Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 244: Quitting telephone and recommendontion

Episode Date: January 18, 2021

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Questions My coworker Alice reached out to me in confidence to say that another coworker, Blake, is leaving in about a month. Blake told Alice in confidence that they intend to put in their two-weeks notice next week. Making things better, Blake is our entire ops team (<3 bus factor of 1) and our startup was not planning on hiring anyone else into that team for three more months! Do I have an obligation to respect their twice-removed confidentiality? Or do I have an obligation to the company (and my remaining coworkers) to push to start hiring their replacement sooner? I’m concerned that if I do nothing, it’s a risk to the company because Blake plays such a critical role and we did not setup Blake in an HA configuration, but I’m also wary of doing something that seems like an ethical gray area. I’m not in management, so I have no ability to directly start hiring. But I’m a senior IC and pretty heavily vested in the success of this company. And bummed about my dear departing friend/colleague! And bummed that my workload is about to go up as all of us learn to be ops engineers, too! Help! I don’t want to have to take the soft skills patented advice of quitting my job when the startup crumbles under the ops team’s departure, so what do I do instead? Someone I worked closely with on a previous job has reached out to me, asking for a referral and recommendation to my current company. The problem is, I really didn’t enjoy working with this person. The experience was so bad it prompted me to leave that job for another one. I didn’t want to burn bridges, so when I left the job, I cited personal reasons and did not mention the real reason was that I hated the interpersonal dynamics there. It could be the case that their toxic behavior was partly due to the toxic organization we were in. It’s also possible that over the years they’ve matured, but I don’t know. On the other hand, each time I’ve asked someone for a referral, they’ve always done it, so I assume that there’s an expectation to refer previous coworkers? I can’t in good conscience recommend this person to my current company. If I provide my true opinions, I suppose they’d eventually find out. Can this person sue me for defamation if they don’t get hired?

it takes more than accidentally emailing the entire company your code review feedback to be a great engineer this is soft skills engineering episode 244 i'm your host dave smith i'm your host jameson dance soft skills engineering is a weekly advice podcast for software developers who don't know how to use email anymore because all they ever do is slack oh when you take open source too far what what does that mean like everything should be public and viewable and i can tell someone's been reading the public facing gitlab user manual or not user manual what do they call it employee handbook yeah employee handbook i do read that thing a lot i kind of don't want someone to tell me if gitlab isn't really like this because

I have this built up idea in my head of what it's like to work there from the manual which is very good yeah it is very good that's you know I've read some employee handbooks in my day well not very much because they're virtually impenetrable cognitively

but the GitLab one that thing sucks me in it's so good yeah it's like TV tropes yeah it's so good you just see a link and you're like oh what's this oh and suddenly it's five hours later

yeah exactly exactly it's really good we should have kpis on the number of slack messages that we send and make them publicly visible and auto update them dynamically in the employee handbook yeah and put them live link them in the handbook yeah give me a month yeah exactly hang on i can't do work i need to update right i work at a big company and every couple months email goes down because of a reply all storm where someone sends an email and then enough people reply all saying why did you send me this email that it just brings down two million people's email right it's the greatest irony too oh it's so good and you can't and then people email back replying

all saying stop replying all and oh it's just beautiful yeah or unsubscribe unsubscribe it's like every attempt to fix the problem makes it worse yeah it's so good i worked at a company that had a special like kill switch button to stop those things i bet if you're like an exchange expert you have some crazy stories about that oh yeah i've only seen glimpses of that's not what this show is about though not at all and we should thank our patrons i want to thank these folks who get a shout out every single week thank you to adrian boarding roman denisov fizzbuzz influencer code lemur christian polanco oladapo fade kiaran sveinsen ragnar hardison nick hathaway travis sanders dennis bogdanov braden kane stephen arman lee john grant chris hogan the agile

ventures charity nick cantar philip john basile thank you to this illustrious crew this mighty what's another collective noun i almost said mighty steed because that just seems like what you're supposed to say after mighty mighty band mighty herd because i called him steed and horses make up yeah the only word that kept coming to me is mighty murder with like a murder of crows i didn't want to say it yeah that could be bad if you want to join this group you can go to softskills.audio and click support us on patreon if you join and contribute any amount of money you get invited to our slack team which is great has all these people and more in it and you help keep the show going so thank you very much wait what else does it have besides people in it the

