Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 255: Only positive feedback and overworked and siloed

Episode Date: April 5, 2021

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Questions Hey there! Thank you so much for the amazing podcast. In my current job I work with an incredible (and very strong technically) team, and I like working with my manager a lot. BUT, during all 1:1s, and annual reviews the feedback is always that I am doing a great job and there is never a negative nor constructive criticism. However, I have been waiting for a promotion for more than a year, I never get assigned to the shinier and more challenging tasks/projects, and for the merit review I was put in the “good” bucket (not great, not the best). So, if I am always doing a great job, what else can I do to get this promotion and be trust worthy of shining projects? Jon asks, I’m having a hard time at work. There is so much to do my team can barely spare the time to collaborate on anything. Even when I ask for help, the overwhelming stress usually results in a snarky response. I’ve been working here for a year under these conditions and I’ve learned a lot but we never talk to each other…I feel like I still don’t have the whole picture because I’ve basically never been onboarded. I want to collaborate with my team but either the organizational structure or sheer amount of work is keeping us in silos. Trying to break them down usually lands me in the dog house. What the heck do I do now? I feel like if I stay I’ll only ever get year 1 dev experience, but I also feel like I’ll be totally useless to any real development team.

it takes more than turning down meetings by saying let's do this over email and then never checking your email to be a great engineer this is episode 255 of the soft skills engineering podcast i'm your host jameson 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 sometimes i get called out for wanting to do asynchronous things and that meaning not wanting to do anything that's code for how about we talk about this never yeah that's just part of my secret prioritization strategy which is see if someone bothers me about it later do you want to thank our patrons dave yes i want to say thank you to those that

are contributing at the level that gets them a shout out every week they are monkey face emoji Jonathan King, TestingIsDocumenting.org, Adrian Bourdink, Roman Denisov, Fizzbuzz, Influencer, Oladapofadi, Yee, Kiaran Sveinsson, Ragnar Hardison, Nick Hathaway, Travis Sanders, Dennis Bogdanoff, Brayden Kane, Stephen R. Munley, John Grant, Taras Haru, Chris Hogan, The Agile Ventures Charity, Nick Cantor, and Philip John Basile. If you would like to join this illustrative crew. Illustra- like exemplary? I just change the suffix for fun once in a while. anyway if you if you'd like to be called out you can contribute an exorbitant amount of money to the show every week sorry every month and we'll call your name out every week you can do that on softskills.audio go click the support us on patreon button if you contribute any dollar

amount greater than zero we will send you an invitation to our slack community which is a super fun place to come and chat with other people get get deep personal and professional questions answered and they actually get people there actually give serious answers unlike the show they're really off brand so i don't know who's overseeing that but there's good serious answers there unlike the drivel that we produce every week on the on the audio i suppose we'll allow it the slack community is the yin to our yang that is a good way to put it yeah they they keep things balanced exactly should i read our first question yeah let's do it all right this is from an anonymous listener hey there thank you so much for the amazing podcast in my current job

i work with an incredible and very strong technically team and i like working with my manager a lot but during all one-on-ones and annual reviews the feedback is always that i'm doing a great job and there's never any negative or constructive criticism i have been waiting for a promotion for more than a year i never get assigned to the shiny and more challenging tasks and projects and for the merit review i was put in the good bucket not great not the best so if i am always doing a great job what else can i do to get this promotion and be trustworthy of shiny projects hmm okay merit review i was put in the good bucket not great not the best so are there only three buckets oh yeah i was assuming good was the middle bucket but it's the first bucket

you never know in like yeah that's true this could be some weird business speak thing yeah you're a you're a shining star and that's actually our worst grade like if you look in the sky the shards the stars are not that bright right especially compared to the sun so oh i just want to come up with a leveling system now where they all sound really really good so i assume this is an annual review process and it's one through five and they they got a three they got a fine they got a fine job but not not maybe what they're expecting given how positive the feedback was from their boss this reminds me of the time back in college toward

the end of my college career i went and took the gre do you remember that what that is isn't it the exam to get into some graduate schools yeah exactly it's like you're not smart enough to be a doctor. That's a different test. You're not smart enough to be a lawyer. That's a different test. You can go take the GRE. So I took the GRE and amazingly, like 20 years ago when I took it, they would give you your score as you walked out of the testing center. So you'd go sit down, take the test for four hours and then walk out and you had your score. And I looked at the number and I was like, whoa, four digits. That's really good. And I drove all the way home and then I got on my computer got on the internet and looked up what a good score was and for whatever dumb reason

