Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 223: Feedback rage and making up for lost time

Episode Date: August 17, 2020

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Questions Hello. Thanks for hosting such a great podcast. I recently finished binging all the previous episodes. I’ve recently noticed in conversations with my team, whether synchronous or asynchronous, after I propose an idea or stake out a position, I easily get defensive if a teammate tries to give feedback on my idea. I don’t mean to get angry, but I sometimes don’t notice until it’s too late. I think it has gotten to the point where my teammates might have caught on, and I don’t want this to lead to a state where they never disagree with me. Have you ever dealt with this, in yourself or others? How have you dealt with changing this mindset? My first software developer job lasted two years. I didn’t learn much. We deployed legacy Java apps with SCP We had no tests We didn’t have CI/CD We were using a beta version of an old framework which we never upgraded Our repos were not in sync with our production code A lot of commented out code, dead code over the place Using multiple languages across the board. We were using Java for something, Node for some, PHP for web/api, JS for client side. Basically the devs were cowboy coding to get the stuff out. I am three years into my current role & have already learned so much more than in my first role. I feel like my first job set me back. How do I overcome this?

it takes more than googling how to be a great engineer to be a great engineer this is episode 223 of the soft skills engineering podcast i'm your host jamison dance i'm your host dave smith soft skills engineering is a weekly advice show where we answer your non-technical questions about the technical field of software development i mean is googling technical not anymore what do you mean since they made the ui so easy well not that it was ever hard i think you know maybe in 2000 in like 1999 second half of the year before anyone had heard the word google maybe then it was hard when it was actually dealing with a google of something oh look when you google how to be a great engineer the second result is how to transition from average engineer

to 10x engineer i assume it's a lot of like anabolic steroids and well that makes sense because the the hero image on this article is a bunch of guys running a foot race on a track so so they're real buff they are super lean yeah yeah that's all it takes 10x is kind of dripping in like greasy testosterone it kind of is that's not what this show is about no other stuff dave you want to thank our wonderful patrons yes i'd like to give one-time shout outs to those who contributed on patreon at this level gearplex and pavlo lebedev and also to those who are contributing at the level where they get a weekly shout out oladapo fadier kajaran's venison ragnar hartesen alexander microconfig.io nick travis evgeny sladkowski dennis bogdanov brayden

canes philip john basile steven armand lee john grant luke bayliss ryan the real mccoy vinlock stanley tactical radio the agile ventures charity and nick cantar and sean if you'd like to support the show on patreon and get access to our slack community you can go to softskills.audio and click support us on patreon any dollar amount greater than strictly greater than zero we'll get you access to our slack community the first week of every month i want to thank bettery who is sponsoring this show bettery is a marketplace for finding a next great software engineering job you can go to bettery.com soft skills to hear more or you can wait for the ad break thanks bettery all right you want to read our first question dave you bet i do

how did you know that's what i wanted to do my 10x developer intuition i figured out why just now i figured out why i hate that so much why it feels so competitive it's like you are 10x if you are measuring yourself against everybody else and trying to defeat them yeah there's this inherent like competition and and winning the competition part of it and i really do not enjoy that well the beauty of 10x is it's a ratio which means it has a numerator and a denominator and all you have all you have to do to jack that thing up is to crush the other engineers productivity into one-tenth engineers yes many ways to be 10 times better which you do by publishing articles called how to be a 10x engineer distracting poison their

mind yes and suddenly they are all reduced productivity and you rise sort of i mean your fraction rises perfect okay let me read our first question this comes from an anonymous listener who says hello thanks for hosting such a great podcast i recently finished binging all the previous episodes my hat is off to you my friend that is that is impressive that's a lot over 200 okay anonymous goes on to say i've recently noticed in conversations with my team whether synchronous or asynchronous after i propose an idea or stake out a position i easily get defensive if a teammate tries to give feedback on my idea i don't mean to get angry but i sometimes don't notice until it's too late i think it has gotten to the point where my teammates

might have caught on and i don't want this to lead to a state where they never disagree with me have you ever dealt with this in yourself or others how have you dealt with changing this mindset am i the only one having an image of the hulk right now no i was just thinking about that actually i was thinking how you would hulk smash feedback right exactly it's like oh crap i turned into the hulk yeah you don't remember you look at all the pull request comments and you're like i figured out how to make all the text green and large in my comments on github yeah it's amazing markdown feature where it changes all your text to green and removes all the verbs pr bad

