Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 220: Premature leadership push and credit and status

Episode Date: July 27, 2020

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Questions Hello, I know you said you don’t read the compliments on air most of the time but this podcast is great. I just found it a few weeks ago and I love the positive fun approach to question answering. It has really made me think about software engineering outside of the ““make code do thing”” box. Anyway, the question: I have been at the same company for 4 years. It is my first job out of college. I have ended up working in so many different languages and frameworks I don’t remember them all. I guess that’s just how things go. Recently I have been selected to take on a scrum master role and I feel I am quickly being groomed for management. That was never really my goal. I wanted to build a depth of knowledge and always have my hands on code. Will taking on these kind of roles hurt my chances at future technical roles? Am I dooming myself to managing spreadsheets and Jira tickets until I retire? Will I only communicate in Dilbert references? My teammate frequently gives status updates or fields follow up questions about work that was mostly done by someone else. I am pretty sure they do this to be helpful not to claim credit for all the work. I just wish I could speak up about the work I contributed primarily to before they do so on my behalf. I wish it didn’t bother me since we are one team and I would rather focus on the progress of the team rather than receiving credit. How should I respond to these situations in a way that allows me to not get bothered emotionally and also do what’s best for the team?

it takes more than mocking every single method to cover every esoteric edge case to be a great engineer this is soft skills engineering episode 220 i'm your host dave smith i'm your host jamison dance soft skills engineering is a weekly advice podcast for software developers about non-technical topics i think the worst code i ever wrote was after i got really into mocking and it felt Really productive because I got to write so much code. Yeah. It was just the code was mostly mocking and then exercising the mocks that I wrote. And you have the bonus of knowing that no one will ever change this code.

Exactly. Don't worry. It's encased in armor. All right. I was just going to ask if you would like to thank our patrons. I would love to thank our patrons. Thank you to Vinlok, Ragnar Harderson, Oleksandr, microconfig.io,

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who have supported the show. Thank you to everybody else who will someday in the future. And all of those people have gone to softskills.audio and clicked support us on Patreon, contributed any dollar amount ever and then gotten a swift or not swift depending on what time of the month you do it yeah it might be invite into our slack team when patreon bills

you basically then we send out all the invites so usually at the beginning of the month after you start we just have to make sure we get that sweet one dollar before we risk sending you this invite yeah my time kind of goes up and down in a sine wave in terms of how much time i spend on the group but every time i do i learn stuff i interact with people who are kind and thoughtful and it's great you should join them what's the period of your sine wave good it's it's a good period you should go track your activity and see if it happens to correlate to some like celestial body it's van gogh's blue period okay perfect i've got a follow-up here to read from a listener who took our advice or or didn't I guess you can decide from two years ago so let me read

what they wrote in they said hey gentlemen I asked the quote insecure teammate question in episode 108 for reference episode 108 was April of 2018 so over two years ago continuing they said I appreciated your answer and would like to follow up my conflict with the co-worker led me down a path that has led me recently to getting a job at google so maybe it was for the best i was a two years out of college at the time and i would characterize myself back then as eager to learn hard working and a bit insufferable slash arrogant my insecure co-worker was very hard to work with but i escalated the situation i think if i hadn't pushed back and complicated the situation the team management would have eventually decided to terminate my teammate i know you already play

devil's advocate on the show to some extent where applicable i would encourage you to treat the narrator as unreliable and fallible more often and steel man which is the opposite of straw man their opponents i think i tarnished my professional reputation by making it my personal cause to push back against my co-workers behaviors i likely would have been promoted to team lead at that company had i shown more tact best regards from a long time listener that's really interesting so congratulations on your ability to to reflect on your own past and your own behavior that seems like a pretty mature thing to do unless you're like i was a bit insufferable insufferable and arrogant and like now i'm really insufferable and arrogant because i'm so proud of how i was

able to look past look look look to the past and realize how arrogant i was and only someone An incredibly talented and special would have been able to do that. And now I've doubled down. Yeah, this is interesting. Yeah, I mean, sometimes we contribute to our own problems. That's true. So steel man, is that a new term for you? It is for me.

