Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 169: Conspiracy theories and flexible schedules

Episode Date: August 5, 2019

Vote for Soft Skills Engineering on the Hackernoon Noonies awards for best Dev Podcast! In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: One of my co-workers at the software company I currently work on has an ‘uncommon’ set of beliefs that include, among many other things, a strong mistrust of mainstream science. He is currently very concerned about the effect that Wi-Fi signals have on our health and wants the company to make some changes to our Wi-Fi hubs and our devices’ wireless connection usage. I’ve found in the past that it’s not easy to have a conversation with him about this type of topic. How can I be respectful to him and not undermine our work relationship while not giving in to connectivity inconvenience based on fringe-science beliefs? Hello! I love the show! The humor interjected into real advice (or real advice injected into humor?) makes thinking of boring and scary things like coworker relations or quitting your job sound fun! Everyone should resolve conflict and/or quit! I just started a new gig and I’m running into a situation I haven’t before. We have flexible work hours, but, unlike at previous jobs, people actually use them! I am meant to be pairing with another dev who is working quite different hours than me. I have a couple questions. 1) How do we communicate about this clearly? I tried to set expectations at the onset, but it seems we missed the boat. I asked when he works, told him when I work, and it didn’t seem this far off. But on a day we’re supposed to pair, he’s here an hour and a half after me, which means I’ll leave an hour and a half before him. 2) How do we make the time together the most effective? How can we turn about six hours of work into something meaningful, given normal distractions of meetings, bathroom breaks, etc?

it takes more than crashing and burning in live demos to be a great software engineer this is episode 169 of the soft skills engineering podcast i'm your host jamison dance i'm your host dave smith soft skills engineering is a weekly advice show for technical people about all the non-technical questions that they have i crashed and burned well not crashed and burned i lost i don't know like a wing but still managed to land it in a live demo i did have you ever done a demo where you're like okay i'm gonna run through the demo three times beforehand to make sure i work out all the glitches and then there's some bug that only manifests after the app has been run three times i'm pretty sure i upgraded versions of chrome between when i practiced the demo and

when i gave it and they changed the thing so i did practice it and the rest of it went great well one part did not the part where you got your wings clipped yeah got my wings clipped still landed okay but it was a harrowing experience let's talk about our patrons okay it's a new month which means we have a new list we have some every week shout outs and one-time shout outs we want to thank everyone who's contributing at the level that gets in this shout out they are matthew voidovich the agile ventures charity ted nugent crash bandicoot zach grannon this engineer goes up to 11x luis santos nick cantar taras karuk sean sunny tie sonic the hedgehog iva robotnik marie russo chris hogan chase norton stanley tactical radio and one-time shout outs to pablo

morgan cedric and dimitri yanson thank you so much if you'd like to support the show go to softskills.audio and click support us on patreon and if you do we will send you an invite to our slack community where you can join discuss episodes discuss things ask questions so many awesome conversations happening there every week it's fantastic there's a pretty good one about googly eyes attached to your desk and how you deal with it slash retaliate yeah so we send out we send out the slack invites at the beginning of the month which is when patreon builds folks so if you subscribed last month or supported last month you should get one probably already by the time this episode comes out thank you so much yes and it turns out we've been nominated for

a award on the internet a very meaningful non-made up no not something that dave and i put up ourselves actually that's true that is true we did not put this up called the noonies go to hackernoon.com click on noonies click on dev podcast you'll find soft skills engineering look jameson and i are desperate we need validation if you can't if you can't join us on patreon at least click the plus button by the noonie award and vote us into that number one spot yeah spend your precious precious engagement on us they say that the smartest minds of our generation are working today on optimizing ad click-through rates we just want you to click this one thing like you don't have to be smart to do it what do you mean what i mean is the smartest

minds of this podcast hosts group are working on getting you to click on this poll yeah all right okay we'll put a link to it in the show notes too yes okay i'm gonna dive into our first question this is from an anonymous listener one of my co-workers at the software company i currently work on has an uncommon set of beliefs that include among many other things a strong mistrust of mainstream science he is currently very concerned about the effect that wi-fi signals have on our health and wants the company to make some changes to our wi-fi hubs and our devices wireless connection usage i found in the past that it's not easy to have a conversation with him about this type of topic how can i be respectful to him and not undermine our work

