Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 208: Toe-stepper-on-er and high leverage work

Episode Date: May 4, 2020

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Hi Dave and Jamison, my name is Bob Marley. I am a senior software engineer at a tech company. How do I deal with a chronic toe-stepper-onner? I have a coworker named Jimi Hendrix - also a senior software engineer - who has a habit of getting involved in and trying to manage my projects. He joins meetings and slack channels, uninvited, and starts asking people for status updates and questions them why things are done a certain way (and not the other), what’s taking so long on unfinished tasks, etc. Jimi basically feels that my projects are his to oversee and manage. So far, my response has only been passive aggressive - e.g. taking discussions to a different slack channel or thread, or meeting the team members offline when he is not around. This is obviously not working out and it is not sustainable so I’m looking for some advice on how to deal with it. It’s not hindering the project so I don’t have a strong reason to complain. Other than the fact that it drives me nuts when Jimi gets involved and asks for a status update on a project which I have fully under control. Should I just do nothing and wait for the problem to go away due to him getting moved to a different project? But how do I keep my sanity until then? And what if even then he finds a way to step on my toes? Have you guys experienced this kind of situation? Is there a permanent solution to it? And no, I don’t want to quit my job. Please help! Yours truly, Bob Marley Hi Dave and Jamison. Love the show. I have been gathering informal peer feedback from my team. I was told I am doing well, and I should be doing “more high leverage work”. I interpret that as coming up with design patterns, best practices, and mentoring other developers. I mentioned that to my manager, and while he agrees, he also said there is no additional head count for the coming year, and knowing that there is a backlog full of features, my concern is that I will be the primary person tasked with writing those features. How could I negotiate/convince my manager to let me do more tech lead work instead?

It takes more than pouring hand sanitizer over your keyboard to be a great engineer. This is Soft Skills Engineering, Episode 208. I'm your host, Dave Smith. I'm your host, Jameson Dance. Soft Skills Engineering is a weekly advice podcast for software developers about non-technical topics and where we've completely lost sight of our intro messages and what they're supposed to be. This shift has really caused a rapid change in the prized cushy tech job perks before it was a slide that took you from your office to the cafeteria with all the free food made by grownups who can do adult things.

And now they just, like, ship you a bottle of hand sanitizer and you feel still privileged and cushy. Yes, you're employed. Yeah. I want to thank our wonderful patrons. Thank you to the folks who are supporting the show at the level where we say their name or a word of their choice every single week. Thank you to Vinlock, Brayden Keynes, Chris Hogan, Dennis Bogdanoff, Evgeny Sladkowski, John Grant, Luis Santos, Luke Bayliss, Nick Hathaway, Philip John Basile, the Agile Ventures Charity, Sean, Stanley Tactical Radio, Stephen Armand Lee, Taras Harouk, Travis, and Zach Grannon. Thank you to those people. And thank you to everybody else who has contributed.

and a pre-cognitive future thank you to people who have yet to contribute but will someday. They just feel a prick in their heart and know, maybe not today, maybe not this month or this year, but someday I'll go to softskills.audio and click support us on Patreon. And then if you do that, you will also know there'll be a separate prick in your heart telling you,

and when I do this, I will get added to their Slack channel, which will be great. That's true. your heart is really active it's going to be active so prepare it yeah three pricks is the grim reaper coming for you so pay attention very carefully to the number of pricks it's a halting problem though if you get the two it doesn't mean it doesn't mean you're totally out of the woods have you seen that episode of the simpsons where bart is underwater diving and they give him a rope to pull and they tell him like 63 poles on the rope is you're fine

or no disaster or something and 64 is like everything is fine so they just sit there counting while he pulls on the rope 63 he's in trouble oh 64 okay okay no i haven't seen that well i stole their joke good one now i'm funny now i'm funny like the simpsons you are hey remember the simpsons and how funny they are me too that like like me Oh, you are funny like the Simpsons. All right. I also want to say thank you to Vetteri for sponsoring this episode. Vetteri is an online marketplace where you can go find a new job and we'll tell you all about them later on. Would you, Jameson? Would you love to read our first question today? More than anything.