i hadn't done this before i i went to the testing center and i realized hmm yeah that's not really great like four digits is kind of like minimum passing grade so yeah that's how i feel like that's how this person feels it's kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy if you had if you were the kind of person that would get a five digit score you would already know they went to five digits yeah so you you sound like you work for a nice manager or at least someone who's afraid to be seen as not a nice manager and it's a good way to put it i identify with this manager because i have been guilty of this in the past of not wanting to hurt feelings or make someone feel bad or rock the boat or just have an uncomfortable conversation i just want everything to be happy

and chill. And that conflicts with the reality that there are limited resources. And even if it's not explicitly competitive where you work, there is some amount of competition for those limited resources of promotion and projects and, and glory. Yes. Yeah. You're, you're, you're seeing the, trying to think of a good analogy for this and you know how good I am at thinking of good analogies on the spot all right imagine an m&m okay a delicious hard candy shell except on the inside it's sawdust so that's that's this you've got the hard delicious colorful exterior of nice feedback but but you're not getting the underneath goodness of what's really going on yeah got it i think i got it yeah that's a good one that's a good one i'm just gonna take a moment and step

back and luxuriate in like how good of a job i did there i would say that analogy was good i would put it in the good bucket was it okay good i have no more questions good because i didn't want to tell you what the other buckets were yeah i i think the best thing you can do here is signal to your manager that you want more directness and and an easy way to do that is be direct say i appreciate the feedback thank you for being so positive but i'm trying to grow i'm trying to get better what do i need to do to get to the next level what do i need to do to get these projects handed to me or to get promoted or whatever and if they say nothing then then you can dig into that a little bit more because

then you get to say well why didn't it happen then and there should be something yeah they're like yeah exactly that's a great that was a great idea like if they say nothing then well that's just not an acceptable answer right yeah i mean there there are sometimes things outside of a manager's control around project allocation or reward allocation but if someone is is just amazing enough and recognizably amazing enough then there's a way to make it happen right there's probably some people on the border who don't who don't get things that they deserve because of limited funding or something like that but like the the top outstanding person uh is you want to be that person you don't want to you don't want to be someone where the manager has to fight a

political battle to justify you right so so let's talk about let's break that down so you you feel like you're getting positive feedback from the team and from your manager but there are projects that you want to work on that you're not getting there's basically four reasons that i can think of for why that might happen and now we're going to find out if i can actually say all four without forgetting i was i was very impressed because that's a large number well i feel like you have is this on a poster on your wall that you like wrote yourself or something is this some patented like dave wisdom no i was like i was running through a list in my mind i'm like okay i can think of two reasons and i thought of a third then i thought of a fourth but now that

we've talked about them and i've had a little laughter under my belt i'm sure i won't remember all four so let's just go down this rabbit hole and see what happens i thought this was just a leap of faith and you didn't have anything and you just picked a number and we're like and now they will come to me well we're about to find out okay so reason number one you're not getting on the projects your boss actually doesn't think you can do them and doesn't want you on those projects that's that's just option one option two it just has never occurred to your boss just because they haven't thought about it and you haven't told them you want it and so it's just they're like

oh i'd be happy to put you on there i just didn't didn't think about it option three there's some other problem like lack of resources but it's not related to your skill it's just that maybe there's someone else who's like super way more qualified or the opportunity just hasn't come up for a team change or there hasn't been a new project since they've started noticing how good you are or something like that and as predicted i can't remember option four i have option four i'll save you hit me option four is that you are working on something that they don't want to pull you off of ah maybe there's not a good replacement or the thing you're working on is important but you just don't want to do it or whatever right oh i just thought of option five which is that

you're working on projects that other people complain about and you're the one person on the team who doesn't complain about working on these projects and so it's not about not wanting you to work on those other projects it's about the opportunity cost in the form of complaining from others that would happen if they pulled you off the ones you're on yeah that kind of fits in with the like too nice to give direct feedback piece too because yeah it goes both ways yeah they just don't want to deal with with unhappiness so they pick the thing that will make the team the least unhappy like apparently right hmm so they're really i mean there may be a sixth option here i don't know probably but probably not i feel like we pretty much covered i feel like we pretty much

covered the universe here and and so if you're comfortable with all with hearing any of those then it's time to have a conversation with your manager where you say i want to be on these projects what's holding you back yeah i i think the first part of i want to be on this project is is important too because the question asker did not state explicitly they said they're they've been waiting for a raise and and hopefully they have said or a promotion i mean hopefully they've said i would like a promotion and are working on a plan with their manager but it's possible they're just they're just hoping that it happens and yes and then it probably won't and same with the project assignment if uh so so asking is the first part and that solves yes problem one i don't

remember it was definitely one of them though yeah i think it was number one yeah i think it was good good memory this i think you know if if quit your job is our number one piece of advice i think our number two piece of advice is that the best way to guarantee you don't get something is by not asking for it yeah that's uh good advice yeah that's why we give it but but seriously i mean i'm just reading i may be reading into the question here too much but the question asker didn't say i've asked for a promotion my manager has told me these are the criteria to get the promotion and i'm working on them the question asker just said i've been waiting for the promotion and haven't it hasn't happened and i've been waiting for getting assigned

