Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 194: Leveling up through speaking and negativity

Episode Date: January 27, 2020

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Hey friends, thanks for such an entertaining show, I look forward to it every week. My question relates to ‘leveling up’ as a developer. I’ve been getting nice feedback for my work on projects and the blog post updates I’ve been writing along the way. This has been noticed by colleagues, managers and the local meetup organising committees in my city. I have now been asked to speak at a number of events internally and in the community. While I am very flattered they enjoy my writing I am not interested in hitting the local ‘speaking circuit’ and would prefer to focus on building, writing and mentoring without getting up on stage. Is it ‘ok’ to say no to speaking when it simply does not spin my wheels or is this a mandatory ‘thing’ I must get on board with to progress my career? I am a tech lead on a team where, for the most part, people are friendly, optimistic and professional. There is one engineer who is mostly upbeat and has shown real potential but in certain contexts, e,g, retros and the odd technical conversation becomes a crippling black hole of negativity. The person in question is quite young, relative to the rest of the team, has only ever worked at our company, they are well compensated and have great opportunities to work on exciting green field projects, every developers dream right? What could I be missing? I don’t want to lose this person but I can’t help but feel that they need to grow in maturity and somehow, despite pointed feedback, that’s not happening here. What do you think I should do to stop the chronic pessimism, which I’m afraid if not rectified soon will lead to more victims?

it takes more than memorizing the order of the crontab fields to be a great engineer this is soft skills engineering episode 194 i'm your host dave smith i'm your host jameson dance soft skills engineering is a weekly advice podcast for software developers and we occasionally dabble in cron jobs i just put one for all of them that seems to do the trick the first minute of the first day of the first year i couldn't tell you what it does except works if in doubt just put stars for everything there are two values of crontab fields it's star or zero yeah anything else mysterious magic yeah start putting slashes in there and what sorcery is this slashes in my cron in my zero or star field

all right i want to thank our wonderful patrons who have donated at the level where we shout them out every single week and as a bonus this week they get to hear me read their names in a sick voice which is worth more i guess so you're welcome thank you to brayden canes chris hogan Dennis Bogdanov, Ivor Robotnik, John Grant, Luis Santos, Luke Bayliss, Matthew Wojtowicz, Nick Kantar, Philip John Basile, The Agile Ventures Charity,

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to people who will support in the future. You will continue to help keep the show going. So thanks. You can go to our website, softskills.audio. click support us on patreon and that'll take you to the place to do that and if you do it you get to join our wonderful slack what is it called again slack cult pod slack pod our slack flock a flock of slack where fantastic people give good advice and are nice to each other it's great hey this episode is sponsored by veteri veteri is an online marketplace where

you can find employers who are interested in you it's free for job seekers and you'll be hearing more about them later if you want to quit your job which we don't talk about quitting your job that much anymore we should we should bring that back yeah it's like a sine wave thing yeah we're in a trough right now but if you if it's time to quit your job then veteri is the place to go all right jameson would you read our first question absolutely this is from an anonymous listener hey friends thank you for such an entertaining show i look forward to it every week my question relates to leveling up as a developer. I've been getting nice feedback for my work on projects

and the blog post updates I've been writing along the way. This has been noticed by colleagues, managers, and the local meetup organizing committees in my city. I have now been asked to speak at a number of events internally and in the community. While I am very flattered they enjoy my writing, I am not interested in hitting the local speaking circuit and would prefer to focus on building, writing,

and mentoring without getting up on stage. Is it okay to say no to speaking when it simply does not spin my wheels, or is this a mandatory thing i must do to progress my career huh so you write these blog posts you could just read those on stage dramatic reading maybe you got built-in talks just just print them out and read them yeah that seems good no slides needed you could print them on little note cards so you look really professional yeah instead of a piece of paper anything that's on note cards the same content versus on a piece of paper seems better and then you know if you want to embellish

a little you can do like the talk show hosts do where they have a note card and then when they're done with it they just kind of fling it off stage you know one card at a time maybe you'll print out your website and then you accidentally read like the twitter embed codes or the copyright notices yeah the copyright notices the cookie notification acceptance thing all that stuff the belligerent popover and in conclusion this website uses cookies please hit accept to acknowledge that would be the best ending to a talk actually that would be the best beginning to a talk yeah you have to read the newsletter pop-up because that's first on the on every website please yell your email address to me right now to subscribe to my newsletter

