Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 245: Sweating the small stuff and quit my first job?

Episode Date: January 25, 2021

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Questions Hello soft skills audio, love the show and your great advice. My question is how do I stop sweating the small stuff. I have one colleague who either can’t spell, or types so fast the words make no sense and doesn’t correct the mistakes. Emails, comments in code, comments in PRs, presentations to management, everything is a garbled mess and makes us look bad as a team. Another colleague just can’t stop talking in ‘business speak’. Every conversation is twice as long as it should be because they need to ‘touch base on what’s happening in this space and will circle back’ These are by no means ‘quit your job’ problems. How do I avoid eye rolling and getting frustrated over something so minor? I’ve been working at a software company for almost 10 years now. It’s an amazing company, 5 minutes from where I live, with a really good culture. I have an awesome role as a senior developer working with interesting new technologies, a lot of flexibility, responsibilities and a valued opinion on both technological and company-wide matters. However, this is still my first job. I’ve invested a lot of time and effort on career growth the last few years but I feel like there are only a few developers at my company who share the same level of enthusiasm and the need to grow as I do. I’ve been able to bring in new tech, introduce modern practices and share knowledge with my colleagues, but it feels like I’m the only one who’s actively pushing for this. Since this is my first job, I don’t know if this is the case in other places as well. I’ve done some freelance projects on the side to learn more about how things work somewhere else but mostly I’m the only senior dev on these projects. On the one hand I have a job that I love, on the other hand I don’t really know what’s out there. I feel like I might regret it later if I don’t try something else but based on other people’s experiences, I know it’s hard to find a company with such a good culture and understanding as where I am right now. Switching jobs would also give me a significant salary increase, but will require a longer commute. There are only a few software companies in my area. Can you help me figure out if I should take the blue pill or the red pill?

it takes more than bragging that you could clone a multi-billion dollar company's product in a weekend to be a great software engineer this is episode 245 of the soft skills engineering podcast i am your host jameson dance i'm your host dave smith soft skills engineering is a weekly advice show where we talk about all the non-technical parts of software development and it is a rite of passage to look at whatever the i don't know it's probably tiktok now yeah whatever popular social network is out there that is wildly valuable because of network effects and say that's just a rails app and then yeah and it's not it was it was at one point probably it was yeah and now it's a rails app with a thousand people just furiously scurrying about

to try and keep it held together yeah given no users everything is scalable that's right it's my wise adage easy peasy yeah do you want to thank our patrons dave i do i want to say thanks to a one-time shout out to thanks a lot for this name princess simon candy cane lollipop chicken bach bach pop pop and dog blueberry pie applesauce snakes input length validator and also and also to these weekly contributors who are adrian bordink roman denisov fizzbuzz influencer code lemur christian polanco oladapo fadiyi kiarns fainson ragnar hardison nick hathaway Travis Sanders, Dennis Bogdanoff, Brayden Cain, Stephen Armand-Lee, John Grant, Chris Hogan, the Agile Ventures Charity, Nick Cantor, and Philip John Basile. If you'd like to support

the show and get access to our Slack community, go to softskills.audio and click support us on Patreon. Any monthly contribution will get you access to our Slack community, which is super duper fun. It really is. It's great. Yeah, it's been great. It's been great to participate, to meet people. I'm impressed by how global it is. I feel like when we started this show i expected it to be very u.s based because i live in the u.s and everybody in the world is like me that's kind of my default assumption but there's people from all over all kinds of different experiences i learn a lot just by kind of the the background of the context of what people say so join us i will read our first question this is from an anonymous

listener and it says hello soft skills audio love the show and your great advice my question is how do i stop sweating the small stuff i have one colleague who either can't spell or type so fast the words make no sense and doesn't correct the mistakes emails comments and code comments and prs presentations to management everything is a garbled mess and makes us look bad as a team another colleague just can't stop talking in business speak every conversation is twice as long as it should be because they need to touch base on what's happening in this space and we'll circle back these are by no means quit your job problems how do i avoid eye rolling and getting frustrated over something so minor hmm i love oh man i love i really love when i graduated from

college actually even before that when i was in college and i did like a internship between semesters and i just remember thinking these people are speaking a weird language touch base what does touch base mean yeah sounds unsanitary i really still don't know what that means like i know what it means i just have no idea how touch base came to be huh does google know how it came to be where did touch base come from comes from baseball where the runners need to touch the base to make it run legal that has like nothing to do with how it gets used though huh like are we gonna go touch a base so that i can be thrown out of the game because i didn't

