Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 204: Remote work and ghosting your employer

Episode Date: April 6, 2020

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: My whole team recently transitioned to working from home. How do I handle this? The good news is I don’t have a fever. Working remotely, what should you do if either you ghost the company or the company ghosts you? (Ghosting as in the relationship)

it takes more than sitting your kids in front of disney plus so you can get some work done to be a great engineer this is soft skills engineering episode 204 i'm your host dave smith i'm your host jamison dance soft skills engineering is a weekly advice podcast for software engineers about all the non-tech stuff like plunking your kids down into the living room so you can get 30 minutes of work done there's a lot of tech behind that whole whole giant bundles of tubes to pipe the mickey mouse into your ipad yes so i am a selfish man and i really don't like disneyland or disney world or theme parks in general and i have up until a week ago successfully crushed my daughter's dreams like in some dystopian future where they don't know colors exist and everything's in black

and white and then someone shows them a color my my mother-in-law was like mentioned disneyland offhand and my daughter was like disneyland what's that and she said oh it's this magical place where all these disney characters walk around and you can go talk to them in real life and they have rides and games and food and she was like father may we please go to disneyland like you didn't no disneyland existed no so someday now we will go to disneyland thanks to your thanks to who is this it's my mother-in-law who's wonderful and yet she did this awful thing to you maybe i'll like it with kids i don't know i hated it as a middle schooler and above you'll feel better when you send your mother-in-law the invoice for

the tickets but i thought you were gonna say when i send my mother-in-law there with your daughter yeah that'd be cool disneyland's great but you know what's really great going with your grandma she would love that she loves her grandma all right i want to thank our wonderful patrons thank you to these folks who are contributing at the level where we say their name or any arbitrary word they choose i guess on the air every week thank you to vin lock 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 sonic the hedgehog stanley tactical radio steven arman lee taras haruk maple syrup travis and zach grannon thank you to everyone

else who has contributed and if you do for any dollar amount you will get invited to our slack team which is great um an interesting and fun well not fun that's not the word an interesting thing that has happened lately is with all the instability around the the pandemic folks have kind of come together to share stories of how they've helped other people or kind of commiserate and it's been interesting i've liked seeing how people can both kind of talk about their interpersonal problems that they're having at work but also just be there for each other and help each other so join this friendly kind group of people and make us say a dumb word on the podcast, I guess. That's right. I don't know what's worth it. I mean, those are both great

things. We're cheap. You can buy our words. All right. You can buy our dignity. You want to read our first question, Dave? Yes, I do. This is on topic. So I just want to, for the people that are listening to this podcast, 500 years in the future, you're going to need to open up your history book it's in the space library of congress as a human artifact of great renown that's right so episode 204 was when they really took off they're doing okay before then and then then that's when the hockey stick turned into the handle of the hockey stick not the yeah not the the whacker not the flat part i don't know what you call that the whacker blade i think it's a blade i think whacker is correct

Yeah. I know Canadians. I'll ask them. Yeah. Anyway, so if it's the year 2520, just open your history books. There'll be a little footnote about this thing called the coronavirus. So we decided to do a remote work themed episode today. We plucked out a few questions about remote work. Anyway, that's what we're doing today. So let's read the first one here. So this comes from an anonymous listener who says, my whole team recently transitioned to working from home. How do I handle this? The good news is I don't have a fever that's great i'm glad you don't have a fever though you may be asymptomatic that's right it's it's been interesting seeing more people transition to working from home because i've

been doing it since before it was cool dave i've been working from home for years like two no more than two years three like four whoa four let me let me check linkedin hang on i love how every time i ask you a question about your own life 2016 you have to reference linkedin i have to check linkedin why would i store knowledge in my brain when i give it to this for-profit company to make money off of anyways so four years i just gotta ask like when you wake up in the morning and you wonder where to go to work do you sometimes check linkedin first no no i don't because i have footprint spray painted on the carpet from my bedroom to my office and i just one step at a time pick up one foot and place it on the hot pink foot

until i'm there at my desk and actually i have a code editor that has all my code pre-written for me so i just type it's like did you ever play those spelling or typing practice games when you're a kid on a computer or something it's like that except for like writing this crud route that talks to a database i just just type and stuff happens and i don't know if i have to understand what it means i just get points for matching up the pink hot pink letters that's hilarious linkedin work from home Anyways, I got this weird missing out feeling where I saw these people sharing remote work hot takes that I wasn't participating in. Everyone was saying, like, make sure you shower and get dressed every day and have a strong routine and go outside, see people, real people in real life, like, end work at a defined time so it doesn't smudge into your life.