i promise you won't get spammed you'll only get fresh content from this blog and it's impossible to dismiss without signing up without giving a valid yeah you have to read all the dark patterns out loud you say except i want to broaden my perspective or no i am a crude philistine who loves to play in dirt and we'll have a shorter lifespan oh my gosh that is so true just wait we should make we should have oh jameson april fool's day is coming up and i have some ideas for our website oh yeah okay yeah yeah man okay now that we've got our web design plan set up for april let's get back to the question yeah i think it's great that you've been writing i feel like writing can scale i mean they're different mediums so i guess they

do different things. But in general, I feel like the average blog post, well, I don't know. I'm spouting nonsense. I like it when people write and I like reading blog posts more than I like watching talks. So writing can scale fairly well and it's easy to share. I think you're doing something right there already. Yeah, like if you're reviewing code for someone and you get to link your own blog post, that's pretty powerful. I've heard of someone saying that Because I tweeted about how it stokes my ego. Yes. Yeah, that was an interesting moment in life.

Yeah, so I think writing is great. And I feel like I know a lot of people who write very well. And that's why I follow them. Although they all give talks too. But I don't watch their talks as much as I read their stuff. Yeah, I feel like watching a talk video requires a level of engagement that I just don't usually have to offer, you know? Yeah, I'll sit down to watch a talk and the shattered remnants of my attention span will last about five minutes. And then I'm like, I wonder what's on any other thing in the world. And then I'll tab over to some other sites and be like, yeah, it's important that I read Reddit while I play this technical talk. that's right that'll really help me capture the message i just don't have the attention span to

watch technical talks i'll put them on 2x and be like okay this is a more efficient use of my time and then get to the end and realize i didn't understand anything but i got nothing out of it twice as fast that's right well you wasted half the time getting nothing out of it i think talks are good for like inspiration and kind of big picture things and pointing me to things that I didn't know existed, but I don't get a ton of value from like, here's this specific technical problem or things like that. Yeah. I recently heard a term that I think sums up what you just said very well. And I'm going to sound like kind of a jerk saying this, not jerk, but self-inflating, but I've been listening to some MIT computer science lectures. And I know right

off the bat, that makes me sound like a turd, but this one professor said that speaking is good for exposing people to ideas. Writing is good for informing people about things. And so he called it expositional versus informational. That's interesting. Yeah. And it's like that totally rang true with me because all the conference talks I've attended or watched online, I feel like they just dip their toes in the water of the topic. And then if I really want to go deep, that's where you have to read. So your blog posts are probably helping more to inform anyway. So they might have a deeper impact so i run a couple conferences i have a vested interest in this format continuing to exist and i will say that i think talks communicate the feeling of an idea or the

excitement behind it much better than a blog post like i never read a blog post and then i'm like so pumped to go try out a thing i'll kind of be stroking my chin and saying huh but great talks make me like excited and i'm like cheering and clapping and and like just happy to be in the industry getting to be around people smart like this so there's some amount of kind of community and and emotional engagement that happens in talks yeah i feel that i i think is hard to get across in the written word and maybe you probably have to be a much better writer kind of like the average talk compared to the average blog post you'll get a much more emotion out of the average talk does that make sense well i think it depends on how many animated gifs the blog post has yeah i mean

those have leaked into talks quite a bit too that's true they've kind of replaced jokes it's like here's a space where a joke would go instead look at this image moving pictures yeah like see i i copied that in so i am funny i know yeah i'm not the biggest fan of that trend i've yeah i've become less less of a fan myself they're kind of gimmicky but we are drifting the question is will will this person's career benefit by giving talks or be harmed by not giving talks or neither i don't think it'll be harmed i think it could benefit i know several examples of people who have given talks and it has kind of led to them having a higher profile in the industry and in general that gives you more options to to get jobs and and exposes you to more people and

