Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 206: Micromanaging WFH and vaguely tech lead

Episode Date: April 20, 2020

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Due to corona virus, we had to work from home. But the manager, is checking up on us very frequently. We have to give the day’s plan at 10:00am sharp, otherwise he assumes that we are taking the day off. Also, we have to send an email listing the things we did at the end of the day. This is on top of using jira. I feel he is micromanaging a lot and because of this, the team isn’t able to work efficiently. P.S. Now he wants us to add our tasks to a Google sheet. Hi Dave + Jamison, First of all, thank you for putting on the show every week. It is definitely my favorite podcast by a wide margin, every Monday I just keep hitting refresh waiting to get my weekly fix. I started my job about 10 months ago in a late stage startup. In my last annually review, I was recognized for all my hard work and was made into a “Tech Lead”. I am not sure what this means. There is no “tech lead” title in the company wiki. Everyone title is just “software engineer” with a level. The salary adjustment definitely suggest this is not a promotion, and the all important company wiki says I need to wait to get promoted anyway. What is your advice? What should I start doing now, what does it mean for my career?

it takes more than moving the mess just out of frame before a video meeting to be a great engineer this is soft skills engineering episode 206 i'm your host dave smith i'm your host jamis and dance soft skills engineering is a weekly advice podcast for software developers about the non-tech stuff that goes into software engineering such as clearing all that clutter and children out of the video frame right before your meeting starts so i would like to take this moment to claim my hipster cred way back in december or january that's when i started using the zoom virtual background feature in earnest well before all you johnny come lately's who with your like fancy minecraft backgrounds or videos of yourself talking to yourself

somebody on my team was working from an apartment and right behind them was their kitchen so they just change it to an all flat black background nice before i just used it to goof around but that was when i realized that black is always clean flat black background never a mess yeah that's a good idea actually so if if if anytime you set your zoom background if you could just like i don't know say out loud i realized jameson did this before me then that will give me the validation i so crave your background is good isn't it the uh produce section of a walmart yeah it changes but that's what it has been lately that's a great one i'm just sitting in the produce section i think i talked about this but for a while i got pictures of people i zoomed

with regularly of their background so i would change it to be their background yeah like their actual environment not not their fake background yeah yeah like somebody was in a garage and they sent me a picture of their garage and then i changed my background so i was in their garage too i'm right behind you the moment it started for me was in a meeting where i took a screenshot of the zoom meeting window and set that as my background and then other people started layering more screenshots on top of it nice yeah that was fun anyways hipster credit is claimed i would like to thank our wonderful patrons thank you to these folks who are donating at the level where we thank them every single week thank you to vin

lock braden canes chris hogan dennis bogdanov evgeny sladkowski josh john grant how did i say Evgeny Sladkowski right, but I said John wrong. Anyways, Luis Santos, Luke Bayless, Nick Hathaway, Philip John Basile, the Agile Ventures Charity, Sean Stanley, Tactical Radio, Stephen Armandalee, Taras Harouk, Travis, and Zach Grannon. Thank you to those folks who keep the show going. Thank you to everybody else who has contributed. And if you do, you will get an invite to our Slack team, which is great. And more connection to people through virtual means can't be bad right now it's a good group of folks people are helping each other out so go to soft skills to audio and click support us on patreon to do that yeah also this episode is sponsored by veteri which is an

online marketplace for developers to find new jobs i'll hear a little bit more about them later all right you want to read our first question i do this is from an anonymous listener due to coronavirus we have had to work from home but the manager is checking up on us very frequently we have to give the day's plan at 10 a.m sharp otherwise he assumes that we are taking the day off also we have to send an email listing the things we did at the end of the day this is on top of using jira i feel he is micromanaging a lot and because of this the team the team isn't able to work efficiently p.s now he wants us to add our tasks to a google sheet yeah the only thing worse than a task tracker is two task trackers so you have to give the day's plan at

