Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 251: Working with real live developers and the royal we?

Episode Date: March 8, 2021

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Questions I’m not a developer, and have never worked with developers. I have four years of systems/IT experience (ansible, bash, python, windows, etc). I got hired in a devops role at a company with many developers. How can I make sure I’ll have meaningful discussions (and a good learing experience) with software developers in my upcoming devops role at a new company? Will they notice that I don’t know what an enterprise communication bus is if just don’t ask but instead scribble something in my notebook? I just watched “How to crash an airplane” by Nickolas Means. It is about how the flight crew of an airplane crashed in 1989 yet saved 189 lives. The learning is that there are no heroes and teams can succeed only with inputs from all members in the team. All opinions need to be heard. And he also emphasizes that the captain used “we” in all his speeches. When it comes to interviews, the expectation is to talk about your personal experience. Using “we” during interviews would look like negative, right? Especially in leadership interviews, this is difficult since leaders are successful only with their team. Can you give us some strategies to balance this the best?

it takes more than converting your work from home setup into a peloton desk to be a great software engineer this is episode 251 of the soft skills engineering podcast i'm your host jamison dance i'm your host dave smith soft skills engineering is a weekly advice show where we answer your non-technical questions about the technical field of software development And I wonder, there's got to be a thriving marketplace for like Peloton leaderboard hacks, right? Do you know what a Peloton is? I should probably explain. I should probably make the joke even funnier by explaining it in exhaustive detail.

Yeah, how can I laugh if I don't know how, you know, why it's funny? Okay, imagine an exercise bike, but now you have to pay for it every month. It's a Peloton. It's got a subscription to this cloud service that lets you pretend like you're on rides with other people. That's right. Well, yeah. Fancy stats, etc. And can I just ask you to pronounce that word one more time?

Peloton? Peloton? Pelican? Just go ahead and say it the way you said it the first time. I like that the best. Peloton. Rhymes with pelican? Maybe. Yeah, now I need to look up how you pronounce it. I don't know. I thought I was just doing the normal thing. Maybe that was the joke all along.

Oh, okay. The joke is you just incepted this idea into my head that that's not how it's pronounced. You got me. Do you want to thank our patrons, Dave? Oh, I do. Thank you so much to those that are contributing on Patreon that earned them a one-time shout-out.

There is one new one-time shout-out this month whose name is Bananas. Thank you, Bananas. And our weekly shout-outs are, first of all, question mark which i think i think may have been i don't know if that's how you wanted us to pronounce it but we're going to save a question mark until we hear from you so thank you to question mark jonathan king testing is documenting.org adrian boarding roman denisov fizzbuzz influencer oladapofadiyi kayaran sveinsen ragnar hardison nick hathaway travis sanders dennis

bogan of braden canes steven armand lee john grant taras haruk chris hogan the agile ventures charity nick kantar and philip john basile if you would like to join this illustrious crew and or join our slack community go to soft skills.audio and click support us on patreon where you can give any dollar amount and we will send you an invite right on over to our slack community where you can chat with several hundred people who have joined have a great time good laughs good insights and i think jameson has indicated that they also smell really fresh yep it's a new enterprise slack feature where you can send direct smells instead of just direct messages uh it can be used for great evil though so the question mark person isn't that pronounced text encoding error that's

always what i feel like yeah it should be all right i'm gonna read our first question well before you do that i need to riff on question mark because i heard one developer who would occasionally refer to the question mark by a name that i think we should all use and it is hook whoa that's amazing were they were they a native english speaker yes and they use it in the context of a url so it's like you know slash foo slash bar hook foo equals bar oh my gosh it's incredible it's revolutionary i i have a five-year-old daughter and it's not too late to convince her this is what everyone calls it oh that's beautiful the time-honored tradition of parents lying to their children so that to make the world what the parents want yeah

yeah i had a daughter who referred to apostrophes as sky commas and i really wish that would catch on to sky commas oh that's so pure my daughter calls pancakes pam pam pakes and hurricanes hurticanes and like she's old enough to know better now but we you encourage don't want to corrector because it's so good we do that too we're like no you just keep saying it wrong please one of our favorites is instead of hand sanitizer it's hanatizer hanatizer which i think is great horn shoe instead of shoe horn that's a good one that's a great one all right i'm gonna read our first question okay do it this is from a listener named alex i'm not a developer and have never worked with developers i have four years of systems it experience ansible bash python windows

