Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 202: Can't stand up and new team, new me

Episode Date: March 23, 2020

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Hey Dave and Jamison. Due to a chronic joint problem, I find it uncomfortable to stand for more than a couple of minutes. How do I talk to my boss about sitting during standup meetings? If I change workplaces, when do I talk about it to a new boss? I look and walk just fine, so people usually don’t realize that there is something wrong with me. I’ve already been to the doctors, and there is not much they can do, so I need to soft skill engineer my workplaces. Hello! I love your show! I am an entry level engineer that had graduated college with a B.S. in Computer Science in May of last year. I was on my previous team for about six months doing mostly documentation and asked for more development work because I didn’t have a lot of experience in hardcore dev work in my past internships. My manager, some of my team members, and the lead systems engineer gave me high props that helped me get onto a new team. I’ve been on the new team for two months but I am having a hard time finishing my tasks. I try to do things on my own before I ask for help, but it seems that I’m always stuck or can’t get the code to work in a reasonable time. My team has a strict deadline at the end of March. I have multiple tickets in Jira assigned to me before then. When I ask for help, it seems like my team members just finish my tickets for me. I feel like a fraud and it really doesn’t seem like I am delivering. People had praised me for my work to get on this new team, I don’t have anything to show for that praise. How did I even graduate from college with a Computer Science degree? Do you have any advice on my situation?

it takes more than looking at git log before stand-up to remember what you did yesterday to be a great engineer this is soft skills engineering episode 202 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 don't use git very much for our show but if we did that's what i'd be looking at right now to figure out what else we did yeah on this show when you move into management you start using outlook as your git log that's right just look at your calendar from the previous day to remember what you did that is absolutely true we have some great patrons that i want to thank thank you so much to vinlock braden canes chris hogan dennis bogdanov evgeny sladkowski

john grant louis santos luke bayliss nick hathaway nick cantar philip john basile the agile ventures charity sean sonic the hedgehog stanley tactical radio steven arman lee taras haruk maple serp travis and zach gran and thank you to those folks who we shout out every week because of the absurdity of their donations i don't know what's a better adjective the preposterously large amount of money they support the show with thank you to everyone who's supporting the show at any level and if you support us on patreon for any amount of time for any dollar amount then you will get an invite to our slack team which is great it's slowly but steadily increasing in activity and membership size, and I check it often and have good conversations there. Yeah, me too. You can

go to softskills.audio and click support us on Patreon to do that. All right. We'd also like to thank Vetteri for sponsoring this episode. Vetteri is an online marketplace for developers who are looking to find a new job. Go to vetteri.com slash softskills, and we will have more info about them later. I'm just going to read our first question. This is from an anonymous listener. Hey, Dave and Jameson. Due to a chronic joint problem, I find it uncomfortable to stand for more than a couple of minutes how do i talk to my boss about sitting during stand-up meetings if i change workplaces when do i talk about it to a new boss i look and walk just fine so people usually don't realize that there is something wrong with me i have already been to the doctors and there's not

much they can do so i need to soft skill engineering my workplace nice i hope you don't mean quit it's like social engineering oh i get it yeah just to quit every job that has any yeah i mean pick the right career if you are uncomfortable standing for more than a couple minutes because sometimes i go hours without standing yeah days this is a very sedentary job yeah i slump out of my chair somersault from my office to my bedroom just crawl to your bedroom yeah the bottom of your feet never touch the floor it's kind of like a weird the floor is lava game but the floor is only lava to my feet that's right your feet are not my elbows and only the bottom of your feet yeah well this

stinks i'm sorry you have this joint issue that sounds like it's it's no fun i'm sure it causes lots of problems to deal with yeah there needs to be a name for this thing where you have an ailment but it's not apparent you know i i'm sure there is like there's a pretty big community online of folks with disabilities and i'm just not a part of it at all but every once in a while i get like a glimpse of it on some twitter thread or something so i'm sure if we were more experienced in that we would know the the lingo to use well i think in that case we should just make up our own lingo is this is this a thing with spoons have you heard that no what are you what are you talking about that's like a chronic illness term yeah i think spoony is is the word here

really okay what is this so yeah it's it's from this metaphor that you have like a certain number of spoons to use up each day each spoon represents like an activity that takes energy and if you have this chronic illness then then like getting out of bed might take one of your spoons and then you don't have a spoon left at the end of the day to like order food or i don't know like walk to your car or something it's it's not that you like literally cannot move ever it's that you have this chronic thing that kind of saps your your energy or affects your life in some kind of constant but invisible way okay yeah so i think that might be the term but again totally from the outside so kindly explain to me if i got it wrong how about that yes that's what the

