Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 259: Moving up to meetings and will remote work stay a thing?

Episode Date: May 10, 2021

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Questions This question came with a delightful ASCII-art diagram that I will now dictate as follows: “pipe space space space space” JK TLDR: I want to move up the ranks but I’m not sure what might await me… except meetings. What should I expect? And how do I get there? Too Small, Want MOAR! I work in a big enterprise as a Tech Lead in an ““agile team””. So day-to-day I focus on getting our team to build the current feature we’re meant to be building (eg by helping other devs, attending meetings, and sometimes writing code). The next step for my career would be what we call an “Engineering Lead” but I’m having a hard time figuring out what that role actually is and our “EL” is so slammed with meetings I’m afraid to take any of their time to ask… SO - Dave & Jamison, can you enlighten me? What might the goals and life be of someone at that level and how would someone who still codes every day(ish) start figuring out what to do to get there? P.S. It’s taken me about 4 years but I’ve finally managed to listen to every single SSE episode! (I have a kid, binging podcasts isn’t possible for me). P.P.S. In an interview recently I was asked ““What’s the most valuable piece of advice you were ever given?”” to which I replied ““To negotiate for better benefits in job interviews, got it from a podcast called ‘Soft Skills Engineering’””. The interviewer thought that was cool, subscribed to your podcast during the interview then REFUSED TO NEGOTIATE ON ANYTHING! >:( Living in a small town my options as a software engineer have been limited to working for one company straight out of uni for 7 years. Wanting to develop in my career, and knowing you have advised others in the past to move on from their first job out of uni. What is your opinion of seeking out and switching jobs into remote work? Will this provide the same development value found in a traditional job switch, especially after the impact COVID has had on the way companies see remote work.

it takes more than agreeing with flat earthers so your geopoint distance math is simpler to be a great engineer this is episode 259 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 on the non-technical parts of the technical field of software development i feel like map makers might like you a little bit more too what if you didn't have to worry about projection oh yeah what if it was all just flat that really is what iceland looks like or greenland or whichever yeah can be like it's so small antarctica is just the size of rhode island geospatial engineers for flat earth that seems like a lobbying group that should exist yes great idea do you want to thank

our wonderful patrons dave i do we want to give a one-time shout out to jesse and weekly shout outs to chitalian patron.com.au we're hiring ira chan eric larko monkey face emoji jonathan king testing is documenting.org adrian bordink roman denisov fizzbuzz influencer oladapo fadayi karen sveinsen open bracket unpronounceable unicode emoji close bracket ragnar hardison nick hathaway travis sanders dennis bogdanov braden kane steven armand lee john grant taras harouk chris hogan the agile ventures charity nick kantar philip john basile and bitesofwisdom.com with a Y. If you would like to join this crew

or get access to our Slack community, you can donate a 1954 Chevrolet Thunderbird to Jameson's house. Remember how Car Talk used to do that? They'd say, write a check and strap it to a Model T Ford or something and mail it to us. That's pretty funny. slip a dollar bill in between the keys of a i don't know fancy mechanical keyboard yes

every time you press a key a new coin pops out of the side it's like the blocks in mario it's perfect that'd be rad anyway if you want to join our slack community you can donate on patreon go to softskills.audio and click support us on patreon you can get yourself access to our Slack community, the emails, stutter, the emails go out the first week of every month. So you can message us and ask for something earlier, but that's when it will come out. Thank you so much to everyone who supports the show on Patreon. We love you. We do. To show that love, I will read our first question. Good job. That's my love language. This question came with a delightful ASCII art diagram that I will now dictate. Pipe, space, space, space, space, space, space, space,

Space, space, space, space, space, space, space, space, pipe. Carriage return. Just kidding. You'll have to imagine it. Nice. Here's the question. I want to move up the ranks, but I'm not sure what might await me except meetings. What should I expect and how do I get there?