No, I think I first heard about it in the internet where I hear about most things. Yeah, maybe we should define it. So straw man is usually when you take someone's argument and you kind of turn it into a weaker version of their argument so that you can destroy it right and make yourself look right right and steel manning is the opposite where you you create a version of their argument that is so strong that they would agree with it and say yeah you you have you have it right this is what i believe and this is why i think i'm right and then you kind of work with it that way it's sort of an attempt to be more rational about disagreeing with people i guess also if you steel man your opponent's opponents

then it's like straw man kind of is that what they're saying here what i'm so confused it says here okay so the writer the listener said i would encourage you to treat the narrator as unreliable and steel man their opponents yeah that's what it says so if you can use what you think it says i was saying if you're arguing with someone you can steel man their opponents to argue against them it's wouldn't that be yourself well no like you take some other opponent that they have and steel man them look i don't know oh like form an alliance i just is this a joke no it's not a joke look have you not figured out that i just throw random words out there and when one of them makes you laugh i double down but sometimes you don't laugh

and i just move on so one time i was watching gi joe the cartoon when i was growing up and there was this plot arc where there was some bad guy that had a snake somewhere on his uniform i think and the good guys were fighting against them and then another bad guy appeared and they formed an alliance suddenly with the first bad guy is that what you're suggesting like find an enemy of this person and steel man their arguments and make them strong i don't know i don't know i don't know okay i just i usually just win arguments by punching so i i don't know all this word stuff i don't get it there's no help dave smash yeah there you go yeah thank you for writing in with this story i really appreciate hearing how things worked out and it sounds like overall your life

has not been ruined by listening to this show so some of it clearly is thanks to us another ringing endorsement for soft skills engineering my life was not ruined by listening to this show or you were so resilient that you were able to overcome the negative effects that listening to this show had on your life i got a great job at google despite the fact that i listened to soft skills engineering yeah all right i want to thank veteri who is a company that provides a marketplace for finding a next great engineering position they are sponsoring this show and we are very grateful to them for that you can go to veteri.com soft skills to hear more about them or just keep listening all right i'd like to read our first question yeah this comes from an anonymous

listener who says hello i know you said you don't read the compliments on air most of the time but this podcast is great i just found it a few weeks ago and i love the positive fun approach to question answering it has really made me think about software engineering outside of the quote make code do thing box i love that anyway the question is i have been at my company for four years it is my first job out of college i have ended up working in so many different languages and frameworks that i don't remember them all i guess that's just how things go recently i have been selected to take on a scrum master role and i feel i am quickly becoming groomed for management that was never really my goal i wanted to build a depth of knowledge and always have my hands on

code will taking on these kinds of roles hurt my chances at future technical roles am i dooming myself to managing spreadsheets and jira tickets until i retire will i only communicate in dilbert references you make the job sound so appealing yeah spreadsheets and jira and dilbert let me tell you a story about the past two days at work one of the teams i manage has a quarterly kind of hackathon thing where we just work on whatever we want for a fixed amount of time we're supposed to decide a topic ahead of time then we present at the end and i was really pumped about my idea i got to do it last time and it was fun and i wrote zero lines of code in the two days of the hackathon because i was spending a lot of time in spreadsheets and share tickets and meetings and

and it can happen to you so if you really like code and want to do it a lot there is a chance that moving more down that route will move you away from this i like the job of management overall but it does shift you away from the day-to-day work of writing code yep not even hackathons can save you what about just you know just scrum master i'm not really a manager just just dipping my toes in the water scrum master is the gateway drug to management so you get to the real hard stuff of engineering manager yeah i sense some concern from the question asker that they could do this. I even sort of sense that it might be interesting to them in some ways, but they are worried that they won't be able to get technical depth, which is true in a way, and they are worried

