Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 209: Glue and Covid ghost job

Episode Date: May 11, 2020

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Is a “glue person” valuable on a software team? Someone who isn’t the strongest developer but is liked by teammates and builds a cohesive team dynamic. A while ago I interviewed with a big company. Right after completing a code challenge, covid-19 got out of hand in my country and they sent me an email saying they are putting the process on hold. Weeks have passed and I came across a job opportunity posted recently by the company for the position I was applying to. I felt betrayed. I emailed the recruiter asking for follow-up and she said that they are sorry about the situation and that they wanted to schedule a meeting. The question is, should I let them know I was displeased by this or is this really a non-issue? Do I risk my chances by doing so? Am I acting like a jealous teenager? Thanks a lot and love the podcast, stay safe!!

it takes more than a healthy skepticism of code written after midnight to be a great software engineer this is episode 209 of the soft skills engineering podcast i'm your host jamison dance i'm your host dave smith soft skills engineering is a weekly advice show where we answer your questions about software development but not technical questions i don't think i've written code after midnight for a long time actually it's been a long time for me too but if i did i'd be suspicious of it i guess i i did in my younger days i did two overnight coding sessions just non-stop all night long for what well for work and for work yeah it was like i really wanted to this is going to sound funny but i really one of our applications i really wanted to port it

from 32 bits to 64 bits and so i just did it and it was like oh this should be easy and then i and then the sun came up but i did it did you finish though yeah got it running in 64 bits i mean was it successful yeah and yeah actually this is one of those stupid situations where i did this thing and then like not too long afterwards we started getting all 64-bit hardware so like we really had to do it so and i had been running in 64-bit so this was before my time what did you was it just like changing like shorts to longs everywhere or something no well it was like so it was c++ code and we had point wait a minute wait a minute what are we doing save that for hard skills engineering yes the secret bonus show tweet tweet me later and i'll

tell you the details it was pretty fun okay dave do you want to thank our patrons yes i do thank you to those that are contributing on patreon at the amount that gets them a shout out every week they are vin lock brayden canes chris hogan dennis bogdanov evgeny sladkowski john grant luis santos nuke i almost said nuke bayless like nuclear bayless luke nuke bayless that's his wrestling nickname i guess luke's a nuke bayless in this corner yeah all right nick hathaway philip john basile the agile ventures charity sean stanley tactical radio steven arman lee taras haruk travis and zach grannon if you'd like to support the show on patreon go to soft skills.audio that's our website and click support us on patreon and if you do we will give you an

invitation at the beginning of every month to join our slack community which is a vibrant growing community of amazing engineers who have really interesting discussions especially nowadays like stuff like what is your company doing in the light of this weird coronavirus situation which has been fascinating to compare notes you did say you'll get an invite every month and i I was going to say, well, only the first month, but actually that's not true. We're pretty lazy about how we invite people. So we just re-invite people and hope Slack de-dupes the invites for us. And sometimes they do.

Yeah. So if you would like a monthly reminder that we care about you, all you have to do is make a $1 contribution on Patreon. Hey, these trying times, maybe that's worth it. All right. I'm going to read our first question from an anonymous listener. is a glue person valuable on a software team someone who isn't the strongest developer but is liked by teammates and builds a cohesive team dynamic hmm glue kind of holding it together

yeah did you ever put glue on your fingers then wait for it to dry and then peel it off when you're a kid yeah oh well oh or when i was i mean how about and as an adult i guess every time i try to use super glue to fix something it ends up sticking two of my fingers together no matter how careful i am oh what's like the adult version of preschool like advanced preschool level skills before it was paste in preschool and now it's super glue in grown-up preschool well i have stopped eating it eating super glue seems like it would be bad yeah maybe that sounds bad yeah a glue person have you heard the term glue person is this like a common knowledge thing i'm not sure i think i've heard it i've definitely heard of glue code but this is not that yeah yeah this is

