Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 182: Lunch and switching to product management

Episode Date: November 4, 2019

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: My team often goes out to lunch; I almost always bring a lunch from home. They invite me to come with them, but it feels weird, since I won’t be purchasing a meal from the restaurant. Should I swallow (pun intended) my pride and go with them anyway, or decline their offer? I would bring lunch less frequently, but it’s difficult to predict what days they are going out together. I’ve been a software engineer for 7 years and it recently occurred to me that product management would be an interesting and fulfilling field that I’d like to give a shot. Is this something I should discuss with my engineering manager or director, or other product managers at my company? While I think it’s possible these people might be able to help me, my anxious mind can think of many ways that advertising I want help transitioning out of my current role could go badly. I also happen to be fully remote, so I don’t have many opportunities to bring these things up in more casual settings. I doubt I’d be able to get hired as a PM at another company without prior experience, so getting help from co-workers or management at my current company seems pretty important. Do either of you know anyone who’s made this jump? Any tips on getting help without pushing too hard or creating problems for myself?

it takes more than finding something to lean on during stand-up to be a great engineer this is episode 182 i'm sorry of the soft skills engineering podcast i'm your host dave smith i'm your host jameson dance soft skills engineering is a weekly advice show for software developers about non-technical topics such as leaning on things during stand-up i wonder if there's someone so there's the trope about stand-up meetings going really long i wonder if there's like a fitness enthusiast manager somewhere that's like we just got to make this meeting long so people stand and and get their steps in and that's right i'm helping look at me i'm helping we've got some patrons to thank thank you so much to all these folks who are donating at the level where we give them a shout out every

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from a listener named alex alex says my team often goes out to lunch i almost always bring a lunch from home they invite me to come with them but it feels weird since i won't be purchasing a meal from the restaurant should i swallow pun intended my pride and go with them anyway or decline their offer i would bring lunch less frequently but it's difficult to predict what days they are going out together if you can get them on a schedule then you could bring your lunch and just make sure it's a much better homemade version of the food that they're going to get at the restaurant like if they go to taco bell you you just bring these like super elaborate street tacos that you made at your house or yeah i guess you you make a very fancy hamburger if they're going to some burger

place nice oh yeah well yeah i'll go with you i just i just brought this from home and you whip it out and it's got like garnishes everywhere the little sauce drizzles on the plate that you get at those fancy restaurants where the portion sizes are very small right just totally flashy showmanship on the plate yep just make them jealous yeah how would you handle this dave okay so we got do you bring your food do you bring your home food to the restaurant possibly offending the restaurant employees do you decline the invite oh no i don't think so but i think that's actually one of the questions here is is that is that cool i'm cool with it i think it'd be fine i've done it yeah yeah at my first job before i realized that engineers made money i was like in college student

mode still so i i remember very distinctly i brought rice and beans to uh nice to like i don't know some burger place that's awesome i yeah and everyone just ordered their food and i sat down and ate my rice and beans and it was fine did you ask the restaurant if they had a microwave you could use no i didn't but i thought about that yeah that's that's the one caveat i don't think they had a restaurant i think this is kind of rest i think i think they only had a deep fryer they would have just like taken my tupperware container and dipped it in the deep fryer and then handed it back to me yeah we can heat that up for you that would be so awesome okay melted plastic rice and now my container is deep fried

and it turns out deep fried plastic pretty edible you can deep fry anything really yeah deep fried my silverware i brought with me yeah so you could just do that i don't know why i stopped though why you stopped uh bringing your lunches why i stopped bringing them to the restaurant oh okay i don't know but you you can certainly just bring it i think that's fine yeah that's cool i've done that not very often but i've done it i actually empathize with this listener because for a lot of years i was in super frugal mode because unlike developers today i started in the field before developers made any money you know i mean what was it 2003 right after the dot-com bust we were just happy to have jobs and i'm not i'm not saying i was poor but certainly

my income was a mere fraction of what it is today and so yeah i i made food from scratch almost every meal and it was it was a big deal you know when when my co-workers were like hey we're all going out to lunch and i'm like oh crap i think i don't know if my budget can take this yeah it was tight it was tight back then i had i had two kids at the time and you know mortgage an oppressive mortgage an oppressive mortgage it wasn't really which has since become delightful just a comforting weight on your shoulders that's right it's like a it's like a weighted blanket yeah so do you think that that was you just being responsible and everyone else was like just swiping that credit card or do you think it was like they had different expenses or i don't

