Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 203: Downturns and conflict

Episode Date: March 30, 2020

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I am worried it is only a matter of time before the growing pandemic impacts the job market. I work for a young start up, and as of yet I am gainfully employed. But if this goes on as long as some folks say it will, I’m just not sure. I’ve heard there was a software job market crash after the dot com boom. What was that like ? What’s the best thing to do if you get laid off in a market downturn? Wait it out? Look for software jobs? Switch industries, temporarily? I’m a technical lead on a small team. Two of my teammates are constantly annoyed with each other and I need to know how to talk them down so we can be a better team. Let me introduce them: Alice (the names are made up), an experienced programmer, who is slower to catch on, keeps dragging old arguments and old ways of thinking in, works very slowly and in her own vacuum, and often comes across as difficult to work with. Alice constantly disagrees with the team on things like naming conventions and solutions to problems. In the other corner, Bob, a 2nd year coder, eager to follow leadership but still learning when to ask for help. He takes criticism constructively, but not from Alice because to him it sounds like fingernails on a chalkboard. Alice and Bob constantly bump heads. Yesterday, Bob rewrote Alice’s stored procedure because it was slow and he had some ideas with how to reuse some code. Today it was SQL formatting - Bob’s SQL is ugly, according to Alice, who wants to confront him on it. I suggested we create a style guide to settle that argument. This kind of thing has been going on since the team was formed. My question is, what can I do? They both look to me as the leader, and I don’t want to take sides, but we’ve had this problem for nearly two years.

it takes more than creating a gui interface using visual basic to track the killer's ip address to be a great software engineer this is episode 203 of the soft skills engineering podcast i'm your host jameson dance i'm your host dave smith soft skills engineering is a weekly advice show where we answer your non-technical questions about the technical field of software development and i guess talk about like old memes did you ever watch csi i I knew this was a reference to some pop culture thing, but I didn't know what it was. I don't know why this became a meme, because it's actually not too weird. In terms of techno babble that makes no sense, this actually kind of makes sense.

Each individual word makes sense, but when you put them all together, it's like, what? There's a CSI quote where somebody says this, and then somebody actually made the GUI interface in visual basic to track the killer's ip address and like posted the code on github or something that's so funny yeah i don't i don't know why this is famous because there's so much more egregious like tech offenses than this which is all real things pretty much except the killer part i think this one is famous because they obviously went to some work to find actual words like visual basic and gooey and ip address but then when they strung them together it was just like oh you should have just asked someone if this makes sense so here's where you put the button

that says track killer and then it just finds them the killer just knows yeah anyways that's not what this show's about dave do you want to talk about our fantastic patrons yes thank you to everyone who is contributing on patreon at the level that gets them a weekly shout out they are vin lock brayden canes chris hogan dennis bogdanov evgeny sladkowski john grant louis santos luke bayless nick hathaway nick kantar philippe john basil the agile ventures charity sean sonic the hedgehog stanley tactical radio steven armand lee taras harouk maple syrup travis and zach grannon if you would like to contribute to the show and gain access to our ultra secret yet not secret at all slack community you can go to soft skills.audio and click support us on

patreon the password is yeah it's pretty insecure it's it's any dollar amount that's the password any integer will gain access to the secret slack community yeah it's great though it's it's full of nice people who help each other out a lot i'm impressed by how thoughtful some of the discussions are on there all the discussions i don't mean to imply yes i mean they're all thoughtful except for some of those really unthoughtful discussions no they're great yeah they are i learn should i read our first question yes go for it okay this is from a listener named alex i am worried it is only a matter of time before the growing pandemic impacts the job market i work for a young startup and as of yet i am gainfully employed but if this goes on

as long as some folks say it will i'm just not sure i've heard that there was a software job market crash after the dot-com boom what was that like what's the best thing to do if you get laid off in a market downturn wait it out look for software jobs switch industries temporarily i guess for some context if you're listening to this long afterwards this is during the coronavirus pandemic i guess we can't be we can't have any form of media and not mention it somehow that's true it's got to touch every part of our lives even your software podcast that's right huh yeah this is i i mean i don't want to focus too much on the coronavirus part because i don't know i don't know i'm not a scientist but i think this is broadly applicable yeah what yes you are

