Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 219: Remote crickets and Manager Careering

Episode Date: July 20, 2020

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Questions I took the cult’s advice and quit my job at a start-up!! Now I’m at a big company and the pace of work is REAL different. In my previous life, if I asked a question, I would get an answer within the minute, or at the most, within the hour. At my new gig, the response time on Slack can be 6 hours, and pull request comments so far are never – after a day has passed, I just send a Slack to ask for a response to the PR comment. I’ve noticed that if I schedule a Zoom call I have the best chance of getting a hold of them, but a video call sometimes feels like overkill. I realize it’s due to my coworkers/manager being super busy, so I try to make my questions short, sweet and infrequent. Still, I’m now missing deadlines because I can’t get an answer. How can I get my coworkers’ attention so I can do my work and meet my deadlines? Engineering Managers support growth of their direct reports. Once you become a manager, it’s expected to own your own career development. How much should you expect your manager to support you in that?

it takes more than surfing the web with dev tools open to be a great engineer this is episode 219 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 all of your non-technical questions about the technical field of software development with our dev tools open with our dev tools open at all times yeah we don't need did you ever hear about those boss buttons that they would put in like browser games back in the day now in what games i don't know browser games or or just regular computer games there'd be some key command or some button you could hit they would turn it into like a screenshot of a excel spreadsheet or something like that oh jameson i've got you beat here okay

I had this button in the 1980s on my Atari 1040ST computer while playing Chessmaster 2000. What did it do? There was a button that said, if your boss comes by, and if you clicked it, the whole screen turned into like an old school spreadsheet with like sales numbers on it. Weren't you like a child? I was. I was like, I thought, what is this? Your mom walks by, she's like, why aren't you working on your spreadsheets, Dave?

quit playing video games work on your excel or your lotus 123 or whatever it was back then i i don't know what it was i don't remember i just remember thinking this looks businessy wow grown-up life must be horrible you have to have this button that takes your game away and replaces it with this stupid screen well you're not wrong do you want to thank our patrons i do a big thank you to those that are contributing at the level that gets them a shout out every single week they are vinlock ragnar harderson alexander microconfig.io nick travis evgeny sladkowski dennis bogdanov braden canes philip john basile steven armand lee john grant luke bayliss ryan the real mccoy stanley tactical radio the agile

ventures charity nick cantar and sean if you'd like to support the show financially you can donate as little as one dollar over at softskills.audio click on support us on patreon and if you do that we'll send you an invite to our slack community slash cult at the beginning of every month you can join the 300 people strong there who chat every day on topics ranging from well i don't a lot of things i guess i don't have like a from and many things everyone knows that topics are ordered you just have to pick the first one and the last one in that case it's everything from cfps and speaking to jobs that's how they order our is in my slack community works this is not alphabetical no it's not mine goes from episodes to victory oh victory that's a good

one yeah so dave said if you want to support the show financially do some stuff which would help us if you want to support the show emotionally just give yourself a hug right now and then we feel emotionally supported that's right thank you to everyone that does though we really appreciate that i want to read a follow-up from a previous episode by a listener named we looked okay we we listened to youtube videos to figure out how to pronounce all this stuff from a listener named george you talked about different words meaning to fire someone in a previous episode in french we have limoges nope try again limoges there you go we practiced this jameson oh not enough limoges meaning to put someone

aside in the hope he'll resign it comes from the city of limoges where military were sent when the top military didn't like them so now you can limoges someone all right man she got limoges so bad i'm totally gonna limoges you limoges yeah that's what i get for pronouncing the word wrong which is ironic because i think it was not just last week where you said that you pronounce perfect french and if you don't understand my french it's because you don't speak true french well i feel like i had to learn french as it is spoken nowadays you know not like back in the day when everyone spoke true french yeah i speak old french that's what it is like from the middle ages

yes back when all the old french people used to sound like dumb americans i would like one croissant please you mean chris sandwich oh gosh thanks for sending that in i love the idea that there's a a language specific word for this concept yes that has a history behind it it's cool which i don't know if we mentioned but in english we call this managing out yeah way more boring that's dumb i know i'm actually gonna see if i could get limoges worked into the you know industry cultural vernacular here yeah just got to write a blog post that goes viral easy peasy okay it'll have a little

