Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 262: I'm too popular and too much turnover

Episode Date: June 14, 2021

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Questions Hello!! This is maybe the opposite of a problem, but I’ve found myself stuck - how do you navigate too much interest from outside parties? I work in a pretty niche subsection of software dev, so I field a lot of job offers/recruitment when people start to put together a new team. These are usually coming from managers/people I would be working with directly (and admire!) rather than recruiters. Generally the opportunities are something I could see myself doing one day, but I’m perfectly content in my role as-is for the time being. Where’s the line between expressing interest in future opportunities (emphasis on future) without stringing people along? How many “catch up” conversations are reasonable before it shifts from maintaining a relationship to active recruiting? Apologies if this comes across as a humble brag but I’m getting overwhelmed. Love the show, you rock 🤘 I recently started a new position at a startup after being recruited by one of their senior leaders. Being a startup the company has had its ups and downs, including some layoffs within the last year. I am really loving the company so far, the people, the culture. They really seem to care about correcting past mistakes and listening to feedback from everyone. There is still a good amount of turnover among engineers and engineering managers. I’m sure some turnover is normal especially at startup. But at what point does it really become something I need to be concerned about? What questions should/can I ask to help me get a better picture of what is going on? Is there anything specific I should look out for that might be my cue to start creating a backup plan?

it takes more than realizing that there's an army of servers powering your quote serverless applications to be a great engineer this is soft skills engineering episode 262 i'm your host dave smith i'm your host jameson dance soft skills engineering is a weekly advice podcast for software developers about the non-technical sides of just how many servers are powering your serverless app they should have called it computerless no computer development it is true that no bugs driven development is a subset of the broader philosophy no code driven development where you just build nothing and also have no bugs no bugs yeah we

haven't really revealed what's actually under the philosophy but that's it yeah you know what's not in it though that's all you need yeah there are no bugs yeah should i thank our patrons yes thank you to nick kantar the agile ventures charity chris hogan braden canes john grant philip john basile dennis bogdanov travis sanders nick hathaway taras harouk bites of wisdom with a y ragnar harrison oladapo fadje karen spainson fizzbuzz influencer roman denisov adrian bordink testingisdocumenting.org, Jonathan King, Will Angel, the picture of the monkey face emoji followed by the words monkey face emoji, Ira Chan, patreon.com.au, and Chitalian. Thank you so much to these folks who contribute to the podcast Patreon at the level where we say the

words they tell us to say, but do not guarantee to pronounce correctly. If you want to join this crew, you can go to softskills.audio, softskills.audio, click support us on Patreon, and then you'll be here. You'll also be in our Slack team, which is fantastic and friendly and wise and teaches me stuff, like how to tie my shoes. That's a hard skill. Yeah, but that just shows you how versatile it is. Yeah, true. Do you want to read our first question? You bet. This comes from an anonymous listener who says,

Hello, this is maybe the opposite of a problem, but I've found myself stuck. How do you navigate too much interest from outside parties? I work in a pretty niche subsection of software devs, so I field a lot of job offers slash recruitment when people start to put together a new team. These are usually coming from managers or people I would be working with directly and admire rather than recruiters. Generally, the opportunities are something I could see myself doing one day, but I'm perfectly content in my role as is for the time being. Where's the line between expressing interest in future opportunities, emphasis on future, without stringing people along? How many, quote, catch-up conversations are reasonable before it shifts from maintaining a relationship to active recruiting? Apologies if this comes across as a humblebrag, but I'm getting overwhelmed.

