Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 184: Indispensable and IT cold war

Episode Date: November 18, 2019

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: How do you quit when you’re indispensable to the team? I am the lead developer at a startup. I have a small team of 3 developers under me. I am essentially the “person who wrote all the code”. I have an offer from another startup for more money and more percentages of the company and they want me over there asap. I’m afraid to quit this startup as I fear that it’s not yet at a place where it could survive without me. I realize that sounds super egotistical but unfortunately I don’t have a successor ATM and none of the other developers are at a level where I could potentially train them to be my successor in the time frame I have with the other offer. The other sticky thing is that the current startup probably doesn’t have enough money to hire someone at my level for what they’d actually be worth. I, and the rest of the team, are severely underpaid, as this is a bootstrapped startup. Love your show, would love to hear your guys’ take on this. I recently interned at a local factory to help clean up some broken 20 year old databases. After remaking them, I quickly became a rising star and word spread fast of my aptitude. I was offered a full time salary position, in which I was able to negotiate for some special privileges and a cool title: software engineer. I am having an awesome time building little tools for various departments while learning different languages. I’ve been very fulfilled with the projects and recognition I’ve been getting, there’s just one problem: the IT department absolutely despises me. They see my sole existence as an affront to their entire structure. I am a part of the engineering team and work very closely with product and process engineers, which is apparently hurtful to their ego. Lately, IT has been actively obstructing every project I work on and refusing many requests, sometimes with obviously false excuses. I do not have admin privileges, I have limited internet access, I’m not even allowed to have my email password. It’s at a point where I start getting serious anxiety when I need to see IT (e.g. to install a framework or IDE extension). How can I navigate these awful encounters without letting it harm my view on the rest of the job? I am feeling like I need to wage war but I want to retain my golden boy status.

it takes more than load shedding via exponential backoff plus jitter to be a great engineer this is soft skills engineering episode 184 i'm your host dave smith i'm your host jamison dance soft skills engineering is a weekly advice show for software developers about all the non-technical and non-exponential backoff stuff that goes into being a software engineer this threw me for a Luke, that was a real technical thing that real software engineers do. It's breaking with tradition for the intros. I know. Well, you say real engineers, but when was the last time you implemented exponential

backoff with Jitter? I did it once in my career, and it was a long time ago. I bet you felt pretty cool. I did feel pretty cool. And then, to my knowledge, it never worked. but that was many jobs ago james and your jitter is just not quite jittery enough i just hard-coded it to return three jitter factor get jitter factor i want to thank our wonderful patrons thank you so much to the

people who are supporting the show at the level where we shout them out every single episode thank you to vinlock matthew voidovich barrett takowski the agile adventures charity brandon canes ted nugent crash bandicoot zach grannon john grant wow this list is getting long louis santos nick cantar taras karuk steven armand lee sean sunny tie britney ellix sonic the hedgehog ivo robotnik florian tatzel philip john basile chris hogan luke bayliss and stanley tactical radio thank you all to those fine folks. If you support the show at any level, you get access to our Slack community, which is great. And if you want to support the show, you can go to softskills.audio and click support us on Patreon. Yes, you can. And this episode is sponsored by Vetteri,

which is a new marketplace where you can find awesome developer jobs. And we'll tell you more about Vetteri a little bit later. All right, I will dive into our first question. This is from an anonymous listener. How do you quit when you're indispensable to the team? I'm the lead developer at a startup i have a small team of three developers under me i'm essentially the person who wrote all the code i have an offer from another startup for more money and more percentages of the company and they want me over there asap i am afraid to quit this startup as i fear it's not yet in a place where it could survive without me i realize that sounds super egotistical but unfortunately i don't have a successor at the moment and none of the other developers are at

a level where i could potentially train them to be my successor in the time frame i have with the other offer the other sticky thing is that the current startup probably doesn't have enough money to hire someone at my level for what they'd be actually worth i and the rest of the team are severely underpaid as this is a bootstrapped startup love your show and would love to hear your guys take on this so there's an easy way to ease them into it which is just start screwing up a lot and that'll solve a lot of problems one it'll solve the problem that you're the person who knows how to do everything and takes all the tasks on and solves all the problems because you will not you'll do a bad job and create problems the other problem it will solve is that you will