I work in a big enterprise as a tech lead in an agile team. So day to day, I focus on getting our team to build the current feature we're meant to be building by helping other devs attending meetings and sometimes writing code. the next step for my career would be what we call an engineering lead but i'm having a hard time figuring out what that role actually is oh he's got smashed by a yawn um it doesn't reflect my feelings about this question i'm having a hard time figuring out what that role actually is and our engineering lead is so slammed with meetings i'm afraid to take any of their time to ask so dave and jameson can you enlighten me what might the goals and life be of someone at that level and how would someone who still codes every day ish start figuring out what to do to get there

P.S. It's taken me about four years, but I've managed to listen to every single episode I have a kid binging podcasts isn't possible for me In a recent interview. I was asked what's the most valuable piece of advice you were ever given to which I replied To negotiate for better benefits in job interviews. I got it from a podcast called soft skills engineering The interview thought it was cool subscribe to your podcast during the interview and then refuse to negotiate on anything oh my goodness that is hilarious what's the what's the cpm on on that right like how much did that cost you to get us one additional listener hours of your time spent prepping for that interview and then zero negotiation movement yeah beautiful but what i'm saying

is the benefit was that the other listener for the show okay yeah i don't know call it several hours of interview prep probably a thousand bucks or something uh-huh but it's not our thousand dollars so it's worth it oh my goodness so so tech lead to engineering lead this is an example of the fuzziness because yeah you don't say what engineering lead means to you and guaranteed it means something totally different to every other company and probably some other people in your same company is this like an engineering manager i don't know i just i was thinking why not just call it lead engineer so we have tech lead engineering lead lead engineer leader of tech engineering tech

technical engineer have you ever seen that old monty python movie gosh i can't remember which one it is It might have been the life of Brian, where you have these, this one group who calls themselves the Judean People's Front, and the other one that calls themselves the People's Front of Judea. And they're two different groups, and they get really offended when you mix them up. I feel like that's what's going on with these titles. Yeah, I mean, so it's either, I assume this is either some kind of architect role across multiple teams but still as an individual contributor or an engineering manager yeah

my like a people manager but but yeah but none of the my el is so slammed with meetings that i'm afraid to take any of their time to ask that doesn't clarify it because both of those roles usually involve a whole bunch of meetings and i can't help but notice that you your el is so slammed with meetings that you're afraid to take their time to ask but you didn't even ask about my meeting schedule before you took my time to ask this question that is not where i thought you were going i thought you were gonna say like and you want that job yeah well okay but i like yours better my meeting schedule is pretty pretty next level yeah well you can't ask the person who does that job already that would be too easy and impossible at the same time

too easy and impossible presumably you work with this person in some way though right if they are your engineering lead that implies some relationship okay yeah so you have some tiny keyhole view of what stuff they do with you right just multiply that by however many teams there are and then that's their job there you go figure it out extrapolate you have one data point or they're doing they're doing nothing the whole rest of the time oh sounds cushy and that's why they're so busy all the time yeah they're out their calendar is full of fake status meetings check the status of my tulips out in the garden

no they have to they have to sound believable it's like i mean just call it project tulip and everybody will think it's a code name project project go watch batman begins in my home theater it's not the best not the best code name ever but well no one knows what it really is that means it's a great code name it has hidden the project effectively you turn it into an acronym though oh okay go watch batman project my basement play skyrim again psa oh my goodness it's pronounced psa that's my every monday five hour psa meeting perfect so how do you how do you figure out what the next job looks like and then how do you get there i think your your order is right you probably need to figure out what the job is like before you get

there it's easier to aim at it when you know some some idea of what the job is like i like that the question here is one of the questions that's that i just want to read it word for word how would someone who still codes every day start figuring out what to do to get there and it's just i kind of have this this joke in the back of my mind that makes me want to laugh but also cry a little bit which is that what do you do to get there if you want to move into people management in this industry in the engineering industry is you just get dumped into it that's it now you're a people manager like have you known anyone who's i don't know i i sense that maybe more so than other industries we have this expectation that well if you can write code surely you can manage a team of

people who write code without any any training yeah just dumped into it is that's not exactly how i'd put it but i agree that the for some reason we find it impossible to not estimate how good of a people manager someone will be by how good of a technical contributor they are and just like it's so hard like even though i i still do it sometimes too even though i know it's not how it works but still i just assume all the people who are the best technical contributors would automatically be great managers i mean did you see that for loop oh my gosh this person would be so good at managing a team of people i didn't even see the for loop because they eliminated it with their clever optimizations like they will eliminate delays from the roadmap

or interpersonal conflicts from the team or blocked dependencies optimize those they'll use non-blocking dependencies it's amazing just like their non-blocking io yes so we're kind of dancing around it but not code sounds like one of the potential answers to this that's not often what the job looks like although especially as an architect there is there can be a lot of prototyping and a lot of design which is still very technical you're just not you just get to say you just get to draw a box that says like do the easy part and then someone spends six months of their life trying to try and actually do that and finding out all the all the hard parts you've abstracted over oh my gosh and you are so

