Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 188: Drama overload and agile ouroboroses

Episode Date: December 16, 2019

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I work in a charity as an iOS developer and there is so much drama in the office about anything. I am so scared to talk with my backend engineer about work that we created a non-company slack workspace. This is how we communicate, even though we sit right next to each other. Please send help. I work in a company that’s around 10 years old with 1800 employees that started implementing agile methodologies a few years ago. It was great and improved the work, but now all the agile coaches are pushing to have physical boards and doing things apparently just to justify their own existence. I agree we all should try new methodologies but shouldn’t it always be based on a problem we are trying to solve? And shouldn’t all the team be on board with the change instead of just doing it because the agile coach wants to?

it takes more than sending your boss colon q in place of a resignation letter to be a great engineer this is soft skills engineering episode 188 i am your host dave smith i'm your host jameson dance soft skills engineering is a weekly advice podcast for software developers about the non-technical aspects of quitting your job with a resignation letter that's just a colon q maybe that would get you a raise though because you would demonstrate you know how to exit vim which is if i believe twitter right one of the hardest technical skills to master fantastic oh i love that i am gonna talk about our wonderful patrons thank you so much to ryan marvin and to all these other folks thank you to scoof iva robotnik luke bayless louis santos

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i have american flag socks but i feel like that doesn't reflect the true level of my patriotism and the only way to truly reflect it is to kill some of the symbol of the united states the bird and take its feathers for my signaling for your socks you understand bird i just really love america so much i know you'll appreciate it and also that's what i'll tell the cops when they come to take me away i'm pretty sure it's super illegal it is you can't even harass bald eagles in the united states they'll get you the bald eagles will defend themselves anyways thank you to those folks i we don't do anything nefarious with the money that was a joke it's true maybe poor taste i don't know it does support the show thank you we really appreciate it and if you do

support the show you can join our slack workspace i found out it's called not a cult i was informed that is not the correct slack terminology join our slack workspace and hang out with smart people there by the way no cults call themselves cults just so you know that's true that would be a good signal that we're not a cult if you call yourself a cult you're probably not now some sneaky cult is going to use that to yeah to find yeah to protect themselves would would a truly evil organization actually call themselves the evil death murder cult i don't think so that's how you know you can trust us it'd be it'd be too preposterous sign here please

okay do you want to read our first question dave yes i do this comes from an anonymous listener who says i work in a charity as an ios developer and there is so much drama in the office about anything i am so scared to talk with my back-end engineer about work that we created a non-company slack workspace not a cult by the way it's just a workspace this workspace is how we communicate even though we sit right next to each other please send help i've i've heard that said about engineers all the time that they just type to each other when they're sitting right next to each other but it's always been kind of like a reflection of their preferred working styles never as a defense mechanism as as stenography or i don't know

hiding information from the bad guys who are apparently in your office with you i don't know why i'm gonna say this but i just get such a kick out of imagining the pathway of the slack message that goes from you to your co-worker sitting right next to you and just how far that thing travels before it gets to you i just love thinking about that yeah it is kind of cool the internet it works it's like so inefficient you know we're gonna send these electrons hundreds of miles through who knows who knows how many dozens of computers before it comes back to two feet away from me. I think the solution to this

is to express all of your technical discussions as drama. If you can't even communicate because there's so much drama, you just got to slip the work discussion in with the drama. Did you hear that preposterous rumor about the new UML diagram that I need feedback on? Or you won't believe this pull request until you see it. Can you believe the nerve, that person?

and just drama is the new protocol for communicating now i guess well don't you have to kind of rise above the drama to get any attention though so it's got to be really dramatic ah i mean how would you i don't watch a lot of reality tv so i'm not up on dramatic statements we were talking before this though i do love twitter drama and i do read a lot of sports news basically all for the drama okay are there any lessons we could learn from sports drama news that might be applicable here yeah yeah there are some so i'm trying to think of the the best one i think it's that if you're really really good at your job you can get away with whatever you want okay basically that's that's the main lesson i learned from sports drama until you call