pronunciation guide inside there that's true yeah writing it down will make it hard to pronounce i want to thank a sponsor veteri is sponsoring this show they are an online marketplace to help you find your next great job you can learn more about them by going to veteri.com soft skills engineering and you can also learn more about them by listening to the show because we'll talk about them more thank you to veteri for supporting the show dave do you want to read our first question you bet this comes from a listener named rachel who says i took the cult's advice and quit my job at a startup oh always a good way to start a sentence i took the cult's advice i love it there's blood everywhere and i'm levitating what next

okay rachel goes on to say now i'm at a big company and the pace of work is real different in my previous life if i asked a question i would get an answer within the minute or at the most within the hour at my new gig the response time on slack can be six hours and pull request comments so far are never after a day has passed i just send a slack to ask for a response to the pull request comment i've noticed that if i schedule a zoom call i have the best chance of getting a hold of them but a video call sometimes feels like overkill i realize it's due to my co-workers manager being super busy so i try to make my questions short sweet and infrequent still i'm now missing

deadlines because i can't get an answer how can i get my co-workers attention so i can do my work and meet my deadlines yeah going from instant to six hours or soon-ish to never yeah just feel like a big change the never is a pretty big change six hours i mean six hours means that 75 of the time in your eight hour day you're not going to get an answer in that day yeah rachel says i realize it's due to my co-workers slash managers being super busy do you think that's true do you think everyone is just so busy that they just never talk to anybody else i think they all need to be limoged i don't know i if you could see my face right now you would know that it's my skeptical face i mean no one is no one is so busy i mean unless they just hired like 15 new people and

they're just getting barraged so there's like this backlog by the way i think barraged is a nice french origin word as well barraged but yeah like did they seriously just hire like 15 people and it's like one person's job to answer all the questions so there's like a six hour latency on this thing yeah or is it like always the manager folks who are in meetings all day might be tough to get a hold of yeah or maybe they welcome the distraction from the meetings so they can multitask yeah but okay so i i worked at mostly startups until my current gig where i work at a very very large company i actually noticed a similar thing around communication expectations and the pace of work and stuff and i think a lot of it is cultural more than required where

at a startup typically companies are smaller although the word startup has lost all meaning like ubers was until recently a startup i guess okay but like a small startup with with i don't know fewer than a hundred people like you know most of the people you work with you might be co-located with them directly but if not it's not like there's a huge number of outsiders outside of the group of people you know that you still have to somehow work with yeah and the company is much smaller generally less stable has less more long-term uncertainty about where the money is coming from so there's maybe a little bit more of a sense of urgency at a big company there are way more people my my team right now is bigger than several companies i've worked at oh really

just just your team yeah my part of the organization is bigger than most companies i think in in the world yeah like it's just a much different scale and that means you have to fan out a lot more which means you might be sort of like multiplexing between a bunch of different stuff or context switching between a bunch of different stuff more it also means that you are much more likely to get like random stuff that has nothing to do with you come in oh really and like it's it's somebody i mean this is a personal experience so it probably depends company to company or area within specific company to company but like someone is desperately trying to find who can help me with thing x right they like stumble upon you and think does this person know and you

say no but you become part of their like rpg style quest you say go kill 10 boars for me and then i will tell you the next person you need to fetch something for to find out who can help you with this thing communication is just way harder when there are way more people to work with yes and the way that some people deal with this is just by like stepping back or tightly funneling communication or batching it up so it might not be that they're ignoring you because they don't want to deal with it it might be like question time is at the end of the day when i check my email or something like that you know yeah because they're otherwise there's so much coming in all the time that they wouldn't be able to focus so it might be like a defense mechanism on some people's

part yes everything you said i relate to because i also work at a large company now which is a thousand times larger than any company i've ever worked at before maybe ten thousand times larger actually in terms of headcount. But I have also noticed a high degree of variability between individuals in my company as it relates to their response times. There are people who I can consistently get a hold of within minutes. And there are people who consistently require about three messages over the course of three days to get their attention. Do you see any correlation between level in the company or tenure or role or anything, or is it pretty random? That's a great question. I tend to interact

