Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 221: Current boss reference and getting paid to do nothing

Episode Date: August 3, 2020

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Questions I’m in the process of quitting my job. I’ve been a developer here for a few years and made amazing friends. I love the people here but I am looking for a new challenge and a pay increase. I was discussing my references for the new role with my partner and she said I should ask my current manager. I stopped hard in my tracks and said “absolutely not.” She works in healthcare and said she wouldn’t get a job unless her old manager gave a good reference. I dismissed this as not applying to software engineering. But the thought has stayed with me. Would use your current manager as a reference? Am I wrong to not do this? At what point do you tell your current manager your looking to leave? My manager does not know anything yet and I thought it would be “mean” to tell him I’m leaving and also ask for a reference. I do believe he would give a good reference though. What are your thoughts? Hey guys, Should I stay at a job where I get paid to do nothing? I took a new job as a data scientist a few months ago and since COVID-19 blew up I have had absolutely nothing to do at my job. I’m supposed to be working remotely but our team doesn’t get a lot of business and we’re mostly keeping a facade of being busy with “internal projects” and “training”. This was nice for the first few weeks but at this point I’m concerned about my career development. Also, the job is more business-oriented than I expected while I would rather focus on building things. I would like my next job to be a machine learning engineer or a software developer role in some other domain. I’m worried that my “hard” engineering skills are deteriorating with every passing week. All of this is made more difficult by the disturbed job market at the moment and the fact that if I stay at my role for another 7 months, I will receive a sizeable retention payment. What should I do? I love the podcast. Keep up the great work.

it takes more than turning it off and on again while shouting devops to be a great software engineer this is episode 221 of the soft skills engineering podcast i'm your host jamison dance i'm your host dave smith we tried turning it off and on again several times before the show and it didn't work so we are not practicing devops soft skills engineering is a weekly advice show where we answer all of your non-technical questions about the technical field of software development sometimes you have to turn it off and on again three times and then it's you can call it like stochastic devops that's right yeah probabilistic devops wait that's artificial intelligence as soon as you use statistics now it's ai that's right

if there's a chance you're right it's ai if sometimes it's wrong and you can never tell why yeah exactly it's artificial intelligence if you have an inconsistent crash in your software that's because it has artificial intelligence i am an expert ai developer oh yeah me too you want to thank our patrons dave you bet thanks to those folks that are contributing at a level to get some a shout out every week on patreon they are vinlock ragnar hardison 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 kantar and sean if you'd like to support the

show on patreon and get access to our amazing slack community go to softskills.audio and click support us on patreon any dollar amount greater than zero will get you access to our community the first week of each month right after patreon builds you every person that supports us on patreon i just like shout really loud thank you wherever i am so you can just know that that's happening and feel good too that's another benefit that i haven't been open about until right now if your ears are sensitive enough you might just hear it yeah thank you so much to everybody who's doing that you really do help keep the show going thank you as well to veteri veteri is a marketplace for finding a new software job they are sponsoring the show and we are really grateful to them they

help make it possible too you can hear more about them by going to veteri.com soft skills or by waiting about 15 minutes and listening to the podcast where we will talk more about them that's right do you want to read our first question yes i do want to read our first question this comes from an anonymous listener who says i am in the process of quitting my job i've been a developer here for a few years and made amazing friends i love the people here but i am looking for a new challenge and a pay increase i was discussing my references for the new job with my partner and she said i should ask my current manager i stopped hard in my tracks and said absolutely not she works in health care and said she couldn't get a job unless her old manager gave a good reference

i dismissed this as not applying to software engineering but the thought has stayed with me would you use your current manager as a reference am i wrong not to do this at what point do you tell your current manager that you're looking to leave my manager does not know anything yet and i thought it would be quote mean to tell him i'm leaving and also ask for a reference i do believe he would give a good reference though what are your thoughts so my manager's last day of work is exactly a week from today okay i would ask him for a reference right now strategy one get your manager to quit and has no ties to the company and then they can give a reference yeah so okay i can think of two scenarios that could play out if someone asked

