Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 224: Bad review from conflicted boss and questioning my career choices

Episode Date: August 24, 2020

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Questions Hi Dave and Jamison, I’m in my mid twenties working at a large company with 1,000+ devs. My direct manager (let’s call him Bob) is probably in his late forties, is from a different country, and has a wife and two children who live in his home country. He currently manages ~20 devs in multiple scrums. Last month, I had my mid-year performance review with Bob. I am pretty sure that I’ve done a great job during the first half of the year. I made a few performance improvements, designed and partly implemented a few new systems, and even saved the company from a potential lawsuit. I think that I’m already delivering much more than the typical junior would already. Bob seems to disagree. He only gave me a mediocre review. When I pushed him for his reasoning, he seems to avoid the question and just told me to focus on the whole year review instead. Last week, I just came to know that Bob is filing a divorce. I would think that he is probably feeling quite depressed. Nonetheless, it bothers me to feel that my review score is somehow related to his personal affairs. He rushed all of his reviews on the last deadline though. I get the feeling that he is dispirited and didn’t focus on giving his team a thorough and honest review. I don’t want to bring this up to Bob’s manager as it would probably make him even more miserable. I also don’t think I can give him divorce advice. What would you do? Hi there. I just graduated from undergrad and will be starting my career in just a few days. A big question on my mind going in is whether software development is the right career for me. I landed here because my parents saw me tinkering with HTML as a kid and pushed me into a CS major and this job. Me personally, I had wildly varying attitudes towards programming in college. Some days I was so hungry that I threw myself into hackathons and side projects; other days I was ready to drop my CS major. All this left me unsure of where I really stand. I’m grateful to have ended up on this path, but as I think more long-term, I question whether I’m really here for the long haul. What signs could I look for to gauge my compatibility with the tech industry or help me decide whether this career is really for me? Either way, thanks so much for making this podcast - it’s been a great window into the world that I’m about to join.

it takes more than bulk closing jira tickets with won't fix to be a great engineer this is soft skills engineering episode 224 i'm your host dave smith i'm your host jameson dance soft skills engineering is a weekly advice podcast for software developers about all the soft stuff that goes into software development, such as declaring Jira bankruptcy. I feel like you could track something about our careers by figuring out how often the word Jira appears in the intro tagline things. Ouch. I don't know what that would tell you, but it would tell you something. It'd tell you the scope of your management responsibilities. the size of the company you work at maybe yeah yeah there you go correlated oh but it feels so

good it it's like when you just select all your unread emails and hit delete yeah it's pretty much the same feeling i don't think i've ever done that i've done it once i very carefully made sure that the only unread emails are ones i can safely delete but i've never just rolled the dice and said i hope i don't delete the one email that causes me to get fired right someday what a way to go that would be you just today is gambling tuesday today i just delete all my emails without reading them see how long you can go i want to thank our wonderful patrons thank you very much to the folks who are supporting the show at the level where we shout them out every single week. Thank you very much to Oladapo Fadiyai, Kiaran Sveinsson, Ragnar

Hardison, Oleksandr, microconfig.io, Nick, Travis Sanders, Evgeny Sladkowski, Denis Bogdanov, Brayden Keynes, Philip John Basile, Stephen Armand-Lee, John Grant, Luke Bayliss, Ryan Reel-McCoy, Vinlock, Stanley Tactical Radio, the Agile Ventures Charity, Nick Kantar, and Sean. Thank you so much. You help keep the show going. You help provide meaning to my life by making it clear that i don't know where i'm going with this i don't know uh the lesson i took from that is money equals meaning yeah i think so i think that's the lesson i take every day thank you to everybody else who supported the show if you support the show for any amount of time for any dollar amount greater than zero and one billing cycle yeah onto your card then we will invite you

to our soft skills engineering slack which is great and full of kind helpful people who who really support each other. It's kind of nice to see all the community that has sprung up there. Very nice. I'd also like to thank Vetteri, which is sponsoring this episode. Vetteri is an online marketplace where you can find great companies to employ you as a software developer. You can go to vetteri.com slash soft skills, and you'll hear more about them later. Do you, Jameson, want to read our first question? Absolutely. I will read it. Starting now from anonymous. Hi, Dave and Jameson. I'm in my mid-20s working at a large company with 1,000 plus devs. My direct manager let's call him bob is probably in his late 40s and is from a different country and has a wife

