Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 191: Overshadowed and demos and credit

Episode Date: January 6, 2020

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I’m an introverted person but am not afraid to present my work and have strong 1-1s. For the past few months, I’ve been working on a project with a coworker who is very extroverted and expressive compared to me. During meetings with higher ups to present our work and progress, he overpowers me in conversation unwittingly. Most of the time, I feel he does a good job but other times I notice that he makes claims without gathering all the data. I’m much more deliberate and will let people know if I’m uncertain about something; But he is willing to just say something outright then later apologize if he was incorrect. I want to make sure that in meetings, I don’t come across as weak. I’m pretty confident in my technical ability and am polite at work, but don’t think I come across as very approachable due to my lack of expressiveness. Is this something I should work on? Hey Jamison and Dave! I absolutely love your show and have listened to every episode. You guys keep me company on those commutes to work and keep me sane. Every quarter, we have an organization-wide demo. Usually, it’s one person demoing the feature - usually the person who has been working on it most recently. For some of the features, I put in a lot of hard work and time into the feature but was later moved off to another project after completing my part. Essentially, I wrote the foundation of the whole feature. However, everyone has long forgotten that I ever contributed to it and I only found out it was even being demoed on the day of. I feel really disappointed my efforts aren’t recognized, but is it too petty to care? From a career standpoint, I worry that the person demoing will get a lot more visibility from leadership and it will lead to faster career growth for them. What are your thoughts? Thanks!

it takes more than coining acronyms for things to be a great engineer this is episode 191 of the soft skills engineering podcast i'm your host jameson dance and 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 and we don't have an acronym for it I mean, SSE, but that's like senior software engineer. Yeah. But that's never stopped any developer from coining an acronym for anything ever. Wait, this already conflicts with a widely used term.

Oh, well. I think watching names affect usage is kind of like, I feel like that's the closest I feel to believing in witchcraft, where there's this dark art of like naming something gives you power over it, like the mean stack. That's true, though. before mean was a name it was just like you could use some of these open source projects and someone came up with the name mean and then a thousand consulting companies were spawned and like a million boot camps and it just kicked off this industry of people all talking about mean

or like jam stack or lamp or even the word stack yeah yeah and lamp lamp that one really dates you what was the other one i was thinking of there's another another name i can think of that has a huge impact on the industry what is that ajax oh yeah ajax enormous everyone's favorite acronym i mean yeah what if what if soap's name was less like easily i don't know soap is kind of like a cute name that sticks in your mind what if its name was like moistener or something that was like the the acronym that would be more appropriate yeah fungi even more appropriate anyways that's not what this show's about no you want to talk about our patrons i do thanks to those that are contributing on patreon that get them a weekly shout out they are skoof ivo

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the sly community and get real good advice please join us we love it there we'd love it if you did and it helps support the show all right i'm gonna jump into our first question this is from a listener named quality wolf i'm an introverted person but i'm not afraid to present my work and have strong one-on-ones for the past few months i've been working on a project with a co-worker who is very extroverted and expressive compared to me during meetings with higher ups to present our work in progress he overpowers me in conversation unwittingly most of the time i feel like he does a good job but other times i noticed that he makes claims without gathering all of the data i'm much more deliberate and will let people know if i'm uncertain about something but he is

willing to just say something outright and then later apologize if he was incorrect i want to make sure that in meetings i don't come across as weak i'm pretty confident in my technical ability and am polite at work but i don't think i come across as very approachable due to my lack of expressiveness is this something i should work on oh very good question yeah so i know a group of men that this is kind of the default way that they communicate with each other they just like explain stuff at each other that they don't understand very well and it's kind of interesting to sit on the side and watch because no one knows what they're talking about but they're all like performing knowing what they're talking about and and that's it's not like malicious on their part

it's just how they just how they interact with people to some extent so some people explore ideas by speaking about them so hold on you got to tell us more about this group who are these people are they talking about politics it's everything that you could talk about without knowing a lot about so like politics sports religion like i don't know new technical facts or i don't know fun fun technology ideas culture things electric cars just stuff you can talk about okay all right yeah but but i think that's the way some people work things out okay they just they just say stuff the way they discover truth is by saying it out loud and seeing how people react yeah kind of i think so i mean seems pretty reasonable i mean this is what we did before

