Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 197: Rambling co-worker and awkward resume leak

Episode Date: February 17, 2020

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Help! I have a co-worker who can’t get to the point. They keep rambling, throwing in useless jargon, with veiled bragging of their knowledge and accomplishments, and answering questions that weren’t asked; and all in a very monotone voice. My brain starts to zone out now every time they start in to “explain” something. They also somehow survived at the company for 8+ years and have recently become a team lead. Our paths don’t cross every day because we work on separate products, but I am interested in their team’s product and might want to join them in a year or so. What do I do? Listener Zezima asks, Hi! I’ve been at my current job for about a year and a half now. My boss says we should be getting more money and investors and will soon give everyone a raise. I’ve seen many people being hired and others given a raise but have not yet received one myself. I recently started applying to other jobs. I don’t want to leave but want to learn my market value and get a slight increase. I was demoing some work in a meeting, and sharing my screen to do so. As I went to upload an image…. my RESUME file is open. resume,coverletter,resumeadobe,resumeTesla. I mashed the cancel button and bounced in to panic mode but continued like nothing happened. I hear some typing shortly after closing. Did they see it? Are they talking about me…? Do they know I dont want to leave but just want some sort of compensation? These questions are going through my brain and I have no clue what to do. Should I call up the people in the demo and have a heart to heart?

it takes more than writing a bunch of codes to automatically silence the alerts generated by the other code that you wrote to be a great engineer this is episode 197 of the soft skills engineering podcast i'm your host jameson dance i'm your host and alarm creator dave smith i'm the alarm reaper i silenced them soft skills engineering is a weekly advice show where we answer your non-technical questions about the technical field of software development it does feel like you could get into this cycle of it's it'd be like an arms race oh yeah then the people who want the alerts to get through would find new ways to deliver them yeah and you have to find new ways to block them listen i'm not getting out of bed for anybody i mean this the way this arms race

ends for the alarm creators is they end up like implanting something in you while you're sleeping that you can't silence physical alarms yeah it's like am i the only one hearing that buzzing sound i don't hear anything it sounds like our pager that's weird it's the same notification sound but it's coming from my elbow i mean i guess there's another thing you could do which is make it so your stuff isn't broken but that sounds harder yeah do you want to thank our patrons yes thank you to those folks who are supporting us on patreon we have some one-time shout outs because it's the beginning of the month they are john george sample antonio pitasi austin carried tomas uncle iroh and the nicelander

and big shout out to our weekly shout outers who donate at the level where they get shouted out every week they are vinlock matthew voidovich taras haruk luke bayless zach grannon louis santos stanley tactical radio chris hogan ivor robotnik braden canes philip john basile steven armand lee john grant nick cantar ted nugent the agile ventures charity maple syrup sonic the hedgehog travis dennis bogdanov sean and evgeny sladkowski if you would like to support the show you can go to softskills.audio and click support us on patreon and if you do we will send you an invitation to our slack cult i don't know why yep i need to figure out i think we renamed it yeah uh which has upward of 200 folks on it now a lot of people coming in and

all kinds of interesting conversations and discussions and challenging questions and some hilarity occasionally so if you'd like to join them you can donate at any amount greater than zero us dollars i am going to share a thing that a listener shared with us so in episode 190 we talked about a github repo stored on the cto's home server and listener anton shared this on twitter at my first job the web app was hosted at the ex-developer's home server i only learned that when the app was down i was troubleshooting with no luck then i reached out to him and it turned out that the shelf that the server was in fell down that's so pure yeah just think i'm just thinking about the post-mortem like five whys why did the shelf fall down

well the shelf fell down because i used sheetrock screws that were not rated for the weight of the server yeah i love the idea that the five wise analysis will end at building a very robust physical setup in the ex-developer's house like problem solved that's yeah thanks for sharing that okay do you want to read our first question dave yeah okay this comes from an anonymous listener who says hello i have a co-worker who can't get to the point they keep rambling throwing in useless jargon with veiled bragging of their knowledge and accomplishments and answering questions that weren't asked wait a minute is he talking about us like i think you just defined this podcast okay back to the question and all in a very monotone

voice oh okay that's not us my brain starts to zone out every time they start in to quote explain something they also somehow survived at the company for eight years and have recently become a team lead our paths don't cross every day because we work on separate products but i am interested in their team's product and might want to join them in a year or so what do i do so the initial part of the description i listened to a podcast called hardcore history and there's a series of episodes about kind of babylonian like ancient near eastern history like babylonians assyrians those kind of people and the records that have survived from then are all basically horrible kings bragging about how awful they've been to this other people

