Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 214: Jumping ship and saying "I can't"

Episode Date: June 15, 2020

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Questions We have just today been told that we may or may not have a job in 1 week. I feel lucky because I handed my notice in yesterday for a new job, but my colleagues are not in such a position. The company burned through all it’s money, and its only hope is that someone or some company who wants to buy the business in its current state. How would you approach a situation like this? Is it best to just jump ship right away? What would potential new employers think when you told them the situation? What about my co-workers? Long time listener, first time caller asker. How do I tell my boss I can’t complete a task? I’ve been with my current company for 6 months. In that time I’ve fixed a lot of problems that have blocked our current embedded system project because of my hardware design background. Sometimes I take a bit longer than projected, but I’ve been upfront about that and it’s all fine. I was trying to implement a new feature and it was meant to take around 3 days of work to do, but after 3 weeks I just couldn’t quite get it to work. I asked for help and pulled out every trick in my arsenal and just couldn’t figure it out. I ended up having to tell my boss that I was out of ideas and letting him tell me to shelve it, but I could tell this disappointed him. What should I do next time? Show Notes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D4tvZJGNIhM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnolia

it takes more than configuring your home router quality of service to stop cutting out during video calls to be a great engineer this is soft skills engineering episode 214 i'm your host dave smith i am your host jamison dance soft skills engineering is a weekly advice podcast for software developers about all the non-tech stuff tech stuff such as qos settings i think my experience with qs settings is that every knob and dial on any ui to configure them could be replaced by a giant button that says ruin your internet i've never been able to make it do anything besides screw everything up so true yeah maybe someday i want to thank our patrons thank you to these fantastic folks who donated in the past month who get a one-time shout out thank you

to danny castile cast cast you castillo depends on which language you're pronouncing it in i guess ilia kochetkov mark hardaway and thank you to these other folks who donate at the level where we shout them out every week braden canes dennis bogdanov evgeny sladkowski john grant luke bayliss microconfig.io nick hathaway nick cantar alexander philip john basile ryan real mccoy the agile ventures charity sean stanley tactical radio steven arman lee travis and vinlock thank you so much to everybody who's helping keep the show going thank you very much you pay for stuff that costs money which is important in life that is true is that generic enough for you perfect all right i have a uh follow-up that was written in would you like me

to share this follow-up to a story so much okay good so much i would okay back in episode 200 faithful listeners will remember that we did a special episode where people wrote in with crazy work stories and one of the work stories was about a particular director of engineering and i'm just gonna read the follow-up here about that story okay this person writes i wrote in the story on episode 200 about a new director of engineering who was hired into my company from a fang company to make us into a mini fang and just as a refresher for people who aren't familiar fang stands for facebook amazon netflix google apple microsoft and other companies that don't fit the acronym okay so the listener goes on to say he's the one who fired half of our engineering team

tried to leave our burning ship that he single-handedly set alight to go to twilio but was rejected because the recruiters were tipped off about his terrible management history do you remember this story jameson i do okay i remember it fondly because it didn't happen to me otherwise you'd remember it with bitterness and angst yep okay so here's the here is the rest of the story uh the listener goes on to say well it gets better some colleagues were taking the soft skills engineering hallowed advice of quitting their job and started interviewing at a new company in the city they found out that our director of engineering was working there but he was still employed at our current company

oh he did it he achieved the dream we also had some contacts at the new company and asked them to check and it was true. Our director was there. It was like a nightmare where he is everywhere you go. It seems he took advantage of everyone being remote for COVID-19. We really don't know what our director does at our company since he's basically fired all the people he can fire and I guess now there's nothing left for him to do. My colleagues ended up not moving forward with their offers from the new company because of the presence of the director. Well, we recently heard from our contacts at the new company that only after a month of joining, our director is no longer employed there we can only surmise that there was enough negative feedback from

candidates during turning down offers because of the presence of our director on this new team it's a funny story but we're all still sad because it ends up that we're still stuck with our director at our current company so i guess the joke's on us and then he's got a smattering of like five emojis here with we have laughing we have tears we have scratching the chin emoji and one that i don't recognize there's a face palm ah that's it yeah uh i think the they all average out to a frowny face though if you average all those emojis add them up and divide by six yeah well thanks for the follow-up that was better than i expected but still bad for you yeah thank you for suffering for our art i've actually been wondering if anyone would be able

