically go away if someone's there in person yeah i i believe like there's something at the root of that i mean it might it might it might be that it only manifests when they're remote i i guess what i mean is they'll be able to look over and see oh productive worker x is in their seat working productively but there's something going on in their head to cause them to say if i can't see them working productively they are not going to be working productively and that won't be resolved by just moving everyone into the office like that lack of trust in people and like the question asker says they're doing great work they're the backbone of the project and that's not enough so

i feel like it's it could this underlying problem could bubble up in other ways too yeah it just you just won't be able to work from home anymore now that you've kind of illustrated that kind of laid that out for me that way i almost wonder if maybe the leader is seeing other examples. Because I think if I were in this leader's shoes and I knew of one engineer, sorry, one engie who is not meeting my expectations in a remote situation, I would probably take it up with that one person. But if I sensed a trend, that's when I would start verbalizing concern with the team about possibly bringing everyone back to the office. And indeed, I did have this situation once in my last company where I was in a management role. We had

a single work from home day per week and i started to get just just my horse sense oh that's not even the right word my spidey sense my remote spidey sense is horse sense where you can tell that there are carrots close by like what what does horse sense mean i don't know i was just thinking about what about bob where he describes the dr marvin anyway that's that's a little reference for you what about bob fans anyway my spidey says a robust form of common sense believed to be found in poorly educated but shrewd people perfect okay i'm gonna write that on my linkedin bio poorly educated but shrewd anyway i started to get this sense and so i looked for some data to back it up and sure

enough, I saw that like our get commit volume on those days was like 10 to 20% lower than the rest of the week. But at the end of the day, I abandoned the idea because I think realistically, there wasn't really an issue. I was just concerned. And just because you're concerned about something doesn't mean it's actually real, especially in management when there's so many false signals. So if I were in this employee's shoes, and I really wanted to preserve my work from home status, I would go to the manager and I would reiterate with them how much I like working from home and how it's a big part of why i work for this company and please you know before you make any drastic changes let's discuss this very candidly because it's important to me yeah that makes sense and

especially underlining how valuable it is for retention and hiring oh yeah it's it's a competitive market out there and there are a lot of places developers can work i mean you don't want to say it like a mobster saying nice nice nice ngs you got there it'd be a shame if they all found a different job where they could work from home yep but i think there's some concerns there it's it's i think it's tough to recover culturally when you start pulling back perks too oh it is bad oh it is when your company just like takes away things you like about it yep i was gonna say that you need to just sell out the rest of your team and say listen they all can't be trusted but i i am capable of working from home and i understand if you want to curtail their work from home days but i'll just

need a little exemption right here hmm oh the other thing i was going to say was that i've found it harder to do work from home days than work remotely where working remotely full-time it becomes a pattern and i figure out my routine and i figure out how to protect my productivity and when i work well and when i don't and work from home days just in the middle of the week it's a much bigger fight to keep it from becoming the day that i can run errands at 2 a.m or whatever you know yep that was one of my concerns as well i just have all my doctor's appointments on wednesday now because that's the day i work from home yep so i feel like that's almost an argument for not almost i think it's more of an argument for fully remote is it helps

your workflow it's a problem you have to solve that you don't have to solve the same way if you just work from home all the time so push further yeah double down go fully remote yeah talk about that office space you don't have to rent oh yeah that's like a whole more other other ng depending on how big your office space is maybe more that's one full-time ng equivalent yeah well have we solved it i think so good luck good luck what should people do if they want their own questions answered go over to softskills.audio and click ask a question you can leave us as much or as little detail identifying information as you want we love your questions thank you so much to all those that have written them in what can people do if they want to support the show they can

subscribe on whatever podcast thing they use they can rate us they can follow us on twitter we're soft skills eng and we have been nominated for a best dev podcast award the hacker noon website is doing some awards called the noonies we're on there we're definitely there so we'll uh throw a link in the show notes but we would love it if you like the show to go vote for us there yeah and there's no prize beyond just swelling our egos even more and knowing that you're part really that's all the prize that we need oh yeah yeah we have to pitch it like okay yeah join join our team join join the soft skills squad like and subscribe and really help contribute to this mission of making us be number one on this arbitrary list there's a lot of good

podcasts on here actually i'm i feel honored to be here if you like us vote for us all right all right we'll catch you next week