Yeah, it's like do this thing to validate it, but we use it to mean, I don't know, make sure we both understand the same thing. Maybe that is the same thing. Imagine that you work in a business and you don't know anything about sports though. There's got to be so much stuff that makes no sense to you at all. Absolutely. And let me just say that it's doubly bad if you don't know anything about American sports and English is a second language to you. And let me just say, I encountered some of these phrases that are just hilarious. Like, i just need an estimate that's in the right ballpark yeah and it's like what what does that even mean i wonder i feel like if i moved to a country where cricket was really popular

and cricket is basically calvin ball to me yeah that must be what it feels like yeah i worry that i talk in business jargon without knowing it you undoubtedly do i like i think of myself as the cynical like truth teller too cool to be influenced by this dumb corporate culture double speak stuff but i'm pretty sure i've i've touched a base in my day i've circled back many times yes i actually said the word synergy the other day and i meant it unironically oh no but it was true it was like the sum of the parts was greater or sorry the whole was greater than the sum of the parts so i mean it's the right word sometimes yeah have you ever

encountered someone who speaks in this business dialect that you thought was really sharp and really knew their stuff and and this was just a fog you had to get through but behind it there was really good content. I guess this is a leading question. Let me just say whatever answer you need to tell me what you're going to say next. Okay. My experience has been that the more people talk this way, the less underlying meaning there is in the stuff that they're saying. It's like saying um, but it sounds smarter than saying um. It's just a way to take up more time with your words without mumbling okay oh so it's like pardon me i'm thinking about something circle back touch base synergy yeah it's it's a there's a name for this for these words you say in between the actual

stuff you're trying to communicate but filler words yeah maybe that is i don't know i would have we'll never know because i already used up my one google per show you're you've already touched base with google one too many times yeah but maybe this is revealing a bias that i have where i am discounting people who are valuable because i don't like the words that they say have you tried making fun of them a lot when they do it i've found that shame and mockery is a great way to enforce conformity to group standards that is true and if it was used against you in middle school guess what time to get revenge except now you're a grown-up and there's a lot on the line

that's it's all it all comes back to childhood trauma though well okay you didn't touch enough bases yeah that's true the people oh that's so true the people that did the sports metaphors were the cool kids and now they're just they're just lording it over you still yeah i can still hit a home run with this presentation because i practice hitting real home runs so much that's right that's right all this time you thought they were wasting their time while you were playing muds on your on your bbs on the internet preparing for the real world it turns out the real world is all sports metaphors it's sports metaphors all the way down yeah oh boy i had a good idea and it's gone what was it um just circle back when it comes back to you yeah let's put a pin in it

yeah we'll take that offline oh i said that today oh no you can't not swim in this water jameson you can't you're if you jump in the pool you're gonna get wet is that a business metaphor no i just made that up i just i thought i thought it was good though okay when you pick up the stick you get the synergy on both ends you can't pick up a stick at one end is that isn't that the thing maybe y'all know someday if i do more business i i don't know how you get them to stop doing it but well you mean besides the shaming thing well that's true okay yeah say for some crazy reason that doesn't work, I don't know. I'd be surprised, but it doesn't.

I mean, this is a highly unnecessary plan B, but here comes plan B. Yeah. The good news is conversations take twice as long. So while they are generating these nonsense phrases to give themselves time to think, you also have time to think about whatever you want. Like you can go to your mind palace and relive some treasured memories or take a micro nap oh my gosh oh that's so funny i wish i could take a micro nap oh imagine how cool it would be if you could just go to sleep for five seconds on command yeah but you like you leave that one subsystem in your brain awake enough to be able to know when they've come back to the land of normal words yeah you can snap back to consciousness oh that's so funny i i don't know how you get them

to stop i think you just have to clarify that you understand what they actually mean so maybe this means repeating back to them in in words that make sense to you what they said that won't solve the problem of conversations taking too long it'll actually make them longer though but if you're trying to make sure you don't misunderstand them because their words are so vague you can push for more clarity if the answer is they're saying these words because they don't know then i guess you can just leave i don't know just walk the other direction yeah just just walk away oh the spelling one would distress me though because i'm on a remote team and so much of our communication is in text all i can think of is how to approach these as a manager which is so different though

than how you'd approach it as a peer well how do you approach it as a manager stop saying those words or you're fired that's the root of every manager report conversation really no i think as a manager you you have this explicit expectation that part of your role is to coach and provide feedback and direction and so you can identify this communication thing as as a problem and say it's it's hard to understand you takes longer to figure out what you mean sometimes people misunderstand you it communicates sloppiness which is not the message i think you want to communicate kind of point out the cost of it and then ask them to do it differently but as a peer if a peer did that to me i would tell them very sloppily in misspelled words written very quickly