and i gotta tell you i don't do any of that stuff wait let's i haven't worn pants in my office in years okay so just walking down the list you don't get dressed you don't go outside you don't talk to other humans you don't exercise what else shower oh yeah eat lunch at a regular time and work and begin work at regular times i mean i'll be clear i'm wearing i'm currently clothed okay but let's say i haven't worn pants that do not have some kind of stretchy material around the waistband in my office basically in four years so you're saying elasticity is not just for the cloud anymore no no it's not and and the thing is it's not that i have like my

work from home outfit and my going out outfit it's that my only outfit now is joggers or or like sweatpants or gym shorts do you do the trope where you have something fancy on top and gym shorts on bottom oh heck no okay are you kidding me no i just barely put on a new t-shirt today but let's just say the laundry bill is has gone down the laundry bill is that a utility now so you're going green is what you're saying i you know besides this giant desktop tower i have plugged in cranking away with like five fans mining bitcoins yeah yeah besides the part where i externalize this negative cost of destroying the environment so i can get magical internet money yes i have gone very green okay great and it's it's gone great

we'll get to that later but i just want to point out that when the cdc started advising everybody to do social distancing jameson was reading the guidelines and he was like uh-huh uh-huh i already do all this where's the new stuff no literally yep exactly my life has been sheltered for years yeah but it's interesting that there's this there's this trope of advice that's like just like crank on the productivity jets baby we're blasting off to productivity space and in my experience i did not realize how much routine like externally imposed routine affected my life and what would happen with the lack of externally exposed routine and what is what is uh what is an externally imposed routine what do you mean so i go into the office

every day okay i would wear pants with less elastic waistbands if i had to go to the office like maybe some jeans i would shower more yeah i would wear some jeans yep shower more i would probably walk around more because i would have to get from my car to my desk and back yeah there's just there's just some built-in stuff that happens when you go to the office And none of that stuff happens by default when you don't. And it turns out it doesn't have to happen at all. And what has this done to your mental health? So we were talking about this before the show.

I love working remote. I enjoy it greatly. And I would not want to go back to an office. But I'm pretty sure I was happier when I worked in an office. I would grumble about my commute and be like, oh i wish i could just like skip home for lunch and hang out with my family and then come back and then i never would because it would take like two hours to go back and forth but and now i can do all those things but just i'm i'm a pretty introverted introvert but even i still like and

and do better when i'm around people regularly and around a larger i don't know i'm around people in my house because I'm married and have two kids and they're great I feel like I'm about to like but I can't stand them no like I love them and they're fantastic okay but there's just something about being around a larger group of people that's that I don't know was was nice that I didn't realize I would miss until didn't have it anymore but at the same time like I still don't want to go back you know yeah yeah exactly so you're like you're a little bit less happy maybe a little grumpy I'm a little more grumpy myself yeah but you don't want to yeah and I don't want to go back either when I worked in an office and did work from home days I noticed a

pretty drastic difference in how grumpy I was where I would get really grumpy and work from home days when it was like one day a week and then would be fine back in the office and I think that's toned down a little bit so I'm not I'm not as grumpy as I was for those work from home days but i think i do get grumpier than i did in the office okay maybe it's like the keyboard warrior thing where like i don't know they're just they're just names in slack so i can send glitter bombs to their house or whatever evil thing i'm gonna do without feeling the consequences right as as i would if i were looking them in the eye while i was sending them a glitter bomb right there is something to that that is true especially the glitter bomb part so how to handle it

that's the tip just just revert lowest common denominator of human become sink down to the remote work level so i think what you're saying is just ignore the hot takes and ignore the hot takes or or go like really far in the other direction and take several showers a day and come to work every day in a full formal wear dress tuxedo whatever yeah work two hours have an extreme schedule where your day starts at 11 a.m and ends at 1 p.m and stick to it rigorously just take the advice to the limit it is interesting i so i have family members that are working from home now and someone was like yeah like they have so much more time around the house right now to just hang out during the day and i'm like hmm they got the home part i guess

you're like what my my employer is afraid of when we say remote work exactly so still do work yeah that's the point maybe that's number one don't screw this up for us okay someone's someone's have a good thing going oh man you know i i've been remote for about two years now coming up on two years oh dave once you've been remote for four years yeah then you'll truly understand yeah for me you know i've done some of that in an office but still remote and some of that at home but still remote oh where you're away from the home office kind of yeah like in a satellite office with other engineers but who with whom i don't work and then i all the engineers i work with are in remote cities and i can tell you like i i that's kind of a it was