relationship while not giving in to connectivity inconvenience based on fringe science beliefs okay i feel like i feel like i need to lay some groundwork here before we jump into this question and i'll just say my beliefs are the moon landing was faked earth is flat and the demise of jquery was an inside job the john resig was a secret plant from the framework authors yes big framework big framework took him out yeah the yeah if i were smart it is like an illuminati joke i could make about all the core teams of view and angular and react and stuff yep yeah this is huh yeah so i've i've worked with i've worked with co-workers who had what i considered to be fringe beliefs that i disagreed with quite a bit but it it was just like okay i won't talk

about like topic x with that person but it wasn't ever related to work it was just there's this kind of after some uncomfortable heated conversations i was like okay we disagree a lot and it's probably not i don't know there's much much value to to get out of these further conversations but this is like this is a work thing this would be like if i believed that zoom was secretly opening a web server on your computer and refused to use it when zoom is your main audio video chat client you are such a conspiracy theorist that would never happen yep wait a minute you know one of the things that i find interesting about this is like isn't it true that software developers all have kind of fringy beliefs like i believe that monads are you know

whatever i believe that this time i will write good code and this project will never be hard to work in these fringe unproven beliefs yes if we switch from scrum to kanban our productivity will go up a thousand percent you know our problem it's we don't have enough services and if we split this into a bunch of individual services and run them on Kubernetes, the overall effort will go way down to operate our platform. But isn't it true though

that like probably 90% of what we call best practices in software engineering are basically based on junk science? Yeah, I have a book sitting on my desk. I'm going to hold it up. I'm going to drop it on the desk so you can hear that was it.

It's called Making Software, What Really Works and Why We Believe It. And it's kind of like a research overview of research into software engineering. And I think the thing that I've gotten from reading it is it's all either common sense or no one knows anything. It's like, yeah, if you're a horrible jerk to people, your software is worse because it's collaborative. That makes sense. Or like we put 18 different languages in this shootout and it turns out they all are the same with defect rate or I don't know.

It's totally unclear. Right. Interesting. so i think we're agreeing with him and saying yeah wi-fi signals are bad for your health and i mean they're just as bad for your health as say waterfall is for your development productivity yeah that's just as bad i mean if you have a fridge full of like red bull that's probably a lot worse for your health than wi-fi signals maybe you can oh that's a give them some non-fringe science about how i don't know that will never work i

don't think there's anything about convincing this person wi-fi is okay because oh yeah this is where this is when the one thing i know about this situation is do not engage do not like be like like i'm gonna lay out the facts for you you just don't understand like nothing will make i don't know i'm gonna cast a little bit of a broad net here maybe paint with an extra wide brush and just say people who get into this kind of stuff and by the way i actually don't have an opinion on the wi-fi thing but people who tend to get into like conspiracy theories and pseudoscience when you try to convince them with facts the almost inevitable outcome is they double down yeah i double down in arguments with my family it's it's like the human thing you know

and the reason i know this is because about 10 years ago i tried to guide a team from using subversion to using git ah the fringe science of distributed version control it was fringe right back then oh man so hard to convince them i don't know dave that wait a minute there's a commit and a push step that's like just an extra step huh anyway double down what happened oh well eventually we got them on git oh i'll tell you what happened the the git svn wrapper where you can use svn at least it looks like svn but under the hood it's git so okay okay that's i i got it then you have to build a tinfoil funnel that collects all the wi-fi signal and then you just plug an ethernet cord into the end and plug that into your laptop and say this is this is the wi-fi to ethernet

wrapper and you have to wear this on your head yeah so the rest of us can walk around i mean this is an interesting it makes me wonder what fringe beliefs i could adopt that would just get me out of doing things i didn't want to do like i i believe that the rothschilds are behind uh quarterly planning and every time you do it it just it just puts another dollar in their pocket for them to spend on the lizard people or whatever like what so now i now i know you don't have Security audits, you know what? They're just a way for space government to get access to your system. You know that's who's really behind them all, right?