Love the show. You rock. followed by the hand in the gesture of a of the rock on emoji what if they don't know what that means though you just wait you just described it as the gesture of the rock on emoji yeah so allow me to be more specific please this is the best part take your hand palm facing your face and put your hand in front of your face now bring your thumb and your pinky together nope sorry already screwed up bring your your middle finger and ring finger down to touch your palm while keeping your pinky and pointer finger extended then bring your thumb inward toward your palm

and touch the front face of your middle finger and ring finger and now you've made the rock on now turn it around and face someone else and put it up in the air now you've made the rock on emoji hand then you gotta wave it up and down yeah up and down like the horns of a goat yes did i get it right do you think was that a pretty good explanation yeah i went wrong when when you said put your yeah it ended up right i did it i followed along and then i did rock on actually is i mean it was a journey but i guess that was the fun part was just the journey yeah what a waste of time this poor listener weren't we just saying before this show that we have to go really fast because we have to go

at a specific time after this yeah i have a meeting with a manager who wants to interview me but i'm not sure if it's an interview or just a lunch date to keep in touch wait i'm just kidding oh okay i got it okay it's all tying together here your deadpan was too dead it got me yeah too popular interesting so try and get them to come work with you right now flip it around on them like reverse recruit them yeah you're probably hiring probably have some kind of incentive to hire people some kind of referral bonus just reverse it's like it's not reverse psychology what would it be turning the tables around i don't know yeah turn the tables around oh so you want to catch up over coffee do you well have i got an opportunity for you

i recently had a few people leave the the company that i work at and i've been really bad at keeping in touch with people from former jobs but i finally became a boring adult and started putting more stuff in my calendar and i set up calendar reminders like six months talk to this person and it's not because i mean they're all people i would like to work with again someday but But I'm assuming that six months after they left, they'll not be inclined to come back. Well, maybe they are, but it's more just like, I want to keep in touch with them. Okay. And maybe there's some amount of this too, that they're just saying, hey, maybe it's not the right opportunity now, but it'd be nice to have me in your mind when you're thinking about your next opportunities.

But see, won't that just make this problem worse? If you go out and build up a network of all these connected people, now you're front of mind for a lot of people. Yeah. So maybe do the opposite. Make them pay for lunch. I was going to go one step further and say deactivate your LinkedIn account. Go off the grid. Off the grid.

Maybe this is more than LinkedIn. Maybe this is like real life friends or something. What if you bill them? Say, hey, it costs $700 an hour to catch up over coffee. That's my rate. That's my catch up over coffee. That's the friend discount. Oh, yeah.

You don't even want to know what the corporate rate is. Yeah. That's heavily subsidized by the corporate rate. Have you thought about accepting all of these jobs and then collecting all of these salaries and seeing how long it takes you to get fired for not doing any of them? You could clear like a million bucks. Yeah, exactly. If you could accept 12 jobs and stick around at each of them for only one month, which I think is doable, you could get one year of salary in a month and then take the next 11 months off and do it again i saw a tweet that one of my team members tweeted about that and i was

like hmm wait a minute wait a minute who am i in this story we we heard no we had an intern right in who had done just that apparently had accepted two full-time internships at the same time oh yeah that's true we did and was asking really reasonable questions which kind of just i felt like we were being gaslighted a little bit because it was like, you're in a completely crazy situation, but you're asking us these questions like, how do I balance these two internships? Like, what do you mean? That's the kind of pluck and grit it takes to get ahead in this world. I want to tell two stories. How's that? Are you up for it?

Yeah. Okay. A couple of years ago, I caught up with an old friend of mine who we had worked together years prior, about 10 years before. And we had not worked together since. We had talked about working together and he had approached me about joining his company at one point. He was actually the head of the company. And I got together with him a couple of years ago and said, hey, let's go out to lunch. I just want to catch up. And I really literally did just want to catch up. And we sat down, we had some nice lunch and we chatted about computers for like an hour. And at the end, this is a CEO now, right? So he probably hasn't had a non-working lunch in years.

and he at the end he just looked across the table at me and said it was really nice to just talk to you and not have some other ulterior motive and i thought that is nice it is nice just to catch up sometimes so that you know sometimes these were catching up conversations there's always an ulterior motive and i'll give you an example of that so i reached out to a former co-worker of mine this week and put 30 minutes on his calendar and we got together and i definitely had a motivation which was to offer him a job and see if i could convince him to quit his company and come join mine. But he did something very professional and impressively clever. Before the get-together, he said, look, I just want to level set expectations. I'm very happy at my job.

