Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 250: The management track and active listening

Episode Date: March 1, 2021

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Questions I’m a Tech Lead at a decent sized corporation. If I want to grow towards a promotion my options are a more people management track towards Engineering Lead (basically a TL who also manages 1-2 other TLs) or a more technical track towards Staff TL. Where I’m struggling is I don’t know how I would actually work towards the Staff level, seeing as most of my time is spent wrapped up in mentoring, coaching, planning meetings, and just generally large blocks of time spent on Zoom. Have you ever seen someone move down that path? I worry I would be letting my other responsibilities slip through the cracks by focusing on my own technical advancement. How should I balance what my team needs from me vs. what I need to focus on to get to a role like that? Is the best way to get there 1 step back (to being an individual contributor again) and then two steps forward (working towards Staff Engineer then Staff TL)? Hello soft skills! Love the show and your great banter, keep the laughs coming. Do you have any tips for ‘active listening’? My manager is very, very chatty and our catch ups over zoom often last two hours or more. I find myself drifting in and out while he talks and then need to snap out of it when I hear something that might be useful. How do I keep focused in extra long meetings where we are one on one and the content is not particularly interesting? Thanks! Show Notes https://mediocre.dev/it-takes-more

it takes more than editing source files directly on production servers and calling it continuous delivery to be a great engineer this is soft skills engineering episode 250 i'm your host dave smith i'm your host jameson dance soft skills engineering is a weekly advice podcast for software developers about all the non-technical stuff like how to get away with continuous delivery by not actually implementing continuous delivery usually the thing you say after how to get away with is murder so i don't know what this says about editing files directly on production servers if you've ever hefted the continuous delivery book you know that it is a potential potent murder weapon it's a murder weapon you can't get through airport security with that book

yeah trust us this will help you go faster this ponderous thousand page tome it is kind of wild that this is just how it used to work in the php days you just continuously delivered all the time because your whole app reloaded on every request that's right hot reloading boom it was done it was so hot long before javascript i want to thank our wonderful patrons thank you to nick cantar the agile ventures charity chris hogan braden kane stephen arman lee philip john basile whoa changed your name sorry john grant dennis bogdanoff Travis Sanders, Nick Hathaway, Oladapo Fadje, Karen Sveinsen, Ragnar Hardison, Christian Polanko, Roman Denisov, Fizzbuzz Influencer, Adrian Bordink, and testingisdocumentation.org.

Thank you to those folks. Sorry that I mispronounced your names. I can't promise it won't happen again. If you want your name mispronounced, then go to softskills.audio and click support us on Patreon, and we will shout you out at a certain threshold, but at any number of dollars or monetary unit that you can convert into dollars you'll get an invite to our slack team which is great and happy and kind and i'm trying to think of another adjective nice impeccable impeccable table manners i thought you were going for more kind synonyms no just more good things you know i can only imagine the table manners are top notch in this community They know how many forks and where to put them for a fancy dinner.

Well, I mean, just for reference, I have literally never seen a single member of our Slack community put their elbows on a dinner table. I have never seen them slurp soup in a country where that is impolite or fail to slurp soup in a country where that is polite. Correct. They get it right 100% of the time. Oh, amazing website too. I'm going to take this one.

someone tweeted at us a website called mediocre.dev slash it takes more and it looks like they compiled all of the intros and you just hit a button and get a new random intro which is pretty rad so if you want to review the intros with words i should clarify these are text they're not audio snippets yeah that's version two yeah i wonder if you could turn this into those quotes of the day files do you remember those oh yeah the qotd or motd was the message of the day oh yeah yeah in your linux login yeah i need one of those of myself yeah you're such a narcissist but thank you for doing this this is cool we'll attach a link it is cool i i shared it with a co-worker at dinner last night and he just sat there kept tapping the button to read more and more and

chuckling it was good nice created a binge reader on your website yeah that engagement is really high yeah dave do you want to read our first question you bet i do this comes from an anonymous listener who says i'm a tech lead at a decent sized corporation if i want to grow towards a promotion my options are a more people management track towards engineering lead or a more technical track towards staff technically where i'm struggling is i don't know how i would actually work towards the staff level seeing as most of my time is spent wrapped up in mentoring coaching planning meetings and just generally large blocks of time spent on zoom oh that one hurts okay have you have you ever seen someone have you ever seen someone move down that path i worry i would be

