Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 198: Stinky manager and VP overhaul

Episode Date: February 24, 2020

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: My manager smells really bad! Sometimes so bad that I can’t bear to be in his proximity. I am not sure if it’s his breath, or body odour (probably both), but the smell is very foul on a daily basis. He has been with us for quite a few months now, but I am not sure if anybody has mentioned it to him, because the situation hasn’t gotten any better. I’ve also retrained from speaking about it with anyone else. He’s a good guy, and a very hard worker. I want to build a better relationship with him, but his smell is literally getting in the way. How can I help this situation? I can never tell him outright, but he’s the worst smelling person I’ve ever met, and have to work with. But I do want to work with him. Help. Hey friends, thanks for such an engaging and helpful show, it makes me happy to see every new episode pop up in my feed. My question relates to the politics and drama of a restructure and whether I should follow the time honoured tradition of ‘quit your job’ or stick this out. Six months ago our new VP of Engineering was hired to work remotely in a city across the country and decided that the first order of business was to restructure our three Engineering teams into one mega team with new management and a matrix structrure. This meant 15 Principals, Senior Engineers and Product Managers decided it was ‘time to move on to a new challenge’ and are now being replaced by the VPs ex-colleagues in the city across the country. All our processes are being thrown away to do things ‘their way’, new Jira boards, new Confluence pages, new file locations, new AWS accounts, new hiring processes, new everything. The new folks are getting the pick of the exciting and high profile projects while those of us who have been around for up to ten years and hold the institutional knowledge are left monitoring and maintaining the fragile work that could really do with some help from the Principals and Seniors. Is this all part of a standard restructure after six months? Should I carry on trying to put on a smile and fall in line or run away as fast as I can?

it takes more than staring intently at your dashboards during a risky deploy to be a great engineer this is episode 198 of the soft skills engineering podcast i'm your host dave smith i'm your host jamison dance soft skills engineering is a weekly advice podcast for software developers about the non-tech stuff that goes into software development i wonder if there's any correlation between how closely you're watching your dashboards and how, I mean, I guess that's the intro, right? It's like, if you just stare at it, it'll work. Oh yeah, I mean, if my experience is any indication,

there's a 100% correlation between staring very closely at your dashboards during a deploy and the success of the deploy. So if you are staring closely at them, the deploy works. Is that the summary? That's right, and it's like the same thing where if you stare at a pot of water on a stove, it will not boil.

A watch deploy never fails. That's right. I have some counterexamples where sometimes it fails both when you watch it and when you don't. But that's a separate problem. That's probably not right. Am I watching it wrong? Yeah, I think you are. You're holding it wrong.

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Please do. This comes from an anonymous listener who says, My manager smells really bad. Sometimes so bad that I can't bear to be in his proximity. I'm not sure if it's his breath or body odor, probably both, but the smell is very foul on a daily basis. He has been with us for quite a few months now, but I am not sure if anybody has mentioned it to him because the situation has not gotten any better. I've also refrained from speaking about it with anyone else. He's a good guy and a very hard worker. I want to build a better relationship with him, but his smell is literally getting in the way. How can I help this situation i can never tell him outright but he's the worst smelling person i have ever met

but i do want to work with him help oh this poor person both of them yeah oh this is like a joke question turned real i feel like when i tell people about the show the the fake example i give for the kinds of questions we get is like my co-worker is stinky what do i do right and here it is this is worse because what you would do if your co-worker is stinky is try to confront them but also try and talk to your manager about it but it is your manager it's your manager oh man this is super tricky but thankfully we can look to history for an answer which is we can do like they did in the 1500s where everybody was stinky and they would the rich people would carry around these little perfume bags that they could hold in front of their nose when they were walking around

other people and then it would mask the scent if you're a startup you could get like startup branded perfume bags yeah that's right to build the company culture branded swag is an important part of startup culture yes yes it is so your manager may be the worst smelling person you have ever met but it's possible they would have been the best smelling person alive in the 1500s That's true. Actually, hang on one second. I have, I got to grab a book from my shelf. I feel like I've talked about this book on the show before.

