Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 263: Why am I bored and ver-boss-ity

Episode Date: July 5, 2021

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Questions I’m feeling bored and disengaged with my job lately, but I’m pretty sure it’s one of the best jobs I can find: my manager and teammate are great, my compensation is very high for my area, worklife balance/benefits etc are excellent, and the mission and product the company make are awesome and help the world! On top of all that I think the work is technically interesting! But still I’m bored and disengaged :( I can’t tell if I’m just burned out from the pandemic and this is how it’s manifesting, or if I just have a serious case of “the grass is always greener” and now that I’ve been on this team for 2 years I’m ready just for a change of scenery. I want to fall back in love with this job, but how can I do that? Do you have any advice? Changing teams isn’t a great fit as this is a small office for the company in a ““satellite”” site, with only one other team that I’m not super interested in. I could of course take the patented advice and find a new job that might be equally great, but what else can I do? Listener Very Verbose asks, Love the show! I’m rapidly working my way through the backlog and dread the day that I reach the end and have to wait a whole week for the next one! :) Whenever I write a message to a coworker I tend to start with a huge wall of text, then revise it down to something smaller and hit send. I do this with emails, slack messages, code review feedback, you name it. Even this question I’ve re-written a few times! I feel like I’m over-thinking things, and trying to make sure there is no misunderstanding in what I’ve written. For example, a relatively small piece of feedback for a code review might be re-written many times, because I’m concerned that I will come across as overly negative or condescending if I just send through my first draft. Often, the feedback is positive and they agree with the points that I’ve raised. But they’re only seeing 2 points, when I probably started with 10 and deleted 8 of them that I later deemed to be ‘too nitpicky’ before sending it through! Naturally, all of this takes time and I’m often wasting more than 20 mins, only to end up sending 2-3 sentences at the end of it. Do you have any tips for helping me get to the point, so that I can be more productive and move on with other work? Do I just need to care less about what they think of me? Should I just skim over the code, say “LGTM”, and suppress the fear that I may have just approved a critical bug to go to production? Appreciate any advice you can give. Unfortunately, I don’t think inventing a time machine to go back 18 minutes after spending 20 minutes writing a message is a reasonable option :) It would take me several decades to be happy with the time machine before I turn it on!

it takes more than declaring we're doing kanban so that you can get out of meetings to be a great software engineer this is episode 263 of the soft skills engineering podcast i am your host jameson dance i'm your host dave smith soft skills engineering is a weekly advice show where we answer your non-technical questions about the technical field of software development what if we just declared we were a vlog now to get out of meetings yeah to get out of recording a podcast yeah when i first joined a job a while ago the team was doing air quotes kanban but really it meant like everybody did whatever they wanted all the time and whenever you asked when is this going to be done they said i don't know we're on kanban said yeah can we can we do this

big project that takes a while and will need to be broken down they'd say sure like put it in the to-do column so it is it can be convenient convenient so you don't have to commit to anything yeah we don't have that much space in our in our board for more post-it notes so we actually can't take on any more work right now sorry kanban says i mean take it up with the con bond consultant that's mr bond con is his first name con bond i like my sprint board shaken not stirred do you want to thank our patrons dave i do but first i want to acknowledge that that was the dumbest joke i've ever made on this podcast i liked it thank you to those who are contributing at the level where they get a weekly shout out where we say then their name or an unpronounceable

shape or whatever the heck you type that's safe for work all right they this week those names are nick kantar the ij of interest charity chris hogan brayden canes john grant philip john basile dennis bogan of travis sanders nick hathaway taras harouk bites of wisdom.com with a y ragnar hartesen olad apafadie kiaran sveinsen fizzbuzz influencer roman denisov adrian bordink testing is documenting.org jonathan king will angel monkey face emoji ira chan patreon.com.au we're hiring and chatalian if you'd like to join this crew or not join this crew but still send us money you can go to softskills.audio and click support us on patreon you can send us any amount you want and everyone who does that will get an invitation to our slack

community where you can come hang out and chat with other listeners and this week there was a photoshop contest that gave me great joy oh my goodness that was pretty rad i i have to say i showed well we should probably describe what happened here but someone found a picture of me on the internet and let's just say after you see this picture you'll you'll understand why we're not a vlog but anyway have we tweeted these out no maybe it's time all right well i'm going to okay pay attention to soft skills audio on twitter and you will probably be disappointed you did but anyway someone photoshopped some pictures and they are pretty hilarious at least i thought so then i showed them to my family and they were unimpressed get a new family i know i already

