Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 17: Side project ideas and getting fired

Episode Date: July 4, 2016

In episode 17, Jamison and Dave answer these questions: From listener Greg Harrison: I want to build a side-project, but my lack of coming up with a good idea saps my motivation. Do you guys have any tips? Have you ever been fired? What happened? How do you bounce back?

There's more to being a great developer than writing great code. This is Soft Skills Engineering. I'm your host, Dave Smith. I am your other host, Jameson Dance. And that was a new intro, ladies and gentlemen. What did you think, Jameson? I think it'll sound even better when I edit in that, what is it, that THQ, like movie noise that happens at the beginning, the giant like synth swell.

You mean like the, oh, THX. Oh, THX, yeah. Yeah, there you go. least i didn't i was gonna say thc and then i was like oh wait that's a different thing yes yep that'll be great thanks edit in some thc so dave i think you had a listener question or a listener story that you wanted to share this week yeah so way back in episode 14 which was like uh 15 internet years ago i think

we took a question from a listener named Zachary about how to deal with legacy code and um I thought we did an okay job answering that question what do you think Jameson yeah I mean we we certainly said some words words were said we we definitely filled all the airtime we needed to fill we sure did we it was interesting in my head it was like a a five-year-old project or something like and and a lot of our discussion was around like you can still get value out of that and yeah yeah yeah exactly don't be too don't be too hasty to rewrite it it's not that bad kind of like this undertone of like suck it up a little bit yeah exactly like you're probably yeah exactly because that's actually pretty predominant ideas like well i need to rewrite this code it's six months old yeah

but uh that was not the case at all how old was this code base jameson uh he said from the early 90s yeah so we're talking like 20 years old yeah uh it didn't it was like usb based it doesn't run on anything newer than windows xp which is no longer supported by microsoft and um and so we were just kind of way off base there so hey so we're sorry zachary um but the story has a really cool ending i was really impressed with with zach zachary here can i call you zach i feel like we're Buds. So Zach's idea was to move the code base over to a web-based application using Chrome's USB API, which news to me, I didn't know that was the case. Apparently, this is about 10 times faster than the previous implementation, and it runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux.

And so he built a prototype. And then he presented it to the CEO and the VP, and they decided to move forward with the new code base and even added two additional programmers to the project. So Zachary says, I realized in hindsight that my boss was not willing to make the decision because I was not presenting the information to him in a manner he understood.

Once I broke down the advantages into feature improvements, portability improvements, and ease of use, it became a no-brainer for him. So I thought that was really, really cool and I was really impressed with the way Zachary handled that. Yeah, for sure. It can be hard sometimes when things seem intuitively obvious to you as an engineer Why no one around you is supporting the concept or the idea, you know, or sorry

It can be intuitively obvious to you that it's a good idea But then people around you are like I don't get it, you know and sometimes we have to put things in words or with examples that Really resonate with others and like the the closer your example is to giant dollar signs the easier it will be And if you just say the word cha-ching between every sentence it helps I think that's part of the sales process from my understanding. Anyway, so I feel like we answered that question for the wrong listener. But I think for everyone else, what we said was probably beneficial.

And I'm really happy with the way Zach handled things here. I thought it was super cool. No, I'm going to take credit for the good outcome he had. Even though we totally misjudged the situation. We were the catalyst that led him to do that. That's right. It's 100% on you, Jameson. Yep.

Good job. Thank you. i feel good about the work i've done well should i read our first question let's do it okay this is from listener greg harrison and he says i want to build a side project but my lack of coming up with good ideas saps my motivation do you have any tips yeah just build uber that's what i would do uber but for cars uber brilliant okay uh this is i i think implicit in this question is the fact that this person is probably comparing themselves to all of the like famous rock star developers celebrity developers or whatever they just like post about all the awesome stuff they make all

the time it's so like linus torvalds like i'm just making an operating system for fun yeah you know i think that's how he introduced it yeah on twitter even um oh yeah twitter in 1992 that was a good time yeah mailing lists were the original twitter uh but but i i feel this sometimes that there are these developers that seem like they're just always producing stuff and it's amazing stuff and often it's in things that i am bad at but i wish i was good at so it's even another level of like comparing myself and coming up short and and like i rebuilt uber in haskell yeah exactly like oh man that's awesome and i could never do that um and i and i feel like there's this tendency for us to compare our like weaknesses against other people's