to take advantage of the work from home situation to get a second job listen i've worked from home for years do not screw this up for me okay i i work for real i do real things i don't want people just turning into grifters and then companies canceling work from home because they feel like everyone's going to have two jobs yeah i agree it's beyond good behavior okay i'm going to read our first question okay this is from an anonymous listener we have just been told today that we may or may not have a job in one week i feel lucky because i handed my notice in yesterday for a new job but my colleagues are not in such a position the company burned through all its money and its only hope is that someone or some company will want to buy the business in its

current state how would you approach a situation like this is it best to jump ship right away what would potential new employers think when you told them the situation what about my co-workers this is actually a pretty old question but it felt relevant given given the times yeah there are companies doing this more often than i think they used to so the situation is that you've already found a new job but your company might disappear in one week or they might just sell it to a i'm sure benevolent and wonderful buyer whose only whose only objective is to make a good environment for engineers yeah those are two pretty interesting options to consider like like when someone adopts a a tattered kitten on the highway and raises it up to this beautiful

yes healthy cat with a lustrous coat that's basically what private equity firms will do to you that's oh a struggling company with no bargaining power and potentially some assets that we can strip mine i mean nurture we'll buy this company with love we'll cherish it nuzzle it into our bosom along with all of our other distressed assets that we of strip mined i mean nurtured oh you know we give private equity a hard time but there are some good private equity companies out there there are um yeah you just don't read headlines about them i guess they they actually i don't know they keep a low profile i'll tell you that's for

sure i have very little experience with private equity beyond reading horror stories about what they do to companies yeah they're they're nurturing tactics yeah they're aggressive nurturing tactics sometimes it's tough love that really benefits companies the most you know yeah how would you approach the situation like this so i think they're trying to decide do i stick around for for a week or potentially longer to see if this hail mary pass will drop and result in in a touchdown in a touchdown or a game losing play turnover well usually when you throw a Hail Mary the default state is you're losing like right you're gonna lose unless this miracle happens that's true so you're no worse off I feel like this fits pretty well yeah like

this company's going down unless a miracle happens do you owe it to your co-workers to stick around and like try and help the company stay on its feet or to all go down together like we're in this together yeah yeah it just so happens that I have a job we're all in this together until the end at which point i've got a very nice soft landing pad that i'll be landing on the sooner you jump ship the faster you can find a cushy island to bring them to if we're we're going to continue this metaphor of jumping ship jump off the sinking ship you swim to the island you use that time to prepare shelter you've played a lot of minecraft so you know about hitting stuff into other stuff to make stuff and then by the time they go down with the ship you can sail your

rectangular boat over to rescue them i have prepared for this yeah i don't think i don't think anything you do will make a difference is the the overriding first thing if it's going down in a week unless this miracle happens the miracle is going to happen on like the financial side not on the sit down and write a bunch of code side is my opinion if only i could just complete this massive refactor in one week i can save the company if only i shift all our authentication from cookies to jwts but the react migration is so close

we're so close to moving to scala the company saving programming language what will the investors think if once they hear we've moved to scala yeah it's going to be through some shady backroom deals not anything that you do in your job. Can you just see the CTO sitting at a negotiating table with the investors, the potential investors, and they're looking over the term sheet and then saying, this looks pretty good, but I've got a piece of information I want to share with you. Slide a piece of paper across the desk. The investor picks it up and it just says, Scala migration complete tomorrow. Imagine the pitch deck. There's a slide that just says like,

we're just almost done porting it to view now the all the investors like stroke all their collective chins well this changes everything yeah it doesn't matter what you do the company is probably going down but should you stick around to kind of like i don't know keep the camaraderie going i guess or maybe make the people who are getting who don't have jobs lined up already make them feel better it sounds like it was a coincidence like you were leaving already and then surprise the company is also leaving you you're right it was mutual you can't quit we're dissolved instead of you can't fire me i quit yeah how do you quit a business that does not exist

and that will allow the cto at his next job his or her next job to brag that they never had anyone quit right i didn't let them quit those retention numbers up i shut the whole company down so they couldn't quit i mean look so a typical job offer you've got a two-week lead time on it and your company is going to be dissolved in one week i think there's two things you can do here you can be a moral support agent for everyone at your company right now help them out help them get through the tough times maybe even try to help them find a new job connect them with people at your new company and you can be an investigative journalist to watch this whole thing go down it should be a fascinating learning experience i would not walk away from this opportunity