lol no no you but in like text message lol no the letter u yeah lol no you i usually just say new phone who dis did you ever see that that joke about the universal new yorker comic joke no so they these comics in the magazine new yorker they always have a little one sentence kind of caption underneath them that's jokey and one of them is i'd like to add you to my professional network on linkedin okay and it does seem to work for everyone and i feel like new phone who disc could also be another pretty universal new yorker joke caption that would just work for all of them just works for every joke yeah that's cool that's funny i'd like to add you to my professional

network that is what you say after funny stuff happens that's funny that's how i know i've shown my wife a meme that she does not that has lowered her opinion of me she just says that was funny that's really funny jameson yeah oh funny funny you're funny like i'm gonna go back to whatever i was doing no matter what it was i'm going back to it now yep then i get her back when she shows me a cute animal and i don't smile and go ah you don't gush gotta i gotta be tough because i'm melting inside do you just say that animal is cute i say consuming that animal would provide many valuable calories and lots of utility for me that's how you offend her okay yeah good work

and then i have to cry a tear as i turn because you know you lied so helpful what a helpful response okay we have gone way off the rails here okay let's get back to the let's get back to the bottom line here you have colleagues who do things that annoy you but they're really low grade annoyance you know we're not talking stinky feet here we're not talking like deeply offensive things we're talking typos and business speak how do you stop caring about this i mean you could correct all their typos right just make pull requests to change all their comments reply to every email they send with like red lines through it you know abraham lincoln did this thing where

he would write letters to people that he was mad with and then not send them you could you could edit all their content and then just put it in a box ah you're like ah the world is more ordered now yeah thanks to my contribution i honestly though i think that for me age has made me stop caring about a lot of stuff including typos have you noticed this about yourself too jameson or are you still so young and innocent i am i am sort of young i would like to believe but i think i do care less about stuff i used to care about i don't care about typos i don't care about i don't care about business speak so much i do care about typos though business speak i think i'd be okay with but the typos would bug me you know what's made me stop caring about typos what rereading my own

emails from years past and realizing yeah oh i'm that guy i i just writing is a way to think and if you just jam out some sloppy like i sometimes i wish i were that person who could just get a long email and then forward it to someone else with like a question mark yeah and then that somehow leads to people doing things like massive action taken yeah but i i i have to edit down prose every time i write anything to people because you you just value their time more than your own i think it's because i can't shut up when i type what really you just you just spew yeah i have to delete a lot of stuff so you're more talkative in print than verbally yes that is absolutely true yes you probably should have been an epic fantasy author then

yeah so this would be personally hard for me i think what i would do is i think i would try to let it go unless it was something where this person was like representing my work or my team's work to other people and if that was the case maybe i would step in to try to help or take it over like presentations to management right if this is gonna affect people's impression of your team then it's probably a little bit more worth dealing with than if it's an email that has a typo to you that you can still understand yeah so i guess this is a way to say let it go but i think the question is how how do i let it go well you said getting older helps so stay alive i think there is no fast forward button on life but there is a pause it's called micro naps

oh that's kind of like a fast forward though because you don't know what like you miss time while you're asleep yes that's right for all intents it is a fast forward that's accurate it's more like a seek or a skip yeah anyway let's not get too pedantic here i here's what i think i think you have an expectations problem not you jameson but the listener the expectation is that other people will put the same level of rigor into their speech into their communication style as you do or i don't know maybe you don't maybe you're a huge hypocrite and you actually just spew typo filled business speak non-stop it's just like non-stop business speak all spelled wrong it's like synergy with three ends yeah it's an abomination you like spell touch bases

with like a c instead of an s and base anyway or no base like those what the heck does that mean touch bass anyway let's just assume that you're not the world's biggest hypocrite and that you do have kind of this level of expectation i say drop that expectation and here's how i suggest doing it what i think is that you need to change your expectations and you can do this by recognizing the value of variety and ask yourself this thought-provoking question do you really want everyone in your life to do the things exactly the way you like. So it builds character, kind of. Is that what you're saying? Ah, boy, that might be next level. I wasn't even thinking that deep. I was just thinking...