strengths and i don't think you have to be like the most productive i don't know you don't even have to be productive at all in side projects that you should think about what your goals are in doing a side project like if you want to build a product that's a pretty different side project versus i just want to learn this technology and play with something true true and and personally i am tired when i get home and i don't want to like have a second job building uber for cars uh don't worry it's it's coming i'm about to take over the uber for cars market uh so my side projects are all like just stupid really dumb things that make me laugh and that no one else thinks are funny uh and and they're just purely for exploration and then sometimes

i call them art because that excuses how crappy they are like anything you can just say it's art is art like this is the worst program i've ever written that's because it's art yeah like how see your reaction you don't see the beauty of this no yeah the reaction you have to this code is part of the piece itself and i was attempting to recreate the feeling that you get when you come into a new legacy code new to you legacy code base and you can just like bs forever and then it's art the rage you feel when you read crappy code yeah that's what this that's what this piece is all about isn't that really what makes us human and you just put that sentence in there and then it works oh my gosh that's such a good idea that explains so much of the code i've

written like i just did this so that you could explore your own humanity yeah try that in your next code review someone's like i'm pretty sure there's like a seg fault in your javascript right here i don't even know how you did that but there is and then you say what does that say about the human experience oh my gosh that's such a good idea it'll go for really well i can't stop laughing at this idea i want to hear how it goes uh but to come back to the question that's that's how i feel about side projects and that takes the pressure off of me to come up with like air quotes good ideas because good doesn't mean anything like there's no pressure it's just what can i do that would teach me something um so that's part of my approach yeah what's the other part uh the art

you can't say part without art that's true yeah how do you feel about this question dave well i also i and i have the same problem actually so i'm like well i want to work on something cool but i don't have any cool ideas so i just won't to anything and when you get in that kind of lurch i think a really good thing you can do is find some project that already exists and just clone it just make your own version of it like who cares if it's popular who cares if anyone uses it and if you're really just doing this to explore new technologies or learn new skills or concepts just find something and clone it um i think i've seen people do this with like uh wasn't it like the the what's the base camp company 37 47 signals

37 some number of signals you're close yeah um and i think i saw someone rebuild that app just for fun to learn a new technology and they chose it because it would give them a nice surface to explore all the different features of some framework and it was like oh yeah that's pretty cool so i say just clone something find something what you know that you're moderately interested in and clone it and i don't mean get clone literally i mean make a version of it that you yourself created part of the comparison with other people thing i was talking about earlier is is sometimes i feel like there are some developers who their life's passion is like animation and then they just build all these awesome animations all the time and explore that space uh and i can

feel like if i'm not as passionate about whatever dinky little side project i'm working on as they are about that core thing then it's kind of a waste of time and i feel bad about it um so i like that idea about just cloning something because that tells me it doesn't have to be this thing that keeps you up at night and you can't stop thinking about rewriting base camp but in haskell or whatever like right you'll still learn stuff from doing that yeah i also once read this interview with some one one person from the band kiss about one famous song they made i don't even remember what song but they said they came up with it by trying to copy a led zeppelin song and they were really bad at copying it so it came out totally different and they're like oh cool so they tried

to plagiarize and fail yeah exactly so maybe well there you go yeah and the act of copying this project you'll probably be like i don't want to put that feature and that's hard to do and then maybe the product is better without that feature in it next thing you know bada boom bada bing you're a millionaire yep so and that will happen i promise that's a soft skills engineering guarantee that's about as good as all of our other guarantees yeah i've had a few fun personal projects also that i've actually never cloned a project but i've had over the years i've had maybe four personal projects that were all about a personal itch that i had to scratch um the first one was uh my isp at the time had a bandwidth cap where they said you can only

