Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 256: No degree ceiling and reverse whippersnappers

Episode Date: April 12, 2021

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Questions Hiya, thank you for the show. It’s very insightful and both of you are pretty charismatic. Without getting too much into details I had a number of difficulties when I was younger which caused me to never finish my computer science degree. I took a job as a Business Intelligence analyst because I needed to move out. Fast forward a few years and I am now an Engineering Manager for one of the biggest companies in the UK - nearly 2000 engineers and around 100.000 employees overall. I consider myself incredibly successful for my age, just turned 30. I manage two teams(11 and 4 ppl) that are seen as the top performers in the Data Engineering department, and that is credited to my leadership. I’ve always been very self conscious of the degree situation. I’ve tried to finish it online a couple times but I simply can’t find how. I am now being asked to apply to my boss’ position as Senior Engineering Manager, which could mean being responsible of 6 teams of around 10 people average and a sizeable budget. I live in constant anxiety from the possibility of hitting a ceiling or being confronted about the degree situation. While I didn’t hide it on the interview process It’s not something I advertise at all but I got to a point where I just don’t know what to do about it. And so that would be my question: What would you advice for someone in my position? I’m working at a small company where we used to have 2 developers. Both of us had at least 10 years of professional experience and both of us are around 28 years old. A few months ago, our bosses decided to hire 3 new FE devs and all of them come from bootcamp. That wouldn’t be so unusual, but all of them are 35+ years old and have families and basically just 6 months of experience. This causes a lot of friction in our team. We’re trying to “mentor” them in best practices and experience we’ve gained over time, but sometimes they don’t accept it, because we’re just too young for them (in one case 10 years younger). Do you have any tips how to approach “mentorship” when it comes from younger to older dev? And how to overcome the 10 year barrier? Show Notes https://www.simscale.com/blog/2017/12/nasa-mars-climate-orbiter-metric/ https://money.cnn.com/2012/05/13/technology/yahoo-ceo-out/index.htm

it takes more than squinting at your sql hard enough so you can call it machine learning to be a great engineer this is soft skills engineering episode one zero zero zero zero zero zero was that eight zeros i don't know my brain doesn't have the technology to count how many zeros in a row you said it was supposed to be eight zeros which is episode in in decimal for people who actually use that archaic base 10 system is episode 256 i'm your host dave smith i'm your host jameson dance soft skills engineering is a weekly advice podcast for software developers who like to think in decimal and binary jameson have i ever asked you why the hardware engineer always confuses christmas and halloween no because oct 31 equals deck 25 okay

acknowledged that's a really good way to respond to a joke machine learning means you learn about how the machine works right i'm learning about machines yeah i'm starting with levers simple machines should i thank our patrons yeah go for it i mean this isn't going to get any better so you just go to the patrons all right let's move on thank you so much to these people who have contributed for shout outs thank you to bananas and then thank you to the folks who contribute every uh month at the level where we shout them out every single month i mean week

close enough it's just so month is is a week in binary i'm still doing that conversion i meant i meant an octal month obviously yeah exactly thank you to ira chan eric larko smiling monkey emoji jonathan king testing is documenting.org adrian warding roman denisov fizbuzz influencer oladapo fadie karen spainson ragnar hardison nick hathaway travis sanders dennis bogdanov braden canes steven arman lee john grant taras harouk chris hogan the agile ventures charity nick cantor and philip john basile thank you to that group and if you want to join them or just help support the show you can go to softskills.audio and click support us on patreon click support us on patreon

the problem jameson is you have this eight bit system and we just blew past it with this episode yeah that was yeah that was my language center overflowing yeah you also just briefly called me dave for a second so did i think you have yeah i must be short-circuiting too i'm saturated yeah this is gonna get weird we're about to crash into the surface wasn't the mars rover crash an overflow thing because they use the wrong or was it just because they use the wrong measures you know what i'm talking about yeah so i do remember a i'm just looking it up i do remember a couple of different instances where one was a conversion between imperial units and metric units yeah that went wrong i don't know if that was the very first mars rover that drove off the platform

and then just stopped like three feet off the platform i think that was one that just smashed into the surface of mars because yeah it was like meters oh we have we have tons of meters left so many no it was feet it was like oh we have so many feet until we crash into the surface uh it was meters you fool you should have been using cubic fortnights the imperial imperial measure wouldn't it kind of make sense to use just some completely obscure measurement system so like no one can ever be wrong it's like not wrong it's just no one ever wonders are we using meters or feet no we're using the length of the nasa director's left pinky i think i'm wrong anyways i do not think there was a i don't think there was a famous anyways ignore me no there