etc i got hired in a devops role at a company with many developers how can i make sure i'll have meaningful discussions and a good learning experience with software developers in my upcoming devops role will they notice that i don't know what an enterprise communication bus is if i don't ask but instead just scribble something in my notebook great great deflection technique just making notes about what you said it's not that i have no idea what you said wrong it is and later i'll tell you what the notes say my immediate reaction to this is to find esoteric corners of software development that nobody understands and just start rattling off buzzwords from that and may i suggest that functional programming is a good place to look those

people aren't programmers or developers either they're mathematicians so it's fine fine that you're not a developer what about i feel like mumps we've used that before as our go-to like old-timey tech stack mumps you say yeah isn't that a an old database oh you have brought that up before mumps system i'm gonna end up at some anti-vax website now your youtube feed will never be the same that's what the system tells you they tell you mumps is real that's what the system wants you to think huh i don't have good jokes about this i just have real answers which aren't funny i don't know my jokes are all gone wait they've ran out i thought we only had jokes or only had real answers i don't know which though yeah maybe i'll just be silent to

not reveal the truth about what i'm about to say not reveal if it's a joke or a real answer it's fine not to know what an enterprise communication bus is and it's fine to ask i think maybe it sounds like they have a little bit of concern because they're moving into this land of these experienced mystical creatures called developers who have these unknowable skill sets right and guess what that's what they think about you when you talk about bash and active directory and like yeah all the stuff you do and again we can think of a hundred things powershell yeah powerpoint as a programming environment you know how they are if you talk to old unix people they always have some

gnarly story about how they accidentally deleted most of the file system and had to recover everything with like half of a working cat program or something like that yeah yeah you need one of those but all you have on a windows machine is like powerpoint and somehow you like rebuild your registry by putting slides in the right order or something but you're on to something here though because it folks have a lot of stuff i mean all you got to do is start talking about firewall rules and most software engineers are just going to glaze over yeah yeah you're talking to the people who whenever they run into a permissions problem type chmod 777-r pseudo if it didn't work the first time what if we didn't have permissions that's how i'll solve this problem what if they

went away this is so true oh my gosh imagine a world like the early internet where there was no authentication because we just trusted everybody yeah let's go back to that right now and then you hit enter and suddenly it's like a time machine you and everyone who you know and everyone who they know suddenly have all the access that you want it's fine it's just a web of trust yes it's a web of complete trust a web of complete trust it's like more it's more like a trust fall that describes my covid strategy too what do you know just assume nobody has it that's right jump on down that water slide oh man you don't think too highly of software engineers is what i'm getting at and i am one so no i i know our deep secrets the deep the deep secrets are we

don't know nearly as much as you think we know so don't worry yeah the deep magic is is pretending like we know stuff yeah i guess i always feel this at a new job no matter what industry it's in where i feel like i need to establish that i know stuff and i'm credible and i'm also very worried about trying to learn the specific domain and not there's nothing that destroys credibility faster than pretending like you know stuff yeah so i'm always trying to find that balance when i first start of like how do i prove i do know stuff but also be clear on what i don't know so i learn it and they don't think i'm just trying to fake it and yeah so i don't know that this is unique to Maybe it's worse in your case because you're moving to more of a different field than you have been in the past, but this is fairly common, I think.

Yeah, it is, and I think it's exacerbated by the fact that many developers have a superiority complex where they think that IT folks or systems people or ops people are second-class citizens, and I've seen that. And so this is a headwind, and I'm sure that's—I mean, I don't know if you've verbalized that, but I'm sure that that's part of what prompted this question. like they're either feeling it or worried that they will feel this superiority thing yeah exactly just ask them about how their debugging session is going what do you mean or ask them how their sprint is like how's your sprint and then yeah just walk away cackling how do i make sure i'll have meaningful discussions and good learning experience yeah i think it's you can be smart and not know stuff at the same time yeah i think that's your goal prove that you are smart and also that you don't know stuff and and learn stuff and then you'll have meaningful discussions so asking

good questions is a really handy way of doing that and i will say there are a few things you can do to make this situation worse which is asking the same question over and over because you didn't pay enough attention or didn't ask follow-up clarifying questions when you didn't understand i think most people expect someone in your situation to have lots of questions but it can get kind of tiresome to have to answer the same question again and again so be really deliberate in tracking those answers and if you don't understand something in the answer, be really clear about that too. You know, I think one of the worst things you can do is just pretend to understand, but then not, that's going to come back to bite you.