a little different my so my interpretation of it is somebody who isn't super flashy they're not like just cranking out raw technical output but they kind of just make things better around them in this vague hard to measure way and and maybe not even technically yeah i mean they make the team more effective broadly but they're not the person who is tackling and solving the really hard technical problems so like maybe an example would be someone who when they're in the room tensions are always at ease and people can communicate more openly and clearly and yeah or they ask good questions like do we have to do it this way can we shuffle these priorities around and i don't know in my head they're tied to impact more than raw technical output i guess yeah if they're a good

glue person yeah so they're kind of like a kind of a force multiplier maybe i think so yeah to make the team more effective i think a good glue person would be yeah maybe one of the defining characteristics of a glue person is that they are constantly underpaid because no one appreciates yeah i think you're right glue people are harder to recognize than someone who like their name is all over this really core piece of code that's that's very easy for us to recognize and value and promote on but just saying if i wasn't here stuff would just be worse it's hard to measure and and impact is already hard to measure would you consider a glue person to potentially at least one type of glue person to be someone who is constantly giving good feedback on code reviews

but not writing a lot of code themselves yeah i think so yeah i mean that's that's a way you could have good impact or or even just demonstrating and encouraging like good patterns of communication in in code reviews because those can devolve and become gross and unhelpful yeah okay i mean a hard thing here is glue like the the value a glue person provides is is pretty subjective i feel like and sometimes people who are struggling or who aren't delivering value i've seen them try to claim that they're being glue people and it doesn't seem like that for some of them and sometimes people are delivering tons of value by being glue people but they're just totally ignored and and like the the normal mechanisms for recognition and and reward don't really catch their value

so it's like a good one is great but it's hard to know if someone is good at it i guess so it's like easily a false positive situation i think so so it's really risky to be a glue person because management is constantly thinking yeah is this person an underperformer or a critical glue person on our team it's like those are the two exactly yeah like we know for sure that they don't have the strongest technical skills right like that part is we we got the question is are they doing a bunch of other stuff or are they just like don't have the strongest technical skills maybe not i don't know strong technical skills is the wrong term it's like they're not having this pure technical output right they don't have an obvious technical contribution that we measure with our

rudimentary tools yeah so like it could be dangerous to be the glue person oh it totally is there's this presentation called being glue that i think i've referred to a couple times in this podcast but i'll refer to it again because it's really fantastic and that's basically the argument the argument is if you are just attracted to like where the biggest problem is oftentimes times those things aren't technical and you end up like scheduling meetings and unblocking people and i mean not technical is the wrong word they're not like sitting down and writing a bunch of code right and if if you're trying to just point yourself at what can make the biggest difference that can lead to you doing a lot of things that look like managerial work or tech lead work and

if you don't have that title then it's there's this weird bias against like measuring like once you're a manager you're you get this pass on doing glue work because that's the expectation is right that's your job that's your job so of course your value is kind of like diffused over your whole team that's that's what you're doing if you're sitting down and writing all the code then you kind of suck but if you're doing it without being a manager then you can get this reputation as someone who just can't deliver right so maybe you should go after that manager title just really quick if you're the blue person i mean that's one way to do it like if you really like this role then yeah maybe maybe make that roll your job but let's not forget that glue is the thing that's

like holding things together which by definition means it's under constant pressure and always always at risk of being torn apart yeah that's true there's some forces pulling at you all the time in every direction yeah yeah that's true i think i think there's another kind of glue person too which is so we've talked kind of about the soft skills glue person the person who unblocks people through like getting the right people in the room together asking good questions calming tensions then there's another kind of glue person who's holding it holding the ship together through a treasure trove of technical knowledge and context that they've amassed over the years and this is like this is like the person that i think this person is in a less risky situation

because everyone knows that they are like the bus factor on this person is super high so if we lose them then the whole the whole ship's going to fall apart and we know that and so it's kind of like these two categories like the one person just quietly does a good job keeping the keeping the ship on track and the other one does it loudly and everyone knows well they don't contribute a lot of code but boy if we didn't have them we would no one would know what to do yeah huh i haven't thought about that as a glue person but that that kind of makes sense so do you think that person is valuable well no i think that person no seriously i think that is a a really bad sign that your team has a bunch of tribal knowledge that is trapped inside of a skull

