Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 175: Famous devs at conferences and becoming obsolete

Episode Date: September 16, 2019

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Hi Dave and Jamison, thanks for the awesome show. How should I conduct myself at software conferences when my dev community heroes are in the midst? I recently attended a conference where one of my developer heroes was in attendance and I was really looking forward to meeting them. I couldn’t muster up the courage to introduce myself. What do you do in these situations to break the ice and not come off as a creeper or a nuisance? It’s a weird feeling to hear someone’s voice on a podcast every week or read their blog posts and feel like you are best friends with them while knowing that the other person has no idea who you are. Am I overthinking this? Recent new listener here and I must say that I love the show and to keep up the good work. My question can possibly be answered with the standard soft skills answer BUT I have my reservations about quitting my job. I work at a consultancy doing work in a niche web development framework that interfaces with an old monolith ERP system that I’m just not excited by but I am very good at creating web applications in. I know eventually these skills will become obsolete, and I had a new job opportunity recently that I decided not to take. Am I being stupid? Should I stay in the niche and hope I can get a newer job in the future where they just accept I can learn new tools?

it takes more than understanding recursion to understand recursion to understand recursion to understand recursion to stack overflow to be a great software engineer this is episode 175 of the soft skills engineering podcast i'm your host jameson dance i'm your host dave smith there was no base case sasko's engineering is a weekly advice show where we answer all of your non-technical questions about the technical field of software development i'm restarting my machine after that stack overflow give me a minute is that the only way to recover every time you forget a base case it's like instead of a fairy loses its wings somewhere a vm in the cloud restarts that's right just some random some docker container just died

yeah quantum computing is already at work i guess there's spooky action at a distance going on okay let's talk about our wonderful patrons this week we'd like to thank the following who are contributing at the level to get some a shout out every week on patreon they are matthew voidovich the agile ventures charity ted nugent crash bandicoot zach grannon this engineer goes up to 11x louise santos nick kantar vinlock taras karuk sean sunny tie dimitri yentz and britney ellick florian tatzel sonic the hedgehog iva robotnik marie rossow chris hogan and stanley tactical radio if you'd like to support the show go to softskills.audio and click support us on patreon thank you so much you help keep the show running we love it we have a comment from a

listener so this is a follow-up to episode 154 from a few months ago about how soon is too soon to quit your job you answered my question a few months ago about how soon is too soon to quit a new job i just wanted to give an update on how the situation turned out i ended up using jameson's favorite method of problem solving aka do nothing and help the problem goes away and it worked that's great oh i'm so glad i have a brand the ostrich method two months after i submitted the question i was laid off along with the entire engineering team wait i thought they said it worked yeah they didn't do anything they wanted to quit and they didn't and then they still didn't have a job there they effectively quit without having to do anything about it yeah i'm now at

a new job that seems like a great fit by the way this is my second layoff this year and both have turned into raises so i highly recommend that strategy to your listeners that feel like they are underpaid oh boy what is wrong with this industry i don't know i mean i'll take it while it lasts i guess oh man cool congratulations great job failing upward to the top i guess you're not failing your company is failing and you're benefiting yeah it's like if your car ejected you and above you there was a softer nicer better car waiting i don't know the metaphor doesn't quite work all right should we read our questions yeah i'll read the first one this comes from an anonymous listener who says hi david jameson thanks for the awesome show how should i conduct

myself at software conferences when my dev community heroes are in the midst i recently attended a conference where one of my developer heroes was in attendance and i was really looking forward to meeting them i couldn't muster up the courage to introduce myself what do you do in these situations to break the ice and not come off as a creeper or a nuisance it's a weird feeling to hear someone's voice on a podcast every week or to read their blog post and feel like you are best friends with them while knowing that the other person has no idea who you are am i overthinking this huh what a good question just this whole idea of developer heroes is weird i think every developer who is famous should be forced to pair program for like 30 minutes with every person that

thinks that they're inhumanly perfect you mean to like reset everyone's actual understanding yeah or publish their google search history or like publish their jira log of tickets they've caught i don't know production issues they've caused or something like everyone's just a person i don't know but it's a thing some people have reputations as being really good at things or i don't know i wish it wasn't so stratified because it feels like it makes the community less welcoming when they're the people that have tech celebrity and this makes me sad to hear that you feel like you can't approach people because i'm sure they want to be approached yeah i mean i suppose you hit on not coming on off as a creeper or a nuisance that's pretty good the