i don't think i've personally suffered from this although maybe i do and i just don't know yeah i think it is admirable that you notice this about yourself i feel like people who who react this way tend to not know they react this way right yes that's nice so i i have a variation of this where this is kind of weird i i maybe shouldn't say this out loud it's it's not so much that i get angry but my default position when an idea comes from higher up the org chart for me my default reaction is to reject it and i i've had to suppress this over the years because you know that's not really great it's kind of career limiting but yeah so i don't know maybe that's in the same vein now i just want to talk about that our question asker you have empathy

for them though yeah i have empathy i get it so i think you could dissociate yourself from your ideas by telling someone that they all came from your friend whose name rhymes with your name and that way if it's if people are criticizing the ideas they're not criticizing your ideas but the downside is if your ideas are really good then your imaginary idea friend will get all the credit like well this wasn't actually my idea it was pave you know pave oh yeah paves that go-getter that comes up with all the ideas that we love how do we find and compensate pave for all their contributions okay got it so when you're dealing with issues with other people

it can be tempting sometimes to dive into like amateur psychoanalysis of them and figure out what's going on in their personality and their childhood and it is usually pretty useless because you're usually wrong and that's just not a super productive way to deal with conflicts at work but in this case it's you oh like this is a thing about you not about other people so i think it actually might be worth a little bit of introspection into why you react this way have you had negative experiences with people discounting your ideas in the past or i don't know did you get a lot of wedgies growing up or i don't know whatever whatever it might those one of those two options okay i mean that's the spectrum right there that's both ends of it yeah

i think understanding what about you makes you react this way might be a a deeper way to approach this problem and since it's you is more useful than trying to tell somebody hey i read a blog post about psychology once so let me rattle off everything that's wrong with you right that's a good idea so i mean obviously this person has got some pretty good introspective muscles so maybe flex those same muscles and kind of try to root cause this but what do you do if you discover what the root cause is a time machine i think like change the traumatic experience in your past to a validating one yes i don't know i'm not a psychologist i can't get further than that i i feel like understanding it or understanding what contributes to it might

help you react better in the moment than feeling like it's just this this this part of you that you are that you don't control so you think the the root cause discovery process itself might actually root out and solve the root cause yeah you know just like it does with computers where you sit down and figure out what went wrong and then it's fixed and yeah and then the bug never happens again i wrote this post-mortem and the act of me writing it caused our database backups to succeed all the time so the thing that occurred to me when i heard this was okay let's let's stop the bleeding here and one of the benefits and also one of the curses of the modern internet is that you can get obsessed with kind of esoteric interesting topics and the

internet will just feed you information about these topics especially these big platforms like youtube and for me that has turned into general aviation aircraft crashes and youtube just like feeds me a steady diet of these crashes and people analyzing them and invariably the people's suggestion is a checklist of items to execute in the event of an emergency and seemingly the key to surviving these crashes is or preventing them is to have like this part of your brain that has been so trained on these repetitive simple tasks that in the event of an emergency your hands are already executing the motions to resolve the emergency before your brain even has registered the emergency so with that as a backdrop i would suggest some emergency procedures for you to use

when you detect that you are receiving feedback would you like to hear them yeah okay back on the stick yeah no that's like the worst thing you can do push down on the stick yes yeah that one is that's a very common one uh you pull up i see that a lot in youtube people pull up and install so you're gonna like unplug the power cable yeah yeah back away from the computer i'll kind of walk you through my mental process that i follow when people are giving me feedback because i think the question asker here really latched on to something important it says i don't want this to lead to a state where my co-workers never disagree with me because they're used to this like negative reaction every time they try to comment on my ideas that is so important

So the opposite of that is encouraging your teammates to disagree with you or offer counterpoints So here's what I would say. First of all, as soon as you detect feedback, you gotta go into this pattern I think it's like six or seven steps here. So bear with me, but step one tell yourself this is feedback Okay, that like shifts your yourself into the emergency procedures and then automatically you have to say without even thinking Thank you for the feedback. That's got to be response number one Whether you're in person or typing the first thing you got to say is thanks for the feedback no matter what even if you think it's terrible, or if you think it's great, you say, thank you. And then take a pause. And the very next thing you got to say is, just to make sure I understand,

