Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 261: Anxious about work and senior imposter

Episode Date: June 7, 2021

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Questions Hello, I have been working as a software developer for 10+ years now and recently took a job at a non-technical company. I was recruited to craft a web app for this company and thought they had an idea of what it means and the changes it may require. I am the only developer on the project. I feel like, either I’m not communicating well/at all, or they just simply don’t care about the work they recruited me for. I don’t have a good work/life balance since I’m always anxious when I receive an email from the company fearing someone will complain about the quality of my software. I feel isolated and unable to show how my work positively impacts the company Since I know my work is not perfect, I feel like I should not complain at all and just make my software bug-free. I’m doubting my abilities and starting to think I actually don’t know anything about Software Engineering. Because the company is non-technical, do I have the right to say that my work is that essential? What should I do so I don’t feel like crap every morning before going to work? In your last episode, you brought up a listener question about a developer of eight years accepting a senior developer position. I’m in a similar boat, but with far less experience. How much less? Well I’ve worked as a developer only for THREE. This is by no means a flex, but I’m kind of worried that I’m in over my head. There was little due diligence on my new supervisor’s side, so my trepidation is that I’ll be two/three months into my new job and they’ll look at my perf and see “this kid is not a senior at all”. I know, the classic imposter syndrome. I’ve been straight forward with my new supervisor about my experience level—or lack thereof—and they seemed not too worried about it. Do you guys have any advice for me going into this? What can I do to maximise this opportunity I’ve been given this early in my career? Love the show!

it takes more than swapping planning poker with planning solitaire to be a great engineer this is episode 261 of the soft skills engineering podcast i'm your host jamis a 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 technical field of software development and discuss how to gamify the planning process right you know it would make yeah you know what planning isn't enough of fun that's what i was gonna say not enough of fun yeah well you know what is fun what solitaire yeah at least it's well i guess i'm speaking for myself i would be sad if planning took over an activity that i really thought was actually fun i don't play poker for

fun so i'm okay with that connotation but if it was like hey this is planning hang out with your family and and that's the metaphor we're using then it would just poison hanging out with my family outside of planning every time you hang out with your family you just start sweating and worrying about commitment sprint commitments yeah i'm i'm sorry i don't know how long it's going to take me to drive you to soccer practice i don't know how many points it'll be to drive you to soccer i thought you were going to say um instead of planning hanging out with your family i thought you were going to say planning dota planning well yeah i mean is that a fair it could be a fair metaphor because um i got really mad a lot during dota and i still spent a lot of time

on it and my life was actually worse afterwards but i did share a lot of memorable experiences just like sprint planning actually yep exactly okay do you want to thank our patrons dave yes thank you so much to those that are contributing at the level that gets them a weekly shout out they are nick kantar the agile ventures charity chris hogan brayden canes john grant philip john basile dennis bogdanov travis sanders nick hathaway taras harouk bites of wisdom.com with a y ragnar hartesen oladapofadi kiarin sveinsen fizzbuzz influencer roman denisov adrian board inc testing is documenting.org jonathan king will angel monkey face emoji ira chan patron.com.au we're hiring and chitalion if you'd like to join the celestrius crew you can go to soft skills.audio

and click support us on patreon we will say whatever thing you tell us to say legally within the law on this argument we are legally bound yes we are legally bound to say anything by your earth laws legal yeah that's it except if you if you send us a donation and ask us to say this sentence is a lie oh my gosh that would be the podcast divides by zero and then crashes how about like this person is not a patreon supporter that'd be so awesome that just means they get charged in a infinitely for oh that works yeah so that one we will accept my brain is so computerized that when i heard bites of wisdom with a y i was like how else yeah it's how you spell bites right that's true that's funny i'm like that was totally unnecessary to say with a y

yeah okay should i read our first question go for it this is from an anonymous listener who says Hello, I've been working as a software developer for 10 plus years now and recently took a job at a non-technical company. I was recruited to craft a web app for this company and thought they had an idea of what it means and the changes it may require. I'm the only developer on the project. I feel like either I'm not communicating well slash at all, or they simply don't care about the work they recruited me for. I don't have a good work-life balance since I'm always anxious when I receive an email from the company fearing someone will complain about the quality of my software. I feel isolated and unable to show how my work positively impacts the company.