people that i read in the weekly shout outs and more than these people okay got it i thought you were going to say something like parades because i know we had a parade once and parades no not yet maybe some chatbots snuck in there i don't know yeah there are there are some chatbots potentially do you want to read our first question dave i do this one comes from a listener named nicholas who says my co-worker alice reached out to me in confidence to say that another co-worker blake is leaving in about a month these are fake names by the way all right blake told alice in confidence that they intend to put in their two weeks notice next week making things better blake is our entire ops team it has a parenthetical note with a heart emoji bus factor of one

and our startup was not planning on hiring anyone else into that team for three more months do i have an obligation to respect their twice removed confidentiality or twice removed what does that mean like blake told alice alice told nicholas can nicholas tell anyone else okay got it yeah The transitive property of confidentiality. Does it apply? Okay. Yeah. Or do I have an obligation to the company and my remaining coworkers to push to start hiring their replacements sooner?

I'm concerned that if I do nothing, it's a risk to the company because Blake plays such a critical role, and we did not set up Blake in an HA configuration. HA stands for high availability, for those of you who haven't had the pleasure of setting up RabbitMQ. Sorry, that's not just RabbitMQ. That's a lot of systems. But not Blake. No, Blake doesn't do it. I mean, not this instance of Blake, anyway. Okay.

But I'm also wary of doing something that seems like an ethical gray area. I'm not in management, so I have no ability to directly start hiring. But I'm a senior individual contributor and pretty heavily vested in the success of this company. And bummed about my dear departing friend and colleague. And bummed that my workload is about to go up, as all of us need to become ops engineers, too. help i don't want to have to take the soft skills patented advice of quitting my job when the startup crumbles under the op teams ops teams departure so what do i do instead huh yeah i like the twice removed confidentiality i think there's a precedent established which is you can

tell one person but not as long as they're not in management yeah and if if the management finds out I mean, you only told one person. How could it be your fault? Exactly. You're removed from the consequences. You need a plausible deniability play here. So you could tell someone and then immediately take one of those like drugs that makes you forget the last 30 minutes of your life. And then you'll... Yeah.

Like, I don't know. I didn't ever tell anyone that. Do you know what a warrant canary is? I've never heard that term, but let me just guess. Okay. When a police officer has a search warrant and there's a little bird that delivers it, that's the warrant canary. The cutest little bird with its little badge on. Yeah. It is not that.

So it is a way of dubious legality, I don't know if it's legal on earth or not, to signal that your data as a tech company has been requested by a warrant from the government. So normally those come with gag orders where you can't say like, hey, by the way, we gave your data to the government because they asked about you. But what they do is they put up a web page that says we have not given our data to the government. And then if that date, if that web page goes away, it's not like they told you they did. They just took down a web page. Yeah, they just took down a web page. Yeah. So what you need is a my coworker is not quitting their job canary.

and you just put one up for each of your co-workers and you show it to everybody and then while they're all watching you you uh just like close a browser tab like oh the blake one's not there yeah that's weird what do you know well anyway then news travels like wildfire but browser tabs are closing all over the company they are yeah okay i learned something new warrant canary i have heard that concept but i just didn't remember what it was called i just like the name warrant canary yeah i like it too i like it too yeah i had to google it to make sure i was not lying it is called a warrant canary yeah this is interesting the the fact that it could be an existential threat to the company makes this

tricky because if it was just like our project might fail companies have projects fail all the time yeah if you really think this person is a single point of failure for the whole company then you have to balance this obligation to it's sort of to yourself too honestly it's not just to your company and your job and your co-workers to all those things with like is it okay to break someone's confidence yeah why do you think blake told alice yeah because alice clearly can't be trusted i wonder if that's this is blake's way of just kicking off the notification process yeah exactly i think what i've learned from this is when i quit this company if i don't want anyone to find out don't tell alice yeah so the the bad consequence that's always there is you could get

fired right away that happens to people in real life and i though i don't think it happens very often it's a small probability with a high cost if it does happen so i can see why people are wary of this this is so you're saying if you are blake yeah if you're blake yeah and you say hey in in three weeks i'm leaving then they might say nope in three minutes and then you miss out on i don't know pay and plans and well i have i have news for this question asker your team and company are already screwed even if you do share the information because guess what it takes more than a few weeks to to hire a really good ops team especially to replace an entire ops team as one person yeah and then even if even if you could magically hire that person like tomorrow