Hi, Dave and Jameson. My name is Bob Marley. I'm a senior software engineer at a tech company. how do i deal with a chronic toes stepper honor i have a co-worker named jimmy hendrix also a senior software engineer who has a habit of getting involved in and trying to manage my projects he joins meetings and slack channels uninvited and starts asking people for status updates and questions them why they are doing things a certain way and not the other what's taking so long on unfinished tasks etc jimmy basically feels that my projects are his to oversee and manage so far my response has only been passive aggressive e.g taking discussions to a different Slack channel or thread

or meeting the team members offline when he is not around. This is obviously not working out and it is not sustainable, so I'm looking for some advice for how to deal with it. It's not hindering the project, so I don't have a strong reason to complain,

other than the fact that it drives me nuts when Jimmy gets involved and asks for a status update on a project which I have fully under control. Should I just do nothing and wait for the problem to go away due to him getting moved to a different project? But how do I keep my sanity until then?

And what if even then he finds a way to step on my toes? have you guys experienced this kind of situation is there a permanent solution to it and no i don't want to quit my job please help yours truly bob marley ah stymied we can't give our normal traditional advice have you why not he said i don't want to quit my job oh okay i mean it's kind of rude that yeah how dare he presume yeah to limit our advice how do you take that off the table when you know you know who we are for all shows recorded during like the spring of april 2020 the the advice is amended to quit your job later yeah so i jameson have you ever heard of

the security concept of a honeypot yeah yeah it's where you set up something that is easily exploitable and use it to try and like collect information about people who are exploiting stuff right yes and there's a similar concept i think it's called a tar pit or a honey pit i don't know where you basically lure nefarious bots into your systems and keep them busy on on useless endeavors that have no outcome so like you're trapping them yes exactly okay interesting so you're occupying their cpu cycles on useless dead-end targets okay so now you're wondering how does that apply to this situation well i'll tell you all you have to do to solve this problem is first of all you're all remote second of all you got a lot of slack channels going on here

and jimmy is dropping in on these slack channels asking questions all you have to do is create a chat bot that can impersonate developers and just respond to questions like hey what's the status update on this project or why didn't you do it this way or that way and it can generate like random answers and it can just keep this guy occupied and then you guys can all move off to a totally different slack workspace okay so you're gonna honey pit this guy and leave him like furiously micromanaging this fake made up like markov chain generated project status can you imagine something more passive-aggressive than that because i can't oh boy yeah yeah and it could pay off if the cost of keeping this guy up to date is higher than the cost of spending a

couple sprints building this this honey pit wouldn't that be so fun though to build that yeah that would be rad actually that there should be that sounds like a good thing have you seen those like stupid dumb ideas that nobody wants hackathons no but i love it all right i gotta google it yeah we're a family show so i can't pronounce the full name of the hackathon stupid stuff no one needs and terrible ideas hackathon it's a hackathon explicitly for just real dumb stuff that i love that exist i love that so much i'll link it to you and maybe if you're lucky we'll link it in the show notes but also you can just google it so this would be a good fit for something like that or or just a hackathon in general and you have to push for the restrictions to be really

loose and talk about how much value you get from not like siloing or not not constraining people's efforts into like business value things or say the word gmail a lot and talk about how how gmail came out of a hackathon even though it totally didn't yep tell people amazon came out of a hackathon just like all of it like one day someone was at a hackathon and they thought hey i should build aws and then they did in 48 hours of caffeine infused yeah sleep hackathon work just yeah it's it's all banged out in pearl scripts or something yeah so do that i like it bob marley is worried that even if they get moved to separate projects his toes will still be stepped on which would be some long shoe extensions to reach over to step on your toes still well jimmy you've got

big toes to be stepped on i mean the the core thing is it seems like there's this weird mismatch between this person's title and your understanding of what their responsibilities are and and like the reporting relationship and what their responsibilities and understanding is like you think that you are peers and you've got it under control and they maybe think that they're your boss or maybe just think it's the role of a peer senior software engineer to like ask for status updates on another separate project that they're not working on have you ever heard of like the secret dating situations in high school where it's like yeah we can we can date but it'll just be our secret don't tell anyone else i wonder if i wonder if jimmy hendrix oh who are

we talking about okay jimmy is the micromanager okay jimmy hendrix is the stepper on yes i wonder if jimmy hendrix's manager was like look i'm promoting you to tech lead of the whole organization but it's just our secret this i had hundreds of secret girlfriends in high school all my girlfriends were secret girlfriends and they didn't even know it they did not even know yeah nowadays we call that being a stalker i wonder yeah so time to give the always advice that's easy to give and hard to do in practice which is maybe talk to them about it and say hey why are you why are you like acting like this is your project to manage there's probably a more diplomatic way to to go through that maybe you ask them what they're hoping to achieve by doing