know it sounds like you were pretty pretty locked in with your budget yeah we were i mean at the time i was super financially responsible and also i was pretty junior on a team full of more experienced engineers who had 10 15 years on me and so you know their income was much higher than mine ah i didn't realize just how high it could go at the time but you know look at these people Well, they can afford lunches? Yeah, exactly. Maybe someday I'll get there. Yeah, exactly.

I remember talking to another engineer who had been working for a good 15 or 20 years. And he said to me, well, I bought this graphics card for my computer and it was like $300. And my jaw kind of hit the floor. And I said, you spent $300 on a graphics card? And he looks at me, kind of cocks his head to the side. And he's like, well, you're an engineer, right? You make good money. And I was like, thinking to myself, well, I make like $49,000 a year.

That's pretty good, but dang, I don't know if I could blow $300 on a graphics card. I guess I was just so frugal at the time. It turns out if you are not frugal, you can spend money on whatever you want in the short term. Anyway, I actually don't know if money is motivating this question asker. Yeah, there could be a lot of things. It could be dietary restrictions or health stuff in general. Maybe they just want to eat healthily. or yeah and i i had a co-worker who had extreme extreme sensitivity to gluten and it would just

it would just destroy him for like a week if he ever got even like a spoonful of food with gluten in it so he brought the same meal every day from home and it was fine like people would be like hey we're going out to lunch he's like okay cool i'll see you like no big deal he didn't care and i think it was fine i yeah so i brought my lunch to a restaurant i think i only did it once but i also worked for a while with a group of people that would go out pretty regularly and i would go like some fraction of the time but it certainly wasn't a big deal to not go and and there wasn't it wasn't like the mean girls click where it was the core group that you had to like get into to join it was just it was kind of this arbitrary blob that went different people joined and left

and hey jameson we're going to lunch and we're doing our promotion committee discussions so you know you can go or not so this this will be a big lunch to make if if you're interested in joining the mean devs we all write code in a procedural language for work but we all know haskell so we make fun of everyone's code exactly just say if only you were enlightened like us so that was fine i i think you do have a few options you really could just bring your lunch with and i don't think that'd be a problem if if you want to optimize for that then you're kind of limited to stuff you can bring without reheating or maybe you like reheat it before you go and then hope it lasts insulated lunch carrier come on yeah exactly yeah put it in a thermos

heat your soup up drink your soup don't forget the deep fry option always on the table deep fry everything yeah that would be a power move the waiter comes up and you're like i'm not going to anything but can you just do me a favor i brought these ingredients can you please ask the chef to combine them surprise me however you want to use this chicken and uncooked rice and a little bit of butter and some salt and pepper just whatever whatever whatever inspires you yeah yeah that's awesome and then there's always the option of shoving it in the fridge for one more day you know i'm the kind of guy that can eat anything if it's been in the fridge for a day two days three days whatever works for me have we talked about like the moral good of eating leftovers

on this show i don't i don't think that has come up okay well i'll let you finish your thought i want to hear this moral good what is this oh it's not a well-developed philosophy it's more a feeling i get every time i consume some leftovers i feel like the world gets slightly better in some vague way like okay just it's it's like how do i explain it it just feels like i should say you're welcome to everyone when i eat leftovers to the person who made it to people i see on the street you know there's just there's just slightly less waste in the earth because i did this okay i just feel this this powerful need to eat leftovers to improve the world because if you didn't those leftovers would end up in the ocean wrapped around the necks of cute dolphins exactly yeah my my meal

of of leftover motor oil and uh like drink what are those plastic rings around the soda soda six pack rings yeah so does six packs rings sauteed in motor oil i really do just get this kick out of eating leftovers i'm like it's like the closest i get to being a mountain man who lives off the land you are one with the earth exactly yeah it doesn't matter where the leftovers came from like they could be leftover pizza that we ordered three days ago but i'm like i've forged successfully another day mother nature you won't get me not today not today mother nature oh my gosh not today i've i've made this old crusty pizza from scratch from the freezer