and two children who live in his home country he currently manages about 20 devs in multiple scrums last month i had my mid-year performance review with bob i am pretty sure that i've done a great job in the first half of the year i made a few performance improvements designed and implemented a few new systems and even saved the company from a potential lawsuit i think that i'm already delivering much more than the typical junior developer bob seems to disagree he only gave me a mediocre review. When I pushed him for his reasoning, he seemed to avoid the question and just told me to focus on the whole year review instead. Last week, I came to know that Bob is filing a divorce. I would think that he is probably feeling quite depressed. Nonetheless, it bothers me

to feel that my review score is somehow related to his personal affairs. He rushed all of his reviews at the last deadline. I get the feeling that he is dispirited and didn't focus on giving his team a thorough and honest review i don't want to bring this up to bob's manager as it would probably make him even more miserable i also don't think i can give him divorce advice what would you do oh you preempted us yeah it's time to parent trap this situation oh my gosh you know i just watched that movie this summer the old one or the new one we watched the old one ah it's on disney plus yeah it's pretty good i guess yeah parent trap is a movie where these twins that i think they split and one goes with one spouse like one goes with the mom

one goes with the dad yeah then they conspire to get their parents back together after they successfully i might add yeah it all works out in the end for the twins for the twins the mom and dad are back into a toxic relationship but the twins have an intact family yeah mom and dad's previous partners are out of there so right depends on who you're rooting for i guess oh man so a couple things that struck me one is bob has a lot of direct reports 20 ish devs that's a lot of people to to rush reviews for through well yeah yeah if bob had 10 direct reports then he could just bang out those reviews in an afternoon but yeah 20 devs at that number you can't have a detailed understanding of the performance of every

developer that reports to you some you might if you work more closely with them but there are going to be some that you just don't really know what they do or how it goes and you're working from very limited kind of glimpses into their output that you get every so often i'm just i'm imagining bob has like a template where it's like okay exceeds expectations meets expectations below expectations and he's got like this default text that he writes up for each one and he just kind of round robins through all 20 all right let me take a look at our stack ranking curve that we need to fit okay let me just roll some dice and all right reviews done boy why do people complain about this

yeah the other wild thing is that when you asked bob for his reasons he said i don't know shut up and work hard so your next review won't be bad or something to that effect like literally the whole point of the performance review is so that you can understand where you stand and why that's where you stand if your boss like you might not agree with the reasons but if they just don't have any reasons then that's pretty ridiculous yeah it means they don't know yeah it means they made it up or that or like it's something that they maybe don't feel comfortable writing down in a right an hr document like they just don't like you or it's not something related to measurable work output yeah so this seems bad yeah now okay now let me take the opposite side

of that argument which is okay bob might actually be right it could he might know that the mid mid-year review is just a formality that has no bearing on your compensation or career trajectory and he just has to push the paper through and so he's like just don't worry about it Yeah. So that's how it is at my company. It's like an informal check-in that doesn't affect things. It doesn't get written down anywhere, but just saying, don't worry about it. I just kind of rolled the dice and this is the review that came up for you. It's really dissatisfying because the point of it is supposed to be to help you understand where you stand. And if you need to make changes, help you make them before it is written in stone and goes on your permanent

record and affects stuff. So saying, don't worry about it. Like how are you supposed to improve if bob just says hey you're not doing well and i can't tell you why just do better don't worry about that either yeah don't worry about it and you'll find out for real at the end of the year in the real review best of luck to you bob's like i've been doing this for 20 years at the annual review i'm also going to roll the dice so don't worry about it there's no possible way that anything you could do could affect the dice roll i have bought perfectly weighted dice and don't worry literally don't worry i'm using cryptographically secure random number generation unless you can affect the the rate that isotopes degrade in the atmosphere or something then

now there there is some evidence that uh rolling the dice might actually be as effective at choosing the correct assessment anyway so bob might not be too far off here yeah bob has taken the null hypothesis approach to performance reviews he's doing the thing that you compare against to see if you're doing if you're making a difference or not that's right yes perfect he is yes creating a perfect control baseline yeah yeah that's a real bummer if you so the divorce stuff to me is interesting because i like drama okay but i don't think if bob wasn't getting divorced and gave you a crappy review i don't think i would act differently than if bob was getting divorced and gave me a crappy review because either way you would act a little differently i mean if he

wasn't getting divorced you wouldn't give him divorce advice yeah that's true well you don't know that maybe maybe that's just my default advice to every boss that gives me a bad review is yeah listen bob 54 of marriages end in divorce so yeah here's some advice on how to how to do a prenup listen happily married bob yeah yeah listen lifelong bachelor bob right not yet married which means you're yet to be divorced it's like they say there's only two kinds of hard drives those that have failed and those that will fail i mean you could apply that same advice but yeah i mean it stinks for bob and if this has affected his review of you that stinks but either way i think you focus on the review not what bob is going through i think do you think jameson i think i