me for a reference if one of one of my reports asked me for a reference one would be i really didn't want them to quit and so i'd say no i'm not going to give you a reference that'll make it easier for you to leave i can't give you a glowing referral or you will you will abandon me and the other scenario would be if i really wanted them to quit because they were bad at their job and i would say i can't give you a glowing reference because i cannot tell a lie much like george washington i'll chop down the cherry tree of our jenkins infrastructure now well it's good to know if i ever work for you as my boss and i ask for a reference and you say no i won't know why

i mean yeah my first instinct would definitely be to keep them around i guess if they told me it's not you it's me you're really great i just can't work here anymore and like flattered me enough so that my ego was assuaged then i would give them a reference but i mean i would prefer them not to leave if i like them and we don't have i had a boss once who talked a lot about people who leave jobs being alumni like they've they've gone on to other things but you don't it's not like you graduate from school and are like screw that school i hate them forever and they're like all mad at you that you betrayed them by graduating it's like a network of people that you spent some time with and you'll keep in touch with some of them and that's cool

and they were pretty explicit about that as an attempt to make it so they still had incentives to keep people around but also to try and get rid of some of the taboo around talking about not wanting to work there ever again or even acknowledging that at some point someone would quit the job i don't know maybe that's a culture you could normalize that sounds like spin they didn't quit they just graduated i did not fire them i gave them a diploma i love these education metaphors was this when you worked for that tech ed company no actually it wasn't oh that seems like it would have been a better fit for it yeah that was a missed opportunity yeah i should have brought that with me you have graduated with high honors

in failing to write good software you know you know how when people quit a job they sometimes will the team will take them out to lunch and have a little celebratory thing to say you know we should do like a graduation ceremony oh yeah play what's that song they play at every graduation pomp and circumstance yeah pomp and circumstance make it like eight hours long make sure that 99.9 of the people there don't care about it but have to be there for like five seconds yep perfect yeah and then they do a little bio on the person where they reveal that they're going to be making 40 000 more at the new job congratulations to stephanie from graduating getting a gigantic raise which she would not have gotten if she had stayed at this company

honest graduation i love it yeah i would feel weird about this but this question is making me examine that assumption and i mean if if i had a decent relationship with my boss and i was pretty sure that they couldn't keep me then i don't think it would be weird especially the the i think there's some expectation that the more role you have in management or the more kind of sizable your role is the better it is to give more notice like there's more stuff depending on you and you need maybe a longer handoff period or something so that might be a decent situation to do that in yeah i suppose but i think i'm i'm guilty of the thing i do a lot which is like yeah everybody's pretty reasonable right like bad stuff just doesn't happen right surely nothing bad

would happen to a person because bad stuff doesn't happen to me right i'm thinking about this nursing industry and if a precondition for getting a new job is that your current job gives a reference i'll bet you people never change jobs unless they're moving to a new city or something what do you mean well if you have let's say you hate your boss and you want to quit but the reason you're quitting is because you hate your boss now it's like i'm trapped here hey boss i really just want to take this pay cut to do this worst job yeah for some reason exactly yeah that would give a lot of power to a boss yes like over future employment which right now in software it's i mean nobody checks references nobody even puts references on there and if they're there like

even writing it down counts as a solid reference yeah it's just weird so i mean i never do this i have never gone to my current employer to get a reference for us for a future employer that i'm interviewing with do you think you will now that this question has opened your eyes no so like i mean okay why why is there a taboo in our industry on looking for other jobs and yet literally everyone does this yeah and i would say even more than some other industries too i think tech is kind of famous for people just hopping jobs every couple years yeah but you can't talk about it you must pretend like it's not happening right you you must take weirdly timed sick days yeah weird trips to the fax machine we've talked about that in the past

it's a good story yeah one sign is if somebody starts taking two days of pto every couple weeks right right and it's like you know when you go to your boss and you're like well i'm turning in my resignation this is my two weeks notice i'm going to a new job and they're like oh i thought so yeah you did have lots of conveniently timed faxes yes it's just weird though i don't know why we have this kind of like how dare you betray our mission and go to the enemy team that we're playing against in football i honestly think it's it's because some places really suck to work at and their only draw to keep people from working somewhere else is that it's painful to get a new job i see so like if there's this stigma around looking for a new job then you might stay longer