less stalkery the better you probably shouldn't tell them you've been following them and collected a bunch of skin cells that they dropped give them back oh boy i noticed some something flaked off you i think you probably wanted it here it is i could tell it was from you by the smell and the taste oh i think i just threw up in my mouth a little bit yeah here let me collect that for you oh i gave it back to you you don't have to worry about losing any of those valuable stomach acid fluids oh i don't think it has to be that complicated hold on you're saying like any behavior that's less creepy than what you just described is you're good to go no there's a wide spectrum of stuff less creepy than that that is still creepy i think all you have to do is is go

up to them and say hey i really enjoy thing x that you do or write or whatever i think people that have some following in the tech community are generally known for doing things publicly maybe they have some open source project or write prolifically or whatever like they're doing something that puts out a public thing and that's an automatic conversation starter you can say hey i really like this project that you maintain and use it a lot and people are generally pretty open to talking about stuff like that because they do it and they do it partially because they want to help other people so you have a built-in icebreaker you don't have to just go up and say like you're my hero like just talk about the thing they do and and okay i don't think i qualify as dev famous

but i i have like dev famous friends and they're all very nice about it and they love it when people come up to them and say that they like the work that they do it's it's flattering right everybody loves to hear nice things about themselves you don't want to go too overboard but just say like hey the thing you do is great let's talk about it that's fantastic i can see why it's hard though conferences are tricky because they're often groups of people talking and if you are a single solitary person trying to approach a group and butt in that's real weird i still feel really awkward doing that all the time we've talked about this in another episode actually and it can be hard to butt in and say like hey i just wanted to meet you really quick i don't know

of any secret things to do besides just do it just sidle on up yeah so a conference i organized happened a couple weeks ago and the mc is a great person named michael chan he talked about on stage a trick he uses to get over these kind of social anxiety things where he just counts down from five like he's jumping off a cliff or something which seems like maybe it could backfire but he just he just kind of gives himself an artificial deadline to say five four three two one okay i'm gonna go in and say hi or whatever nice i mean people are generally at conferences to mingle and talk and i think you want to be sensitive to their personal time so don't knock on their hotel room or whatever oh gosh but if they're if they're out and about that's generally a signal that they want to

talk to people yeah not not to mention if they're at a conference they're probably the kind of developer who welcomes social interactions like that i mean that's a pretty good signal yeah i feel like in saying this all i'm saying is it's not a big deal don't worry about it which doesn't seem very helpful like that might be helpful though to know that having had first-hand experience and second-hand experience with this and heard from these people that they're cool with it i think that helps kind of reduce the anxiety a little bit i think also you're pointing out there's not like some special secret handshake you have to do to be able to approach these people successfully i don't think so i'm trying to think if i've ever had anything backfire i don't think i've ever had

anything go horribly wrong i think the the most negative interaction i've had is i go up and say hey i really enjoy thing x and they're like oh cool and just kind of go back to talking to whoever they were talking to yeah which isn't bad it's just i don't know they're just busy it's a little awkward though it is uncomfortable you have to admit yeah but i think most of the time that's either been because i interrupted a conversation that was already pretty deep okay i think that's probably most of it it wasn't like they were just super rude but maybe i don't know maybe one or two of them were secretly huge jerks it shows that moment to reveal it themselves i feel bad about the answer because it feels like i'm also saying like i don't know this is easy for me just do it

but it's not that easy for you right yeah but i know enough people that there's often some overlap already with the person i'm trying to introduce myself to and also there's another dimension here which is that i usually share a lot of cultural things with the person i'm trying to introduce myself to just from being white from being male that's kind of a common tech industry demographic so i think if i were from a different background it might also be a little bit harder to kind of break through just less shared cultural context but i think the underlying thing is that these people are generally happy to talk and are there because they want to talk like you said so you're not gonna bug anybody yeah i think that's right and it might also help if you can find someone

that you both know to introduce you and say hey i'd like to get to know so and so you know and Maybe you don't have this, but if you do, use it. Ask your shared acquaintance to introduce you. The tech network is more connected, I think, than a lot of people realize. You might actually know someone who knows them. Especially at conferences, which are generally centered around some kind of community already. It's pretty rare that there's a conference that's just about all of technology all at once. And you have like COBOL devs coming in to talk with, ColdFusion devs coming in to talk with, C devs coming in to talk with.

I'm trying to think of all the tech that starts with C. C Sharp, I guess. That's kind of cheating. and Cloudflare. I don't know. Cloudflare devs. That would be an interesting conference. Oh, yeah.