Yeah. I've, I felt like I've used up my question budget before and the answer is total gibberish, but I, I, I just like smile and nod like, Oh, got it. And then go away and hope someone else answers my question, but that doesn't work well often. It's great in the short term. It gets you right out of that awkward situation. it does but it's like awkwardness debt that you just accrued you're gonna have to pay it back with interest yeah i think it's also okay to say you know thank you for that answer i didn't follow everything there so i'm probably gonna have to ask follow-up questions later like if you run out of time you know because sometimes you just get a feeling like okay i've asked four questions i

don't think i'm gonna be able to keep going um this person is busy so just say like hey really appreciate all your answers i'm gonna need some more clarification on some of these points but can we talk about them later? I'll, I'll do the research I can. And then maybe tomorrow I'll come back with a few more better informed questions after I've gotten my foundation built a little better. Yeah. I like that. I guess it's a game of expectations management, you know, like you're allowed to ask more questions, but only if you tell someone you're going to ask more questions. Yeah. And respecting, we've talked about asking good questions before. Respecting people's time is super important. I'm glad you said that. Have we answered the question?

i'm gonna have to get back to you on that i've got some info here but maybe i'll tell you tomorrow okay i'm trying to think of a joke about me just understanding that there's a thing called tomorrow that i've never heard of yep i think we can call this one answered just smile and nod yeah tomorrow that's my favorite flavor that's my see you later oh that was a good one all right do you want to ask no not ask bad james do you want to read our next question yes i'll read it this comes from an anonymous listener who says i just watched how to crash an airplane by nicholas means it is about how the flight crew of an airplane crashed

in 1989 yet saved 189 lives the learning is that there are no heroes and teams can succeed only with inputs from all members in the team all opinions need to be heard and he also emphasizes that the captain used we in all his speeches when it comes to interviews the expectation is to talk about your personal experience sorry let me re-emphasize that when it comes to interviews the expectation is to talk about your personal experience using we during interviews would look like negative right especially in leadership interviews this is difficult since leaders are successful only with their team can you give us some strategies to balance this the best so you've never been on a team yeah everything you've ever done has been by yourself i just

pulled myself up by my own bootstraps didn't have any i just kept pulling yeah pretty soon i was the vice president of bootstrap pulling myself so i'm guilty of this especially in uh management or leadership interviews because i think i naturally dislike taking the credit for accomplishments of the team and i view part of a manager's output as what the team gets done so to me saying we did this is sort of saying like implicitly and i helped support it and but in an interview you do want to know exactly what that means like well does that mean you just scheduled meetings or did you like help them solve problems or and and the we can obscure that for sure pretend like it's the royal we how about that

whenever i say we just imagine i'm saying i yeah but with a robe on a crown have you felt yourself do this in an interview before dave well or have you seen it in someone else maybe that's a better question constantly and so i i've seen this so much that i've kind of when i interview i've trained it out of myself because i want to tell well here's how i justify it because it does feel bad to say i did this i did that i did this you know it feels like just bragging but i've trained it out of myself because i've convinced myself that in order for people to get a clear picture of the situation you're describing you need to be precise about who did

what in the situation and when when everything is we i can't separate what you yourself actually did from what someone else did and so i'm you're painting a fuzzy picture so people do this all the time when i am interviewing them and i will often stop them and say i'm hearing you say the word we a lot i understand why you're doing that and i appreciate that but i need to get a clear picture of what you did and and people people pivot pretty well when i do that and they'll say well i you know i did this and then the team responded by building this so just interview with dave yeah i'll beat it right out of you that's the secret using we during interviews would look negative right especially in leadership so that that's true and and it's not so much the

word negative is maybe overstated there but it it paints like i said a fuzzy picture and i gotta tell you like i think as human beings we don't appreciate how ambiguous we are when we talk sometimes we will speak and the idea is just perfectly crisp in our minds but what ends up getting transmitted is so lossy that when it comes around to the other side you just have it can be completely the opposite of what you intended to say like how i mean to say i but i say we all the time yeah i'm just trying to think can you give us some strategies to balance this best yeah pretend like dave is there if dave is not there and what exactly did you do i think having a clear theory about your role is probably going to be helpful for this because