have a family they're all in the slack oh the the familial bonds of paying one dollar at least one time to join the slack it really unites family unites a group yeah it's a common bond yeah well yeah i'll post these and then you can laugh or not laugh as is your choice it's your choice in life all right you want to read our our first question, Jameson? Yep. Thank you. This is from an anonymous listener who says, I'm feeling bored and disengaged with my job lately, but I'm pretty sure it's one of the best jobs I can find. My manager and teammates are great. My compensation is very high for my area, work-life balance benefits, et cetera, are excellent. And the mission and product the

company makes are awesome and help the world. On top of all that, I think the work is technically interesting, but still I'm bored and disengaged. I can't tell if I'm just burned out from the pandemic and this is how it's manifesting or if I have a serious case of the grass is always greener and now that I've been on the team for two years I'm just ready for a change of scenery. I want to fall back in love with this job but how can I do that? Do you have any advice? Changing teams isn't a great fit as this is a small office for the company in a satellite site with only one other team that I'm not super interested in. I could of course take the patented advice and find a new job that might be equally great but what else can I do?

She's got to cut our legs out from under us like that. Oh, sure. I could quit my perfect job. But no. Have you ever felt this way about a job? Like it's good, but you're bored, I guess, or not engaged? No, I've always come up with other fake reasons to convince myself that I should get a new job. Okay.

My job is perfect. The people I work with are great. I'm well paid. The work-life balance is perfect. I love the company. the work is technically interesting but i'm bored hmm i want to fall back in love with this job it sounds like you need a second honeymoon is a sabbatical like that i guess two years might be too short to take a sabbatical yeah so there could be a couple things going on one thing could be

that you've listed all the great things but really there is something about the job that you maybe haven't talked about here haven't even noticed explicitly yes like i don't like it where every day when i come into work someone hits me on the head with the two by four but other than that it's great yeah but everywhere is like that so i didn't even bother to mention it yeah we uh instead of poker planning we do poker full contact rugby and i don't like getting hit and knocked to the ground i don't like it yeah i don't like just the scrum the literal scrum of people smashing into each other oh do you guys do scrum too yeah it's weird we don't even wear helmets like in american football

yeah but i interestingly it makes it safer because you don't lead with your head as much right hard hits so scrum is good you heard it here first yeah so there could be something that you that that is underlying your dissatisfaction to do with work it's also fine to just be disengaged to your job and and still do it i mean maybe you maybe just punch the clock for a while i've been through periods of my life where i have punched the clock and then been engaged in other things outside of work not at the same time but not not on that same clock no not on that same clock there are two clocks yeah but i mean it sounds like it's a pretty good gig alternatively it never hurts to interview i know you said don't find don't tell me to what else can i do this

isn't find a new job this is go interview for a different job i've also had the experience where i've been kind of disengaged or unhappy with my job and interviewing has actually convinced me you know what it's pretty good here yeah yeah some of the stuff out there i really wouldn't want to do yeah and and that's been helpful so you're saying to get over the grass is greener go over there and eat some of the grass and find out that it's disgusting yeah literally go take the grass and compare it under a microscope check the chlorophyll levels is that the thing that oh yeah that's definitely what i would do with grass under a microscope these chlorophyll levels are terrible you call this photosynthesis fall back in love with this job how can i do that

you said fall back in love and so that makes me feel like this is has to be like a romantic comedy with your job so like what would this plot line be like if it was a romantic comedy i don't think you see too many romantic comedies about well wait a minute about falling back in love yeah usually usually there would be like a different new job or a different new employee that would take your place and then well the story is actually about those two but there are a couple stories a couple of movies though that might fit the bill here one is mr and mrs smith with angelina jolene and jolie and brad pitt remember their life was dull i haven't seen it and oh they had a dull marriage and then they've both found out that they were both secret agents and then their marriage got

spicy again okay there you go so you find out i mean what would this be you find out that the mission and the product of the company are awesome and help the world it's actually like how do we produce more toxic sludge to spray on the birds faster or something spice it up that way it's secretly been a a hospital seeking missile company the whole time or something i'm still bored and disengaged you can see how long you can be bored and disengaged and still have a job like that that's a thing so so turn it about experimenting on just how long your disengagement stamina is. Yeah. I, so I had a job once where I became bored and disengaged and started, uh, it affected my performance quite a bit if it, so then it kind of became