you are a computer scientist yeah that's true and and that does give me the power to speculate wildly on every field besides my own because of intellectual hubris that's right listen i can i know how system calls work so therefore epidemiology is way easier and i can just sit down and reason through it from first principles so straightforward yeah anyways but i think this is broadly applicable because there will always be downturns of some form or another there's one right now but there will be one in the future probably no i heard this was the last one oh well that means it's real bad i can tell you my plan if i need to deal with an apocalypse scenario my plan is to go around and ask the warlords if they need websites built or like servers maintained do they need me to manage

your product team for them kind of help iterate quickly and test out some ideas build up their ci cd pipeline it's hard to manage your like skull inventory i guess so you probably need software to do that oh man where do you get these ideas i don't know these are just i this is from me wondering like what would i do if zombies came alive because there are people who have i mean if you're a contractor like a a house building contractor of that like you could you could be useful you know you could build fortifications build houses inside those fortifications but what would i do like i would be bad manual labor i think

and i'd whine i'd be like where's my free catered lunch my hands are soft i have blisters can i can i get a standing desk to uh is there a sitting shovel uh yeah i'm gonna sit on this yoga ball while i dig trenches to put the bodies in because it's better for my back oh my gosh yes we are we're the first ones with our backs against the wall when the revolution comes let's be honest yeah i mean it's it's like one of the dangers of being so highly specialized is if the circumstances that make those specialties useful go away then what do you do not only specialized but completely spoiled yeah specialized in spoiling myself oh man i don't know i uh i do worry about that so i think the end of this conversation is

me turning into a prepper but let's assume it's not quite that bad okay yeah what do you think dave well why don't we talk about what what we do know which is in past downturns what it looked like and sure i you know i think everyone has this moment where they realize that they're getting old when they say something to someone who they thought was their peer maybe even their same age and that peer just looks back and it's like a historical reference that was part of your life and that peer just looks back at you like cross-eyed like what are you talking about yeah like when you mentioned the year 1999 and you realize they're grown-up adults who have families who are like i wasn't alive then yeah exactly exactly i do remember in i think it was

2014 or 15 i uh had a co-worker and i was just chatting with them about the dot-com crash and they just hadn't heard of it and i was like wait you how what and then i was like okay well it was like 14 years ago 15 years ago okay and you are 28 so yeah you were in middle school yes you didn't hear about it you didn't care about that and the funny thing was he came back to me and he's like oh yeah but that just affected tech right it's not like it's not like the economy changed or anything i was like well why don't you go look at a stock chart and you'll see there was a pretty big crash. Anyway, so that was my moment when I realized I was getting old and the industry had kind of been growing up around me and I had been surrounded by people who were all 10 years

younger than me. So yeah, I did live through the dot-com crash, but I came at it at kind of a different, a little bit right on the cusp of starting my career. So I graduated from college in 2003 and started my job search in early 2003. And this was about, I guess like a year and a half or two years into the crash. I don't remember the exact date that things really went, started going down, but we were pretty far into it at this point. And jobs, software jobs were hard to find. In fact, I was so nervous because the dot-com crash happened while I was in school still. So I'm going to classes and hearing all these stories of people who are graduating and getting these massive offers from big tech companies with huge signing bonuses and big perks and stuff.

And I was getting really excited. I'm like, this is really cool. What a great time to be in computer science. But then about halfway through my major, all the stories started changing. In fact, I remember one story was Intel had done its annual college hiring, and they had made a bunch of offers to a bunch of students, including signing bonuses. And then a month or two after they had sent all these offers out, they sent letters to all these students saying, you know what, keep the signing bonus, don't come to work. We don't have a job for you. wow yeah that's so that's so different because from my experience because i've never known a world in which it was not easy to find a new job right just it's just this constant frothing frenzy of everyone trying to hire developers so yeah yeah that is that is pretty different it is different and i and when i finally did graduate in 2003 and or well i started the job hunt before i graduated and i remember i applied to about six or seven jobs we didn't have linkedin So there wasn't just like I didn't have a backlog of recruiters who had reached out to me, you know, for 100 different opportunities. Yeah.

So I applied to six jobs. I only got calls back from two of them. One of them was really awesome. It would have actually been working for the open source development lab. That's what it was called at the time. This is what turned into the foundation. I think the Linux Foundation is what this got renamed to later. I would have actually been writing code to help Linus Torvalds do kernel releases, which would have been really cool.

