Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 232: "Junior" developer and NDA'd

Episode Date: October 19, 2020

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Questions First I want to say thank you and I really love the show and all your helpful advice. I think it has made be become a better developer. I am a current junior in high school and the lead developer (intern) of the small non profit with approximately 10 college and graduate interns on it. School has recently started to push me away from the project (not enough time in the day) but I still want to be a source of help. I wrote a very significant portion of the code for the current application, however the founder wanted this to be shipped as quickly as possible and this led in a sense to a bit of a cobbled together mess of microservices and no documentation. My main problem is that although I feel I have the technical skills to lead the team, I really do not have much experience in terms of team management, especially in the case of leading a development team. During the main development of the application, it mainly consisted of me and this other developer writing the code. However now that they are gone, I am the only person (along with someone else who kind of has an understanding) with knowledge and familiarity of the code base. Sorry this is long, but I guess what I am asking is how can I (i) create a team structure that will not only prepare interns for real world development as well as making sure that the application remains after I move on and (ii) help build processes and structure that will allow people to meaningfully contribute to the code base. Also, just for more information, I have not yet added unit tests or code reviews. Most of this just usually became just as me. I work in AI startup and planning to change my job. My contract is full of NDAs about pretty much everything. How do I talk with companies and recruiters about things I do when I’m not allowed to disclose project details like technologies or libraries used, algorithms for data manipulation, or even where we take data from, bought or downloaded. I can’t say anything more than “I work on AI and we do music manipulation in a programming language”. What do I say?

it takes more than memorizing fizzbuzz code by heart to be a great engineer this is soft skills engineering episode 232 i'm your host dave smith i'm your host jamison dance soft skills engineering is a weekly advice podcast for software developers about how to implement fizzbuzz in four lines of code i'm pretty sure my pinned tweet is still about when i tried to implement fizzbuzz with my eyes closed and without looking up what it was it is it is not my most popular tweet but it is the one that made me giggle to myself the most which is how you should choose your pinned tweets yeah the ones you like exactly oh you're not the only jameson dance on twitter are you oh you are jameson underscore dance but there's an imposter with no underscore

what oh my gosh who is this person they got a weird creepy crab avatar and haven't tweeted since 2013 that's probably you huh yeah i probably forgot about it you were doing it with your eyes closed and without looking up what twitter was tweeting yeah tweeting with my eyes closed no way i was on twitter way before then oh yeah that's right that makes me cool you are super cool have you ever been asked to implement fizzbuzz in an interview never never in my life yeah me neither it's kind of cliche now i guess yeah is there a replacement for fizzbuzz well there was reverse a string for a while i've seen bill the doubly linked list or singly linked list but i feel like according to mr joel spalsky fizzbuzz was like the standard yeah and i don't know maybe

he just wasn't telling the truth or whatever wait was it him or was it coding horror guy well i don't know they're they're basically the same person in my head they are jeff atwood i think is his name yeah i used to read a lot of his blog when i first got into programming so what's funny is you know was it goodhart's law that says as soon as a measure becomes a target it ceases to be a measure yep i think that's exactly what's happened with fizzbuzz it's no longer an effective measure because everyone's like gotta memorize the fizzbuzz fizzbuzz training courses it's like fizzbuzz coaches yeah come join my three-day workshop fizzbuzz influencers oh all right well i've got some patrons that i want to fizzbuzz call out right now for their

support please but every third patron i'm gonna say fizz and every fifth okay so we have two new patrons who get a one-time shout out they are adrian miyasek and ben chen and we have some folks who get a weekly shout out they are oladapo farigi kayaran sveinsen alexander microconfig.io nick hathaway travis sanders dennis bogdanov braden kane steven arman lee john grant vinlock the agile ventures charity nick cantar and philip john basile if you would like to support the show financially and get a shout out or and or get an invitation to our slack community all you have to do is go to soft skills.audio which is our website and click support us on patreon and if you just contribute