and it sounds like this it's like they have one sentence to say but they throw in a bunch of titles and accomplishments and records of deeds and yeah steve first of his name on his way to conquer the lowly qa department inventor of 15 open source projects closer of thousands of bugs feels like we need to get back to that just totally flagrant heralds were for yeah i mean they were like carving all this stuff in cuneiform on tablets too so the cost of it was higher they were forcing slaves to carve them into tablets and then killing them afterwards yeah that's true it costs someone a lot but it's easier now you can just type it into twitter yeah it's really a shame that twitter limits your profile string yeah i mean emojis are their own

language i guess you have to get your rambling and useless jargon and veiled bragging in through emojis oh boy have you dealt with someone like this before boy that's a question the question i was thinking is am i this person i have that too my note says am i the rambler this is my greatest fear oh yeah that your audience is just like oh jameson be quiet already yeah get it so i i heard a description of charisma which is that you are confident in taking up space in other people's heads and it's unsourced i can't remember where from but i have the opposite of this every time i start telling a story i immediately half my brain is like examining the audience and assuming oh they all hate this and i should just cut it off

halfway and they'll be like baffled by the point of it because it won't make any sense but at least i'll stop taking up their valuable time exactly so i think that means i'm so i'm too insecure to be the rambler okay i don't think i'm the rambler because i do okay well yes and no i do have a habit of saying oh i'm rambling and then just stopping and so i at least can identify so i self-police a little bit but but i guess back to your question which is actually the useful question which is how do i deal with people who ramble do you think they know like does the rambler know they're a rambler i don't think so and and i'll tell you one time i asked someone a question and they started to ramble and they probably went on for a minute and i stopped them in the middle of

their rambling and i restated my question and they just looked back at me and said yeah i know i'm getting to it and i was like oh let me get all my titles and accomplishments out of the way first it was like they felt like they needed to kind of lay all this groundwork but i thought they were going in a different direction or that i had given the question in such a way that they couldn't understand it you know they were like no i got it you just need to be patient so that didn't work very well but was this person a rambler generally or were you just impatient in this instance this particular person was a kind of a confusing speaker which i think is maybe a sister category to the rambler category where they okay they kind of speak in circles and

eventually it all comes together but it's like it's kind of like they put the pieces of the puzzle together in like a random order and then suddenly when they put the last piece in you're like oh you know yeah they were loquacious prone to chattering but not well i guess no that's the rambler because it's not going anywhere in this yeah question askers opinion it's just it's like a runaway train it's just started and it's going on its own it's fueled by bragging if you're like this is like some vc's nightmare of a rogue ai that's the ai produces technical nonsense yeah what do you do about so so you say you're saying um you tried to do something about it and it didn't work which was interrupt them yes i've worked with several different people

over my career who have varying levels of this some of them ramble because they're very excited and and they just have so much in their head that they're excited to get out and share with you and that's a little different because it's coming from a good place yeah and i feel like you probably need to have a lighter touch there because you don't want to crush someone's enthusiasm and and often the extra context turns out to be helpful but with someone who literally cannot get to the point yeah i don't know anything else besides interrupting them and and bringing them back on task it's helpful if you have a specific agenda if this happens in meetings then you can point back to the agenda and say hey how do we answer the question we're trying to answer here there

is kind of a power dynamic here though where i mentioned the rambler is a team lead like if you're a more junior person it's harder to interrupt someone more senior who's prone to rambling and say hey how do we solve the problem we're here to solve yeah and and you kind of touched on a theme there where the rambler is actually going off topic you know i think there's on topic rambling and there's off topic rambling and i have dealt with an off topic rambler once and i'm so not always like this but i try to be very gentle and sometimes i think i'm in this with this particular person i was so gentle that they didn't get it and so i'll say things like yeah that's a very that's a very important topic but in the context of this meeting i think we should

set that topic aside for later and they're like okay and then they keep talking about it and i'm like well too gentle there's also kind of a judgment call here because maybe to them that is the topic and yeah and and you're saying hey that's not what we're here to solve and they're saying no it is you can tell by all the words i'm saying did you not hear my titles yeah didn't you hear how many open source projects i have yeah so it's it's much easier if there's some shared expectation or agreement beforehand that you can point back to if it's kind of a vague exploratory conversation then part of exploring is kind of following tangents and it's it's harder you have to get consensus about what's worth pursuing or not and that's harder than saying hey we're here