to a cooler project but that hasn't happened and i mean waiting for things to happen in a kind of a professional environment is a pretty surefire way to make them not happen and i gotta tell you like managers they usually don't mind it when you ask them for things that you want yeah i i just keep going back to the this person this manager's is really nice and if you can signal to them somehow you want the truth and you're not gonna flip out on them or make it uncomfortable or i mean if they really do think you're not good enough you want to know that and you want to make it so that they will tell you that if they think that yes and it's possible that that's the reason and they're just not telling you because it's distasteful to them for some reason yes i had another see i was good

i should have said i have two things to say and called forth the second thing because i did have another thing now it's gone and it's because i didn't claim it in my experience the best way to make something completely slip out of your mind is to say that there's more than one of them and then by the time i finish saying the first one all the rest of them are gone yeah the absolute best way to make that answer come back to your mind is for us to just end the show and about 20 minutes later you'll be filling up a cup of water and be like oh curses i don't know yeah that's probably what will happen yeah but i do i do like your idea of saying look i'm i'm a professional i want to improve and grow and that means that i need to hear hard things i remembered it i

remembered what i was gonna say so for most of my career i worked for nice bosses for most of my like adult career i had some horrible bosses as a teenager i think that's tradition though and it was pleasant and they they were happy and fun to be around and were supportive but i definitely had this underlying feeling of like am i gonna get fired someday because i'm secretly just not performing and then i went to work for a boss who was very very intense and very open with criticism or free with criticism i guess and in some ways it was a nice change of pace because i felt like oh i i know where i stand like if there's something that my boss does not like i will know it instead of just hoping that i'm not secretly disappointing

them and uh there's i mean there's good ways and bad ways to do that but it is very freeing to to feel like you know this is what is expected of me and this is where i'm meeting it and this is where i'm not meeting it and it's yeah you're probably not meeting expectations somewhere even if you're doing great overall and and i've had to guess about that for my whole career uh until i started working with this boss and it was a good experience good but also kind of painful yeah definitely painful like like the kind of pain you feel when when you lift enormous amounts of weight and your muscles get shredded yeah or the kind of pain you feel when you start grinding your teeth at night in your sleep because you're so stressed out and you can't bite down for a couple months and yeah

it was a stressful time okay but but a growing is often stressful to go back to your muscle analogy yeah got it so i mean your manager is not that right now but but it's something you can push for you'll probably never radically change who they are but if you can yeah just just push very clearly for for wanting to know where you stand yeah that'll get you somewhere i love that have we answered the question yes okay shall i read our next one oh i it sounds like we both had the same idea at the same time okay here we go this next question comes from john who asks i'm having a hard time at work, there is so much to do, my team can barely spare the time to collaborate on anything. Even when I ask for help, the overwhelming stress usually results in a snarky

response. I've been working here for a year under these conditions, and I've learned a lot, but we never talk to each other. I feel like I still don't have the whole picture because I've basically never been onboarded. I want to collaborate with my team, but neither the org structure or sheer amount of work is keeping us in silos trying to break them down usually lands me in the doghouse what the heck do i do now i feel like if i stay i'll only ever get year one dev experience but i also feel like i'll be totally useless to any real development team hmm have you ever been onboarded really well i think so one time i never have someday i hope to see it you just get thrown in the deep end and yeah i'm trying to think i don't know what my team would say if if they had

been onboarded well either um some of them might say yes and some of them would definitely say no but not being onboarded well is sadly the fairly normal i think yeah there is i gotta say a healthy tension between spoon feeding new employees too much and really not giving them ownership over their own charting their own course on the onboarding and really kind of taking ownership of it as opposed to um you know throwing them on the other end of the spectrum is throwing them in the deep end and saying all right figure it out on your own i think there's kind of somewhere in the middle that's the sweet spot and it varies probably from person to person but probably on the most extreme end i just found out one of my friends got a job at facebook as an engineer

and i asked him what team he was going to be on and he said i don't know yet because the first three months at facebook are just spent in training and meeting a bunch of teams to figure out which one you want to be on and i was like whoa that's like extreme onboarding that company has so much money to spend i know i know oh man yeah it's you mentioned throw them in the deep end as one end of the spectrum and spoon feed them as the other and i think the default is throw them into the deep end because it's free and you just do nothing and then you have thrown people in the deep end right exactly well a better way to say that is all the costs are hidden that's true yeah you'll never know how much money you wasted by throwing them in the deep end oh