I think you're saying, and then repeat back the feedback that you think you got and wait for them to acknowledge it. And all of this is just designed to give you time to process and let your higher order reasoning center take over from your lizard brain that is screaming to retaliate and then only then i think are you in a safe place to be able to respond to the feedback whether you're you know asynchronous like like the asker mentioned or whether you're in in real time you have to take the time to kind of like reset your brain back to a state where you can process it and actually respond and then you know you basically have two choices you either hate the feedback or you love it or it's not relevant or something but in every case there

are polite responses like if you hate it you can say that's interesting i'll have to think about that if it's good you can just tell them that's a really good idea so that's my suggestion that's like the emergency procedures that i would propose so there's a book called thanks for the feedback that i haven't read maybe read that right seriously it's about the science and art of receiving feedback well oh my gosh okay we've got to read that book and see if i just you know wrote the outline if you scooped them yeah i wonder if i wonder if the question asker has had their ideas shot down in the past are they worried that their thing will not happen are they worried that people will misunderstand their idea because there might be a way to improve your

ability to explain what you actually mean if you find that people are reacting to your ideas and and you feel like they are misunderstanding you and pointing out things that you feel like you've solved or that aren't problems or i don't know so some of it might involve changing the way that you present ideas as well not just changing how you react to feedback communication problem you're saying yeah but i think i like your idea the most so far it does feel more likely that if you get angry when people react to your ideas it's not because all of your ideas are bad and people are booing you every time every time you say anything even good ideas need to be refined usually yeah i don't think i've ever had an idea that was so good that it that no one gave me any feedback on

it you know yeah i think the question asker even recognized this is a potential weakness when they say that i don't want this to lead to a state where they never disagree with me and you're absolutely right because your ideas will be will be worse even if they get accepted or put into production or whatever if nobody challenges them right also i think you know we i've heard this what i'm about to say quite often but maybe the question asker hasn't heard this and by the way this is much easier said than done which is try to disassociate your own personal identity from the idea and instead of being the idea try to be the idea's cheerleader or coach the idea and what i mean by that is you're going to throw an idea out there imagine you're putting it out on like

a playing field or something and other people are going to kind of guide the idea one way or the other and and you're going to guide it one way or the other but your goal is to have the idea be successful and be the best idea it can be and with that as your goal it's not about whether you are successful it's whether the idea itself is successful and unless everyone is participating it just will never be i like it i like your ideas i like your positive feedback good job i give you good feedback i give you positive feedback that's how i reject your all positive feedback starts oh no yeah you like knee-jerk argue with it well have we answered the question i think so i think we've given impossible things for this person to do that will

maybe have a marginal benefit so it's answered par for the course 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 Vetteri lets you specify your salary requirements early rather than going through the whole interview process only to find out, wah, wah, 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 Vetteri 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 Vetteri. Go to vetteri.com slash soft skills 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 Vetteri, they will send you $300. Thank you so much to Vetteri for sponsoring the show. All right. Do you want to read our next question?

I do. This is from an anonymous listener. My first software job lasted two years, and I did not learn much. We deployed legacy Java apps with SCP. We had no tests. We didn't have CICD. We were using a beta version of an old framework, which we never upgraded. our repos were not in sync with our production code a lot of commented and dead code was

everywhere we used multiple languages all over the place basically the devs were cowboy coding to get stuff out i am three years into my current role and have already learned so much more than in my first role i feel like my first job set me back how do i overcome this oh another time machine opportunity that's that's is that the new universal answer instead of quit your job it's invent a time machine and make different choices in the past we felt like quit your job was too easy anybody can do that you have to work to solve your problems why is it that every time i think about a time machine and going back in time the literally the only thing i can think of is writing down which stocks to buy and when probably because a lot of problems go away if you are independently

wealthy yeah it doesn't matter that you didn't learn much yeah your first job when you come back from your time machine you've got a billion bucks in the bank yeah so what do they do well i mean baked into the premise of this question is that there's some kind of lost time you know like i've been set back i'm behind the other runners that were all racing together like if you spent two years at this other job you would have been two years ahead of where you are right now yeah exactly but i think respectfully i kind of reject that premise i just don't really see it that way even though i actually felt exactly this way when i left my first job out of college which i lasted for 18 months i didn't really ship anything useful the same kind of situation i made a lot

of shelfware junk that never got used and i felt like i had just completely wasted my time and look where you are today still wasting the time so you said you felt like this but you shouldn't feel like this yeah you know i uh i remember like talking to my parents about it at the time you know i was pretty young and i was just kind of whining about how i'd totally wasted all this time and they they were insistent that it wasn't a waste of time and i said well that's just because you don't know anything about computers but now i look back and i realize actually it wasn't a waste of time it taught me a bunch of valuable stuff it just it wasn't skills that i directly apply it was skills that i indirectly apply meaning i know what a crappy job looks like now