It'd just be boring? Yeah, it'd be lame. Imagine a world where everyone is just like, well, I was going to say touch base, but I know Dave doesn't like it when I do that. So I'm going to say sync up. And then I learned he doesn't like that either. So now I'm going to say, let's get together and collaborate and make sure we're both have a common understanding of the problem yeah anyway i would hate to i would hate to think that the world is revolving around my capricious preferences plus i like it when people do weird stuff that bothers me i think it's great there's one of those pithy programmer laws postal or postals law be conservative in

what you do be liberal in what you accept from others seems like maybe a case for that where you are trying to be very conscientious about your communication but they're going to be i liked what you said about other people not having the same values that you do yeah i think that's the problem i have where i have some perfectionist stuff going on and i not everyone's gonna nitpick or waste their life away crafting an email yeah and they shouldn't no they should do things differently than you or else we wouldn't have airplanes you know like surely i'd get to them someday i took too long to write emails to when i was a young 20 something i had this ridiculous idea where i thought to myself if everyone would just act like me we wouldn't have any crime and

then i was like it's like i was i don't know like 22 or something i'm like this is as my my 40 something year old self looks back and he's just like that is like the stupidest thing on so many levels that i could ever say to me well you're welcome i guess anyway just the dumbest thing i could ever think it's like why don't you just all not do crime oh okay didn't think of that anyway i think that it kind of goes in the same vein here it's like set your expectations that people are different from you and learn to embrace that and and relish the difference don't get frustrated by it that's true because most likely you're going to work with a lot of people that use business speak if you are in business yeah and if you just are are shocked

and appalled by it and it disrupts you so much then you'll have trouble touching base and circling back you'll never your circles will be all oblong you'll never you'll never touch that base all right we've got to move on to the next question here all right do you want to read it dave yeah i'll read it this comes from an anonymous listener who says i've been working at a software company for almost 10 years now. It's an amazing company. It's five minutes from where I live with a really good culture. I have an awesome role as a senior developer working with interesting new technologies, a lot of flexibility, responsibilities, and a valued opinion on both technology and company-wide matters. However, this is still my first job. I've

invested a lot of time and effort on career growth the last few years, but I feel like there are only a few developers at my company who share the same level of enthusiasm and the need to grow as I do. I've been able to bring in new tech, introduce modern practices, and share knowledge with my colleagues, but it feels like I'm the only one who's actually pushing for this. Since this is my first job, I don't know if this is the case at other places as well. I've done some freelance projects on the side to learn more about how things work, but mostly I'm the only senior dev on these projects. On the one hand, I have a job that I love. On the other hand, I don't really know what's out there. I feel like I might regret it later if I don't try something else, but

based on other people's perspectives, I know it's hard to find a company with such a good culture and understanding is where i am right now switching jobs would also give me a significant salary increase but will require a longer commute there are only a few software companies in my area can you help me figure out if i should take the blue pill or the red pill i can never keep those pills straight by the way i don't know about you yeah i mean the purple pill is to take both of them right yeah do i give up the five minute commute for a massive salary increase and possible new job where i learn new things i mean i just have to ask like what did you think we were going to say i remember we asked a few months ago to hear from people who just joined a job and stayed

there stayed at their first job for a long time so this is another person who's been there yeah yeah that's interesting i mean it makes sense why why you are there you've grown a lot you like the culture interesting technologies so i'm i'm struggling to understand the interesting technology interesting new technologies valued opinion but also not enough interesting new modern stuff oh it's not that it's that they can do it but nobody else does okay i got it so so it sounds like you want to work somewhere that will push you a little bit more where you will learn things from other people yeah i think they're worried about limited exposure to ideas like all the ideas they've had have come from their own mind at work and that's kind of scary

Yeah. You might learn about whole new business speak. Yeah. Maybe they loop-de-loop back instead of circle back. So this is maybe a cheating answer, but remote work, maybe? Is that an option? They talk about commute time and limited exposure to software companies in their area, but we live in the now times where everything happens online because the real world is dangerous. Right. So you could potentially get a remote gig at company. For sure. That will teach you new things. And there are plenty of giant megacos that have moved to remote. That's also true. So Jameson, am I reading between the lines and thinking that your suggestion is quit this job? Yeah, I guess so. I mean, you went straight to remote opportunity. So, you know.

Yeah, that's true. You couldn't do that and stay at the same company that you've been at for 10 although we've talked about that too remember the double intern wait no there was a person who got an internship at two different companies at the same time oh yeah that's true that's sort of the freelance thing that they mentioned though right they did some freelance projects to learn yeah true but usually when you do a freelance project you're you're selling the value of you you're an expert right you don't have you're not going to waste time reading docs that's where non-experts You're just going to sit down and type the right thing without any delete buttons until it's done.

