Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 243: Saying no and conference

Episode Date: January 11, 2021

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Questions Quite often my manager writes me in the morning: hey, can you help the team with this thing? And sometimes it happens so that I know no more than “the team” about the thing, and actually there’s no way in the world I can help them, but everyone assumes that I am some kind of expert in it. Where did they get that impression? This is so irritating! I absolutely love to be asked for help when what I’m asked for is kind of “my thing”. But in some cases, I can’t just say “hey, this is not really my specialty, I will be more of a burden here”, because everyone would think that I’m just lazy or unwilling to help. And then I sit and struggle through the process of everyone asking me questions I obviously don’t know answers to, and I try to guess or figure out these answers, and I suffer because I don’t meet everyone else’s expectations, and everyone else suffers because no one knows what to do, and it goes on and on and on… I don’t know about you - do you find yourself in such situations and what do you do if you do? My company just asked me if I’m interested in going to a conference that’s about a month away, but I’m currently in the process of job hunting and don’t know if I’m going to be around for much longer than a month. What do I do? It feels dishonest to go and then leave the company shortly after. But it also feels dishonest to say “Nope! Not interested!” because I actually would like to go. There’s also the benefit that people often are recruiting at conferences so it might be a great place to be for that.

it takes more than two weeks off to be a great software engineer this is episode 243 of the soft skills engineering podcast i'm your host jamison dance i'm your host dave smith soft skills engineering is a weekly advice show to well weekly except for the last two weeks which we took on to answer all of your non-technical questions about the technical field of software engineering that is accurate all the europeans are laughing at us right now yeah you americans with your two weeks off that's okay at least we have a stable political system oh no that may be the first time we've ever mentioned politics on this show yeah well let's get away as fast as we can do you want to thank our patrons i do uh i want to make some one-time shout outs and some

weekly shoutouts they uh go to jason bowers and thomas edwardson who are contributing at the level that gets them a one-time shout out and weekly shoutouts go to adrian bordink roman denisov fizzbuzz influencer code lemur christian polanco oladapofadiyi karen sveinsen ragnar hardison nick hathaway travis sanders dennis bogdanov braden kane steven armand lee john grant chris hogan the agile ventures charity nick kantar and philip john basile if you would like to join this illustrious crew this illustrative crew it looked like like a good or bad example infamous they're good anyway if you'd like to join these people and many others who have access to our slack community all you have to do is go to our website at softskills.audio and click support us on patreon

and we will send you an invitation to our slack community and you can start chatting with all these soft skillets anytime you want technically we don't know that all of them are people some of them could be advanced chat bots with access to a credit card yes we i wonder i wonder how many gtp3 instances there i don't know if that's the right term how many how many presences there are that are just gtp3 yeah hanging out in chat rooms across the internet right now yeah i wonder that as well did i get the acronym right even gtp3 right gpt ah oh good thing i don't say i'm an ai expert this is a soft skill show jameson you're allowed to swizzle the acronym letters yeah let's let's get away as fast as we can by reading a question i will read it this is from

an anonymous listener who says quite often my manager writes me in the morning hey can you help the team with this thing and sometimes it happens that i actually know no more than the team about the thing and actually there's no way in the world i can help them but everyone assumes i'm some kind of expert in it where do they get that impression this is so irritating i absolutely love to be asked for help when i'm asked when what i'm asked for is my kind of thing but in some cases i just can't say hey this is not really my specialty i will be more of a burden here because everyone would think i'm just lazy or unwilling to help and then i sit and struggle through the process of everyone asking me questions i obviously don't know the answers to

and i try to guess or figure out those answers and i suffer because i don't meet everyone else's expectations and everyone else suffers because no one knows what to do and it goes on and on and on do you find yourself in such situations and what do you do if you do that's like my entire life people ask you questions that you don't know the answer to well just me being confronted with problems i don't know how to solve all the time yeah i wonder how you end up in this position is it like really advanced hazing i think i think you just exude trustworthiness or competence like somehow you you have this competence aura what if you have a voice like morgan freeman and someone asks you how to scale up a database cluster and you say in tones of

