Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 238: Naughty team and quitting after 2 weeks

Episode Date: November 30, 2020

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Questions A few years ago, my current company did a big no-no which turned into a scandal that made national headlines. When I was considering joining, I said it was important for me to feel ethically aligned with my work, and asked about how things had changed since The Incident. They told me they stopped doing bad things, and I accepted the offer. Well, during my time at the company, it has slowly been dawning on me that my team is THE TEAM in question. I finally gathered the courage to ask a coworker, and he confirmed that this was true, and that there’s more designs coming down the pipeline that he and other devs are uncomfortable building. He brought it up with our manager and he was basically told “business is business”. As devs, we don’t make the decisions. And our golden handcuffs are really shiny. Should I leave, stay and try to influence change from the inside, or stay and maybe be a whistleblower one day if need be? I think I made a horrible mistake. I gave up an undesirable job for a fairly large tech company, and joined a Drupal agency. These two weeks have been the longest year of my life. I haven’t written one line of code, and the Drupal admin is incomprehensible. Since it’s only been a (relatively) short time here, how do I get back in the job market without looking like a chump? Do I remove it from my resume? Do I own it like a hideous tattoo? What do I tell hiring managers; whether its a gap in my resume, or that I want to leave after only 2 weeks? Any and all help is appreciated. Thank you!

it takes more than writing apologetic comments in your code to be a great engineer this is soft skills engineering episode 238 i'm your host dave smith i'm your host jameson dance soft skills engineering is a weekly advice podcast for software developers and also for lemurs sometimes my daughter is way into wild kratz and when i say lemur she gets upset at me because it's not specific enough and she knows many varieties of lemur wild kratz is a tv show where they talk about animals a lot okay fantastic so she's like you got to be more specific dad what kind of lemur and then rattles off a bunch of names writing apologetic comments in your code so at first i was imagining sorry this code is ugly i was in a time crunch but then i thought

what if you were apologizing for other things like sorry Todd that I stood you up on that date I just was immature back then and I hope this code finds its way to your phone and then you read the license and then find it on the github page because it's open source or something I guess I guess you could think of the your comments as kind of a steganographic diary for yourself oh yeah why not put positive self-talk into your comments then jameson i know you've had a rough day today but it all turns around starting now that'd be great stumble upon that every once in a while and then the next line is like throw new error

your focus will shift after this line executes grab some random uninitialized bite somewhere from a random number of perfect okay i want to thank our patrons thank you to these folks who are supporting the show at the level where we shout them out every single week thank you to fizzbuzz influencer code lemur christian polanco oladapo fade karen sveinsen ragnar hardison nick hathaway travis sanders dennis bogdanov braden canes steven arman lee john grant the agile ventures charity nick cantar and philip john basile thank you so much to those folks if you want to join this group this i say crew a lot i need a new word this band this rag tag rock band this rock band okay well this this jazz band if

you want to join this jazz band of soft skills engineering supporters then you can go to soft skills.audio and click support us on patreon and any amount of money will get you invited to our slack team which is also great it is it's true he's not lying about that yep you can trust me because dave said i'm not lying that's your i am your only witness i'm more of a character character reference i guess yeah do you want to read our oh yeah we've got a story yeah okay this comes in in response to episode 234 where we asked people to share their stories if they've been at their first company for like a long time like 10 years and this comes from carlos who says hi jameson and dave i started working at the company when i was at university in my second year the

office was close only 10 minutes away to the university and hours were flexible so i was able to go to all the lectures and then come back to the office at my home country of latvia it is very common to work and study simultaneously i stayed for six years then i got married and my wife switched her jobs so again i stayed at my company so we could have stable income if that would not work out then i got a child again more stability fast forward january of 2020 i decided to honor the long time standing soft skills advice of job switching i got an interesting job at an airline carrier in their in-house development department since it is an airline and the beginning of 2020 you can kind of see where this is going no in lafayette there is a three-month probation period