10 a.m sharp this cuts both ways though where if your manager doesn't give you the day's plan then work is canceled that day so you get to hold them to nice some high expectations i think this is also a chance to have whatever career you always wanted you can dress for the job you want now in this case you can task track for the job that you want okay so if you wanted to be an astronaut just put like in the google sheet weight zero g training in the pool spun around in that gyroscope thing yeah i think that's most of what astronauts do yeah and practicing squeezing liquid food out of foil packets took one of those cool pictures of me in my helmet and and space suit yep yeah see what you can slip in there all right so that's like a

advanced job crafting it's like job narrative crafting i don't know yeah you're basically telling a story oh you could tell a story you could say like worked on bug x and noticed a weird movement out of the corner of my eye and like slowly flesh that out over the weeks until you've built up this fictional world of mysterious shadowy creatures tracking your every move which sounds a lot like this world your boss could read those narratives steganographically embedded into your task updates and then over the course of weeks finally realizes he's the villain yeah you just have to make it a really obvious metaphor for how much you hate your boss for being such a totalitarian micromanager oh man that's a great idea thank you what are your ideas dave

I had my great ideas. Tell me your great ideas. As usual, you've set the bar impossibly high. I can only fail, but I still go forth. I would say that you should propose at your next team meeting that you should create a third tracking system for bathroom tracking. Every time you need to leave your keyboard to go use the restroom, you need to put an entry in this Google spreadsheet.

Yeah, that's productivity that your company needs back. So, I mean, how, I don't mean to get crass, but how detailed is the information in this spreadsheet? Well, let's just say there will be one column for the date and time, but there'll be another column for, that can only hold the number one or the number two. Okay. That'll give your manager the data he needs. Yes. It's also a meta-narrative about the things that you track are crap. oh okay just so you know i injured my ribs the other day and now every time you make me laugh

you also send shooting pain through my rib cage oh dave the sacrifices you're making for this podcast i know i really appreciate them oh man so does does your job suck i think that's the main question i have for this because when when i've had sucky jobs that's when i have wanted to do my work the least and wanted to just goof off and that's when micromanaging of someone saying like hey stop goofing off and do your work would have made the most difference to my productivity but i don't have sucky jobs anymore i haven't for a while and like every job has things that suck and things that don't but in general i am motivated to do work and the people i work with are motivated to do work and this assumption of like if i'm not actively staring at you doing

work you're not working is weird i have seen this exacerbated by remote there's just something about remote where like it's not like they can see you do work all the time when you're in an office but they just assume they can yeah and losing that safety net makes people clamp down really hard but but i don't know i question the need for that i guess i can understand where the boss is coming from because I think every company, I think many companies right now are facing this concept of working from home for the first time. And I think honestly, they're terrified that productivity is just going to drop off a cliff, you know? Yeah. I mean, it might because everybody has to homeschool their kids in this global pandemic. And like, there's a lot of reasons why productivity might

drop off a cliff. Yeah. Yeah. I think most of this tracking is probably pretty harmless, but it's kind of flirting with danger because i think that what i would be on the lookout for is if your boss starts using the sort feature on this spreadsheet who put the most rows in today yes and new lines of code written per day exactly and then you should that's that's warning sign number one is the sort feature and then number two is like if They start drawing thick black lines, horizontal black lines, about halfway down the sheet or maybe three quarters of the way down the sheet. Everything below the line is highlighted in red.

Yeah. That's when you really need to be worried. That would be a new, I feel like companies are always competing for new gross ways to lay people off and highlighting someone's name in a spreadsheet in red would be like a new, I haven't seen that. it'd be a new entry yeah in the field of gross ways to lay people off you just get an email it says go check this spreadsheet link you'll know what to do yeah i mean we recently learned about did you hear about the was it bird it was one of the scooter companies that called a meeting

that a few hundred people were invited to it was a zoom meeting it was two minutes long everyone's camera was turned off everyone's microphone was turned off and it was just someone saying hey you're all laid off and then the meeting ended oh my gosh so you got to beat that and it was like the only people invited were the layoff fees yep oh boy so this way you at least have some warning as you see the spreadsheet get like sorted around yeah maybe the color starts as like a yellow and then it gradually darkens exactly but remember i mean this is a great time to invoke goodhart's law it is goodhart right who said anytime a metric becomes a target it ceases to be a metric so yeah if you know that your company is using this kind of sheet to track