to talk about thing x let's talk about thing x yeah like for example if your meeting title has the word brainstorming in it then that's just like a license yeah then license to ramble it's just yeah ramble city you have entered the ramble dome in the middle of ramble town yeah so so clearly defining let's see i mean what if you're not in a meeting with them and it's just you just stopped by to ask a question maybe you don't do that anymore yeah exactly i think i think certain ramblers will definitely alienate people over time because they'll realize i just don't have the time to invest in this simple one answer question that i need to ask yeah there's just there's so many different not so many different they're very different kinds of ramblers

and some some is i'm rambling now i'm going in circles i just want to say the thing i already said what kind are you oh no i mean there's people who ramble because they have so much information about the topic and they maybe haven't distilled it down into a summary or a context that will make sense for the listener they either don't have the time or the that skill set but if they literally can't communicate well i feel like you just gotta nudge them say hey i asked i don't know there's there's lots of various levels of rudeness to do this with but yeah start at the low levels and work up yeah here's here's what we're trying to solve let's talk about that or here's the question i ask can you answer that or i don't know there is one category of rambling

to which i belong which is i think i might be i might be perceived as a rambler when i do this but i actually think through problems by talking out loud sometimes ah and so you may come to ask me a question and if i haven't already thought about that question my answer might be a weird stream of consciousness that feels like a ramble but then we'll come down to a conclusion that's simpler yeah and i think a strategy for me is to try to like demarcate where in the conversation this is happening. So I might say like, okay, I need to think through this. Entering the Ramble Zone. Welcome to Ramble Town. This will just take a few minutes. Please be patient. And then I can say, okay, we've exited. We've now exited Ramble Town. It's in your rear view mirror. Here's the

two sentence conclusion. Write this part down and erase everything else. Yeah. Calling it out explicitly is so valuable because there are some people who don't think out loud at all and cannot do it and they were the way that they generate ideas or think through problems is on their own and if those two people if those two kinds of people mix generally the talkers win yes well yeah yeah if there's not some shared understanding of here's how these different people communicate so if if you know that about yourself and know that about other people it can really make communication a lot better i worked with someone who was the most extreme version of this i've ever seen both in willingness to kind of monopolize meetings to to talk through things and would get

pretty far ahead like was a very bright person so so the combination was most meetings with them where you sit down and listen to them figure out the solution and then they say here's what i figured out please go do this thing and it would have been a much more productive relationship if i could have identified that earlier and said hey i would like to collaborate but i can't just keep up with the raw like in the moment discussion and contribute so if you want my contributions beyond just doing the thing you said then i'll need some time to go away and think through this yeah but i didn't you just quit no they quit oh perfect they got so far ahead of you they quit before you could i'm much i'm much more cognizant of that now though like it was

a learning experience because i i had to sit down and figure out why was it so hard to work with that person they're really bright they're they're not a jerk like and and i think the key was this communication mismatch i think that i have been that person if only you were dumber then your ideas would your brain would move slower and then it'd be easier for other people to keep up yeah that would be great i don't mean to say that i'm smarter than other people but i have a pretty high like verbal processing velocity both input and output but, and I think I tend to, I tend to just confuse people and cause a little bit of frustration that way. So I apologize if I've done that to anyone listening here. All right. And that was the point

question answer. Dave's apologized for being who he is. I think we've talked about some strategies. I think you have to guide them back on topic if you're crossing every day. And if you can't, then you're going to endure a lot of rambling. Yes. And you could also just re-baseline your expectations and just say yeah i'm just gonna budget more time with this person when i need to get something you know i wish i had more time for contemplation throughout the day having a conversation where i don't have to contribute or listen in any way with this person is a way to do it it's like a meditation hour yeah just listen to the sounds of the words not what they are just the sounds focus on the movement of the mouth yes it makes the words

not what the words are saying perfect okay all right i'm gonna read our next question this is from a listener zazima who says hey i've been at my current job about a year and a half now my boss says we should be getting more money and investors soon and we'll be able to give everyone a raise i've seen many people get hired and others given a raise but have not yet received one myself since then i recently started applying to other jobs i don't want to leave but i want to learn my market value and get a slight increase i was demoing some work in a meeting and sharing my screen to do so as i went to upload an image my resume file was open resume cover letter resume adobe resume tesla i matched the cancel button and bounced into panic mode and continued like

nothing had happened i heard some typing shortly after closing did they see it are they talking about me do they know i don't want to leave but just want some sort of compensation these questions were going through my brain and i had no clue what to do should i call up the people in the demo and have a heart to heart there's like two questions here i need one of those signs on my wall that says it has been this many days since a live screen sharing incident someone i don't know someone's significant other text them something weird or like oh yeah you like someone forgets their screen sharing and pulls up youtube or there's so many ways this could go wrong yes so true especially in an all remote team i would love to hear screen sharing stories by the way