one skull with no redundancy and teams that have that kind of situation where it's like well i don't know how to do this but let's go talk to yoda he's the only one who knows you know it's just bad news skulls are remarkably fragile too i mean we think they're hard but like they're harder than they're harder than like belly buttons but yeah not harder than pavement lots of things harder than skulls cars anyway yeah viruses oh too soon i think for that joke no this is like this is a smell i think if you have this kind of a glue person who's holding it together through context and knowledge that other people don't have tribal knowledge that's all in one person that's a smell and then the symptoms are

manifest in people getting blocked all the time because they don't have access to this person so what do you do about it what do you do about it if you're on the team or what do you do about it if you are the glue person well if you are the glue person and layoffs are happening you're safe if you're the technical glue person right that you're talking about if you're the the keeper of the old ways yes if you know the sacred texts yes how to maintain this old php thing that makes you all the money right yeah no i'm just kidding uh if what do you do if i was leading a team that had the bad kind of glue person the tribal knowledge glue person i would take action to get all that information

out of that person's head and into the rest of the team through the form of knowledge sharing sessions through documentation you know i would basically say anytime you go to so and so with a question they you have to document the answer you know and then eventually that person will become obsolete and then you can let them go just kidding just kidding yeah i was gonna say what happens to the person suddenly they have to contribute just like everyone else and it levels the playing field i think that knowledge you're talking about can be a curse for the glue person as well because they are lashed to this project they can't leave it or it falls apart and i i'm assuming it's probably kind of tricky to work in so it's it's not like the most enjoyable thing

and it might be hard to modify and produce new things out of it but you can set them free you can break their bonds you can you can you can unglue them relieve some of the pressure no it does it stinks to sit at your desk all day and just wait for people to come ask you questions and have a line of people constantly wanting to ask you questions especially when you're answering the same question over and over there is a better way i don't know that sounds pretty good for my ego if i had people lining up at my desk like supplicants that'd be pretty cool maybe like people lining up in a in an online google form asking you soft skills questions every week oh yeah i guess yeah you are the glue jameson i am so we've kind of landed on maybe if it's if it's

glue because it's this technical knowledge that they contribute value by by doling out when you're really stuck then fix that i don't feel like we really landed on a hard yes or a no for just the general like spread goodness through the team person i think i think the answer to that can be yes and what do you do to make sure that that person doesn't get underappreciated and the answer i think to that is that you document what makes a valuable engineer on your team and what are their criteria for progression and growth and you can write down specifically some of these things like encourages good code review practices that are constructive and non-attacky yeah non-attacky is what you could write that in your hr documentation i think but you could you could

enumerate all the things that glue people do and you could encourage everyone to become a glue person so that you have you don't end up having specialization creep where one person gets all the cool tech jobs that get lots of visibility and one person gets left as the glue keeping it altogether yeah there's also a difference between someone who likes this kind of work but is is a very capable technical developer still and someone who is kind of like driven to it because that's where they can provide the most value and it's it's a hard it's like a hard thing to judge i don't know judging technical skill is a pretty unsolved problem anyways but but i know it when i see it exactly yeah you know it when you see it like if someone is saying i don't know i'm just

really struggling but i'll like schedule some meetings like that can go pretty poorly and and end up costing more than if they were just struggling and concentrating on technical work so i think the point i'm trying to make is there should be like you should have some idea of what value you're getting out of them and if they're turning to glue work to like cover up the fact that they can't provide a bunch of value so they're just kind of retreating to these hard to measure places and saying like i'll be safe in the shadows of of meetings and gamp charts and like i don't know vague just diffused value then that seems like a problem i think either way if you can make it more measurable then the good glue people will be rewarded and people who are kind of

