Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 248: Non-private slack channels and expectations

Episode Date: February 15, 2021

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Questions Our engineering manager keeps sneaking/creeping on our private slack channels. As an admin of the workspace he can join any private slack channel without being invited. I feel like this is an unacceptable behavior. What should I do? Should I just reach out to him and ask him not to abuse his admin privileges? Should I setup a discord server for me and my fellow developers? Or should I take the soft skills engineering advice and quit my job? Thank you guys for your awesome podcast. I have recently begun my foray into management with the reception of my first subordinate. I selected him due to his illustrious undergraduate project presentation and his ability to expound on the intricacies of said projects. But, I’m having a hard time managing my expectations. He is unable to complete the simplest of tasks, often going off on tangents that, despite being given the answer, result in spending hours in unrelated rabbit holes. Additionally, he asked for a high salary and was promised an increase scheduled ahead of review. As a first-time manager, I worry that I am inflicting unrealistic expectations especially since software is my passion. I enjoy learning learning new languages and technologies. What is the best way to let him know that he is not meeting expectations? How can I say this without my typical brashness which will ultimately result in me blurting out something to the tune of “you aren’t nearly as capable as you made yourself out to be”?

it takes more than sweet ascii drawings in your code comments to be a great engineer this is soft skills engineering episode 248 i'm your host dave smith i am your host jameson dance soft skills engineering is a weekly advice podcast for software developers about all the non-tech stuff and this week's episode every digit is a power of two whoa we're getting closer to 256 too we are another bit one more day another bit that's right we're six weeks away from saturating eight bits in our episode numbers not eight bits wait i want to thank our patrons yes eight bits don't you dare thank those patrons while i'm thinking about bitwise math dave we would have no way of knowing it's impossible give it up okay i was right sorry oh it's been a long time since

i've worried about uh powers of two values but i i kind of just had this moment of fear that i I've forgotten how many bits are in 256. I used to think about it every day, you know, 15 years ago. Yeah. It's like when a golfer starts getting the yips. What is that? You don't know what the yips are? No.

It's like old man golfer disease. I don't know if it's a real medical condition, but when golfers get older, they get shakier and it messes up their stroke. So you just notice, like jerk the putter or something. I'm not sure. What's it called when your pinky has a tremor and shakes because you've held your smartphone and stared at Twitter for too long? twitter yips the twitter yips that's what i have yeah i have i have smartphone related

repetitive stress injuries as do i but unironically actually truly in real life i do yeah me too i actually went to a hand therapist life-changing i'll say i want my life changed but first i want to read these patron names thank you to the folks who are supporting us at the level where we shout them out every single week. Thank you to Nick Cantor, the Agile Ventures Charity, Chris Hogan, Brayden Cain, Stephen Armandley, Philip John Basile, John Grant, Dennis Bogdanoff, Travis Saunders, Nick Hathaway, Oladapo Fadie, Kiaran Sveinsen, Ragnar Harasun, Christian Polanco, Roman Denisov, Fizzbuzz Influencer, Adrian Bordnick, and testingisdocumenting.org. Thank you to those folks. Thank you to everybody else who has supported us. You keep the show

going. You pay for the stuff that the show needs. It turns out it needs stuff and you pay for it, which is what i just said that's right switched around we have needs you have dollars let's get together yeah and because these people did they get invited to our slack group team channel community org we used to say cult but i think that was insensitive so we stopped until today yeah i've decided to not worry about offending the cult members yeah what are they gonna do yeah draw creepy signs on my grass and okay that does sound bad oh that was not an invitation by the way if you want to join this illustrious group you can go to softskills.audio and click support us

on patreon and then uh get an invite and help support the show thank you all right shall i read our first question. Yep. Okay. This comes from an anonymous listener who says, Our engineering manager keeps sneaking slash creeping on our private Slack channels. As an admin of the workspace, he can join any private Slack channel without being invited. I feel like this is an unacceptable behavior.