letting my other responsibilities slip through the cracks by focusing on my own technical advancement how should i balance what my team needs from me versus what i need to focus on to get to a role like that is the best way to get there one step back to being an individual contributor again and then two steps forward towards being staff engineer then staff technical lead hmm so staff tech lead and then that's separate from regular tech lead these titles are weird let's just say that yeah these are weird i i haven't seen tech lead as a promotion track or an explicit role very often it's more like a responsibility meaning you haven't seen that as the title of the person who has the job yeah like you have been congratulations you've

been promoted to tech lead now you have been promoted to staff tech lead right i've seen it as a, as a hat that people wear at different levels. Right. So you're like level six and that implies that you'll be providing technical leadership for a team. Or, or like, I don't know, you have a team of five engineers and one of them is the tech lead because of, I don't know, maybe some tenure or experience or aptitude, but it's not, it's not like they have been promoted explicitly to that role. And now they are on a tech lead track. It's, it's just a thing that an experienced engineer who is good at it can do. The organizations that I've seen, which have a well-defined career ladder, which is a very small number of organizations, I will say, but the ones that haven't tend to be very big.

I've seen them where you have an individual contributor track and a management track. And every one of the management track titles has the word manager in it. And you're expected to do leadership, but it's more focused on people management, but obviously some technical requirements. and on the other side on the individual contributor track you are expected to do leadership but not the people management side of it so in other words you're making technical decisions you're designing systems that others can work within the confines of the systems you've designed you probably spend a lot of time on zoom you do that that's the thing in either of those yeah like the numbers go up and the zoom time goes up regardless of which track you're on

yeah yeah it's just you have different awkward conversations on each side you probably don't have to do performance reviews as a as a staff engineer yeah i'm trying to think of the awkward stuff you would avoid by being a manager i think you just avoid it all by being on the individual contributor track i mean the awkward conversations you have as an individual contributor was that you know this work isn't up to our bar our quality bar yeah i guess i don't like your code i like you i can't fire you but i would if i could and then the manager says i don't like you that's right what you're implying that's why i'm not giving you a raise this year yeah so there's an interesting problem that i think manifests a lot when people are considering

promotion which is that the business wants the incentives to align so that if you do stuff to make the business better you will get promoted right and that's not always true there's sometimes a gap between what you feel like you need to do to get promoted and what helps achieve valuable things for the company and there's often some pretty good correlation from what i've seen that people who get promoted i mean there's some false positives and false negatives but generally they have done something impactful so i'm kind of questioning the i worry i'd be letting my other responsibilities slip through the cracks like maybe you need to focus on the responsibilities that would get you promoted because that's a proxy for more impact and you've been sucked

into less impactful things just by trying to keep up with all the stuff people ask you to do i think i'm projecting this is called projecting right now my calendar is very full and then i get to the end of the week and i think what important like did i do the most important things and sometimes the answer is definitely no i i sure answered the stuff people asked me but i mean i went to all the meetings on my calendar i went i went to all the meetings i 100 meeting attendance perfect attendance you get a little certificate at the end of every quarter yeah gold star i actually didn't i skipped one and then oh the one i skipped i was supposed to attend i found out so i played the game and lost yeah yeah you know how all these different things like duolingo

and exercise apps they all have these this concept of a streak that they've gamified we should create like a google calendar or outlook meeting streak plug-in it's like the github yeah the github uh code contribution graph but yes for meetings uh-huh you can feel so proud of yourself for too long engineers have dominated the green squares it's time for managers to get their recognition their own green square i want my github profile to show all the meetings i attend that would be so funny you should totally build that well i can't because i'm a manager you're in meetings i'm stuck in meetings to build it hey i've got a special project for you fast track to promotion yeah right here exactly i need some recognition well so back to the

question here i i sense that there is an assumption or a presumption baked into this question that i think is wrong which is that if i stop participating in mentoring coaching planning meetings and other collaborative efforts, that that will be required to advance on this individual contributor ladder. I take issue with that statement because from my experience with career growth on the individual contributor track, I think it takes a more collaborative person and more skills of collaboration and getting work done through others, which inherently means spending less time on your own individual work and more time in communication, discussion, driving debates, things like that and so i think what might need to happen here is a mindset shift where you see