we had science it worked for thousands of years yeah why change now it worked for exactly 7 000 years according to those people yeah yeah i think so i guess my point is it might be you could you could look at this behavior and ascribe it to ill intent of someone just being a blowhard but it could be just yeah just brainstorming stuff i don't know how you deal with it though if you feel like it's negatively affecting you that's where we come in we're gonna solve this for you Oh, okay. Erase that last sentence I said about not knowing how to help from the mind. I mean, to get actual help, you have to go to the Slack community. But I was going to say that you said they don't have ill intent.

And I think here it's the question asker says he overpowers me in conversation unwittingly. And then later he corrects himself if he finds out that he said something incorrect. This is great. Yeah, I feel like they're above average. Yes. If they notice that they are wrong. For the people that I know that act like this in meetings, they don't do those things. They don't come back and correct themselves later.

Yeah, they will die before they admit that they said a thing that was wrong and it was them saying it and it is wrong. Exactly. So this is like, first of all, this is great. I think you just need to accept that this is not a terrible situation. But now you still have to figure out how to navigate it. But, oh, man, it is so much harder when they're like, what do you mean I was wrong? No, I wasn't. I meant exactly what turned out to be true.

I never said that. Yeah, exactly. That's when your strategy of never taking notes in meetings bites you. Exactly. So that's good. But now how do you become, I guess the fundamental question is here is how do you become expressive enough that you can both be heard in meetings and be trusted by others to come to you and actually develop like an expert rapport? what i would like to be true is that you just quietly do a really good job and it happens yes well that is the law honestly that is the long game here yeah that's true to some extent

but you're also kind of hoping that you're in a place where being a good actor is rewarded and kind of just doing doing good work will work out for you in other words not being a good actor being a good yeah i know you i know that the context you meant actor is different than i'm taking it wrong on purpose, but this other person is an actor, right? Yeah. I know what you mean though. It's much funnier when you explain the joke. Thank you for helping. Have I said anything else that you were wondering if it was a joke? I'd be happy to explain that too. I guess, yeah, you're putting a lot of trust in a company whose job is to make money at all costs. True. Not live up to your trust what do you do in the short term or what do you do to help that along maybe

maybe they're not yeah i don't know maybe you don't have to be totally cynical about it but you just say like i want my good quiet work to be quietly recognized by everyone loudly yeah i mean can if you are not an inherently expressive person and and by the way i am a very expressive person so i tend to be that person in the meeting who is a little bit more talkative than everyone else and i i tend to kind of raise the energy level a little bit and honestly this this frustrates people and i've seen it in fact about 10 years ago or so i was working at a company and it was an extremely engineering oriented culture like the entire management hierarchy was all engineers and we're talking capital e engineers here not not software

developers like there's a bunch of electrical engineers who ran the company and i remember one of them at one point said something about meeting decorum and discussing something and he said and i was in the room he said the last thing we want is a bunch of dave smiths running around here and he was specifically referring to my kind of gregarious expressive nature in group settings and he's right like there's a certain balance to be struck here i think where you have people that are just over expressive to the point that they actually say false crap and then on the other hand on the other end of that spectrum you have people that are so quiet that they seem unapproachable that they don't say true crap right exactly

so this doesn't help you directly actually maybe it will this is where the role of a facilitator comes into play a skilled facilitator will know the communication styles of people in the meeting and will know that hey quality wolf often has good ideas but doesn't jump in to express them or sometimes waits for all the data to come in. And so sometimes we don't get their insights as much. So I need to reach out to them and make sure that they're involved by asking them specific direct questions.

Yes. That's a thing that a manager could do or someone running the meeting, but that also depends on that person knowing you well and being willing to kind of get the best out of you by pulling it. So are you saying you could like hire a contractor to come in and do that job in your meetings?