not be underpaid anymore because you'll be producing less value right so you'll be worth exactly what this below market rate is so you're saying there's two ways and then you'll quit the underpaid problem you can either get paid more or do crappier work yep just do a bad job okay and then when you quit they'll say thank goodness that that boy they were doing well for a while but they really flamed out towards the end and we're actually better off without them ease them into it you just never tell them it was really for their own good that's right then you really would be a hero you're the unsung hero they'll never know that they

needed or deserve exactly what's what's the quote at the end of batman yeah something about the hero gotham deserves not the one we need yeah i don't know i always get it backwards when we need not the one we deserve i don't know all i know is that batman lets gotham think that he shot harvey dent and that's what you're going to be doing too that's right you're going to be the hero this company needs and deserves i mean what they paid for anyway so that's my idea okay i'm i'm good with it okay oh well this is a tough situation because some people and i can tell this person might be among them love to be the hero they just love it oh yeah it feels great yeah i have a problem with this actually myself oh man about 15 years

ago or so when i was kind of starting out in my career i was doing my hero thing jumping in fixing everything you know always responding first to the issues that came up and i had a customer who this was a defense contractor company and so we were pretty close to the people with the purse strings and this customer actually pulled me aside in the hall one day they were visiting from washington dc at the time and he pulls me aside and says dave you have a problem you are too indispensable and like at the time I just had this backwards view of indispensability and I thought wait a minute I've always been told that being indispensable is a good thing because it means they can't fire you and you have job security and that's great right like being indispensable is good yeah but he said

to me look when I was young like you I did the same kind of things and my team really resented me for it and I really prevented them from growing and doing better things and it kind of came down on me like a ton of bricks at that point what what was really happening when I got a little bit outside myself and realized if i do all the hard things then what's left yeah so what what what did you do in response to this i doubled down i'll show you i'll hero even harder i reached up to my button-up shirt and pulled it open and revealed a superman logo tattooed on my chest i'll be on call twice at the same time i'll be primary and secondary

no what i what i did was actually you know honestly it took me a few years to figure out how to do that i didn't get it right away i probably it was probably several jobs later before i really got it in fact i would probably say it wasn't until in the last couple of years that i really got it so it probably took me a good 10 to 15 years to really get it apparently i was on the slow track for getting off the hero pedestal but you know what's happened recently is i've actually seen in my current company i've seen promotion criteria that say specifically you know should this person be promoted to the next level and one of the criteria is do they rush in and fix things on their own or do they help other people grow and i'm just like

oh wow this will block a promotion at my company if you are too much of a hero and you rush in and do everything on your own without bringing people along with you you will not be promoted here that's really interesting that's interesting that they call it out explicitly yeah i it was very interesting to see that like it's not just something we talk about it's like a checkbox i have been the hero and i've also been kind of under the shadow of the hero which i think i've been the hero since then which means i didn't learn my lesson i guess but i i worked at a pretty small startup it wasn't this small but there was definitely a hero who knew everything did everything jumped in solved every problem they actually got laid off because the company

had some funding issues just startup things you know and the people that were left were shocked like how what are we going to do without this person that solves all our problems and it turns out we were fine and we uncovered a lot of things that could have been better if they had more brains on them than just one person and people learned how to do a lot more than they had to do before when everything was taken care of for them just by it wasn't even that people were complaining and saying hey can you fix this thing it was like anytime there was a hint of a problem the hero would would that that's the hero's signal you know they can just hear someone saying oh how do i do and then the hero appears and types really fast on their keyboard and the problem has gone away

and that was gone so the team had to learn and and grow a little bit more i'm curious like what was the transition like was it was it like super like ripping a band-aid off really hard but then not bad soon after like was there a ramp up period or you know how much pain did you have i don't remember honestly i i don't remember how much pain i had it was a while ago and it was also i mean the company went through a round of layoffs so there was a lot of just kind of general bummed outness going around at the same time but i don't remember it being difficult technically or causing us to miss timelines or i don't know downtime or anything like that i'm probably misrememberings how hard it was in some way or glossing over some of the problems but it