the owner of your team out on his pending prostitution case and then then you can't get away with that anymore you call someone else out who's even better at their job yeah i guess i lied there's nothing we can learn it's all entertainment okay no lessons learned just join me in in the fun drama pit drama pit it's so good oh man yeah what what should they do so they try rising above it by being even more dramatic no yeah that doesn't work okay well i'll say you probably did the right thing by not using your company's communication i mean at first when i read this i was thinking oh you're using you're using this slack this secret slack workspace as a place to communicate and say negative things but then i realized wait no this is just where they

communicate to get regular work done because they don't want to talk out loud or use any of the other mechanisms yeah that's the wild thing i have heard that a lot and been around situations where people have kind of a speakeasy little place they can go to vent but this is the place you can go to to get work done which is just wild that is wild like what why is that place not the office you know i i don't know i've never worked in charity so i have no insight into the world of non-profits or anything i mean i feel like my default answer when i don't know what to do is to tell people to go to your manager about it okay this does seem like a thing that i mean maybe this would cause more drama though if you say hey there's so much drama we can't get any

work done then suddenly all the drama is focused on you person ios developer thinks that we are dramatic the nerve of that person and then they're all mad at you for it what are we gonna do about it pull you into meetings i'm so scared to talk with my back-end engineer about work that's i just can't believe it unless your work is to like destroy the company somehow you're on the secret team to what if we took money away from the orphans what have we pivoted we are a charity that helps rich people by taking money from orphans yeah you're on the secret skunk works 0.001 percent project that's right the only people eligible are the billionaires or maybe maybe they're plotting for a private equity firm to

buy out the charity and then convert it into a for-profit company just like put it through the meat grinder of private equity and squeeze out some some sad humans that don't have jobs anymore and also a little bit of profit yep rich people that's right yeah yeah maybe you're maybe you're the enemy working from the inside or maybe everyone else is and you're the only people that truly have the best interests of the charity at heart there's a conflict there yeah i feel like my my outsider uninformed impression is that if people are very very mission driven and it's very focused on like it feels like it could amp up some conflict at work where it's not just about like shipping the thing and making another dollar it's like

this is this is life or death here this is this is going to change the world in in a good way or affect people's lives powerfully and we want to make sure we get it right and so i could see room for disagreements potentially blowing up there but the fact that you can't focus on technical work is just that is this disturbing i guess i wonder if it's the kind of situation where mistakes are always framed in the lost like in the in the current in the currency of lost opportunities oh yeah yeah like this is this is money we're paying you this money that could go to this cause instead and this is the kind of work you deliver or like every bug in your software means 10 kids don't get measles vaccines or something yeah that could that could turn into drama pretty quickly i

think i wonder if people feel a lot of pressure because of that and maybe that's causing the drama it might be fun to do kind of some investigative journalism here and figure out just what is behind all this drama yeah yeah if there's if if the whole company is like that if it's and if it's about everything if it's not concentrated on specific people or specific topics then it it does seem like maybe there's a cultural reason behind it and and maybe that's something you can raise i mean if you can't have a conversation about technical things i would i'd venture other people also can't have conversations related to their own jobs too yeah it seems it seems odd that drama would only prevent you from getting work done not other

people and i i think we're using the word drama that can mean a whole bunch of different stuff and there's not a lot of other detail about what that means so i don't know i'm assuming by by drama it's it's like relatively pointless conflict about things that that don't get resolved cleanly and result in bad feelings but but it could be other things and they could be folded into that word too yeah i'm assuming that the drama is not worth addressing i guess but what you call drama could be like important problems to other people yeah yeah it could be also i will say that i think you do have to calibrate yourself on what is drama because i think some engineers might be a little bit more sensitive to drama than other people in the company and to you what might feel like drama

to someone else just feels like water cooler conversation yeah someone raising their voice to you is like well they're they're real mad but yeah it's just they're just loud how they do it yeah you gotta be flamboyant to raise funds that's right this is a charity people let's get some noise in here so we talked a little bit about understanding it and investigating it but i still don't feel like we have a solution like what do you what do you do to get work done please send help well that's what they said i yeah i am a little concerned about just going heads down on your own private Slack workspace and just kind of detaching from the rest of the company

and getting work done? Because I think that might work in the short term to get some stuff done. But in the long term, it might create optics that make you seem detached and uninterested. And especially at a mission-driven charity, it might be like, well, the engineering team, I mean, they're just here for the paycheck.