Yeah, it's just piping all your data directly to the alien overlords. Just kidding. I want to do security audits. I want to know if my stuff is insecure. I'll leave it to your imagination to decide if that means I want to do security audits or not. Okay. I mean, yeah, I think you're right that there's this essential conflict that no one's going to convince him like, oh, I just didn't read the right study about the safety of Wi-Fi or I didn't I didn't experiment the right way with my own brain matter or whatever. so i i don't think there's a peaceful resolution where you can convince him i think you just have

to this is the reason managers were invented you know like if you're a co-worker oh you don't have to you don't have to solve it and i'm pretty sure there's no way that this one person is going to convince everyone to not use wi-fi in an office of software developers i mean you have like phones and there's it's just flooded the poison is there you know yeah um so i i feel like this is a case where you need a manager to step in and say, I understand you have these beliefs, but we just aren't going to do this because of team productivity reasons or whatever.

It seems like it would be inappropriate to let this one person's opinion change how the whole team worked when it's not really based in stuff that the rest of the team agrees in, I guess is how I'd put it. And so you're basically saying punt it to your manager? I think so, yeah.

This is what they're for. It sounds like you have a kind of a conflict, but really it's not your job to decide what the office IT Wi-Fi policy should be. So I don't know why, I mean, I don't know why you have to be the one to deal with it. I don't think the question asker feels like they need to deal with it

and put this question to bed. I think it's more like this is one of many topics that you can accidentally step on and blow off your leg when you're dealing with this person. And I really liked the way the question was framed, which is how can I be respectful to him while not undermining our work relationship, while not giving in to all the inconvenience based on these beliefs, whether it's, and I would extend that and say, whether it's this

Wi-Fi question or any number of other topics that may be work impacting. And I think that's actually quite a bit harder. Like, you know, is it possible to completely sidestep a conversation when this person is like dead set on talking about it? Yeah. And that's a good point because it would be easy to flip the bozo bit and say this person is just a goofball and i don't trust anything they say and i'm gonna avoid them but that's not a productive working relationship yeah there is some give and take here where uh if it's making it so no one can collaborate with them that's it's affecting their job performance and you can't just i don't know you you have to be able to work with people without lecturing them all the time about yeah the mole men

i don't know i i'm trying not to make fun of him but i just can't not don't tell him all the he'll just double down on the mole men if you tell him we made fun of him so so what do you think so so dave i said talk to the manager have the manager say hey we're not going to change all the access points please continue to do your work and you you brought up that it's not really about that it's like that might make it so it doesn't happen but he's still gonna bring it up every time you sit down at his computer to pair or something like that yeah that's what i think not not to mention there may be other topics as well yeah so so how do you carefully navigate you know i one of the things that i am pretty good at and this isn't something that i've

worked at but one of the things i'm pretty good at is kind of smoothing over conversations where someone kind of wants to get hostile with me i am just such a coward and so conflict so conflict diverse that i'll just kind of smile and nod and be like okay yeah all right cool hey uh could we talk about this bug that we're working on you know yeah and just like make them feel heard you don't have to internalize what they're saying but they need to feel heard and i think sometimes the only way to get them to stop talking about these topics that you don't want to talk about is to let them get it all out there and then once they feel heard they'll be more comfortable to move on to another topic oh i don't know i i feel like i've talked to some people where they will feel

heard at the heat death of the universe where there there's there's an infinite amount of words in them about that topic and listening to the words only makes more words yeah yeah it's like oh someone who is open to my ideas great i would do that i would do literally the opposite of what you said and deflect and say like well no not the opposite i would do the first thing you said which is smile nod and say okay cool let's talk about this pull request and and then deflect it away from the tricky things to discuss back to work stuff okay so there's like three options here let's say you're you're at a you're at an intersection that has a left a straight and right left is listen respectfully let them get everything out on the table right is engage them

in combat and straight is just smile and nod and just keep on driving and i think what you're saying is if i go left or right they're gonna double down i think so yeah yeah i mean yeah yeah and i agree with that i'm not saying you have to like sit down get out your popcorn and just like consume everything they say but you at least have to acknowledge like that they said something and then you know you don't have to agree you don't have to disagree but i understand you feel that way yeah like i can understand why you'd why you think that like a little empathy i think would go a long way here and not so much empathy that you're like sitting down as a pupil you know as letting them mentor you on the ways of the mole men but but so much that you know you're