Since I know my work is not perfect, I feel like I should not complain at all and just make my software bug-free. I'm doubting my abilities and starting to think I don't actually know anything about software engineering. Because the company is non-technical, do I have the right to say that my work is essential? What should I do so I don't feel like crap every morning before going to work? Ooh, ouch. Huh. I feel like I should not complain at all and just make my software bug-free. that that would have been the no bugs during development philosophy and if you can pull it off it's great if you can pull that off you have a bright future in no bugs driven development coaching at many fortune 500 companies yes and then you can do like scaled no bugs driven

developments for the enterprise or something so my first impression is that these people you work with are probably they well they're not technical right it's not a software company so they just have no idea how software works and how building it works so they don't their expectations are probably pretty vague even to themselves and that could lead to them being like wildly impressed when you make like a little animation happen when you click on something and also not understand why it costs like more than five dollars to run like your whole server infrastructure right like Fair. They could be both really low and really unreasonably high at the same time. Or just like unreasonably in left field, you know?

Like what? Like the 10 red lines, all perpendicular. Have you heard that? No. Oh, man. Well, you have to Google... Wait, maybe. Is that... Okay. It's a video of like... It's like mocking all these non-technical people kind of trying to design a software product. It's... Well, the video has an engineer in the room and then, you know, a business analyst, a product manager and a few other non-engineer roles and they're giving the engineer conflicting

requirements you know like i need you to draw four red lines but i want you to use blue ink and they all need to be perpendicular you know and they're like you're an expert right yeah i think that so i remember that and i think it's funny for a few reasons one reason is because it's funny to say like yeah sometimes this happens but the other thing is it's so like i mean you can tell whose perspective it's from right it's like one one person in that room is smart and knows the truth and everyone else is dumb and asks impossible things and is wrong and like i mean the world is like that right like ask anyone whoever has to balance a budget like what do you how do you weigh the different trade-offs you have to make these hard decisions so

i it is it's it's funny and it's also kind of like you can see the the developer hubris on display a little bit of like if only these people got it if only they got it like i did then they would know you can only ask for one color and like i don't know you have to follow geometry and stuff and yeah i think i think i've shown that video to the non-engineers and they're just like that's not funny yeah anyway so yes you you are working at a non-technical company and what i'm reading into here is that you're not communicating or they just simply don't care about the work they recruited me for and i feel like what's going on is you're doing things some good some bad and you're not getting any of the usual responses like normally when the app throws up a 500 unknown error that's

a bad thing and the i wonder if your clientele the employees at this company are thinking huh is that is that what it's supposed to do is that good yeah there's a couple there's a lot of ways i was going to say two that would be pretty uh bold of me to say there are only two ways to judge how good your software is but there are at least a few and and one way that i sometimes fall into as an engineer is like when someone brings to me a problem i figure out if it's a big deal or not by thinking how easy to fix is it uh-huh if it's easy to fix then it's a small deal it's like i don't care that costs a lot of money i just make this one change and then and it's fixed so it's fine right and then another problem or another way to judge like the quality of software

is is how impactful it is for users and that feels like a better way maybe but another way is just like whatever pops into your brain at the time right like if you if you don't have a good model of how software works then it's just like whatever pulls your attention is the thing that you notice that you use to judge and i mentioned that like animation thing i have found it hard to get non-technical people to understand both the costs and the benefits of building especially back-end kind of engine systems engineering stuff because the benefit can be so far removed from customer value to them yeah like they don't understand why you need to scale your message queue up or something like that it's like it's like can we just not do that and it just needs

to show the right page yeah it just needs to do the right thing what are you talking about like can you have it do the right thing and just not do that part just skip that yeah and sometimes the answer is yeah actually yes yeah but i i think the challenge you have is you you need to somehow educate these non-technical folks without turning them into engineers right it's unreasonable to say well just know all the stuff i know and then we can have a conversation you need to explain trade-offs to them in in ways that make sense to them and explain like the impact of what you're doing in a way that makes sense to them too and it might be a good test too you might sit down to do that and then find out like oh there is no like you said there is no impact here you sit down to

write an impassioned plea for why you need to port everything to view and then you're like because actually no we don't need to do that modules will be more modular and it's good it's good for me to feel good it's good for my next job right i i think what's happened one thing that's happening here is you're a solo developer in a company full of people who don't do or participate in the software development life cycle. So that means you have to wear all the hats. You're the product manager hat. You're the test hat. You're the infrastructure hat. You're the designer hat. You're wearing all of them. And it turns out the main thing that this question asker is talking about is usually the job of the

product manager to communicate outward and get feedback, do user research, and then decide what to do next. What's the next biggest priority? And that is a big exercise in communication. And so I think what's happening is here is you're getting kind of a firsthand education and why it's so important to have people do these functions. What about this section about being anxious about the company kind of complaining about the quality of what they build? Yeah, because you're not hearing anything. So you assume the worst, right? Yeah. And so you're like, well, it's just a matter of time before I get that email that says, OK, your software has been sucking for the last three months.