your team presumably has some broader accomplishment but if you have an understanding of while you're doing it not just after the fact of what specifically your job is to make that happen then it's easier to talk about that specific part in context of the whole accomplishment yes if you don't know what you're doing to help and then someone asks you what did you do to help a year later then you might not be able to answer like i don't know i went to meetings and sent emails i did that a lot yeah we hit enter on the keyboard to send the email i placed my finger next to the other person's finger on the enter key and we simultaneously depressed the key we only do mob programming yes and mob meeting attendance and mob email writing and mob executive decision

making on budgets. Yeah. Mob conflict resolution. Yeah. That sounds kind of violent. I think that means tar and feathers. I'll give an example of this. So, you know, as a leader, like, let's say your team accomplished something really great. It's sometimes hard to detach yourself. And as the leader of that team, to detach yourself and say, what was it that I actually contributed here? and sometimes the answer is you created an environment where the team could be successful and sometimes that takes the form of shielding them from distractions sometimes it takes the form of approving requests that they ask from you and sometimes it takes the form of just creating a culture where they can thrive and if you can state the specific things that you've done

it really helps you know you can say things like i clearly communicated to the team that everyone's voice was welcome as a result i saw that 80 of our team members participated in our design discussions as opposed to only half of them prior to my comments you know and these things are hard to track right like it's not like you can say i wrote this code that built this feature you know it's a little bit more difficult but the more you keep track of that the better you'll be actually as a leader anyway so you can understand what the contributions or sorry what the impact of your contributions are it's like you're a gardener just tilling the soil helping these little plants grow you don't make them grow the plant in this case is an enterprise service bus

i just work the soil make sure it has water and the enterprise complexity just grows and grows i tend the bits yes chaos monkey is sort of the equivalent of aerating poke a bunch of holes and stuff so it grows cutting off limbs yeah pruning yeah that's probably chaos monkey well i don't know you turn stuff back on after chaos monkey yeah put the metaphor has strained it's it's no longer useful i don't know i think my other answer to this is it's friday afternoon okay i don't know brains is that because we had a hard week jameson you sound like a kindergarten teacher now did we have a hard week jameson yeah yes i don't know i i'll be a good audience say something dave

we made a podcast jameson incredible did you hear that we made a podcast yeah that's that's all i got yeah i guess you weren't joking you were at the bottom of your well i am well i think the key insight here is that you're right using we in interviews is it does create ambiguity and ambiguity can work against you in an interview so can specificity if you haven't done very many important things so i don't know now i did exactly nothing on this project but boy was it successful yeah that's a good point about ambiguity working against you i wonder if that's a that seems like a case where bias could creep in as well yeah maybe if someone

has unconscious bias then vagueness would lead them to assume oh they clearly didn't contribute enough where in another person they might assume well that obviously they contributed look at look at what color their skin is you can tell so you can weaponize ambiguity by coming in like with all the right confidence you know just put kick your feet up on the desk you know you're like no problem crack open your energy drink and then just use we all over the place the more hoodies you everywhere, the better the assumptions will be about you to stack them on. What about, do you think this changes for an individual contributor? I know this question is about a leadership role, but what about, I don't know, just a senior developer or staff or team lead or

something? No, I think it's the same problem because I have interviewed so many individual contributors who say things like, we built this, we built that. And I'm like, I really, it always leads me with the question did this individual contribute meaningfully to that project or were they kind of just riding on the momentum of other people who were really carrying the team and when they say we i don't know i don't know and by the way when i don't know in an interview the answer has to be no like i'm not going to hire you if i think you might they said we but they probably meant i yeah they probably yes strong yes strong yes uh they really did a lot that's the plural day in this case yeah uh they mean referring to the their entire team of 50

people that they were probably on anyway yeah yeah like i the absence of data points in an interview of concrete data points to me it's as if i haven't interviewed you at all and i'm not gonna hire someone who i haven't even talked to so that that's what it feels like to me i dig it we dig it we dug it we do we think we have answered this question successfully well i do we do sorry i'm just picturing you with a robe and a scepter right now we do that reminds me of the comment somebody made in slack this week about you should get a staff gifted to you if you get promoted to staff engineer like a wizard staff that's what staff means yeah oh that's brilliant means you have an object of great power cool

i love that that implies that i mean is there like a king or queen engineer yeah royalty engineer i know there's a jack a jack engineer all right all right i think we're i think we did it yeah it's over let's wrap this one we answered the question what can people do if they want their own questions answered go to soft skills.audio and click on the ask a question button and we just want to say thank you to everyone who's asked questions you are the lifeblood of the show and if you want to support the show click the same go to the same website and click support on patreon and we love you we do all right catch you next week