So I think what you're saying is you need to convince the rest of your co-workers to adopt your philosophy. And then you can all just revel in your self-righteousness at work without having to go out to a restaurant. Exactly. Yeah, it does need a name because that will really unite the group. You already have the smug sense of superiority, which is key for a food philosophy. But then you have a shaky, shaky foundation of scientific, pseudoscientific nonsense. i think you're ready to go just need a name that's it okay i'll leave that up to you and if you want you can name it after yourself and then i will i will be an act to light we call this an

alex lunch alex is the name of our listeners today this is the alex lunch theory alexism that's right yeah i'm ready to join alexism i don't know about the rest of you well here's the thing the longer food stays uneaten the more time the calories in it have to kind of evaporate okay so it's healthier too it's lower calorie okay the calories get sublimated into the air that's good we've got the pseudoscience nailed yeah okay you can write the book all we need to do is find a doctor who's low on cash a hundred percent of the doctors we interviewed endorse alexism endorsed by this one poor desperate physician all right i think we've answered the question oh yeah

definitely definitely i i really do think if if it's a social gathering you're worried about i i do think you could just bring it and it might be weird and it will the weirdness will wear off but i also think there's not i don't know i don't know there's a big stigma about not joining in people don't join into stuff that's fine yeah depends on the group probably all right yeah question answered should i read our next question yeah hit it okay this is from an anonymous listener i've been a software engineer for seven years and it recently occurred to me that product management would be an interesting and fulfilling field that i'd like to give a shot is this something i should discuss with my engineering manager or director or other product managers

at my company well i think it's possible that these people might be able to help me my anxious mind can think of many ways that advertising i want to help transition out of my current role could go badly i also happen to be fully remote so i don't have many opportunities to bring these things up in more casual settings i doubt i'd be able to get hired as a pm at another company without prior experience so getting help from co-workers and management at my current company seems pretty important do either of you know anyone who's made this jump any tips on getting help without pushing too hard or creating problems for myself great question yeah i actually like how there's this kind of boundary of fungibility around kind of engineering and product and

management and project management where it's not that everyone moves between those roles but there's there it's it's relatively common to see people move from one to the other right and i think it's cool that you get people in the roles that have experience in other roles i think i think you'd be a much different product manager as someone who's been an engineer for a while yeah for sure and that'd be great good perspective give you some superpowers yeah and there is a class of product managers that have strong technical backgrounds that end up product managing highly technical products products whose customers are other engineers for example so that's that's one niche where you can really shine yeah that actually is kind of my role or part of my

role at my current job where our product is very technical and it's its users are all developers so there is a lot of product management and it's pretty fulfilling to be able to dive into that stuff i think isn't that how i've heard that's how google does it where all of their product managers they they go through kind of a technical hiring process like you just have to be an engineer yeah that make that makes sense who also wants to do product management stuff yeah i wouldn't be surprised i mean really that what how else are you going to do that it's like how can you be how can you design your product when your product is an api consumed by engineers if you haven't really got the skills to you know understand the api oh i can i can i don't have

the skills and i can still design apis it's easy you just do a bad job okay great yeah so what should our listener do so i think the risk here that they're concerned about is if they start putting out signals that they're interested in changing roles that they might get some kind of negative repercussions like i don't know getting fired or getting a bad reputation i was thinking more like probably the risk is oh so and so doesn't want to be an engineer anymore well let's give them the menial crappy tasks because they you know aren't a quote true engineer anymore they've tainted their obviously you know they're not a pristine pure-hearted engineer they're interested in product management you know that's the risk i think yeah i think that's the risk that

is being perceived here i'm not saying it's an actual risk yeah that would be weird to me if that happened in real life that seems like a pretty punitive place to work where you get you get punished for not falling in line correctly but i don't know there are those places probably exist i think you should just announce it to your team one day you know how we we always talk about how you can put any job title you want on linkedin okay see if that extends to the real world and just show up to work one day and say hey as the uh as the new product manager i think i've been thinking a lot about the direction and i've been doing these user studies and customer interviews and looking at our competitors in the space and just see if people go with it yeah yeah perfect