and during that time you can be fired or just leave without a cause on the spot luckily i had a very good relationship with the previous company and they took me back i decided to stick with what i know because at this time nobody knows how all of this pandemic situation would pan out i love your pun there how the pandemic will pan out very good very good so yeah i'm a person who likes stability very much however at the time of the job search i didn't find it difficult to land a new job in-house development departments of the of the airline is viewed as a very respectable place to work but there is also a huge shortage of developers so that probably played a major role in this anyways thanks for the podcast i really enjoy it well thank carlos that's a great

story and i i totally get it so 10 years at the same company with one small attempt to go to a new company but jumped on back that's what you get for taking our advice yeah january 2020 what could go wrong it's time for a change yeah and the world rubs its hands together and it's like you want to change do you finger on the monkey's paw curls oh yes latvia cool place i have been there and i would you've been there wow not me that sounds great to riga well to other places too but mostly cool all right i want to read our first question this is from an anonymous listener for reasons that will become clear a few years ago my current company did a big no-no which turned into a scandal that made national headlines when i was considering joining i said

it was important to me to feel ethically aligned with my work and asked about how things have changed since the incident capital t capital i the incident a proper noun they told me they stopped doing bad things and i accepted the offer well during my time at the company it has slowly been dawning on me that my team is the team in question i finally gathered the courage to ask a co-worker and he confirmed that this was true and that there are more designs coming down the pipeline that he and other devs were uncomfortable building he brought it up with our manager and he was basically told business is business as devs we don't make the decisions and our golden handcuffs are really shiny should i leave stay and try to influence change from the inside or stay and maybe

be a whistleblower one day if need be oh man oh wow that last question is what an ethical quandary it's like should i stay with the enemy so i can blow the lid off this thing when it goes bad yeah this is wild i this is literally all the detail we have there's nothing more here so we can't even i i don't even know i mean there haven't been that many scandals about companies in the national headlines for doing bad things right so we could probably narrow it down from like the two yeah there's only a couple companies that do bad things only yeah only one or two bad bad things i wonder if this company finally made good on theo dorat's claim in his open source licenses that you can use his software to build baby mulchers what

have you heard of this guy baby mulcher license theo de rock found it that's the guy we prefer free do as you like what so this is the guy who i believe theo de rock created the bsd license which is the most open and unrestricted license of any open source license and i think he created open ssl or open ssh or both and open bsd and his license says you can do whatever you want with the software including create a baby mulcher huh i just i'm on a wiki quote page from him and there's a quote saying buttons are for idiots and the source is a c file that he wrote somewhere oh i'm not at all surprised to hear him say that yeah okay well yeah sounds like somebody somebody finally did it i guess i was listening to a podcast about the rise of the nazi party okay

oh we went we hold on i just want to point out we went straight to nazis yeah i'm just is it poe's law no good good no that's the that's the parody one godwin's law yeah why don't we yeah prove it's true okay and there was a story about a guy who was a very conscientious objector to the nazi party and was an academic and was kind of influential and he had a decision where he could have they had to like swear an oath of loyalty to the party and the implication was if you didn't swear the oath then you would get fired and potentially more bad things would happen this was fairly early in the 30s i think and he was wrestling with this decision of if i if i say no then i'll lose my position of influence and i might not be

able to help as much and he did genuinely help save a bunch of people later on he sheltered a bunch of people and was was well known for that afterwards but he he basically ended up saying i'll just swear the oath it'll be a lie i won't mean it and then i'll stick around and improve things i'll just cross my fingers behind my back when i swear the oath yeah yeah like i i know i won't mean it so it won't do anything and he said that he ended up regretting that course of action because if he had stood up earlier he thinks that more people would have stood up earlier as well instead of just his act of saying rolling his eyes and saying yeah yeah whatever and then working against it from the inside helped some people very directly but indirectly it contributed to