Yeah. And you're fired. And that's why you have to proactively go get that communication done. Because if you had a functioning product manager, that product manager would have regular check-ins with your customers, which are in this case, probably your internal employees. And they would know, they would always have their finger on the pulse of their user sentiment. Yeah. Now that's your job, because you don't have a product manager. this is an easy thing to say and a hard thing to do but i wonder if if you might be spreading yourself too thin and implementing a lot of half-baked stuff instead of a small number of fully baked things right i imagine if you're the only developer and this is a company that has a

lot of appetite for software being built for them then there's there's plenty of requirements right there's a giant long list of features and so maybe maybe there is a quality issue and the quality issue could be caused by the fact that um you and the company haven't figured out how to invest enough polish into things and if they're upset because they feel like there are issues with the quality of your software some of that could be like getting better at your job but some of it could also be you helping them understand the trade-offs of we can we can have more stuff that'll have less time spent on it and so might have more issues or we can spend a bit more time on each thing we do and it'll take longer to do but if you want me to fix all these problems like i can't do

that and then also keep cranking out new stuff at the same rate yeah it's a fair point i'm kind of thinking that maybe this person should start to create should create some kind of mechanism for proactively collecting user feedback and maybe some kind of survey you can send out every month you know to say yeah how are things working did it does it have the right things what's your vote for the next thing to be built you know something low touch you don't even have to go and have a bunch of conversations with people just blast out this thing to all your users see what they say yeah because here's here's what i think this person says i'm doubting my abilities and starting to think i actually don't know anything about software engineering it's not that in my in my view based

on this write-up i don't think you don't know anything about software engineering i think you don't know anything about product development and so what you have here is the ability to do the software engineering but you've been you've worked in the past in a robust organization that provides all of these these other functions that now all fall on you and you just haven't really engaged too much in those other functions yeah so here you are this is what it feels like to not have all those things around you it is a bit of a sneak preview of the like solo developer or consultant lifestyle too, of, of your kind of wearing a bunch of different hats and sitting down to solve the technical problem is only one of those hats. I don't, I mean, maybe if you

understand that that's the expectation, then you'll enjoy it. Or maybe you're finding out you really, really like working somewhere where the focus is on solving technical problems and you have more of a support system for handling the other stuff. Could very well be. I think I'm out of wisdom for this question okay i well and also i have to save up some of my wisdom for the next question so i can't use it all good how what percentage did you use on that one i just want to know what we're going to get on the next one it feels like 47 so expect a bit more wisdom on this question the other day my daughter was done with her dinner she said and she still had food on her plate but she still wanted an otter pop and i said how are you full but you still want

an otter pop and she said she had an otter pop shaped hole in her stomach that it could just slide right into but food would not fit in there but my broccoli won't fit yeah it's the wrong shape did you uh ask her to prove it well i just melted the otter pop and then said it can fit anywhere i blended up the broccoli i don't know i probably gave her an otter pop that's usually broccoli flavored though it was green is green probably probably vegetable yeah all right all right you want to read the question yes i shall read it here we go this comes from an anonymous listener who says in your last episode you brought up a listener question about a developer of eight years accepting a senior developer position i am in a similar boat but with far less experience

how much less well i've worked as a developer only for three years this is by no means a flex but i'm kind of worried that i'm in over my head there was little due diligence on my new supervisor's side so my trepidation is that i'll be two to three months into my new job and they'll look at my performance and see quote this kid is not a senior at all i know the classic imposter syndrome i've been straightforward with my new supervisor about my experience level or lack thereof and they seem not too worried about it do you have any advice for me going into this what can i do to maximize this opportunity i've been given this early in my career love the show what can you do slap that up on linkedin senior developer maybe maybe in this case they meant oh we thought you were a senior

in high school they sure pay seniors in high school better than juniors yep I mean, this is generic advice that applies to any new job, but you just, you really want to figure out what their expectations are for you. And some places have very rigid expectations or not rigid. The title informs the expectations quite a bit at some places. And at some places, the title is like, it's nothing. It doesn't mean anything. It's made up and it doesn't matter. If you, if you meet expectations for what the expectations are for you, it doesn't matter what your title is like you'll be doing well so this is kind of generic cheating advice but i think you need to focus more on what the expectations your manager has for you are and less