this or what like do they have concerns that they're trying to address or something but some some way of more directly bringing up to them that you think it's weird this is happening and figure out what's going on in their head and then they tell you the secret and they're like hey boss told me not to tell you but i'm gonna let you in on boss and i's secret which is i am the secret co-vp cto now right and i'm just trying to ease into that role and i'm just with you i'm worried that i'm gonna get a bad rating if i don't do the job fully i was asked by boss to be their covert spy into all the micromanaging of all the projects yeah i think ask him what's going on would be interesting yeah and how do you do that mr smarty pants uh

and it's remote so clearly with plentiful emojis and lots of gifts because that's how we communicate now yeah yeah i think i think it's like what i said earlier i think you asked them say hey i've noticed you checking in a lot on my project can you help me understand what you're trying to accomplish by doing that or what your concerns are something like that because i think you can say that honestly like you're confused about what's going on and you want to know what's going on and that that's less accusatory than just saying hey you're stepping on my toes jimmy go back to sweet guitar solos reinventing music don't you have some purple haze to go right yeah i mean worst case jimmy does die tragically young at the age of 27 which is i guess in like this weird

tech industry we're in maybe a plausible age for a senior software engineer true true so maybe jimmy is 26 and will soon turn 27 and pass on let's hope not yeah so your your approach is to ask them why they're doing what they're doing yeah help me understand what you're hoping to accomplish and maybe they'll say like i just thought your project needed some help and maybe you ask why did you think that do you think it's not going well or i don't know you can you can kind of poke from there and understand them more and well i mean i think eventually you might end up at a place where you need to say hey please stop doing this yeah yeah but it's easier to do that when you understand why they're doing it instead of is it though i mean you don't think it is what if

they convince you what if you leave this conversation with another boss i mean if you if you put all this effort into understanding why they're doing why they're stepping on your toes you might walk away and be like jimmy is right for this for doing this i accept it i do need someone to check in on my projects that is my peer i mean if you already know where this conversation has to go why are you beating around the bush with these like empathy questions and i and i'm kind of playing devil's advocate here a little bit i'm not completely heartless but you know i mean i think it does make sense to ask what's motivating them to do that you're just playing the devil not his advocate just straight up the devil i am the devil um i

think it will be easier for jimmy to receive your message if he feels like you've worked to understand it and if it's going to go badly it's probably going to go badly anyways but there's i think there's maybe a window where it would have gone badly if you just said hey back off but because you put in a little bit of effort to understand it could work out smoothly now yeah so in other words you're you're forming these questions to try to soften the blow so that when you deliver the request to stop checking in on your stuff jimmy is more likely to be like i can tell that bob really has everyone's best interest at heart this isn't like a power play so i'm going to go with it yeah or maybe maybe there's some genuine need that jimmy is trying to get met like

maybe they have a project that depends on this project and like trying to figure out if their dependency is going to get met and you can say i will give you these status updates and that way we can not be interrupted as much and you still get what you need i think that's the ideal outcome is that you craft a conversation such that you both walk away having your needs met so on the one hand jimmy walks away saying i feel confident that bob's going to deliver me the updates that i need i can go about my business and not have to keep this up jimmy walks away saying i feel confident that bob's gonna get off my back can you imagine as well the just the the musical collaboration if jimmy and bob can figure out how to work together it'd be like this reggae

guitar oh yeah yeah it would be rad it'd be good so say that doesn't work say they say i don't know say they just get mad or tell you well i'm checking up because i don't think you can do it and you you're doomed without me or i don't know say it doesn't end up at a place where you can magically give them what they need and get what you need what do you do then yeah this is this is where you break out the e-word ecstasy entitlement european it's european i don't know what's the e-word well all of those are e-words so first of all congratulations those are the only three e-words that i know

but the e-word i was thinking of is escalation so if you're coming to a point where you two are peers and have a disagreement on what the working relationship should be it's time to take it up the chain and break the tie yeah yeah i mean sure and i think it's probably fair to i think the way you escalate is just say hey it seems like we can't agree on this let's escalate like i don't know that you have to do it sneakily behind their back oh yeah you escalate together that's right yeah and that's and that's that's one of the roles of your managers help resolve disagreements too so that is right sneaky behind the back escalation that's not escalation at all that's that's just sneaky behind the back you're escalating a knife into their back exactly thrusting upwards

it's the best way to reach the heart right from the back yeah okay so you escalate how do you make sure that your manager agrees with you right before you how do you make sure it's going to come yeah yeah let's escalate together and help resolve this by way well see this is where just the mindset of escalation will help you form an objective opinion about what's going on and it's going to require you to actually describe the negative impact of the behavior you're seeing here in terms that are beyond just your feelings you know if yeah if jimmy's doing things that are good for both teams and there are limited costs and lots of benefits it's going to be hard for you to make a case that it's a bad thing he's doing and maybe the answer is you should have