legitimizing or supporting this this thing as a whole well that is a genius that is a very insightful comment yeah so uh like all references to the nazis it's very how do i say it very extreme right like your company is probably not the nazis but there is some danger of like there's a lot there could be a lot of people who think like you do that hey this seems kind of sketchy but everybody's kind of going along with it so i guess i'll just put my head down and go along or kind of keep evidence or and and also i'll tell you there is having worked for a company a large company in in my past that some people have issues basically it's impossible to work for a large company without having people oppose some of the positions of that large company and i worked for one such

company and i did see engineers leaving on ethical grounds they said i can't support what this company is doing and kind of the other side of the coin of the story you told is that it could just have no impact at all which is the case for the engineers i knew who left oh no so i knew two people who left on ethical grounds and one of them had zero impact as far as i could detect and the other one was actually a very senior ranking person and still as far as i can tell had zero impact so there's also that side of that coin yeah i guess there's there's the like what are you okay with personally and what are you trying to if you're trying to push a giant company by you personally leaving it probably won't happen but if it's just about you sleeping

well at night then i mean i assume that happened when these people left the the company that they had ethical objections to probably they felt they felt better probably i mean maybe if they didn't or maybe worse yeah i was gonna say maybe they felt worse because they also followed the stock price of that company after they left yeah yeah there's a lot of stuff going on here i think about so again i have no idea what company this is uber is a famous tech company that had some some fallout and it was basically blown up by a whistleblower who was was she still on the team i think she was still on the team when she when she went public with it or not on the team but still at the company still an employee yeah i think that may be right this is susan fowler

who wrote about her experiences with sexual harassment and and in great detail with tons of evidence and and it caught national attention and and resulted in lots of changes to the company I think they had a bunch of executive turnover at Uber after that. Yeah, I mean, the CEO, the founder left. But anyways, so that's an example of where staying was. She eventually left, but she changed the company a lot while staying and blowing the whistle. At great personal cost, I will add to her. I think it was very hard.

Oh, yeah, it would be. I'm sure she got plenty of nasty notes from people. Definitely. not only that but working for a company that is so toxic that the only reason you're there so that you can blow it up later seems like a very difficult cognitive position to maintain yeah it might it might do lasting damage i'm not saying anything about susan fowler but i'm saying if i were in a situation like that where and i by the way i don't think it was totally black and white where she was like every single thing about this company is terrible and i'm only here to

destroy it that's not at all her position i mean it was like there are instances of very bad behavior that needs to be called out but like 90 of the hours of my day are not embroiled in toxic nastiness right and that's probably how it will be with this question asker as well and so it's probably a little easier to live with that than to be for example a nazi and during during world war ii you know yeah are you saying that jumping to comparing everything with nazis is a way to oh raise the did you see the twitter thread from godwin himself the guy who created godwin's law he's still alive he is and someone got into a twitter argument with him and compared him to hitler and he was he like retweeted that tweet and uh responded this will not end well for you

do you know who i am it was so funny i'm like wow the internet you just couldn't write this kind of a script you know anyway it was funny oh that's funny he's got some he's got some tweets for those of you who don't know godwin's law is that any argument on the internet if it goes long enough will eventually devolve to comparing one or both parties to hitler and so that's that's Godwin's law and he got compared to Hitler. So it's great. I wonder if he paid that Twitter person to compare him to Hitler just for the amazing irony. Oh, no. Do you know how many doofuses you can find on the Internet who will call you Hitler for free or who would pay you to call you Hitler?