gravitas well you just plug in more power cords to it so the discs spin faster but it sounds so soothing that everyone thinks ah they know what they're talking about yep i can't do impressions i'll spare you my morgan freeman impression i would love to hear that your voice your voice is pretty soothing jameson i attribute much of your success to that wait until they come up with snapchat filters for your voice oh boy make your voice have makeup on it that that already that does exist i get ads for it i guess that's a compressor huh yeah i get ads for it where you can sound like a celebrity really that is the thing huh okay well maybe next week morgan freeman will guest on the show that would be amazing oh man i would love that but seriously you do have

a great voice and i've spent many tens of dollars on microphone equipment to try to sound like you just has to be broken in the specific way yeah that's a thing with guitarists where someone will just pick up a guitar and play it the way that seems normal to them and if they get famous then everyone else says how do i sound like that and then spends tons of time and money obsessing over individual like transistors in their amp and and the person's like i don't know and they pick up a different amp and sound the same and then you're just crushed yeah it turns out no matter how much money i spend on pedals i will never sound like eddie van halen or in my case like you i yeah i guess i'm eddie van halen in this example you are and i am cool every 14 year

old kid with a guitar yeah this sounds like the curse of being too helpful sounds like our question asker helped just one too many times you crossed the reputation you crossed the threshold remember that shell script you helped debug a few months ago that was it i would i would wonder i would want to find out if your manager thinks you already know how to do this or thinks that you're good at doing things you don't know how to do because it's possible that your assumption is wrong that you think that everyone expects you to know how to do it but really your manager just thinks hey i've seen this person figure stuff out before so they can go figure this thing out too managers do have a highly attuned skill for identifying people on

the team who can get things done and make problems go away yeah and so and let's let's not forget most managers myself and jameson included don't know how to do anything so a task a task that that you know how to do and a task that you don't know how to do look the same to me You know what? They both look like tasks that I don't have to do. Exactly. These both look like tasks that you're going to make go away from me. Through the magic of delegation.

Some people talk about getting more stuff done with delegation. And I always wonder, do those people know that someone else has to do that work still? it's not like it's a pyramid scheme yeah it is yeah just keep delegating what well what's what do i delegate to well it's delegation all the way down yep i'll read my specialty i don't think i'm lazy or unwilling to help yeah i think if you clarify i'm happy to put my brain to it but my brain is empty of facts about this thing right now yeah i will bring all my potential but none of my kinetic energy. You'll see me grow a lot throughout this project because I start from being a complete idiot that knows nothing about it.

Oh, man. Well, here's an idea that's actually helpful, perhaps. But it could very well be that your manager has tapped you on the shoulder because there is a team that knows how to do this, but they are completely occupied on other higher priority things and so from a team perspective it's actually better to bring in someone who knows nothing than to take someone off the team who's working on something else that's higher priority yeah i think i think it's fine to ask how much do you expect me to know how much do you think i know about this already that's what i would do that's my advice just say how much do you think i know and they'll be like yeah no i would just find out are they are they asking you

to do this thing because they think you're a go-getter who can get stuff done or because they think oh this is a problem about pointer arithmetic question asker is an expert in pointer arithmetic and you're like frantically stack overflowing over there in the corner like google what is pointer arithmetic yeah what what is arithmetic let's start from the basics yeah exactly i only know how to identify and match pointers by color haven't gotten to the math part yeah i'm just i'm still cutting with safety scissors so you're you're i'm gonna guess that you're suggesting this just to manage expectations so that when you inevitably take longer or fail then the manager is like that's okay i knew you

wouldn't succeed yeah i suspect that a lot of this pressure is self-imposed because you think because someone asked you to do a thing you have to be an expert at it already yeah but if the expectation is you'll be figuring it out then they should be able to cut you some slack while you're doing it for sure and not be mad when you completely screw it up yeah you need to ask for a waiver i anonymous's manager affirm and disavow all rights to complain about the result of this task furthermore when we have a production outage due to this person hereby absolve them. I got to tell you, I, over the last four or five years working for a mega