your your productivity for the purposes of sorting you into layoff and not layoff categories then you just got to do what you got to do to get that metric to be right bump those numbers up wait do you really think this is because this isn't like just they don't trust people are working from home it's that they're they're trying to like make cuts at the same time well like i said earlier i think just tracking productivity is probably a harmless motivation but i think that it's now one step closer to nefarious purposes i don't think it's harmless i don't think this implementation is harmless i mean everyone has i would i would say every manager has some rough idea in their head of like how much stuff people get done on their team but this is very focused on tracking the

inputs the butts in seats not the outputs and that's the thing you should be tracking it's like what what value are we getting not like how many bathroom breaks did you take or did you go play frisbee for an hour during lunch which is like i don't know you should be able to do that well not right now don't go play frisbee with strangers right now but like i don't know this this rigid linking between the individual actions you're reporting and like there's this there's this judgment of like if you're telling me you're doing lots of stuff you're doing lots of stuff and you if you are not telling me then you're not yeah but that's not i don't know the the company shouldn't care about how many entries there are in the sheet they should care about what

you're getting done which is kind of what's in jira right yeah yeah that makes sense to me although the 10 a.m thing is also kind of interesting because it's like look you have to check in by 10 a.m or i'm assuming you're using one of your vacation days you know that's that's pretty painful but i mean frankly it is the company is within their rights to do this i don't really have an ethical problem with it but i don't think it's in the company's best interest to track the movements of their engineers so closely. Yeah, it's sending a gross signal. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

And the kind of good signals I'm seeing coming from companies right now are the flexible arrangements that they're making to say, look, we understand you're juggling more parenting potentially. You're having to respond to like, oh, I just heard that the grocery store has an item that I need,

so I gotta go run and get it. You know, all these kinds of things that encroach on your regular kind of nine to five schedule. And so the companies I'm seeing, I'm very impressed with them saying, look, we understand that you need four hours in the morning to swap with your spouse to be able to care for your child or something like that, you know, and it's like you can do your work at a different time of day.

And I think that's great. This company seems to be sending a signal that says we're going to be even more regimented than we were before this whole thing happened. Yeah, yeah, that's gross. I saw this tweet going around saying that basically we will learn things about work from this mass work from home movement. and one of the things we'll learn is that most people don't have much work to do in the day and um interesting so so there might be this conflict between like we have to stay busy but

there's not real work to do i don't know i've never felt like that was the case for my job though maybe i just don't recognize the work i'm doing as busy work but i feel like i always have way more to do than there's time to do and i can like crank through many many hours and not get all my stuff done yeah i feel that way too i yeah i guess hit me up if you have a job that you can cut down to two hours a day tell me more about that i feel like though don't you also feel like as you crank through your things to do in the in the day when you take a good hard objective look at your productivity over the course of a long day it just starts to fall off a cliff toward the end yeah it does i feel like i'm kind of like buying lottery tickets though i think if you zoomed

way out and looked at each individual thing i did maybe that percentage of things would pan out to be actually really valuable but i don't know that i always have that knowledge up ahead up front you know like i'm gonna work for eight hours today and maybe in six months one of these hours will have resulted in value but i don't know which hour that is so i'm just like buying i'm buying more lottery tickets covering more things and again you could say if you were better at your job you would know and then you could do eight of those hours instead of right one of those hours and i don't know we've wandered a field of the question though like yeah what do you do yeah you push back on your boss and say hey this is dumb and we can't get anything done oh that's a hard