You're like, I didn't even know the computer had a copy paste function. Yeah, it's hard to say, I'll do this. You'll pay me by the hour. I will need 50% of the time to go learn this new thing, by the way. Right. No, that's, that's funny. It's like, yeah. So you, so in other words, you get a gig that you're, you know, you're already an expert

at, but then you bill in 50% overhead for learning and then don't learn. you do another gig i don't want to underestimate the pain that a longer commute would cause but i hate commuting a lot so much that i make lots of choices that are harmful in other ways to avoid commutes but it does feel like maybe you're the big fish in the small pond here and and the scope of problems isn't pushing you so that is something that you can explicitly search out at another job and that is something i've looked for at other jobs as criteria i want to work somewhere where people are excellent and the problems are hard and i will be pushed and learned by being around these people and me too i played soccer as a kid i played in city league which back when i was a kid

was the place that people who were bad at soccer played oh as opposed to the travel league right yeah yeah i played kind of where it was weird to play on a travel team now i think it's sort of the norm in the u.s at least if you're at all into soccer yeah you have to go all the way but i was i was bad and one year i ended up on a team where everyone else was way worse and it was really fun for a while to be like the good person i i was good because i kicked and it went forward instead of back and nice stuff like that yeah and that was really fun and then i played soccer on the jv team in high school at a small high school where jv was like that you have legs that work team and i was not the good kid on that team at all but it was fun in a different way where i

got so much better and and i was low in the hierarchy of i don't know the order of most skilled to least skilled but i improved a lot more yeah and so i think there's there's room for some periods like that in your career too that's a good point so you're saying that maybe the last 10 years have been i would use the term big fish little pond yeah i guess that's sort of a sports metaphor too just a different kind of sport is fishing really a sport i don't know yes it is i don't want to offend anyone okay okay moving on i am with you on the commute thing like i feel like you're over this listener is overstating the value of the five minute commute especially in a pandemic era where the commute is already zero minutes for like 80 of developer jobs right now yeah it's

pretty nice it does take me a few moments to walk down the stairs though yeah i sure take a lot fewer showers than i did when i went into the office every day though oh boy i'm about to go on a tangent with this one but i have over the last couple of years so i've been working james and i've both been working remote for a long time now yeah year and a half for me i think jameson what three four years more than that yeah like five or six i've recently developed a habit of showering every single day and i like it it's good turns out it was a good idea all those years Yeah, my mom was right. Here's my advice. I'm going to come down squarely on the quit this job side. Easy for me. 10 years, long time. You've done great things at this company. I think it's great. It's time to level up. And you will, just like Jameson's soccer story, I think you'll find that even though it's going to be a lot of discomfort and challenge, you will definitely grow a lot more if you can find a place where you can be exposed to more senior people. However, the other side of that coin is when you get 10 years of experience in our industry, it can be kind of hard to find a job where there's a lot of people who have more experience than you.

That's true. It does age out pretty quickly. It does. We are in a pyramid that's not linear. It's more like a quarter pipe on each side of the pyramid. Very narrow top, very wide base. That's a base you can touch, by the way. Yeah, that's why I think it can be useful to go to either a company that is big or a company that is specialized enough that they will have experts, because if your company has 10 developers, the top of the pyramid is pretty small.

But if your company has, I don't know, 30,000 developers, there are some people you can learn from there, no matter what level of skill you're at. There are some experts in domains that you know nothing of. Having worked at a company with 30,000 developers, I can tell you that you might not spend that much time with them because they probably have a narrow pyramid too, and they need you to be mentoring a lot of other people who are more junior than you. But that gives you growth opportunities too. So I don't know. I'm going to say change jobs after 10 years. You've probably tapped out on the growth trajectory. I think there's still growth opportunities at every company, but I think the velocity is going to go down so much that it'll be beneficial. Plus,

significant salary raise that's great i mean go for it and if you're really sad about it a you can go back to your old job if you don't like it and b you can dry your tears with dollar bills you know you have so many extras they're very absorbent yeah actually that'd be a horrible idea dollar bills are filthy yeah you'd give yourself so many gross diseases true all right we've answered the question right i think so i think so good luck let us know after your life goes completely off the rails and spins into a terrible tragedy because you followed our advice we'd like to hear about it yeah sorry pre-apologies especially then what can people do if they want their own questions answered dave go to our website at softskills.audio and click ask a

question thank you so much to everyone who does that we have so many questions and we love all of them and we will eventually answer them all if you want to support the show go to the same website click support us on patreon you can join our slack community love to see you there thanks everyone. See ya.