Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 177: Work life vertigo and work life interviews

Episode Date: September 30, 2019

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I started working at a big fintech company doing cutting edge work. I was given a ton of responsibility (owned a major component, built it from scratch, manage external relationships with vendors, had a team of 3 engineers, filed a few patents). I was extremely successful at this role but I was working 60 hours a week. Even though I was successful, I felt like I didn’t have good work life balance. I left and joined a well established tech company with 600 engineers. I’ve been here almost 1 year now and looking back I’ve only worked on menial feature work and software maintenance. Now I work 30 hours a week and have great work life balance. I feel like I gave up a great opportunity with my old role. How do I make the most of this role? How should I tell my manager I’m not happy? should I just look for a new job? How and when do you ask about or gauge work life balance in a job interview? I recently got to round 4 of an interview and a developer told me that a person wouldn’t do well at this company unless you put in a lot more than 8 hours per day and the CEO rewarded those who stay late at night. This indicated a bad work life balance to me so I didn’t proceed any further. Does it look bad to bluntly ask an interviewer “what’s the work life balance like” or ask about this in round 1? Do you think I am lazy?

it takes more than fingers to be a great engineer this is episode 177 of the soft skills engineering advice show i'm your host jameson dance i'm your host dave smith soft skills engineering is a weekly advice show where we answer all of your non-technical questions about the technical field of software development it actually does not take fingers to be a great engineer there's a video of a talk called voice driven development who needs a keyboard by this pretty cool engineer named emily who just programs with her voice she has her her software setup customized enough that she doesn't type at all and just just talks to her computer and then working code comes out wow which is cool i gotta check that out i only talk to my computer when working code doesn't come

that's right it doesn't help when working go doesn't come out you talk pearl to your computer i i do i say symbols yeah do you want to thank our patrons dave i do thanks to those who are contributing at the level that gets them a shout out every week they are matthew voidovich the agile ventures charity ted nugent crash bandicoot zach grannon this engineer goes up to 11x louis santos nick kantar vinlock taras harouk sean sunny tie dimitri yanson britney ellick florian tatsel sonic the hedgehog iva robotnik marie rosso 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 i'm gonna read our

first question this is from an anonymous listener i started working at a big fintech company doing cutting edge work i was given a ton of responsibility owned a major component built from scratch, managed external relationships with vendors, had a team of three engineers filed for a few patents. I was extremely successful at this role, but I was working 60 hours a week. Even though I was successful, I felt like I didn't have good work-life balance. I left and joined a well-established tech company with 600 engineers. I've been here for almost one year now, and looking back, I've only worked on menial feature work and software maintenance. Now I work 30 hours a week and have great work-life balance. I feel like I gave up a great opportunity with my old role.

How do I make the most of this role? How should I tell my manager? I'm not happy. Should I just look for a new job? Oh, wow. Huh? I didn't think of any jokes for this one There's just a hole where a funny quip would be This is interesting So from 60 hours to 30 hours, I mean that kind of matches my mental model of fintech I've never worked in fintech, but just finance generally has longer hours associated with it So I assume that kind of carries over to the tech side yeah and i think 60 hours from what i've heard yet it would actually be kind of a light week

in some of these jobs yeah well yeah yeah if you're going into finance finance not fintech then one of the tours of duty you do is you get a job as like a junior analyst or something and just work like 100 hour weeks for two years and then you go get an mba and then every job after that you say thank goodness i don't have to work 100 hours a week it's just like pain to make you more immune to suffering or something like man these 80 hour work weeks are sweet oh this is great i have time to sleep twice this week what should our listener do do you think do you think they made a good choice oh now you're making me make a value judgment i mean i don't know 30 hour work week sounds pretty nice that sounds great work-life balance i mean work is