really you'd stick around for one week yeah yeah it would be really interesting to see i'd try and get into the smoky back rooms honestly because i don't know i know stuff about code i don't know what kind of negotiations go on with a desperate company trying to find investors and what they're presenting and what kind of questions they ask and stuff yeah what about potential new employers yeah i don't think it would affect potential new employers at all because you already have a job hopefully there won't be potential new employers right away but also like the company disappeared i don't know i don't think you have to give a lot of detail about how you like left with the last week

still hanging over the company's head because you couldn't bear to just like sit around and watch people die i don't know like you just left and then the company went under i don't know that there's a more complicated story than that well i could think of a more complicated version well okay tell me i can just imagine you're sitting across from a potential employer and they're like oh it says here you left company x is that because you didn't finish the scala migration that they fell apart yeah you didn't say the company went under because i deleted all of our databases and all of our backups too i pulled a magnolia on us that's a slightly different story yeah are you familiar with what happened to magnolia no i don't know what that is at all i was

just laughing to try to sound cool oh it was a bookmarking service where people could save bookmarks in the cloud basically in like the 2000s and it was beloved and then they lost all of their data forever and just shut the company down just they just posted a sad story saying like hey all your bookmarks wait was it magnolia i gotta look it up hang on yeah they lost members booked marks in a widely reported data loss and shut down was this a company or just like a yeah it was a company okay and then they died that's really unfortunate did they have two okay i gotta look into this afterwards they might have had two incidents of total data loss anyways they had at least one maybe that's why your company is shutting down in which case that's a cool story to tell like

your friends but not future employers yeah okay let's just hope it wasn't because of you yeah so question answered no problem i think so i think you're fine if you stick around it won't make a difference to the future of the company probably and you have a job lined up so i don't think you have to worry too much about it do you want to read our next question sure this one comes from an anonymous listener a long-time listener first time caller backspace backspace asker okay the question says how do i tell my boss i can't complete hang on did you say three backspaces only two only so long-time listener first time call got it sorry wrong number of backspaces oh i'm sorry i was going to say the the sequence of vi keys to be able to remove that word but

i didn't want to do that okay because i actually don't know how to say them i only know how to type them i was gonna say like because you totally know them but some other people might not and it would confuse them i do know them i just don't i don't know if i could ever say them out loud i have to stare at my finger anyway isn't it weird yeah i have finger knowledge about a lot of things i can only sit down and type them but i couldn't talk about them exactly okay let's read this thing the question goes how do i tell my boss i can't complete a task i've been with my current company for six months. In that time, I've fixed a lot of problems that have blocked our current embedded system project because of my hardware design background. Sometimes I take a little bit longer

than projected, but I've been upfront about that and it's all fine. I was trying to implement a new feature and it was meant to take around three days, but after three weeks, I just couldn't get it to work. I asked for help and pulled out every trick in my arsenal and just couldn't figure it out. I ended up having to tell my boss I was out of ideas and letting him tell me to shelve it, but sorry i read that as shove it really struggling with this question i'm sorry i was out of ideas and letting him tell me to shelve it but i could tell this disappointed him what should i do next time huh this is really interesting three days turning into three weeks yeah that feels very familiar that happens to me

all the time the wrinkle of like i wonder if this is more of a problem in in embedded systems or hardware where you can kind of make anything work in code if you want to invest enough time into it but like maybe there's some physical constraint going on that you just literally cannot work around like the speed of light yeah listen i thought it would take three days to do time travel but i've been working on it for three weeks now that's way longer than my original estimate i'm gonna have to shelve this ftl drive hmm what do you think dave i think this might be evidence that you're working on some pretty cool stuff actually i think a lot of engineers you know they they get a task and it's like you know make this button do that or make this drag and drop interface or

update this field in this database right nobody fails adding logging to a project is what you're saying yeah like there there are low risk tasks like that and and by the way sometimes low risks tasks are actually just high-risk tasks wearing low-risk task clothing this was low risk until it turned out to delete the database right until i found out that in order to do this we have to migrate the whole app to angular yeah so i mean i think this is evidence you're working on some pretty cool stuff potentially depending on the nature of the problem i mean if this was the case where it's like i just can't understand this code i don't know what it's doing and i don't know how to read it and after three weeks i still don't know how that's different than saying something