What should I do? Should I just reach out to him and ask him not to abuse his admin privileges? Should I set up a Discord server for me and my fellow developers? Or should I take the soft skills engineering advice and quit my job? Hmm. Have you heard the term shadow IT? I think I've heard you say it. Oh, well, I'm going to repeat myself, I guess. It's the idea that your company has some IT policies like use this software, don't use this software. And there's this shadow black market ecosystem of software that people use instead. Like, say everyone is supposed to use Google Drive, but you really like Dropbox. I don't know, like you'll figure out some way to use Dropbox. And this is usually said in a bad way as like, you need to get rid of shadow IT by providing better services. But in this case, I think this is a strong case for some shadow IT of a different way

to talk to all of your work folks without your boss being able to join. Didn't we find out years ago that terrorists were using like the chat feature built into certain online video games to plan their destruction? What? I don't know, but I'll find out if Google can tell me. yeah i mean i think that's a great idea in this situation you could all be on what i don't know what's popular now minecraft you could all just be on minecraft all the time and chatting with each other in there yeah it's good because it doesn't have voice chat so you can't uh

you can't swear at each other verbally just with text or with blocks you could i guess you could write things in blocks you could yeah if your it department disables the chat feature in minecraft yeah what how isis terrorists may have used playstation 4 there you go all right maybe it happened put it in the show notes that's crucial information i found it linked on google and that's good enough for me so we did this at a previous job we just set up an irc channel and relied on security through obscurity i don't think it was private it was just like you probably won't guess this name on this random chat software that nobody told you we use yep so if it's work related you should talk about in slack if you want to like complain about work with your friends i've done

that before not on work run chat mediums yeah turns out they exist you can create like a subreddit just for your team yeah you should figure out what's the the most conspicuous way you could do it that still prevents somebody from finding it right like buy buy domain names to send messages to each other or something like that in the dns text field yeah dns text field that would be great i wonder if i mean someone's done like telnet star wars i wonder if someone's done dns txt record chat over dns txt i love that that's a great idea wasn't there there's some company repel it that that released some new feature somehow it exposed logs of of requests people were making to their service and people turned it into a chat room they would send arbitrary

requests to to that would like have ascii art in them and their message and someone built clients for it so this was like it was an inadvertent disclosure right the logs were leaking i didn't read it so first of all ignore me but second of all i'm pretty sure it was some feature they did on purpose and they showed somehow like check it out you can see the logs okay i see and then people turned it into something cooler and so you could basically build a chat client by uploading code to repl.it with like console.log commands in it and then capture the output somehow no no you would just like send a get request somewhere and the url is like the message that would show up in the log because it would show someone made a request to

this end point okay got it i don't know what it is about me i love it when developers find unintended uses uses for things i don't know it just makes me happy it's like a rube goldberg machine but not in the bad way that you did it wrong at work in the fun good way that you did it to entertain yourself exactly it's like fun but you want to know when i hate it when when my customers do it because now now i have an implicit contract that i must never break like it turns out that any file storage you ever offer to anyone will immediately get used to store torrented videos yeah exactly it's kind of like in that theme and this is a way you can like upload your like tax records to share with each other and then bam somebody uploads season five episode

six of game of thrones immediately exactly great next thing you know the mpaa is knocking on your door yeah oh man yeah exactly anyway back to back to the the question at hand how do i boot my boss out of my private slack channels oh man why does he do this yeah it's gross so there are private slack channels at the place i work okay but they're very easy to get invited to it's basically like everyone that ever works with the team gets added to them okay i'm sure there are private slack channels that i can't see but i don't care i mean tree has fallen in the forest and i didn't hear it so it doesn't matter i'm wondering what your what your engineering manager is trying to do right is yeah are they monitoring for bad behavior somehow are they trying to figure out

if you're actually slacking off and not working like i know that people on my team are playing starcraft i think it's cool yeah play on i didn't have to sneak in to find that out yeah they invited me i can tell by the fact that you haven't produced any code in three weeks you and i are both engineering managers at this point and i can barely keep up with the channels that i am invited to yeah that's a good point maybe they don't have enough work to do yeah maybe you as a team are doing too good of a job and there's nothing to manage so he's out there looking yeah make some fires that'll also make them look good because they'll be able to solve the problem yeah this giant scary problem will pop up and then they'll be able to be the hero