I know you're probably hiring. There's really maybe a 10% chance that I'll be interested in in this job. I just want to give you the option to not do this if you think it's... So he put it right back on me. And I said, you know what? I still want to catch up with you. I just want to talk. But now I, it wasn't, it kind of took all the pressure off because now the ball was in my court. I knew I was just, this was just going to be 90% just catching up and seeing how he's doing, which we did. And I knew there was a very, very low chance he was going to leave his job. And so that's a great way to do it, I think, is just to put the ball back in their court and make them choose. Yeah. I actually had someone do that to me too. It was a referral for a job.

They, by the time I contacted them, I guess it's sort of similar, not quite the same, But they basically said, hey, I'm about to sign another offer, so it's pretty unlikely that this is going to go anywhere. But I would love to just chat to meet people and who knows what the future holds. And it was nice. It was nice to just talk to someone who was smart. And you were like, stop. Put that pen down. Don't sign that offer.

Everything turned into slow motion. I dove across the desk, tore it up in front of them. they're like no this is just a printout of an email yeah it was just it was actually a an echo sign doc it was actually virtual so yeah i don't you just tore up my uh my driver's license actually yeah so i think i think it's fine if if you and if you want to catch up just catch up if you're not looking say hey i'm probably not looking but i like expensive steaks or yeah i love it and i say don't, I, oh man, so many engineers I know would just turn these offers down. These, not offers, but turn down these opportunities just to connect and go to lunch. Don't do that. Like, I think you

want to keep these relationships alive. And by the way, I'm not just saying that so that you can get another job in the future, but that is a nice benefit. Part of what makes being alive great is knowing a lot of people and having connections with people. So I would say don't, don't turn them down, even though you might feel pressure. Just put that pressure right back on them and then enjoy the human connection yeah and plus that'll make them want to hire you even more oh yeah the heart you mean the hard to get playing hard to get exactly even if you're desperate for a job you still tell them i'm not looking for new opportunities but dave you're unemployed i know but i'm just you know maybe not interested we're gonna have to we're gonna have to offer this guy

a lot of money i'm in a really good part of this book yeah and it's gonna be tough to put it down all right should i read our next question you bet i recently started a new position at a startup after being recruited by one of their senior leaders being a startup the company has had its ups and downs including some layoffs within the last year i am really loving the company so far the people and the culture they really seem to care about correcting past mistakes and listening to feedback from everyone there is still a good amount of turnover among engineers and engineering managers i'm sure some turnover is normal especially at a startup but at what point does it really become something i need to be concerned about what questions should can i ask to help me

get a better picture of what is going on is there anything specific i should look out for that might be my cue to start creating a backup plan oh well one cue is a lot of turnover right i sometimes groups of employees get burnt out by the behaviors of the company or the circumstances i feel like i've seen this where like the old guard has just had it and maybe things are different now but they they have this lingering like they've suffered too much and it doesn't matter that things are different now they're not they're not better enough for what they've gone through right they're like objectively fine but it doesn't make up for something that happened in the past so i don't think turnover is necessarily bad if everything seems good now

but it definitely is a strong signal isn't it true that everything is relative with human perception it depends on it depends on something depends on what happened to me recently yeah but like you know it's the hedonic treadmill right we talk about this all the time you know what what might be perfectly fine to someone else is like the the straw that what is it the feather that broke the camel's back or the straw the straw that broke the camel's back it's the feather that whipped me in the face i think is the other figure of speech the feather that tickled my nose and made me sneeze or the straw that broke the camel's back they're basically the same thing anyway i like the first one better it's a lot less violent

Yeah, I agree with you. But I will say that turnover at a startup is, I don't know, in the first few years of a startup's life, I found, boy, this is going to be a stupid sweeping generalization, but it seems like if you were willing to join a startup and really get into it, you probably were way into the mission and way into the company because you probably took on a lot of risk to do it in the form of lost income or long hours or something. and you're probably committed to it. And so in my experience with startups, I don't see a ton of turnover in those early days. And maybe that's just because numerically you have so many people joining so fast that the people that do leave are dwarfed by the people that are joining.