with people who are at my similar level in tenure just because of the way this company is set up but i think it has i think it's 100 personal i really do like i've tried to identify maybe it's this one team maybe it's this one organization i don't think so i think it's pretty well uncorrelated to their role level or tenure i think it's just like personal style that's interesting so it's it's it's it's not like someone with way more responsibility is so much busier that they can't get back to you it's it's doesn't correlate with that really yeah not really no and like i can think i'm just kind of mentally cataloging the people i know that are at like higher levels where they would be expected to be more responsible and i'm thinking about i can think of several

examples on both sides of this coin you know extremely unresponsive and pretty responsive so i said that it might be a defense mechanism or kind of a decision it's hard to change expectations around communication with a culture as a whole and the further away someone is from directly working with you the harder it would be to change but i have direct experience with this issue occurring within a team where where some people were just not getting the response that they wanted or felt like they needed and it took a few conversations but we just talked about it openly as a team and people became more responsive oh in in a way it's like i think some of that the outside culture leaked into interactions within the group if that makes

sense yeah like in terms of priorities yeah yeah like you prioritize your stuff you get work done you you check communication every once in a while and you have to like filter what groups you apply those rules to right and they were getting applied a little too broadly but i think the point of this is if this is like people far away from you that you interact with infrequently, it's kind of tough to change and you can't do much more than pester them. And I love how scheduling a meeting is the ultimate form of pestering. It's like a synchronous, you have to sit down in a chair at this specific time and talk to me. You cannot ignore this. And it sucks, but I mean, sometimes you have to do that. Yeah. Meetings are an amazing forcing function. I'll tell you the most extreme

version of this one individual who will remain nameless and it's not you jameson i mean i wasn't thinking it was until you said that this person had i had a meeting with them and then i needed to do some follow-up discussion with them and it was like email no response wait a day email no response and it went on for like a week and a half or two weeks and then we got a new program manager who came in and i uh partnered with the program manager and i said can you reach out to this person and see if you can get them still no like still weeks later i said okay let's just put a meeting on their calendar. And the beauty of Outlook, the only good thing about Outlook is that you can put time on other people's calendar without their explicit consent. It

just shows up on their calendar as tentative. This is great to do to other people. No one should do it to me. Exactly. But, and then you, cause you know, they're going to be looking at their calendar and you know, they're going to be like, oh, I have a meeting with Dave. And that's how we finally got this person's attention although funny enough he he actually had to bail on the first one and then we rescheduled it for a few days later and then we got him i've had literally the exact same experience of trying to get a hold of someone asynchronously failing after a while giving up scheduling a meeting having to move the meeting but it happened in a meeting right because it's

harder to ignore right but it took like three weeks for us to get this and i'm like okay we just needed like a little information from you by email and the information was hey are you still alive do you still work here the answer to both questions was yes thankfully yeah if they don't answer over email then it's hard to know if the answer is yes or no i guess yeah it's a halting problem if they never respond they were dead yeah i mean meetings are kind of like mutexes right like you they can be expensive if used too much but sometimes you have to synchronize stuff and then i guess it it's better than race conditions this metaphor is being strained

yes you have any practical tips and tricks for getting in front of people getting their attention especially in a remote environment which i'm assuming is the case here yeah that's a good point this is a remote environment that i was talking about as well it's always been remote all remote forever right one is you might have to pester people more than you expect yeah i'm gonna offer a refinement to what you said you might have to pester people more than you are comfortable with yeah that's a good way to put it yeah i type something once and i think oh they'll get to it when they get to it and then i feel bad like i'm somehow being rude if i ping them more often if they haven't responded yet but if i actually need a response and they haven't yet

then i mean that's what it takes yeah so some of it is getting over that fear i do think it is worth an explicit conversation around expectations for communication because it's possible i've worked at places where the expectation was communication is 100 asynchronous and someone can message you and and you will reply when it works well for you and that could be several hours from now it's just it's just async if you need to do synchronous things schedule a meeting if it's an emergency like you call them on the phone or page them or whatever and maybe some people think that's how it works at your company or maybe it's not anything deliberate maybe they just don't realize how big the cost of delaying responses is i think the second situation is more