tech co with tens of thousands of engineers, I came to appreciate the fact that no one knows anything and managers all knew this. And it was actually kind of nice because they knew that when they gave me a task, it was Greenfield, not Greenfield isn't the right word, but it was all new to me. And that I was definitely going to be ramping up and doing a bunch of research. And i was going to be coming back and teaching them how it worked and even if i was going to work on some other team's stuff that they in theory or on paper actually own even then i would probably end up teaching them some things because lots of growth lots of stuff lots of complexity no one really knows hardly anything as a percentage of everything yeah so this is a valuable meta skill

to have you're getting a chance to practice it exactly all right well is the question answered well i guess so so what is the answer it's just set expectations don't worry about it no it's set okay find out what expectations are if there are none then set them i think you can do this with a really good attitude where you say um hey i i'm really excited to help here and to learn something i don't know anything about you know and then that simultaneously tells your boss you're a team player and sets expectations that you have no idea what you're doing. I believe failure is important for growth. Hand over the task, please. I am very much looking forward to this growth.

But also it does give your manager an opportunity to say, oh, my mistake. I thought you were competent. I'll give this to someone else. Well, or if they have some timeline they're trying to hit or i don't know they they should know they should have correct expectations and if they don't you are helping them not just avoiding work or yeah letting them down somehow yeah and there is one other option you could do which is identify someone who is more capable in this area than you and you could offer them as a i don't want to say fall guy right yeah oh no you could say i know someone who needs the growth even more than i do oh my gosh yeah so i mean but but seriously you could say have you considered fred who has a lot

more experience with this area than i do you know and that'll give your chance of manager to give you context and you could also just come to them and say why me you know why why are you tapping me to do this i'm i just want the context and you might be pleasantly surprised when your manager says i just think you're really good at figuring out things and i've been really impressed with you and that might give you the motivation you need to knock this thing out of the park cool because all you really need to do is believe in yourself that's the true skill that you're learning here we all know that from tv great do you want to read our next question dave you bet all right this comes from an anonymous listener who says my company just asked me if i'm interested

in going to a conference that's about a month away but i'm currently in the process of job hunting and don't know if i'm going to be around for much longer than a month oh yeah this is from the before times by the way this is an oldie i just wanted to remember what it was like oh so reminiscent okay i'll keep reading then what do i do it feels dishonest to go and then leave the company leave the company shortly after but it also feels dishonest to say nope i'm not interested because i actually would like to go there's also the benefit that people often are recruiting at conferences so it might be a great place to be for that yes now let's just take a moment and remember the times when we could go to conferences and be in a room with a thousand people i think

even most introverts are thinking that would be fun to do again it's been long enough they've forgotten the the horror you know it's like childbirth i think we should have another baby you're you're there alone you are surrounded by 400 circles of five people each all in animated conversation with each other they've all known each other for years you walk back and forth between the two water jugs 100 times in between each talk oh my gosh you know how they say that you know extroverts get recharged by being around people and introverts get recharged by being away from people uh-huh but you know how they also say if you overcharge like a lithium battery it explodes you're saying some extrovert is just gonna lose it the next time there's a

conference they'll just oh that's that's not what i was saying climb onto the roof i was saying the introverts have been away from people for so long now that maybe they're overcharged they're like oh they're exploding okay bursting with energy yeah they need to get drained okay exactly got it gotta release some of this pressure you're gonna blow anyway yes conferences i'm having a hard time even taking this question seriously right now yeah so there's a bunch of options there's say no because you're leaving say yes because you want to go and just don't tell them you're leaving say yes and use the conference to hunt for another job what are they what are they expecting to get out of sending you to the conference if they're trying to use it as a nice

perk to some sometimes places will kind of dangle training opportunities as a perk of working there you get to go to conferences and network and it's just a cool thing i think if that's what they're using it for then it would be trying to figure out how i feel about this by talking about it and it's not working i think i would feel weird going and trying to find another job on the company's dime that would feel weird to me but then i mean you might just meet people and eventually end up working with them how do you do you just not talk to anybody to say like no i must keep my motivations pure and avoid sullying them by potentially getting recruited somewhere so if someone sits down next to you at the lunch table and says hey what's your name and you say i'm