at this place that isn't making you happy i have seen some companies claim that they don't mind if people look around because it it like helps them be the best you know it helps make sure that they're that they're valuing their people well which feels like kind of a kind of a power move to do right but i think most places would not prefer that that happens sounds like that would just cost a lot of places money yeah i think so if you have that netflix money though then maybe you can afford to do that yeah it's weird like i have this mental model that if you go looking for other jobs and your company finds out that it will reflect poorly on you yeah how dare you yeah and yet literally everyone at your company has done exactly this in fact they probably joined

your company under the cover of night from their previous company they like repelled out of a helicopter exactly landed in the company compound having escaped right here's my resume yeah so it's like how do you think everyone who got the job that they currently have how do you think your manager got their job and yet we still have to pretend for some reason like this is so taboo but you know i don't know as a manager i do take it personally a little bit when people are out looking for a job it tells me oh they don't like it here or they think there's something better which means i'm not doing a good job and so i get that yeah i do get that so the real question was would you use your manager as a reference nope

yeah i actually think it's great for our industry that we don't require your current boss's permission to get a new job i think it really helps companies stay on their toes be competitive and create better environments for people to work in and i think it's great for the employee too because you're free to explore the market and see if there are better options out there we've talked about this before but it it is rough for people in their first job where if they want really strong references who can speak about their technical accomplishments then they gotta like i don't know You have to somehow trick your boss into filling out a form that is actually a reference but they think is, like, submitting you for a company award or something like that. Hey, it's time for our annual would-be-a-really-good-fang-employee award.

Can you please fill this out? You have to trick one of your coworkers into nominating you for a company award and then just plagiarize some of the text with your manager's signature on it and say, here's my reference. Perfect. nobody's gonna check anyways so it's fine yeah you're good have you ever checked a reference ever for a technical hire yes and i have been a reference for people who wanted to get a job in fact i got one last week i've only checked informal references oh you got a new job last week no i was a reference check for someone else who wanted to get a new job okay i've been a reference i've checked references but only informally through if i if i find out that

they know somebody that i know then i will check the reference that they didn't give but i don't know if i've ever like called up someone's references so we at a at a previous company we used a 360 degree reference check service that would ask the candidate to give a list of three or four names and then they would contact them and have them fill out a form that answered a bunch of questions about the candidate it was great i'm confused by the geometry here You said 360 degree, and I expected that you would have to, like, give references to sign up to the service. Like, prove that you're worthy of participating in our reference checking service. I always took 360 degrees to mean everything you do will come back to bite you.

But, like, I remember one time we were on the fence about this candidate. very strong technical candidate but we got a few glimpses of some behavioral issues that we felt would not be a good match at our company and so we did the reference checks and we got back we did not like probe the people for those issues we just did the generic check and our suspicions were confirmed and people did write back and said you know here are some behavioral things i've seen with this candidate which surprised me i'm surprised that anyone would write negative stuff on a reference like this like what's in it for you but they did and we decided to pass on that they were just trying to cut ties with that person this is a convenient shortcut i guess so but but

in every case i've ever done a reference check it's always been either a previous previous company meaning not current but the previous one yeah or a like co-worker who has the confidence of the candidate in the current company yeah but never their accomplice yes yeah who then sometimes joins us next as a kickback for being their reference yep get them a new job so what what's your answer to the question would i use my current manager as a reference let's assume your current manager isn't actually quitting yeah a current manager who is not actively leaving the company i don't think so i'd be worried about like betraying trust or not even betraying trust i'd be worried that they would say i don't get the job right i still work there i assume my career will be

different now that i ask my manager to give me a reference to get somewhere else than than if i had kind of like kept up the facade of loyal employee who will work there till he dies right which is weird but yeah i don't know i'm weird too so oh good well now have we answered the question yes we have because we both asked at the same time okay great 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, sign up. If you are thinking about taking our advice, the soft skills engineering