which you can't but even if you could it's going to take them time to ramp up and become blake yeah so you're doomed nihilism i worked at a company who had a very experienced and crucial member of the operations team leave and i had i was struck with fear that everything was going to come crashing down and it didn't and i should have taken better notes because i don't remember i have no memory of of huge struggles that took place because of it in my head it just kind of continued smoothly probably like one person on the team had a really bad month but they were not as big of a bus factor as i thought they would be that's often the case yeah you might be overestimating the impact although i don't know maybe this is a blessing in disguise maybe once blake leaves

everyone will realize you know what we really should have adopted devops culture let's do this we're all ops now that was a thing that happened honestly it was this person was very good and very fast at doing things so they just gathered more things and when they weren't there anymore the rest of the team had to they couldn't just rely on this person to do stuff anymore they had to figure out some of their own problems and it spread the knowledge around a lot more if this person is so essential to the team it's possible you telling management will result in them getting a giant raise and staying at the company too oh wow double win so wait it's not all bad yeah huh because if they know that they have three weeks to live instead of two weeks to live

And I mean, yeah, it seems unlikely that they would say three weeks. What if we had zero days to prepare instead and then just fire him right away? Yeah, exactly. Exactly. If Blake is really that good, which I suspect he is. Yeah. Good ops people are hard to find. They are.

I don't know what the right thing to do. I always feel like I have to think of the hardest thing. And then in my head, that's automatically the right thing. It's like, you got to go to Blake and tell him, hey, Alice told me this, and I'm going to tell management but just so you know so i'm being above board and that's just so awkward and tricky and i would be unlikely to do that in real life yeah so it must be easy to say on a podcast i love how you are like i do the hard thing because usually that's the right thing yeah the hardest thing of all and the highest value thing to your company is to go to blake

and convince him to stay oh yeah that's right yeah perfect that's what i would do you just have a chat yep use your reality distortion field blake this place is great why are you holding up two fingers and moving them slowly side to side like you want to stay at this company that company isn't the company you're looking for hang on i'm doing that in real life now i don't know what that means just one sweeping motion slowly from left to right with two fingers in the air it helps if you're wearing a brown robe with a hood and sitting in a speeder on tatooine i have no idea what you're talking about that sounds like star wars yes jedi mind trick these aren't the droids you're looking for oh a jet okay got it i thought you were like doing a sassy no no like finger shaking in someone's

face that would be one finger not two oh well maybe for emphasis it's two two hands this time I felt like that was a pretty obtuse reference, but not one that was unachievable. We'll have to see. I wonder if other people disagree. I have like a Star Wars and Star Trek blind spot in my cultural knowledge. Oh, really? I know about it through osmosis, but it just doesn't resonate with me like it does with a lot of people. Yeah.

So don't take my advice. That's what I'm saying. I can't be trusted because I don't like Star Wars. Okay, true. yeah i feel like what i would actually do in real life not hardest thing that sounds the best i would probably say that i had seen indications that blake i wouldn't say blake told alice and alice told me that he is leaving in three weeks i would say i'm concerned that blake seems unhappy or might be considering other offers and i'm worried that that could put us in a bad spot

if you were to leave i would love that idea that's almost exactly what i would do the only thing different is that i would do it in a slightly more nasally and annoying voice than you would i thought you're gonna say by taking your hands from left to right in a sweeping motion you know i was doing like windshield wiper motions and just trying to figure out what what that would look like i would also say something like hey actually i wouldn't even say that i was going to suggest that maybe go to management and say hey what are we doing to retain blake he's a key key player you know if we lost him it would be catastrophic wink wink

but i think that's all above board like you don't have to disclose that you know you don't have to say that he's leaving but you can kind of clue management in and it could work out really good for him yeah it's easy when it's someone else's job and we don't know any of the details if you felt like there was some risk of them rage firing blake then i would be more concerned but in this situation it just sounds like that's pretty unlikely yeah that's that's not what you do to a a very competent capable person who is thinking of leaving who's in demand with other companies yeah that's just that's just not how you do it yep yeah but we've underestimated the evil of companies in the past that's true yeah there there are companies that will rage fire in the future

there are i guess managers more than companies seems like an unlikely company policy but yeah well the startup probably doesn't have a written policy on anything so that's true all right i think we did answer the question shall we move on to the next one yes i will read it it is from an anonymous listener who says someone i worked closely with on a previous job has reached out to me asking for a referral and recommendation to my current company the problem is i really didn't enjoy working with this person oh no the experience was so bad it prompted me to leave that job for another one oh my gosh i didn't want to burn bridges so when i left the job i cited personal reasons and did not mention the real reason was that i hated the interpersonal dynamics