internet is good at right yes kindness and kind and explanations are like the internet's forte yeah have you ever seen those magic tricks where the magician slips like a metal rod up their up their pant leg and it attaches to them somehow so they can actually like support their weight on it and like lean in weird ways unnatural ways or like almost hover and stuff like that you ever seen one of those i mean i think i saw somebody hover but now you destroyed the magic dick sorry remind me ruin it now forever onward i will only see someone slipping a metal rod up their pant leg that's not a trick i'll yell out from the audience that's not real magic this is a ripoff remind me after the show we need to talk about santa claus

okay anyway there there is this thing magicians use it i love santa claus i can't wait to talk about him okay well good i can't wait to talk about him with you too so no i'm just thinking of like a silly solution here is you get one of those magicians support kits you run it up your pant leg before stand up discreetly after you distract the audience of course with like an explosion or something yeah and then you could stand there for like that's what the smoke bombs are for you could stand at stand up like you could go from being the person who has to sit down after a minute to the person who could literally stand on one leg at an unnatural contortion for like eight hours as is traditional i have to reference

the office because there's a prank where dwight gets a standing stool and he does basically that where he has like a stool leg that goes up his pants and then he's got like a seat hidden in there and then somebody knocks it out from my room yes there's precedence cool i mean so that might work there is some expense there yes you can probably get it reimbursed the magical supplies yeah reimburse it stand-up expenses yeah what else what else could they do well i mean the question is how do i talk to my boss about sitting during stand-up meetings yeah i was trying to think of how i would do this and i was thinking if i could stand but wanted to sit just for no reason other than i just like sitting down that would actually be a harder conversation than to say i have a

joint problem i need to sit is it okay if i sit down and and frankly yeah the fact that you feel like you need to ask this question instead of just sitting without asking makes me wonder what kind of environment this is to begin with because it seems like you should just feel like yeah that's okay like it's not a commandment you know to sit i mean to stand yeah i mean i don't think i've ever worked in in a really strict capital a agile shop i guess i don't even know if there's such a thing it probably depends on what consultant you ask like which branch of the religion you belong to right but i i have never worked somewhere where standing up during stand-up was literally the requirement i've i've worked places that had daily regularly scheduled stand-ups but pretty sure i've

sat for all of those so i i guess i i don't have an experience with this pressure that you literally must stand up i've usually seen it i mean i know it's supposed to be a thing that encourages the meetings to stay short but like you can just do that and still sit down i think any good boss would be very understanding about this oh yeah you just went to them and said hey i i have this problem where i can't stand for long periods of time so i'm just gonna sit down and i wanted to let you know so you don't just see me doing it and think i'm being like a not a team player or something yeah like i'm making a statement or something yeah yeah like you know what i hate this i hate this process and i'm gonna fight against it subtly it could be seen that way

right like i don't i don't support this you know so you definitely want to head that off yeah there's probably a question of how comfortable you are with other people knowing this besides your boss right because even if your boss knows other people might not know and i mean it's a very personal thing so i can't tell you how you should feel about it but if i had a co-worker who said hey i just can't stand for too long i don't think i would think twice about it besides being thankful that they told me so i could avoid putting them in uncomfortable positions until you need to until i need to put them in an uncomfortable position like you need that like if i'm negotiating with them yes like salary negotiations okay yeah i'd love to talk to you

about salary but first i need you to stand up there are no chairs and the floor is lava please join me in my office your feet have special lava proof padding on them this is basically how games go with my daughter she actually has a broken leg right now so she cannot stand oh wow and how do your family stand-up meetings go we tried telling her to suck it up and just try harder and it didn't work like you just don't understand how important our stand-up process is annabelle just why can't you support us in this why do you got to fight against everything we do don't worry contrary those days will come later you're saying that she will become very compliant in a couple years no no i i'm saying that i know

you're joking about her now but well i don't know actually i don't know i guess i don't know your daughter well enough i was just saying that as a parent who has very defiant children on occasion there will be plenty of opportunities to deal with defiance oh she was she was born defiant oh it'll get i'm excited can't wait can't wait for the teenage years i think it's good though i think it will serve her well in life and it will give me gray hairs yeah anyways that was a tangent yes so how do we get back lead us back i just want to make sure everyone is clear that we were joking around when we would say you could use this weakness to your advantage yeah that's like that's like the bond villain answer but no um what i was thinking though that's like the you