a buck we will send you an invitation that's worth like at least a dollar and ten cents to join our slack community so you'll make money on the deal and if you paid more than that your invitation was worth more that's right so you didn't get ripped off definitely definitely great community there so many good interesting questions too and just a nice vibe i like it yeah it's very helpful very supportive this episode is sponsored by monday.com a visual teamwork platform that we will tell you more about later but first i will read our first question all right hit us this is from oh what's that i said all right hit us okay this from an anonymous listener and i will read it unedited okay first i want to say thank you and

i really love the show and all your helpful advice i think it has made me become a better developer i am a current junior in high school and i'm the lead developer intern of the small non-profit with approximately 10 college and graduate interns in it school has recently started to push me away from the project not enough time in the day but i still want to be a source of help i wrote a very significant portion of the code for the current application however the founder wanted this to be shipped as quickly as possible and this led to a sense of a cobbled together mess of microservices and no documentation my main problem is that although i feel i have the technical skills to lead the team i really do not have much experience in terms of team management especially

in the case of leading a development team during the main development of the application it mainly consisted of me and this other developer writing the code however now that they are gone i'm the only person along with someone else who kind of has an understanding with knowledge and familiarity of the code base sorry this is long but i guess i'm asking how i can number one create a team structure that will not only prepare interns for real world development as well as making sure that the application remains after i move on and number two help build processes and structure that will allow people to meaningfully contribute to the code base also just for more information i have not added unit tests or code reviews most of this usually became just as me

okay huh okay great question but i just want to rewind a moment just in case our listeners missed a key word in this question which was this is a junior in high school and this is wild do you want to explain what that means for our non-american listeners yeah they might be 16 maybe 16 years not 16 years of experience 16 years of age what were you doing when you were 16 dave oh gosh i'm trying to remember what i was doing nothing useful my sole mission in life was to spend as little time working and as much time on the lake as i possibly could oh yeah you're like a big time wakeboarder yeah i wasn't like great but i sure spent a lot of time out there and it was very fun i was pretty good but what i was not is a

productive member of a development team or someone who touched a computer besides to play video games ever and i'll tell you this you neither you nor i could have used the term microservices correctly in a sentence no well i mean if we could have at 16 we would have been way ahead of the game a little visionary yeah yeah little martin fowler like disciples or prophets this is an incredible question just absolutely amazing but not for what the question asked but because of who the question asker is i just can't believe the level of maturity that i'm seeing in this question it's it is fascinating to me so good on you yeah we i am amazed with you cobbled together mess of microservices and no documentation it sounds like you're doing production quality work already

junior in high school yes um the founder really pushed to ship it quickly check yeah like i don't know i i wonder if some of this is lack of experience to know how normal this is because this is sort of par for the course for a lot of development teams honestly this is amazing you're just doing it like 10 years before other people in their lifetime i mean the questions the questions you are asking are incredible questions for someone of your age i'm just so impressed and now i just want to say i think you should go hang out at denny's or something that's what i was doing at age 16 these decisions you're making seem too good suspiciously good suspiciously good i feel

i feel very threatened by you yeah yeah in a couple years we'll all be working for this person i know i know i wish we could say the name of this listener just so that we could have a reference and say we were the first one we heard of them before they were powerful exactly before they were mark zuckerberg yeah so it's a team of volunteers i think that's harder than the fact that it's a team of folks who are newer in their careers honestly like i have a friend who runs a non-profit web development agency that is mostly volunteer and then like a tiny amount of money to pay some people and he has a really hard time coordinating work because you just can't if you're paying someone you can

hold them accountable to a standard and then stop paying them if they don't meet it but like what are you going to do if they're a volunteer and they don't do their thing say i'm not paying you the zero dollars anymore you just have to like you just have to say you know all that goodwill you've built up by doing all this free work well you're about to lose it if you don't do what i say Maybe it's a school project. And if it is, then like doing a good job, you have this external motivation of grades attached to it. But the fact that it's a junior in high school and then some grad students and undergrad students makes me feel like it's probably not at least like a high school project. Maybe it's like a research project for the grad student or something that there's some collaboration on. I think what we might have here is a pioneering tech startup founder who has stumbled upon a labor pool, super willing, super eager, lots of free time, and very, very inexpensive. And right now, your founder is out pitching VCs in the Bay Area and showing all the stuff that's been built, and then they're looking at the expenses and going, wow, this is amazing.