It's called The Dirt Unclean, An Unsanitized History. And it's literally like a history of hygiene in different cultures throughout the ages. And it's mind blowing. So rich people to be clean would change their shirts. Like showers and baths were unheard of. Showers were unheard of because the tech didn't exist. But baths were either dangerous or this unthinkable luxury. Like they were dangerous because of the fire involved?

no dangerous because they were they were suspicious that a bath was harmful for your health oh it was like washing away all the there was some idea that it would like your skin would build up this natural barrier against oh bad vapors or something and if you wash it then you're you're like clearing away this barrier and you're more exposed to disease okay i mean disease was like the term they didn't have but bad stuff yeah bad things like spirits anyways this isn't directly related except that it gave me more perspective on stinkiness and like the changing attitudes towards stinkiness and this idea that like people smell like soap and that's that's what a person smells like is fairly modern oh yeah to some extent an invention of soap companies

that's right the the natural smell of people is horses yeah yeah but i mean unless you want to change the whole culture like that's that's the culture you live in so well that might be easier than confronting your manager about the smell how conflict diverse you are yeah maybe it is easier to change your whole team change their whole hygiene habits for the worse than ask this one person to have better hygiene habits maybe they've got a really good reason for it like okay let's just assume that the root cause here is they don't take showers and maybe they're like super eco-friendly saving water saving energy yeah it's like then you could comfort yourself knowing i'm putting up with this smell but the carbon footprint of this guy is so small as you take your daily 30

minute hot shower yeah thanks manager without you i'd only be able to take a 15 minute hot shower today exactly oh a good guy and a very hard worker he's been around i'm i'm not sure if anybody has mentioned it to him this is a horrifying yes and the longer it goes on the weirder it's gonna be when someone mentions it to him for the first time. Yes, yes, yes. So true. There are some cultural aspects to smell. Like some cultures, I guess,

are less afraid of natural human body odor than others. But I don't know where this person is coming from. I'm assuming it's the US because in the US we're terrified of how people smell. We are. No one can smell like people. You gotta smell like deodorant. You gotta smell like perfume.

You have to smell like cinnamon cookies. That's so funny you put it that way that no one's allowed to smell like people i love that it's so true that is so american unless you work from home and then my office has an an odor it's an organic fragrance yeah it's yeah low carbon footprint for that because all i have to do is exist unless the fragrance comes from like the four giant monitors i have running which carbon footprint of those is probably a bit higher a bit higher yeah what do you what do you do i think everyone's probably yelling at their at their phone right now saying just tell him but look if you're conflict averse you could change

stuff about yourself we already said you can hold a little perfume baggie to your nose but what if you just killed your sense of smell i mean like for example i've heard that if you were like stripping finish off of wood if you used too high of a concentration like you will permanently kill your sense of smell huh that could be a real win that could be a feature yeah get into woodworking strip some finish off some wood and then never smell your manager again so does cocaine kill your sense of smell yeah it does cocaine damages the nasal passages passages okay google knows a little bit more about me because i google the cocaine effect on sense of smell this is what incognito mode is for well then then they

know jameson went into incognito mode to google cocaine effect on sense of smell it's just a flag yeah he really doesn't want us to know this that gets routed right to the blackmail folder so that's an option that has some trade-offs that's putting it lightly yeah is there any way beyond just talking to him about it i wish there was i mean yeah i don't think there is because so again if it was a co-worker and maybe you talked to him about it and it didn't work out you go to the manager if you went to your boss's boss and said hey my boss

smells bad like it's not great yeah i don't know that i'll tell i'll tell you what though i'm just gonna keep playing the conflict diverse card here okay and say you don't have to talk to him about it when i was a kid we had horses as part of my family business and every year or so the farrier would come those of you who are equestrian heads will know that the farrier is the person who trims horse hoofs and puts new horseshoes on the on the horse horse's feet obviously i'm not an expert as as an experienced farrier yourself and i gotta tell you look horse barns they don't exactly smell good day to day but when the farrier comes holy cow it smells bad so bad like i would walk through the barn and like tears would flow from my eyes and i would like retch in my mouth