track to take because if you say that your boss is going to say how long does it take to update the sheet and you're going to be like five minutes and your boss will be like get back to work yeah and then they'll say if you've got nothing to hide why are you afraid yes exactly you want some privacy. You must have something to hide. I think you need to demonstrate the psychological impact that this is having on the team. You might even be able to cite that Google study about psychological safety being the main variable among teams that predicted productivity the best. Psychologically safe team is a team that doesn't need micromanaging levels of follow-up. Didn't you work a job where you had to track your time pretty rigorously? You were working,

your company was contracting for some other company or something like that yeah exactly we were government contractors and so we had to track our time technically the rule said we had to track our time down to six minute increments or one tenth of one hour i did that for for seven years can you talk about in some ways that's similar to this can you talk about how that affected you i mean how much time did it take and how it affected your concentration and you did it for seven years so i guess it couldn't have been that bad it was pretty bad but yeah i would i would go nuts i guess that's i would hate that i feel like just the fact of like having this extra to do beyond all my other to do's which is write down all the things that you to did in six minute increments would all the

things that you did smush me yeah no absolutely it was hard and we had to do it every day you couldn't just wait to the end of the week and then kind of fill it out you had to fill it out every single day and if you didn't you got uh there was like escalating a discipline associated with missing your time card deadline every day huh now fortunately i never saw it used for the purpose of like productivity tracking it was strictly for billing yeah and so it didn't have this element of your managers reviewing your time card to see if you're spending your time on the right stuff and many engineers many actually just build the same contract for 40 hours every week so most people didn't really have a lot to worry about is just did i get my hours in for the day was the

question not so much like did i bill every little item correctly now in my case i worked sometimes i worked on as many as four or five contracts per week and so that was a little trickier to track all the time but again like i think management did a really good job of being trusting and hands-off and so never in seven years did my manager ever sit down and be like well dave you tracked five minutes here or six minutes here and i need to know what that was you know yeah maybe a a less aggressive way to go about this is ask your manager what they're hoping to accomplish by this yeah i think did you say lay out the costs of it yeah i was gonna say try to describe the impact it's having on the team which is hard to quantify but you could certainly qualitatively describe

that yeah i mean and then if you understand what their underlying reasons are maybe there's a less gross way to meet those needs maybe someone is pushing them to do this maybe it isn't even their idea that's that's what i was thinking my guess is you're you've got someone at a higher level in the company saying i am concerned about productivity dropping managers you need to do whatever you can to track it and then show me artifacts that demonstrate that productivity is not dropping yeah i think to get into that a little bit and if that doesn't work just put like eight hours of coming for your job reading management books eight hours of going over my manager's head eight hours of one-on-one time with your boss coffee with the ceo

nice all right have we answered the question i think so good luck it does sound like a creepy frustrating situation to be in unfortunately it might be one of those situations where you just have to buckle down and just do it who knows all right 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 veteri 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 linked 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 in quitting your job, check out Vetteri. Go to Vetteri.com slash soft skills to sign up.

That's V-E-T-T-E-R-Y dot com slash soft skills. If you use that link, you will help support the show. And if you get a job through Vetteri, they will send you $300. Thank you so much to Vetteri for sponsoring the show. Dave, do you want to read our next question? Sure. This one comes from an anonymous listener who says, Hi, Dave and Jameson.

First of all, thank you for putting on the show every week. it is definitely my favorite podcast by a wide margin every monday i just keep hitting refresh waiting to get my weekly fix this is great uh makes me feel bad for those days where we delayed by several hours on accident okay they go on to say i started my job about 10 months ago in a late stage startup in my last annual review i was recognized for all my hard work and i made it into a quote tech lead i am not sure what this means there is no tech lead title in the company wiki everyone's title is just software engineer with a level the salary adjustment definitely suggests this is not a promotion and the all-important company wiki says i need to wait to get promoted

anyway what is your advice what should i start doing now and what does it mean for my career i want to have some meta commentary which is i go back and forth all the time between including some people include compliments in their questions some people don't it's not a requirement and sometimes i edit them out because i feel weird reading compliments that other people said about us but we just need it we need we need to pick me up right now so it's true i left it in we we got that boost nice okay good so maybe we should have just read the compliment and left the question be a little easier yeah then we wouldn't have to do anything besides read although i struggle to read as you know if you listen to this show sometimes i say words bad yeah so don't we all