already know the answer to this question but i'm gonna ask you anyway would you feel comfortable now that's the wrong way to ask it you'll definitely say no if i ask it that way would you be willing to go to your boss and say bob the details in this performance review are unacceptable and i need i expect higher standards from you would i be willing to do it yes maybe i think if i disagreed strongly enough with it yeah now that i'm thinking about it more i think so there's a there's kind of a culture of like accountability for performance reviews where i work where you might not love it but you can certainly talk about it more you know like it's not that the expectation is that you will agree with everything that's written but the expectation

is if you have concerns you can bring them up so i think i would i thought you were going to ask would i be willing to say hey i think you're giving me a bad review or a or a lazily done review because you're getting divorced can you not do that what's your answer to that question and i would probably not do okay me too no i don't think i would do that i think this might be one of those situations where you just have to pretend like bob is not having major personal problems in his life yeah i don't think it affects how you address it yeah because at the end of the day you got a performance review that you were dissatisfied with and not not just because it's not the ranking you wanted but because it doesn't have actionable input and that i think is what you

need to latch on to and just try to forget about the personal issues going on in bob's life yeah you suggested bringing it up directly with bob the question asker says they don't want to bring it up to bob's manager yeah is that a thing you would do oh i would try with bob first so here's the thing if you want to get a good performance review you need to be clear before it happens with what you need in the performance review in order for you to consider it to be good so you know you need examples maybe you need actionable uh guidance for what to change and you need to go to your boss with these things beforehand and frankly i think these this would be a good thing to do just in general before performance review time yeah so that they know

what you expect out of it and then so you asked me about bob's boss i would do that first and then i would see how the next one goes do that first meaning talk to bob right yeah talk to bob first i'm sorry yeah i didn't mean to say go to his boss talk to bob first first thing you do yeah right over his head exactly just drive a truck over his career let me tell you the secrets to a good performance review from your boss that's right backstabbing i would go to bob first and say i I'm not satisfied with the details in this review. I need more information in order to improve and make sure that I'm performing at the level

that expected by the company. Then I would say, here's what I want. And I would lay it out. And then in the next review, and I know this is a dissatisfying answer because you're going to have to wait six months. But in the next review, I would see if Bob delivers. And if he doesn't, then I go to his boss and say,

I'm not getting the career guidance I need. Oh, you wouldn't make it based on some more detail added to the current review. You would just say like, do better next time, please. And then check next time. Yeah, exactly. The pragmatist inside me thinks that Bob doesn't have enough information to do that because he's been checked out. But now that he knows... Getting a divorce, managing 20 devs, yeah.

Yeah, he doesn't have the info. Now, to be fair, Bob could actually go and interview your peers and collect the information needed, but he has 20 devs to manage, so that's probably not going to happen. It might though. I mean, if you're a squeaky enough wheel, you might get the guidance you need, but I wouldn't bet on it. yeah it is a tricky situation because say you do go to bob's boss whether after this review or the next one it's it's unlikely to work out that your boss will admit he made a mistake or like commit to do better and then things will just improve radically i think that for most folks would have some effect on your long-term relationship if they felt like oh now this person will go over my head

whenever i do something they don't like and even if they're doing a bad job even if bob is doing a bad job like bob's defensive instincts will kick in right and he will figure out a way to make it your fault that he's in trouble or that his boss now has this negative opinion of him or knows this bad thing that happened on his team it might even become your fault that he's getting divorced so be careful that's just like anonymous always sticking their nose in yeah planting poison in the ears of people i'm close to so i feel like in a way that's like a sacrificial move where maybe bob improves later on but it's probably going to hurt your relationship and it would be hard to work with bob long term after that yeah i do think i like your point about um trying to get expectations

about performance reviews way ahead of the performance reviews and maybe you can focus on that now and instead of just saying hey i don't like this one give me more detail now you can say like how can i provide you information that'll help you give me a an accurate performance review yes because maybe they don't i don't know maybe they don't even have any maybe you don't even write anything maybe bob just sits down and says like hmm what do i think and then tells you rolls the dice and picks one shakes the magic eight ball yeah magic eight ball says meets expectations yeah i do think it's worth talking to bob oh yeah i like our strategy of not mentioning the divorce are you saying that you should divorce the topic of the divorce from the topic

of the performance review ah yes i think so i guess i am yeah if it we haven't said quit your job in a while but working for a bad boss yes who doesn't support you and doesn't have a clear understanding of where you can improve and isn't willing to kind of work with you is not a great situation so that might be a case to use the old quit your job advice yep could be bad bosses can make your life way worse or transfer teams it's a big company mediocre or good bosses yeah that's true i guess quit quit your boss right perfect that's our new catchphrase and if well this is where it gets tricky though lots of places have rules where you cannot transfer teams if you have subpar reviews yes for some period of time so so let's hope the dice come up good next time

yeah better replace the magic eight ball with one of your own choosing that has different weights little raspberry pie on the bottom manipulating the yeah that'd be cool all right have we answered the question i think so question answered 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 Vetteri.