Oh, man. Why pay for that? Well, OK, let's get down to answering this question then. I'm going to say for me, if I feel strongly about an ethical decision that this company has made in the past and I see evidence that they have not repented and are continuing down the same path and I feel strongly about this I am probably not going to stay at this company because it is hard enough to be an engineer and do your job day in and day out and just do life without this extra cognitive load of now wondering is now the time to blow the whistle is this bad enough to call it out you know i am just like there are plenty of great companies out there to work for where you can be fulfilled you can do great work and not have to also have this extra burden just on your

back all the time and you know if they do turn out to be the nazi party why not bail out now yeah business is business devs don't make the decisions i mean there's also some i i like places where developers have more input into direction and that's very convenient for me as a developer yeah turns out i like being able to contribute more than just typing out the code so some of that is is just general culture things too if there's someone putting together the assembly line and then cracking the whip while the developers just put their heads down and and crank out the stuff that comes through that doesn't sound like an ideal place to work anyways yeah our golden handcuffs are really shiny i mean yeah there's there's probably a reason right

Sounds like you found one of the reasons. But I got to say, as shiny as you think your golden handcuffs are, they're probably not that shiny. Like there are shinier ones out there? There are definitely shinier handcuffs. I got to say, if this industry has taught me anything over the last 20 years, it's that you are not making nearly as much money as other people in this industry. I mean, it's ridiculous. So if you really care about the money, you can definitely track down a company that will beat what this company is offering you.

Yeah. So it sounds like you're landing on leave. I am. Even though you've seen personally that leaving did not influence the company at all. It's just not worth it, in your opinion, to deal with the stress of being this conflicted about, are you doing the right thing? Are you selling out? Exactly. That's what I would say. That's what I would say. And I probably would not even advertise the reason I'm leaving because I just don't think it's going to make an impact. This is more about my own self. Now, having said that, I am assuming here that this person is an

individual contributor at a low level on the org chart and not able to directionally move this company. If this person is a leader who is actually influential in their ability to change the strategy of this company, I would say it's actually on you to change the course of this company to get this ethical crap resolved. But that's my caveat. I'm also assuming it's not illegal too. I mean, i don't know illegal is a very broad there's lots of laws but i'm assuming you you aren't looking at this and saying yeah like someone will die because of this or we will steal money from someone it's it's like i don't know vaguely uncomfortable for you but not something that you are worried will result in legal things there's probably a whole different source of issue of of a whole different

swath of issues to consider if you're worried it's not just things you're uncomfortable with but things that are actively problematic legally and then you need to talk to a mere earth lawyer yes because in space law we have very clear laws there's only one law which is do what jameson or dave would do so it's law school is pretty simple and in space law yeah they you just ask jameson or dave all of these terrestrial issues are just so beneath our jurisdiction yeah i mean there's like whistleblower protection laws and there's there might be some like duty to report in some places or there might not and yeah it gets complicated yeah join us in space where things are simple for the low low price of several billion dollars you can come

i think i'm just muddying up the waters though i would like to believe that if i were in this situation i would leave yeah it would be really easy for me to stay and say i'm staying because i want to be a whistleblower it's just pure coincidence that these golden handcuffs are so incredibly heavy and thick and worth so much money that has nothing to do with it but like yeah i don't know it's there are other jobs especially right now oh yeah and it's not the worst thing in the world to make less money i mean it depends on your personal circumstances too That's true. That is true. Although if you make less money, it just puts a little more time between you and that life in space that you've been wanting to have. That's true. Yeah, I think

you've convinced me, Dave. I started off wishy-washy and now I agree that you should leave. And like you, I have not seen dramatic exits change anything. Like the company rejects you because you're not part of its tribe anymore. So they kind of discount what you say, especially if it's a lower level i mean low level sounds like a negative thing if it's if it's an individual contributor though and especially if it's a big company there's just so much turnover and churn that like your co-workers will know you left like your boss's boss's boss won't and right maybe they're the source of all the bad stuff anyways so that's true i love how our argument is like you can't change anything so don't even try that's how you know you've done the right

thing my my argument came more from a place of it's life's too short to to carry that burden at this point in your career yeah so i don't know that's what i think that's and i'm mostly just saying what i would probably do at that given those facts but good luck quit that i mean really we're just saying quit your job i mean we're just sticking to our our script here that's true so you can't really fault us and you will notice a theme with this next question this is From another anonymous listener, I think I made a horrible mistake. I gave up an undesirable job for a fairly large tech company and joined a Drupal agency. These two weeks have been the longest year of my life.