just using it to struggle a little bit will will be able to be like held accountable like if you want to do that work it's it's valuable you should just be able to show how valuable it is yeah also i do think you could be a better glue person if you are stronger technically on an engineering team yeah for sure i think everybody needs a little bit of both yeah i've come to appreciate the older i get the value of having a team with different strengths instead of just all hardcore code ninjas you know yeah yeah i agree it's it's great to have variety well have we answered the question i think so good luck and let us know how your glue situation works out i guess this isn't really a situation so maybe don't let us know anything just i don't know look up at the sky and you'll

see us there we'll just know we'll we'll look down and smile and nod i think we just hit peak arrogance with that one oh boy no we can go higher there's more room for arrogance we are space attorneys so why limit yourself at the sky okay let me just set all that aside and move on to our next question which comes from an anonymous listener who says a while ago i interviewed with a big company right after completing a code challenge and covet 19 got out of hand in my country the company sent me an email saying they are putting the process on hold weeks have passed and i came across a job listing posted recently by

the same company for the position i was applying to i felt betrayed i emailed the recruiter asking for follow-up and she said that they are sorry about the situation and that they wanted to schedule a meeting the question is should i let them know i was displeased by this or is this really a non-issue do i risk my chances by doing so am i acting like a jealous teenager thanks a lot and love the podcast stay safe hmm you could be a teenager i don't know teenagers get jobs as software developers too i've hired one then you can just yeah then you can just tell him hey i'm i'm a jealous teenager i hired a teenager once did you yeah no i actually did and in fact this particular teenager was so young that his mother had to sign his stock option agreement holy cow

yeah this is pretty cool it's kind of like the child actor situation where maybe his mom was just cashing those checks thanks for supporting me like i supported you yeah time to pay back so is this a weird situation you think no i don't think so i mean weird stuff happens all the time with recruiting and and things change enough even when there's not a global pandemic going on yeah even when there's not this unprecedented global event stuff is constantly changing inside the company and you have very little insight from the outside about what's going on like the department you were getting hired in could have totally disappeared and been like split up and reshuffled across a whole bunch of different teams and oh yeah these

huge changes could have happened behind the scenes that have nothing to do with them wanting or not wanting to hire you totally or they could just not want to hire you and they're bad at saying no yeah that's a possibility but the fact that they've scheduled a follow-up meeting probably means that's not the case yeah that's true i guess i yeah if they were gonna ghost you they would have just ghosted you. I think it's really common for less experienced engineers to read too much into job descriptions that are posted online. This applies to literally every word in the job description, whether it's required skills, whether it's the title, you know, these things are almost always wrong. And so just because you saw a job posting appear that matches the previous job

posting you saw doesn't mean that it's even the same organization within the company that posted that job yeah yeah that's a good point often they're reused too yeah they might have some standard template for just like we need a software engineer and then throw that out and then yeah it looks the same but it's wildly different projects and people and reporting structure i know that because i've worked for big companies and and sometimes the company will have a public facing job site where you can read the job descriptions and then there's also a corresponding internal job site which gives more information about each job listing like for example what the name of the specific hiring manager is and i've been surprised sometimes when i look at a listing on the external

site and i think oh i know what that team is and then i look it up inside and i'm like oh it's that's not even the same organization like it's a it's like a different thousand person organization on the other side of the planet yeah if it's a big tech company i mean they're probably hiring hundreds of engineers at a time and a lot of those will look the same i imagine not all those job descriptions are carefully individualized for the exact role and like you said i mean people don't even know they just know like i would like one more person on this team please right in fact at google the job descriptions are almost totally generic where it's like you will be a google software engineer and you don't even get to pick a team until after you've passed the

interview process and then if a team wants you they'll pick you it's called the matching matching process so at some big tech companies you're interviewing for a position but there's actually not a designated team where you would go if you pass the interview yet huh what about this question of should i let them know i was displeased by this i am displeased i require one ferrari as compensation for my hurt feelings i'm displeased but i could be pleased for a price i could be undispleased yeah you could buy back my please i would absolutely not say hey this was a jerk move like yeah i don't know you have no insight into what happened i think you could ask them why this happened and then you might get some