will get sued for discrimination exactly exactly stay away from that at least so yeah but no what i wanted to say was that like this is like james was saying this is so personal you might not be comfortable with anyone really knowing that you have this concern or i'm sorry i don't even know the right word i don't want to say weakness i don't want to say issue but that you have a joint problem you know i know that some people are sensitive to that and in some company cultures you might not want people to know if you're in sales it's really going to put a damper on your ability to do celebratory push-ups after every sale and to like crush it in the gym at your lunch break yeah true so i think you're in a good career for it that's true i guess if you're not in

sales you're in a pretty good career yeah just just kidding love you sales folks my personality is i'm perfectly comfortable with people knowing if i had this i'd be perfectly comfortable sharing that and just saying hey i gotta sit it's cool don't worry about it but you might not be that way and if you aren't that way i just don't really know what to tell you because i think that's a very hard situation yeah you gotta weigh the the two competing discomforts of is it going to be harder for you to have your boss know but to have nobody else know and potentially think like something weird's going on or to have other people know and then that makes you feel uncomfortable yeah i think that's kind of up to you for the other question how soon should i tell my new boss

if i switch workplaces i think you should just bring it up right away it's not like some shameful secret to me i don't and again this is very personal to you but like i guess i don't see a downside to bringing it up in in early interactions to kind of set the parameters of of how you'll be at work yeah and if you're on a team where it would hurt you to reveal this information you need to find a new team yeah i mean yeah if you can't talk about constraints that that affect you and have people respond with empathy to those i agree that that's that's a pretty big red flag if the sales bros start to bully you because you can't do enough push-ups like yeah i don't know time to bail yeah well have we answered the question i think so good luck

hopefully this is just straightforward and smooth and if it's anything but that time to take our advice and quit your job yep if you've been a software developer at the same job for a few years it might be time to start looking around quit your job is our favorite advice but first you should probably find a new job trust me it is better this way check out a service called vettery which matches developers with employers based on what you want like your location salary requirements and technologies you want to work with i actually signed up myself and within a week they sent me an opportunity that looked really good my current approach to job seeking is tweet dumb stuff and hope the company notices me so this sounds like an improvement i think yeah once you sign up you

get a consultant to help you find opportunities i also like that veteri lets you specify your salary requirements early rather than going through the whole interview process only to find out want want your salary expectations were way off that actually happened to me in an interview would have been nice to avoid that you can start using veteri without reversing a link list on a whiteboard too they don't have a coding test to sign up if you are thinking about taking our advice the soft skills engineering patented advice and quitting your job check out veteri go to veteri.com soft skills to sign up that's v-e-t-t-e-r-y.com soft skills if you use that link you will help support the show and if you get a job through veteri they will send you three

hundred dollars thank you so much to veteri for sponsoring the show all right shall i read our next one please this comes from a listener named lisa who says hello i love your show i am an entry-level engineer that graduated with a BS in computer science in May of last year. So for those listening to this later, that's about 10 months ago. I was on my previous team for about six months doing mostly documentation and asked for more development work because I didn't have a lot of experience in hardcore dev work in my past internships. My manager, some of my team members, and the lead systems engineer gave me high props that helped me get onto a new team. I've been on the new team for two months, but I am having a hard time finishing my

tasks. I try to do things on my own before I ask for help, but it seems that I'm always stuck or can't get the code to work in a reasonable time. My team has a strict deadline at the end of March. I have multiple tickets in JIRA assigned to me before then. When I ask for help, it seems like my team members just finished my tickets for me. I feel like a fraud, and it really doesn't seem like I am delivering. People had praised me for my work to get on this new team. I don't have anything to show for that praise now. How did I even graduate from college with a computer science degree do you have any advice on my situation sounds rough oh yeah yeah there's a lot here there's like new engineer some imposter syndrome some deadline pressure some some kind of like

questions about their own ability a lot of stuff going on i i will say a computer science degree kind of like only accidentally prepares you to be a working professional software developer yeah like you can go through and get a computer science degree and become come out as a solid professional developer but it's not what the curriculum is designed to teach you in most places yeah there's a lot of focus on kind of the very underpinnings the theoretical stuff the math stuff and you write code but it's so different from code that you work with in a professional environment like you write most of your code from scratch yep you don't maintain it for a long period of time you don't have to come into this gigantic code base and kind of like figure out

how to make changes you're not working with these large teams like it's it's really different yeah So I think computer science degrees can be great and they're a pretty big pipeline to get into the industry. But from my perspective, I would not expect a fresh computer science grad to come in and just like sit down and say, all right, give me any problem and I will solve it. Yeah. In fact, this is not the first listener who has written in and said, I have a computer science degree.