download x number of gigabytes in a in a month but they said but during the night like from midnight to 6 a.m you can do as much as you want and i was like oh okay and at the time i really liked downloading like big files like bittorrent files and stuff all very very legal sure bittorrent files and so i wanted to have my bittorrent client like automatically go unthrottled at night and then like pause during the day and i'm like well this seems really solvable and i was using this bittorrent client uh that i think no longer exists and so i figured out that it had a plug-in system and i wrote a plug-in for it and i was like this is really cool it was just a fun way to write a plug-in that would let me write you know configure a schedule and and download stuff and and i worked

hours on this stupid thing and it turns out it was really popular in australia because i think they had a lot of metered isp connections down there and uh yeah for whatever reason um lots and lots of people i think hundreds of people use it to to meter their downloads um and uh it was really fun and i found myself getting up at like five in the morning to work on it before i'd go into work because i was just really excited about it and uh and so that happened but that's only happened to me a few times um and i think the key there was the personal itch like i really wanted to solve this problem and it turned out it was also kind of useful for some people i think a bunch of uh successful products and tools have come out of that personal itch thing too oh yeah

like linux yeah i thought you were gonna ask me to name some and then i was gonna say know you named some yeah so so i think that's a really powerful way to make your life better and it turns out that you're probably a lot like other people and and so that'll make other people's lives better yeah exactly sometimes we think well surely no one else wants this but if you want it that's a really good data point that someone else probably wants it so that's what i do for motivation find something i want no matter how lame it is and just uh scratch my itch and maybe even find something that you want but already exists and just try to build your own version of it um and maybe that'll sap your motivation too though like well i'm just reinventing the wheel

here i'm solving a problem that's already been solved maybe the meta point is it sounds like we both do this very differently my strategies are very like pick something totally random and exploratory and there's no attempt to finish stuff or i mean i can finish them sometimes but i don't i just leave this trail of unfinished half-baked ideas and and your strategy is you're um trying to solve some problem you have and then you also suggested the clone thing and uh maybe you just have to find the one that works for you that yeah maybe maybe because i very i very rarely leave things unfinished like if i'm going to start a project i'm probably going to finish it but because of that i've only done this maybe four times like i said in in 15 years but jameson it

Sounds like you do it a lot more frequently. I have probably a 95% done Ook interpreter. And I just didn't want to like write the one last case. Wait, Ook as in on-off keying? No. Oh, okay. Ook is a, oh, okay. This is not a soft skill, but pretty valuable information about to show up here.

Ook is a programming language made up of three different symbols. There's Ook with an exclamation mark. ook with a question mark and ook with a period like the the noise you would write out if a monkey made it ook oh okay uh and and you can find all those different symbols to like shift bits around in an array or something it's kind of like a i can't say the name on of the language on this podcast a brain oh is it starts with an f yeah it's a brain f word clone but instead of weird symbols you just use ook so it's like the world's premier um monkey based programming language i think yeah and and the code is amazing it's just a lot of like ook ook

that's pretty great okay well there you go that was a hard skill sorry for that diversion it's okay well i don't know why i said okay we're apologizing to the listeners it's ook yep it's it's uh hopefully you find some motivation uh greg who is the person that asked this question do you want to ask her thanks for the question oh sorry i keep cutting yeah uh how dare you first of all and yes i would like to ask our second question right okay uh this is a little bit more somber so buckle up have you ever been fired what happened how do you bounce back after being fired and i'll i'll share a little confession jameson told me before the show that he's never been fired and he silently judges anyone who has been

i i was fired when i was 15 once um i think the times where i i might have been fired i like preemptively quit that's probably happened to me before you're like i see this train wreck coming yeah like let's get off the track and then i get to preserve my pristine record so it's all about the stats so probably if you've been fired it won't be as bad as the story of uh my dad my dad is like this lovable teddy bear guy so nice so kind cares a lot about people's feelings uh he did not always have those qualities and he was a manager back in the day of sales people totally unrelated industry and and he fired someone in a kind of like a sociopathic way that makes him sound horrible i swear he's not horrible though um so there was a salesperson