like well this piece of hardware has limitations that i can't work around and they took a lot of time to discover and quantify that's totally different and that's that's actually really cool that you get to work on problems like that as opposed to just kind of like make this pixel blue yeah so it sounds like what you're saying is maybe there should be some understanding of risk involved in taking on this trickier work like if you are adding a feature to an existing web application there might be some risk that it takes longer or that it breaks something else or that it doesn't i don't know people don't like it right but there isn't a ton of risk that it'll that it'll be impossible to do and i feel like there's kind of a built-in yeah calculation of

that when when folks think about product development but theoretically if you're doing stuff that's that's tricky like this there should be some built-in understanding that hey some of the things we're going to try will not work not because they'll fail after we ship them but because they won't be possible at all and if your boss doesn't understand that good news you get to explain to him sometimes stuff will fail i guess i don't know hopefully they understand it already so i've heard this called invention risk and this is the concept that we're going into new territory we're inventing new things that haven't been done before and there's risk associated with that risk that the entire thing might fail because of unknown

unknowns or things we haven't been able to quantify or identify yet and so i think at the beginning of a project it makes sense to call out these risks and invention risk isn't the only kind of risk that can block or delay a project but it in this case it seems like we're dealing with invention risk i like that name for it i haven't heard that before that's cool okay so that's one thing you could do next time is call out explicitly that there might be some risk if you know that ahead of time. What about if you don't and you sort of get into it and you just kind of feel that it's not going great? So that's when you need to hire a PR expert who can actually pitch the problem to your manager for you and make it look like a strength. Okay. Huh. Okay. Can you give me an

example of what that would sound like well i'd have to hire a pr person to craft that for you sorry i think you'd have to talk a lot about like iteration and failing fast and like how you you gotta aim for the stars because if you miss you might hit the moon just talk a big game about setting your goals really high and how that inspires you to greater heights but the the journey is the destination say that really the journey is the destination and i know more than i did about this board that we used look around the room we are all better because of this

yes this will not ship but can you quantify the amount of smiles that we had as a team together working on this can you put a price on that really we we shipped friendship there's probably some steve jobs story from the archives that you could pull out and be like well you know steve jobs and the newton eventually it turned in the ipad but i'm steve jobs in the 90s yes but soon i will come back and be steve jobs in the 2000s he had he had to wander for a while that's right okay that worked good news i i asked our listener and they said that worked okay great oh they've been promoted oh wow they're now chief innovation officer cool that's a cool title yeah i think you need to keep that pr department around

now because that's your full-time job just alternate between saying ai and blockchain over and over again yeah exactly exactly um innovation is ai and blockchain yeah okay so what else if if you sense it getting weird or or getting sticky right and i think the the key here is to minimize the amount of time before you come to a full understanding that it's going to be stuck that you're not going to be able to make progress and sometimes when we write code on projects that we're unfamiliar with we are inclined to do kind of this depth first thing like i'm going to get this component completely working unit tests polished refactored nicely and then i'm going to go over to this next component which is also in the critical path and i'm going to

start working on that if you go with that approach where you want to get like each individual piece all polished up and ready to go you'll never have a chance to test the whole thing end to end and you might not encounter a blocking issue that's going to completely invalidate all the work you've done before until it's too late and so i like to think of this like a swimming pool like let's say we're building a swimming pool and let's say that water has completely different physical properties than it actually does in the real world got it okay i'm following you so far and you have the option to build a swimming pool and you know it's got like six lanes in it and you could either fill one lane all the way with water and have a swimmer test it out and see if it's the

right length and everything's good or you could fill all lanes one-sixth of the way across and then the second sixth and the third sixth and so on until it's all the way full and then you can test it but at that point if there's a problem you've taken all the time to fill all six lanes so pools don't work like this but but imagine if they did but what if they did it would be the ideal way to fill a pool also wouldn't it be awesome if water could just stand up on its side and you could swim in it oh dave i'm just getting a new notice this listener has actually been replaced as the chief innovation officer by you thanks to your visionary new idea of how pools should work