the company's deal. I just wasn't getting much done cause I would sit down and then stare at the computer and do nothing. And I just quit that job. So you've already preempted that, but I found out that it wasn't just the job. There was also a lot of other stuff going on in my life and that reflected the job or reflected in my job performance it wasn't actually the job quitting the job was like a catalyst to resolve some of that other stuff for me like it made did it was it like process of elimination well that didn't fix it i'm still miserable yeah it's uh it was just like the the shock of moving myself into a different situation professionally uh helped solve the underlying problems in a way but it wasn't that

the underlying problems were caused by the job so i i know you i just keep saying but what if you quit your job after you said what else can i do well i mean i'm sure this person has listened to this podcast before they had to know what we were going to say yeah i mean take a vacation that's always standard advice if you're feeling burnout take like two weeks off in a row not just a couple days take or take long enough that you can disengage completely from work and if you come back and you're immediately just rolling your eyes and saying i can't believe i have to deal with this crap again or i don't know that could be a sign or maybe you come back and now you are you are re-energized to work on these exciting problems with these wonderful people for great

pay and benefits again yeah can i have your job what if that what if we do that your job sounds great what if we do a job swap yeah you can have my job and i'll have yours you come run this podcast and i'll come to your job yeah yeah i mean yeah pandemic burnout is real i have noticed a spike in people quitting across the board i think there was some amount of uh kind of be conservative don't make any changes hang on to stability during the pandemic and now that it's over people are putting their heads around up and looking around a bit more and it i mean it affects everybody differently but yeah you certainly shouldn't underestimate the effects of that on you i felt it i did too even though i worked remote already yeah i i that's right me too

interesting yeah it's uh it's been interesting i actually quit my job in the middle of it well i did not i'm at the same job but definitely it's been yeah it's it's it's been hard to stay engaged sometimes because of the the isolation i don't know where i'm going with this changing teams isn't a great fit is this is a small office pick a different programming language rewrite everything in that yeah it is time for haskell at your company the time has come you know what we've been shipping too much i need to rebuild everything so that it's exactly the same on the outside but the inside will be this perfect clockwork watchmakers intricate arrangement yes yeah i don't know i i would say see if this extends outside of work there's something else

contributing to it don't underestimate the power of stepping away for a bit and and you can always just hang on for a while just work there and be bored and disengaged and see if you can find engagement or meaning somewhere else yep i'm on board all right also oh also i don't need you to bear your soul here jameson but i felt like you were adjacent to something i was thinking of and before i make this next comment i need everyone to know that we are both certified space psychotherapists so you know when it comes to interplanetary therapy we're your guys anyway if you are disengaged with things that in the past have been very exciting for you this might be a symptom of a mental health problem that needs some attention and it might

not be a bad idea to go seek help yeah that's very true yeah it could be i mean some people develop mental health problems and they're chronic some people have like uh i don't know instances of depression that come and then and then they kind of resolve but it doesn't hurt to talk to a professional about it for sure and if that doesn't fix it it's time to go be a goat herder on the plains of wyoming yes famous for its luscious goats and bountiful harvest of goat milk wyoming goat milk it's so good do you want to read our next question dave yeah i do here we go okay this comes from a listener named very verbose who says love the show i'm rapidly working my way through the backlog and dread the day that i reach the end and have to wait a whole week for the next

one or sometimes two weeks depending on how lazy we were whenever i write a message to a co-worker i tend to start with a huge wall of text then revise it down to something smaller and hit send i do this with emails slack messages code review feedback you name it even this question i've rewritten a few times i feel like i'm overthinking things and trying to make sure there is no misunderstanding in what i've written for example a small piece of feedback for a code review might be rewritten many times because I'm concerned that I will come across as overly negative or condescending if I just send through my first draft. Often the feedback is positive and they agree with the points that I've raised, but they're only seeing two points when I probably

started with 10 and deleted eight of them and later deemed it to be too nitpicky before sending it through. Naturally, all of this takes time and I'm often wasting more than 20 minutes only to end up sending two to three sentences at the end of it. Do you have any tips for helping me get to the point so that I can be more productive and move on with other work? Do I need to care less about what they think of me should i just skim over the code say lgtbm and lgtm and suppress the fear that i may have just approved a critical bug to go to production appreciate any advice you can give unfortunately i don't think inventing a time machine to go back 18 minutes after spending 20 minutes writing a message is a reasonable option dang it no this is okay before i read

the last sentence of this question i just have to say the last two questions have just cut us off at the knees our go-to options are off the table we're becoming predictable yes 263 episodes in okay final sentence i should have read this it would take me several decades to be happy with the time machine before i turn it on oh i love it hmm i just want to know how many hours went into this question do i just need to care less about what they think of me yeah that's that's interesting because that to me sounds like telling someone just just be taller you know like i don't know how to just make myself care less about what other people think of me or how to make someone else care less about what other people think of me and probably my life would be better some people's