i know what a bad product strategy looks like now i know what poor technology choices look like now and i know what it looks like when a customer isn't engaged now and i can head off those things before they become you know absolute killers for a job or a company so you you learned from bad examples basically yeah pretty much and that's what i think this caller has going for them is they don't have to say now like when they say we should have tests or we should have continuous deployment or we shouldn't deploy our apps this way they can say that with conviction you know yeah i've seen it i know what it looks like yeah that's a good point part of the value of experience is doing things the right way and part of the value is doing things the wrong way and knowing

for sure you did them the wrong way yeah so you're saying flip that frown upside down you got two years of valuable negative experience. That's right. You couldn't buy that. You'll probably avoid deploying legacy Java apps with SCP at your next job now. That's right. Or you'll make a bigger stink when you encounter that and insist that it gets fixed. Yeah, I like that. How do I overcome this? I mean, yeah, say you worked at a place that had everything figured out, that had an incredible engineering culture, very smart people who always did the right thing. Maybe you would not have been in a position to understand why those things were valuable either like you could maybe kind of mindlessly copy good things that they did but it might not work in a different

context or maybe they were only good things in their specific problem domain or with that specific team or something so i guess i'm saying don't worry about it because you might have gotten it wrong anyways if you tried to copy everything i like that thought exercise of saying okay take it to the extreme in the other direction you've got the most perfect team would you really even know what you were looking at you know and i've mentored a few people at my current company who were fresh out of college joined my company and there's some really amazing engineering practices here that i've observed over the last few years basically tools that solve problems that took me years to realize even existed at other companies and they just operate in that as if that's normal and i'm

like i've told several of them like you have no idea how high quality this process is that we're following right now compared to what i've seen at other companies yeah and they're like whatever it's cool whatever old man yeah i don't know what else to say that is super valuable i think i'm just agreeing with you a lot that you gotta slow down and appreciate all sides of life not just the good engineering practices that commented out code that taught you things like don't comment out your code delete it with a vengeance yeah like how long do you think your career is going to be i mean we're talking about two years out of what like a 30 40 year career you know we're talking less single digit percentage here of the years you've spent that you think are wasted so even if they

were just absolutely wasted and you literally learned nothing which i think is not true it's still not that much this kind of ties into the thing we were saying earlier about the 10x engineer too and what you were saying about a race where if it's this competition you'll never make those two years up if if you're comparing like how long it took you to learn the right thing but it's very non-linear like engineering careers are are varied and comparing across different people's career paths is not usually super useful or satisfying to me it can be interesting for me to find out like what's possible but i think it generally just makes me real sad if i try and hold myself up to someone as i don't know use their career as a yardstick and say okay at this age

they were doing thing x i'm this age and how am i doing compared to them yeah although if you do crack the code on the 10x engineer thing you can definitely make up some lost time turn on those afterburners yeah that's true yep then your your x's go way up it's like a that up into the right hockey stick graph in terms of number of x's and maybe you can get like vc investment into your career i guess they just they just bet on you by just giving just giving you money we like the cut of your jib you're a young white male who wears a hoodie you're going places he's got hustle yeah i think i agree with you good job we're just both saying it's a mindset problem like you're thinking about this wrong and you can't change the past anyway so you may

as well just change what you believe about it yeah yeah nice i believe that everything i did in the past was great i believe i chose the optimal direction every time perfect all right have we answered the question more or less i mean i guess so i don't know yes definitely indubitably yeah we we 100 have because i don't want to deal with the regret of thinking we could have done a better job answering this question and like where we would be in the podcast if we had answered it even better like how much we'd have how much lost time we'd have to make up if we had done a bad job yeah how many more satisfied listeners we would have oh man yeah we did a great job we did great we must have done great because i can't handle it if we didn't

and we won't hear any disagreement yeah and if you try to give us feedback on this one you're just going to get rage we're going to lose our minds to fit in with the theme that's not true we love feedback and we learn a lot from both positive and constructive feedback if you want to give us feedback or if you want to ask a question you can go to softskills.audio and click ask a question and then fill it out we will get to all your questions eventually we really appreciate that you asked them and my brain stopped perfect it's just pausing politely to let you contribute dave oh how nice you've been talking too long just stop right there and let dave take over mid-syllable i have nothing to add so i guess that means we're done we're done

all right catch you next week