important and you do a lot of it uh so it's it's it's nice to be fulfilled at work but if you just work less, then you have more time to be fulfilled outside of work. I'm thinking if you're only working 30 hours a week and you're accustomed to working 60 hours a week, I think you've got enough hours in your week to start a startup. Yeah. Like a second job. Yeah. Can you push it down to work like 15 hours a week? Yeah. Like what's the, what's the bottom line here? Like how far can you go? Yeah. I feel like I gave up a great opportunity with my old role. So in my career I feel like there have been ebbs and flows where sometimes it'll be a period of intense activity and learning and pressure and there's some downsides and work life balance suffers a

little bit but I do learn a lot and then I get burnt out or tired and I and I relax or take a different project or get a different job or somehow change the circumstances or they are changed for me and I'm comfortable kind of recovering for a while and and taking things a little bit more easy and maybe that's just a natural thing you have kind of tours of duty where all right why is it a thing that we always make analogies about the military like dave and i have nothing to do with the military at all never served never i don't know i have an an uncle in law that's as close as i get anyways it's not like soldiers are deployed all the time right they rotate out and then come back so maybe maybe you just kind of take brief spurts of intense

activity and then and then chunks of relaxation what do you do during these relaxation tours of duty to not feel like you're not doing anything useful like you're just wasting your time yeah i mean obviously the obvious choice for me is just lots and lots of video games yeah yeah honing your hand-eye coordination those brain training games that they claim make you smarter increase your iq i feel like i gave up a great opportunity with my old role so have you heard of something called job crafting no what is this is it like warcraft no it's the idea that you can without necessarily switching your employer you can turn your job into a job you would rather do you kind of create the job that you want to want to hold on this

sounds completely antithetical to the whole point of this podcast what oh yeah transform your job that's what it is oh boy wait did we just pivot i mean i feel like quit your job has had a good long run okay yeah so i guarantee on a on a an engineering team with 600 engineers there are high profile projects that are very important that that have lots of things to be done and lots of responsibility and visibility and if you want that kind of life i think you could probably make it happen it sounds like it's not just happening it's uh people aren't kind of recognizing your ability and handing you stuff but you can you can change that how do i make the most out of this role should i just look for a new job no you shouldn't like you should i don't think you

should look for a new job and just assume well i'll just be bored here forever find non-boring things to do there i just it's just so weird okay when someone says should i quit my job i mean we've just so often said yes that to hear you say so plainly no you shouldn't i'm just trying to figure out who is this person i'm talking to i mean they've only been there a a year like that's not very long and only work 30 hours a week 600 people is also big enough that there's probably lots of ability to transfer if it's a small team at a small startup then you can't really i mean everybody's kind of working on everything but yeah i think i think you have a lot of flexibility and quitting your job is a it's a big lever to pull i guess yeah and there's lots of smaller things

you can try before then if there are other things making you miserable maybe maybe then pull the lever but yeah it's just like i don't have enough important work to do then i i bet someone would be happy to hear you say that and give you important work yeah you know it's true managers respond in my experience very well to the statement i feel underutilized and like i could be contributing more yeah they're like oh oh wow you know yeah they i mean they're all drowning they all have just tons of stuff that they can't get to that they would love to so it does get a little trickier if you feel like your team is not going to be doing exciting important work ever and you want to switch teams because then you're basically saying hey can i not work on your team anymore

right i mean you can do that it's it's just a little harder yeah a little harder to say your team is garbage and i want a better one yeah but i think you that's why you should start by saying what you said dave good nice smart way you said that i forgot already but just say hey i want i want to do more and see if that works and if not then the next step is probably looking around for other teams in the company yeah yeah can you contribute to open source software and you don't get any more money but you do have more work if you're just looking to close that 60 hour gap that's definitely a way to do it yeah there's there's stuff to fill it with unpaid internships you could start at the at the bottom rung of the ladder at a media company

fetch coffee for people find fulfillment in coffee fetching hashtag job crafting How do I tell my manager I'm not happy? I think you answered that already. I don't know why I'm reading this again. I wouldn't, I wouldn't, I probably wouldn't just jump right in and say, I'm not happy.