that it will hurt them later on if they spend too short of a stint as an individual contributor engineer before moving into management. I think both of those are true. I think generally what i've seen is the strongest engineering managers have been strong engineers at first and not that being a good engineer makes you a good engineering manager but it's harder to be a good engineering manager if you have not been a good engineer first so even if you do want to move into management at some point i would encourage you to stay in it and if you do move into management in most places there are i don't know it's a wide spectrum of what it looks like but in most places you'll be further away from the code and the nitty gritty and you won't know about like kubernetes grandchild

whatever that cool thing is going to be several generations after it you won't know very much about it you'll know kind of the buzzwords but you won't be using it you know and every time you use the buzzwords your engineers will look at you and be like you have no idea what you're talking you'll use them wrong yep you just have to be humble about it yep so i i felt this let's call it management creep in my early career as well at about the same time period about the four-year mark and you could do what I did which is just basically every time your weekly coding time drops below a certain threshold you quit that job go get a new one yeah it's I mean it's hard to push back against this stuff in some ways because it's it's kind of flattering and it's people

saying we need your help and you're good at this thing and there's some status and prestige and power that come along with it so yeah and and guess who the people are who are asking you to do it they're managers and so when you tell them i don't want to do your crappy job they don't believe you is that what you're saying or they're like my job's not crappy you don't want to you don't want to hurt their feelings and push back no offense but no sane person would want to do your job i don't think i would trust someone who came straight into their career thinking i can't wait to be in charge of people like yeah being ambitious is one thing but saying like i want to manage people just straight from the get-go before you know how to

do a job feels weird to me yeah and i'm i'm inherently suspicious of those kind of people So in a way, I feel like not wanting to be a manager early in your career is one potential marker of someone who could want to who could be successful at it later, because it means you might not get a huge ego about it. So congratulations, you've cleared the first hurdle. Yeah. Not wanting the job. Yeah. How do you go about not doing it? Like, I think there's basically two, three approaches here.

approach number one i already suggested just quit this job and go get an individual contributor job where you won't be asked to manage jira on the first day that'll come a few years later but option two you got four more years yeah the timer resets no seriously it is a it is a reset yeah this is i i kind of consider my early career like a sawtooth function where it would just like you're moving left to right along the graph along the x-axis and like the line would just move up and up and up closer to management and then i would have to take some deliberate action to drop that line straight down and then i would go to my next job and the line would creep up at a 45 degree angle up to management and then i would have to take some deliberate action which is quitting my

job drop it straight down again and this probably happened three times before i finally just gave in and accepted the accepted the gravity but anyway that's option one option two is so we've talked about sine waves and sawtooth i think we need to fit in some more like maybe fourier transforms Can we fit in some more like signal metaphors into the show to pivot fully? If you consider a sine wave in the frequency domain, now the metaphor is complete. Yes. So option two is you could just do a really crappy job at this management stuff. Just make, and this is actually very easy.

Just make an absolute mess of the JIRA backlog, which turns out is actually the default anyway. please don't do this you will have you will make so many people's lives worse so many people's but hold on though i mean lives how many jira backlogs have you seen and my question is is it actually possible to have a good one well there's a difference between being bad at a jira backlog and just being bad at management okay uh yeah don't do it if you don't want to don't don't do it just i i hope you're joking i assume you're joking but also i want to be clear that um bad managers cause way more damage than bad individual contributors and i feel like in general they are harder to get rid of or they take longer to get rid of interesting now to to be fair i was not

suggesting that you go into management and then do a bad job i was saying do a bad job as the scrum master and then you'll never be given the crown of manager where you can really screw up yeah okay yeah so in other words fail the gateway drug just say no to candy rocks what are what are those things that pop when you put them in your mouth pop rocks rocks or something pop rocks yeah just say no to pop rocks there was always a rumor when i was growing up that if you filled your stomach with pop rocks like to like swallow a bunch of them and drank a bunch of coke that your stomach would explode a bunch of kids that sounds like a kid rumor yeah did it work did they explode no well except jimmy jimmy just left a real mess on the street yeah i think well you