right with that about 15 maybe 10 or 15 years ago i was working at a company and we were designing the next generation of this like big signal processing system there was one it was right around the time when the cloud was coming into vogue as a as a thing and i remember people kept drawing these diagrams of the new system the next generation system and there were concrete blocks for everything except this one part in the middle they always drew as a cloud and nobody knew what it was and they were just like oh yeah that'll be in the cloud it wasn't actually the cloud like aws or azure or something not like that it was just all it meant on the diagram was this is the thing we haven't thought about and it turned about turned out to be the most complex challenging part

of the whole project classic yeah i keep running up against the wall of talk to the engineering lead about what their job is like. They're so slammed with meetings, I'm afraid to take any of their time to ask. I think most people would be flattered if you said, hey, I think your job looks really interesting and I'd like to work towards it someday. Can you talk to me about what you do for half an hour or something? I find it hard to believe that you would just get a flat out no from someone you had a relationship with, even if they were busy. And if I were so slammed with meetings, that might be a nice little break from my other meetings. I don't have to do anything to prepare i just show up and hold forth and answer questions that i already know the

answers to instead of questions i don't know the answers to yeah exactly i don't have to promise anything or commit anything yeah there's no dates involved tell you what i do it's perfect yeah so i think you should still do that you should still ask them and if you're worried about it yeah i think flatter them quite a bit when you ask oh wise and no excellent engineering lead oh gross what might the goals and life be like of someone at that level so again it's hard because we don't know if this is engineering lead is is a not an inherently meaningful term but generally it's going to be uh something higher profile and higher priority and broader in impact than whatever you're doing at your level so if you're working on building out features it might be about

designing products or a line if you're working on one team's i don't know agile roadmap stuff it might be around a department or multiple teams or something like that just just take whatever you're doing and multiply it by five units five units yes another thing that i would say is the the person who is the people manager on your team probably deals with a lot more unexpected surprises than you do in your day-to-day job that's a a big part of management is that's a really good point showing up at work and just having your world turn upside down some days and that becomes kind of normal yeah that's a really good point you were joking before uh the call but like the higher up you get or the more responsibility you get the less control you have over what you actually do

day-to-day generally because stuff bubbles up to you more instead of things being pushed down or driven from your input as much and i think that's probably something that people find counterintuitive who haven't experienced it because they look up and they think oh that leader is calling the shots and deciding what we're doing but that leader is also where the buck stops and a lot of fires go to that leader but only the hard ones because the easy ones get resolved you know down on the ground kind of in the trenches and so only the most painful difficult challenges rise to that level yeah have we answered the question oh not even close yeah we should probably move on we gotta i go to the next question sorry good luck we're the worst why did we even pick that question we

don't know anything about it i guess i mean that's kind of the whole theme of the podcast but it's not quit your job or it takes more than writing code to be a great engineer it's why did we pick this question if you don't know anything yeah and why do people keep asking us questions oh man how could we be so bold after all these answers i just can't imagine why anyone writes in questions but you keep doing it and we love you for it all right shall i read our next one please okay this comes from an anonymous listener who says living in a small town my options as a software engineer have been limited to working for one company straight out of uni for seven years wanting to develop in my career and knowing you have advised others in the past

to move on from their first job out of uni what is your opinion of seeking out and switching jobs into remote work will this provide the same development value found in a traditional job switch especially after the impact covid has had on the way companies see remote work let me just be the first to say i love it when people say uni it's so cute i agree it is it is endearing for some reason it strikes me as very european it's like for some reason when people say maths instead of math too i think that's another european thing totally but i think it i just think it's cute i don't know why maths hmm yeah will this provide the same development value yes yes it will yep it's fine still a wildly different environment even if it's switching uh remote jobs still a

different job different problem domain different strengths and weaknesses in the team so i don't think that part is any different yeah agree especially after the impact covet has had on the way companies see remote work i've observed an interesting thing with remote work at my company which is everyone is remote now because of covet all the all the corporate folks anyways and we moved from being a this weird remote org in a in-person company to everybody's remote now but they aren't like all in on remote and they keep talking about going back to the office and they're having this uh this struggle internally about well do we hire remote or do we hire in offices and tell people you're not going to work there now but you still need to live around there right