that was kind of um just slacking off he wasn't answering his pager and pagers were really important for their process back then and he wasn't showing up to work and and just was having some problems so after a while of this he got called in to the office and my dad asked him what was going on and he said oh my pager's broken and then my dad said okay i'm gonna call your pager and if it buzzes then you're fired and it did oh yeah i called his bluff yeah i don't oh that makes me shudder can you can you imagine being in that seat like yeah my page was broken okay i'm gonna call it oh crap yeah i think the modern my plan has backfired i just i just haven't been feeling very well and then someone pulls up like

your your twitter feed and they're like oh yeah why did you tweet at the beach 8 47 pancakes at 12 32 this afternoon i don't know oh yeah that is like the modern equivalent yeah so hopefully if you've ever been fired it's not that bad but i have been fired would you like me to tell you my story i would love to i worked for a large well-known software company at the time they were a little bit less well-known now 15 years ago i was an intern doing testing for some of the software that this company produced and i was also a participant on a local linux users group mailing list and there was some trash talking going on on the mailing list of some of the products that my employer produced and i participated in the trash talking and news got

back to my employer and my manager called me into her office and was like hey uh this product owner of this other product line just called me and told me some of the things you said and i think you need to i'll quote her prepare for the worst and hope for the best and i said what's the worst and she's like yeah am i gonna die and uh she was like no no no just getting fired and i was like oh okay so about a week went by and sure enough an hr guy called me into his office with my manager and he says uh we've decided that uh you and the company are not a good fit that's how i just let go. So they told me that, signed my time card and shuffled me out the door. And that was the end of that whole internship after like six or eight months or something. And I learned a really

valuable lesson from that, which is that you really shouldn't go and say negative things about your employer. It's like the proverbial biting of the hand that feeds you. And even if you're right, you just shouldn't. And maybe especially if you're right, you shouldn't say them. So that was my one and only experience being fired from a software job. I think there are a lot of interesting things to talk about in that story. One of the fascinating things to me is the way that they told you, which is just cloaked in euphemism. It sounds like they didn't say, you shouldn't have said that, you're fired because we don't like it when people talk bad about the company. No, no. The HR person never said that. Never even referenced that. We all

knew that that was what was going on. But incidentally, they also said, hey, if you want a letter of recommendation, we'll give you a positive letter of recommendation. And I was like, oh, interesting. My grown-up eyes now look back at that and realize they were trying to prepare a soft landing for me. In fact, they told me, all we're going to write down on your records is that your internship ended. We're not going to say that you were terminated with cause. And I think this probably got them out of some like unemployment obligations to pay. But also it made it so that when I called later with references, they were able to give a positive recommendation.

So they were kind of like protecting me while also kicking me out of the organization. It's like punishing you and protecting you at the same time. Do you feel like they had some valuable feedback that they could have given if they were just willing to be super blunt? In a more complicated situation, yes. But in this case, it was really clear. like you did something acutely wrong and we won't tolerate it um but yeah i think so and and i have uh i know that happens actually and sometimes they do that for your benefit so i have been

involved in in in someone being let go who there there were definite problems and and I just did not have the guts to say like you did not do good enough work and so I just made up some crap about like oh it's just not a good fit and I don't know that's did you feel like a coward when you did that yeah well I already felt horrible because it was like a very nice person very easy to get along with it was kind of like kicking a puppy and then but but i also feel stupid talking about this now because like i still had a job i don't know it's not it's not about the person doing the firing the person that's getting fired feels way worse but the reason i bring that up is the person um firing it has all these social incentives

to um sometimes not be completely honest because they don't want to make people feel bad yeah yeah absolutely and it's hard it's hard to look someone in the eye and say you're not you're not good at programming you know like you're not good at the thing you spend almost all of your time doing but it sucks it's probably harder to hear that and maybe we should talk about oh yeah what do you do so either situation sounds horrible right either you just nobody wins and no one tells you and you're like am i like a do i have a disease or you get fired and they're like you are bad at your job like what do you do in those cases i think in both cases you you can feel absolutely distraught and your confidence can be shaken. Even if you've been a successful