almost like a transition period for me where it's like moving from being local to being remote but in an office to being now remote and from home and it was definitely a stair-step decline in my overall like happiness and demeanor but just like you i still want to keep doing it i hadn't thought about that until we talked about it and i can't figure out why like like why you're less happy no why i still am convinced that i wouldn't do anything different oh stockholm syndrome i i don't know maybe i'll take more showers now i actually did do something to combat my grumpiness around the fall time because it gets you know i don't do well in the dark evenings i don't feel well yeah and my wife suggested that i start taking these vitamin d droplets in my

drinks a few times a day in my water and you know i don't know why how or what but i felt so much better when i started doing that really oh yeah tons i would get like these weird like nighttime headaches not really headaches it was just like very light pressure i don't it was almost like a psychological headache like it was not physical just kind of like a psychological headache i don't know if that makes any sense but and i didn't get them this year and i i attribute that to either the vitamin d or the placebo effect of the vitamin d which i mean who cares the placebo effect is real yeah i don't i don't i don't care how it fixed me it does stuff yeah but another thing that happened is i lost my commute right so working from home you don't have a commute

anymore and for i think a lot of engineers that's a substantial portion of your day probably like an hour you know i know plenty of people who have they spend multiple hours a day commuting and i actually did the opposite of you jameson i actually went out and started going to the gym every morning instead of commuting oh dave hot take rookie mistake that's what they that's what they want you to do well i like it so there i yeah i i don't know why but i think i exercised more regularly when i worked in an office because i think it was just a routine thing like i would go to the gym on my way to the office so i would leave the house at the same time and i'm not gonna like show up an hour early at work just because i'm really pumped

about it yeah but for some reason there's just a lot of other stuff i can do when where i work out and where i work and where i hang out with my family is all the same place maybe i'll be like you when i grow up well good luck with that i'd like to see you try i just meant when you succeed you might decide that it wasn't the best choice okay i mean the standard advice i've seen a lot of is like this is not a normal time to work from home and the normal pattern of going through the the learning curve because there is a learning curve is is not like while everyone's kids are home from work. And while people are kind of worried about this impending danger and there's a lot of uncertainty in the world in general. So I think I agree with the broad advice I've seen

that you should try to do a good job, but you should also make sure you're being patient with yourself and with the other folks who are newly working from home. You're going to see a lot of plopping kids down in front of Disney Plus. True. So I actually have two good ideas that I can share that have worked for me when I've been working from home. Would you like to hear them? Please. Okay, number one, the little conversations that happen organically in an office have to be mechanized.

Otherwise, they won't happen. You will fade into the background and you will be forgotten. So I identified the list of half dozen or 10 or so people that I need to stay in contact with regularly. And I went ahead and scheduled 30-minute one-on-ones with them at different cadences. Some are twice a week. Some are once a week. Some are once every two weeks.

And some are only once a month. You have twice a week one-on-ones with people? Just with one person that I need to stay very connected to. Okay. Very tactical, you know. So I do that. And it's worked very well. And I think in some companies, this can be really awkward.

And I remember my last company I worked for, we did not have a culture of doing one-on-ones. But someone joined us from Google. and google like most big companies i think the culture is more accepting or more encouraging of having one-on-ones that are officially scheduled on your calendar that aren't just with your boss it's just like two peers they want to catch up they put 30 minutes on each other's calendars and they do that and so this one guy this google person started doing that with people and i remember some of my co-workers were like that's weird like does he think he's my boss but i think in a remote scenario you just have to do it even if it's weird for your culture

so that was thing number one it'll only be weird until the second person does it and then it's not weird what do you mean oh yeah and then it becomes part of the culture i don't know you'll do it and someone else might yeah i think it's a good idea and do it yeah so the second thing that someone on my team did which i thought was really cool was they set up a one hour weekly virtual social hour where everyone on the team we're talking like 16 20 people show up and we just sit and talk for an hour once a week and we talk about you know how's your work from home situation going what's new and everyone just takes a turn spends a couple minutes a few people comment and chat and it's actually really fun and you might think an hour of that would be tedious and bad but actually it is

really enjoyable and i'm so glad this team member set that up for us is this recent yeah this is with the coronavirus thing because all my team is now working from home so they set this up in the last couple of weeks okay so they they didn't have this just as a general thing it's just now that people are spread out more yeah interesting yeah it's cool that's a cool idea we've talked about this on the show but my team has a standing always on video call that people just kind of hang out in but that's a little bit different because it's there might just be nobody there the whole day okay this is a defined time for everybody to come together that's cool so do people just randomly drop into it yeah or people drop in chat like hey i'm gonna just be hanging out come come hang out

if you want okay i've always wondered how that would work it sounds like it's not super like it's not a lot of people don't use it all the time no it's not like the whole team is there all the time okay there have been moments where there are several people there and we found out you can share your audio through zoom and it turns into a virtual dj session people spin tunes oh like share the audio that your computer is playing yeah yeah so somebody will blast some carly ray jepsen all right which is known to inspire productivity and developers it is known anyways i think we answered it that's how you're productive when you work from home which is carly ray jeffson just the sum of everything we said you know shower don't shower

lift weights don't no yeah this is a tricky time and be be patient with each other all right you want to read our next one i do this is from an anonymous listener who says when working remotely what should you do if either you ghost the company or the company ghosts you. What the heck? I mean, you can't get ghosted if you ghost them first. Preemptive ghosting.