it was so bad because the farrier was stinky no the horse hoof clippings huh like have you ever clipped your toenails and said oh that smells bad no what wait really no oh boy do we have to edit this out this just got a little embarrassing you've never clipped your toenails and thought that stinks i'll check next time okay well my kudos to you for the hygiene because i'm impressed listen you know that story in the bible about how samson never cut his hair and became very strong oh yeah i'm like that but with toenails okay i see why now maybe one day i will clip them for the first time well i'll discover the smell for those of our listeners who have ever smelled a yucky toenail smell multiply that by like 10 000

and that's what a horse's toenails smell like when you clip them because remember horses stand in dirt all day and sometimes they step on their own poop anyway it's so bad but this guy this was his 40 hour a week job all day every day he just got used to it and so my point in bringing up the farrier is that you can adapt to some pretty bad smells so maybe you just need to spend more time with your manager yeah yeah like schedule an off-site you know and sit right next to him spend all day by the end of the day you won't be able to smell him anymore and maybe you'll start to smell a little like him if you can't beat him join him for how yeah how you kind of come together a little bit yeah that's the thing our brains do right don't they filter out like repeated signals

yeah you become desensitized yeah i mean that could work i mean like i i knew that this what we were going to be inclined to say was what can you do to change my manager but i kind of wanted to take a different tack here and say like what can i do to change myself yeah but really you have to talk to him like i don't know i don't know any other way around this either you're gonna suffer for the entire time you work together or you have to talk to him but like what what if this is like an ailment that this manager has that he can do nothing about it's like he's been to doctors the latest science can't help him and what if he just comes back to you and says i know this has been my burden to carry for 20 years and there's nothing i can do i'm sorry so i think

it's probably well is it better i think that would make it easier to put up with it certainly but all you would do is now embarrass him i david's it's gonna embarrass him if you say hey you smell so bad that it's hard to work with you i don't know the way i don't know a non-embarrassing way to say that i'm just really trying to hold my ground here that you can change you okay let's let's let's practice let's do you want to be the stinky man or do you want me to be the stinky man you'll be i'll be the stinky man because you're the one that has to tell me okay listen dave oh no my immediate instinct is to go to the crap sandwich and start by saying all the things i appreciate about you ah okay i think i just have to yeah right dave i appreciate you as a manager

you work really hard you've done great things for the team there is one thing that makes it harder to work with you and it's your smell. It's just, it's hard to be close to you because it smells pretty bad. Is there something you can do to change that? And that would help me work more effectively with you. Jameson, thank you for bringing this up. There is one thing that you can do and that is you're fired go work in a better smelling place oh boy yeah i don't you see that didn't go well at all it didn't go well at all oh i'm regretting all my instincts smell is such like a personal thing like normally when you're giving feedback about work giving feedback to people can be hard for some folks yeah when it's work related when

it's like you did not fill out this this you didn't write this report in a clear way or whatever the thing is but if it's like about you as a person well that's even trickier but i i really i don't see a way around it besides approaching them about it yeah maybe maybe it would help to preface it and say hey this is kind of awkward i'm not sure of like yeah a non-embarrassing way to say this but but it is i can't even role play it without getting awkward there's a certain odor about you that is stinky like yeah i think your goal if you're gonna do that i think your goal needs to be to minimize the duration of this conversation get in deliver the news and get out as soon as you can because yeah the last thing you want is for this to drag out yeah if

yeah that's a good point the longer you're there the more i mean the worse it's gonna smell but also yeah you're don't worry you're naturally gonna want to get out anyway yeah it's like you have to rip a band-aid off yeah and if you're agonizingly hair by hair pulling it off yeah it's gonna be worse that's right maybe you do it like when you're walking opposite directions towards each other in the hallway and there's that normal like hey how's it going you say great and then you walk by they say hey how's it going you say great hey you smell really bad it's hard to work with you and then you keep going like zoom you're just gone and it can't so you're saying create a situation where you can do the whole conversation in one breath without inhaling