Yeah, hire your own personal meeting facilitator for you. who just speaks up only for you though yeah exactly you could approach a manager about that though and say hey i'd love some support in these meetings there is something here about i i don't want to speak up until i have all the data i will let people know if i'm uncertain it makes claims without gathering all the data i do think that's a valuable valuable perspective to have but there are times when anecdote is it's not data but it is useful for determining direction like every every scientific study started off with an anecdote and then someone went like huh i should look into that more you know yeah so i don't know that you have to have everything 100 proved out

before you say it it can be very useful to have data to back up what you say but you can also contribute without all of the data just from your your experience and insight does that make sense it does and i think what you're saying is learn to express what you know and what could potentially be true even if it's multiple things and the uh confidence that you have in those things in other words, while Mr., I guess we don't have a name here, but the overpowering, overshadowing guy, while he's out there making these statements that are overstated, you could say, not in response to this person, but rather just on your own, you could say, look, these are the things that may be true. And in order to determine their truthfulness, we need to do the following

activities, you know, and just state like, what is known rather than just sitting quietly. Yeah, that's valuable too. Like it's valuable to have ideas and opinions thrown into discussion, even if they're not provably true especially um especially if a decision needs to be made for like a low impact reversible decision you know where it's like you know if you get this wrong it's not the end of the world so let's not let's not waste time deliberating isn't there another bezos thing about how if you wait until you know for sure you probably waited too long yeah that's in the theme of two-way and one-way doors okay is this something i should work on so this is all separate from kind of approachableness though this we've talked more about how do you

just contribute more of your own thoughts but very approachable to my due to my lack of expressiveness i don't know one one thing you could do if you're having a hard time expressing yourself because you feel uncertain you could actually express that uncertainty and so you could say i'm having a hard time giving you an answer because i have uncertainty about x y and z you know and then that that sometimes can be a very useful answer and that might actually bridge this gap of approachability i wonder if there's also some just kind of like discomfort with small talk or or kind of interpersonal interactions in general which is a very real thing that lots of people have sure and i think that's a thing you can get better at with practice to some people

it comes very naturally yeah and it turns out those are extroverts and people who who kind of set a lot of the communication ground rules i guess that's true so it can feel like you're you're just playing in someone else's game and you don't understand the rules and you just lose all the time because they've been practicing their whole lives and you don't know how to put on the equipment right or whatever yeah your helmet's on backwards introvert yeah that's they've got introvert written all over them jerseys on inside out and introvert is on the inside of the jersey that's right of course this metaphor but there are things you can do to practice getting more comfortable with people and communicating more more fluidly with people even in non like

information gathering communication like if you're in a meeting where you're presenting something that's one style of communication but it feels like quality wolf is saying like i just kind of don't i don't know i don't like chit chat with people well so i've seen kind of standoffish yeah a book that i've waffled back and forth on recommending to people is how to win friends and influence people it's kind of the classic about this it has some weird stuff too but it's an interesting insight into like what might make people get along with you better i guess but there's a million of them out there you should create like a 21st century version of how to win friends and influence people that takes out some of the awkward like 1960s culture yeah i think

it's older than that it's the 20s oh my gosh it's a century old it's time for a refresh how to win sponsorships and influence followers for the instagram age step one tight tight tight yoga pants those apply both to to any yeah anyone anyone looks good in tight yoga pants that is so true and you trust their technical advice more turns out if they've got strong quads so what do you think about like in a meeting context where your co-worker is out spouting falsehoods that you don't actually know if they're true yet because you you feel uncertain because you need to go do some homework on it oh yeah i totally forgot they're on the project with them yeah so it's like it's like he's speaking for you

too yeah in a sense so yeah is it appropriate like you don't have enough okay so i've got an idea here but like you don't have enough information to actually shoot the idea down to say like well here's data that says that's not right but you do have one piece of information which is your own uncertainty about it and i have found that it can be pretty effective to say in a meeting i don't share your enthusiasm for this for this information i don't think it's i don't share your confidence in this and that can be done diplomatically and carefully so that you don't completely just you know crap all over this person's this person's ideas but i think in some cases that can be a very good thing to do to at least participate in the conversation and make