this is the real thing we need to fund is how to get work done for free yeah now i imagine it's like a passion project that people are interested in inherently but there's still some flakiness that comes from that yeah you know how we often joke about i guess we don't joke about this because i mean you did it but we we talk about how people drop out of school to work for some startup or work for you know as a developer yeah pretty common trope you know we dropped out of college whatever it was computer science or whatever you know i'm a college dropout and actually many you know many of the celebrated tech giants were college dropouts like steve jobs and michael dell and mark zuckerberg and stuff you know maybe the answer here needs to be well if dropping out

of college is good let's take it to an extreme you should drop out of high school yeah dropping out of college is too mainstream now exactly everyone drops out of college don't drop out of high school. Lame. No, please no. So I dropped out of second grade to work for this tech startup. Best decision I ever made, man. Didn't have to jump through all those writing my cursive letters hoops. When are you going to ever use cursive? Got to get out of the rat race, you know who needs to spell or addition or identify the colors it's lame no that's not second grade okay true they already have that and that is why they're ready to drop out they're like how often in real life do you need to cut out paper snowflakes

almost never i will agree that for me that skill has been pretty useless yeah you should drop out school elementary school i think to drop out of elementary school really what you're telling them is like go off the grid and disappear because you can't really drop out of elementary school you have to like move to the jungle oh because of like federal law yeah i don't think you're allowed to drop out of elementary school in the united states but if they never catch you because you're in your survival bunker in the mountains then oh you mean you mean your tech boot camp Your tech boot camp? Yeah, it's a tech boot camp survival bunker in the mountains that trains people on how to start up startups.

I mean, look, I know it might sound like a terror cell, but no, it's not. Yeah, exactly. I know that there are groups of men with beards doing jumping jacks, and I don't know, like, everyone's in camo, and you sure have a lot of firearms for a SaaS startup, but... But we're raising the VC money. That's our customer support team. Yeah. I mean, so dropping out of college, fine. Dropping out of high school, please don't.

Dropping out of elementary school, obviously we're joking. Let's just be clear. So there's this trend of naming your customer support team something that is demeaning, but you think is cool to make it feel like they're important and valuable. Okay. It's like customer support heroes or ninjas or something. Okay. So we have a customer support militia.

Okay. We are armed and helpful. Yeah, don't do those things. How can I create a team structure that will not only prepare interns for real-world development as well as make sure? So one thing that strikes me is this seems like it could be similar to an open-source project. Okay. because it's like loosely structured no external hierarchies people coming and going dipping in and contributing and then maybe disappearing forever and there's lots of projects that work

like that there are some open source projects that are very structured but plenty that are kind of like loosely held together by groups of volunteers yeah they all usually have someone or some core that is very dedicated though i don't know of any that literally everybody is kind of just floating in and out right so one option could be to appoint yourself as the benevolent dictator for the rest of your college your high school career i mean high school career jeez i can't even say it right yeah benevolent dictator for two years of this project and then you kind of structure it as like you marshalling other people's help but your job is also to find a replacement start looking at that freshman class now because by the time you're ready to go you want them to

be around for a while that's right succession plan yeah i'm i don't think i'm joking i think that'd be interesting i think it's helpful to have somebody kind of running the project but but you can coordinate stuff just think about the springboard that this person has right now and to be able to extend that to an incoming class of other bright entrepreneurial not even entrepreneurial but just you know tech-minded developer-minded folks it's fantastic it's like a great way to pay it forward and i would say that you're over you are overthinking this problem you are already getting so much benefit and everyone on the team is already getting so much benefit and real world preparation just by having shipped a product at all with any working

code that you are miles ahead of where the typical developer is and i would not fret one bit about this just have a good time and learn everything you can i'm gonna be harsher i'm gonna say you gotta do you gotta do better now i agree with dave that like yeah you're doing great if you really want to improve stuff i think you can just help build processes and structure um i often see like contributor guides in open source projects so you can just document what you hope the practices are that people will follow or kind of i guess first i would pull them and get agreement and then write down the things you agreed to in some kind of document that lives with the project and then it's really easy to hold to them because you say hey like we do code reviews like it says in