yeah i mean it'll take their attention away from slack trolling slack lurking honeypot channels you need to make some honeypot channels yes get them to join love it see if you can like is this what they did with honeypots you like drop information in that channel and see if your manager brings it up in some other context where the only place you put it was this channel that you're trying to get them to sneakily listen in on and then you'll find out if they were actually reading it some little interesting nugget that you know would be valuable to share in a meeting that you're in with that same manager and see if they say it but that i mean that's just a detection mechanism and you already have a detection mechanism i guess you already know yeah yeah

you can just look at the member list but i think the the word so i've heard of honey pots honey pits and tar pits so a honey pot is like an attractive target for a hacker that has you know it's like a fake exploitable machine on the internet and then a honey pit actually i don't know what a honey pit is let's get the tar pit wait no actually no tar pit doesn't exist it is honey pit honey pit i'm pretty sure i'm not going to google this i'm just going to look stupid and leave it out there but a honey pit is where you're trying to trick bots into wasting their time traversing endless urls and links to each other right and so it basically consumes resources of people that are out there harvesting email addresses and not doing other nefarious things

with bots this is like a 20 year old concept by the way i don't i don't know if it's still in use anymore nowadays they call it a tar pit back in the day maybe they called it a honey pit dang it my instinct was right the first time i know you should have stuck with it so bring it on home now we know about tar pits and honey pots i'm saying create a tar pit of slack channels with all this bot traffic in there that just burns up your boss's time trying to find the real slack channels which are intermingled yeah you could even do i mean just invite randos from the internet right to join your slack teams yeah just just you need noise in there find some create like a fantasy novel discussion group yeah a group of acquaintances that are playing that one online

final fantasy game move away from discord use my company's slack it stores logs forever and has voice chat for free and as a side benefit to me my boss will never find my messages again yep you could oh here's what you do every week you have a rotating slack private slack channel name that changes based on a hash of the day of the year and the and the year you know and so it's constantly shifting like a like an enigma machine from world war ii germany yeah so your boss is always trying to break the code because he doesn't know what salt you used every day yeah so you you switch to a new channel on a regular interval yeah using a secret key as your hash all of these will work yes pick any one of them i do think it's fair to ask what are you trying to do i feel like in a

small enough org i would just make all channels public yeah maybe that's an option and then you can just say there's not this expectation of privacy that we are that we are destroying by having this manager creep on stuff but it also does sound like they're trying to gather information in a way that's making the team feel bad might have some some unintended consequences why don't they just ask you their questions i mean let's be perfectly honest your boss has every right to be in private slack channels with you i mean yeah that's true that's like a feature of slack like admins can can see all the messages and maybe he doesn't even think it's surreptitious so i don't know that is a feature of slack right i just assume it is yeah i mean everything's

persisted forever who do you think's not going to read this as an individual contributor would you feel weird going to your manager saying hey how come you're looking at our slack channels like that that seems like a weird question to ask like of course your manager's looking at your slack channels yeah i mean if you made a slack channel called my boss really sucks then it's gonna be awkward to say hey why are you looking at my slack channel called my boss really sucks and then your boss will say why did you make a slack channel called my boss really sucks and then even even if you have a more innocent slack channel name still the boss's question is like why do you have a channel where you don't want your boss in there hmm yeah i mean

this just turned it turns around fast in my opinion so i don't know i feel like it's fine for your boss to be there if i were your boss i would not want to be in a slack channel where people didn't know i was in there yeah i just i work for a really big company and i have no expectation of privacy on any text i ever send over the company systems i just assume that anyone at any time will be able to pull it out and like it might be inconvenient for me sometimes when yeah someone finds the dumb typos i made or i might get in trouble for i don't know starting rumors that so and so isn't i can't think of something dumb enough someone's tesla is fake it's actually this carbon fiber body kit they put on a little geo metro yeah no it has to be