I haven't written one line of code and the Drupal admin interface is incomprehensible. Since it's only been a relatively short time here, how do I get back in the job market without looking like a chump? Do I remove it from my resume? Do I own it like a hideous tattoo? What do I tell hiring managers? whether it's a gap in my resume or that i want to leave after only two weeks any help and all help is appreciated thank you oh boy

my very first code that i ever got paid money to write was drupal related oh my goodness as a what did we call i think they were called webmasters for the computer science department at my university oh that was drupal yeah our school well it was a couple years after you but It had been around several years by the time I was there. So it was probably Drupal still when you were there. Alert listeners may have just noticed that Jameson and I revealed that we both went to the same university, but not at the same time. Yep.

Fill in that line on your crazy yarn diagram on your conspiracy wall. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, it was like some internal, it was a mixture of posting articles about stuff people had done in the department and some internal budget and tracking and payroll stuff i do not recommend implementing payroll software in drupal oh man yeah i have i have lots of memories that in retrospect were wild but at the time i was like okay i guess this is what software is like yeah things that seemed like a good idea in 2003 managing your payroll with a php-based content management system exactly it turns out that uh like a shift that's really kind of like a post

right yeah a page a pay stub is it's sort of a page an article everything's a post everything's a blog really yeah the author of the post is the person who got paid yeah sure we can make this work it's the perfect data model for everything well we'll just stick the hourly rate in the timestamp fine yeah so i feel you that's what i mean i'm sure it's better now than it was then but it can't get that much better on an absolute scale given the paradigms in play here oh man yeah i remember clicking around in that gnarly admin interface that is like infinitely customizable by any random plugin you install and oh yeah it's like if you're playing with legos that hated you right legos where if you plug them in wrong they cut your finger every

time you touch them yeah or they come alive and scream at you oh man so i mean here we have a situation where the listener was in an in a large tech company at an undesirable job and then quit that job to get a job that was even worse. And I think this is kind of, this is, this is the risk of, of the grass is greener syndrome. You jump out of the frying pan and you're actually into the fire. And you know, it, it just kind of goes to show that just because your job sucks, doesn't mean there aren't worse jobs. Yeah. Yeah. We don't have any more detail than this about their old job, but before we answer the question, we should always just tell the listener how wrong they were. I think there's something here, right? Like, why did you end up at this

job that you hate? And if the answer isn't like, I had to get out and this was the first thing there. Well, I mean, that's a valuable answer too. Anyways, sure. You could, you could ask yourself, what can I learn from this? How can I find out more about my next job, which will be soon. So I don't end up in another situation, right? Where I, I get there and realize I hate it that's part of the goal of the interview is and ideally what you get to do if you have some leverage or some options is pick something that you think you will like if you had to take this job then there's another question behind that which is like i don't know just keep extending the questions back into why you had to get in this situation until the answer is study harder in

school this all goes back to that third grade math test that you failed yeah that was the point that set you on this trajectory. I always have this like mental battle when I answer questions of what do I want to tell the person to do, but what would I actually do myself? And a lot of times they're different. And this is one of those cases where I'm like, well, of course you should own it and put it on your resume and be completely forthright about it and transparent. I wouldn't do that though. I wouldn't either. It was two weeks. I would say I stopped working here and then I started looking for a job that's what i would say like i stopped working at tech company and then started looking and you just kind of elied the fact that there was a two-week period where

you were looking while working at this horrible place and there's a great technique you can do to conceal that information which is you don't have to put the exact day and hour that you started and stopped at every company you could just put the month and if it's a two-week period that doesn't span a calendar month or even if it does you can have a nice contiguous work experience work history on your resume without raising any eyebrows at all yep that's what i would do i would sweep this under the rug like it never happened we shall never speak of this again except when you're telling stories to the young ones in 10 years about how you took this terrible job for two weeks so the question asker says should i own it like a bad tattoo and drupal has a very