said three things so you said two yeah i want to hear your third thing okay so three is the hardest one which is going to management and i am so bad at this basically telling management i don't want to do the thing that you think i would be good at and that you want me to do i just i just never have done it i just always say yes to this stuff and maybe that's why i've always resorted to option one you don't have to go tell management you don't want to do the thing if you tell them i don't work here anymore yeah is that what you're saying that's less less stressful to you to quit your job yeah i i have seen a couple cases where someone gets sort of pushed lightly towards management and says no several times and i i admire it in the cases where it works well but

it's like management doesn't give up that easily they keep seeing problems that would be solved by this person doing this kind of work and keep trying and it might take a little bit in the cases i've seen it has not resulted in any negative consequences but i know it has they've been persistent yeah but doesn't it just feel bad to say no i guess some people can just say no and not feel bad but i'm not one of those people doesn't feel bad dave yeah i'm totally one of those people i'm terrible at saying no there's an idea of parallel career tracks that is becoming more commonplace at technical workplaces where there's the management track and there's the technical track and if your company has one of those you could pursue that deliberately and kind

of tell your tell your boss and tell people around you that that's the move that's the direction you're interested in moving in your career and that's sort of like an implicit no to management if you say i'm really pumped about being a principal software engineer you sort of just know that that person doesn't like to i don't know performance improvement plans or all the management stuff you don't want to do right if that doesn't exist at your company you could start to push for it i think it's it's one thing to go to to a boss and say hey you asked me to do this management thing my answer is no it's another thing to go to them proactively and say i'm really interested in growing technically and i really want to increase my technical skills and level

up my ability and be promoted that way how do i work towards that and just having that knowledge will help people guide you towards opportunities that move you in that direction whereas if you don't say what you want to do if you just kind of like seem like you might be good at it sometimes times people will toss these opportunities at you and then you're dealing with their assumptions instead of having them marshal their efforts in a direction that you want to go. Does that make sense? Yeah, absolutely. And there is kind of an easier option here. So you're still at the stage where it hasn't set in fully yet and you're just being offered these opportunities to act as a scrum master. One thing you can totally reasonably do is say, I'll do this for six months, but I'm

not doing it any longer than that. And we need to set up a rotation so that someone else can step in in six months i think you're just really you're interested in pushing someone else to try this like rotating team lead thing that you tried except with scrum masters true true uh i personally would not like the job of scrum master and i don't really i guess it could maybe it's like half a step closer towards management but i don't think that it has to be necessarily yeah i agree with that do you want to do the scrum master job because that's a different question maybe you like that but you don't want to do other stuff yeah that makes sense and i think you're you're segueing nicely to the last part of this question which is will taking on these kinds of roles hurt

my chances at future technical roles and i i don't think so i don't think at all first of all i think companies like to see engineers who step up and take on additional responsibility and that doesn't necessarily mean they're going to make you step up and take on stuff you don't want to do but also you don't have to tell them like you don't have to say i was a scrum master yeah it's not like you're getting drafted into the army they're like you you've held a gun before to the front lines yeah there's no they don't hire an investigator to find out if you had been a scrum master so you know companies know what you tell them about them and they sometimes will call your former

manager but usually not so it's actually a nice thing about our industry usually not yeah reference checking is cursory at best yes i think you'll be fine i don't think you've cursed yourself to a lifetime of jira tickets and spreadsheets all right have we answered the question i think so good luck let us know how it goes 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 vettery 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

vettery.com slash softskills to sign up. That's V-E-T-T-E-R-Y dot com slash softskills. If you use that link, you will help support the show. And if you get a job through Vettery, they will send you $300. Thank you so much to Vettery for sponsoring the show. All right, do you want to read our next question? Yes, I will read our next question. My teammate frequently gives status updates or fields follow-up questions about work that was mostly done by someone else. I am pretty sure they do this to be helpful not to claim credit for all of the work i just wish i could speak up about the work i contributed primarily to before they do so on my behalf i wish it didn't bother me since we are all on one team and i would rather focus on the progress of the team rather than