yeah i'm trying to think what's the worst screen sharing thing i've ever done maybe i don't know because i still never knew i was screen sharing and it was so embarrassing that no one told me that's probably true the worst one i can remember is really embarrassing and is going to make me cringe to tell it i was presenting at a meetup and previously to that was having a private slack discussion about someone that was not like super mean but was not very complimentary about that person and as i was sharing my screen i got a text message from the person who i had been having that discussion with saying hey you're sharing your slack by the way like the person is in the meetup right now and could potentially be seeing this stuff and i think i just turned red and stopped

screen sharing and sat down very abruptly and and then moved to a new country yeah just never acknowledged it never yeah just turned into a pumpkin and then rotted away and was smashed by some teenagers oh that sounds so painful yeah that sucked that was a bad day i mean nothing i don't know i'm such a lightweight like nothing bad happened to me but i just that just threw me into a tailspin for a long time see i think you in that situation knowing what i know about you and how empathetic you are you would rather be the one to be in the audience and see someone saying something bad about you than to have been on the other side oh yeah 100 yeah i got all my defense mechanisms if somebody's saying something bad about me i just have to convince myself they're

dumb and wrong yeah easy and i don't even know as to this day i do not know if this person ever saw it or if anyone else at the meetup there were like 20 or 30 people there if anyone else saw it and put together that oh this is about that person sitting like three rows to in front and two seats to the left like i don't know and again it wasn't like horribly harsh but it wasn't complimentary maybe the lesson is never say bad things about people yeah ever how long has it been four or five years i think you should reach out i think it'd be great okay another good story yeah i'll do it i once had a manager after a one-on-one with me sit down with me and say hey dave last week in our one-on-one there were some things on my screen about a side business that i'm doing

and i just want to know if you saw it and i honestly i had not i had not noticed it so apparently he had i don't know he had something on there he didn't want me to see it to this day i don't know what it was and i said no i didn't see it and he was just like oh good and i was like oh man what was this silk road v2 or something yeah that's the that's he rolled the dice though because he did now you're curious right well yeah if you hadn't seen it now you now you're aware it happened and want to know exactly and whatever it was it must have been pretty serious for him to actually proactively ask me if i had seen it that's my fear if i go to this person and say hey in a meetup five years ago did you ever

see me did you ever see me share my slack screen and it had a conversation about you and they say like no and i'm like well good because it didn't happen definitely didn't happen it's true it's true i don't know how you would handle that but you should definitely do it okay so okay so i have one more story on this one when i that's that's actually very similar to this one but it's way lower tech and it let's just say it involves a fax machine but when i okay in like 2004 or 5 i was applying to work for another company that i think no longer exists a company called vonage they did voice over ip home phones and i applied for the job and they asked me to fax the application to them so i used my company's fax machine because you

know who owns a factory actually it's kind of weird that a tech company was asking me to fax something in 2004 but anyway so i faxed it and of course i don't know if anyone here has ever fax something, but it never works the first time. It always spits out some error message. And the way fax machines give error messages is they print out the error message on a new sheet of paper, and they usually include a copy of the fax you tried to send on the paper. So I put it in the machine. I punched in the phone number. I hit send. It went through the machine, started to scan, and it started making the modem noises. So I took my paper, and I went to a meeting. And then a couple of hours later, my skip level manager came to my manager with

with an error an error pay printout that had my application in full to this company and he was like what is going on with your employee and so my manager came to me and said just so you know my boss is kind of freaking out right now what are you doing that's weird on so many levels the fact that you were like you know the best way to get this information is send it from the company fax machine that's the only thing i could think of by the way vonage had a billion dollars in revenue last year so they're probably very offended you said they don't exist anymore they definitely exist okay so there's another way to look at this which is it's kind of embarrassing but if i am a manager i want to know if someone is actively looking for another job on my team

because there's things i can do to maybe retain them there's things i could do to maybe help them along like i i want to know that information and even if i found out in a way that is not carefully delivered by them kind of privately sitting down with me i feel like in the end i would still be i would still rather know than not know you know yeah so i mean it's it's kind of embarrassing but the maybe this is just me being naive again i feel like that's one of the themes of the podcast jameson is naive about how badly things can go like it's true i i'm thinking like well now they know and maybe good things will happen to you but there's there's definitely a world where you get retaliated against as well if people think you're you're looking to leave