How come I can't do anything? You know, like how come I'm not productive? Yeah. You could do stuff. You can figure out big O. You could probably prove things with induction. Yes. probably written like a kalman filter to do some ai stuff uh-huh you could like normalize a database

to the fifth degree yeah yeah you could probably implement dykstra's faster than i could yeah without having to look it up yeah there's a lot of stuff you could do it's just you don't do that yeah at your job most of the time that's right that's right there's just like this mountain of details that sit on top of the fundamentals that you've picked up that you have to get through And a couple of months is not a lot of time for that. I think the last person who wrote in and said, I have a computer science degree and I'm six months into my first job

and I'm still not productive. I think we said the same thing. We're like, well, that's because six months is not very much time. Yeah. I mean, six months isn't even a lot of time for someone who is experienced in the industry, depending on the situation.

Like if they're learning a new tech stack or a new code base or a new company, it can take quite a while to get fully spun up. I mean, obviously someone who's very experienced would have a different initial productivity level and probably a different kind of end state once they're fully spun up. But stuff can take time.

It can. And one of the things that really benefited me in my computer science program was I was so lucky I got a job as one of the systems admin team members for the computer science department, which means I was like administering Linux servers. Wait, what?

Yeah. How have we never talked about this? I don't know. I feel like I've said a bunch of times that i got a job working in the computer science department but i never knew that you did it was the same computer science department it was but that's because you were actually working in a lab like a researcher i was just no no no no i was for a very small percentage of the time but most of the time i was like the webmaster for the actual computer science like office department

oh you were academic administrative office yeah oh i mean it wasn't your job but yeah i well i knew the i think i knew the former webmaster we're gonna have to exchange notes afterwards okay yeah so i worked i worked in a little corner office that would we were uh we were a parallel help desk as well as the we administered the network and the six or seven linux servers and you know 3 000 users in our ldap server and stuff but my point in sharing that is that that experience for just a couple of years of just like you know managing operating systems writing tons of little scripts interacting with lots of other systems learning how the kernel works and all that stuff that stuff was so valuable so when i when i started the first job out of college i was so

ready to just jump into that stuff and those skills have probably served me more than anything else even to this day yeah the question says i didn't have a lot of experience in hardcore dev work in my past internships so maybe that was kind of a gap in in their experience before this yeah but i i mean i imagine you were not super productive in your first couple months in that role yeah i You weren't one of those kids that grew up just kind of messing with computers, were you? I can't remember. Well, starting in my teen years, I did become one of those kids. I was like building them out of parts and running Windows on them and stuff.

And all through college, I was like, you know, constantly dual booting my laptop. And, you know, I had like three distributions of Linux running on it. For what possible purpose? I just loved it. I don't know. It was just fun. Just to do it. Actually, I just did it so that today I could look at young whippersnappers and say,

what you've never heard of mandrake linux that's the only reason you were investing in your street cred that's right long ago long-term investment yeah so i think the overall message is like take a deep breath kind of be patient with yourself this stuff kind of takes time which is hard because the situation you're in has tight deadline constraints yes you have a deadline by the time the show comes out it'll be like days away but don't worry just end of march just sit back relax take your time it's like the worst possible situation tight strict deadlines tight constraints like this are not a great environment for most junior developers or if they if that's the environment you have to be in then it's kind of your team's and your boss's responsibility to

very tightly constrain and like kind of gate their expectations for for what you'll get done i mean everything i'm gonna say is gonna be too late because it literally will be days away by the time the deadline the deadline will have slipped by then it's good that's true i mean is this a thing what do you think about bringing this up to a boss this would be kind of a scary thing to bring up though because you're sort of saying like hey you know how you want me to do all this stuff i'm not doing all this stuff oh yeah that is scary to bring up i i would i can't get the work done you have given me like that's a scary thing to say yes especially as a junior i think a better way to say that would be can you give me feedback on my performance am i delivering as fast as you

would hope for this for my tenure yeah and then just figure it out because one way or another you're going to learn what they think of your performance and the later that that happens the worse it will be for you yeah that's a good point there is a lot of kind of looking at what's happening and assuming things are going really badly but maybe this is what they expect of you But either way, it'd be great to know that explicitly so you can calibrate your expectations. I don't know if you're doing this, Lisa, but when I feel like things are going poorly, sometimes I try and hide from actually finding it out as if that will magically make the truth different.