sure that your viewpoint is heard i have had sort of this problem i worked with someone who is very bright and very expressive and extroverted and they basically dominated any meeting that they were in so that it it became a planning session for them to tell other people about their good smart idea that they figured out in the meeting and and have them go do it and it was really frustrating for me because i don't often generate good ideas in meetings i feel like i need to kind of sit back and work at the problem and wrestle with it myself a little bit which i think is true for most people there's some research into that that meetings are good for kind of giving feedback on ideas but not as good at generating them anyways so any meeting i would i would be in

with this person would just be them kind of just racing ahead because they're smart and had a lot of context but but they were really bad at bringing people along or getting feedback or input from others so it's i think eventually they left the company and i don't didn't didn't work with them anymore so that solved it in one way but another way that it was solved is we developed this strategy of saying like okay that's a cool idea just because you had this idea first doesn't mean like that's what's going to happen we have to kind of take this back and think about it and come up with some alternative solutions as well so kind of like slowing it down a little bit and reining it in because i i bet sometimes your co-worker has good things that he says yeah so

you don't want to just clamp down on him completely but yeah kind of kind of in line with what you said i like that and i think people might be tempted to poo-poo the notion of slowing down the idea train you know it's like well hey we're innovative and we move fast here but in reality i have felt this myself where i have some idea and the temporal proximity of that idea having had it just a few minutes ago has great influence over my thinking about that idea and it's like this is so important it's got that new idea smell exactly exactly and so many times in my career i have come back to an idea that for whatever reason got sidelined maybe by accident and i I look at it two weeks later and I realize, yeah, you know, this isn't that important.

Yeah. All the time that happens. Yeah. There's also most of the projects I have wasted the most time on have been because I jumped in too fast to doing them instead of spending more time thinking about them ahead of time. So it can always feel tempting. Like you're losing time. You could be spending implementing the thing if you think more and talk more about it.

But I think in general, that usually pays off pretty well to step back a little bit and think a little bit more, especially if you're not really comfortable with what's being decided or discussed. Another technique that you can use is you can start asking questions in these scenarios. So your coworker is throwing out ideas as if they were facts, but you think they're not. And you could just ask some simple follow-up questions about them. And this could indirectly communicate to the rest of the group that these ideas are actually not that well-formed. And it could demonstrate to them that you are engaged in the decision-making and idea generation process. And you might just find that the meeting starts to turn toward you and include you a little bit more if you're asking questions.

And I don't mean basic questions like, what is that? I mean questions like, what will be the effect of your idea on X? Or have you considered Y? You know, questions like that. Keep those variables in there, too, because then it's generalized to everything. But have you considered X? Well, what is X? It's whatever you need it to be.

Whatever it needs to be so that I was right. one last thing i want to talk about is that there are different roles in teams and projects and i don't think it's too bad that you have a role of being more evidence-based and focused and this person seems a little more prone to flights of fancy okay i think those can work well together in some extent and you might need a little bit if you have people that just are focused purely on data, you might reach local maximums to some extent. And if you have people that are just kind of flying by the seat of their pants all the times, then it turns out you make bad decisions sometimes too that could have been prevented. So I think we've talked a lot about how to work

around this, but also there's probably some amount of appreciation for working with people that bring different skill sets and values. I support that. I've really come to appreciate that over the last couple of years, actually. And I think that a team that has people like this and also people like quality wolf quieter more analytical more deliberate and slower is a very can be a very effective team especially if there's someone to mediate it too yes all right have we answered the question i think so good luck let us know how it goes i will read our next question please do this comes from an anonymous listener who says hey jameson and dave i absolutely love your show and have listened to every episode you guys keep me company on those commutes to work and keep me

Insane. Thank you. That's good news. I sometimes worry we have the opposite effect. And drive me mad. Every quarter we have an organization-wide demo. Usually it's one person demoing the feature. Usually the person who has been working on it most recently.