it did feel like i was surprised at how we just kept going yeah and it was fine yeah and that's actually been the case every time i have left a company or had someone who was in a heroic position leave a company i've always thought oh this is it this is not going to work out and then you know what it does every time it's been fine so i mean i i think it doesn't mean that you're wrong and you're not a hero it's just that people generally step up when they have to and it's hard to step up when you don't have to especially in the situation where there's the one person who wrote all the code who's still there it can feel hard to challenge some of the underlying assumptions that's just a hard environment to step up into while that person is still there i've experienced

that a little bit more recently too and it's it's amazing it's like a breath of fresh air when there's freedom to say hey why don't we do these different things instead or there are some times where where we wish we had this person where i've wished they were around to ask them questions but overall i think you're right that the i don't know what it is if it's hubris or like just awareness of how much knowledge you have or something but i i think it's less horrible than it seems afterwards most of the time yeah so we're basically saying just do it yeah just just burn it down yeah but we're also saying kind of behind the between the lines we're saying that probably you could have done a better job of including these other folks in giving them a little bit

more ownership and not hand-holding and anyway there's like all kinds of ways you can become indispensable so we're kind of saying like yeah go back in time give yourself a talking to and then give yourself 10 years and then change because that's what that's what it would have taken for me i'm still struggling with this honestly delegation is one of the hardest things for me yeah sorry i don't know sorry everybody we finally found a weakness that jameson actually has i've talked about this before if you pay close attention to i don't even know what episode you got to go back in the archives yeah so yeah i i understand your your pain basically that yeah one one way to solve problems is just to use your big smart brain on them and put in a lot of work and

then they get solved and that's that's very it feels very in control you know you can you can just do it and then it's easy and there's no communication overhead and things get better and people say nice things to you and yes there's a lot of incentive for it there's a ton of incentive but it's really problematic i think yeah if if their offer is to leave asap is there anything they could do within like a two-week notice period to make this smoother well i mean that i think the sooner you can make your company aware of the fact that you're leaving the better and then what you do is you say all right take away my get commit access for the next two weeks or whatever time period is and i am here only to share contextual historical information that can help

you make good decisions in the future that's my only job yeah i wonder if they can afford to do that though if this developer if it's proportional they're at 25 of the developers yeah well actually it doesn't say there are only three there might be more than four developers i guess i'm assuming there's this person plus three developers under them it's a small startup if they wrote all the code yeah they're they're probably the only developers so you you might be 25 but if you're this hero you might be like 50 or 75 of the developer output and can the team afford to go without that for two weeks if they're this small bootstrap startup with no money and yeah well you'll find out i mean i i hate to be the like cold-hearted mean advisor who says just leave

them in the dust and let them you know rot that's really not what i'm saying what i am saying is they'll probably be better off than you think we all kind of tell ourselves these stories well some of us tellers i am one of these people that tells myself this story about how valuable i am and how this company could never work without me and i think i do think there are a whole other class of people who say this company would be so much better without me i'm so slow and terrible right even if they're great but it'll probably be better than you think and if you are feeling really bad about it like i guess i would ask myself this other question what if i was at this other company already today i was getting paid this bigger salary i had more equity

and i encountered this bootstrap startup who could pay me less would i walk away from that other company take a pay cut and give up my equity to join this small bootstrap startup and help them that's really interesting that's kind of where you are and the only variable i took out of this scenario is the fact that you helped build this bootstrap startup you know you wrote all the code or much of it so i don't know if the answer to that question is yeah i would leave then you should probably stay here i thought you were going a different direction i thought you're going to talk about how it's not really i mean it's a job it's not you're not married to this company true like you are allowed to leave your job and go have a different job yeah and

if if the situations were reversed and i mean if it was in the best financial interests of the company to lay you off then they probably would that's that's how the relationship works yeah so i mean loyalty is a thing and you can get some i don't know you have some opportunities from staying at a startup from when it's small and there's a whole bunch of stuff for why staying is good but yeah this shame that people feel about leaving jobs i don't know that that's always productive unless you work for me on my team and then you should be very ashamed you should stay don't ever leave me please no but like i don't know people will move on it's it's how work works not everyone works somewhere for long tenures especially in tech so

yeah beyond even just the the the whole hero thing just this shame of leaving them and what are they going to do without me like i i don't know that's not really your problem at that point like you have a different job now that's that's your new problem yeah so how do you get over the shame you just have to be a sociopath i'm saying this but i feel great shame every time i leave a job and there's obviously a way you can take it too far right if you i mean there are things you can do to burn bridges if you like negotiate really hard for a raise and then that's salary bump and title bump and then you're like thanks i'll take that to my next negotiation at my new job or you take on some huge new project and then just leave it to die there are ways it could go