I didn't get that job. So think of all the fun stories you would have about being yelled at by Linus Torvalds. So true. If you had had that job. I know. Oh, man. I might not even be a software developer today. Anyway, that would have been amazing, especially I was such a young, what's the word?

Just ideological, way, way into open source at the time. You know, my computer was blessed by. You would have been working at church. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. oh man anyway those were good times so yeah did not get a did not get that job and i only i ended up getting the job that i the second callback and when i went to apply i interviewed they did campus interviewing so i showed up did interviewing on the campus and the interviewer

told me they were interviewing 200 students from three universities to fill three positions yikes yeah and i was like oh my gosh those numbers boggle my mind like think of think of your experience on the other side interviewing people have you ever interviewed that many people for one position i mean it feels like their process is bad if they have to invest like five hours with 200 people to hire three people anyways yeah yeah it was crazy well now to be fair the 200 people were just the first wave and so they were like 30 minute they're like screening 200 people exactly so like 30 minute interviews in a little interview pod on campus for 200 people but still that's like 100 hours right yeah so i got past the first wave got

invited to an on-site interview went through that and that was like a more of a traditional interview where I met with like four or five people sequentially. And they each asked me random weird questions. And I ended up getting the job. So there were three of us that got this job. And I was just so grateful to have any job at this time because I really had no other prospects. But it was just crazy. And of course, the pay was about $30,000 less than the rumored big tech salaries that were coming out. So very low. Yeah. So I think that's probably a natural thing that will happen is that if this drags on and turns into a first class downturn for software is that salaries will probably come down. And that happened slowly, I think, because they just

stopped going up, but cost of living goes up, you know? Anyway. Yeah. So that's, yeah, that was my story. And it was actually, it was so weird at the time, or the jobs were so scarce that I actually applied to grad school because I thought, you know what, I'm just going to ride this out by taking on some student loans. I'll just spend the next couple of years insulated in academia, maybe get a master's degree, and then I'll try again when hopefully the market has warmed up. So I applied to a grad school at University of Virginia for the computer science master's program. And if I'm remembering this correctly, they had like 30 or 40 spots open for grad students and 900 applicants for those spots at the time. So grad schools will probably fill up

if there's a downturn. And I didn't get in there. I did not get into UVA. I did apply to another university where I did get in, but then I got the job offer to actually start working. And at this point I was getting pretty sick of being in school. So I decided to take the job. So that's what it was like for me. Yeah. It's just such a different world. So different. Do you feel like it's affected how you have approached your career when you started? I mean, yeah, I started my career in a time of plenty basically where tech was booming and continued to boom even more basically until right now i mean there's been kind of some some growing cultural dissatisfaction with tech but but yeah that hasn't quite affected jobs that much but i feel like i mean it would be hard not to

affect jobs right now just given how how things are like do you do you feel like it's affected how you evaluated opportunities or did your work or or i don't think so i was so oblivious at this young age that I don't think I really appreciated the predicament that we were in at the time. And I also didn't have a lot of responsibilities, you know? So it's like, yeah, so you lose your job for, maybe you can't get a job for a few months. No big deal, right? Like I had low obligations. Yeah. It's like, well, I have $500. That should carry me through three months. Yeah. That's exactly right. So I don't think it really affected me. And I got to tell you, the hedonic treadmill is real. You know, like as soon as the industry started to pick up steam

again and job opportunities started flowing like wine, I adapted to that really quick. So, you know, no, I don't think so. Yeah. It is amazing how quickly you can get used to feeling like you're important and valuable and deserve a lot. Yes. Turns out we're good at that. Yeah. It's so easy. Yeah. So what should our listener do if they're concerned or if they do end up getting laid off? go apply to grad school i mean my generic advice is that it's probably worth being a little bit more conservative right now maybe saving a little bit more money so you can afford to not have a job for longer trying to lower your expenses so that money lasts longer maybe evaluate if you have different

opportunities you're looking at kind of the the value of stability has risen in my in my mind where maybe before you would be more interested in something pretty risky and wild and tense but now i mean that risk always has a downside it's just that downside isn't that bad if you can kind of like stumble out of your house and then get another job just by tripping in the street yeah but if that's not true then stability is a little more important i think yeah i think that's a great idea is having a fallback plan and by fallback i mean like having savings you can fall back on to sustain you for a while while you're looking if it turns into an extended job search it's just a fantastic idea and and like this is a luxury a lot of people don't have right like