like a really fuel inefficient car that cyber truck is actually a hummer it gets four miles to the gallon yeah they'll find out my machiavellian plan to turn the company against this person by starting rumors about how inefficient their electric car is but if i wanted to have private conversations i would do it privately that's not slack yep except for our slack because we don't pay for it so we can't get the logs oh that's true wait is that true i've never tried i'm pretty sure we can't yeah i'm sure i guess i haven't tried either but i think that's a pay yeah that's true we have a slack community it's all occurs to me maybe this question is actually about us that's true well i don't know i haven't i don't know if they're

private channels i can't join we don't pay so no i didn't know i don't know all right have we answered the question i think so i which i mean to summarize i would say your boss has every business or every right to be in your private slack channels and why did you think otherwise and should i set up a discord server yeah that'd be fun you should do that yeah sure all right question answered i will read our next question thank you guys for your awesome podcast i have recently begun my foray into management with the reception of my first subordinate i selected him due to his illustrious undergraduate project presentation and his ability to expound on the intricacies of said projects. But I'm having a hard time managing my expectations. He is unable

to complete the simplest of tasks, often going off on tangents that, despite being given the answer, result in spending hours in unrelated rabbit holes. Additionally, he asked for a high salary and was promised an increase scheduled ahead of review. As a first-time manager, I worry that I am inflicting unrealistic expectations, especially since software is my passion. I enjoy learning new languages and technologies what is the best way to let him know that he is not meeting expectations how can i say this without my typical brashness which will ultimately result in me blurting out something to the tune of you aren't nearly as capable as you made yourself out to be huh software is my passion i always think of graphic design is my passion yeah have you seen

these dave it's a meme about design that will sound really dumb when i say it out loud so as memes do stop saying it yeah okay never mind oh come on just forget it it'll be great no i i mean i did like that's it i just that's all it is it's just uh it's it's it's like a crappy rainbow background that says uh with graphic design is my passion on it it's someone's fake joke portfolio i like it so i guess the software equivalent would be like software is my passion and it's like i don't know what it would be some like books about functional programming i think no it'd have to be something that clearly demonstrates it is not your passion or you're really bad at it but all the things i can think of would be hard to do or demonstrate that you

knew what you were doing kind of right i don't know it's impossible software can't be your passion that's the summary that's right not in a meme not in the meme space anyway not yeah you can't you cannot translate this into a program actually i'm sure you can and i want our listeners to tell us how we would do it okay i also like the illustrious undergrad project presentation yeah and it makes me think of like illustrated manuscripts for some reason okay where so there's like a powerpoint slide and it's got this giant hand-drawn like e at the beginning of the letter of the sentence instead of helvetica oh yeah like an old english letter yeah i don't know maybe he's dressed in a tunic okay a doublet of some sort okay fanfare i don't know illustrious undergraduate project

presentation that's what makes it illustrious in your mind i think so it's like fancy lettering fancy lettering elegant garb yeah and a fake british accent of course or if you're from i mean if they're from the uk then i'm not sure what you would do yeah now what where do you go you can't go up from there yeah you gotta turn it country no wear a farmer hat and boots and what's higher status than cowboys in england nothing no that's clearly one thing i know about english culture it's that i don't remember if this was a conversation with you but where you or someone who reminds me of you was talking to a british person and just saying have you noticed that whenever british people speak americans think they're automatically intelligent just by their

accent the british person says yeah i've heard that before and then the american says did do british people think the same about americans and the british person just cracked up just started laughing gosh no heavens no good heavens oh man so daft all right so all the helps out of the way got that out of the way now down to business round two how do you tell a brand new engineer out of school that they are not performing that they're completely distracted not producing anything but you're also worried that you might have an inflated expectation of what a new hire out of college should be doing yeah have you ever worked with any other new hires as a as a peer this is their first person they're managing it sounds like