wrong but overall this sounds like you might be too worried yeah maybe you might be surprised like i mean have faith in these other people you may not think that they're ready to step up and take ownership but people surprise you sometimes when they get into a circumstance where you're gone and they don't have the security blanket anymore and they start flexing their muscles and find out that they're actually really strong and they can do cool stuff so and they found you you joined when you were severely underpaid yeah bootstrap startup so like kind of something going for them unless you're the cousin niece i don't know whatever of the founder yeah and they don't have any more relatives who are capable team leads yeah they're all a lot of cousins yep yeah i think they'll be

fine and if not then you get to say if any startup can be killed by me leaving it it was probably not a good startup oh and it and it's your fault because you made it that way and then you just stamp uh what what symbol would you stamp you stamp like an outline of a i don't know of a LaCroix on the side of your vehicle like that's another another another kill a LaCroix like a fighter pilot for every startup yeah this is how many startups I've killed another one on the side of your Prius yep on the side of your Prius exactly okay all right got it good luck all right good luck hey jameson before we go on to our next question did you hear that one of our slack community

members just got a new dev job with a fifty thousand dollar raise yeah that was wild they used a service called veteri veteri matches developers with employers based on what you want like your location salary requirements and technologies you want to work with yeah so i actually signed up myself and within a week they sent me a job opportunity the hiring manager wrote me a very nice note and the salary was actually amazing i was pretty impressed i don't know i'm a pretty big fan of my current job search process which is quitting my job and then asking strangers on twitter if they know anyone hiring for cobalt okay so once you sign up for bettery you actually get a dedicated consultant assigned to help you tweak your profile and find the opportunities

you're interested in and the best part is you get those pesky salary requirements out of the way early in the process no more going through the whole interview process only to find out that your expectations are way off another thing i like is that there's no coding test to get started and as much as i love balancing binary trees on a whiteboard under time pressure that's a pretty cool thing if you're thinking of taking the soft skills engineering advice of quitting your job you should check out veteri go to veteri.com soft skills to sign up that's v-e-t-t-e-r-y.com soft skills and if you use that link you'll help support the show and if you get a job through veteri you get 300 bucks thank you so much to veteri for sponsoring the show do you want to

read our next question yes i do okay this comes from someone named flyzik who assures us this is not their real name okay flyzik says flyzik says i recently interned at a local factory to help clean up some broken 20 year old databases okay let me just pause there and say this is amazing i love it 20 year old databases at a factory like what is this factory i love it okay back to the question after remaking them i quickly became a rising star and word spread fast i was offered a full time i was offered a full-time salary position in which i was able to negotiate for some special privileges and a cool title software engineer i am having an awesome time building little tools for various departments while learning different languages i've been very

fulfilled with the projects and recognition i've been getting but there's just one problem the it department absolutely despises me they seem this is awesome they see my sole existence as an affront to their entire structure i am a part of the engineering team and work very closely with product and process engineers which is apparently hurtful to their ego lately it has been actively obstructing every project i work on and refusing many requests sometimes with obviously false excuses i do not have admin privileges i have limited internet access i'm not even allowed to have my own email password it's at a point where i start getting serious anxiety when i need to see it for example to install a framework or an ide extension how can i navigate these awful

encounters without letting it harm my view on the rest of the job i'm feeling like i need to wage war but i want to retain my golden boy status i love that golden boy this is a good question have you heard of the phrase petty tyranny petty tyranny no what is that it's basically this where there are these people in situations that don't it's not like you have phenomenal amounts of real world real world power but because of some quirk of organization or bureaucracy or something it has this authority and because it's how because of how small it is it kind of encourages bad behavior with this authority i've worked in i was a temp for a little bit a long time ago in an office just doing data entry and there was an it person and he was all of the worst stereotypes of an it guy

oh no embodied in a person really arrogant very poor social skills made people feel so dumb for asking questions about how to get things fixed would just goof off all day but he he he terrorized people because he had the magic keys to like make it so you can log into your email and get your job done or not get your job done or whatever so and it certainly wasn't a tech company it was it was kind of a non-tech business so maybe there's some of that where that is more prevalent in uh it departments in non-tech places it's a classic factory it story yeah like like that one how i got around it was by being a temp for three months and then moving to a foreign country for a few years and it turns out that solved my problem with the it guy by leaving the country that's a