software engineer for many years, being fired can shake you to the core. And it's perfectly normal to feel your confidence drop to the floor when that happens. You may question everything like, what have I done? Have I been screwing up for 10 years? Am I just, am I a bad person? And I've seen people go through this roller coaster and it is incredibly painful. but it is normal, I think. And I'd say if you're going through that, or you've been through it, that the one piece of solace that you can take is that this is actually normal and healthy to get to go through this. And I think the best thing you can do is let time heal the wound and prove to yourself over time that you are valuable and you do do good work and you can be a productive

member of a team. But that will take time, you know, 24 hours after getting fired, you're just not going to feel that way. Sure. So let's say you have been fired. What do you, what do you do? Let's talk tech. Let's talk tactical first. Okay. Um, first of all, if you got fired, there's a good chance your company has a severance policy and it's common in our industry to pay out one, two or three or more months of pay on the moment you get fired, you'll walk out with that check. Uh, that's pretty common. And then, um, there's also unemployment insurance that can be collected. I don't know how that works exactly, but I know that many, many companies in our industry will pay a severance. So you should at least ask. That sounds crazy to me. I'm trying

to imagine telling someone, telling me you're fired and then you saying like, okay, but can I have severance pay is that really what you have no well i mean no you shouldn't have to do that companies should have a policy and it should just be part of the thing uh but but could it really hurt to ask like you've already been fired that's true you can't be double fired like you're fired again yeah or maybe they were about to say just kidding it was all a joke and then you ask that and then they're like oh and then they really they yep yep we can't handle people asking about severance pay that's beyond the pale so okay i think it's cool to check into kind of benefits and severance and all that stuff definitely okay then what i was gonna after you're done hitting

the ice cream well start looking for a job um i think when you're looking for a job the hardest part after being fired is explaining what happened i was going to ask about that people are going to ask yeah often yep why aren't you with company x anymore why are you why did you leave and you could say i got fired and i think that that would be the hardest message to receive and probably hurt your chances at the next employer the most um but you can without lying you can have a good story for what went down you know and you and some companies will even make an agreement with you like okay we're gonna if anyone calls and asks we're gonna say budget cuts for your benefit and so you can say budget cuts you know i was laid off because they were cutting budgets or they can uh

you know you can set something up like that or you can tell a story like i was ready for something new you know you can explain the situation without saying well i was fired because i did a bad job you know that will not help you get your next job so i'm not really saying lie but i am saying tell the best possible true version of the story you could also talk about i mean i think you are a smart person and a good engineer because you're listening to this show and that that shows you have a strong character and and are amazing and a high tolerance for bad jokes yeah and that um so somewhere something went wrong to to make it so that it ended up this way either you kind of lost motivation somehow or you were put in this weird political situation or the company was

struggling and needed a scapegoat like there's some explanation beyond i got fired even if the reason you got fired was you did a bad job like you aren't bad so something caused you to do a bad job and if you can talk about that as the cause instead of saying i got fired because i i deleted prod in a fit of rage you could you could say well i just uh i i i left because i got really frustrated with the x policy and i wanted to work somewhere else or something and maybe that was like why you deleted all of broad in a fit of rage yeah oh um and and i don't think that's dishonest uh i i think it's looking at the root cause instead of yeah the event yeah like the uh the incidental thing that was the like the last straw

uh isn't nearly as important of a story as the the background that led to that yeah yeah and and also um that might be a valuable way of um kind of getting some closure and and dealing with the fallout of the situation is if you can figure out why this happened and uh hopefully the answer is is not i have no idea and there's nothing i could have done or foreseen to prevent it at all because that unfortunately some people that's actually a really common attitude though i shouldn't say really common i don't have like research data on it but it's really easy to just be like i don't know what happened, you know, and it's hard to see. And this is where I would suggest doing something that I personally have not done, but I have done for other scenarios, which is

find a good counselor, either a career coach, a mentor, someone you look up to, or someone who professionally coaches people for their careers and consult with them and see if they have any insight into what may have happened. There's a very good chance that what happened to you is common and they will have strategies for coping with it and being coming successful afterwards. sure i was gonna say and if you can't find like a career coach find a regular therapist or counselor hopefully you know you already have one that you trust and and have a good rapport with but they can help you work through these things too and really self-assess and figure out what's going on in your head yeah um i mean they're they're definitely also layoffs like some big division