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This comes from an anonymous listener who says, hi there, I just graduated from undergrad and will be starting my career in just a few days. A big question on my mind going in is whether software development is the right career for me. I landed here because my parents saw me tinkering with html as a kid and pushed me into a cs major and this job. Me personally I had wildly varying attitudes towards programming in college. Some days I was so hungry that I threw myself into hackathons and side projects. Other days I was ready to drop my cs major. All this

left me unsure of where I really stand. I'm grateful to have ended up on this path but as I think more long term i question whether i'm really here for the long haul what signs could i look for to gauge my compatibility with the tech industry or help me decide whether this career is really for me either way thanks so much for making this podcast it's been a great window into the world that i'm about to join so has done cs in school about to get a full-time career but is not sure if they actually want this or not yeah because of some some kind of ebbing and flowing interest in the field i guess yes that's how i took it and a little parental pressure uh good news it's nothing like school it's totally different from studying for a cs major that's true except well it's it's

not totally different you know when you're sitting in the computer science lab trying to get your program working and calling the teaching assistant over for the seventh time to try to verify that your program meets the requirements like yeah isn't that really just like testing in prod yeah yeah i guess that part of it kind of feels similar but there are not often like late night deadlines that you're yeah cramming to meet i gotta get this bug fixed by 12 or i'll get an f right no performance review also you don't get to throw away all of your code every semester yeah you have to hold on to it but yeah it's it's i mean if you hate the act of writing computer programs then that is still part of your job but yeah there's it's it's pretty different it's a

pretty different feel overall from studying cs so you might learn some stuff by just going to work yeah and now you get to go to meetings and write computer programs yeah and for most developers meetings are free time it's like recess recess it's like that recess you had in college yeah anonymous went to a forward-thinking liberal arts school that had a recess program and nap times yeah like scheduled as as classes you had to take i guess yeah so i actually empathize a little bit with this listener because when i started school my parents encouraged me to do mechanical engineering and i agreed with this because i liked legos and of course that means you're qualified to be a mechanical engineer came in handy on on my high level lego courses yeah

technique courses yeah of course clicking legos together i found very quickly it has basically nothing to do with mechanical engineering but it turns out stringing together random things you find in bags on the internet is a lot like web programming and i've never looked back you know how when you just grab all the lego pieces off the ground and throw them on a bucket and they just like merge into this lego stew uh-huh that's called stack overflow you gotta dig through it for that piece you need yep okay so did you study mechanical engineering and then change majors in school i did one year so my first year in college i took a couple of mechanical engineering classes during that time um and i absolutely hated them just could not

stand them and then i switched to computer science because all you know actually this is kind of a stupid and funny story that will reveal just how little i understood the world at the time i started college i told myself that i could never stand to sit in front of a computer all day so i'm gonna choose mechanical engineering like i don't know what i thought mechanical engineers did were you thinking of mechanics right you know with like the welders and like wrenches i don't know those power wrenches those are pretty cool those guys really get their hands dirty you know mechanical engineers right fix cars yeah so although frankly i am much happier now that i did a computer science degree

because when i go to my in-laws on holidays they don't ask me to fix their cars they just ask me to fix their computers yeah much better it's way easier to just like swap out someone's computer without them right you did it in their car if you broke it too deeply to fix it yes okay i may or may not have done that before what are the signs that this person could look for to gauge compatibility with the tech industry boy the word does the phrase compatibility with the tech industry kind of puts shivers down my spine it's incredibly broad that's i mean they sound different from you in that they sometimes really liked it and sometimes were frustrated or fed up that to me doesn't seem like they just bounced hard off the idea of programming

at all yeah me too i think it sounds great yeah i i mean maybe focus on the parts that you liked and see if you can gravitate more towards that if you really liked one of your classes or felt really pumped about a specific subject like there's plenty of room to specialize and the field is super broad and it's pretty easy if you get in to like ease your way into a non-software role if you start as a developer there are well-trod paths to product management or project management or or like i don't know engineering management although if you really don't like programming that's probably not great but like there are there are all these related careers that are kind of tech adjacent but aren't you working as a software developer yeah like ui