this thing that we all talked about and then when a new person comes on you just do code reviews because that's what you do it's not like a discussion you have to have yeah so i think when i was young and james and i'm curious if you agree with me but when i was young i undervalued writing and written documentation and i wonder if this person does too although to be perfectly frank this person is obviously 10 times smarter than we ever were so probably any advice that we give here is just stupid but well since i dropped out in first grade most of my documentation is finger paint documentation just like finger painted uml diagrams your fingers are so chubby and the paint is so smeary i can't tell if that's a diamond or a circle oh my gosh the touring

machine the the symbols are written on the tape and finger yes oh my gosh it's a touring complete painting kit it's amazing i mean this is just amazing did you did you ever see the tv show doogie howser never but i've heard of it okay so doogie howser was popular in the 80s and it was about a kid who was like a 16 year old or maybe even like younger doctor you know and i just guarantee you if they remade doogie hauser today this kid would be a developer except it would be way boring to just sit there and watch them type hence why they haven't remade it i guess i'm sure it's been pitched yeah i agree with dave though you're rad if you really want more i would look at open source structure but i mean anything you do will be pretty awesome right now this is amazing

This is just mind-blowing. By the way, feel free to send me your resume. I will definitely look at opportunities for you. The youngest person I've ever hired was actually 17, so probably a pretty similar age to this person. And his mom had to sign his employment contract so we could give him stock options. I was going to ask, does he need parental permission?

Yeah, his parents. Doesn't that run afoul of child labor laws? No, not at all. I mean, 17 is an employable age. It was totally up and up, above board, every bit of it. Okay. I mean, this is great. Cool. You know what else I would say? So I'm just going to like throw away the questions you've asked me because, I mean, they're fine. But what I would say is, I wonder if you're being paid for this to do this, but if not, go get a job as a developer intern anywhere. You're going to have to find a company who will stretch a little. I've tried to get interns your age hired at big techos and it does not work.

but plenty of startups will hire you at a really good wage and you could pay yourself your way through college very easily if you start now at a job that pays you know 20 or 30 bucks an hour that would be awesome oh man that's that's outrageous amounts of money for a high schooler and college student and many adults and an outrageously small amount of money for every company that pays software developers yeah that's true know your worth and get out there and go find i'm just i'm just amazed by this question it's fantastic junior in high school well the junior intern lead developer team lead intern microservice operator 16 year old i love it might not have a license to drive a car but does operate a complex microservice architecture and is thinking about

unit tests that's fantastic i don't even think about unit tests i never will i'm gonna die without thinking about it. You're already ahead of me. You dropouts are all the same. No unit, no quality. I'm not going to name any names, but we have a time-honored tradition on this show of complaining about hard-to-use task trackers.

However, things are changing in this world. Have you heard about monday.com? Yeah, I've used monday.com. It's a work OS that powers teams to run processes, projects, and build custom workflows in one digital workspace. It's pretty cool.

It's very modern. I heard you can actually develop apps that run on monday.com now it's super customizable that's right and monday.com is hosting an app competition for developers they're giving away three teslas and a bunch of other prizes to the winners i am recruiting a team to implement doom in monday.com and you can ride in my tesla if we win this sounds like a good chance to get in early on a growing platform currently there are over a hundred thousand teams that use monday.com for their daily work and your app could be in front of them. To sign up, go to monday.com slash soft skills. You can find the dates and the rules of

the competition there. I suggest you check it out today so you don't miss out. Go to monday.com slash soft skills. All right. Do you want to read our next question? Yes, I do. This comes from an anonymous listener who says, I work in an AI startup and I'm planning to change my job. My contract is full of NDAs about pretty much everything. How do I talk with companies and recruiters about things I do when I'm not allowed to disclose project details like technologies or libraries used algorithms for data manipulation or even where we take data from bought or downloaded i can't say anything more than quote i work on ai and we do music manipulation in a programming language what do i say okay i've got a couple ideas one is an nda chain letter okay where