patented advice and quitting your job, check out Vetteri. Go to Vetteri.com slash soft skills to sign up. That's V-E-T-T-E-R-Y.com slash soft skills. If you use that link, you will help support the show. And if you get a job through Vetteri, they will send you $300. Thank you so much to Vetteri for sponsoring the show. You want to read our next one? I surely do. This is from a listener named aaron hey guys should i stay at a job where i get paid to do nothing i took a new job as a data scientist a few months ago and since covet 19 blew up i have had absolutely nothing to do at my job i'm supposed to be working remotely but our team doesn't get a lot of business and we're mostly keeping up a facade of being busy with internal projects in air quotes and training

in air quotes this was nice for the first few weeks but at this point i'm concerned about my career development. Also, the job is more business oriented than I would expect. Well, I would rather focus on building things. I would like my next job to be a machine learning engineer or software developer role in some other domain. I'm worried that my hard engineering skills are deteriorating with every passing week. All of this is made more difficult by the disturbed job market at the moment. And the fact that if I stay at my role for another seven months, I will receive a sizable retention payment. What should I do? Love the podcast. Keep up the great work. Why thank you, aaron you should stay for seven months and then quit question answered oh hang on stay for seven

months work on projects that are vaguely work related that will enhance your skills in a direction you want and then quit now question answered okay well that was easy yeah this one's easy i don't know that's what i would do i mean assuming there really is nothing to do assuming i feel like if there is literally nothing to do then it doesn't really feel enough unethical to just kind of like do things that seem vaguely valuable for the company and also valuable for you i don't think you're ethically bound to fall on your sword and quit and say there is no work for me i shan't take another cent under this false pretense and then you just leave so just this week i watched that old episode of the office where the office salespeople go down into the warehouse

and they're like working a day in the warehouse and they're like loading boxes on a truck and dwight says hey we could be a lot more efficient if we did it a little differently and stanley says and stanley stops in mid mid sentence and says we are in a run the clock down situation here yeah i think i'm a stanley i'm saying run that clock out but is that the same episode where they rig up the like grease based system of like sliding boxes on the ground and like ruins all the paper and stuff no that wasn't this one because in one of them they try and load boxes they make like a bowling alley looking thing with with guardrails along the side and then they just lay down a bunch of grease in the middle i slide them across the floor all the way over to

the truck nice which i imagine ruins paper so i thought you were going to say that it's kind of like idle hands are the devil's playground is that how that saying goes yeah like it's dangerous to give an engineer a bunch of free time and say do some internal projects to help the company because soon you'll have like fully automated hr running on kubernetes somehow like you have a docker container for every employee but but remember this is a data scientist so i think what you're gonna have is stochastic paychecks with probabilistic amounts you stream everyone's payments like like paychecks to them through spark somehow yeah yeah got it hadoop's gotta be in there yep i don't know that's what i would do it feels pretty

straightforward to me i'd take the money well if if money is all you care about jameson why not do what that intern did in episode 217 and just get another job while you're still running the clock down on your current job oh yeah perfect okay that does feel bad you can't do valuable work for someone else you can just not do valuable work for the people paying for you that's where i draw the line yeah i don't know the the business oriented thing honestly feels like a bigger concern than the lack of work currently thing so you think this might be the wrong job for this person even if they were doing things yeah i think so i don't know it doesn't sound like the kind of job they want it sounds like they would quit if they didn't have a retention payment

coming up and if they felt like they could get another job good news you have a lot of time to look for another job right now so the like the disturbed market shouldn't be an issue i mean you can you can be slow because you are gainfully employed but look for another job and you have plenty of time it depends on how much that money is worth to you you've got all day long to brush up on your interview skills you have i don't know what the data science equivalent of cracking the coding interview is but i'm sure there's one out there yeah i think all data science interviews are just like, they give you a picture of a bird and say, make a program that can tell me this is a bird. I think it's just like full-time Kaggle competitions. Yeah. That's what you could do is

you could just work on your Kaggle ranking for the next seven months. I've signed up for that website and I got their emails for years and never did a single thing. It just like made me feel smart to be vaguely affiliated with it. It's a, we should probably explain what it is. I think it's like a data science, like machine learning competition site. It's kind of like hacker rank but for data problems right something like that yeah i don't know i feel like it's that's what i would do what would you do dave seven months is a long time to do nothing i don't know it might take you six months to recover from that mess but good news is if they pay you enough money then you can just not work for those six months oh yeah just compound your problem of skills

deteriorating yeah this is a really interesting experiment to try and arrive at the time value or or what what dollar amount you place on on like being satisfied at work because presumably there's a number out there at which it would be worth it to you to do a boring job and if this number is high enough then you can stay and do your boring job and if not it's not let's say that number is equal to one retention payment good news yeah i feel like you need to sneak into like an undergrad economics study because they do all these experiments to try and figure out how much people value different things by giving them small amounts of money.