the value of working through others and scaling yourself out that way rather than saying well i just need to get really really good at elastic search you know and then i can be promoted yeah i mean it is true that you usually need to have be really strong in some technical area but you need the other stuff too i guess what i'm wondering is is the question asker saying i don't have time to focus on really growing my technical skills because i'm doing all this other stuff and how do i how do i do both of those things how do i get really good at elastic search if that's if that's my domain but i have to spend all this time on zoom where they're letting my other responsibilities slip through the cracks by focusing on my own technical advancement

yeah i mean if you're like me you say yes to too many things so if you can find a way to gracefully divest yourself of some responsibilities that will probably help you focus on more impactful things in general and i just need to do spring cleaning of things i've said yes to every so often where they've just piled up in the corners i said yes two years ago and i'm still doing this thing like why am i no i'm gonna say no now took me two years to recognize so you could do some pruning and have a little bit more time that makes sense so in other words maybe maybe there's things that don't help you in any regardless of which track you're taking just cut those up yeah or i mean not that they don't help you that there's just the opportunity cost is too high there's other

things you could be doing with that time that would be more helpful than illustrated manuscripts of expense reports or something which you agreed to do for finance for some reason you never understood but you can't stop because you said yes yeah you're drawing some like weird rabbit goat hybrid on the branches and the margins of the excel spreadsheets and they really love it They really do. It makes them so happy. Yeah, and how could you take that joy away from them? You can't, which is why you'll get good at illustrated manuscripts and not being a staff tech lead. I agree with your point that they're often success in those roles is more collaborative than individual.

There are some people who are just the rare geniuses who just go into a room and make a thing and then show it to everybody and everybody loves it. But most people are not that person. that's right and and that person that style of work tends to usually cause more harm than good yeah and even so i'm trying to think of i don't know these people at all but my impression is like the guy who wrote redis or the guy who made hashicorp they make like console and all these fancy enterprise tools like they seem like fantastically productive individual contributors who just crank out amazing systems but the impression i get is most of the work they do now is is like organizing and guiding as the things that they have built have grown and become more

impactful even if they still have these really strong chops of building very solid systems they're still working through other people because they need more than they can just do by themselves right see and and i've heard this described as the breadth engineer or the depth engineer and i like that most people who have advanced to higher levels on the individual contributor track I find are breadth engineers, which means they are extremely effective across a wide array of domains, and they collaborate well, and they can be a force multiplier to help other people do better work and more work. But the depth engineer is a little bit the opposite.

They know one domain extremely well, so their input is very valuable. You know, maybe, like I said earlier, I said elastic searching. Maybe they are the search expert, and they don't necessarily work well with lots of other people. they don't necessarily create like a beautiful architecture that like 25 other engineers can work within but they know how to set up a search system and make it work for you and that talent is very rare i would say the ratio of those is like 50 to 1 breadth to depth in terms of what yeah the industry needs yeah that seems true it's probably concentrated in specific fields too like

if you're doing i don't know compilers or something or like some very specific niche machine learning then maybe you have more individual experts or depth engineers i guess yeah but yeah but especially for normal business development i don't know software to to make money off of i i think you're right that that's very much breadth over depth yeah so on this question you know the question that just keeps niggling at me is should i stop mentoring coaching and helping my team plan in order to develop myself and i'm like well if you're going to go for the depth engineer role then maybe maybe you need to cut all that stuff out and just focus on your elastic search skills you know but i doubt i doubt that's where this person is going

and so to me it seems like a paradox to say i want to get really good at influencing lots of engineers and being a force multiplier and working through others but i don't want to work with anyone and i i'm going to focus i'm going to cut out all my mentoring time so i can focus on getting really good at working with others exactly exactly like yeah i've never met a senior individual contributor like a staff principal level individual contributor who's not also an effective mentor with lots of mentoring experience and time yeah well you convinced me it's answered okay great congratulations to me i guess should we move on to the next question yeah will you read this one i will this is from another