you are you can tell people stuff but now they're part of the nda too okay and then they have to forwarded on to some of their friends so it's all above board all covered just the nda has a wider scope if it grows as the chain letter goes out and they have to send it to a completely unsustainable number of friends right yeah 15 people otherwise you are in violation of the nda contract perfect so then everyone is under nda yeah they're all under nda it's fine i just had this image in my head of like somebody being under this really strict nda and then just kind of totally ignoring it and telling the recruiter everything and being like oh man they're really gonna freak out when i told him i told the recruiter all of our secret sauce and just like

totally casual about it i don't know why it just made me chortle inside why because the recruiter is not going to do anything with that i don't know why it's just this idea of like someone being so casual about this thing that's big and scary and nda'd is i'm sure it happens a lot yeah probably but the times that it goes bad you hear about it in the news because they get sued and it usually only goes bad for people that are probably making what you make with a few extra zeros on the end yeah or if it's like sales or if they have some expensive or valuable kind of contract or contacts with customer list i don't know customers yeah i've seen that stuff go poorly stenography you could try hiding oh the technologies that you use in like the first letter of every line on your

resume you okay you send your resume over but you also send a piece of paper with a bunch of very small holes about the size of letters yeah yeah see if they can figure it out yeah or you like write tensorflow in lemon juice on it with a with a toothpick and then say hold this resume up to heat i love it but you can't tell them to hold it up to heat they have to figure it out because that way you have plausible deniability yeah i don't know how you tell them to figure it out without telling them to hold it up to heat though yeah i don't know climate change you just gotta heat the planet up enough so that your resume so that the the lemon juice turns brown and then you can tell people good news you're an ai so you're probably using a whole

bunch of gpu cores already so you're on you are part of the solution yeah i mean you could speak in rhymes just be like look i'm under nda so some of the words i say might sound a little weird but we did some really cool ai with this technology called fence or flow when you said speak in rhymes i imagined you composing like a limerick and you just leave the last word unsaid but you can figure out what it is by rhyming there once was an ai engineer okay you could probably twist this around and actually turn it to your advantage and say you know look i improved our accuracy from x to y by using some amazing techniques that i cannot ever

tell you about but if you pay close attention to my work after you hire me you might just get some some clues pay me to observe the secrets of this famous ai company i mean they can't an nda can't stop you from using your knowledge to build new things at a new company but so i'm only half joking when i say that sure it can stop you from saying this company uses technology x but if you show up your skills are transferable regardless of nda and so now you just have to pitch that and i think the way you pitch that is by describing the impact of what you did and you can say things like you know like i increased accuracy from x to y or i increased precision or whatever but you may not be able to actually describe the technique that you used but i think what that

means is that they're going to have an unclear idea of whether you know certain technologies but you could tell them hey you could ask me about tensorflow and i'll tell you what i know about it But I will not confirm or deny whether I used it at this company. Yeah. Another good thing about this NDA is you can't tell them what you did, but you also can't tell them what you didn't do. So, I mean, they could assume that you know everything, right? Like, you can't tell them you don't know stuff, because then by process of elimination, you'd be telling them what you knew. Okay.

So, you just get to claim implicitly, I guess, that you know every AI technology. yeah and library and algorithm and yeah it's it's great perfect and i'm sure they'll believe you that will enhance your value what technologies do you know assume i know all of them yeah for legal reasons my lawyer says i have to say all of them yeah i like that idea of talking about impact i am not a mere human earthly lawyer right according to the tenets of space law though there's probably some limit on nda scope if not that is actually a thing that you can negotiate in your contract or or it's probably too late now if you already work there but when you're when you're working at places and they hand you stuff to sign depending on the company you can say hey

like please put a timeline on this instead of have this nda last forever like i don't know two years after the end of employment or whatever term and that way that kind of frees you up from accidentally breaking an nda sometime on your deathbed or something like that like yeah there's there can be flexibility in those terms as long as you make it clear like your intent is to protect the company's proprietary information you just don't want to get into a situation where it ruins your life to do so yeah too late now yeah sorry time travel problem once again yeah i have never worked somewhere where the ndas covered the core like it covered the secret sauce of the business like i couldn't tell people how much money we

made or something but never like what we did oh and this company is trying to solve this problem so we built this technology to solve this problem so i'm not sure how i would get around it if if like the problem you're trying to solve as part of the secret sauce. Right. Well, one thing, one thing that I've seen done and that I've done myself is I will reference public statements by the company. I mean, those are obviously not protected by NDA. So press releases, any kind of announcement, marketing emails, collect those and know that any information in those is fair game. Can you say like, I worked on that thing, that thing in the press release?