little extreme yep yep it was great you're like let's see if you can chase me across international waters your sharepoint powers are useless here okay so i'm assuming that's not an option so no i well i don't think so can i navigate these awful encounters without letting it harm my view i mean one way you could do like you're basically in a cold war here so one thing you could do is do like the russians and the americans did in the real cold war which is just a bunch of posturing like set up an alternate email system and i thought you were gonna say go to space start a space program good get to the moon before the department yeah you have a factory i mean what else do you need

they probably make couch cushions not anymore we're gonna need to retool a little bit do you think we could fit a 350 foot rocket in this factory i think we could okay so i was gonna okay going to the moon is obviously option one but if that turns out to be unreasonable for, I don't know, resource constraint reasons or something, then option two is set up a competing email system and convince people to migrate over to that email system and then withhold the password from the IT department. Now you're in the power position. Yeah. Tell them about Gmail. Oh boy.

Have you heard of the phrase shadow IT? No. What is that? shadow it is the name for tools that people turn to at companies where they're not approved by an it department to just get their work done yes the black market people make private email accounts or yeah it's like the black market of it yeah because there's all these stringent requirements like people have their own laptops because they can't install anything on the company provided ones or whatever right so you could be the shadowy it broker you could have a code name a burner phone yeah a trench coat that you open to reveal like i don't know what it would be non-company issued

smartphones yeah non the pouches of non-company issued smartphones and serial numbers to register for like microsoft office online that's right whatever aws credentials hey do you want to deploy stuff whenever you want here have some free credits yeah so i i don't know a lot about the reporting structure here there's not a ton here but it sounds like they're not in it but are still affect their productivity is affected by it i I wonder if there's a manager or someone you report to that you could go to and say, hey, this is like, I can't do my job because of these requirements. Because if it's down to you directly to fight IT, that seems unlikely to go well.

But if you are responsible for being productive to someone else, you can bring this up as something affecting your productivity. Like, I can't log into my email, so I can't do any work. How can you help resolve these problems? You're going to have to have this conversation in person, though, without email, because I can guarantee you what's going to happen. You're going to start typing that email and then it's going to be like, oh, it bounced. I wonder why that email didn't get delivered. That's weird. Weird.

Their filters are so strict here. There will be no complaints about the IT department through IT systems. That's right. I don't know. I feel like I probably wouldn't go straight to management just yet, but I would try to get to the bottom of why they're feeling this way. And I have a theory. My theory is that you've got a comfortable IT team who's been doing things the same way for a long time. I mean, let's be honest.

You have 20-year-old databases that needed to be fixed, which tells me this isn't the company that reinvents itself every year. And so what I think is happening here is you are automating these people out of a job. And they're starting to feel nervous that you're going to just go around from team to team solving all their IT problems without an IT person and maybe even doing a better and faster job of it. And they're going to be like, oh, crap, how long until layoffs come and we are out of a job? So if that is a problem, what's the I mean, shouldn't you be making stuff better and faster and more efficient? Like, yes, you should. This is yeah. I mean, this is where you have tension right between the old guard and automation. And maybe this is, if you do find that this is actually the incentive system that's at play, this is where management does have to step in.

And I don't know if I want to be the guy who goes and tells management about this situation, because it could be that that would actually accelerate the doomsday for the IT folks. If management's like, oh, wait, you mean to say you've been doing all this stuff automated? What are our IT people doing anymore? I have no idea how you would have this conversation with people that seem so hostile. but i mean a thing you hear is you automate yourself out of a job so that you can work on higher leverage work and it sounds like they might not be viewing it that way where you're automating them out of their jobs so that they have they will get fired i mean presumably they have other stuff they could be doing with the free time yeah when they're not manually doing all these tasks if that

is the problem so if they already hate you you're probably unlikely to succeed by going up to them saying your attitude is just wrong you need to look at this as an opportunity right i'm helping you level up like i don't i don't know how you'd get that message across but if you could somehow trans what that's probably incept if you can incept that into their brains right so that they think of it themselves that might help them now go do other stuff and not see you as this enemy anymore maybe okay maybe the issue here is that this person is kind of horning in on their turf and doing their job like maybe they would be perfectly happy to build some of this automated stuff and and yet oh like maybe they want to it's on their it's on their roadmap and they have all