software jobs are very well paid yeah and and theoretically you should be able to i mean everybody's circumstances are different so i don't know but i think it's easier for software folks to build up savings than people in other industries because they're compensated so well so yeah i mean you should take advantage of that and and recognize not everybody can do that i think you should also ask yourself what would happen if my company laid me off tomorrow and look at your skill set look at your experience, look at your resume and try to answer the question, am I appealing as a candidate on the open job market right now? Yeah. And that answer you can, you can use, you can take a, try to take an objective look at yourself and say, what have I really contributed? Like if another

employer came along and said, tell me why I should hire you. Do you have anecdotes that you can share where you've made meaningful, significant contributions to a business? Because in a lean market where there are fewer jobs and plenty of people competing for them employers are going to be especially in that market employers are going to be looking for people who can make a big impact and just be one person yeah like a an easily measurable impact yes like i've got a business we're all struggling it's a downturn i need someone who's going to make a big difference yeah so being able to demonstrate that and and i don't even think it's as important to say well i i have experience with technology x y and z you know hot technology x y and z i think it's more

important to be able to say i'm an engineer that can make a big impact on your business yeah yeah here is here is bad thing look how i made it good thing yeah yep that's good although having said that i do think specific technology experience can be valuable in this market because again employers are going to have their pick of people who already have that experience and won't have to pay a ramp up cost with them so they can be a little bit more picky yeah that make sense um whereas in the past they might have been willing to hire a fungible engineer who can learn and grow on the job so yeah i mean it's hard but like if also you should look at your industry like is your industry likely to be one that is going to be impacted by the downturn

and are your skills narrowly scoped to that industry like let's say you're an expert on hotel or airline travel engineering and it's like i'm not an expert in web technologies or generic technologies that are hot i'm an expert in hotel bookings it's like well you might want to try to broaden yourself a little bit i think network is really important i mean it's always important for finding work but i i imagine it becomes even more important when it's harder to find jobs because i feel like there are going to be more people competing for just kind of random broad openings and so you you don't want to be in that group competing with all those people as much as possible if you can work with folks that you know or that can recommend you or put in a

good word for you that's important so oh yeah developing good relationships with folks and and being willing to help them and and be helped by them is important i would also say that this is a great time i mean it's always a great time for this but a particularly great time to make sure that you are taking your development as an engineer seriously which means you're you're learning new things you're learning how to learn you're developing new skills and you're not stagnant i think for the last 10 years plus it's actually very easy to just be good at one thing and not branch out and have plenty of employment opportunities anyway and so if there's a downturn which you know who knows if there is a downturn it's i think the people who have taken seriously

the effort to actually develop new skills and grow are going to be the ones that benefit because you know they'll be the scarce commodity what's a big scary answer it's true time to give some hot stock tips too yeah make sure you put all your money in i don't know tesla now short this one yeah buy it that much yeah yeah i don't have any hot stock tips yeah me neither bury it put it under your mattress in cash yeah yeah i maybe talk to someone that has maybe talk to a financial person if you're interested in financial advisor if you're interested in kind of hedging your your your risk against downturns financially as well where you could marry a very wealthy spouse do not let them sign a prenup and then murder them just

keep keep procrastinating tell them you'll get back to them about their prenup yeah push really hard on the wedding date yeah classic yeah i saw a great murder mystery about that recently okay boy this this apocalypse really picked out the best yeah when the chips are down we really know what dave will do i'm going all in yeah i mean my plan is to be very lucky and just like have nothing bad happen if that doesn't work i'll go to my uncle's house in idaho who has a stockpile of weapons and food yeah actually yeah great yep he said if the zombies ever attack then we can drive over there okay did he lend you a tank so you could make the road trip oh can he lend me a tank no yeah i would have to make my car make my subaru look very intimidating

on the highway maybe some like paper mache turrets and paper mache turrets i love it some red paint all over it yeah it's big spikes and stuff yeah i mean i don't know we can't predict the future but i i do think it's it's most of this stuff is great to do anyways no matter what the market is like it won't really hurt you yeah so i don't think it hurts to say like what what would i do and then do it right now even if it ends up not being that bad for what it's worth and my predictions are worth even less than toilet paper which actually is worth quite a lot right now well yeah i saw 60 a roll somebody was scalping them for oh man for what it's worth my prediction is that this will probably not have as big of an impact on the software development