designer yeah exactly or mechanic mechanic yeah i mean if you want to like drop out of society and live in the mountains then you'll require a more drastic change than going to work at a large company and trying to trying to make friends with the boss that manages the team you like but i don't think there's like a lumberjack team that you could kind of use your way into yeah but if it's not that i know we work on the mobile app for our bank but are there any lumberjack teams in the company do you need anyone to test connectivity in the appalachian mountain range oh man while making a life for themselves so i remember kind of looking down the long road of

my career and just like right when i was getting out of college and starting out and just being nervous like will i be able to find a job will i be able to earn enough money to take care of myself you know will i get fired am i cut out for this and you know in my experience those questions i think the signal that it's working out is that those questions fade into the background instead of constantly coming back up for me so if you stop thinking about those questions the answer is yes for the good ones and no for the bad ones because there was a mix in there can't say yes for all because then you'll get fired and some other bad stuff. Yeah. I think it, so take our advice with a grain of salt. That's the, I know this is an advice podcast and nobody else listened

to this part, but sometimes our advice is not perfect for you. Okay. Everyone else can listen again. Yeah. But if it were me, I think I would just start work and see if I enjoyed the act of working there and if i really hated it then you can start making your plan to switch into something else there's also good news lots of people really hate their jobs their whole lives so you could be one of those people too where you just hate work and you do as little of it as possible and and and keep doing it yeah and just live your life in misery every day monday through friday and you're like the bad guy in office space and yeah not not like a specific character like the whole philosophy office space is right against but just really get into kayaking on the weekend

that's true i would say more people hate their jobs than love them i don't know is that fair yeah i don't know i don't know i think i mostly work with people that like their jobs i do too i do too to be fair mostly interact with people outside of work that don't like their jobs yeah same so i don't know here's the thing though you're at this juncture and you're having these concerns but you don't actually have a choice right now you know like you just finished four years of college you've invested all this into it it's not like you're completely repelled by the by the industry. So what really are your options? Go back to school and study mechanical engineering? I don't think so. So I would say just do it. Go to work and set those questions aside for some

period of time. I would say give it a couple of years and give it a fair shake that way and then see what happens, you know, and see if those questions fade into the background or if you're constantly saying, I hate my job, I hate my job. And there's a little like corollary to that, which is my experience right out of college was I did land in a job that I hated. And I spent, I spent 18 months there, and it was terrible, and it took me a long time to realize that I should exit that job. But if I had conflated hating the job and the company and the product with hating the industry as a whole, I would have cut myself short. And instead, I ended up jumping to another company that I absolutely loved, and it turned out to be really, really great. So there's a lot of variables here, and be careful to not discard an entire industry because of your first experience being bad.

And it will probably be bad. Yeah. well you won't know if it's bad or not you won't know how bad it is yeah that seems reasonable to me i i like the the fatalism of like well what else are you gonna do like you need to work you're not qualified to do anything else there are worse industries to take a paycheck for work you don't enjoy than software because the paycheck is much better than other places you could do work you don't enjoy it is i mean that's maybe another option if you find yourself really hating it then that probably affects what you do with that paycheck maybe you have to take a pay cut to

get into a field that you like or right just take some time to figure out what you need without working or something i don't know okay have we answered the question i feel like we probably didn't because we're so you and i have this bias where we are so far removed from this point in our life that it's hard for us to remember what it was like to start out and have all that uncertainty ahead of us i got a little bit of the way part way down the path of that in medicine where i did a bunch of pre-med classes and some of them i loved and some of them i hated and the thing that made the decision was i failed the ones i hated enough and did not get good enough grades to submit i i mean i didn't like finish i just looked at my grades in the classes

and thought you know if i really wanted to be a doctor i would have studied harder for this test and i didn't so i don't think i do but if you've finished i mean i don't know that said you at least can put up with it yeah and the fact that you did side projects that speaks volumes i know a lot of people who come through cs programs and they've never touched a piece of code outside of their assigned projects yeah i know people like that too and and they mostly all get jobs i don't know if they like their jobs or not but yeah they they are employed they exchange their time for money right right and they're probably fine yeah just save all your money and get into like bitcoin or something we're gonna pivot to a cryptocurrency advice podcast right which which inevitably

goes to time travel always buy it in the past here's what you're gonna do you're gonna get highly leveraged in 2003 okay now i'm pretty sure we've answered it okay it's good all right good luck i i would love to know how this ends up for you what can people do if they want their own questions answered dave go to soft skills.audio and click our little ask a question button where you can fill out our form thank you so much to those who have done that if you want to support the show you can follow us on twitter at soft skills eng you can share the show with your friends and leave us a rating thank you to everybody that does that we will catch you next week