just you're saying cold turkey just go for it yeah just i can stand up one day yesterday you were like yeah i was deep in this i'm really struggling fixing this this thread locking issue and then the next day you talk about user studies a lot and pretend like you've been doing it for years yeah yeah like the results of our most recent feedback survey have come in and here's the direction that it suggests our quarterly metrics are improving just want everyone to know that our business metrics i think you could do some kind of job crafting this is is job crafting going to become the new quit your job this is the second time i've talked about man job crafting is where you nudge the job that you have in the direction that you want you don't necessarily

switch careers you just tweak it so you do more of the kinds of things that you want this isn't a long-term solution if you want to be a an official titled product manager but there in every engineering team i've ever been on there is always more room to talk to customers and to do producty things as an engineer so i think if you just start kind of doing those things while still doing your engineering work you can kind of get some of the benefit and ease into it and start exploring that space a little bit at your company and see what the reaction is and if the reaction is positive then maybe that'll be added support for added evidence for your case of hey i want to be a product manager and look i've been doing these product manager things along with my other

duties and it's paid off well and and i think this is like i've i've had to do less engineering work to make it happen and it's benefited the team because of this here's here's kind of how it's affected our overall our overall trajectory so it's kind of a a little experiment you can do to ease into it does that make sense i think so but i think that i don't know it might it might feel a little awkward to start doing those things maybe not i mean you're saying basically keep it a secret more or less that you're interested in transitioning to product management that you want to become it and yeah that's a i guess that's a different question i don't know i don't know that you have to keep it a secret but i think whether you do or don't you can just start doing a little

bit more of that and maybe it's focused specifically on kind of an engineering task assigned to you i see yeah where where maybe you have this kind of broad feature and you start to kind of put on a product manager hat for a little bit for that feature and then do that for a bit and then go back to engineering it depends on how the relationship works with product already though yeah that's what i was going to say is maybe you could work with your product manager that's already assigned to the stuff you're working on and ask them if you if they can offload some of their tasks to you. And yeah, you don't have to make a big deal about it. Just say, Hey, I'd like to kind of try out some of these things. Are you cool with that? And, and they can say, yeah, do

this or that and then see how it goes. And I think that would be a really low key way to get your feet wet. Like you were saying, I think that's a pretty good idea. Why thank you. The other thing I would do is I would probably sit down with other product managers at your company and I would just have a one-on-one with them and say, Hey, this isn't official. I'm not committing to this, but i i think your job is pretty interesting and i'd like to learn more about it what do you think i could do and and tell them you know i'm telling you this in confidence i'm not necessarily gonna switch onto a different ladder but i i just wanted to talk to you about it and and ask them to keep it confidential if you're concerned if you have any reason to be concerned at your company that

it would be detrimental to you and they usually will and i think people are generally flattered when you tell them hey i'm thinking about getting into your field like they're like cool that's great. I'd be happy to talk to you about it. And I think that would be a really good way to get a lot of concrete data about what these people actually do to see if you would like it. Yeah, that's a really good point about people feeling flattered. I think you're right that if you come and say, hey, the thing you do is awesome and I would love to do it. That's a pretty, it's a pretty comfortable way to start a conversation for someone being told that they're this fancy title that someone wants to get into. Oh yeah, for sure. What about the reluctance to

talk to management about it. I would probably hold off on that until you're more serious about moving. And because I think once you engage management, you're really going to get the wheels rolling. And yeah, you might get their advice early on, maybe. But once you drop that bug in management's ear, it might be hard for them to forget it. And if you decide you want to back out of this later, then it might be a little bit harder if you've kind of planted those seeds. That's interesting. I was thinking of it the opposite way, that it might take a while to happen. So if you want it to happen, it's easier to do it earlier because it might be like one year from the time you first tell your boss, hey, I want to switch to product management. So if you

do that earlier, it starts the clock earlier. I think I was approaching it more from kind of an iterative process perspective where you're not actually sure you want to do it yet. And so maybe gather some more data on the ground first before you do that. But I do agree that it could take some significant time, like a year for sure. That's totally possible. And so I think it makes sense to start that ball rolling. Once you know you want to get into that track, I think it makes sense to get that ball rolling as early as possible. But if you have concern that that's going to come back to bite you in some way, you might want to hold off, you know, to give yourself the escape hatch. I'm trying to think of ways that could go wrong. I think if there's not room