industry as the dot-com bust did i i suspect that as a species we have a addiction to data technology and engineering problems are are just going to increase so i don't know i i think i think we're i think developers are probably going to be okay but i do think that this golden age will eventually end you know and we'll become regular run-of-the-mill folks who you know have to struggle and strive just like others yeah i'm gonna predict the opposite so we cover our bases i think okay good okay so one of us will be right nice and the other one has to leave the show should we answer our next question yeah sure this comes from a listener named nathan who says i'm a technical lead on a small team two of my teammates are constantly annoyed with each other

and i need to know how to talk them down so we can be a better team let me introduce them alice the names are made up an experienced programmer who is slower to catch on keeps dragging old arguments and old ways of thinking works very slowly and in her own vacuum and often comes across as difficult to work with alice constantly disagrees with the team on things like naming conventions and solutions to problems in the other corner i love this wrestling metaphor in the other corner bob a second year coder eager to follow leadership but still learning when to ask for help he takes criticism constructively but not from alice because to him it sounds like fingernails on a chalkboard. Alice and Bob constantly bump heads. Yesterday, Bob rewrote Alice's stored

procedure because it was slow and he had some ideas with how to reduce some code. Today, it was SQL formatting. Bob's SQL is ugly, according to Alice, who wants to confront him on it. I suggested we create a style guide and to settle that argument. This kind of thing has been going on since the team was formed. My question is, what can I do? They both look to me as a leader and I don't want to take sides but we've had this problem for nearly two years yikes wow so first of all we chose the names alice and bob because that is like the classic computer science alice and bob names yeah their relationship has really devolved since they were trying to exchange private information with each other securely back from their glory days of cryptographic

protocols yes alice can we just go back to the time when we did key exchanges yeah i just i miss when i could send you the letter a and no one would know what it was huh so i didn't catch the small team part when i first read this it's possible the team is nathan and alice and bob they're just like it's like when you're out to lunch with two people that just fight you kind of like sit there awkwardly yeah eat your salad slowly quietly yeah yeah if it's if it's more than just these two folks though then it's likely that the other people on the team are not huge fans of this behavior yeah you can imagine yeah what do you think they should do well you know we've talked about cage matches in the past yeah there are they're already in corners yeah take that metaphor

all the way whoever wins this arm wrestling contest gets to define the sql style guide or or whether there is one even maybe they just choose chaos and say the style guide is there is no style guide and no one can complain about sql formatting or only i can complain about it because i won the arm wrestling match yeah that's true you gotta exercise your powers as victor i worked with somebody who had very very detailed criteria for formatting that was completely unenforced by any tool and it was there were other things too but it just made code reviews with this person really frustrating because they cared quite a bit and nobody else cared but there was there was like nothing to enforce like whatever it's fine to have a defined format but it wasn't defined it was just

all in this person's head and then they were they were trying to define it by like getting after people in pull requests saying, Hey, you're not matching this format that I think is really important. And it was just so frustrating because it prevented any conversation about like design and implementation. And it was, it was all just in these little nitpicky details of match up my preferences. Exactly. My preferences, which I will only reveal to you as you violate them. Yeah. It just turned it into this power struggle where instead of saying like, here's some stuff i think might work can you give me some feedback on it it turned into please appease me and meet all my criteria otherwise i'm not letting this through yeah so that was painful i guess the

point of that is i empathize with you that's that's not a fun place to be in it's not and it's even complicated further by the fact that i think the listener here is not the manager but rather a tech lead which means that interpersonal conflicts might feel like they're outside of your sphere of control yeah yeah that's a good point like you might be stepping out of bounds to go after it i only care about technical stuff not people stuff all i have to do is solve these technical problems and the team will be great it turns out that's not true so you know i i think i would probably oh man it's tough i i really wish this question was from the manager because i think as a manager you have got to put an end to this this is just completely unacceptable behavior i