Well, probably. I think an NDA generally is not, is not, I mean, who knows the language might be really crazy in this nda but generally ndas are not about what did individuals do but rather what does the company do and as soon as a company says something publicly that's no longer protected by nda according to my space attorney bar association legal precedent things yes the council of space attorneys okay i think your idea of talking about impact so far feels feels like the strongest one to me yeah and then second strongest is obviously assuming that you know everything that's a good back i mean a lot of times these companies who are hiring engineers for specialized roles like this and i've been in a lot of what we call scientist interviews at my current company

they typically will ask you questions to kind of quiz your knowledge you know they'll say like i'm going to give you a situation you describe to me the approach that you would take some statistical technique or machine learning algorithm or whatever or tell me about the trade-offs of x and why and you can definitely answer those questions i mean the fact that you know how to apply certain kinds of regressions to data sets or whatever has no bearing on whether or not company x uses the that particular algorithm so hopefully those kinds of questions are totally fair game i mean hopefully your value to a different job is not like check out this sweet hard drive full of all the the the weights in the neural network that i took yes like that's how you end up in jail

yeah exactly yeah that's how you become like the waymo guy exactly let's call let's call him the uber guy because it was he the uber guy well he left no my bad my bad he you're right he left waymo he was the waymo guy and took all the secrets to uber yes yep never a doubt in my mind let's not pretend that waymo has anything to learn from uber okay yeah i like focusing on problems that you could solve that would be interesting outcomes outcomes though i i find it hard to believe that you wouldn't be able to say like experienced in image processing or like i don't know like something vague and broad so i'm not an ai expert but i've seen candidates go through the process and they get very specific in my experience

and so it's going to be so it has to be like this specific algorithm yeah i don't think it'd be sufficient to just be like well i improved our recall from 84 to 86 hire me yeah you know they're going to be like how'd you do it and that's where it's going to get dicey i think for you but yeah i don't know it's tough you know those nerf you know all those videos on the internet of somebody controlling a nerf gun where it shoots somebody else by using computer vision uh-huh i did that that's your resume exactly there may be depending on like how serious this is like if this is a lot of money on the line or you know if the offer is i don't know if this is very important to you it might be worthwhile to to consult a lawyer have the lawyer read your nda and then the lawyer can

tell you your nda is not binding it goes too far you should be allowed to talk about that and there could be things that lawyer can guide you on that you can say or not say and then feel comfortable that you're not going to get in trouble yeah there's this delicate dance where you can kind of like say whatever you want but that doesn't mean it's enforceable right but that also doesn't mean that you can't get sued for it yes like and that's the real catch-22 is that like even though you're in the right you might still end up in court and that would suck but the chances honestly the chances of you ending up in court are probably pretty slim unless this company is just super protective i think you could probably kind of examine all of the cases of ndas and court

filings out there and come up with an ai that would help recognize your likelihood of ending up in court like maybe infer this nda likelihood yeah give it a confidence score yeah yeah maybe maybe by ai they really mean like grammar parsing or something you know like the 80s like old school definition of ai it's like building syntax trees or something oh man i wonder if those people are really mad about what ai oh for sure like for sure they are the ai purists yeah that's just statistics the whole crap load of video cards that's just a lot of statistics yeah all right well have we answered the question i think so i'm pretty sure we've answered it good luck oh there is one more thing i mean you could always hold the nda out as evidence that you're

working on really cool stuff just be like look i can't tell you but check this piece of paper out and then tell me if you think it's valuable or not exactly gotta be valuable if they're this concern huh yeah have you ever seen an NDA this ironclad you better hire me all right what can people do if they want their own questions answered Dave go to softskills.audio and click the ask a question button thank you so much to everyone who does that every week we really appreciate it and if you'd like to support the show click support us on patreon and we will send you a slack invitation the first week of every Gregorian calendar month all right we'll catch you next week

you