of the company is is gone and yep and those i don't i don't know how much control a person can have over that no no and and you hardly need any explanation when that happens um we just hired a guy who was uh his whole division was laid off it was like 300 people you know they were like no exceptions you're all laid off and he came to work for us and it's like we didn't even ask like we already knew from the news what had happened sure and we didn't need to be like how come you didn't survive this round of yeah it's like that just it didn't come up yeah so yeah that's that's the easiest one i think i want to ask about um how do i say this i want to ask a little bit about why you don't hear people talking about this more you you do hear people talk about the layoffs kind of

thing or or people love to talk about how messed up the company was and how like if if if there's some reason they got fired or laid off that they believe was not their fault like some crazy political thing yeah yeah that i feel like i hear a lot of those stories but i don't ever hear people say like i i got fired and it wasn't good and i i don't know and one obvious answer why not it's painful right like you don't want to admit failure but i feel like by hiding it um we we make it this horrible thing that it it seems like it emphasizes the general feeling that exists already which is like you did something wrong there's something wrong with you it's bad it's a failure and i must keep it secret yeah exactly it's my scarlet letter yeah yeah um i think that

definitely goes on i don't know is there some place is there some like anonymous board where people post stories about getting fired or something i just i just wonder if there's something almost definitely to to kind of like connect with other people and and and realize this happens you're not horrible like you're among friends we've all been through it now let's share our stories yeah exactly and not the story of like my

whole division was cut but like I screwed up really bad and this is what happened yeah I don't know maybe that needs to exist and maybe it does maybe we should start a soft skills engineering forum where people can pour their heart out to each other sure after having been fired I will go get fired right now

and then start it up the inaugural member yeah roll up my sleeve i'm gonna go deliver some body shots to the ceo on the give him some punches on the on the other um on the other side of that coin you also don't hear people in leadership positions talk openly about firings sure you know like oh i fired so and so and it was because he did this you know like you don't hear that and i i think that's because of privacy like anytime i've heard of a manager being involved in a firing they always in my experience now this won't be true all the time but in my experience they always go way out of their way to protect the privacy of the person uh to make sure that they have a good soft landing

like they already these people are human beings they already know it's going to be terrible and they're just doing everything everything they can to lessen the blow you know yeah i think it can also be to protect the company um firing someone maybe maybe is a traumatic event i mean especially for the person getting fired but it affects all the other people that work there too and and the natural tendency is to wonder like am i what happened you know like yeah yeah um so sometimes those those can often conflict even like you want to respect the person's privacy but you also want to reassure people okay this person was let go for this vague but understandable cause and you don't have that vague but understandable cause

but even that's hard it's hard to broach that subject yeah it is you know well on that downer note i mean it's a downer subject it really is and maybe we're experiencing firsthand why people don't talk about it because it sucks to talk about it does but i wish more people did there was that famous zach coleman post the the github guy about being fired and that was great and also the advice the the generic soft skills engineering advice that applies to every question definitely applies to this question go get another job yeah because you can yeah yep yeah and if you have stories about being fired um or or experiences related to it i would love to hear them if you're not comfortable sharing

them publicly you can direct message us uh if you are though i mean i i think people would benefit from hearing more in the open about this yeah yeah so if you are send us your stories send them publicly or privately and they're private i will respect that privacy but i will learn if they're public then other people can learn too yeah all right what else we got i think that's it i think the question is answered now i just gotta question answered sit and think yeah this one this one really put me in a pensive mood yeah for sure well you know what i do when i get pensive dave what's that i subscribe to soft skills engineering on itunes or my podcast app and how many times have you done that really hits the spot

just over you just go hit that subscribe button you're like oh subscribe i feel so pensive yeah ask my mother-in-law to borrow her phone subscribe again subscribe her too yeah everyone can benefit anyone you can find just people on the train hey pardon me sir can i borrow your cell phone for a moment and they always say yes people love it oh yeah when strangers borrow their your cell phone Well, you can borrow it, but only if you're going to subscribe me to some random podcast. Yeah. But if you are listening, hopefully you're subscribed. If not, please subscribe.

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I know you're all here for Jameson. All righty. Thanks for everything.