One based alphabetically. I love it. And you automatically have 26 years of content. You just say, okay, we're starting at A. It's Adobe and... Yep, Amazon, Apple. Yeah, all of the A technology this year. Perfect.

You could plan the launch of your startup strategically. So you're the only one at the U year or something. Yeah. Nice. I have an idea to share, and this comes from me getting a little bit older. I mean, definitely I'm on the older end of most developers these days. And I say that from a statistical state of mind, not from any other- You're young at heart. Yeah, for sure. You could still beat them all in a foot race. Is that what you're saying? Maybe a foot race of the mind. but what i have noticed is that when people achieve some degree of celebrity

who i knew when they were young i think to myself wait a minute i knew that guy in high school he's an idiot and it just like it really has shattered this notion of like immortal celebrity heroes for me and i just think i you know i know that guy's got a whole closet full of dumb things they've done they got all the same insecurities that i have yeah it's just no problem and i've just started to realize that these people are just not that special that's not to say i don't want to say hello to them and take a selfie with them and get their autograph on my bicep but it makes it easier for me another good thing about being older is if you you've had more time to lift so your biceps are bigger so there's more room your network is bigger but there's

also more room for autographs it kind of balances itself out that's right okay i remembered one other fear that i had i guess i sometimes still have it which is that i don't have anything to say to this person beyond i like your thing where if they're an expert on i don't know i went to talk to Joe Armstrong, one of the inventors of Erlang. And he knows a lot of stuff about Erlang. And I've read maybe a blog post about it. And part of the fear was I can't engage in a deep technical discussion about this domain he's an expert in with him. Yes. But I don't think I need to. Also, he was very, very nice. He passed away a year or two ago, but very willing to talk to people of all experience levels. So I guess I kind of got lucky with him. But you don't need

to have like a presentation prepared to show like you are an expert on the thing that they do that you like like people are happy to talk for the most part to anybody of all experience levels you don't have to prove yourself knowledgeable enough that was a fear that i remember having yeah it's true and another fear i have is that i just want to have anything to talk about and i think it helps to come armed with a few questions that you can have in mind that they will probably have interesting answers to and just just to kind of prime that pump for you as you're thinking about things you could ask. An obvious one is if they own a project that you use, maybe they're an open source celebrity, you can say, you know, hey, what you working on? You know, anything

interesting happening on the project coming up soon, you know, stuff like that. And I think if you have a few of those questions ready to go to kind of paper over the lulls in the conversation or to bridge those lulls, I think it can help you feel more comfortable initiating the conversation. Sure. That's just a general soft skill too, is the best way to have good conversations with other people is to ask them questions because people like talking about themselves, asking questions about themselves it's flattering and it just gets stuff moving yeah i've been meaning to ask jameson what you're working on nothing i'm on paternity leave this podcast and then back to bed no that's not true i have all kinds of things i'm working on and i will tell you after the show

oh great secret nice all right have we answered the question i think so good luck and be confident get in there and say hello yeah all right i will read our next question this is from a listener named nathan recent new listener here and i must say i love the show and to keep up the good work thank you nathan my question can possibly be answered with a standard soft skills answer but i have my reservations about quitting my job i work at a consultancy doing work in a niche web development framework that interfaces with an old monolith erp system that i'm just not excited about but i'm very good at creating web applications in i know eventually these skills will become obsolete and i had a new job opportunity recently that i decided not to take am i being stupid

should i stay in the niche and hope i can get a newer job in the future where they just accept that i can learn new tools enterprise resource planning is just the most fun kind of resource planning it's scalable and resilient i mean just to be clear we're talking about star trek here right like you're planning the resources for the enterprise ah it's like where to put the shields yeah okay that makes it sound a lot more enticing have we ever defined erp i don't even know if i could it's just everything i'm not sure i could either it's everything like what give an example it's just like how the business works it's sales okay wikipedia says category business management software that organizations use to collect store

and manage and interpret data from the many business activities so it's like you have your list of all the people that work at the company and accounting software tied into it and sales data and customer service and just everything all together in one giant software stack and how many photon torpedo bays yeah where the shields are who's been beamed up and down recently how many other red shirts you've lost that month but the recruiting pipeline is like all that stuff month over month red shirt loss rate yeah oh man there's a ton of these out there and they're generally mega expensive and kind of crappy yeah but still very vital to businesses i don't know i don't understand the world