lives would probably be worse and would be improved if they actually cared more about what other people thought yeah they're like i'm already a sociopath i don't care what you think but i think it's pretty common to be negatively affected by other people's perceptions of you and i don't know how you change that without i guess this is go to therapy for a long time and try really hard and then maybe that will work maybe you can finally achieve apathy and then you can write the code reviews that you need and you can join the zen masters have you tried being really busy i am prone to this problem of walls of text and deleting a lot of it and i've gotten a lot better at deleting a lot of it but i've also gotten better at not writing the wall of text and one

of the biggest things that's pushed me towards that is just having like 8 000 things to do so i can't sit down and write the wall and then tweak it and then think what if they interpret this phrase wrong and then like i just i just have to be more direct and succinct like i just can't afford to do this yeah i just can't i just can't tweak it it's also get a second job i heard there's a great one that offers excellent pay and benefits and good co-workers and cool technology and a meaningful mission and we just told them to quit so they might be hiring you could also do an experiment you could try see what happens see what happens if you just dash off a reply and don't edit it the experiment details are important so what you do is you

randomly assign your co-workers into one of two groups let's just call them a and b and maybe we'll call this an ab test i don't know whatever and for one of the groups you take your time and you really go concise and for the other group you just blurt out your first thing and then after a few months of this you survey the group and ask them what they think of you on a scale of one to ten and if there's a statistically significant difference between the two groups then you know it's worth the effort and you'll need like a few thousand coworkers in each group right like you need a lot of data points you're probably going to need to do like four or five code reviews per second at least good news you have now achieved the state of being too busy to spend

a lot of time on them yeah i i wonder what the culture of code reviews are on the team Is there an expectation that they are very detailed? Is there an expectation that they're very positive or, I don't know, fluffy? You can kind of look from the context of how other people are reviewing code to figure out why I stick out a whole bunch. If I give them a list of 10 things, just do people only give a list of one thing? I think it's great that you look through the code

and find 10 pieces of feedback because that means that you care and are thinking about stuff. if you find yourself consistently having the same pieces of feedback that might be an opportunity to pull it out into linting or some kind of discussion or agreement with the team so that you you don't have to remind people don't do this thing or the team can you can just know like they don't care and and the team has decided collectively that that thing is not a problem so i will stop trying to to find problems that look like that if this person is any person like me even after you've got your linter doing all the easy stuff i'll still come up with 10 things you can debate

variable names for eternity exactly should i just skim over the code say lgtm i've done that a lot certainly there are times where i've been very clear and explicit and deep on my code reviews and i've i've rubber stamped plenty of stuff to production suppress the fear that i've just approved a critical bug to go to production yeah but you at least you didn't write it it could be worse could be worse yeah that is an interesting point though what what responsibility do you take on by doing a review for for the product that's delivered i guess i see i see code review as a way to add value not a way to like remove potential disaster oh oh you just kind of rocked my world a little bit stuff is gonna get through code review it will or you'll have spent

way too much time and money on code review for it to be worth it um but code review is a chance to like add value or find some things it's not it's not like the last in my mind anyways it's not the last opportunity you have to prevent the world from being ruined so maybe if you flip that a little bit your your fear of like what if i don't cover everything might go away a bit but that same fear i don't know so yes i agree the code review ideally is a place to add value but most of the time isn't it really just about averting crises i don't know i feel like it's it i feel like the code review feedback i've seen is some of it is like ways to do a thing in a language or a framework or something sort of like patterns or idioms that you might not know some of it is larger scale

design feedback and then a little bit of it is like this does not work or there's this bug or there's this flaw but it's not only like will this code light stuff on fire yeah i think there's there's opportunities to coach and and teach you know if you see someone who's doing something that could be done a better way that's very much a high value activity but also if it's like i know something about this particular piece of code that the author of this code change didn't know and i know that if you push this it's going to cause a crisis i don't know see to me that's not really a matter of editing your review comments it's like you either see a crisis unfolding or you don't and you can convey that concisely or you don't and it sounds to me like this isn't so much

about conciseness as it is throwing away things that you decide not to share because you're worried they aren't worth taking up someone else's time maybe they're not i mean yeah how many of those eight points are like i like it better this way right versus it'll have this actual benefit that's exactly right and it's very hard to keep those separate in people's mind in my mind especially like this feels so important to me right now because i'm looking at it on the screen at this moment but as soon as i look away it's like nope i forgot in so many things in life In resumes, in job promotions, in code review, in bugs. Like the most important thing is to get the top things on there.