So you had to stay for two more seconds at your job and I give you these two nickels. Would that be worth it? And then they just extrapolate for seven months. Until you finally break. Yeah. Oh, man. Well, I mean, I've had a job when I was in college

that was basically run the clock out situation. It was over a summer. It was completely undemanding, but you know i was there to save money for college and i found myself using the time to get educated on things i learned a lot about sorting algorithms that summer like real life computer sorting algorithms yeah no really yeah you just read up on other stuff yeah i read up i it was fun you know the company gave me a computer with microsoft excel which has visual basic for applications in it and i did a lot of reading and implementing of sorting

algorithms. I don't know. Their fatal mistake. They should have locked down Visual Basic so you couldn't learn. Exactly. So, I mean, it sounds clear to me in this case that the company knows that they don't have your full attention and that they are using this retention bonus because they think that it's more important for them to keep the talent on hand than to have to rehire a bunch of folks in seven months. So they've set up this retention to keep you around. That's one thing I would think so that kind of alleviates the ethical question for me because i mean if if it was like well they expect me to do things but i've found a way to meet their expectations in 10 hours a week that's a kind of a different story i wouldn't go down that path but now it's up to you to like

find ways to to fill your time such that you feel productive and learning and the way that you could ethically justify this is to say i'm going to study things that would make me better at this job and even if those skills don't get applied i know that they have the potential to do so just convince yourself that you have all the business side down like you don't need to study that stuff you're a pro at the business stuff that you don't like what you really need to shore up is all the technical stuff that you do like even if that's 10 of your job yeah well you know the pareto principle probably says that's the most important stuff anyway exactly yeah you need like an ai research project. So I think you need to figure out how to develop an avatar that can attend

meetings in your place and then just like summarize them for you. You can skip some business stuff. So I would probably split my time three ways at this company. Way number one is I'd probably spend about 10 to 20% of my time each week trying to find interesting and valuable things to do that the company actually wants for myself and my team. I would just go after that and see what I could find. There's probably problems around every corner that need to be solved and would benefit from your expertise number two i would do interview practicing and take real interviews as well because if something really great comes along and you tell them that you have a seven month retention payment coming they just might give you a bonus anyway to match it which

would be kind of cool yeah yeah they might buy you out that's a good point exactly and then number three is i would just study the things that i want to get more skilled at anyway and do pet projects while i'm at work aaron does say that they might be it's between machine learning engineer and software developer in some other domain machine learning it might be trickier to find kind of small in scope projects that you can just crank out to help the company but if you're just interested in general software development there's there's an endless array of software for it the inside of a company there's a word for that internal software software for the guts of the company okay company guts got it company guts yeah make those guts work

better but there's there are problems everywhere that you can solve by writing little programs to help people that that might be kind of fun to poke at and you just get to write them all in rust now because that's the thing you're interested in maybe this is the best time ever for a rewrite of some company software that already exists ah yeah that's a good point the cost is is much different now that there's no opportunity cost yes exactly i mean that's boy that's a really great way to put it what would you do if there's no opportunity cost that's awesome try to go pro at halo okay well i feel pretty good about those answers how do you feel dave i feel great all right aaron told us that they feel great too so the question is answered good thanks aaron

we got a back channel what should people do if they want their own questions answered dave sure go to softskills.audio and click ask a question you can fill out our form there thank you so much to everyone who's done that we really appreciate it you keep the show going if you want to support the show go to that same website click support us on patreon and join our slack community and be sure to share the show you can follow us on twitter at softskillseng where we tweet occasionally and share the show with your friends thanks for listening we'll catch you next week I'll see you next time.