was i'm googling it right now hold on okay yes how nasa lost a spacecraft from a metric math mistake i'm just going to go ahead and put this in the show notes this is crucial information but that's the that's not an overflow is just oh right sorry they multiplied by the wrong number oh i totally got off track there yes i was recollecting the the unit conversion problem not the overflow i don't remember an overflow one but whatever i mean i wouldn't remember because my language center is all jacked up now so how would i know therac 25 that's what it was do you remember that one derrick 25 therac oh nope this is this is a classic like dangers of poor software story oh it's like an x-ray machine or some some medical device that uses radiation

and it had a bug in it that caused something to overflow and it gave a bunch of lethal doses of radiation to people because it messed up their their settings ah well can't say i've never done that this is why i work in medical equipment yeah it takes a special steady hand to be a medical equipment software engineer so you're about to get lethal doses of off-topic rambling we've overflowed our eight bits oh man do you want to read our first question dave i will this comes from an anonymous listener who says hiya thank you for the show it's very insightful and both of you are pretty charismatic kind of thank you i feel pretty grateful for that comment okay continuing without getting too much into the details i had a number of difficulties when i was

younger which caused me to never finish my computer science degree i took a job as a business intelligence analyst because i needed to move out fast forward a few years and i am now an engineering manager for one of the biggest companies in the UK, nearly 2,000 engineers, and around 100,000 employees overall. I consider myself incredibly successful for my age. I just turned 30. I manage two teams of 11 people and four people that are seen as top performers in the data engineering department, and that is credited to my leadership. I've always been very self-conscious of the degree situation. I've tried to finish it online a couple times, but I simply can't find how. I'm now being asked to apply to my boss's position as senior

engineering manager, which could mean being responsible for six teams of around 10 people average and a sizable budget. I live in constant anxiety from the possibility of hitting a ceiling or being confronted about the degree situation. While I didn't hide it on the interview process, it's not something I advertise at all, but I got to a point where I just don't know what to do about it. And so that would be my question. What would you advise for someone in my position? don't do what that yahoo ceo did which is lie and say you have a cs degree and get found out and get in legal trouble because you said you had a cs degree in some like shareholder disclosure document that was supposed to tell the truth

and then leave and claim it was because of thyroid cancer but then very swiftly after become the ceo of some other company oh man okay that was 2012 i'm looking it up yep don't do that scott thompson don't pull a scott thompson okay got it so you didn't say i have a degree but you didn't say i don't have a degree either exactly exactly do you think someone will ask this question asker hey did you get a degree is that just gonna is that gonna come up i think the chances of that coming up are directly proportional to the size of the company you work for like chances go up if the company is bigger i think so like at some point it might come up in like the interview process or just in in the

normal casual water cooler chat oh no i'm thinking no not at the water cooler what's a water cooler anyway. I haven't seen one of those in a while. I need to get one of those installed in my home office here. Yeah. No, I think that the likelihood that HR makes it a thing at some point in your future is higher the bigger the company you're at. So for example, they might say, oh, you're being considered for a senior engineering manager position, eh? Well, I have a checklist for that. Yeah. So I don't have a degree. Now I'm one class short. Sometimes I have nightmares that I'm back in school sometimes i have good dreams that i finished that one class but part of my brain is still thinking about that pretty pretty regularly yeah clearly clearly but just to be fair just to

be fair james and i do have a degree and i also have those dreams it hasn't ever come up no it did come up it came up in that my employer used to have a separate title for it's the same level but someone without a degree oh my gosh they just got rid of that a few years ago i think that was kind of a leftover of an older system but since and it had no effect on like pay or position or anything we just want everyone to know this is a non non-degreed engineering manager yeah exactly that sounds awful what was the time do you know what the title difference was did they have like engineering manager comma not classically trained i think it was technical expert something like that principal technical expert or chief senior staff something like that it was something plus

technical expert the technical expert was the thing they bolted on to say i'm not i don't have a c a degree yeah instead of like title software engineer okay but i don't think it went into being selected or not selected for the role okay part of me thinks that if if you're already there that they will value your experience and internal credentials a lot more than whether you have a degree or not yeah i mean for sure don't lie about it if they ask you but you're more of a known quantity than some rando yeah the other thing is i don't know at what level this becomes important but i think at some level your like public brand for the company is important and often degrees or especially fancy degrees are important for that like probably the ceo of of

this hundred thousand person company went to some prestigious college somewhere yeah good chance of that and maybe they wouldn't be the ceo if they didn't go there probably in the boston area well they're in the uk so oh so so oxford yeah just teasing or both it could have been both probably both yeah you're you're probably right but i feel like senior engineering manager especially the company this size it's probably not big enough that that matters that much yeah because you're probably not going to show up in like a board meeting or i don't know as the public face of this company or anything like that right right right and if they need some indication of your prestige or pedigree that they can share i'm sure they have a wealth of things to pull from that

