Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 266: Switching tech stacks and awkward zoom silence

Episode Date: July 26, 2021

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Questions Should I change tech stacks every few years in order to not get pigeonholed? Is it a good idea to stick with a tech stack for as long as I can or should I follow the market trend and try to learn another promising tech and then try switching into that? Would you advise me to be more of a specialist or a generalist early in my career, and what about later when I’m more experienced? I’m a full-stack web developer who’s just starting out my first job (if that matters) I love this show so much, I’m even trying your goto advice - quitting my job! But not untill I’ve got another lined up so shhh about it already. In the mean time, I work for a huge agency as a senior(ish) developer and have recently started work with a new team. However, they have issues: no one turns on their camera for video calls, which I’m ok with, but it makes the next bit worse somehow - most say the absolute minimum in response to any questions and offer no opionions / thoughts / ideas. It makes things like sprint retro meetings very awkward. We have a scrum master running our meetings who is clearly struggling to engage the team, I try to hold off to let any of the others answer questions but I always seem to end up picking up the slack. I’ve even started timing how long I’ll let the slience endure before jumping in to answer, I’m now waiting 15 seconds. Have you come accross this before? How can I get people to engage more?

it takes more than jumping time zones in an effort to stay ahead of that deadline to be a great software engineer this is soft skills engineering episode 266 i'm your host jamison 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 and time travel that does come up more often than you would expect it does it is the universal solution to every problem i wonder at what point it so i mean it's not time travel but as you what if you just go close to the speed of light and wait for relativity to kick in so you have more time to complete your work oh yeah just move faster yeah just go faster like run really fast

that feels like something that a game dev studio would try it's like all right we're 18 months behind our launch date we have 4 000 hours of work to do before we go gold in the next two weeks time to orbit the earth at a million miles an hour yes we're putting the whole team on the back of a flatbed trailer truck and we're gonna go really fast down the freeway it can't be worse than some of the other stuff they do to try and get more productivity out of people that's true dave do you want to thank our patrons sure thanks to those that are contributing at the level that gets them a weekly shout out they are chitalian patron.com.au we're hiring ira chan monkey face emoji jonathan king testing is documenting.org adrian boarding roman denisov

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cent probably not because they have all these fees they have to pay i think the best way to find that out is to have about 10 million people try it we could make stripe a lot of money i guess whoever does their processing okay i will read our first question this question is from a listener called recent should i change tech stacks every few years in order to not get pigeonholed is it a good idea to stick with a tech stack for as long as i can or should i follow the market trend and try to learn another promising tech and then try switching into that would you advise me to be more of a specialist or a generalist early in my career and what about later when i'm more experienced i'm a full stack web developer who's just starting out at my first job

if that matters ah just starting out as a web developer wouldn't that be like a no stack web developer i don't know any yet i remember caring a lot more about this when i was earlier in my career and yeah the longer i've been in tech the more i've seen i was just talking to somebody the other day who there's this super productive company built totally on php and they they're they're fine like everything exists somewhere in the world even the hype is not uniformly distributed but the hype in your particular corner of wherever you're getting your tech industry pulse is is not really representative of what people are actually using in production so i don't think it's bad to stick with tech for quite a while quite a while is like you know

several years you shouldn't worry about hopping because the the thing you're using is out of date if it's in popular use right now it'll still probably be around a couple years for now that's separate from uh i mean there might be stuff that pays better or that aligns with your interest more that you just think is cool but i don't think you have to doesn't it turn out though that just because someone's using it now and will be for a few years if you become the expert on something now on that sorry that was put wrong let's say you develop deep expertise on something to the exclusion of a bunch of other things and yeah sure it's good for a couple years but then you get hung out to dry when the world moves on eventually from that technology we've talked about

this a bunch before too though there's there's uh different half-lifes that technologies have where they some of them take longer to decay than others yes and and after a while you kind of learn i don't know like operating system fundamentals yeah we haven't linux has been around for a long time maybe serverless means that's less of a deal i guess maybe that's the big paradigm now so that's important in some ways but there's something out there that is not going to change even if the language it's implemented in changes and so maybe the the specific api of the specific php framework that you're using that will help you be productive at your job and your next job will probably not be using that same framework so yeah you'll lose that but you still gain knowledge about php

knowledge about web development in general and how to scale systems and architect things and And that's the stuff that you carry with you. And if you're smart enough to be an expert in a language, I feel like you should also be smart enough to pick out the agnostic, just good technical practices and carry those to a different language. I respectfully disagree with you, Jameson. I'm appalled.

I think it's very difficult to pick out the cross-cutting best practices when you've only been exposed to one. That's true, actually. That's a good point. Yeah, the best practices are just like literally everything about the thing you know, because that's the best you know. Yeah, it's the only one you know.

They're also all the worst practices. Right, for you. Yeah. I don't know. I think something happens when you've moved on to your third, fourth, fifth technology stack. You start to get a sense for what's a good idea, what's a bad idea, as you see themes repeat themselves in a good way or in bad ways i don't know i feel like i feel like it does make

sense to jump every once in a while and completely reboot yourself even if your old tech stack isn't even dying yet so this is less about keeping up with the market trends and more about exposing you to a breadth of different ways of doing things i think so and and this is from someone who lived through 2013 which was kind of the year of the front-end web framework wars you may recall several hit the scene and were just so hot and it was all this competing for mind share and whatnot and i i don't espouse the idea that you should say well this is hot this year i'm gonna go do that because that's where all the jobs are i i don't think that really works yeah so like you said i am more into rebooting for my own self which is really driven not just by getting exposure to

the new stuff and but also that i think that you need to develop the muscle to learn new things quickly and there's really a great way to do that which is throw yourself into the deep end of a brand new tech stack yeah okay so i'm gonna claim that we both agree with each other in a way because you're saying you should shift so that you widen your scope and i'm saying you don't have to switch to keep up with the market because tech takes a long time to switch. But yeah, those can both be true at the same time. You mentioned the framework wars of 2013.