like okay i acknowledge that you said that i heard your point i'm not even going to tell you whether i agree or disagree i'm just gonna move on yeah i i love that i think if you're not trying to if you're not worried about it actually happening then that makes sense you just kind of acknowledge it briefly and then keep going with your day don't make it the focus don't get sucked into discussions about it yeah and if you're concerned that this person is making headway with management and actually going to get your wi-fi removed and you're opposed to that drop a note to your manager and just say hey i know that this is on the table i just wanted to voice my opinion which is that i love having wi-fi i'm not concerned about the health effects and i like the productivity that

it gives and i hope you'll keep it you know just put that out on the table and move on there's not really not much more you can do you need a pro wi-fi conspiracy like it's that's what you need yeah yeah it it cleans out the brain fog i have a hot tub in my house that's not full of water it's full of wi-fi and i just i bathe in it every night you've got just a bunch of tp link access points sitting in the tub with me carefully arranged so that the the focus points are just right between your ears oh yeah i've got like 20 pringles cantenas and when you get out of the bathtub you can use it to cook popcorn neat all right should we move on to our next question i think so yeah do you want to read it

OK, yeah, this comes from an anonymous listener who says, hello, I love the show. The humor interjected into real advice or real advice interjected into humor makes thinking of boring and scary things like co-worker relations or quitting your job sound fun. Everyone should resolve conflict and or quit the two choices. You can either resolve this or quit. All right. That's a good summary for the podcast. yeah let's move on to the rest of the question here it says i just started a new gig and i'm running into a situation i haven't before we have flexible work hours but unlike at previous jobs people actually use them i am meant to be pairing with another dev who is working quite different hours than me and i have a couple questions number one how do we communicate about this

clearly i tried to set expectations at the onset but it seems we missed the boat i asked when he works told him when i work and it didn't seem this far off but on a day we're supposed to pair he's here an hour and a half after me which means i'll leave an hour and a half before him question two how do we make the time together the most effective how can we turn about six hours of work into something meaningful given normal distractions of meetings bathroom breaks etc six hours of work i can turn two hours of work into something meaningful and goof off the whole rest of the day just kidding i was gonna say like it's been a long time since i've had six actually effective hours yeah that's that's a high bar i i work more than six hours but well

you are at work more than six hours yeah it's there's just so much overhead right yeah so many bathroom breaks you know yeah if you're if you're really hydrating sufficiently you've got to go to the bathroom a lot yep and and how do you squeeze in your wi-fi bath breaks that's what i want to know i just have a wi-fi bodysuit it's like a it's it's like a wetsuit wetsuits work by keeping a layer of water in there and the water heats up because your body heats and yes that's what the wi-fi does it just gets activated pump it in yeah pump the wi-fi in yeah make sure you flush it out you don't want that stale crusty wi-fi oh yeah yeah you need fresh wi-fi every day Yeah. The best Wi-Fi comes from this little region of France that you have heard of.

Otherwise, it's just radio waves. Oh, gosh. Okay. How do you do it? That was really funny. So this might be a dumb question, but six hours of consistent pairing seems like a lot. I mean, maybe this is an expectation at your workplace that you will pair more than six hours in a row. But that seems like that seems like a good chunk. I mean, can you just do stuff by yourself until you're together and then go back to splitting up?