receiving credit how should i respond to these situations in a way that allows me to not get bothered emotionally and also do what's best for the team oh man i've been this person before i think have you the one who is just so helpful just all the helpful answers yeah i have to i can feel it bubbling up inside me sometime where someone will ask a question that i know is directed towards someone else but i feel like it's trained from school where i needed to beat everybody else to raise my hand and say the right answer in in like elementary school i just want to jump in and be like i know that so i'm gonna say it like yeah and also that was kind of a dynamic in my house growing up with siblings oh it was there was like a i don't know where it came from

but for some reason it was it was good to be the one saying stuff did did your parents have like little candies that they would throw into your mouth after you answered questions no not at all i feel like this was a thing that emerged from the children just being kids that develop weird patterns of behaving around each other that is correct jameson here's a tootsie roll yes yeah so i i think i've been guilty of accidentally appearing to claim work for stuff when really it's like i just am so pumped that i can contribute somehow or that i know the answer yeah i can yeah i don't know share something that will help someone what an exciting moment for me i can

answer that question about my co-workers work yeah exactly this will be great for me and everyone i mean everyone loves hearing me talk yeah it's good for me which means it's good for all i've tried to be more aware of it the past couple years yeah so what so what do you do if you're if you encounter your own self doing this yeah if i run across a jameson well there can only be one i'm gonna take the credit for everyone's ideas well i'm gonna get all the answers right so i need to eliminate this person ah yes well even if you assume it's evil intent i think you still should pull them aside and try and have a friendly kind calm conversation with them about it about how it makes you feel and what you're trying to accomplish i think it's pretty likely that they

don't know that they are coming across this way yeah even if they're trying to be evil and sabotage you i don't think it hurts to have this conversation i would just pull them aside and say hey can i share status about the work that i do or next time you were in a meeting together and someone asks a question about project x since i'm the one working on it can i can i field that question and if you want to get deeper you can say like i noticed you jump in to answer a lot of times and it makes it harder for me to share my perspective and i don't know just want to participate more can leave it simple too but i feel like the conversation about this might help address it and might help them realize that this is a thing they're doing without noticing it

And if they're this manipulating, conniving schemer, then you can prepare your battle plans after this, I guess. How to take them down. I do think there's an assumption here, which is that people, the question asker assumes that the people who hear this status assume that the person saying it is the person who did it. And I think that assumption generally holds that when people hear about a thing, they think the person telling them that thing did the thing at work. Like, why would they be talking about it if it wasn't their project? Right, or at least that they're an expert on it and that's the go-to person

and the point person on this team now kind of cements that idea in their mind. Yeah, yeah. So I think your concern is real, whether it's malicious or not. I think the impression that's coming across is that this is the person kind of responsible for or doing the work or most knowledgeable about the work.

I mean, look, there are other techniques and one of the benefits of everyone working remotely right now in the software engineering world is that there's technology that can solve this problem all you have to do is become a host of the video conference where these status reports are happening and just expertly time your mute usage on the other person so right when they start to give a status update on your thing just mute and then say oh it sounds like we lost bob let me just step in with the status update here mute kick make meeting private yeah oh what a weird network issue i thought you were going to

talk about like air horn technology not computer technology so well that's after we get back in person bring out the megaphones i mean that would work on zoom too right just drown out everyone with your air horn yeah you could i don't know pull out a megaphone in your office it will make life worse for people around you but they're not you who cares about them you know i've seen a few places where there's a culture of the team jointly recognizing other people where it's common for people to say to jump in and give context about hey this person did this work or something like that and i've really enjoyed working at those places because it felt like it wasn't a competition to claim credit it was like people who liked doing good work and were