don't need to include your your degree you know if they need to put your name on a document or a website or something yeah i am now being asked to apply i mean i think that means someone is pitching for you yeah and if the person pitching for you discovers that you don't have a degree and they're horrified and then they they withdraw their support it wasn't very good support if it's only predicated on if you have a degree or not like 10 years earlier i mean presumably they're asking you to apply because you have done great work at the job and you'll do great work at the next job yeah plus you get to be like the cool rebellious bill gates mark zuckerberg yeah startup be genius dropout yeah that's the thing like the icons in the industry who we hold up the most

don't have formal education some of them yeah yeah some enough of them don't have a formal education that i think you've got plenty of leg to stand on yeah yeah i think you'll be fine um would you would you try and get in front of it though and say hey by the way i don't have a degree i oh boy probably not but here's what i would do i would you know okay so i just my mind went right away to your linkedin profile and i'm thinking i was just thinking about that it's it's so easy to just write the name of a university at the bottom of your profile without saying that you got a degree on a particular date or what the degree was and it's probably best if you don't lead people to believe that you might have a degree if you know what i mean yeah i remember

finding out live while recording this show that my linkedin profile said like graduation date this year some some year and it was past some year i remember i had written that when i was expecting to graduate then so and just never updated it right yeah i just never did yep i don't even know what it says about my degree right now i think it just says i went there but that's all i went on the campus of harvard that's like those people that do the open courseware things and then say like MIT graduate or whatever. Yeah, exactly. So, so that's how I would get ahead of it is I would make sure that your LinkedIn profile and resume make it obvious. Sorry, I'm going to, I have to

very carefully use my words here. Don't lead people to believe that you have the degree when you don't, but also don't go out of your way to tell people you don't have the degree. And I think you'll be fine so earlier in the show i said the chances that it will matter go up with the size of your company i still don't think it'll matter in your case yeah but here's the thing though i'm reading into this question and i'm hearing a fair bit of nervousness about this and i'm afraid that this is like cutting into your brain power and making you feel making you less productive because you worry about this thing and i found that in that kind of scenario the best thing to do is to go find out if it's going to be a thing and this is a conversation you could have with an hr

person at your company which given the size of this company i guarantee you you've got an army of hr people who can answer questions like this and you could ask them yeah is there a ceiling at this company based on education attainment or is it only based on performance and just put that to bed put that question to bed yeah do you think it should be someone connect like a close person connected to this job or just find a random hr person because i could i could see it being easier for it to be a hypothetical if it's like someone who isn't part of your org but also maybe they just won't even know for maybe it's different for each org yeah that's a good point you want to find someone who has the definitive answer and if it turns out there's different answers in different

orgs maybe it makes sense to chase down this information from multiple people but there are lots of different vectors you can do that some companies have the ability to submit anonymous questions you know maybe do that but i wouldn't i wouldn't trust this to one person's perspective i'd probably get the answer from two or three before i said okay this is solid and so i would probably chase down an hr person who's distant from me maybe an hr person who's close to me and then a uh like an anonymous question vector but i would do i would do all of this after you've got the new job because it's a lot harder to strip the title away from someone than it is to deny them the promotion in the first place just in case so say you get the role or you don't get

the role even but say you get discovered and it's somehow awful that's when you start to rail against the ivory tower and credentialism and academic bean counters you'd have no practical experience and you just gotta like turn it into a strength you're more in touch with the real world yeah you're pragmatic that's when you go and just do some open courseware classes and call it a day call it a day is and say yep that's i i do have a degree that's right the internet i have a pdf certificate from coursera yeah just just mumble pdf really fast so it sounds like phd oh brilliant there you go that's the solution all right i think we've solved it should i read

our next question yeah good luck and try to find a way not to worry about this anymore i don't think it's going to be a problem for you i don't think so either if you're already in the door it's it's often i feel like places that have it as a barrier put it up front so that's right yeah but once you get past that barrier you're good to go all right read our next question i will this is from an anonymous listener who says i'm working at a small company where we used to have two developers both of us had at least 10 years of professional experience and both of us are around 28 years old A few months ago, our bosses decided to hire three new front-end developers, and all of them come from Bootcamp. That wouldn't be so unusual, but all of them are 35-plus years old and have families and basically just six months of experience.