anonymous listener they say hello soft skills love the show and your great banter keep the laughs coming do you have any tips for active listening my manager is very very chatty and our catch-ups over zoom often last two hours or more i find myself drifting in and out while he talks and then need to snap out of it when i hear something that might be useful how do i keep focused in extra long meetings where we are one-on-one and the content is not particularly interesting thanks oh no would this be better or worse that it's happening over zoom than in person worse i was gonna say better because you can you can do other stuff more you can multitask less obviously it's like jameson are you there hello hello you're just here in the background the frantic

clicking of i'm hang on i'm busy clicking on heads in counter-strike what were you saying again by which i mean i was finding the mute button yeah oh my gosh two hours on zoom with one person who you're not interested in i just imagine a two hour a regular two hour catch-up stuck in a room with another person where you can't multitask is your boss and you can't multitask like i don't want to be stuck in a room with a really good friend for two hours with no escape when we're not talking about work what about me it's never happened yet so i guess we'll have to try it we'll find out yeah i wonder how many hours what what's the ratio of time we spent together in person versus virtually it's gotta be pretty outrageous it's

gotta be a hundred to one yeah at least 200 to one yeah we'll change that in the in the in the good times soon to come i guess a little insider info about this podcast jamison and i we never do this in person and we never turn on our cameras so when i see jamison in person which is about once a year maybe yeah i am always surprised at what you look like yeah i just i'm like oh that's jamison that's after you moved across the country to be closer to me that's right we live like half an hour away now and we still don't see each other i think i think we see each other about the same amount as when we lived on the other side of the country from each other actually we may have seen each other more when i was on the other side of the

country that's true because yeah you would come you would come into town for like a special occasion and i would think oh dave's here we'll go hang out yeah but now that i'm here he's always here yeah what's the point okay take you for granted and long story short even we who spend a considerable amount of time together each week probably would never do this no two hours one-on-one oof oh yeah i don't think your problem is you are bad at active listening that's not i don't think getting really good at active listening will solve this um unless i mean that would indicate that your manager can tell you're not listening and instead of saying like hey pay attention they just keep talking and talking and talking until you come

back to pay attention and they just know that you're drifting off and instead of pointing that out they like lull you into a blissful daze i don't know yeah you're just gonna be tired from listening even harder for two hours yeah so maybe the goal here is to go into like a trance-like state where you can be you can be triggered reawakened from your trance at all the right moments this is this would be awesome and once you kind of nail that you should see how long you can go three hours four hours i mean there are technology tools that could help you as well i've seen people with those zoom backgrounds that make it look like they're there but really it's a video and you could have some kind of like thing that detects silence and sticks in an uh-huh uh-huh

and just keep the conversation going oh i mean it's very chat yeah the real question is how do you tell your manager hey two hours is too long for a catch-up and i can't pay attention and it's not interesting like that's hard to say to your manager but that's the problem here it's not it's not you're bad at listening your manager is bad at listening if they're talking for two hours yes or you know the glass is half full your manager is really good at talking usually they are though i feel like talking good is a is a thing that concentrates in managers in and out while he talks and they need to snap out of it you should just say hey i'm gonna zone out for a little bit when you say something i need to pay attention to or that might be useful

can you make sure i'm like let me know and then just yeah how do you say this because because it would be hurtful probably if they assume you have this great friendship you're just hanging out it lasts so long because you have such a good time together yeah and and you are just dying inside the whole time this is tricky how do you preserve their feelings i mean the way that this happens and friendships is with excuses and ghosting yeah oh so in an engineering work environment the answer is fake alerts from your production system that call you away ah yeah okay that just happened to take place at about the 45 minute mark into every weekly one-on-one so you just have a script that sends out an alert i was thinking you actually break stuff but you have

a much better idea yeah you could even put it on a cron job and then add some jitter in there like your one-on-ones are probably at the same time every week uh-huh plus or minus 20 minutes into it yeah then then it's random ish yes it's perfect oh man i'm really bummed because i just got this alert and i was really loving what we were talking about but i i really got to take care of this do you do you understand yeah you know weekly topic was so interesting to me but I'll have to catch up on the thing you were talking about next week. Sorry. And you could script that too.

Yeah. You're not even there. You could do like a deep fake of you saying those words with randomly inserted phrase. You could. Your job has now pivoted. Good news. You're going to get a huge raise when you become an AI expert. Yeah, exactly.