this other stuff to do first maybe the issue here is that our listener is being uncollaborative and just running into maybe we have a hero problem just like our last discussion you know maybe he's rushing in yeah fixing problems and then kind of leaving the it folks in the dark like maybe maybe maybe they've been cleaning up his messes because you know our listener rushes in yeah i I have seen a lot of people that jump in and are like, I will solve your problem with a set of simple shell scripts. And then they leave behind this horrible mess that doesn't work and doesn't cover any edge cases.

But someone thinks it works and you get all the credit for it. But every time it runs, it works for the user, but then the IT department gets like seven alerts in the middle of the night and have to go fix things. Yeah. So that's sounding more like you should potentially approach them and not just say like, hey, can you stop being bad at your job? or stop tormenting me, but saying like, how can we work better together?

Yeah. Like say things like, Hey, I sent some overlap in the work that I'm doing in the work that you're doing. And I just want to make sure that I collaborate with you and, and do things in a way that works for everyone. I sent some overlap in that. It seems like we're both expecting to know my email password, but only you do. And I was hoping we could just center that responsibility for knowing my email password on me. And that frees you up to do other things. yeah i like that that's i see i was all ready to go to war but dave you're so reasonable and i disarmed you talked me down the the missiles are coming out of cuba yep is that the name for a disarmament when when people are both like we'll throw away like

one percent of our nuclear missiles yeah i think so you throw away one percent of yours yeah yeah i think so and then we'll secretly just move them to a new location we'll throw them away to montana exactly oh okay have we solved the problem not not yet so i think also there i think just on an interpersonal level you might want to do some things to try to get to know these people better this is this would be hard because you it seems that maybe the relationship has started off on the wrong foot but they are your co-workers and you are working together for the same company after all and wouldn't it be great if you could somehow arrange some way to get to know them on

a personal level and let them get to know you you know i'm thinking like a team building exercise you know trust we talk about trust falls a lot yeah trust falls i mean perfect right you're in a factory so the stakes could be really high for trust falls catch me or i will fall into the thresher exactly this is how much i trust you but really i mean what what if you what if you organized or convinced management to organize some kind of team outing or something where you could participate and strategically make yourself in the group with these it folks and you know it's really hard to be mad at someone who's doing good stuff at work when you know them personally that's what i found anyway yeah i've certainly found that where people that i have rough work

relationships with are generally very remote from me and i don't have much sense of who they are as a person and what they want it's just like this person seems like they're bugging me and and that's my whole impression of them as a person yeah so i like that idea and then aside from interpersonal understanding it sounds like you don't quite have a solid understanding of their professional incentives because there are probably very good reasons why they are acting the way they're acting and you just don't know and i think it behooves you to figure that out so that you can clearly articulate what their problem is with what you're doing and once you do that you might find that there are opportunities for you to change and make things work better for both

people i love that yeah if you if you can articulate their motivations beyond they must be stupid and wrong right for being dumb and bad at their jobs or whatever then that's the that's the go-to right like a lot of sense i already understand their motivation they're idiots It's easy. Yeah. Their motivation is to screw stuff up. Yeah. Because they want to.

Right. They just want to see the factory burn. Yeah. Yeah, that's a good, man, such good advice, Dave. Oh, man, it was a good day. Any day that Jameson Dance tells you good advice, that's a good day. That one will go in the journal. Well, have we answered it?

I think so. Good luck at the factory. We'd love to hear more, and I would love to hear what you've done and how it worked out. you know sometimes cold wars turn into hot wars and that would be really interesting too yeah it'd certainly make a good story yep one way or another sorry about your career yeah all right what can people do if they want their own questions answered dave go to soft skills dot audio and click ask a question you can fill out our form there and if you want to support the show go rate the podcast in your podcasting app you can give us five six or seven stars

whichever one you like and what can people do in other ways to support the show you can share it folks you can also support us financially by going to softskills.audio and click support us on patreon oh and you can go to veteri.com soft skills and that will also help support the show oh yeah thank you so much we'll catch you next week