recognizable logo and i think you should combine both of those things i love it and you know those stickers of like calvin peeing on the bad car company logo that you don't like yes your arch enemy truck right yeah that's that's the direction you should go with this you need one of those calvin peeing on the drupal logo tattoos yep and then once you've worked there for a while you just like roll up your sleeve and say i've got a story for you kids work there meaning your new job which will be so much better and every day when you get out of the shower it will remind you why you should do more diligence when assessing their next job i wonder if there's something here about like maybe they're trying to switch tech stacks or

or break maybe they were like a i don't know qa person trying to move into development i wonder if there's there's some reason that this was this felt like a step in the right direction undoubtedly yes and which might make it also hard to get the next job right if if you're an experienced senior dev you just go look and find something and probably it'll be fine but huh right i it could be the case that this was kind of trying to be a step up into a more developer heavy role totally possible or it could just be that your job was so terrible that it clouded you're thinking about this next job. I've been there. I've been there. I took a job and I guess one time I took a job. Sometimes you get lucky, right? One time I took a job because it was the

only thing there and I just was so tired of my current job and it turned out to be a fantastic opportunity. But another time I took a job and six months later, I regretted it and ended up actually going back to the previous company that was so terrible. So yeah, I guess I'm not great at this assessing the company there's always something worse that's the moral of this story that is that is the moral of this story there is always something worse so count your blessings while you have them and be prepared to do your due diligence yeah but i i agree with you you should quit this place ideally start looking now and i don't think you have to mention it yeah and it is it is not, I'm going to say not uncommon for people to quit jobs and then go on the job market.

It happens. And so, you know, you will undoubtedly have to answer a question. Are you currently employed at your previous employer, which is going to be the most recent employer showing up on your resume. And you're just going to have to say, no, I left that company. I'm taking some time between jobs and that's fine. I don't think you have to say anything about this Drupal company. yeah there's a point where it could get too confusing though like i don't know so you can't interview at a certain time because you have to work you know like what do you what do you do there where it goes too long no no where it i don't know you you can be super cagey but at some point the caginess will start being more suspicious than just saying yeah i work at this i started

this job and i hate it it's just really not for me yeah so i'm looking for a new job yeah i mean I actually don't think that would hurt. I don't think that would hurt at all. I don't think a hiring manager would care one bit. I mean, if you can clearly articulate why the job is terrible in a way that resonates with the hiring manager, then it'll be fine because it turns out your ability to assess a company and do due diligence on it before you join is actually not in the job description of, of a good software engineer. So they shouldn't, if they're being rational, they shouldn't ding you because you did a bad job evaluating that company. I was just thinking how I would ding someone for doing a bad job of evaluating that company though

Well, that's why I said if they're rational and you clearly are not yeah yeah, I'd be like You showed poor judgment, I guess which we like people with good judgment. Yeah I'm being wishy-washy as is my role on the podcast, but I I Yeah Even if you have a gap gaps of a month or two are fine Yeah, in my opinion if there's someone who's like we only hire the best of the best and if you haven't had a job for one month that means nobody wants you enough you're not good

enough then that person is dumb yeah yeah you don't want to work there that's a red flag you should be looking for in fact add that to your list of right now you have one item on the list which is the word drupal but add that other thing to your list too now now you have two things to look for in your next company yeah all right have we answered this question i think so good luck with this i'm very sorry that you jumped out of the frying pan into the fire it's so painful you were already in a lot of pain obviously to leave that company and now the pain is only worse now you'll jump out of the fire and into the cool soothing water of your next gig that's right i just want to pre-congratulate you on your next company that's going to be so nice yeah

what can people do if they want their own pre-congratulations go hit our website at softskills.audio and click ask a question where you can ask us questions thank you so much to everyone who has done that there are so many questions i thought that when we started this podcast there would be maybe five or six and then we'd be done there are more than that and we are so grateful to all of you for writing in we will get to them all of them eventually and just thank you so much thank you thank you we'll catch you next week