excited about the good work that their colleagues did so that's a harder thing to institute but creating a culture where um it's normal to recognize the work that your co-workers do could change this from oh yeah let me answer your question about this project to if they really do want to answer the question they can say anonymous soft skills engineering listener did a fantastic job on this project doing this thing that answers your question or whatever you know it's not bad to praise other people but they might not just i don't know they just might not do that yeah so yeah also if i were the manager of this team i would observe this dynamic and i would say there are people on my team who are not getting the visibility that they should and i would sit down

with this person and and tell them please only comment on the stuff that you directly contributed to because i want to make sure that everyone on the team gets credit for the work that they did yeah that's sort of like the meeting facilitation skills that are important in management where you want to make sure that communication isn't decided by the loudest people or the most extroverted people yes exactly and if your manager doesn't do that well then they did not listen to our first question i guess maybe they got pushed into management because they're really good at manual memory management and someone heard oh memory management okay they're ready memory management and people management are just like a few a few letters away from being the same

thing yeah the edit distance is pretty small between those two phrases perfect i don't know i got nothing else okay so the final question that was written in here was how do i respond to these situations so that i don't get bothered emotionally but also do what's best for the team so i mean you can't control other people that's number one we have to always acknowledge that but at the same time you can sometimes ask other people to do things differently which we have we have done. And in a work environment, that's actually a place where that tends to be better received than other social environments, I think. So there's always a hope for that. Yeah, that's a good point. It's way harder to give critical feedback to a family member

than a coworker. Exactly. So there's that. The other thing to do is to ask yourself, how much is this going to impact my life? Like, is there a quantifiable way that this will stick with me or cause me some long-term problem and the answer is probably not and also the situation is probably more temporary than it feels in the moment i mean i don't know i want to push back on that a little bit being regularly underappreciated or under recognized for work that you're doing could have a long-term effect on your career because you might not get promoted you might not get raises as much the visibility might go to these other people who are more talkative and then you kind of miss out on the benefits of doing good work so i i think this is worth

thinking about i think it's just it's worth doing something about not um kind of silently being concerned about it yeah exactly i think being concerned in and of itself isn't a problem because i don't know you're a person you have feelings about things but if you sit here and just feel concerned but then don't take any action to resolve it and don't do anything to work around it then it's just going to hurt you actually it'll hurt you worse or it'll double hurt you because now you're not getting the recognition and you're just sitting here feeling bad about it so yeah i mean do something i think we both agree on that but then if you're not able to affect the outcome you want to then at least don't let that just tear you up inside you know

find a way to cope with that but don't even if you can't get the outcome that you want is what i'm saying yeah get a court herald to announce stuff for you someone like walks in with hear ye hear ye it is soft skills engineering listener the great duchess accomplisher of 35 sprint points slayer of bugs yes and then you get to look very graceful and say oh you're too kind you're too kind and but still everybody knows that's what you did oh hey you know what you just stumbled upon something that might actually work which is you've got this loud mouth person who speaks over you in

these meetings or takes credit or talks for you in these meetings what if you partner with someone else to say when they do that i want you to speak up for me and if they do it to you i will speak up for you and now you have this other person saying oh yeah actually hey bob would you mind letting jerry report on that one i think jerry did that work jerry do you have a little more detail on that and boom control handed right over to you you could do it like my um mental model of the british parliament which is they all just shout like boo when somebody says stuff they don't like and that's how the government works just shout them down you know yeah how could that go wrong boo a pox upon ye perfect the british parliament speaks

speaks like king james bible english i guess it's perfect it's in the bylaws okay all right i like all these okay good this is all good stuff have we answered the question i think so good luck with it and let us know how it goes if you have your own question and you would like to ask it you can do so by going to soft skills.audio and click ask a question where you can fill out our little form we'd like to say a hearty thank you to everyone who has done that you keep the show going thank you very much we really appreciate it if you like the show as well you can share with folks we like helping people we assume that them listening to this show will make their lives better so it's a moral duty

to share this show with them that's right and thus increase happiness in the world thanks for listening we'll catch you next week