now hand it off to some coders to implement i've done all the heavy lifting yeah so i think what you're saying is it's it sort of sounds like an mvp idea of yeah you get something kind of threaded working all the way through from end to end even if it's very thin or or crappy yeah sketchy in some parts it's even pre-mvp it's like this is like proof of concept prototyping where you're just trying to prove out whether it could even be feasible and if you want to be fancy you could call it a feasibility study and budget three weeks for it and then at the end of the three weeks the outcome will either be it was feasible or it was not but either way you were successful because you completed the feasibility study oh i knew there was a reason you got the

chief innovation officer job learning so much feasibility studies hmm yeah that's an interesting idea i i still don't know if that could apply to every problem though i mean jameson every problem guaranteed was i unclear about that so do it when you can but i feel like i don't know maybe this is just because of my fuzzy understanding of what it's like to work on embedded systems like i don't know that you can feasibility study your way to like a thin slice of a working microcontroller or something you know like you know i actually believe it or not i do have experience in this realm about 15 years ago i worked on embedded systems for this company and we worked hand in hand with hardware engineers who

wrote fpga code which is basically programming hardware and i had this really great idea for how the software and hardware should interact and i'm like look this would be fantastic i told the hardware engineers about it they looked skeptical but i believed in them so i implemented the software side and then after i got it done and ready to go i'm like look this is just you implement this side of the api and they're like uh api like this is hardware you know long story short they just couldn't do it i mean they said yeah this might work but this is just not how hardware works and i'm like you know i probably should have talked to you a little more about this before i jumped in on my side if only you had done a feasibility study exactly and the

feasibility study would have consisted of hey can you guys do this and they'd be like no like okay feasibility study complete so i have seen a tendency among smart people who like getting things done to say yes a lot when someone asks can you do this thing or will you try this thing They say, yes. So it feels good to say yes. And then you go off and try it and it gets kind of stuck. Isn't going super smoothly, but you already said yes. And so there's some reluctance sometimes to go back and say, Hey, about that. Yes. Change it to a maybe like, so my boss has said this to me before. Like I would way rather know way early on that there's a chance that something is going wrong or, or that we might have to drop something then find out, Hey, by the way, we didn't do that

thing that we said we were going to do six months ago it's it's the deadline and surprise we didn't do it and i've seen that from the other side as well that it's i'm not mad when people come to me and say hey this isn't going to work it's information that i can use to make reality better like it's not like it's gonna work if someone doesn't tell me no but i can't do anything about it if if nobody says anything does that make sense yeah i think so so i just say it earlier just raise, raise potential problems earlier. Like presumably there was a time between the initial three days and the final three weeks where you suspected it was going to be impossible or at least harder than you thought. And maybe you did say this, but I think updates about that to your

manager or your boss are useful and help frame the conversation from take it from, Hey, that thing that I said I was going to do is impossible to, Hey, remember how I've been updating you on how this is tricky like yeah it worked out the way we thought which is it's impossible right or i'm stuck i don't know whatever way you want to phrase it another thing is you can reach out to peers sooner to get their input on it and that can save you a lot of time because sometimes i found a second pair of eyes brings perspectives that you just have a total blind spot to they did say they asked for help so they probably did reach out to folks oh i missed that but that doesn't hurt certainly yeah so that was my bad you already did that you've been demoted from your position

as chief innovation officer we can't afford that kind of sloppy reading comprehension have you seen the simpsons movie from like 20 years ago do you remember the arnold schwarzenegger like character who got elected to be president of the united yeah rainier wolf castle that's right yeah i do and they bring him three options for responding to some crisis and they say sir we we've brought you three unthinkable options. And he says, I choose number two. But sir,

you haven't even read them. He says, I am paid to lead, not to read. That's me. You're paid to innovate, not whatever word rhymes with innovate. That means read.

I'm not paid to rhyme. Well, Have we answered the question? I think so. Good luck. This is a great, great kind of question. It is. And it's a hard thing to deal with.

So it makes sense it was hard. Yes. What can people do if they want their own questions answered? Go to softskills.audio and click ask a question where you can fill out our form with as much or as little detail as you want. Thank you to all the people that do that every week. There are so many great questions every week. We will eventually read them all.

Well, Jameson will read them and tell me what they say. If you want to support the show, go to softskills.audio and click support us on Patreon. any dollar amount greater than zero will get you an invitation to our Slack community at the coming first week of every month. That community is growing. We've got 300 people in there. Very interesting. Lots of good discussion. It is great. I learned stuff from it and I enjoy the time that I spend reading there and summarizing what people said today. That's right. All right. We'll catch you next week.