I would say, find out what you need rather than making your manager play the guessing game and say, I'm not happy. Guess what it'll, what will fix it? Instead, come to them having already thought deeply about this, maybe even having conducted some experiments

where you kind of gauge your satisfaction levels at your job based on the tasks you did during the day and then tell your manager, I want more of this and this and less of that and just see it. I mean, if you're very clear with your manager, that's the best way to get them to do what you want. Yeah. Although I will say that, you know, we were talking about maybe going beyond your team or finding new and exciting things that may be outside the scope of what you're working on. That can be hard. And we're

talking about a company with 600 engineers. This strikes me as the size of company, especially if it's been growing that probably has a real serious problem problem or could have a real serious problem for letting people move around and letting more people have more influence and i'll tell you why what i've seen is that companies this size especially if they're somewhat young often have a core group of highly trusted engineers that's very hard to break into and they're doing all the interesting stuff and then there's this shell of hundreds of engineers who have to keep the lights on and make all the things work that these engineers built four years ago that were huge mistakes, you know.

That somehow led to them being highly trusted. Exactly, exactly. And I've actually mentored someone who had this experience and it was very hard for them to break into that trusted club. And so it could be hard. And so you might find that you might actually have to leave this company

if that's the case. Do you think those trusted engineers cluster on teams or are they just totally distributed? I don't know. Because if they're clustered, you can kind of move towards them. Yeah, yeah, I don't know. If they're clustered though,

it could be that they have a walled garden that's hard to get into whereas if they're distributed i don't know either way it might be hard yeah just climb the wall yeah but boy isn't it interesting how you just can't have it both ways so here you have you know you had a 60 hour job that you love but was killing you now you have a 30 hour job that you hate but you have all this free time like wouldn't it be great to have a 30 hour a week job that you love and then have plenty of time outside to do other cool things and have a good life yeah boy i don't think that exists i feel like that might have just as much to do with who you are as a person as the job itself maybe if i were more mature i'd be able to be satisfied like that but i i think for my job to be satisfying i feel like

it needs to be kind of hard and challenging and part of that is like time i'm not good enough at work-life balance to just say like i've put in a very efficient 30-hour week and things are where they are and i'll now i'll go have fun yeah well have we answered the question i don't know because i almost wonder if there's some more creative things here we could do like for example if you're only working 30 hours a week what if you could work out a or an arrangement with your manager where you're only working like four days a week so every weekend is three day weekend or maybe maybe even three days a week i don't know this might not work because people expect you to be there you know when yeah when they're there but i wonder if it's known that that you

actually are only working 30 yeah yeah maybe that's a secret yeah that's true i mean you could do 20 this would be 25 time right just use the other 10 hours of the 40 hour work week to just think of cool stuff to do that yeah we'll turn into someone else's burden to bear that's right when it goes into production yeah yeah i think i think you have a lot of freedom and flexibility here to to try things to solve this situation i don't know maybe i'm easily amused but i feel like there's interesting stuff everywhere so i think you can find something okay have we answered the question? Yeah, I think so. Good luck. Best of luck. All right, Dave, do you want to read our next one? Yeah, this comes from an anonymous listener who says, how and when do you ask about

or gauge work-life balance in a job interview? I recently got to round four of an interview and a developer told me that a person wouldn't do well at this company unless you put in a lot more than eight hours per day and the CEO rewarded those who stay late at night. This indicated a bad work-life balance to me so i didn't proceed any further does it look bad to bluntly ask an interview what's the work-life balance like or ask about this in round one do you think i am lazy i don't i don't think you're lazy thank goodness for that fourth round of interviews imagine if they only had three rounds of interviews how many rounds are there in a boxing match is it 10 or something oh man how many more rounds