Better to be the ghoster than the ghostee. So just for those of you who, like me, are over 40, may not be totally in tune with this lingo, Jameson, you want to tell us what ghosting means? Yeah, I'm also an old fogey about this because it has never happened to me, but ghosting is where you're in some kind of relationship professional i don't know personal romantic whatever with somebody and then they just one day

never reply ever again if i gather correctly this is a thing that is fairly common in in the dating scene where you will just you'll just be texting with somebody and then might go on some dates you might be even actively dating them and then just nothing ever ever again and they haven't died it's it's painful though because it's it's the halting problem you don't know for sure if you've been ghosted you can only tell if you've not been ghosted that's true like you could ghost me as soon as we hang up from this call and you will never know with 100 confidence if i did yeah not until next week when we record if it happens and even then but then yeah that's a good point and think about that i cannot fathom what would have to happen to

a company for them to ghost you yeah does that mean they stop paying you well i assume so or are they paying you still they just don't talk to you that's called the trust fund i believe if you just like get free money for doing nothing that's the dream if you are gonna ghost them i mean so you could ghost them and eventually you'd probably get fired but you could put in slightly more effort and create some kind of markov chain chatbot email thing and you could probably delay being fired for months with that okay just read in all your past emails and texts to make a corpus out of that and then just let her let her rip randomly starts posting status updates for you they don't really make any sense and it replies

to dms so if your boss reaches out like hey i didn't understand what you said and then they get some half comprehensible gibberish back like you got to insert a little delay so it looks like you're typing yeah you could probably do that with code generation too i did actually saw someone that there was like a text model that came out a while ago anyways they use they use machine learning to generate c++ code basically and it was eerily legible but nonsensical so you could probably write a bunch of code still what should you do if you ghost the company i mean get a different job well this is the part i don't know this is the part that i don't get like it implicit in this question is that you accidentally ghosted the company it's like like apologize and

say i promise not to ghost you anymore but i mean at some point terribly sorry i guess i guess that you have to take this question to the next level which is what happens if you ghost the company and they don't seem to care like then what i think you solved a problem for them yeah this is another fear of remote work from people who don't do it it's like how will i know if they're working if i can't see them working and that's kind of what ghosting would be for remote work it's like i i don't know how it's the halting problem again how do you tell if they're really heads down in a really hard problem or they have ghosted you maybe they've they've almost cracked that algorithm and just need a little a couple days more of total isolation yeah or they

work somewhere else now right where they've been working for another company for days and they're getting two paychecks yeah i've seen someone ghost a company and it only lasted about a week before they were given the boot that's remarkable i'm actually surprised it only lasted a week like i would expect that it it would be natural for that to drag on i don't know too many details about it but my impression is that there was maybe like some kind of project that was important that there was supposed to be a bunch of status updates so like it was pretty obvious it was happening i guess okay yeah that's probably what would happen you would probably get fired and if the company goes to you you'd probably get another job and i gotta say just from a from a professional

perspective you should never ghost your company ever like they should be you should always reply even if you're in a crisis yeah you should at least send out some kind of communication that's the worst way to quit yeah it doesn't cost very much it's it's a much better look to say i've decided to quit then never reply ever yeah like i get it like you might be upset but at least have the decency to show up in the parking lot and slash your boss's tires then you'd be a poltergeist because those are the things that like throw sharp objects around right tires no no like you would throw a knife around it would just so happen to hit all four of the tires okay got it you're a ghost but you still affect the physical world isn't that oh my god i completely missed the ghost

reference in that comment oh i feel like an idiot gotta be on your toes i guess yeah i think we've clearly answered this question i think we have dispensed all the wisdom that is in our brains and don't ghost your employers yeah don't ghost your employers i can't imagine a scenario in which that would be a good thing to do yeah don't do it what should people do if they want their own questions answered dave go to softskills.audio and click on the ask question button fill out that form and thank you so much to everyone who's done that what should people do if they want to support the show jameson they should go to softskills.audio and click support us on patreon or they should just share it with other people we love hearing from new listeners ask questions share it with

folks you all are the lifeblood of the show so thanks for doing it we will catch you next week