on like will i meet the bar for a senior developer or not that was 53 percent it's it's gone that was it that was it wow okay it burned fast and bright i think and now it's out i think you're a senior advice giver with that kind of quality now does that come with a pay increase or or is the title its own reward i'll give you 10 more than i'm paying you now oh okay good i accept okay if only there was some kind of standard for what senior even means you know like within a company sometimes it's defined but across a company from one company to the next no way not even close yeah my guess is i think you know i'm really latching onto this one phrase there was little due diligence on my new supervisor's side and so i'm thinking senior

could have been a recruiting tactic exactly where people apply if we put senior we're gonna put senior on there and that just means that we can trade giving you a nice juicy title and we don't have to pay you as much i don't know if that's happening maybe it's happening here but i mean yeah the word senior just means nothing anymore across companies so i think it's much more important that you figure out what the expectations for the position are and much less important that you figure out how they define the word senior. Another thing I have found helpful is to just look around at your peers. Unless everyone there is a senior developer and your peer group is all developers. But if you want to try and figure out and move away from like,

I don't know, what's my own special snowflake expectation and get some idea of what the organization expects of seniors in general, then hopefully you work with or around some other senior developers and you can kind of figure out who the respected and and well-known and high productivity ones are just sort of aim for them not aim for them as in like i'm coming for your job aim aim to imitate the good qualities that they have while you murder them yeah are you i mean is this some kind of like consume your life force yes thing consume three senior developers to become promoted to a staff yeah i mean oh man the whole imposter syndrome thing here so you're feeling imposter syndrome because

you have three years of experience and someone just slapped a senior title on you i think i can help by many definitions mine included i would probably most people with three years of experience i would say are not senior like it takes time to accrue that kind of experience you you probably haven't made enough mistakes yet in three years to be a senior engineer by my definition but it doesn't matter like i my definition is totally irrelevant to your situation you just got to figure out what they meant by it and my guess is based on this interview process you described they didn't mean anything by it they don't even know so i wouldn't be one bit worried about it i just get in there and do your best work and give frequent feedback and of course do everything

jameson said because that was 53 fast and bright wisdom i'm gonna go the extra mile and move to 100 i mean 101 see i used up all my wisdom on talking and have no more left for mental math clearly i forgot i was gonna say that was the best possible way that you could wrap up that that was a verbal pratfall oh man that was so good all right well like i've used up all my wisdom but now i forgot what i was gonna say yeah okay i guess i guess 100 really is the limit yeah i mean these numbers are not made up james and math doesn't lie yeah i think that's all yeah i mean clearly that's all my advice

have we answered the question oh my gosh i don't know i mean did we basically give you permission give the listener permission to feel okay about this yeah or we made them feel bad by saying like it's not even a big like senior doesn't matter you're not a senior developer you're not a real senior developer i think if you were moving into an org where they had really strict definitions though you would know you would know that already so that's right and i can tell from this write-up that they don't. And that's a good thing for you because if they did, then you actually might have something to live up to and you would need to be worried about that. Like maybe I just got hired into a role that I'm not prepared to deliver in, you know, and that's a serious, that can be a

serious problem. Jameson, you and I have both known people who hired into a role that was too big for their experience and skills and it ended up turning into a fail fest, you know, and they felt bad. The company felt bad, you know, but I don't think that's happening here. I think you're coming into a really low structure startup i'm assuming startup and so that means the expectations aren't defined so your job is to set the their expectations as low as possible and then when you just barely show a degree of competence you'll blow them away oh one more one more chunk of advice okay 101 right here all right don't forget don't pretend like you know more than you do because you feel like you have to live up to this senior title and senior developers like

never google sql syntax or something i don't know it'll be so much worse if you trying to cover up for not knowing something that'll come out much more clearly and more negatively than than admitting when you don't know stuff and finding it out absolutely all right now i'm all spent that was beautiful i've never seen anyone give 101 but you just did it yep you broke the laws of math you thought there wasn't even a number higher than 100 you've been proved wrong oh man i gotta rethink everything a breakthrough in math technology all right folks this is the number 100 the sequel it's so high i just can't even think of numbers that high all right where should people go if

they want to get their own questions answered jameson they should go to softskills.audio and then click ask us a question or maybe ask a question i don't remember it's been a while since you've been to the website yeah you'll know and then submit all the details that you care to we will read it and then we will answer it at some point before the universe ends thank you very much for listening we will catch you next week Thank you.