would there have been in this interview i know yeah maybe this was like this was like the i don't know the quarter way break do you think that that engineer was delivering a message that the company wanted delivered probably not or were they spilling the beans and thank them for telling you the truth the awful truth or were they worried you were going to take their spot and they were trying to scare you off oh a little politics interview politics either way all of those are bad there's no way in which you want to be like yeah this is the place for me i do really want to know how many rounds of interviews would there be because four good heavens that's a lot of interviews four separate interviews with four people well you think that's a lot the way i read the question

was round four which could be four sets of interviews ah so it's like four one day long for separate on-site interview days. Maybe it's designed to filter out people who can't just take huge sacrifices from their personal life to come and interview. I mean, it's working, I guess. Okay. Anyway, what do you ask then?

What do you ask to discover this earlier? I think the best question you can ask is you look them squarely in the eyes across the table and say, sure, you work hard, but do you play hard? that's true because nobody you could even skip asking work hard because nobody just plays hard if they play hard then they work hard right yeah i like that maybe you could administer some skills tests or lack of sleep harms your short-term memory so you can subtly test them to see how their short-term memory is doing how the reflexes are doing you just like throw out a

random four digit number at the beginning of the interview. And at the end, you're like, what four digit number did I say? And we successfully closed 4,921 bugs when I led this project. I think you can examine their physical appearance. Oh, we both wrote that in our notes. Yeah. Bags under the eyes are a good sign. Yep. So do you think it looks bad if someone just says hey what's the work-life balance here oh that's a tough call no i don't think so i think everyone deserves to know what the what a day in the life looks like at the job and for someone to say how's the work-life balance i mean that's actually kind of a generic question because if someone just comes back and says it's good like yeah everyone

yep yeah yeah so maybe that's a good point that even just asking that is unlikely to yield a good answer so yeah it might though in other words i think it's a bad question but maybe not because it makes you look bad but because it's not necessarily it just doesn't give you much info although in this case the the candidate asked it and got a very straightforward answer yeah so i mean i think the question asker hit on something there where the developer told them a person wouldn't do well at this company unless blah blah blah and i think it's pretty valid to ask what what do people do here that do well and if the answer is oh they just work crazy hours they they work very late and very early send emails at all hours of the night yeah probably don't want

to just ask like what time do you send emails but more about how you handle after work communication how many emails are in your inbox unread when you wake up in the morning on average yeah yeah you can you can look for signals that will demonstrate what the work-life balance is like without saying hey i don't i don't want to work hard do i have to work hard if i work here so trying to find out what they value uh on call if they if it's the kind of role that has on call i think an approach to on call can reveal a lot about work-life balance because done naively on call is just like oh we'll just we'll just like grind people up and and and harm them and that's how we'll solve this problem you could also ask about core hours you could say hey does the team

have any kind of core hours practices where people are expected to be here during certain times yeah that's a that's a pretty innocent question where you're just trying to work your schedule and figure out if yes if you can be flexible yeah come in late and leave later early and leave early right just to see if the work schedule meets your personal life schedule so that's one and you can say and if they say well yeah everyone's expected to be here from 8 a.m to 7 p.m every day or the or the famous samsung 996 oh boy which is 9 a.m to 9 p.m six days a week if those are your quote core hours then you know that gives you a data point yeah yeah i think asking how they handle stressful situations as well like deadlines or crunch time

and seeing how anomalous that is because generally there's some amount of extended work hours in crunch or deadlines but maybe if you see how often that happens and how different it is from the norm that can be helpful as well yeah and you could ask a question i think a good question to ask is tell me about the last time you had to do a big push to meet an aggressive deadline and some key things you're looking for is how long did it last what kind of crazy hours did people work was there any heroics and then ask how often that sort of thing happens and i think yeah i don't think anyone would fault you for asking that question yeah these are all good things to know anyways and knowing all of them you can build up a picture for yourself of what