This causes a lot of friction in our team. We're trying to mentor them in best practices and experience we've gained over time, but sometimes they don't accept it because we're just too young for them. In one case, 10 years younger. do you have any tips for how to approach mentorship when it comes from younger to older dev and how to overcome the 10-year barrier ah you got yourself some old whippersnappers yeah old but young yeah this is interesting because usually the benefit of old man yells at cloud is that the old man knows a lot of stuff but in this case it's like

the inexperienced person yells at the cloud yeah maybe it's literally the cloud of like cloud computing right like this aws mumbo jumbo is nonsense should make it more like plumbing my previous career yeah oh my goodness yeah this is a strange situation i mean it's a series of tubes so yeah they're probably okay you hired just the right person for this job oh man i i gotta say when i hear all these numbers 28 35 i'm like i'm older than all of you i don't know whether to be proud of it or shamed proud shamed yeah this i'm reading this again this is interesting they're 35 years old and they have families it's like that's like a negative yeah the family part they're old and they have families and they have no experience like well

i don't know i have a family they're pretty cool i like it maybe that just means that they don't have a lot in common because these 28 year olds do not have families yes by definition they were raised by wolves no progeny no ancestors they're just lone they stand alone yeah yeah here's something that struck me odd from this question we have 10 years of professional experience and we're 28 years old that's incredible where at age 18 you were working full-time as a professional software developer it says around 28 so maybe they're like 32 because that's kind of around 28 okay it is in the neighborhood yeah yeah so how do you uh you know the boot camp does

not even boot camps but second career developers are kind of in this tricky situation uh where they show up they look like they have more experience like if you if you just interpret the pixels of their faces a machine learning model would predict that they have more experience yeah and they do i mean i would never of course i would never rush to any judgment like that but a computer might and a 28 year old might sorry and and yet they really have effectively zero experience right like six months of experience is essentially zero especially when like five and a half months of that was in a classroom setting so how yeah how do you take a young person who has a lot more experience and then have them lead an older person who has a lot less experience

how do you do it and why does it matter why does their age matter so much i think their age matters because there might be some expectation of like deference or like i i'm older than you i should know more stuff maybe they they maybe the question asker feels that or maybe the the newer developers are actively communicating that but yeah like they're they're not the the fresh impressionable young young whippersnappers they're the old whippersnappers like you said maybe the situation is that these old folks are are just unwilling to listen to people that they perceive as too young to have anything good to say yeah like they they don't value the experience because it's it's fewer years than they have even though it's more years at this career right right and

being a junior developer is hard there's a lot of getting stuff wrong and having no idea what's going on and asking lots of questions and messing up and getting stuck like it it can be hard if you have an ego that you're trying to appease to yeah stumble through that and maybe that's the answer you said it's hard and they make a lot of mistakes and and that is true being a junior developer is like that maybe they just need a taste of the real world maybe what they've had was this incubated boot camp experience for six months where there were no real serious consequences for mistakes and now they're in this quote real world real job and maybe they need to get a couple of good mistakes under their belt so maybe you need to let them spread their wings fly and then

get their wings clipped yeah do you think it's worth raising this issue to the bosses plural because they say there's more than one hmm since the bosses made this decision i mean it's it kind of depends on whether they're making a bunch of mistakes that actually matter or if they're just refusing to listen to you you know yeah i could see it feeling a little bit like i don't know tattletailing i mean i i think it feels like a time machine would solve this as would most uh most problems would be solved by a time machine that's another that's like the third most common thing on our show after you quit your job and talk to your managers right time machine yeah but it feels like they need to have expectations set for for kind of what what

their attitude towards learning and being mentored as as newer developers and maybe there was just an assumption that they would be very uh i don't know pliable is the wrong word very open to learning uh because they're new and they just aren't but i i feel like i feel like i would want to check for that if i was hiring a junior developer i want to make sure that they're easy to teach and they learn quickly and and maybe even say like part of your job is to learn and so You need to ask questions and take direction and use these people around you to get better. And if you argue with them, then that's not happening. Yeah.

And maybe that's the elephant in the room for these people is to say, look, I get it. These other developers are younger than you. And you probably don't doesn't feel great to be taking instruction from someone who's like almost 10 years younger than you. But it turns out you need to. And that's one possibility. There's also another very distinct possibility, which is that these older folks have much more developed soft skills and interpersonal skills and these young whippersnappers are

actually pretty bad at delivering mentorship and and maybe the older folks are just like i get what you're saying but i don't like how you're saying it yeah there is yeah that's an interesting point because i think this is transferable from earlier careers there's some like you get crustier about dealing with um stuff that seems uh nonsense uh-huh as as you age in your career like maybe things that you look at bright-eyed and naively as a as a 22 year old you've you've seen those same general patterns even if it's in a different field somewhere else so i don't know you're not drinking the kool-aid as much yeah and and maybe you can see with clear eyes having just the experience on the earth that some of these