been doing them in the first place and maybe you've been dropping the ball but also the answer could be this is all just extra work and you're giving my team a sense like they have two bosses to report to and you're creating confusion about the chain of command that's our military reference quota for the show right there that's a completely possible explanation but you need to really sit down and quantify what the negative impact is so that when you if you have to take it to a third party like your manager then you have some ground to stand on i like that it's it's kind of a yeah it's like an external pressure to make sure you have your stuff together there was some detail i didn't read that was included in the question which is basically that this person has done this

before to other people and also there was a discussion happening where people were griping about upper management and then jimmy jimmy was like oh no no like that wasn't me that was the other upper managers and so like something weird is i don't know you might just have to have this person's bubble popped or something yeah and i like how you said like if this person is going to freak out at you that's probably going to happen regardless of how daintily you dance into the conversation and if that happens yeah and you've been professional about this you have to not internalize the blame onto yourself in other words if they freak out so hard yeah exactly if they freak out like anytime anyone freaks out unless you're doing something really bad to them

it's not your fault you know yeah the thing i struggle with is thinking there was this perfect path through this conversation or series of events with which if only i followed that then this would have all resolved right and i don't know if this is true or not but the way i get out of bed in the morning is to convince myself probably not like if i had said this thing instead of that thing i think it still would have worked out about the same exactly like your word choice is not gonna change the fact if someone freaks out on you yeah i think you're right if you if you try approaching it with empathy and try and resolve it together and then try and present a clear like objective case that i mean the broad strokes are what matters here yeah well have we answered the

question? I think so. I don't have anything else to offer here, but I would encourage just like, I think that what we've come down to is we would both encourage you to address this with the person. And ideally, instead of saying, stop doing this, you should probably describe what you think the boundaries of their role should be and tell them more proactively. Here's how I think our working relationship should be instead of just like, stop doing that. Stop, stop it. I like it. 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 and quitting your job check out veteri go to veteri.com soft skills to sign up that's v-e-t-t-e-r-y.com soft skills if you use that link you will help support the show and if you get a job through veteri they will send you three hundred dollars thank you so much to veteri for sponsoring the show okay let me read our next question this comes from an anonymous listener who says hi david jameson love the show i have been gathering informal peer feedback from my team. I was told I'm doing well, and I should be doing, quote, more high leverage work. I interpret that as coming up with design patterns, best

practices, and mentoring other developers. I mentioned that to my manager, and while he agrees, he also said there is no additional headcount for the coming year, and knowing that there is a backlog full of features, my concern is that I will be the primary person tasked with writing those features. How could I negotiate or convince my manager to let me do more tech lead work instead so when i hear this question it sounds to me like the manager is just trying to say like yeah yeah sounds good get your stuff done okay that's that's how i interpret this you know sure high leverage is great like write all the design patterns you want please make sure that we still ship software you know because i think the a way this could go wrong is if you just say all right

i am now the architect and now my job is to like audit and recommend and my value will be very very widely felt and very hard to measure but good it will be very good yeah totally possible i in fact the first time i read this question i was thinking okay how can we advise this listener on how to go about this with fixed head count there's not a lot of growth happening and then just now i think i had the same thought that you did like maybe this is the manager giving you a hint like saying yeah that sounds good but just so you know we have fixed head count which i'm actually having a hard time putting those two facts together. Like on the one hand, I want to grow to become more of a leader in the organization. And on the other hand, we're not hiring people.

I just, those two things don't seem like they would be mutually exclusive. So the more high leverage work feedback was from this person's peers, right? Yes, exactly. So I guess what you're saying is the question asker wants to move into more of a leadership role and you're saying there aren't slots? No, no. What I'm saying is that you should probably consider that maybe the manager is dropping you a hint to say, look, I don't want to burst your bubble, but I'm not going to help you grow that way right now. Like we just can't invest that time right now or something?