the work-life balance is yeah and and it's also helpful to ask several different people some of these questions because a lot of work-life balance is personal too some people just like to work more right yeah feel like they need to and yeah yeah so you definitely want to not get one data point and then assume that that's how it is for everyone i think if you can find out who the manager or boss would be for this role it would be helpful to know what their schedule is like too where they can be a signal if they have if they have really strong kind of norms around how they spend their time and when work is done, then that's probably a pretty good signal that they'll respect yours as well. If they work very, very intense hours, then that means that they at least might expect you to

do that as well. Yeah. And, you know, I've had managers or bosses who themselves work crazy hours, you know, come in on weekends, work late every day, but they don't have a base expectation for others to do it. However, in one case, he was very explicit with me that he does reward people who do do it so in other words yeah you don't have to do it to be successful per se but if you do do it you're going to get some kind of financial incentive for doing so sure have you ever worked for a company where you joined not really knowing much about the work-life balance and then you found out it was way different than you expected no not really yeah me neither i feel like none of them have been wildly out of low or high and and I I think just naturally I sort of I mean my very

first job I didn't know anything so I didn't really know what to expect and then learn and it was fine and then after that I feel like I just as part of my natural interview process I find stuff out a little bit so work-life balance is part of the equation but if they expect you to work more hours you need to weigh the potential benefit of that because there are some places where you would work a lot of hours and it would be menial grunt work that doesn't get recognized or doesn't teach you anything or doesn't help you grow. It's just your life is worse. You just spend more of your life doing stuff you don't necessarily want to do or benefit from. But there are also places where the pace might be higher, the expectations might be higher, but you could

go into that knowing that that's a trade-off that you want to make and you expect to get more out of it. So there's a couple dimensions. One is the amount of just the amount of hours you would put in. But the other dimension is how much you expect to learn and grow. And I think you should try and find out both of those, not just how hard do people work, but what happens because of it. Because if you only look at one of those, then you might miss out on a good opportunity that maybe you're willing to put a little bit more hours in if you feel like the benefit is there. And that's a valid decision as well. Absolutely. And I mean, every individual's circumstance can vary a lot. Some people are asking this question because they literally have

constraints on their time to be available at work. Other people are asking the question because they're afraid of burnout, but like in these cases, you know, burnout doesn't necessarily flow from too many hours. Right. Yeah. Yeah. That's a good point. There are other factors. So yeah, like these are, these are good things. I think before you go into an interview, you need to know what am I looking for? Yeah. And is it, is it just a constraint set of hours? Is it fulfillment? Is it, you know, high value learning? Do you think, so you said burnout doesn't necessarily correlate with number of hours. I do feel like longer hours generally correlate with higher pressure though. Do you think that's true? Oh, for sure. People don't generally work longer

hours without some kind of pressure in the environment. Well, I mean, people don't work at all without some kind of pressure. That's true. An addiction to food. Exactly. That they need to live. Yeah. But yeah, I mean, people don't tend to work more than typical without some kind of acute reason maybe there's this utopia out there that is is a land full of opportunity where if you would like to you can put in more time and learn and develop more but it's it's it's not forced you don't have pressure to work more there's not intense deadlines pressuring you to do that i think i haven't seen that yet so maybe the trade-off feels more like longer hours faster learning also probably a little more pressure and stress but that's also

a thing that some people want to do yeah make sure you do it deliberately it would hurt to stumble into right right well have we answered this question yeah i think so good luck let us know if there's any questions that you like to ask in an interview you can do that by submitting a question on our website at softskills.audio and we'd love to hear how things go if you like the show you can support us on patreon go to our website and click support us on patreon the thing i just said it's a really really good ux yeah do the thing it says to do also share the show with people and if you could leave us a review that would be great we hope we have earned five stars if not we will understand if not we'll settle for six yeah we'll just you know what we'll do is

we'll take the four star reviews and combine them all so we'll have fewer reviews but just merge the stars together cool just on the secret podcaster ui yeah it's 24 stars wow nice merge work or if we want we can have 24 one stars you can do whatever you want with these stars it's great all right thanks for listening we'll catch you next week