sorry ethics forbid me from engaging in small talk with you you just have to stand up and walk away yeah or ask them like a some well what linux distribution do you use first and then whatever answer they say you just say huh and then you stand up walk away so at least they know it's because you're a jerk not because they smell bad ah so you use the operating system snobbery as a facade yeah that's beautiful and no one will think no one will think twice about that yeah exactly that'll fit right in at a conference typical gentoo user oh i'm such a noob is gentoo the one with the lizard no gentoo is a kind of penguin unsurprisingly oh the lizard was susa if i'm not mistaken yeah yeah i don't even know how to say it

i got one magazine one time that came with an open open seuss disc that i never used well susa is that what you said i said susa that's what i've heard it's german that's all i know they were bought by novelle you've heard me pronounce words you're in safe company i'll believe anything that my mind can invent or someone else says that's true yeah so okay sorry i'm actually still just i'm literally sitting here in my chair with my head kind of kicked back and remembering conferences i just can't oh i can't break out of it it would be so fun to go to a conference are they sending you to recruit or are they sending you for vague reasons that it might make you feel happy or are they sending you because it's very related to a

problem domain you're working in if it's very related to a problem domain i would for sure go because presumably you'll do some kind of presentation you'll write it up you'll report back and and share the value with the the company that paid for it if it's to recruit depends on if you can honestly recruit while leaving the company pretty soon exactly if you think it's still a good place to work then i would still probably go but if you're like gone because it sucks then you probably will not be an effective recruiter it turns out yeah here's my personal thing i'm just going to make this real easy for everyone i would go and mostly no matter what yeah i would go in this situation i would go and mostly the reason is it'll probably take longer than a month to get a

job anyway so there's no risk of you getting a job before you go and secondly i just don't think it's that big of a deal it's not a ton of money you know sometimes people think oh my gosh it'll cost a thousand dollars and it's like okay that's not a lot of money to your company that's a good point you know and it'll be it'll be three days off okay that's not a big deal to your company you know i think we get ourselves kind of worked up here's the other reason why i might not go if there's someone else in your team who would want to go and you're taking up a slot yeah if you just go and then bail i could see them being a little a little frustrated by that yeah me too but but only a little besides that yeah just go it'll be fine i mean

there might not ever be conferences again so this could all be academic it does feel that way right now yeah well i think i'm done talking about this question my wisdom is all used up well what are you gonna do my my wisdom muscle is what's that you gotta give an answer you gotta land go or no go i said it depends yeah no on many many factors and situations i'm not accepting that cop out all the details are in front of you i must evaluate all the data and deliberate no i don't think i've ever forced you to come down on one side or the other i've just enjoyed listening but now i want you to come down on one side yeah i've bailed on conferences because i didn't want to go to them after i already bought the ticket oh really yeah

yeah i've got that introvert thing it's like when you make plans for people and then the day arrives and you you just hope that a meteor strikes your house so that no one can come over and you don't have to do things with these people you deeply care about have you seen that t-shirt that said sorry i'm late i didn't want to come no but that's been me a lot of times i know that about you oh let's see it's so endearing it's okay jameson i can tell i'm making you uncomfortable by forcing you to answer no i really think it depends there are cases where i would say no there are cases where i would say yes if someone if i was taking someone else's slot i would say know but otherwise yes yeah if i and if they said like you got to go and get 10 leads of people i

mean that's unlikely because that's not really what happens at conferences i guess so probably yes unless unless it was an opportunity someone else was pumped about and then i would not go and give it to them i'll take that's a good answer it's a answer with a predicate thank you you pinned me down enough but not enough to just give a blanket answer that's right that's right which may have never happened in my life ever how does it feel i couldn't tell you it depends yeah all right okay question answer i think that means we answered the question what can people do if they want to remind us about bygone days well go to soft skills audio website still work in a pandemic and click on ask a question you can fill out our little form

there where you can tell us what your question is. You can tell us your name or not, and we will answer that as soon as we can. Thank you for listening. We'll catch you next week.