but i wonder if they have any experience just comparing them to other folks they work side by side with yeah and this this particular question asker is concerned about comparing the new person with themselves because they consider themselves to be kind of a high passion or as i was once accused of being hyperactive engineer who yeah yeah true true story maybe some other time and so the baseline is all screwed up like maybe i'm just overly ambitious and maybe i'm just too good yeah maybe i'm just fan freaking tastic no one can measure up next to me yeah so you shouldn't compare people to yourself you should compare people to some impossible to create but but theoretical objective expectation of performance yes use that standard yeah well it is impossible

i don't know of course i've ever seen no one no one knows how to measure this stuff but you should be able to have something besides this person doesn't do what i do to judge and evaluate them well the way that human beings tend to do this at scale and as objectively as possible is by bringing in unbiased observers to make comments on it people who don't have a horse in the race and who can objectively measure because of some level of expertise what they think is a good performance and then you come to consensus and that's pretty much i think the only way we've ever really tried to tackle the objectivity problem of measuring performance in software. So you're saying get an opinion from somebody else? That's right. And the way that I've

seen performance appraisals done really well is where managers actually don't form an opinion themselves, but rather they collect opinion data, if you will. Data is probably too strong of a word, opinion facts opinion truth maybe the term is data points they collect data points from other individuals who have vantage into this person's work and then they form an opinion

from those collected data points but you have to be careful what you choose but anyway long story short yeah you're probably you are right to question your own ability to measure this person's direct performance as a first time manager I think you need to take the personal stuff away from it completely

though like you can't You can't talk about how you would spend your time to make up for these mistakes by studying more outside of work or something like that. That's not, it doesn't matter what they do outside of work. It matters what they're producing. You should be able to have some rough idea of like, this is a small, easy task and I'd expect it to take a day or so. And it took you like two weeks and you got really stuck on it. And that's not our expectations. It's to do that faster.

I think you have to tell them too and a performance an increase scheduled ahead of review so you're saying that that means we'll hire you and then at this date you'll get an increase without any conditions on it is that what you think this is Dave I think what they're saying is that normally they would be scheduled for a review and salary adjustment at a certain time probably 12 months from hire but that they decided in this case part of the offer to entice this person to join the company was that they would do an accelerated review at let's just say the six month point instead yeah with a target based on performance and that's pretty common offer language so i've had a situation kind of like this happened to me where i was really really

excited about a candidate and then the performance after we hired them just did not at all match my high expectations given how great the interviewing process went and boy did i feel dumb oh really yeah maybe that's the root of all of my interviewing evaluation nihilism is is that one instance yeah like i i was convinced this person will come in and be amazing and we made some accommodations for them some similar stuff like this around salary and and it's pretty awkward to go back and say hey like you know how you negotiated really hard and we gave you extra stuff well you're barely hanging on and yeah we wish we didn't do that that is awkward and that's why it's so important to i i just love that you had this experience actually that now you know

like now i love it yeah no well how long ago was this i don't know i don't know it was a couple years a couple weeks ago it's from the future isn't it great though because i've had this experience too where it opens you up to blind spots in your own interview process where you say oh i wish i had thought to ask x where x is whatever bad behavior or or knowledge gap or behavioral problem this person has yep so next time that'll help you this time it will not that's right yeah i think you got to tell him the closer it is to when he expects to get his scheduled raise the worse it's gonna be i think yeah for sure i mean if the performance is bad enough earlier is always better in performance feedback like this so yes if it's not conditional on his

performance then you're in trouble because it should be and you might have to make it conditional on his performance when he's not expecting it to be but if it is then you need to clearly communicate hey you're not conditioning it it's conditional on performance and it's not you're not doing it you're not putting in the conditioner that we needed just speak in obscure metaphors i'm sure it'll be fine what's the best way to let him know what is the best way to let him know i think as a manager especially as a first-time manager it does behoove you to get a second opinion on this before you rush in and say you're not meeting my expectations get that data point explain as objectively as possible explain the situation and be darn sure you haven't missed

some nuance because software engineering is nuanced and a lot of times you know as a manager the whole point of being a manager is that you can abstract away some of the details of the day-to-day work and become a force multiplier and let other people work and work through them to accomplish things. But sometimes what that means is that you don't have perspective on the unique challenges of the tasks that you've assigned the individual. And so they might have a really good reason why it took a long time and you should give them a chance to explain that. But in this case, it looks like the manager's got pretty clear vantage and the person's just kind of spending time off on tangents learning things. I kind of feel bad for just using a mocking tone and saying