similar to what i saw at my work where it wasn't anyone being deliberate or ignoring someone on purpose it was just like people didn't realize the cost of blocking someone and and were kind of weighing the cost of interrupting themselves yeah with an unclear understanding of what the downside of not interrupting themselves would be does that make sense yes it does and going back to the getting comfortable with this i'll tell you my mind shifted a little bit when where i used to be super uncomfortable sending reminders or follow-ups or saying hey did you get to that thing yet until someone did it to me once and i realized oh my gosh i just let this fall off my plate and if this person hadn't been willing to just follow up with me it would have stayed off

my plate forever. So I was actually grateful that they followed up with me. And so that kind of shifted my mindset from, okay, yeah, there's a balance. Of course you could be obnoxious where you send them a message every five minutes until they reply, but it doesn't hurt to send two or even three messages over the course of a day to make sure that you get attention. And I have learned that you can train people to know that you are the kind of person that will follow up if you don't hear from them. And I think if you balance it just right, you will not become that super annoying person on the team who everyone hates but rather you'll become the person that gets attention because people know that you're going to come back with a follow-up if they don't

respond yeah another thing to talk about is is rachel mentioned missing deadlines because they can't get answers and i think that's a valid thing to put when you're pestering people say hey i have this deadline and it's tough for me to move forward without answering like give some context when you are reminding people or messaging people so that it's clear because i get that a lot when communication comes into me i have no idea what the priority or urgency is so i sort of just make it up in my head sometimes i use the highly effective productivity strategy of ignoring things until they come back several times and then that means it's important so if you include some idea of why it matters that you get an answer soon i think that might help the other thing you

can do is well first of all what what jameson said about having an explicit conversation to level set with the team is i think obviously the best answer but if that doesn't work for some reason you can resort to multitasking where you can say look i have kind of this high latency communication that blocks certain tasks but if i have multiple tasks that i can work on at the same time then when one is blocked i can always swap in another one and work on that until it becomes blocked by a question and so this is sometimes hard to do when you're new you know because it's hard to have like five things going at once but if you have a lot of this you might be able to kind of fill your works your work queue with these threads that are interruptible yeah but you have

enough of them to where your cpu stays busy all the time i i don't love well i'm about to lie because i multitask a lot i i don't like it though because it feels especially for an individual contributor engineer i assume that's what what rachel is they didn't say but i assume they're they're kind of a developer not a manager or someone like that multitasking is rough and is much less productive than one tasking so you have to weigh the trade-off of like do i block and just wait because sometimes it honestly might be more productive to just wait and block and dive into it more on your own instead of pick up this other thing that you can make progress on because you have to context switch back to your first thing when you get an answer but sometimes it is better

to multitask yeah there is the slow road too which is just bide your time become a tenured engineer and then you can be the one ignoring questions from the other engineers it's like hazing where it gets passed down and you can't wait to haze other people because somebody was mean to you right so perpetuate the problem that'll make everything better have we answered the question i think so settle into this new normal take a nap between your prs pad those deadlines with your communication overhead oh that was one more thing i wanted to say sometimes deadlines are more like suggestion lines sometimes they really are hard lines but often they are more motivational or estimates that

turn into deadlines and i have noticed more of this at this bigger company than at previous places where there's there are some dates that are immutable and there are a lot of dates that are more immutable so i mean hitting your commitments and delivering stuff faster and all that that's good if you're worried that like the world will end in my experience the world has not ended when deadlines have been pushed back for lots of things so just don't worry about it that's my answer don't even worry about it it's fine just just take longer okay valuable advice on software productivity. Okay, I feel like the question is answered.

Okay. 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 Vetteri,

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 link 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 do you want to read our next question dave i don't i want you to read it okay okay here goes this is from a listener named tasso engineering managers support the growth of their direct reports once you become a manager it's expected that you own your own career development how much should you expect your manager to support you in that hmm it's so meta it's like once you become a manager you still have a manager i thought no there's only one manager it's you or is it just is it i guess i realize it's just managers all the way up i think so yeah i mean i can't even see the top from where i am that's true so true it shifts back so the top person is like senior software

engineer it wraps around yeah overflows there's an intern up there that link links the list back to itself so the question here is once you become a manager you i think implicit in this question is that you own more of your own career development than you did as an individual contributor is that what you're reading here i think so all right do you think that's true i think there is an implicit part of engineering culture that managers are more equipped to manage their own careers than individual contributors especially junior you know more entry-level folks is it just like tenure or skill set or the stuff they put in the special manager water that only managers drink compound c the special manager juice