They're not really- Yeah, they're never around. They're always off by themselves. That's a risky situation long-term. So if you have a manager who represents you, well, that might be okay. But if you're it, then you might need to find a way to connect that works for you with the rest of the company so i worked for a while at a company where

a small subset of the team was on a completely different communication infrastructure from everyone else at the company everyone else was on this one thing this one subset of the team was on like a different chat application that no one else had logins to and nobody knew about and anything like that and there were some reasons for it that people expressed and i thought their reasons were all dumb and wrong. But the effect was what you said here, where it was much more isolated and collaborating with the rest of the company was much harder. And there was this like aloofness and this kind of like, we're too good for you or they're too good for us feeling that the rest of the company felt. And I think overall, it hurt the relationships of the team and hurt the image

of the team and and this persisted for several years too it wasn't just a quick thing too so it was a long-term thing and and it went away and things immediately got better there are a few like bumps about integrating more fully into the rest of companies communication infrastructure but but the benefits of communicating more openly with people also happened and and turns out when you build stuff other people need to use or when you want to figure out what to build it helps to talk to them so i think i'm just backing up your point that long term this would probably have negative consequences yeah i think so all right well did we answer the question that's all i got i'm sorry someone else can afford right now yeah someone else send help good luck i hope i hope

your charity succeeds and you do good in the world me too all right get some more money to those rich people out of that big orphan industry squeeze them harder all right i'll read our next question i work in a company that's around 10 years old with 1800 employees that started implementing agile methodologies a few years ago it was great and improved the work but now all the agile coaches are pushing to have physical boards and doing things apparently just to justify their own existence i agree that we should try new methodologies but shouldn't it always be based on a problem we are trying to solve and shouldn't all the team be on board with a change instead of just doing it because the agile coach wants to huh so positive agile change and then it just

kept going and now agile for agile's sake i guess is my interpretation of this oh no agile for agile coach salary's sake agile for financial sake yes yeah what's that quote it's difficult to get a person to understand something when their job depends on them not understanding it I love that quote so much. That does seem to apply here. If you're an agile coach and that's your hammer, that's the way you solve problems. Turns out it's going to be hard for you to say, hey, you don't need me anymore. You're good.

It's like the Nanny McPhee situation. What's that? Oh, Nanny McPhee. It's a fairy tale where this nanny comes and she tells the kids, right now you don't want me, but when you want me, I will have to leave. and then she turns them from bad children to good children and then leaves just like an agile coach should do your work yeah get out of here yeah you're trying to agile yourself out of a job have you ever worked with a formal agile coach no i've only interacted with a few at a conference one time but i've never had one at a company yeah i haven't either i will say i do not have the most

positive impression of them before stuff like this, where my impression is they're generally salespeople trying to sell you things to pay them. And if that solves your problem, that's cool, but they'll really sell you some stuff. That problem will be solved. Which problem? The problem where your wallet's too heavy? Yeah. The problem of you haven't bought stuff from the adjunct consultant will be solved. And potentially it will also solve the problem of like, I don't know, your product is bad or your people don't talk to each other or whatever yeah whatever the actual problem you're trying to solve is okay well i've ragged on a discipline i know not very much about it's time for the advice you should slowly turn this physical board that they're creating or

making you create into just a depiction of the waterfall process you just put columns in for design and validation and testing and delivery and i don't even know what all those steps are but but just do it say like you want to move more kanban but these categories don't really match what you want to do like doing and to do and done aren't enough and you need a category for design and then you just keep stuff in there until it's all the way designed and then move it through yep perfect water scrum water yeah water i mean that would be a water board that's exactly what that is you would torture them i guess yeah okay and then just watch them slowly devolve into insanity as they're like what have we done actually you'd be doing them a favor

because then they'd be like, well, it turns out you're all on a waterfall process. What you need is an army of Agile coaches. We have the solution for this problem. I was thinking that the only reason Agile exists or any of these methodologies is because of bugs. And Jameson and I have for a long time been proponents of NBDD,

which is no bugs driven development. And we would be happy to consult at your company for very reasonable fee. whatever these coaches are getting paid we will take less than that so uh you can afford us i think agile transformations often get pushed down from above where some executive sees a problem and and believes or is sold this as an answer to the problem so it can be hard if you're on the ground just kind of like an unwilling participant in someone else's dream and the person who is deciding this is the problem and then this