all right okay so you've got this title tech lead by your name but no idea what this means all i can say is welcome to the club i think no i think most companies don't know what the words tech lead mean yeah i mean there's there's no agreement across any title at any level like junior mid-level senior staff principal double staff okay bow staff engineering manager it's all it's all very contextual and i've seen in the the good version of this is like it's different somewhere else but they've written down what they expect and the bad version is like i kind of know it when i see it right and then everyone's definition is a little different i think the best thing you can do here is ask for explicit expectations of what this role means so someone

told you congratulations you are now a tech lead ask that person hey what do you expect of me as a tech lead yeah we're gonna talk about some i assume we are maybe we aren't i don't know we're gonna talk about some like things we believe to be true about tech leads but the local expectations should always trump advice from randos on the internet because yeah that they affect your life a lot more quite true so ask for an explicit definition and expectation if if they say oh we don't really have one i think it's worth pushing for it and say it it's going to be hard for me to be successful if i don't know what you want me to do i don't know so after you have that conversation and they inevitably say, I don't really have that. We don't have that written down anywhere. And then

when they say, maybe you should write it, then what do you do? I've spoken like a true manager, Dave. Then it's similar to the last question where you get to just make up whatever job you want. The tech lead role is in training for a half marathon. And that's just what I devote my time to is bumping up my miles. But to be a little bit frank, it's quite possible this person's going to come back and give you their own opinion, which might at the end of the day, not really matter. It might not be accurate. It might not be widely shared. And so another thing you can do here is you can find out other people who have the word tech lead next to their name on the company rosters and go talk to them about what they do and try to figure out the common

denominator between these people that's different from the people who don't have the word tech lead by their name and that might be the definition of the role hmm it's kind of like observing the role in the wild exactly in its natural habitat yeah observing the role as it goes to the watering hole exactly yeah that makes a lot of sense to me i mean i have i have some opinions about what tech lead is but again these are my opinions related to people i work with not like global truths about tech lead everywhere yeah the way i define it is it's someone who is responsible for the how and not the what so they're kind of in charge of the overall technical delivery stuff so they might do some like architecture consulting on projects other people on the team are working

on they might delegate that to other people but they are responsible for making sure that in the end the architecture has been thought about even if they're not the ones thinking about it same kind of thing with like mentoring more junior people they're they're kind of looking out for making sure people are growing technically whether that's them teaching and mentoring directly or making sure it happens they aren't responsible for picking like long-term product direction certainly aren't responsible for like salary hiring firing performance reviews that kind of stuff it's it's just focused on like what are the technical outputs we're producing how can we do that better as a team i think that's i think that's one aspect of the tech lead title

that's pretty well shared across many companies is that you're not a people manager although some people managers act as tech leads tech leads don't necessarily act as people managers yeah it does get into like the architect role a little bit which some places have as a separate role and then if that's if you have like an architect and a tech lead on your team then i'm i'm baffled i don't know what it means yeah then ask for expectations because i'm confused you mentioned that we both mentioned that it probably does not include people management duties and that made me realize one of the important questions to ask when you're when you're trying to define this role is what's not part of this role and that might be just as important as what is part of the role

in the eyes of everyone else at the company and you might want to get a list of things like that like you know our tech leads in charge of backlog grooming our tech leads in charge of certain like what level of ambiguity no longer becomes their problem to solve right or what's the scope like am i responsible for my team but not my neighbors neighboring teams or am i also responsible for providing something to them like what what is that where's the fence you know like where where's the fence where i shouldn't be crossing or at least not expected to cross as part of this role yeah that's a good call out i have seen project management stuff get lumped in with tech lead stuff yeah scheduling and allocation of resources yeah yeah and kind of like long-term