Yeah. Do pair programming shops tend to spend the entire day in a pair or do they have dedicated pair time and then individual time? So we had met a friend on a couple months ago on a podcast, and she works at a full time pair shop. And they just pair, they don't code without pairing, basically. But I don't know if they're all like that. I've never worked somewhere like that. I've worked at plenty of places that pair ad hoc, or that will have bursts of a couple weeks of pairing on a specific project. And in those places, it's been pretty flexible of like, we kind of decide as a pair how much time we're going to pair. but the expectation isn't that you have to just do it the whole day or it doesn't that seems exhausting work oh it totally is i hear people say you get used to it but i did not get used to it and then we stopped and did something else and i was very tired okay so i guess let's start with question one how do we communicate about this clearly and i think there's a lot of value in sitting down with someone that you already have an existing relationship with and where habits have crept in kind of organically and just stating them explicitly and saying here's

what i'm observing that we are doing rather than just saying well those those habits evolved we can't we can't talk about them we can't change them that's just what's going to be this unspoken secret can't acknowledge them yeah isn't that kind of how yeah kind of how we we roll sometimes though yeah i think so yeah and i think it'd be a good idea to write these things down and just say here's what the schedule looks like here are the parts of it that i think are good and here's what i think is bad and let's let's recalibrate now and maybe maybe even put a time bound on it and say i want to spend the next month trying something different and then assess how it went at the end of the month this tension between flexible work hours and real-time collaboration is

is interesting i've definitely felt this where uh i've been pretty lucky lucky to work at places where they all say that you can have flexible work hours but then there are meetings and the flexible work hours are like as long as you go to your meetings and those are at a certain time and i'm not just going to drive home every between every meeting and i don't know drive back at midnight or whatever so there's there's certainly some tension to work whenever you are most effective and you need to work on this thing with this other person in real time not over some asynchronous collaboration format yeah there must be like a spectrum of flexibility right and like the only way to really achieve total flexibility is to work completely alone yeah yeah or completely

asynchronously you just never have meetings just email and true documents and that's it which probably is the dream for some people yeah i think i wouldn't like that i i would be sad too i think so yeah like to me if you're going to be saying that pair programming is our policy then i don't see how you can have really flexible work hours too because you are limited to what your pair can do yeah there it does seem like there's a bit of a value conflict there of i mean who's telling them to pair i am meant to be pairing it's the leader capital t capital l the leader the leader has the leader's tentacles in all organizations the leader communicates via wi-fi yeah so there's something i think i'm missing here and i don't know if i'm gonna get it by

saying i'm missing it on on the show but there is this tension between we have to pair or get to or whatever and we have flexible work hours and i think you have to resolve that and i agree with what dave said that you resolve by sitting down and maybe you just agree hey we're gonna do work that isn't pairing on the time we're not together or maybe you say we will each come in shifted 45 minutes from when we normally do yeah you said they they come in later it sounds like and leave later and you come in earlier and leave earlier maybe it's an irregular pairing session and it's this scheduled thing and and it's kind of like a big deal that you're looking forward to and then it just doesn't quite work out perfectly i could see that happening if i was really excited

for this thing i thought was happening at a specific time and it wasn't it wasn't just everyday work i would get bummed out if if it felt like someone else just didn't it would feel like they just didn't care about it or maybe didn't want to do it you know i'm not i'm not quite sure i follow so say say they pair once every two weeks it's not every day you know okay and it's on the schedule of like this is the day of pairing the day of union a day of union you know gotta give it a weird culty title that sounds like a ritual okay and then uh so it's on the calendar and you show up all excited to pair and they just don't show up for an hour and a half i see so you think it's this scheduled important thing and to them it's like oh yeah i'll show up

pair today and come in when i want to or whatever but either way i mean there is there is an expectations mismatch here and i feel like you should clarify that and a good way to do that is by asking how do you think this pairing should work yeah and and that that's a little less combative than saying hey listen i sat and waited for an hour and a half and just just cried the whole time because i was sad because i was alone there was no union on the day of union only solitude even if you even if you approach it the first way the non-combative way where you say how do you think this should work you have to be a little bit delicate about how you approach that because sometimes when you come in with a question like that like you can come across as passively

combative if you say something like how do you think this should be working listen buddy yeah we have some questions for you what exactly are you going for here and it might be good to just flat out share your feedback on the process first and then ask for their feedback that might put the put them into a more i don't know that could go either way depending on the person but it might have the effect of putting them into a more collaborative mood to discuss the issues Flip a coin. Flip a coin to pick whether you start with how you feel or ask them how they feel. It's true. If you want true statistical significance, you got to have a random sample. Yeah. You got to do this a bunch of times. That's true. Yeah. Hmm. So the multiverse is the answer

to this question, I think. That's right. Or if you could just erase people's memories, that would also... Ah, yes. Maybe it's already working and your co-worker has done this to you. Maybe this is like the 14th time you've asked us this question and erased our memory. Because we didn't answer it very well. Oh, no. Yeah, I think you just have to talk to them about it. Because it's possible they just don't know that you're expecting to pair for a solid eight hours and you want them to come in at a certain time that matches the time you come in. Especially if you have this overlying or this overall culture of flexible work hours.