mean, these are two rational adults. These are professionals being paid. And this kind of behavior is just totally unacceptable. And as a manager, I think I would have to come pretty harshly on these people, come down pretty harshly on them and say, listen, I'd probably bring them both in the room and say, you two are having a conflict. It's gone on for two years. It's harming our team and you need to end it or else one or both of you is not going to be able to stay on this team i think i would be that direct about it why because i don't know i just like muscling people around it just feels really good to bully people just like abusing power no i mean i've just always wanted to say the phrase or you're fired yeah and now that i said it out loud in role play

it doesn't feel as good as i thought it would but seriously i mean this kind of behavior it wrecks teams i mean we hear the word toxic thrown a lot around in our culture but this is toxicity and it it spreads and it makes it so that when these two people are engaged in this kind of behavior none of the other people on the team can be at their best and so i i think as a team i insist i've seen that very directly where it's it's pretty easy for even one bad relationship on a team to just like smush the whole team yep so you got to fix it and i'm not as a manager i'm not going to sit down and be like, let me, you know, tell me why you're so upset about this SQL code formatting. You know, I'm not really going to indulge in that. I'm just going to say, you got

to fix this. You know, if you want to ask me specific questions about how to fix it, I'm here to help. But you're an adult, you're a professional, especially this Alice in this scenario, who's got many years of experience. I expect that person to learn grown up people skills and how to interact with other people. And if you can't interact with someone who's two years into the into the profession then that is a turns out that's a required skill to be on our team is that you have to be able to interact with others especially if you're more experienced so i mean you said that's what you do if you were the manager but if you're the tech yeah there's this fuzzy in between where the tech lead might not have the authority to do it but they're still responsible

for the output of the team in some way yep like i mean do you just try to do that anyways no i i think you don't really have the stick to dangle over people's head it's more like yes you're just saying, please fix it because it's hurting the team, not like, please fix it or else. Yeah, yeah, for sure. I think there are two approaches that I would take as a tech lead. The first one is I would partner with the manager. I would sit down and describe the problem as clearly as I can, and then strategize with the manager on how to solve this problem. If it's as bad as you say, the manager is definitely aware of it and has failed to fix it over the last two years. And so they might need your help. And maybe that's what's going on.

So in any case, you got to partner with the manager, figure out where the problem is, and maybe they've taken action already that you're not aware of, and you should become aware of that. Because as a tech lead, I think you really need to be involved at a certain level with these kinds of people issues. It doesn't mean you have to do their performance reviews every year. It doesn't mean you have to do their compensation. But it does mean that when there are serious interpersonal issues on the team, you probably need to be aware and partner it up with the manager to make sure you're presenting a unified front. So you've taken a pretty hard line here. The relationship has been bad for two years. What if it's the kind of thing, in my

experienced the hardest situations to address are things where each individual instance is like not quite a big deal yeah but the totality of it affects things and it's hard to say like when you did this specific thing that was just totally unacceptable it's always like that felt kind of weird and i i wish it didn't happen that way but like it's not that bad but but there's just this broad pattern like how do you how do you deal with it if that's the case where it's i mean And teams disagreeing about style is a sacred right of engineering, you know, like that one incidence by itself is not like a huge problem, I think. But in the context of this whole relationship, it could look worse. What do you do if that's the case where it's like the weight of

everything, not the individual thing? Given that this has gone on for two years, that's almost definitely what has happened here. And so I think it's probably not as clear to the parties that are participating in this toxic relationship as it is to you watching it from afar and so in order to make it clear to them i think you need to give them specific examples of unacceptable behavior and i would just call it out and say yeah look if you did this once twice maybe even three times over two years we wouldn't be having this conversation everyone has conflicts occasionally but you've done it 25 times and here i've been making notes you know so i think you probably need to start writing this stuff down so that you can point it out clearly to them yeah yeah that's

a good call out when you're delivering tough feedback about things that need to change the vaguer it is the harder it is to receive and act on for folks yes yes yeah i like that i like calling it out explicitly and saying that hey it's not the individual things it's that there's this constant pattern that happens right and what's what's going on here i think is that this pair of developers is creating externalities where they don't feel it as badly as the rest of the team. They don't feel the productivity loss from the rest of the team. They don't feel the unsafety that they've created for the rest of the team. You know, like the fact that other people on the team don't feel like they can engage

in a healthy debate because they don't have psychological safety when they've got these two running around. Yeah. Who's to say that the wrath of this one developer might not turn to you if you disagree with them, right? Yeah. And so I think as a tech lead, one thing you can do is you can help them to take the externalities back onto themselves by pointing out things that are happening on the rest of the team as a result of their behavior. And this might force them into an introspective attitude where they say, oh, I didn't even realize that these debates that I thought were just perfectly normal debates were actually causing the rest of the team to disengage.