there it could be the case that their toxic behavior was partially due to the toxic organization we were in it's also possible that over the years they've matured but i don't know on the other hand each time i've asked someone for a referral they've always done it so i assume that there's an expectation to refer previous co-workers i can't in good conscience recommend this person to my current company if i provide my true opinions i suppose they'd eventually find out can this person sue me for defamation if they don't get hired oh you just had to throw in the earth law question at the end there didn't you listen in space you can sue it depends on the size of your laser beams and that's it like that's how disputes are settled so yes in space

and defamation looks a lot like a giant hole in your ship caused by lasers yeah this probably depends a lot on what country you're in too because i i believe these laws are different in different countries interesting i know something about how i think the laws are much stricter around libel and slander in the uk than in the united states it's easier to get someone in trouble for saying a thing that you don't like about you oh really okay is this your professional legal advice or just or what what is that always yeah that's my guarantee for everything i say on this show the internet tells tells me that defamation has to be false so oh this changes everything i mean if it's not false then probably good and yes my professional yeah i passed a pull

up bar today so technically i passed the bar which qualifies me to give professional legal advice and when you say you passed the bullet bar you mean you walked past it right yeah i walked past yeah exactly i passed the bar i mean i saw it and i walked past it good very good yeah i think we can skip that question but because i'm pretty sure no but talk to a real lawyer real mere earth lawyer if you want to know for sure but i think no yeah can this person sue me for defamation if they don't get hired oh my gosh i don't want to live in a world where you can't say

hey i worked with this person and it sucked right like i don't know that's that's bad i mean okay here's the thing is there is there a term for when you do everything you say but it's not what the person expected you to do like i don't want to call it a white lie there's a subreddit called malicious compliance yes that's kind of like that yes okay so malicious compliance in this case you could say yes i will pass along the reference to my company do not qualify the term reference good or bad then go to your boss and say this person has applied they are terrible if you hire if you hire them i will have to leave myself and this is my referral your company will soon be a smoking ruin

and then when they apply your boss can say thank you but we've decided to consider other candidates at this time yeah oh i think i believe that i'm the smartest human that's ever lived and then never wrong okay and so i have had people i worked with that i didn't enjoy working with but that i still believed were were like competent and capable it's just we didn't mesh and i've had people i didn't work with that i believe shouldn't work somewhere that i work ever okay and this sounds more like the second it's not like they just had a different style that you clashed with it's more like you think they will be bad for the company okay yeah i think you're fine in that case to tell the it's more like what do you tell the the person who asked you for a referral right

then what do you tell the company well it only really matters if they drill down with you and try to ask exactly what you passed along to the company yeah and that's when it can get awkward i've given plenty of referrals and they've not been bad so far so i've always said yeah i i'll give you a glowing referral and here's all the nice things i'll say about you well that's like a warrant canary you know if someone if someone says can you give me a referral and you say yeah i'll give you a great referral that's one thing but if you just say yes yep and that's it that's all you say then professional courtesy is such a strange strange passive aggressive thing i also wonder if this is a like is this a tech mega company right does this company employ a hundred

thousand people and it's like help me get into to like facebook or something i don't know some company that that you might think has a high bar and lots of people might want to work there and then it's weird because it's not as much am i going to like saw my own hand off do this really painful thing that will hurt me it's more like do i want to go out to prevent this other person from getting something that might be good for them yeah like say they're going to join another team on another project that's that's yeah like many degrees removed from you that's very different from working on the same team at a big company yeah toxic behavior though i mean that sounds bad toxic behavior sounds more sounds like more than kind of difficult to

work with yeah i don't know i i do know i don't know i said i don't know you know how you just say words to fill space sometimes uh no i wish i didn't i think that i would tell the company don't hire this person and i would say something like i'll pass on your resume or something vague and non-committal to the person if i didn't want to just get in their face and say you're trash and i hate you and you'll never work in this town again like you normally do yeah exactly i mean you reserve that for people you like i guess i just count on them being able to interpret my sarcasm over text i guess when i say bad things about you it means good things right i swear yeah one of the comments

here strikes me though and it makes me concerned which is that if i provide my true opinions i suppose they'd eventually find out that's the thing that makes it hard yeah what do you care they're not your friend i don't know but jameson it's important for everyone on earth to like me yeah that's true this would be worse if this person was your friend but you thought they were bad at their job yeah if if there's someone that you just think is you just had a really bad time with them and they're not good at employee i mean who cares if they find out through the grapevine that you gave them a bad referral come on you can't i know i'm just really surprised to hear you say that if you think there's a non-zero chance they're gonna show up at your house with a