yeah yeah i mean for multiple reasons without inhaling yeah you know you know what i think this is one where we're going to disagree and i'm just going to say i would probably just put up with it i just don't think that i would bring it up to them the the real answer is to work remotely and then the only smells i deal with are my own so you launch a campaign where you try to get this whole team yeah to move to remote and then it's like problem solved look at all these productivity gains we've had from remote work we can hire more people folks work when they're effective we communicate better in in written format and the only stink that i smell every day is my own what if okay one one more thing you know how this is my embarrassing moment i guess so you leave

your house you come back and you smell your house and think oh it smells in my house yes you didn't notice until you left and went somewhere else yes what if this person is now too used to their smell that is undoubtedly true you have to make them like a candle can you get custom scented candles something that will allow them to experience what it smells like to other people so like you mean like a body odor candle yeah exactly a bo candle a stinky toenail clipping candle i don't know Whatever it is. I'll call the farrier and see if he does candles. Yeah.

All right. I think we've answered this question. Yeah, good luck. This is awkward. And boy, I think there's a lot of ways you could go with this. But whatever you do, you are required to let us know and then let us know how it went. Please do. Please.

Please just send us another question with the follow-up, letting us know what happened. All right. I will read our next question. This is from an anonymous listener who asks, Hey, friends, thanks for such an engaging and helpful show. It makes me happy to see every new episode pop up in my feed. You are welcome, friend. My question relates to the politics and drama of a restructure and whether I should follow

the time-honored tradition of quit your job or stick this out. Six months ago, our new VP of engineering was hired to work remotely in a city across the country and decided that the first order of business was to restructure our three engineering teams into one mega team with new management and a matrix structure. This means 15 principals, senior engineers, and product managers decided it was time to move on to a new challenge and are now being replaced by the vp's ex-colleagues in the city across the country all of our processes are being thrown away to do things their way new jira boards new confluence pages new file locations new aws accounts new hiring processes

new everything the new folks are getting the pick of exciting and high profile projects while those of us who have been around for up to 10 years and hold the institutional knowledge are left monitoring and maintaining the fragile work that could really do with some help from the principals and seniors is this all part of a standard restructure after the first six months should i carry on trying to put a smile on and fall in line or run away as fast as i can oof so 15 other senior and principal engineers have taken off they saw something you didn't see i mean that's a lot of people to leave yes that that could be all three of the teams in some places yeah i wonder what percentage of the team that is if if if these were two very or three very

large teams maybe they're like kind of organizations not teams yeah maybe a group of people working on so i think it might be useful for me to recap this using my cynical jaded totally negative view and words to fit that how does that sound bring it on okay so you're telling me that a new vp of engineering was hired in a different city and that that vp is hiring all new leadership after 15 people quit and those are all in that new city and they all just happen to be the new vp's friends and they get all the new projects what could be happening yeah what is your diagnosis of what's happening diagnosis your engineering department has been relocated to a new city but they did not want to have any major disruption so they're letting quote natural

attrition take care of the relocation problem yeah the question asker mentions hey we're stuck working on this old stuff it's fragile we need some help and it's possible that the vp has looked at the existing systems and said like we just need to let these die like we don't want to maintain them so we will spin up fancy new cool projects to give to all my team or all my friends yeah to replace all this stuff and and like we can't afford to maintain them and replace them at the same time yep but here's the here's the good news this company needs you to keep these things alive and the term that you need to know now is called retention bonus what is that it sounds good it's got the word bonus in it yeah so i had a friend whose office

got rooted up and moved across the country and everyone on the team was given an option to either go or eventually lose your jobs but they said for the people who stay we want to give you a retention to keep old systems running for a certain amount of time and they offered a sizable retention bonus to the tune of like, you stay for 12 months, and we'll give you a 50% bonus of your annual salary at the end of those 12 months. Holy cow. Yeah, really big. But companies need this for continuity. It's like super hard to just uproot a team and move them to a new location. You have to keep someone to keep the lights on, especially in this situation, where it sounds like they're building all new processes, all new systems. You know, someone's got to keep that old stuff operational