yeah you did talk about kind of avoiding talking through feelings and i i want to return to that because i want to agree with it basically that it can be tempting sometimes to be an armchair psychologist and think through like maybe alice is feeling pressure because there's this new young eager person learning stuff quickly and alice doesn't learn stuff as quickly that's what the question said and so they're kind of reacting defensively and trying to defend like it doesn't I mean, it matters to them as a human. It does not matter to the team why they're doing it. Like it's the effect of their actions that you want to focus on,

not trying to kind of treat them with therapy. Yeah. Tell me about your childhood. Yeah, exactly. Tell me, are you feeling the icy hand of death approach as you see these new young developers? Like that can be a strategy once you have kind of agreement to work through a thing. but if you're just trying to lay out what's acceptable and what the expectations are you

don't want to dive into the why they're acting like that as much i think i thought you were going to say that can be a strategy once you've completed your psychology phd oh yeah that too yeah i don't know i've i've read a couple i read drive which is by a psychologist so i think that gives me all i need also again you are a computer scientist so you know that's true don't underestimate your psychological abilities have you noticed that like in the last 10 years it feels like developers kind of got obsessed with psychology because they're like oh this is how people work and it's just it's it's like this set of instructions just like computers have instructions and i just learned the truth and la la la la there's no such thing as a replication

crisis la la la la there's just this weird obsession with like pop psychology among developers i feel like maybe maybe anyways a tangent be gone tangent all of this is to say though that even though we jameson and i are both believe in empathy that it's crucially important as a leader to be empathetic with your people we still don't i think in this case you need to put the responsibility on the individuals to change this behavior you know they are professional adults and they have got to do it yeah i think empathy comes in to you supporting them in changing but not into you excusing the behavior yeah very well oh that was elegant oh why thank you dave now i just have to do it that was like as good as an inductive proof an elegant inductive proof i am after all

a computer scientist that's right of course the things i say are elegant i mean firing someone is like the ultimate stick and it has a lot it has a pretty big blast radius in terms of effect on the team do you really think this merits it i know you said early on that either one or both of you would be gone if this doesn't get worked out i think that as a manager if you want to like kind of cool that down a little bit you can say i don't see how the two of you can remain on this team with this behavior any longer and that opens up the possibility for an internal transfer it opens up the possibility for role change or a team split or like a charter focus where you're not going to be working with this person but you know i think the other person

will read the message loud and clear it's like yeah i i do have in my back pocket the idea of terminating your employment but i'm not reaching for it right now yeah i mean one more question is is there something that nathan could have done earlier like what's say say they had a time machine what's something they could have done before just have the same conversation but earlier oh definitely i mean the fact that this has gone on for two years is going to make it a lot harder because now the manager who's supposed to have these hard conversations has to acknowledge i failed to do this on time like part of the responsibility belongs to the manager right yeah it's a it's a horrible feeling to be delivering hard feedback and know like it's

better late than never but this should have happened earlier yeah yeah that that's really sucky feeling you can imagine you would have nipped this in the bud quicker and and i think that nathan will probably take this lesson back for future jobs and say if i see this kind of behavior beginning i know to have the conversation now because it's only going to get harder yeah we've talked about this a while ago but there is i mean there's a skill in working with people that you don't naturally get along with and you don't have to be friends with them you don't have to like them you don't have to want to hang out with them but there should not be that many people that you just cannot collaborate with at all if you're just like easily torpedoed by someone difficult

you're going to be torpedoed because there are difficult people all over the place yep well did we answer it clearly question answered easy peasy simply do the thing we said problem will be solved yeah this is a computer science stamp of approval yeah you're a scientist you know the truth the objective truth yeah this is the hard stuff interpersonal conflict like this is tricky so i guess expect it to be tricky but i think it is definitely worth addressing all right awesome what should people do if they want their own questions answered dave go to soft skills.audio and click ask a question and we just want to say thank you to all of the many people who do that every week we really appreciate all of your amazing questions i think i learn a lot from the questions oh yeah

makes me think about the world in a different way so thank you all right we'll catch you next week you