You know, don't tell me everything you see wrong with this code. Tell me the top things that are wrong with this code. If you found 10 issues, it probably is a good thing to whack off seven of them after you've put them in order of importance. Just show me the top three. I think that's probably a good thing to do. So you've come around to saying you're doing great. I think so.

They did say 20 minutes on a code review only for sending two, three sentences. 20 minutes does not seem unreasonable for a code review. I've seen the opposite. Frankly, I think, Jameson, I think most engineers I know, they review code way too fast. It's like they scan the page top to bottom and then click approve. And I think to myself, like, what were you looking for? What did you see that made you click approve? Yeah.

but seriously i've seen prs get reviewed in a matter of seconds from when they go up and i'm like this was like 50 lines of code what did you they're like scan scan scan oh a green button i'll click that yeah i was looking to bump my numbers up yeah anyway i think more people should take time like you do i don't think this is a problem at all i find myself sometimes rereading the stuff that i've written in haste and realize that it can be interpreted multiple ways. And that's a problem. Especially if you're in a leadership position and you start telling people to do things. I'll just give a classic example that struck me so hard years ago when I had been using this one term. I had been seeing bugs,

like I was triaging bugs as they came in, bug reports, and I was assigning them to teams and saying, please prioritize this. And after a few months of doing this pattern, I realized that someone interpreted that to mean make this bug your top priority while other people had interpreted it to mean select an appropriate priority based on your other things in your backlog i meant the second one and i had been inadvertently sending the message asking people to make this their top priority when that's not at all what i meant to do so i i do think it takes i think it's worth it to take the time to identify where you're being ambiguous and to clearly communicate and this takes time and i think more people should do it maybe you should start a

newsletter yeah although it takes but don't delete it well yeah don't delete the just keep the parts do you have any tips for helping me get to the point so i can be more productive do i just need to care less of what they think of me i think all of this all of this editing you're doing on everything you write is fantastic practice and you'll get to the the skill level where after years of doing this editing that you start producing the edited version first i bet oh i like that you're saying they haven't leaned into it enough they're like they need to practice the skill of of producing the the core of it faster or or first yeah i think so i think what will happen is you know you should be able to see progress on this because it could be that you're

just spending a certain amount of time until you assuage your guilty conscience that you've spent enough time by the way that'd be a great name for a tech conference a guilty conference it would have to be about like tech dead or incidents or something outages yeah oh a guilty conference all about post-mortems let's do it that'd be a great conference anyway what i'm trying to say is don't get i think the one risk is that you get to a point where you just spend a certain amount of time without assessing the content itself and i think over time if you do enough editing you'll get to the point where you can crank out the content fast and figure out how to assess whether something is ready to go without spending more

time on it that's what i would consider yeah yeah there's there's like a there's a spectrum of worrying about how your message is perceived and and on the far bad end of the spectrum is you inventing fears that might not be there in reality of of are they going to think i'm being mean or rude or unkind or is it going to kind of damage this relationship but some amount of of thinking how will the person i'm writing this to receive it will help you deliver it more clearly to them so if you can figure out how to tone that back a little bit that's helpful one other thing i'll say is that often i don't know what i think until i start writing it and so it takes me a couple i gotta i gotta throw a couple iterations out there until i find out oh this is what i'm

actually trying to say and and that's not the worst thing in the world either yep if you just have this list ahead of time of 10 things and you know these are the three most important ones then write those but if you arrive at the three most important ones by writing 10 then maybe that's yeah maybe that's good all right have we answered the question i think so i think you're on track and and i don't think this is a problem at all i think you're awesome and just as someone who reads a lot of written messages every day i just got to say thank you for taking the time to make my life a little easier and feel free to send me an email sometime with something really concise in it. Dave is a busy man. I'll be screening his emails. What should

people do if they want to have their own questions answered? Well, go to softskills.audio and click ask a question and then write and rewrite your question 17 times until it's perfect and then submit it. Or skip all that and just let your cat walk on your keyboard a little and then submit it. I'm going to go backwards and go back to the question. How do you know it's getting better too like what if it's i don't know what if it's worse what if you delete valuable stuff you should just try and and and send some drafts sometime and see and see what happens you'll realize nothing happens yeah yeah you'll never know what people think of your writing unless it's really really bad yeah or really really good okay i think with that we will catch you next week