until the new stuff can come online. Oh, so the point of it is to say, hey, your job is going away soon but instead of you just quitting right now because you know it's going away anyways stick around to the end so it's an easier transition for us exactly okay that makes sense that's how this feels to me huh but they didn't i'm assuming they didn't i mean do you just go ask for a retention bonus is that what you're saying i think yeah so i don't think you can just walk in and ask for a retention bonus because the company hasn't been explicit yet to say you're all losing your jobs by X date. So instead, I think what you do is you ask pointed questions about what the future of this location is, calling out what I just called out in my cynical reading

of the question. And then, you know, but a little bit more diplomatically, don't be a total schmuck. Yeah. But then you might consider saying, look, it seems difficult to stay under these circumstances is where there's no future for me here yeah and then see how that goes huh but you do feel pretty strongly that they're doing this because they're trying to phase out the old team and location and projects and stuff is that right it seems like it is this all a standard part of a standard restructure after six months i mean the word restructure can mean so many different things sometimes it's a code word for layoffs or or like slow layoffs i guess which is what this could be sometimes it's like literally moving people from one project to another but it almost it sounds

like that hasn't really happened in this case where they haven't moved you on to these new projects right so it would be good to understand why is this restructure happening like what's what's the goal what are you trying to accomplish with it and if they say like align business incentive i don't know the the more bs they give you the more likely it is that the goal is to lay people off basically yes yeah but i i agree that there's this this doesn't feel like what i would expect a normal kind of benign restructuring to look like yeah no or benign from your case i guess maybe it's benign from the business's case because they think it'll be better but well they definitely do or else they wouldn't have done it now there is there is a charitable outlook here which is

that they found a vp of engineering who is such a good fit for the role for whatever reason that they decided to let this VP live in a different city from the rest of the engineering department and try to build a leadership team out there. And it could be that the company's just making a big gamble that that's going to work, like this remote leadership situation. That is, yeah, that's a good point.

I feel like this doesn't really happen at individual contributor levels, but especially at like leadership or executive levels, you kind of get a lot of rope to play with and a lot of freedom to say, hey, we're going to do this very different thing. And the consequence is it's much more, it's much easier if that goes wrong to get fired and to totally ruin the company and stuff but like

it doesn't seem outrageous that they would say hey we trust this person and they want to make this big change and like that's part of why we hired them to be this visionary and leader of the engineering organization etc so it's possible they just have a lot more freedom to do whatever they want yep it's also possible i mean maybe they hired them because they knew hey they have a really big network of great people and they just happen to all be in that other city yeah Like we're trying to attract more talent or I don't know, something like that. Or it could be a legitimate bifurcation of your headquarters where you're going to have two main engineering offices.

Yeah. All these feel like things that you would want to have communicated explicitly, though. Yes, definitely. And I think it's certainly right to investigate for some of this information. Agreed. And the fact that you are not aware of these things is not necessarily a red flag because sometimes that information is there, but it's just so seemingly irrelevant to your day-to-day job that you just kind of gloss over it. But this might be a good opportunity for you to now go and

talk to someone who's in the know. And maybe even if you can get some time with the VP of engineering and try to ask them, what is our strategic direction for these two locations? Where are we going from here? And what's the upside? Yeah. And I wouldn't, I actually wouldn't be opposed to going over their head and asking the same question to the CEO or CTO, depending on the size of your company. Yeah. You know, if it's too big, then you just won't be able to do that. But see if you get an aligned answer i do think the odds that your job will go away are higher than they were before this reorg though so i think it would be good to kind of do some prep work for a potential job either because you quit because it seems weird and you don't like the situation or because

stuff changes and and your position gets eliminated redundancies that's how they say it in the uk i think redundancies yes we're made redundant which i don't know it's a crappy thing so maybe it's good that it's got a crappy word there so fitting yeah laid off sounds like you're being like softly put to bed by a kind parent you laid down and snuggled up in a blanket no redundancy a job yeah no you are redundant we have eliminated the redundancy yeah all right have we answered the question i think so yeah and also please tell us what happens because it's really interesting. What can people do

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