i can just see your brain being like well only good things have ever happened to me so maybe that's yeah that's probably what happens to everyone i i was walking and tripped and my resume and cover letter slipped out of my pocket and landed on my ceo's feet he was like oh we got to get you a raise right now to keep you here that's probably how it'll work out right maybe only good things happen at all maybe there are no bad things yeah yeah yeah you're probably right yeah so there's a whole world of negative consequences that could happen but i do want to talk about this thing that zazima brought up which is this idea of i'm not getting compensated fairly i'm not getting the raise so i want to start applying to other jobs i don't want to leave

but i want to somehow turn applying to other jobs into more money right and that feels weird and less effective like i think the likely outcome is you get a different job for more money it's not that you you bring it back and club your boss into giving you a raise yeah yeah we've talked about this a few times and i think we you know where i stand which is i'm not a huge fan of shopping around just for the purpose of getting a raise at your current company yeah like if you have no intention of leaving then then that's what you're doing and i think i'm a little more on the side of this is more okay if you feel like you genuinely might leave but if it turns out to be a thing you use to negotiate with your company that's okay too but but just going out and

interviewing and saying they're not giving me my raise fast enough i'll go get interviews and then i'll make that happen is it feels a little weird so i guess i think you can still do this but you just have to change your mindset to say hey i'm not getting the raise i want and one way to adjust my compensation because it's red hot market is just go get a different job and that comes with a raise just kind of by default and that feels much more much more of an honest way to approach this problem yeah i think so too there's also this could be a signal too if a bunch of other people have been hired and have been given raises and you have not it's possible they're not super excited about the work you've been doing it's possible i mean it's a startup because they have

invest i think i cut out the thing that said start it's a startup so chaos abounds yes who knows like lots of things could happen but maybe they're bad at giving feedback and this is a very indirect way of giving you feedback that things are not great i that's maybe another thing to explore like they're probably bad at giving feedback that's like the default yeah most people are i guess yeah that's true that's the default what about do you talk to the people in the meeting yeah that i yeah that's a good question i think it depends on whether or not your manager was in the meeting i think i think if it was my manager i would probably talk to them maybe but if it was just peers or other people in the company i just probably would not say anything

you're just giving them something to gossip about which is a service in the end so they should be thanking you yeah i think they should be giving you part of the raises that they got that you didn't and then all as well yeah i don't know that i would bring it up with them either maybe if it's like a very close personal friend at work who's gonna be surprised or offended if you leave or something like that but if it's just kind of people you work with i don't know i did hear on a meeting with about 200 people on remotely and a bunch more people on in person i i think i heard someone's marriage end so like there are worse things i mean it was it was yeah screaming at the top of lungs about how we're gonna i'm gonna leave and this is over

and oh my gosh the mic was muted a minute or two too late oh so this is nothing that's what i'm saying seeing someone who i mean people get new jobs that's a normal part of life like i don't know if you get a inside glimpse into that whatever and i'll also say this if you're if this information just flashed on the screen for a few seconds do not overestimate people's ability to consume visual information on a screen share oh they were probably not paying attention to your demo anyways that's a good point no one pays attention to anything i am often surprised at how long it takes me to orient myself when someone shares their screen it's like boom screens in my face and i'm like oh you're talking about screen sharing specifically yeah like you put

something up on the screen or in a presentation or in a demo or whatever it just takes a moment to like orient see what am i looking at here what does that say resume no oh it's gone i don't know you know like there's a good chance people didn't even see it it probably said resume yeah now it's a different story if it was sitting in the corner of your screen during the whole 30 minute demo that's a little different yeah that was more of my situation where it was up for a long time because i didn't maximize the right window or something like it it was peeking out the side waving its hand saying hey i'm here to embarrass jameson yeah i mean besides the screen sharing thing of it being hard to orient yourself it is also very likely that they were

not paying rapt attention the whole time for better or for worse so yeah yeah i think you got some things on your side yeah now if you're a really good presenter the risk is higher that they did see so that's maybe your skills have bitten you if you're very engaging yeah exactly people just couldn't take their eyes off your pixels i think we've answered the question I think so. Good luck. Best of luck. And let us know what happens.

Oh, yeah. We love to hear back from people about what turns out with these situations. For sure. And if you're willing, we will share it on the show, too, if it fits in. What can people do if they want us to answer their questions? Go to softskills.audio and click Ask a Question. We have a friendly forum, and we just want to say thank you to everyone who has given us questions. They're so great.

Keep them coming. Thanks for listening. We will catch you next week. Thank you.