ideas are actually bad you know and maybe they're not bad for technical reasons they're bad for social reasons or for team dynamic reasons or for other reasons that are really clear to you as someone, quote, with a family, to use the words of the 28-year-old, but aren't as clear to a young, single, potentially, I'm assuming single, passionate, fiery 20-something year old, and that's actually the source of the clash. It's not about the technical information. it's about all the ancillary stuff that these 20 somethings might not be aware of as much yeah i'm thinking back to your comment earlier about maybe you're not awesome at delivering this

feedback i mean maybe yeah maybe they're trying to look at the feedback or instruction more critically and and really understand it and a younger person might be more inclined to just accept stuff that someone older and more experienced than them says like oh we do it this way and then you just go and do it that way because that's what that's what you were told where yeah they're maybe less inclined to just do what they were told especially if it's by someone younger than them even though they have more experience in the field so maybe explaining why more is is helpful yeah i think that's a really good idea and and it could be that you haven't had to explain yourself very well very much in your career at this point um you've just

kind of cowboy coded it perhaps or i mean or you just like you work together with someone at your same level of experience so you kind of have the same vocabulary and right right you can communicate in jargon and half sentences and they they sort of make sense yeah yeah so so you're saying it might even be a generational vocabulary gap i don't know about like generational just work generational i don't know field field generational it's just the it's like the expert problem or expert dilemma there's some name for that thing where yeah if you know how to do a thing really well that does not mean that you know how to articulate that thing really well to people without the same experience right and the other the other possible source of friction here might

have nothing to do with age and everything to do with just inexperience in the field so you're speaking these terms and they're like wait what what does that mean and so they're asking lots of follow-up questions and you're interpreting that as resistance yeah do you think it's worth just coming out and saying it and saying hey like i'm younger than you i have more experience than you this feels weird what can we do to work better together yeah i i would do that but i would only do that if you're willing to be open-minded about what the other person says yeah because it could be that they've got some ideas and you might not like them yeah why don't you just shut up and stop talking to me okay well have we answered this question i think we're getting close but i would

say one more thing that your managers should be on top of this dynamic like they decided to take what many would consider to be a risk by bringing in this very fresh inexperienced talent with an age dynamic that's you know maybe they didn't think about that but there is an age dynamic here and it's their job to create a culture and environment where these this group can work together effectively so I think I do think I would go to my manager and just say hey there's an age dynamic here that I'm not quite getting can you give me some coaching have you seen my interactions can you tell what I may be doing wrong to to contribute to the problem and see what they say and at the very least it'll make them aware of the troubling dynamic to you sorry

troubling to you dynamic and they might be able to start putting in place things to help so that's what i would suggest too yeah that makes sense cool by the way i just i didn't quite get i i know time machine is the right answer but i didn't quite get how you would use the time machine in this case yeah i would use the time machine to go back and explain that earlier comment better and the point is that you you use a time machine to set up an expectations conversation when they are first hired about okay how how they need to be open to learning as uh that's part of their job as brand new fresh boot camp grad developers got it so you're saying the old people are all at fault i mean i think that's the general trend in human history is

the older people are wrong and the younger people are are right and have it all figured out yeah true my time to be right though is pretty much at an end i think oh yeah i think it's my turn to start being wrong yeah i feel that well you're you're already wrong oh my bad okay well that's why i feel it i guess yeah because you're a gen x right i am yeah i'm in my 40s i think gen x is firmly like wrong and millennials are starting to be wrong and and the zoomers are right that's i think that's where we are right now oh gosh millennials are starting to be wrong boy i think so time is ticking along yep but what's hilarious is that in the eyes of gen x the millennials have been wrong the whole time

yeah little did you know we're the first generation to get it all right though oh man thank goodness finally yeah our saviors yep all right what can people do if they want their own questions answered well if you'd like to get your question answered by two people who are one is completely wrong and one is on the cusp of being completely wrong you can go to soft skills you can go to soft skills.audio and click ask a question where you can fill out our form and we just want to say thank you hands pressed together in front of me bowing slightly to you to say thank you for all the questions that come in every week we really appreciate them that was a very vivid image i like that i'm just nodding solemnly nice thank you i can tell your

lips are pursed together eyebrows furrowed yeah furrowed i was i had to do it to think what do i look like and i start up and nod down like that yep start on the upward swing and do you end on the oh you end back at neutral right of course okay yeah because if you go if you start from down to up that's hello okay got it all right i think we're done yeah we'll catch you next week see ya