For some of the features, I put in a lot of hard work and time into the feature, but was later moved off to another project after completing my part. Essentially, I wrote the foundation of the whole feature. however everyone has long forgotten that i ever contributed to it and i only found out it was even being demoed on the day of i feel really disappointed my efforts aren't recognized but is it too petty to care from a career standpoint i worry that the person demoing will get a lot more visibility from leadership and it will lead to faster career growth for them what are your thoughts thanks you are absolutely right 100 from a career standpoint it will lead to the person

demoing it getting more visibility from leadership yep as that is how it works and often career growth is tied to visibility for good or for ill that's yes that's a thing that goes into career growth value accomplishments more if they can put them in context and one useful context is like i know this person people how humans work people also value accomplishments more if they can see them yeah yeah exactly ways around this are lots of little easter eggs with your likeness in them So if all the comments in all the code have ASCII art of your face, that'll make sure the developers know who they owe this whole thing to. Whose shoulders they're standing on. Yeah, unless it's bad and they curse the name of the original developer.

Yeah, that can go either way. Yeah. I also thought about this a little bit, and there's some precedent here. So Kanye West crashed the stage during Taylor Swift's acceptance speech, you know? Okay. you could just crash the stage of the demo like hey that's a cool demo let me explain who really did this and just snatch the mic and walk through all the stuff that you did get lost because it's changed a lot since you saw it last there used to be a button here wrote the foundation for the

whole feature yeah that would work pretty well like it did for kanye he's doing fine there's also a precedent for in romantic comedy movies right like the wedding is happening and speak now or forever hold your peace and then someone stands up and says like i object and then so so you wouldn't even have to necessarily crash the stage for this one you just need to shout out from the audience very loudly like i built that and then i believe you have to marry your boss in this situation that's the rom-com conclusion yeah or at least chase your boss through the airport one of those two things yeah what do you do about it besides those things this is a tough one and a question occurred to me when i was reading this which is if this has happened multiple

times which is what i'm sensing why do you keep getting moved off projects before they get to a point of demonstratability or is it pronounced demonstrability demonstratability demon straight ability this is usually my thing to mispronounce words so i i'm totally lost i don't know if you don't know it demonstra stable it just keep adding consonants until it feels right yeah okay so but why like what why are you getting moved off these projects and not getting a chance to demo them because all the ultimate solution to this problem is you would be the one doing the demo but in order to do the demo, you have to be on the project. Are you like the tiger team that jump starts new projects and then moves on to other things? That's a good question. Maybe they're

really good at kind of like standing up projects and getting the initial infrastructure laid down and getting it off the ground. And they kind of hop from project to project doing that. Yeah, maybe. And maybe the answer is before when someone comes to you and says, okay, it's time for you to move on to the next project. You could say, okay, but I want to do a demo first. Yeah. Another thing I take from this question is that it's important to give copious amounts of credit to people that work on projects if you're in some position to demo them or take credit for them like it never hurts unless you work in a horrible place and then get out if it hurts to give credit to people that helped get out but it's kind of a pay it forward thing too if you have a culture of

giving credit clearly to recognize work that was done then this is less of a problem yeah because it's just kind of known that oh yeah anonymous listener helped lay all the foundation of this feature yeah and that's a pretty common practice in demos i've seen yeah maybe that's a piece of feedback for the demo that it should also include credit yeah so whoever's organizing this quarterly demo you can go to them and say hey as part of the demo we should recognize everyone who participated and make sure that the demonstrator person gives credit to everyone else i love that yeah and it might actually be weird if you if they know that you worked on a thing that you're not going to demo like they might be like okay sure we'll make sure everyone gets credit with

big air quotes around it. But if you make it clear, it'd say like, hey, I'm thinking about this because I worked on this, but there are other people in this situation too. Yeah. It would be easier to share this idea if you can identify the names of a handful of other people who are not getting credit. Yeah. That'd be awesome. From a career standpoint. I mean, yeah, that's, is there anything you can do about the career visibility thing once this demo has passed? Oh, that's a hard one. I have seen this behavior. I don't know if this is standard across everywhere, but there's like one unit of career growth in each project and and it gets like used up by the person that gets