I guess that depends on the growth trajectory of the startup too. If it's taking off, then yeah, you'll be hiring. If it's actually succeeding. Yeah. There's so much turnover here. All these layoffs due to budget cuts create a lot of turnover.

If it's just like laundering VC money or something, then then it's fine if you don't grow at all they really seem to care about correcting past mistakes and listening to feedback from everyone i have a bunch of suggestions i'm not sure how many of these will work but that's why i have a bunch of them you could try talking to the people who are leaving and ask them why they're leaving some people have defined reasons and some of them might be like i got more dollar signs at this other job and and that's or i'm like i'm moving or i don't know some of it might be they they have things that are bad about their job that don't affect your job maybe there's a manager that you don't work with that they have conflict

with or something so so maybe if you have any insight or relationships with the people that are leaving you can chat with them about it a little bit love that if you just see people leaving from afar then that's kind of hard to do because they're they're gone by the time you you know you want to talk to them yep another signal to pay attention to is is you said they care about correcting past mistakes and and i think that's an important thing to pay attention to what what do they do when something crappy happens now well yeah that that too like what what actions have they taken besides listening to everyone because they're willing to correct their past mistakes of mass murder and fraud they're really listening to the federal authorities

now yeah they they listen so deeply about the fact that all their employees are underpaid and they just listen attentively yeah i think i think you're looking for signs of have has the trajectory of this company changed or is this just like something that hasn't hit me yet and it's fine to stay somewhere if something hasn't hit you yet too i mean it hasn't hit you yet right you're fine you can survive until you crash into the iceberg of i don't know the poisoned water cooler or whatever thing is that's making everybody quit there there's something it's it's very social like i see people do thing and then my monkey brain goes like oh do thing people do thing you do thing and so yeah seeing seeing the signal certainly affects me there's there's been like

a couple waves of turnover not huge but but sort of clustered around the same time in my current job and it definitely triggers some thoughts of like wait why are all these people i like and admire leaving should i leave should i even be here does that mean i'm dumb yeah and am i on the titanic yeah i think it it made me evaluate the current situation but i still evaluated it it didn't it didn't tell me hey you have to leave because this other person left and maybe that's the value in it makes you ask the question that you just asked us but you ask yourself instead and then do what yourself says and yourself says go write a question on softskills.audio and it's just a vicious circle oh man i so man i what are you really afraid of i guess is the

question i mean it's a great job market for developers i i think people are sometimes really really nervous about getting laid off like they just really want to preempt it yeah this isn't even getting laid off this is like what if i decide to quit later right i understand right yeah yeah that's right yeah yeah it's like why should i quit i mean you you've just called up the two people on the internet who are most likely to tell you to quit your job now anyway so maybe maybe if you have any concerns whatsoever just quit your job is it really that simple yeah what questions can i ask to help me get a better picture ask that question hey there's been a lot of turnover lately what is going on who who would you ask that question to like your manager okay or

if you have any kind of all hands or i don't know any way to bubble that up i i predict that they will say it's unconnected it's just people making independent decisions but there is a chance that they'll say like yeah we had this thing in the past and kind of own up to it a little bit so i don't think it would hurt yeah what if they say oh actually they did not quit we fired they asked that exact same question what a coincidence it's like the the getting fired chain letter yes have we answered the question i think i think not but we're gonna have to say good luck i think you'll do fine yeah i agree what can people do if they want their own questions answered they can go to soft skills.audio and click ask a question

where you can fill out our form and ask questions like this and we'll give you the same crappy answers. I mean, excellent answers every single week. All right. We will catch you next week. Thanks.