should be this should be the solution to it often doesn't have a good idea of what the day-to-day experience is on on the ground i guess so this is tricky i feel like this is pretty common and it i mean in this example is agile but it could be any number of things too i think this experience of someone pushing a process that seems cool and then seems less cool over time will persist long, long into the future. So you're stuck with it. I guess that's the summary. What do I say about it? You have to, you have to find ways to bubble the feedback back up about what's working and what's not, because it's unlikely that you will just be able to go sit down with your agile coach and say, Hey, I don't really want us to have a physical board. Cause I think it's more

work than it's worth. They have some kind of mandate from some other group and you need to figure out how to give the experience that you're having so that they can take that into account as well yeah and it would be even worse to sit down and say hey um i don't think you should be part of our team anymore i think we got it we're good see ya i think that what needs to happen here is you need to figure out what was like you were like jameson was saying i would try to figure out what was the original impetus to bringing in all these agile coaches figure out if there was some metric that was being observed and trending the wrong direction or some set of anecdotes that were coming up the food chain in your company that were causing that eventually

caused your executives to say yeah let's spend a bunch of money to pay agile coaches full-time because really when you're bringing in coaches now i'm just assuming these are consultants and not full-time employees maybe they are full-time employees that would make this a lot harder but if there's some metric or some criteria for success then maybe you could demonstrate that you've met that and now it's time to move past the coaches because they've put you on track and worked themselves out of a job mission accomplished yeah i guess we're assuming that one of the goals is to get rid of the coaches which might not necessarily be the case but one of the goals should be to make sure that the process is solving problems that you have and it's i could see the

the the fear is that well they're here so they're gonna do things like they gotta keep changing stuff or to justify that they're here. And if there's not a real need, then it probably won't be for the better. So another option is to try and partner with them a little bit to identify problems that you actually experience and fix those instead of kind of let them come and tell you, here's the new process. We know this will make things better. Yes. There'll be less of a vacuum. Yeah, that's brilliant. Last night I was meeting with a former coworker of mine and he was recounting a time when he was under extreme deadline pressure self-imposed but nonetheless he felt totally obligated to deliver on time and he was working nights and weekends to get this

project done and his manager would come in on the nights and weekends to try to be supportive and the manager would stop into his office and say hey you know is there anything i can do to help and he told me that he literally would his thought process was like okay what can i say that will make him not feel bad but that will make him go away and he would say things like he would say things like yeah it would be really great if you could bring me a fresca and it was like that'll buy me an hour because he has to go to the store i know we don't have any frescas in the office you know it's like perfect and so maybe maybe with the uh agile coaches you need to start tasking them up with stuff be like hey can you go solve this like i

really need this problem solved can you put together a working group and present a paper or something you know it'd be great and then they would then stop proactively telling your team to do things differently and they would be out doing maybe productive things and solving actual problems you have like the fact that you don't have enough frescas yeah that sounds great the the true definition of agility is a well-hydrated developer team i think that's that's on the manifesto i was just that reminded me of a thing i saw on twitter about there's some japanese company where the executives were bothering people not bothering they were asking for quick status updates on technical outages and incidents and doing it in a not helpful way you know that way that sometimes

happens where your head's down trying to fix a thing and some keep saying like hey stop stop tell me what's going on and tell me the status yeah and you say i'm fixing it and i can't because you keep interrupting me but the the solution was that the way the executives could help out was to go make tea for the developer team oh which i guess really according to this tweet had some like status connotations too where making tea for people is low status or something oh i don't know anything about that either so it's kind of like a subtle burn i guess okay and also uh leave us alone please but i think i mean i don't know every team has stuff that could be improved and and you could turn it into make work just just busy work to keep them off your back but i think even beyond

that you could help find productive things for them to do and that'd be the better version of this like not not just having them not make your life worse but they could work together with you to make things better yeah and especially if they're not consultants if they're full-time members of the team that might be a more productive approach if you need to work with them long term yeah that's that's really good i like that add cards to the physical board about phasing out agile coaches go back to back to the hazing great idea very passive aggressive thanks yes the best way to solve problems have we answered the question i think so good luck all right what can people do if they want

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