weapon like yeah i guess that could be bad that's your bar yeah i i don't know what are they gonna do like well i don't know i just i think now i'm gonna start talking about you a little bit but i think you have kind of a deep-seated need to a be liked by everyone and oh absolutely not cause anyone any pain ever absolutely unquestionably but i had a bad day today so it's it that's all gone now james and dance is one bad day away from trashing everyone he loves yeah i'm grumpy enough that i i have squashed my empathy down oh my gosh yeah it's hard everyone who i like and respect must like me that's that's that's like it's the new bar the jameson prime directive it is not healthy and good but yeah i mean you're so far removed from this person you don't work

with them anymore it's not even that you went from that job to this job it sounds like it's been multiple jobs in between if you're not like roommates with them and don't have to interact with them i don't see a strong downside to saying i will pass on your resume and then saying pass it on with like a frowny face stamped on it we did edit this part of the question out but the the listener wrote in that it's actually their spouse oh oh ah shoot their toxic behavior just a small wrinkle yeah that'd be wild imagine that you were married to somebody and they just they were just so political and awful at work and but somehow they were great not at work yeah they're just like backstabbing you over and over again in meetings and but then when you get home it's

like i love you honey you have these wonderful dates okay so let's get down to it yeah can this person sue me for defamation well yes in space sorry i clearly yeah but i'm pretty sure no and i think you're fine if they find out i mean wow interesting if they didn't want you to give them a negative referral, maybe they should not have been toxic. It's not your job to preserve them, to hide your direct experience with them from your company. And that's often some of the most valuable signal that companies look for in hiring is referrals and recommendations from people. For sure. Okay. Well, I do have one quick story I want to share on this of someone who actually dodged sharing a referral that was i was asking for the referral for me have i told you

this before when i was i don't know i was thinking about getting into speaking like professional speaking this is like almost 10 years ago i had done some talks at like internally to medium-sized audiences at my own company and one of the people who had complimented me on my talk i approached them later and asked if they would be willing to write a letter of recommendation so that i could apply to speak at other venues and other events. And so I got on a call and said, Hey, would you be willing to write a letter of recommendation for me that I can use when I'm applying to give talks elsewhere? And this person was so smooth. He pretended like he didn't actually even hear my question and was just talking to me about like, Oh yeah, you're a great speaker. You got

a lot ahead of you. You know, I look forward to hearing about all your adventures. And then I'm like, Oh, okay, cool. So would you be willing to write a letter of recommendation for me? Oh man, You know, I would love to hear about your next speaking event. And I probably asked three times before it dawned on me, he's dodging the question. It was smooth. It was very smooth. So you could develop your skills at dodging questions and then just never actually commit to it, but then make the person walk away feeling good about the conversation.

That's what happened to me. It's been a long time since I've told my dad's story, but my dad has a story about letters of recommendation. I can't remember if this was what someone did to him or what he did to someone else. So I'm going to, it makes him cooler if he did it to someone else. Okay. I'm going to assume that's the case. Do it.

Someone asked him for a letter of recommendation and he said, you write me the letter that you think I would write you and put it in an envelope and I'll look at it and send it if I agree with it. Oh, but was there an agreement that you couldn't ask if I sent it or not? Let's say yes. Because that would make it awesome. Let's say yes. Did you send it?

Did you send it? Did you send it? I can't answer. Yeah. We agreed that I would not answer. You'll never know if I didn't. And then you find it in the trash can the next day. Yeah.

I think the philosophy there is you are likely to try to, you want the person who's going to send it to agree and think like, yeah, this represents my opinion and words. So you're likely to try and make it real. As accurate as possible, right? Yeah. but if you were super toxic then maybe it'll be like i poopy head do recommend this person and i'm so dumb like and i'll just write it for you to to just lay out sick burns on you and then hope you'll send it oh my god i hope you'll just send it and then oh no i do like the

incentive tension that that creates though it's like those negotiation tactics or it's almost like a silent auction you know i love that it's fantastic yeah it's beautiful all right well there's some concrete ideas you can try out they'll all work so just pick one of them any of them will do yeah it's all good if people want their own questions answered what should they do go to softskills.audio and click the ask a question button and we just have to say thank you to all the people who have done that so many of you so great we will get to all of them keep them coming all right we'll catch you next week