in depth but very niche so yes it's double niche it's like this proprietary software stack for this specific business or set of businesses i assume it's at a specific company because it's an old monolprp system and then there's like a web framework on top of it used to build stuff so niche niche niche yeah niche-ception i assume they're well paid because it's probably hard to find people that have that skill set already and are up to speed and able to crank out stuff in it i wouldn't be so sure about that i mean the first part that they're well paid yeah i mean it could be but my experience has been that sometimes with these super niche things the employees actually they're not that well paid. And it's because there literally is no market outside their company. And

so there's no basis for comparison and no incentive to pay them more because there's no outside pressure. There's basically no threat to quit, you know? Yeah. Especially when they hang their entire career on this one thing. So the question is basically how much should you keep specializing versus potentially taking a pay cut or having to at least learn a new tech stack? Yes. There's just a trade-off in tech between future risk and current reward. I would say if you're not being well paid then you should quit like if if you don't have to take a big pay cut i would not stick around unless i just absolutely loved it i mean i guess nathan said that he enjoys it and feels productive that's that's valuable but yeah being well paid in in the niche i think is is

maybe one of the strongest things keeping you in that niche but you have to look at the future risk of that niche going away or the company switching to some news stack or i don't know you're just kind of betting a little bit on on being able to continue there and the longer you stick around there the more your skills in other areas kind of lag behind and the harder it's going to be to switch so you're you're kind of making a bet and i feel like there's a lot of different ways to navigate that probability space but you should at least be aware that it's a trade-off of i am betting that the value of me staying here and earning more money than i could outside is going to pay off long term versus taking a potential pay cut but maybe long term having

more stability or more pay. Yeah, good observations. I'm tempted to share my cautionary tale from a friend of mine who spent 10 years becoming an expert on PeopleSoft. And I think we've talked about this person before. I know. Wait, why do you shudder? It just sounds bad. Yeah, I don't know. I think it sounds exactly like this situation, right? Niche ERP system. It sounds like the UI to a machine that produces Soylent or something. so i mean this person spent about 10 years in that role and then suddenly that role disappeared one day and he found himself pretty much unable to get a replacement job and it and it's been years this way just struggling i think that's kind of the worst case scenario when you get

specialization in an area that's not marketable i don't know how much detail you're comfortable sharing on this show did he ever get another job no i think he i think he left the tech industry Just left the industry. Wow. Yeah. I mean, there's probably some way to hedge your risk a little bit. If you're going to stay in this niche, you should at least be doing something that publicly demonstrates you either have skills in newer tech stacks or you can learn them. Yeah. So it's maybe the cost of specializing so much. I mean, you don't have to, but if you want to make it easier to jump out, then you can invest some effort into that right now. So maybe side projects, all the classic stuff, open source, writing, all kinds of things that demonstrate that you can and

have learned new things and you're not just a people soft or salesforce or whatever they said niche so i'm assuming it's not people soft is pretty big yeah but i think the same thing applies so i've never been a farmer but i'm gonna do the programmer thing where i make analogies to industries that i have only cursory knowledge about it feels like farming and this is a proud tradition we do this with military bridge building every field of engineering besides software engineering yeah so it feels like farming where you're you're cultivating this crop and it's going really well but the market for that crop could just fall out like maybe you're growing tulips in the netherlands in the 1600s and it's looking great and then the tulip craze dies out and you're

left with this field full of useless stupid bulbs so you can plant some other crops and have those going or i'm gonna strain the metaphor to death all right you're just betting on what the market will value i guess yeah and and there's also this looming external catastrophe like the weather could just ruin your day or a meteor could hit or you know standard farm stuff the meat the meteor farm strike i mean oh yeah if i had a nickel for every one of those oh shoot another meteor just nailed all my potatoes i mean the netherlands analogy you know if you're growing tulips in the 1600s the obvious right hedge is to interleave the tulip rows with marijuana plants ah i mean it's the netherlands was that a big deal in the netherlands no but it is now i'm just looking