How much, where's the payoff point? How much time is it worth investing into building this thing to save you time? Sounds like you've got about two hours a week already allocated for you to work on this. So I've given feedback to bosses before that was difficult for them to hear and difficult for me to deliver. But they had shown signs that they were open to receiving feedback. I don't know what it's like with your boss here. And if they're not open, then that's kind of a tricky thing. But if you feel like they've been open to feedback in other ways, I don't know of a secret sneaky way to do this besides saying, I want this time to be useful and I feel like it's not, or I'm having trouble keeping up with all my work commitments or I don't know, maybe ask them what they're hoping to get out of this time that you spend together.

What are you hoping to get out of this? Because I'm getting nothing. Yeah. I don't know if there's a way you can communicate that without being, if you're too subtle, then they won't get it. Yep. So you can't be too subtle. If you just say, hey, how do you feel about these one-on-ones? they'll be like great i want them to be longer i miss the time we're not talking together

my least favorite time of day is when this meeting ends yeah when you're saying excuses and ghosting i was thinking like you would have to go wash your hair or something hang on i have to go talk to my other boss sorry children are really good at interrupting meetings yeah that's true we're all working from home now there's definitely something at your house that can distract you they come with additional overhead but yeah they are good for that because you're saying if you don't have a child this might be a reason to do that yeah okay yeah i mean you could adopt you know it's not very hard it's not hard to have kids yep there are worse reasons i am having a hard time imagining

a worse reason for having children than this i mean they all get pretty bleak so let's move on what you were going to say. I was going to offer a serious suggestion, which is if you're worried about hurting this person's feelings, which is a valid concern and one that I would not encourage you to do, meaning I would not encourage you to hurt their feelings, you could say, I'm going to take a calendar inventory and I'm going to identify all the blocks of time on my calendar, especially meetings, and try to point out for myself the objectives for each one and see if we're meeting those so for this meeting could you help me define what the objectives are and i'm also going to do this for my other meetings which by the way this is a good idea to do anyway speaking of spring

cleaning uh your old things you've said yes to but you know you could do that and then talk about those objectives with your boss and then say okay i think we can meet these objectives and save ourselves a little time you know and maybe i don't know the way this backfires is when your boss says my objective is you're just a really good listener and i just need someone to talk to i just really enjoy spending time together that's a brilliant idea and i like how i said this is impossible to do without hurting your feelings and then you said why don't you do this thing that won't hurt their feelings um i learned stuff yeah i like that idea that's rad all right so traditionally in one-on-ones they're supposed to have a defined role and if your manager can't

articulate that then they're just kind of copying what they've seen other people do so i i would expect a good manager to know what they want out of a one-on-one or a regular chat time with a report and some people have different definitions but they should have something yeah i mean a common thing i hear is like you're not supposed to just use them to catch up about status i guess that's kind of my philosophy that i try to enact and sometimes fail at but it's about all the other non-status stuff about work of career direction and feedback and things that are concerning on the team or things that are going well and just all the other stuff. But that's a pretty loose definition. So if I was taking two hours, I could say like, yeah, it's all the other stuff. We're

not talking about status. We're talking about the big game coming up. So maybe with this person, you need a tighter definition than that. When you said the big game, I just couldn't help but think of the IT crowd. Did you see that ludicrous display last night? I don't think I've even seen that clip i've just heard people quoted enough that i know oh really i know it's a thing that's funny yeah i like your suggestion dave they should do that okay well let's just rename the show to do dave's suggestions yeah dave's suggestions oh i just really think we need to have listeners start signing a waiver saying do not hold us responsible for the ridiculous crap that we told you to do yeah someday maybe that's an extra high level of patreon support is uh you can't hold

us responsible if you if you give us enough money it comes with a guarantee yes this advice is warranted against defect for one year yeah it's like those dual open source licenses where yes you pick the license this is the enterprise support plan of soft skills engineering that's right oh man well what can people do if they want to ask their own questions and consider the support plan just click go to soft skills audio and click on our pricing page where it says for enterprise pricing call one of our reps don't you hate that when it's like five dollars per user for the professional version and for the enterprise version call us i'm like oh this is gonna be a lot yep okay well anyway if you want

to get your question answered you can go to softskills.audio and click ask a question where you can fill out our form we just want to say thank you to everyone who does that we really appreciate the steady influx of many wonderful questions thank you we will catch you next week