Yeah. Or I don't see it in you. That's kind of a harsh thing to say, but that's what I'm concerned that this manager might be expressing. As a manager, you never want to say this out loud, like, sorry, you're not leadership material. You never want to say that because people can grow into that, even if they're not that now. And so maybe it's a combination of, I don't see it in now we don't have the opportunities now or many other reasons but the manager is basically saying or potentially saying no this could be a very soft roundabout passive-aggressive no yeah exactly but that's just one perspective yeah i wasn't thinking about that i was thinking okay maybe you need to make the case more strongly and tie the work that you want to do more directly to

value but if they just think yeah there's no way this is gonna work out then that wouldn't that wouldn't work too well i think if you had some way to pilot this right so if someone came to me and said i want to i want to work on design patterns i think i would start to get a little bit nervous and think what does that mean like yeah there we already have that book it's fine it's also caused a lot of bad code to be written like what what are you going to do what will be better because of this and try and get them pinned down to some specifics that had more specific constraints and things to measure because it's not easy but it's easier to measure value in like features shipped you can point to them and say this thing exists where it didn't before

yeah but just saying like i'm gonna go tell people about visitors or something like that it's hard to directly tie that to faster velocity or fewer bugs or something yeah as an aside i have noticed recently actually this insight came to me from our wonderful slack community the term design patterns that i grew up with has morphed a little bit and no longer strictly refers to the gang of four book called design patterns we got into a little discussion in our slight community about that recently and so it could be that in other words i don't want to like over index on the term design patterns here it could just be more like design you know like i want to focus more on architecture and design yeah or like architecture yeah like i don't know separating

services well or something like that exactly so you mean yeah yeah but still i think the same my feeling would be the same which is okay like help me understand specifically what this would cost and what we get from it instead of just it kind of sounds like someone saying i would like free reign to do this vague hard to measure work while someone else does the stuff that makes us money like we have this huge backlog let other people churn through that i'm gonna think about microservices right and write white papers about them yeah i relate to what you're saying because when i was a director a few years ago i had an employee come to me and say specifically i want to work on architecture and i probably had three meetings with this employee about this topic and

every time i pitched ideas i'm like okay well you could do this and every time they kind of went back to their desk and were dissatisfied with that and finally i realized like we're not talking the same language here when you say you want to work on architecture i don't know what you mean And so maybe that's really what it comes down to is you've pitched an idea that's ambiguous enough that your manager was like, I don't know what you mean, but flat headcount. Yeah, I feel like we're kind of circling in on advice, which is try and make this specific instead of just kind of ask in generic terms. And the more specific you can be, I think the easier it will be to help your manager understand the value and the trade-off that they're making by having you do this thing instead of something else. Now, I'm going to come back to not come back to I'm going to bring in a different view on this now, because we've thought a lot about or we've talked a lot about, like, the ambiguity of your request. But what if there is already a clear career trajectory at your company to grow into a leadership role where all of this is well defined? That could very well be the case. If it is, then when I hear the term high leverage work, what that says to me is learning

how to work through others, which means like enlisting other developers to build your big ideas so that you can work with three minds instead of one, you know, instead of you having to write all the code and sort out all the little bugs and answer all the little detailed questions, there's three or four minds working on it instead. And maybe, I mean, basically that's a tech lead, right? I mean, a tech lead clears the way, builds a runway, helps teams get off the ground. And maybe there's already a clearly defined path for that in your company. And if so, you should use those terms to describe it.

But when I hear the term high leverage work, that's what I think of is a tech lead who is able to unblock and facilitate others to be able to get cool things done. That's an interesting perspective. Yeah, it's kind of different. But you could probably do that now without any kind of official blessing, you know, start influencing. Yeah. I mean, assuming you have good ideas.

It's important. Hey, I think we should get rid of all of our APIs and just expose our database instead. It'll be lower latency. What's the point of, yeah, lower latency. What's the point of all these like HTTP layers? So much overhead. Yeah. Get rid of all these abstractions.

Also, it's cool that you got peer feedback. That's a useful thing. Yeah. And it seems positive too. Like when your peers tell you that you should be thinking bigger and having more influence and doing more leverage it's that's a sign they trust you yeah if they're like do lower leverage work please can you think smaller and have less impact yeah yeah well have we answered the question i think so good luck this is always a difficult journey to navigate because you know

as we've discussed there's a lot of ambiguity involved potentially and you got to get the right people on board and that gets messy but it sounds like you're on track you've got a lot of positive peer feedback, which is a good first step. Yeah. Good luck. All right, Dave, what can they do? By they, I mean the human race, I guess. What can the human race do if they want their own questions answered? Well, first of all, don't all do this at once because it'll probably bring down our systems, but just a few at a time, a few at a time. Listen, we can't afford high availability or load balancing. You're going to have to balance your own load. Exactly. Just start a random counter an orderly queue yeah a little jitter and when the counter says go go to softskills.audio

and click on ask a question where you can fill out a form to ask a question thank you so much to all those who have done so and if you want to support the show check out veteri.com soft skills if you're looking for a new job and hit us up on patreon on softskills.audio click support us on patreon thank you very much we'll catch you next week