If I just don't know it, then I can still pretend like things are fine. Yes. And that works out great. So maybe try that too. I mean, that works for like hours or days, maybe even weeks. Yeah. Yeah. Most of the worst times in my life have been from doing that for too long. So don't do that. Yeah. I think that's good advice to try and find out some explicit

information about your performance. Yeah. Another thing that, boy, I don't know if this is even a good idea, but you might want to consider shadowing some of the people on your team just to pick up tips and tricks and see what they're doing that's different. I work in a company that has a very sophisticated ecosystem of internal tools. And what that means is that everyone who joins the company knows nothing about it because it's all internally developed. And some people get overwhelmed by this, you know, because it's like, what? I've never... We have tools that solve problems that many engineers didn't even realize existed because they only exist at scale or at certain levels of complexity, you know? And so people

are often drowned by the tools. I hear this a lot. And a very good thing to do is shadow people. So you can even learn like, oh, I didn't know that tool existed. And I didn't know the problem that it solves existed and now i know both just from watching you click a few buttons there's this thing about asking for help and then my team members just finished tickets for me that sucks by the way yeah that that's bad on them i think you could also work around that by being a more demanding pair so one way to get help is pair program with people but if they just try and like snatch the keyboard and say here's how you do it and then type type type type type type problem solved like that's not going to teach you anything yeah and it will kind of smush your your ego a

little bit which isn't great in this situation so i i think if you ask for help you can try and constrain it a little bit and say hey i i'd love for you to sit over my shoulder and kind of give me some advice but i want to make sure i'm the one kind of implementing the solution so i learn more that way you know just just something to put a little bit of a barrier around how the help will happen so that it is not help in accomplishing your task, but help in helping you improve in your ability to accomplish the task. Does that make sense? That does, but that's a very hard mindset to get someone to switch to. It is. And that's why you have to be the one in charge of that because developers are going to focus on the task. I'm telling you, this is a disease that

developers get of short-sightedness when it comes to developing their teammates. And I see it so often they think oh someone brought me a problem i can solve this problem in 10 to 15 minutes and it would take me like 30 minutes to explain it to them therefore i will solve the problem yeah and it's like ah i am a cold logical analytical person look how smart i am but the reality is that's short-term thinking and if you had spent the 30 minutes investing in this person it may have prevented five more of these 15 minute problems from coming to you in the future but you can't like lecture them on that so instead i think you need to be very clear when you i think you you need to be very clear that's true with your co-workers and say i have

a problem i want your help solving it but i don't want you to do it i just want you to tell me what where would you look where would you go to start solving this problem and then force them to describe it instead of solving it and then take that information back to your desk now that's not going to fix your problem though you're now you're going to have to take that information internalize it and actually try to work through it and that's challenging but it's way better than being brushed aside and having them implement it on your behalf yeah i like that that's interesting on the other hand it sounds like you've got a bunch of eager teammates who are willing to solve problems maybe you could turn this into like a mechanical turk situation where you are outsourcing all of your

work to your entire team and you could become like a 10x developer if you could do this 10 times that's true that's true your boss is going to be like my goodness just make sure the jira tickets stay in your name like that's critical yeah you don't want to become the project manager you want it to be clear that you single-handedly are doing all this work you're just standing atop your throne of skulls that nobody else can can know about that's right yeah i mean it's a tricky situation two months is not a very long time and and especially given how early you are into your career i think the overall thing is be patient with yourself even though that's going to be tough in these kind of tight deadline situations you're learning stuff you just might not notice it kind

of day to day yeah that's true it is it is hard to observe your progress yeah and one thing we didn't say yet is you were on this other team for six months right that's three times longer than you've been on this team and that other team you were doing great work but you had a lot more context there. It's not just that you were good at that work and bad at this work. There's a time component there. So you might be comparing kind of the peak of your performance on your previous team right before you left with your new performance on your new team where you're still getting your feet under you. Yep. I think that's a very worthy point. Also, I would point out that when I started my current job, which I've now been at for three and a half years, it took me about

six months to feel like I was even able to contribute. And this is someone who had been in the industry working full time as a fairly successful developer for 15 years. So sometimes at some companies, these ramp up periods are long. So two months might be no problem at all. But I do encourage you to get a checkpoint from your manager. Yeah, that's a good point. You can get some data on that by figuring out does everyone have this kind of lull when they join where they take a while to ramp up? Or is it just you? Is it just junior people? Do they not have any junior people because that's that would kind of explain it too if they're used to everyone being senior when they join the team yeah yeah i agree getting getting opinions and and input from

other people would be helpful in evaluating your situation well have we answered the question i think so the takeaway though is you are not a phony and it will get better yep all right what can people do if they want their own questions answered go to soft skills.audio and click ask a question thank you so much to everyone who does that every week we really appreciate so many questions that come flowing in and if you want to support the show click on the support us on patreon button feel free to join our slack community for as little as one dollar we've got over 250 people now in the slack community and it has been so fantastic all right we will catch you next week