and so i feel like the change in some the the change of like what people are doing right now is pretty dramatic but the long-term cultural change still is shaking out quite a bit and it feels like my company at least is sort of one foot in one foot out of of what does this actually mean long term yeah i think i think a lot of companies are going to keep one foot out or maybe like one toe out yeah you know i am the brightly painted toe the remote toe that is has like polka dot rad nail polish among all the other drab in office toes beautiful have you seen do you have any data on well data might be too much to ask do you have any strong opinions now we're talking conjectures now we're talking on like uh salary and pay with remote so i've heard a lot of

chatter about about uh well when everyone moves remote then it either it makes your salary very competitive or it ruins it or i don't know i've heard a lot of different opinions about what this means for pay yes i do have some wildly wild and strongly held conjecture okay what i am seeing is that in metropolitan areas where that traditionally were not big tech-centric places that attracted a lot of high salary tech jobs their salaries are coming up and the reason i'm that that is a fact i'm seeing that the reason which is now the wild conjecture is that what's happening is now every job is on the national job market you know because we're hiring you know people are if since enough companies are hiring remote even if you live in let's say Akron Ohio which is not known

for having Apple's headquarters there for example you are now competing with engineers on the job market who are in or near Apple's headquarters right it's the same market it's one gigantic market and so if you have a company that's committed to hiring remote their salaries are going to now approach the national average. And I've definitely seen that. Have you seen the national average come down in the higher salary places, though, at the same time? Well, now you're getting outside of my area of expertise, which is my own wild conjecture. Do you wildly conjecture that the salaries have come down? No, I've not seen any evidence of any salary in any data point moving downward in the last 10 years, including this last year. I've seen some fears about it.

I haven't seen any direct evidence. Well, the fears, right, the fear, let me ask you this. The fears are all coming from people who work for the big tech co's, right? Yeah. So say you work in San Francisco for Facebook and then you move to like Ohio, then the fear is that your salary will get cut to Ohio salary. Right. And sometimes that does happen, but I haven't seen it.

I haven't seen people pay, like lower the salary for people still living in San Francisco or what they're offering to hire for people still living in San Francisco. Does that make sense? Yeah, totally does. I don't know if that's happening though. Yeah, knowing you advise. Yeah, I don't think this changes with COVID or remote. I mean, it can be harder to establish yourself

in a new remote job. You have the benefit of everyone going through that same pain right now anyways, or being relatively fresh. So it's not, it's kind of a unique environment where everyone's new to it. So maybe it's not gonna stick out as much, but you do get some,

I had a friend tell me recently that they worked with someone remote for a while and thought they were just the biggest jerk and then okay and then they just met up in person and became friends all of a sudden and the same interactions that they had before that convinced this friend they're a huge jerk now we're just like oh yeah that's that's person and i have the context of what their face looks like when they type and it changes everything suck or whatever yeah like yes yeah so that's that might be a little bit trickier but like if you're saying if you never get that it could be tricky yeah i mean it's hard to meet up at all right now

even if you're remote sometimes you have these in-person meetups but those have been those have been canceled for a while i believe that there will be a cadre of companies who commit to remote in the long run and who use the savings from not having to rent office space to do get togethers in person you know later this year or next year that's and that's what i'm planning to do at least hoping to do yeah and i think we're going to see a fair bit of that Because I really think that having a fully remote team forever is just hard on that level. Fully remote as in you never see each other face-to-face ever. Right.

Yeah, I agree. That's kind of a pattern with remote companies where they'll have some get-together. And that I've seen. I've seen having it, and now I've been forced to see being fully remote without it. And I think I underestimated how big of an impact it had. Uh-huh. Okay. Sorry.

oh does that mean we've answered the question you mean the fact that i just totally yawned through the last part yeah yeah you fell asleep yeah what sorry what are we doing this has been a weird show oh man if this is the first show you're ever listening to just remember they're all like this sorry i think we've answered it okay let's call it answered i think we should confidently move on to the next section which is where i ask you dave how can people get their own questions answered. This is the section where I answer you, but actually I'm not talking to you because you already know the answer to this question. But I'm telling it to people who are listening to the answer, which is you can go to softskills.audio and click ask a question where

you can fill out our form. And this is also the part where I say thank you, not to Jameson, but to you all who are listening for all the questions that have come in. We really appreciate them. Thank you so much. We'll catch you next week. Thank you.