i don't know timelines lining up and stuff like that i mean some feedback and estimates are part of the role for most engineers but like someone giving you a deadline and then saying like work with this other team to make sure your stuff lines up with them and that's that might be a tech lead in some places and not in other places well so we've said i don't know we've said some broad stuff i i like your advice about finding what uh finding out what it's not what else can we tell this question asker i would say even though we kind of joked about your manager might tell you to write down the role description i would say as a newly minted tech lead you're in a great position to document this the old you know more senior tech leads who have been doing this for a long time

they might have forgotten what what the transition felt like and they might have just they don't have maybe as bright of a line in their mind between individual individual contributor and tech lead so i would suggest that if i were in your shoes i probably would create a small committee of other tech leads and managers and other people who have an opinion on the subject and start an effort to write down what the role actually is and if you will participate in that writing process i think not only will you benefit future generations of tech leads but you will get to craft the job to be what you want because like james and i have talked about this before but when you're the one writing you get to anchor the conversation yeah i like that it's not in the company wiki yet

but you can add it to the company wiki and then other people will read it and say like it's in the wiki so this is how it is yeah little did they know that that wiki was written by people that's right who had to figure out what to write that's probably the longer i live and the more professional experience i have under my belt the more apparent it becomes to me that the people who wrote the policies and role definitions and literally everything that you can find written down they aren't like orders of magnitude more intelligent or more inspired than you they just were willing to sit down and do the work of collecting the information and writing it down and achieving the consensus yeah and then their

name was on forever in the edit history in the yes that's glory i don't know i got nothing else that's all the tech lead wisdom i have me neither but i will say there is so much value in writing this stuff down my company has extremely well defined role guidelines for every role and and for us tech lead actually is a level it is not like a separate meta attribute that you tag on to other it's not like a hat you wear yeah yeah um and it's been great to be able to consult this guide and say okay what do i if i want to be a tech lead what do i need to do oh here it is right here and it compares what it's like to be at the previous level and what it's like to be at the following level it's great but at my previous company we took the role of tech lead a lot less

seriously and we just rotated it and said look everyone needs to feel the burden of leadership for this team and so almost everyone on the team will have a chance to be the tech lead over some period of time and it usually lasted three to six months i kind of liked that because it helped everyone on the team be a better team member by having had to wear the burden of the crown you know for that period of time which is which is heavy yeah but i also hated it because it kind of cheapened the role and i think because a there was no compensation increase associated with being a tech lead and b we gave it to interns sometimes so it's like anyone anyone can do this talking about this you know anyone can do it and so therefore it's not special and people didn't

really dedicate time to becoming excellent at that thing you know so trade-offs i think the last thing you got to think about is what you're going to do with your newfound power like how yes how are you going to use this to get your pet weird esoteric language into production yes how are you going to bypass code reviews your own changes yeah just kind of really go wild with it are you going to justify editing code on the production servers live yeah well i'm the tech leading directly to master yeah i'm the tech lead yeah what else do you want to know i mean this is a blank check maybe maybe you should try and be the tech lead if you would like these phenomenal powers all right have we answered the question i

think so good luck it's a great new role with every kind of leadership increase comes this increased level of ambiguity and learning how to be comfortable in that ambiguity is a big part of being successful oh i like that that's a good point all right good luck i'm sure you will do great you've shown great judgment by asking a question and listening to this show and giving us nice compliments people who do those things generally are are very successful in life yes clearly all right what can people do if they want to be like this question asker and be successful in life well you could be the soft skills engineering podcast tech lead if you like just give us a good question and we'll appoint you the tech lead for the week but you can also

share the show you can leave a rating if you'd like but getting more folks to listen is always great we really appreciate it when people do that you can share it on twitter you can follow us on twitter at soft skills eng and again join us on patreon go to soft skills.audio click support us on patreon and any dollar amount will get you access to our slack community thank you so much one of the cool things the slack community did this week is they're starting to set up little social hours where people can actually get together on zoom calls and chat with each other which i think is a really cool contribution to the community right now because people could really benefit from some one-on-one chatting time group discussions semi-in-person lonely out there yeah

it is and it's been great all right thanks for listening we'll catch you next week