expands your network but some of the best most talented developers i know have never given a talk at a conference and never will and right are very competent and capable and have great careers and may never even attend a conference yeah i mean there's this whole separate track of of like developer social stuff versus career stuff and conference speaking absolutely catapults you forward or on the like developer social side okay and that like sometimes correlates with career but sometimes doesn't if you want more twitter followers giving a talk is great that's true that that actually is totally true if you if you want to meet like developer famous people giving a talk is great because those people are all at conferences yep and you might work with

them someday i've given yeah i've given talks and then people have been like people have approached me about working with them or working at their company i'm kind of amazed by that because you have no idea what like i don't know you have no idea how much i practice for this this is not like my natural state this is this is polished jameson right and watch me struggle to like stack overflow something that's that's the real world if i could practice stack overflowing something for 100 hours i'd be really good at that too but i'm just thinking of you standing at a whiteboard in an interview after giving this great talk and they're like wow based on how good of a talk he gave i expected him to balance this binary tree much more efficiently yeah give me 100 hours practicing and

thinking about it and then i will and i'll tell funny jokes while it happens and i'll put it in context of our our industry and give historical anecdotes yep and some great gifts yeah i'll just draw them out frame by frame on the whiteboard wow i've never seen such a hilarious binary tree being balanced so my my experience has been somewhat similar but different than yours so i was going back and counting i have given 12 talks at what i would consider major conferences that have beyond just a local audience and i have also had a great career so far there's still time for that to turn around but i can't of all the major career milestones in my in my professional life where i've you know for example changed jobs or upgraded or leveled up i can't say that any of

them had been directly influenced by giving a talk i'm thinking through my career i think the benefits i've gotten have been a larger network but i don't think i have the job i have because someone saw my talk yeah i think it made it's made it easier in some ways to hire and easier to kind of like bounce ideas off of people i don't think it's hurt but yeah i don't know i think we're kind of landing on the same place where if you really don't want to do it it's probably not going to be a huge yeah barrier to you yeah also what you mentioned 12 times there are some people that speak like 20 times in a year at least like they're i know it's wild to me how how prolific some developers are in the speaking circuit and i think that can kind of maybe anchor your

expectations for what it's supposed to be like where lots of those people it's their job to do that right or they're burning out those are the two options either they're burning themselves out or they have a job where speaking is part of it right yeah so like for example developer evangelists are often paid by their companies and incentivized to go to a certain number of conferences and speak per year as like a goal KPI or something. Yeah. A few other categories of folks who do this are authors, people who write books and then go to conferences to talk about kind of like to sell books basically. Right. You know, that's pretty common. People who are in the training industry like to do this. It's great marketing for their training business. And I've also noticed that a

lot of founders will get on the conference and meetup circuit as a recruiting effort and kind of a hiring brand development which i think is really effective for them yeah but for like a line level software engineer who gives a few talks a year at meetups and maybe even at big conferences i think it can benefit your career but it i don't think it will hurt to not do it so i think that's kind of where i was actually hoping we would disagree on this but it sounds like we're landing i think we've landed at the same spot i think it's a positive thing but it's not a blocker for your career to not speak otherwise there would be a lot of people with bad careers because i would say probably like 99 of developers don't speak at conferences and yeah they're still fine yep cool

well did we answer the question trying to think my my boss has never spoken at a conference i'm pretty sure i guess i could ask them and i don't think any of my peer managers have spoken at conferences yeah yeah most of the people in my org haven't spoken at conferences and there has nothing to do with how good of developers they are or how valued they are professionally well I feel like I was going to, I was going to go the other direction. I feel like I was going to push for it more for your career benefit. It certainly can benefit. I guess that's, that's the thing I keep coming back to, but it's not a requirement. Yeah. So it's, it's neither necessary nor sufficient, but, but possible. Yeah. I mean, if you give a really bad talk, it could hurt your

career probably. Yeah. I think I actually do know people whose careers have been harmed by bad talks where they, they say things they should not have said. Sure. Like they get offensive or something. I guess that's the big one. Offend people. Say dumb things that, yeah, they shouldn't have said. Those are pretty rare, too. Yep. I actually think that people who speak a lot, especially at some of these invitation-only conferences, I think speaking at these conferences is more a reflection of an impactful, successful career. In other words, you've got cause and effect reversed here, where they've had a great career, therefore they speak, not they spoke, therefore they get a good career. Not all the time, but some conferences are like that.