400 years in the future from the 1600s you know what you you needed to plant bitcoin because the price of bitcoin in the 1600s was just vanishingly small you would make a killing if you had a good bitcoin crop i mean you wouldn't but your descendants would exactly oh my god but then there's okay if we want to strain the analogy even further or the further why not you can't you can't i'm assuming again i know as much about growing tulips as i do about growing marijuana i'm assuming they're pretty different crops and you can't just intersperse them like they need different environments and soil types and watering

schedules and all that stuff like there's some cost to uh it's gonna make you less efficient at just cranking out those tulips but that's why you hedge that's a i don't know it's a thing you do that's right investing you you maybe put some money into lower risk funds that's less likely to have a huge return but also less likely to crash your high risk stuff crashes oh so now we're venturing into finance okay another another area we already have right tulips and bitcoin and that's basically true finance another area which i know just whatever i can glean from reading the front page of the newspaper every few weeks finance i heard that's good i'm gonna invest in finance i heard it'll go up

okay okay so back to this i'm gonna make a bold statement about engineering careers but i think in this day and age specialization is the enemy of good longevity and you're in your engineering career and i don't mean that is 100 true of all the time because certainly if you chose the right technology to specialize in for the right period of time you're going to do great but every technology has a sunset. I mean, there's just no such thing as this perfectly marketable tech skill that lasts an entire career. And so I've always said that the best thing to invest in is your ability to learn new technologies. We've talked about this before. And I would say in this case, if you're coming up on five years of working at this place, you're getting dangerously

close to the point where hiring managers will look at your resume and say, can this person do anything besides this erp special framework at the 10-year mark you're gone i think yeah basically at that point it's going to be very difficult you're just gonna ride that ship into the ocean as it's gonna go down with the captain yeah there's probably a wider discussion about specialization but i feel like i just want to give advice that reflects what i did which was never work in old legacy erp with niche web development frameworks like true well it worked for me so don't do that but everyone should just have the career path that i have had right there would be no operating systems there would be no airplanes i think there might be some underlying

principles you could learn at this job or in this tech stack that might be useful and maybe look out for those but i haven't done it so i don't know what they are i mean you mentioned all tech goes obsolete but there's there's different half-lives to tech i think we may have talked about this too like networking concepts stick around quite a bit and yep linux has been a good thing to know for a couple decades now and i assume it'll stick around for more i mean i mean the the cutting edge of it changes all the time so maybe there's something you could do there to invest in these core underlying technologies i don't know maybe it's like a weird like vax system running it's like i don't know object code that you don't even know what the original language is and maybe

there's nothing there you never know so so it sounds like your advice is it might be time to get out? I think so. I mean, I would say five years is when you really need to start looking. This is just based on me as a hiring manager and seeing lots of resumes. And at 10 years, I think that's the point where it's going to be really hard. Or at least it's going to be hard to get through submitting your resume to somewhere without having a contact. So it might not be impossible. You just might need to focus more on networking. But then again, if you're in this niche technology, maybe a lot of the people you know professionally are working that niche technology. Yeah, maybe you might not have a good network. And I'll also tell you that

What will happen, what I've seen here is that people with serious specialization that's not super marketable, they will then find jobs at companies that value general principles, skills that are like general principles. So it's like this person is good with data structures and algorithms, things like that, not like this person is really good with this C-sharp persistence framework. You know, like those jobs will just be off the table for you, but there is a class of jobs. I don't want a job about, that seems really boring. I don't know. Well, I mean, think about what's hot right now. So it's like every web dev job has the word React in the title, right? It's like, well, you got to know React to work here. And that's hot.

Well, you're not going to have that. And so if all these jobs require React experience, then you're not going to qualify for them. But there are a bunch of companies and they tend to be, at least some of them are the highest paying companies in the industry that value this generalist computer science skill because they know you're going to have to learn all their stuff anyway. That's all their internal tooling and things like these are the big tech companies, the fangs of the world you know and so like these might be the places you need to be looking at next because they might be more likely to take you on even though your skills aren't immediately

transferable interesting i'm not going to say you should quit now but i think you should start planning for a future in which you'll need to move on by developing demonstratable skill and also i think the network part is a big deal because like the point you said about your resume looking weird is is gonna get stronger and stronger so you need to make your resume less and less percentage of the signal yeah you got to know somebody basically if you have 10 years of niche erp experience as the last thing you did yep well have we answered the question i think so we gave the exact opposite answer that they asked for should i quit i didn't say you should quit should i stay in the niche and hope i can get a newer job in the future yeah i think we answer okay i think we don't have to

have the same answer that's fine that's why there are two right then the listener can pick which of us they deem more handsome because that's how i choose who to listen to okay great all right what should people do if they want their own questions answered go to softskills.audio and click ask a question where you can fill out a form thank you so much to everyone who has done that the backlog is growing and we are just we love it we will eventually get to all of them and if you want to support the show you can click on that same website click support us on patreon any amount of donation will get you access to our slack community where you can chat with other listeners and have a great time lots of good laughs and good advice and also if you enjoy the show please rate

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