that gets recognized for it first okay to some extent so like this project ships it someone gets a promotion for it and then like the the promotion juice is squeezed out you know out of that project meaning like no one else will get career credit yeah even if even if there were lots of contributors to it like if it comes up they'll be like yeah but this other person did we promoted him for it you know like yeah that's garbage by the way yeah it is it is horrible garbage we know that three of you worked insane hours on this project for six months but only one of you will get any credit yeah and to determine that you will all fight to the death yep that way the strongest survive right and our our culture is healthy that's right full of weak blood that

can't win in a knife fight we take natural selection very seriously here yeah i mean what could you do if you're worried about how do you get visibility on things besides this demo maybe that's the the question we should be asking yeah maybe maybe there's other vectors for you to get visibility maybe or maybe even within the demo i mean if this is quarterly and it's being organized by like across the whole organization then there's probably some amount of coordination that goes into it up front and if you could tap into that process and figure out ahead of time what's being demoed you could somehow work your credit in somehow i don't know it's hard it's hard not to come across as the greedy you know grubby person who's trying to get their name on

everything but yeah but surely knowing that your stuff is going to be demoed beforehand could give you some way like maybe you could offer to help you could say oh hey i see you're demoing this can i help you get some demo data together can i help you you know script the the the demo that you're going to do and then they have to credit you right like it's much more likely that person will credit you if you actually help put the demo i mean if you make their slides then you just add your name exactly exactly hey do you need someone to do your slides note all of this work was done by anonymous listener and they make sure they're a really bad presenter so they just read the slides right and if you you know if you do do the slides go ahead and put a little plug for our podcast in

them we would appreciate that but the real inspiration of this feature was from the soft skills engineering that's right the reason i put my name on this slide link to the patreon hey we've got careers to grow too you know you're not the only one yeah this is interesting i think other stuff we could talk about is kind of more general career growth or visibility advice i remember dave you talked about was it someone that wrote a newsletter about stuff that they had done was this i feel like i remember you talking about this in an old episode that someone would just periodically write about like here's what i've got going on here's like for the company within the company i think so i feel like this is a thing

you said i think i said that i would really appreciate it if like our leadership would do that oh okay yeah another thing to do is so we've talked about this before but julia evans has a blog post called write a brag document and it's basically a log for yourself of cool things that you have done that are worth note because people are very biased towards recency as you can see from here like you didn't work on the feature recently so you didn't show up in the demo it's important to note down when you do things that you did things that are cool because yeah often in promotion discussions or performance reviews part of the input that you give will be like what i did and if all you can think of is what happened last week then that's rough but if

you have if you have this written down like hey i helped contribute to this feature that got demoed then it's easier to carry that forward and and that will give some visibility to leadership and by the way the end of the calendar year is a really good time to do that which serendipitously is right now as we record this and i i have taken on an annual tradition myself of recount just from my own knowledge writing down all the things i worked on the contributions i made and what i learned from each project that i worked on that's such a cool idea i am so astonishingly unreflective about my past like i wish i was better at stuff like that because i just put my head down and do things and then wake up five years later yeah like stuff has happened and i'm i couldn't name

one of those things i also wish i was better at it because honestly i hate it and i always feel better when it's done and i look over and go hey that's pretty cool but the idea of sitting down and doing it is just kind of nauseating to me yeah you've inspired me i'll do it okay get past the nausea okay i've got this garbage can next to my desk just in case yeah well have we answered the question i think so good luck i think your instincts are spot on here and hopefully we gave you some ideas to try to get through this and get things not get through this that's totally the wrong thing to say it's like some illness they have we can beat this thing together i don't care what the doctors say fight the good fight yeah

stay strong what can people do if they want their own advice dave go wait well just ask yourself i guess okay if they want their questions answered on this podcast what can they do go to soft skills dot audio and click ask a question you can fill out as much as little information as you like thank you so much to everyone who's asked questions we really appreciate it if you want to support the show go to soft skills dot audio and click support us on patreon you can also write a rating and review on the apple podcast and share us on twitter thank you so much catch you next week