does c stand for career now it does yeah you know there's an interesting phenomenon that happens as a manager at least at a well-managed company managers take an interest in the career development of their people at least they should and what i think that automatically means is that they get exposure to what career development even looks like so they they know what it looks like whereas when you first join a company as an individual contributor you know you're just pulling coding tasks off the backlog and implementing them you're like career what's that you know but as a manager it's like you're part of your job to do that so why wouldn't you also be able to do that for yourself yeah that

makes a lot of sense you should be able to do it for yourself and yet i know many accountants whose personal finances are a wreck come take a look at my personal website sometime yeah exactly yeah we were talking about this a little bit before the show and i think dave you you mentioned something that resonated with me which is that you should basically never expect anyone to support you in career growth like you shouldn't expect anyone to do anything for you support is i guess depends how you define support i mean they probably shouldn't oppose you but you shouldn't expect someone to funnel opportunities your way you shouldn't expect someone to proactively bring up conversations saying hey you're ready for promotion now you shouldn't expect someone to

guide you to the the correct path to choose to promotion you need to be proactive about doing all that stuff no matter your level is that kind of an accurate summary of what you said yeah like i think it's fine to hand off every part of your career development to your manager that you don't need to get done they're going to use the prioritization strategy we talked about in the last question of just not doing it yeah just ignore it well i sent a slack message to my manager asking for career development and six hours later he still hasn't responded yeah i want to point out i say that kind of cynically and and only half tongue in cheek because i think that the people whose career development is the most successful and the most impactful to them and

who get you know the highest degree of success that they want are the ones who take ownership and do it themselves as much as they can and they leverage their manager as one input among many but they don't rely on their manager and they certainly don't wait for their manager to take action for them to achieve the growth they want to get yeah i believe there are probably people not probably there are people who are better at developing employees than others but it's kind of i mean it's hard to know that before you join a team or take a job yes you maybe can select a little bit for that but you might not be able to as well and even if you do end up on a team where the manager is invested in your work it's not like they're going to promote you without you

doing anything like you still have to qualify for it you still have to i mean maybe they'll say hey have you thought about promotion like they might nudge you a little bit but you still have to do the work for it right and and there are really excellent managers who will create situations and opportunities for people to grow on the job which is awesome yeah but like do you really want to roll the dice and hope that you got a manager that does that for you yeah and this this applies at every level now i think that the kinds of things you depend on your manager to do for you changes when you move from individual contributor to manager so like for example as a manager you probably have very different goals for your career than you do as an individual contributor you know

i think a lot of individual contributors have goals like i want to learn technology x or i want to become proficient with some skill set or some programming language or something but i think a lot of managers have goals that are more like, I want to make a business impact that's to the tune of X money, or I want to be responsible for an organization of X number of people, right? And I think you can certainly expect your manager to help you with that, but you're going to have to be the one setting the goals and communicating to your manager what you want and then partnering with your manager to get it, but probably not delegating very much of it. I think that's a good way to put it. Your manager might be a good, it might not too, but they might be a good judge

of like where you meet and fall short of criteria for promotion but again the more you can tell them you want that knowledge the more likely you are to get it people are bad at giving feedback and people are reluctant to give feedback generally so i think it's unlikely someone will just jump in and say stuff to you yeah so the answer is none none much that's how much you can expect expect nothing work for it enlist their support but it's on you yeah and by the way it always has been you just didn't know yeah there are good folks out there who do a really good job of this just like there are really careful drivers who never speed but you know

oh man you got me there for a minute i was like how many oh all right have we answered the question i think the question is answered good luck careering yourself as a manager and let us know how it goes next week when your career's done growing just kidding it takes longer than that all right what can people do if they want their own questions answered go to softskills.audio there's a friendly button called ask us a question which you can click thank you so much to everyone who has done that we really appreciate all the questions that come in you are the lifeblood of the show if you want to support the show financially you can go to softskills.audio and click support us on patreon if you do that we

will send you an invite to our slack cult thanks very much also you can tweet about the show share it with your friends and if you just absolutely hate it you can share it with your enemies and make their day just a little bit worse yep either way we win all right we'll catch you next week