on the team on your manager's team for you to be a product manager there you're also kind of saying hey i want to transfer off of your team yeah which it i think that differs a lot from company to company how easy that is but it could be like that means they're down a person and so they have to kind of scramble to replace you and like there's there's extra extra stuff beyond just switching roles there like if you have to go to a different org to switch roles yeah for sure so that's the kind of thing that i i feel like managers generally good managers generally want their team members to be happy and work in roles they're satisfied in and there's some amount of like we just have to get this stuff done too but if if if you have this kind of long-term deep

desire to be in a different role i feel like in general they would be willing to work with that it's just the constraints might be like okay we have to like wrangle the head count to see do we hire a new person do we swap teams with another team that has an extra engineer but needs a product manager like how do we make all that stuff work and that's the kind of thing that can take time and can be behind why they wouldn't just say like all right done right you you are approved the other thing i wanted to suggest was once you get into the thick of being a product manager you might be surprised at just how much stuff a product manager has to do i mean you you might be seeing it from the engineering perspective right now where you see prioritization backlog wait are you saying

that maybe the engineers saying like they don't do anything that looks like a cushy job i would like to do nothing too no that's not what i gotta do is show up to this one sprint planning meeting every two weeks no well i mean i guess i am kind of saying that but i'm from an engineering from from an engineer's perspective you probably are only privy to about 10 to 20 percent of the things that a product manager does but like a typical product manager they have to interface with virtually every other part of the company to get a product to be launched and and sustainable i mean for example who's responsible for training up the sales and marketing folks for messaging the new product features that's the pm's job who's responsible for preparing the support

organization to handle customer support for the new features? PM. Who's responsible for accounting to make sure that finance and other things are aware of the functionality and how to account for it and all that stuff? That's PM. So QA folks, UI, UX designers, there's so much interfacing that a PM has to do. It's important, I think, for someone considering jumping into this role to know that to be a good PM, that doesn't just mean that you're good at interfacing with engineers which you are inherently going to be because you are an engineer but it means a lot of interfacing with a lot of people so you're just saying understand that you will have to be spending a lot of your time communicating and pushing communication on people too as an engineer

you often are people are coming to you to say hey can you do this thing hey what's the status on this thing and yeah it's it's kind of the inverse of that yeah it's a lot it's a very very different job and maybe you're cool with that maybe you already know that but this is why i think you should sit down with product managers before you jump in. Yeah, I think, I mean, lots of different people succeed in all kinds of roles, but in my head, the stereotype is engineers are a little more introverted and product managers are a little bit more extroverted, partially because of those communication requirements that you have to be talking to people all the time and reaching out to them all the time. Yep. Now, having said that, my favorite product manager I've ever worked with,

and this is going to show the bias in me because as an engineer, I'm approaching this, was a former engineer and this this particular product manager was just so good at communicating requirements and what needed to be done to the engineering team that i just loved working with them it was fantastic because they had a history of having been an engineer themselves i don't really know how they did with the rest of the company if they interfaced well but to me everyone else hated them but yeah i mean i don't know i actually don't know i don't know i didn't hear resounding praise for them but i was always talking about how great they were and so i mean this is this will be your superpower at first if you become a product manager is you

will be really good at talking to engineers having been one yourself yeah yeah that's that's a good point there's often a kind of natural give and take between product and engineering where product wants stuff done and has all these plans about impact and engineering has kind of the realities of how long it takes to do stuff and technical debt and architecture. And so there's some push and pull there. So I think that perspective would help. Maybe you have a better nose

for what kinds of things seem easy, but would take a long time or what quick wins you could get from the state of the code days or things like that. Well, have we given the advice that we came to give? I think so, yeah.

Good luck. All right. Good luck. Sounds like an exciting time. what can people do if they want their own advice they want their own questions answered go to softskills.audio and click ask a question thank you so much to everyone who has done that so many great questions have come in everyone we really appreciate it yeah thank you so much we'll catch you next week