yeah good point but that's perfect that way they never show up on a balance sheet they never they never show up when investors come asking you know that's right where i want my costs swept under the rug so all right this is going to be a another strained metaphor i think have you ever read the book the structure of scientific revolutions no it's a book by a philosopher named thomas coon about how science advances and one of the things he says in that is that scientists study what is measurable not what is important or or like progress happens in areas where things are very measurable yeah and these big like what does it mean to be a good person like that's an important question turns out it's really hard to publish a paper with a like

statistical distribution on what it means to be a good person so yeah that i mean yeah that's the same like you can measure how much money you spend you can't how much you can't measure how much money you would have not spent had you spent this other money on onboarding very easily so yes and I mean, this harkens back to the greatest philosophical work of all time, which, of course, is Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which says, what is the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything? And, of course, they build a computer to answer it, and the answer is 42. And it's hilarious because it's exactly like what you just said. It's unmeasured. They don't even know what they're measuring, but the answer is 42.

Yeah. That's how science works. I mean, it kind of applies to this question because, I mean, the company isn't seeing the cost of working this way. They just see what they get from it. Yeah. Maybe that's some of the answer is needing to demonstrate what they are losing by burdening people so much. You're saying that John could actually try to alter the company culture by quantifying how much they're losing. yeah what if you just get real sad and then show them that you're sad because there's too much work

to do with like seven sad units yeah which is a lot yeah it would be six sad if we had one more person on this team yeah this is this is hard to management generally grows accustomed to cries of there's too much work to do we can't keep up with all this like they develop calluses over their heart and and learn not to care as much because it's it's the default state of everything it feels like is you're always behind there's always so much stuff to do you can barely keep up so there's a little bit of like how do you convince management that this time it's real all those other times maybe we thought it was real but it wasn't that big of a deal and we made it through but this time we actually can't afford to go on like this yeah and then managers

management is going to be like, ha ha ha. Yeah. I bet this company has very high turnover. Yeah. I mean, that's a classic cost of poor working conditions or pressuring people really hard. Yeah. So I don't know. As I read this, I'm like, okay, there's no way John is the new employee. I mean, one year in, maybe not super new, but pretty new. I got the sense that John was kind of new to the industry as well. I think it's very unlikely that John's going to be able to change this company for the better and make it a a positive healthy place to work where john feels like he's really getting the kind of experience he wants so that naturally leads into you guess the advice we need a soundboard i have different advice besides quit your job

so if if i accept your premise that i cannot change this culture i cannot change this organization so that everyone collaborates and we're not just crushed all the time under the amount of work to do you can also change yourself and become more resilient to it i have worked with a couple people who just were really good at separating real stressors from fake stress that comes from working at a business and they just have this calm easygoing reaction to things and i feel like that's something you could get better at right if there's some demo coming up the traditional jameson thing to do is like freak out and lose sleep and work crazy hard and ruin my life to try and hit this deadline and i feel like the zen person would say it's okay if we demo what

we have and that's not an existential threat to the company but to me like someone saying we have to do this is enough for me to just go sprinting off and get all get all worked up about it yeah And the good news, if they have a lot of turnover, they won't be able to afford to fire you for not jumping every time they crack the whip. It'll be too valuable. Yeah. You sound skeptical. No, no. I mean, it's...

I mean, the only thing easier than changing company culture is changing who you are as a person. Oh, there's something easier than that. What's that? Quit the job and get a new one. So that's a good point. Being overworked is common in lots of places. not being able to collaborate because you're so overworked and everyone's snarky and you can't break down silos i have not seen that as the common experience and it's you can find somewhere

that is better than that yeah that's like one of the classic solutions to being overworked too is you're you share the adversity with someone else it's even worse if you're just all alone in it but if you're if there's team working through this hard situation then that can be kind of motivating if if it's the right group of people and you enjoy the work yeah hmm well have you answered the question well i'm not sure because i'm i think i'm basically saying life's too short to stick around with the situation you should be able to find a better environment so quit your job i mean that sounds like an answer to me is that what you'd say too i would say i imagine you will end up quitting your job yeah but there's some growth that you can get out of this unpleasant

situation like most unpleasant situations and yeah maybe maybe look at that as some silver lining while you're looking for your next job i guess i don't know yeah yeah and i think i think also it depends a lot on what your leadership is saying. If your leadership is saying, look, this is just the way it is, deal with it. That's a very different situation than if your leadership is saying, yeah, we want to work on this. We want this to be better. Help us. Then there's hope. And I think you could stick around and make it a better place. Yeah, that's a good point. Okay, now we've answered the question. Okay. Surely. Must be. Okay, cool. Well, what can people do if they would like their own questions answered? Go to softskills.audio and click the ask a

question button. We really appreciate everyone who does that every week. The questions are wonderful and we love you all. We will catch you next week.