Yeah, that feels like a boring answer, though. Just talk to him about it. i mean isn't that always the answer though it is yeah we just we just kind of think really hard and then go you should talk to them yeah i think you should tell them how you feel about it kindly we didn't say talk to your manager though that's the other staple advice of the show you know what you know what you could do here we're gonna go way way off track here now you could talk to one of your peers who also pairs and ask them how do you manage schedule mismatches yeah i mean i tried to set expectations at the onset but it seems we missed the boat i asked when he works told him

when i worked and it didn't seem far off but he came in late that one day yeah i guess the weird thing is you don't want to be this person's fake boss and say like listen i noticed you came in an hour and a half late that's a weird thing so i it is kind of a delicate conversation but i think it's worth bringing up and just saying hey i thought we were going to pair the whole day but it's hard to pair when i don't know your schedule and and if you if you can use this flexibility to make it easier to find a time where you can both overlap that feels good that's a that's a win maybe you don't have to necessarily start at 9 a.m because you can start at 11 or whatever but you just both start at the same time yeah as long as you're agreed on that

time i guess yeah i think if you can be flexible about when as long as it's yeah the same words dave just said but all right i was gonna say too many too many words yeah okay before we wrap up then number two question number two how do we make our time more effective and i'm thinking attention enhancing medication like have you seen limit limitless no i thought you were talking about like adderall because that's a thing maybe limit limitless is that a tv show now there's a movie with uh oh gosh i'm gonna reveal my ignorance here brandon cooper bradley cooper bradley cooper and he took a pill and his eyes turned blue and he got really smart for like a day okay this is a good one but anyway yeah so get one of those yeah so if you could take to make your time the most

effective you just both need to be smarter okay i feel like amphetamines have come up a few times on this show uh maybe it's a theme now no bathroom breaks i mean it's right on the list normal distractions of meetings bathroom breaks just yep cut those out you have a really fancy aaron chair it's the the deluxe model that doesn't even require bathroom breaks oh okay i see we're not we're way beyond lumbar support here yeah yeah when i have paired it has typically been in intense times where we just clear our schedule for meetings i mean if you schedule pairing sessions then you're you're unavailable to go to meetings so maybe you can schedule that stuff ahead of time just book your calendar full yep or just work even faster

work faster yeah work faster so that your six hours has the effect of eight maybe switch to a dvorak keyboard switch to dvorak yeah speaking speaking of junk science oh no i just i just the hordes of dvorak and and they're typing just furiously but they can't remember where the letters are so it's gonna take them a long time to type their angry tweets to you in like three weeks we're gonna get a bunch of hate mail it'll be like handwritten because they'll have given up they gave up yeah if i if i will live to be a thousand then i would switch to dvorak right now but yeah okay now the roi is like a yeah i don't yeah i don't think it's there for me okay i guess i mean there are people who do it for rsi reasons that seems legitimate yep

but i think that's that's it i mean i i guess i don't quite understand because the times i've paired it's it's been so focused that that hasn't felt like the problem how do we get how do we work effectively for the time we're pairing it's more like how do we make it happen and have the stamina to keep it up and communicate well during it but it has felt very productive when i do these long pairing sessions so oh yeah it's like it's like the solution to eliminating distraction yeah yeah you can't just look at twitter if you're unless you're doing it together and then you pair tweet pair pair retweet yeah yeah okay did we answer it i think so we did all right good luck anonymous listener where can people go if they want to get their own questions

answered they can go to softskills.audio and click ask a question they will also find the support us on patreon button and you can share the show with your friends if you enjoy it we love talking to people that listen. I met a few listeners the other day and it was great talking to them about the show and thank you for listening. We'll catch you next week.