yeah yeah where they they bring in big names basically yeah that's true but if you're being invited to share your ideas with local meetups and conferences this is a very good sign for your career it means people trust you it means you probably have good judgment and you've done good work and people want you to have a bigger impact if you say no i don't think it'll hurt you but this is great like you are on track for success and this is fantastic i got it you need a very finicky demanding writer i will do it if i am picked up by a hovercraft and on that hovercraft there are four different flavors of lacroix all out of production yeah go dig them up and the projector i don't know the day quill is kicking in yeah it only projects red

and it's it's portrait mode not landscape look yeah just throw throw out these requirements and if someone says yes i mean that's fantastic you could really have a lot of fun with that i will only present in vr all the audience members have to wear goggles i will be there in person but if anyone takes the goggles off i will leave immediately the talk is over you must provide the goggles i love it This is a great idea. Okay, now I feel like we've really answered the question. Hey, Jameson, before we go on to our next question,

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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 better you get 300 bucks thank you so much to for sponsoring the show all right do you want to read our next question yes this comes from an anonymous peregrine falcon did i say peregrine correctly peregrine i don't know i don't think i've ever said that word an anonymous peregrine falcon says i am a tech lead on a team where for

the most part people are friendly optimistic and professional there is one engineer who is mostly upbeat and has shown real potential but in certain contexts for example retrospectives and the odd technical conversation, becomes a crippling black hole of negativity. The person in question is quite young, relative to the rest of the team, has only ever worked at our company, they are well compensated, and have great opportunities to work on exciting Greenfield projects. Every developer's dream, right? What could I be missing? I don't want to lose this person, but I can't help but feel that they need to grow in maturity and somehow, despite pointed feedback, that's not happening here. What do you think I should do to stop the chronic pessimism, which I'm afraid, if not

rectified soon will lead to more victims it's like a zombie outbreak yeah one zombie but soon you have more as zombies bite other people pessimism zombies yeah they only eat positive optimistic brains yeah i guess when they turn cynical and jaded that can kill a team yeah this is strange though because it like the stereotype of this is that you have the old curmudgeon on the team who was always complaining yeah and here we have the young the young curmudgeon yeah it's a little bit of a reversal i mean one thing you could try is just verbally complaining about how negative they are just fight fire with fire i mean yeah make the black hole bigger have more mass to it get into the orbit i don't know how

astrophysics works is that what happens yes i mean so you talk about how good the developer has it in my experience this is kind of like a back in my day you kids have it so good we didn't we had to flip our bits by hand all that kind of stuff that i have not seen that be effective in combating pessimism or negativity especially if it's around like the tech that they're working with right now saying it used to be worse right can kind of invite a blow-up where they're like you're you're okay with the status quo and and you're why it's so bad and i don't know just just create more frustration because you're not resolving their negative negativity and you're not resolving the thing that they're feeling negative about you're just saying suck it up

it turns out people don't respond well to that the thing that will say suck it up to this person is life like they'll go on to more jobs and they'll see worse things and better things and get more experience and then realize oh like it wasn't so bad at job one and then they'll they'll become more calm but trying to push that through i don't think will be very effective right now so you're saying don't tell them to stop complaining no i'm saying don't don't say like oh you should you should hear about i don't know soap or whatever whatever like thing that isn't in use anymore that was worse in your mind if you think this is bad let me tell you about mumps sometimes smart young people feel like they need to prove themselves and they have this ego about

how uh they know everything and they need to make sure everyone knows that they know everything And one way that manifests is in being critical. And by criticizing what you see around you, you're putting yourself above it. Basically, you're saying like, I know this is wrong and dumb. I would never have done this. Or like, I recognize this is bad, which means I am better than this. So there could be just some of that inherent in being a smart young person. I think what you can do to combat it is help them recognize the effect this might have