learning things you don't learn things after school learning what do you think this is jeez we don't pay you to learn yeah anyway so that was that was dumb but let's let's just say i would get a second opinion and then i think i want to reinforce what jameson said it's never too early to give feedback and it can be it's very easy to be too late the last thing you want is this person walking into their six-month review that you specially arranged to them to find out, no, for the last six months, you have not been meeting my expectations. And the first thing they're going to think is, well, I wish you had told me so I could have worked on it. Yeah. A useful framework I've heard and experienced for giving negative feedback like

this is situation, behavior, impact. Okay. So you explain what the situation, where the thing happened was like this case it'd be i gave you this task it was laid out clearly this way and it had these i don't know expectations and requirements the behavior is you went on this rabbit hole you spent hours solving unrelated problems that don't relate to the task and won't really help us and the impact is now we're gonna miss this deadline or i don't know this other person had to stay late or whatever if you if you break it down like that then instead of just saying like you're too slow that's vague and hard to respond to and also hard to correct right if someone told me go faster i would cry first but then after i wipe my tears away yeah then i'd

wonder like what does that mean like how do i i mean i guess i'll figure it out like type faster like what yeah talk faster yeah i mean i already go really fast when i sprint from my bed when i wake up in the morning to my chair to sit down to work i don't know how much faster you could go without injuring yourself yeah that'd be unsafe i can't have that i love what you just said and this actually reminds me of a situation from a few seconds ago where there was a situation where you had you had a question from a listener and you answered it very succinctly and the impact was that i didn't have anything to say and i like that our witty repartee was damaged and then the and then the listeners all dropped and then we spiraled yeah this was the peak this

was the moment it all went down yeah it all turned around no i was actually i was using the situation behavior impact pattern to give you a compliment and say that you were meeting expectations oh thank you that's a good point you can use it to give compliments and specific compliments are really helpful too absolutely for some people a generic great job their sport is kind of demeaning but if you tell them more specifically it makes them feel better for sure one other thing i wanted to say you will probably suck at this you'll probably mess it up and if you don't that's rad but this is not a comfortable or normal thing for lots of software developers to do so you might have to go into it knowing that you'll try your best but you you might muddle

through it a little bit and that's okay and this is a skill you get better with with time and practice just like anything else and don't worry because this person's brand new out of college and they don't have any baseline to compare you against so they won't know if you're doing a good or bad job you will feature prominently in their career narrative yes everybody's got stories about that one person and yeah good to know you'll be remembered yeah you'll be remembered one way or another yeah i i just know i can pick out people who i'm like that person tells stories about me and they don't sound very good yeah oh well those are the voices you go to sleep at night thinking every night yep shoot i failed no one can tell stories about me that aren't great yeah have we

answered the question i think so best of luck good luck what can people do if they want their own questions answered go to softskills.audio and click ask a question where you can fill out our form and we just want to say thank you to all the people who do that every week we really appreciate all these great questions we will one day answer them all some days we get closer because we answer more than we get some days we get further behind but we haven't stopped the show yet so let me just say it's been a long time since we've answered more than we get that's true some uh some bad stuff has to happen to lower the question volume for us to catch up but we're committed to it yeah you realize that eventually this results in us like i don't know destroying the internet so no

and can send us questions right we have to fulfill this promise we made that we'll answer all the questions stop the questions stop the questions this this feels like a good time to say i remember after our first few episodes i don't know what it was four or five years ago and i thought yeah we'll probably do two or three of these episodes and we'll run out of things to answer yep look at how far we've come now we're plotting to blow up the ocean so we can stop the inflow of questions to catch up stop we've made it nothing jameson said should encourage you not to ask that question you've been thinking so please ask the question we still want it even though we are gonna have to boil the ocean to answer it all right thanks for listening we'll catch you next week