more details from the recruiter like we have these generic job postings like why what happened like like why the posting came up well yeah just say like hey i thought i was applying to this position I saw this posting. Is it for the same position? Okay. Does that mean you're still interviewing for it? Yeah. That's an, that's an innocent question, but I just don't know what you would do with the answer. Yeah. I mean, you could just ask, can I proceed with the hiring process? You know, that's really what you want to know. Yeah. I guess that's what you're really trying to find out. Yeah, that's true. Let's not forget that this recruiter is probably under tremendous pressure right now and probably is concerned about getting laid off because a lot of companies are

doing hiring freezes. And when you do hiring freezes, that means there's less recruitment activity and when there's less recruitment activity that means you need fewer recruiters so there's probably a lot of pressure on this person right now and you know they're probably drafting nasty emails about their co-workers to make sure that they get let go first you know it's a lot of work to do that as one does just kidding recruiters are good people i think you're right that it doesn't matter why they did this you just care if you still have a chance of getting the job or not that makes more sense than yeah asking what's going on yeah the fact that they scheduled a meeting makes me think you're still in the running yeah i don't i don't know why they

would have met with you again if they were planning on saying no yeah and no could have come in the form of an email although maybe it's a meeting so they can tell you face to face that we're not going to proceed but either way you'll get closure here pretty quick when this meeting happens yeah i haven't seen that too much at big companies especially i mean this is just through the code challenge part right yeah it's very early in the process yeah that's like a screening step maybe if someone went through the whole process and invested a bunch of time then right you might want to kind of have a higher touch with them to leave them with a better impression yeah exactly if you had failed the coding like the coding screening then you would probably get an automated

email saying thank you we're not going to move forward at this time yeah but yeah the fact you got a meeting means they're probably gonna they're basically going to restart my guess is you fell through the cracks and the recruiter lost track of you and made a mistake and probably a lot of other candidates too and they're rebooting the process to get you going again figure out where you are make sure you're still interested and then bring you in for an on-site or something if you did pass the coding screening and people fall through the cracks when nothing is happening like it happens yeah yeah it just it just happens you really can't expect any company of any size to be so on the ball that you can do nothing and the process will go smoothly you are responsible

for your interview process at a company, not the recruiter, not the hiring manager. And if you will take that seriously and not take it personally when you don't get 100% of their attention, you'll have more success. I like it. I feel motivated now.

To do what? Oh, I don't know. I mean, I guess I'm not looking for a job, but I feel motivated to, if I start looking for a job at some point, go back and listen to this episode and then take ownership over the process. Well, if there's one thing

working at a big company has taught me, it's that don't take it personally when people don't give you all of their attention because people's attention is being pulled in a thousand directions all the time and the people who are successful are willing to continue engaging and pinging on a subject or a person and keep them engaged and frankly i see this at the macro level too not to get too philosophical but like companies do this a lot i mean companies grow very slowly in most cases and they do it by continually getting people's attention and keeping customers engaged it's very rare that a company just goes skyrocket success overnight because they went quote viral

anyway same thing applies at the micro level to your interview process you're not going to go viral in the interview that's what you're saying and if you do it's probably for something really bad if if ever you find that your code sample has been forwarded to a thousand people yes you probably screwed up it's not because it's good forward forward forward forward forward holy crap look at this true all right have we answered the question here completely okay 100 completely answered the question what could people do if they want to get their own questions answered they can go to softskills.audio and when they go there they can click ask a question and fill out this form we we read them i think we read them all like yeah and we will answer

them all eventually before the universe ends we get to them all well thank you so much for submitting questions we love reading them and learn from them and we love answering them you help keep the show going thank you for listening to if you like the show please share it with people yeah i got nothing me neither words the end good see you later see you next week