on the team. because presumably if they're upbeat and have shown real potential and is smart and friendly and optimistic in general they want to do a good job and they probably want the team to be doing good work and if you can show them the way that you're expressing concerns is harming the team and is is causing these effects if you can point to if you can say like this person got sad the other day or like this project is late because of it or something like that then i think that might wake them up a little bit to this being more than just you telling them to cheer up or you ignoring their valid concerns or something like that that is that sounds very wise it's the cold

it makes me sound even more wise we need to get you some head colds more often i'm gonna start sending you a letter every month just just go ahead and open it take a deep whiff yeah what you said really resonated with me because i was a young sharp critical engineer you know 20 years ago or whatever it was and i think i was a lot less disciplined with my words back then like i didn't stop to think about what impact they had on other people and that is probably the thing that's going on here i mean setting aside some deeper issues that i think we can talk about in a few minutes i it's very possible this person uh sees problems and just immediately spouts off about them and doesn't realize that what they're doing is actually kind of toxic

yeah yeah that's a good point when i was doing it a lot of it was because i didn't have context around why it had gotten that way and i also didn't have any understanding of cost where i thought that no one had noticed and and yeah by my smart good brain pointing out hey this thing is painful everyone would just be like you're right jameson we had never realized this was bad and let me type this one oh it's fixed all i had to do is type that and we just didn't because we didn't point it out thank you thank you for pointing that out yeah exactly oh you're so smart how do we get along this long without you pointing out this was bad but usually they're hard fixes yeah and it takes a lot of effort to fix them and um by just complaining about them without

helping fix them or providing solutions and helping weigh those against the cost of those solutions you're just like putting more negative pressure without without doing anything to improve the situation and like pain is a good is a valid signal that you shouldn't ignore but you have to have context around the pain i guess one of the things that the question says is that they've given pointed feedback but the behavior continues and i i mean i think there's two possible explanations for this either one the feedback was kind of harmful like we were describing earlier something that didn't resonate with the with the person or two they heard the feedback they understood it it was good and well delivered but there's something deeper going on here

like maybe this person has some kind of deeper seated behavioral problem that actually needs to be treated you know or somehow managed by a professional and i wouldn't rule that out like i wouldn't start with that but i wouldn't rule that out either i feel like see a therapist is is kind of the new quit your job where we could answer a lot of questions by go to therapy go to therapy go to therapy yeah go to therapy change is hard and it's also possible that they heard the feedback and said yeah okay i'll try and then it's they've just been doing this for a while and their life and and yeah it's instinctual now yeah giving feedback once doesn't necessarily mean that it's going to be followed and received so you might find yourself giving the same feedback

repeatedly for for a longer period of time and i don't think that's bad yeah i mean i don't think it's bad of you i don't know i guess it depends on how long it goes on about what it says about this person but yeah you should probably expect to give the same feedback several times especially for things like this that seem more kind of deep-seated I guess yeah yeah I think so then then specific skill gaps or things like that well I got nothing I got nothing else what if just every time this person spouts negativity in a meeting you just like bubble with positive comments just fight it you know I really appreciate that our test suite is flaky because it helps me appreciate that nothing in life is really certain and I gotta take take time to acknowledge the

good times while they happen because they could go away at any moment yeah thanks flaky tests and a bonus i get so much time to think about them because it takes 40 minutes to run that's 40 minutes of meditation time every day several times a day just gotta look on the bright side of the flaky slow test suite so earlier i suggested fighting fire with fire this is fighting fire with water yeah and that works better in real life all right well have we answered the question i think we have good luck listener good luck anonymous peregrine falcon oh i looked up how to say peregrine and i already forgot i think it was peregrine oh let me look it up again pronunciation how come it's gone it worked last time oh i was

right it is peregrine peregrine okay peregrine yeah they learned nice what should people do if they want their own questions answered dave well don't worry about pronouncing stuff and just go over to softskills.audio and click ask a question. You can fill out our little form there. Thank you so much to everyone who has asked questions in the past. We really appreciate it. And thank you to Vetteri for sponsoring this episode. If you are planning to quit your job, go hit up vetteri.com, fill out a profile, and wait for employment opportunities to roll in. Catch you next week.