It's interesting to follow that curve because that's when React came out and it was like hyped. And I feel like now is when React is at peak industry job saturation. Eight years later. Yeah, it's taken forever for it to become popular enough that now you can go and find a react job pretty easily at lots of different places so these

timelines are pretty long that is true that's very long and frankly when you talk about the most popular tech stacks like on the front end there's a few you've already mentioned one and i'm resisting mentioning any others because this is a soft skill show i'm doing my best but on the front end there's like mega frameworks it's really hard to go wrong with picking one of those but still even with one of those even with the longevity we just talked about in 15 years do you really think you want to be the react expert like 15 years from now i'm gonna guess no i want to be the person who writes the blog post comparing whatever newfangled technology of the day is popular to this is just the old react model from way back in 2013 yeah remember 2013 you whippersnappers

yeah i love reading that stuff it's like this is just like kobol in 1978 yeah you could be completely making it up i would have no idea yep but i believe you are wise for reading that so smart but if you're a full stack web developer who's starting on your first job good news you'll probably have a different job in a couple years so this will just happen automatically yeah so well let's do like a yes no answer would you advise me to be more of a specialist or a generalist and should i change tech stacks every few years to not get pigeonholed what's your answer jameson it's a yes or no oh man i have to make a decision uh my answer is um yes okay okay good i agree now second question my answer is pigeonholed okay oh yeah what were the questions

yes go for the pigeonhole it's really cool should you change tech stacks every few years did i uh no should that was one of the questions you asked i think for the vast majority of software developers that's not even a decision that you have to make because 10 years at jobs are short enough it'll make it for you so yeah i don't i don't think you should prioritize that i think you should no i don't think you should i think it'll just happen so you don't have to make a special effort to go do it yeah that's what i think the exception to that rule though is if you find yourself in the same job 10 years in without using you know any new tech stacks maybe you should but pretty much everyone else you're fine it'll happen for you is what you're saying

yeah i think that's what i'm saying that's what i would have said if i had more sleep last night Thank you for interpreting me. Okay, last question then. Would you advise this new engineer to be more of a specialist or a generalist? In their first job, I don't think they can be a specialist. Yeah, okay. What do you mean by that? I mean, there's just a lot you have to pick up all at once in your first job

that kind of forces you towards being a generalist. You're saying there's so much that people need to look... Oh, here I go again, putting words in your mouth. So there's so much... No, do it, please. Okay. The words are not in my mouth. So I need you to put them there.

Here they come. There's so much as a new engineer that you need to learn that specializing in any one of those areas would prevent you from learning crucial things about other areas. Is that what you're saying? I think so. It's kind of like this baseline you're trying to get to. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. So don't even bother specializing. What I would say is pretty much the same thing like for your first few years.

Like don't worry. Just learn everything you can. Don't worry about whether you're getting too specialized or too generalized. Just learn, learn, learn. learn everything you can in order to become really skilled with the tools that you need to do your job every day and then after a few years then you can have this kind of mental decision you need to make about whether you should specialize further or not i've always made it a point to just become a specialist in the tools that i'm using at work and then i choose work based on what's going to

afford me the most learning opportunity so you pick what you want to specialize in and then go get a job doing that thing not so much so i i pick i pick places to work based on what i think will maximize my learning opportunities. And I don't actually care much about the tech stack. And then I become a specialist in that tech stack, whatever it is. Now, there are exceptions to that rule. Like I wouldn't probably be interested in a job

where it's like, you're going to become a specialist in the Salesforce API. You know, like that's less interesting. I would want more broadly applicable. Like you're going to become a specialist in the Java tech stack. I mean, obviously that's not a tech stack. It was like a million Java tech stacks,

but you know, it's like something a little bit more broad. Like you're going to become a spring expert. okay i can do that i think you just offended all the salesforce developers sorry we have some who listen to our show i've talked to some of them oh crap and they're coming to your house they're on their way they got their crm bats they're ready to beat something okay i think we've answered the question okay good luck shall i read our next one please do okay this comes from breaker of awkward silences okay breaker of awkward silences writes i love this show so much i'm even trying your go-to advice of quitting my job, but not until I've got another one lined up, so shh about it

already. In the meantime, I work for a huge agency as a senior-ish developer and have recently started work with a new team. However, they have issues. No one turns on their camera for video calls, which I'm okay with, but it makes the next bit worse somehow. Most say the absolute minimum in response to any questions and offer no opinions or thoughts or ideas. It makes things like sprint retro meetings very awkward we have a scrum master running our meetings who is clearly struggling to engage the team i try to hold off to let any of the others answer questions but i always seem to end up picking up the slack i've even started timing how long i'll let the silence endure before i jump in with an answer i'm now waiting 15 seconds have you come across this before and

how can i get people to engage more silence is only awkward if you're engaged so if you are just completely disengage you won't even notice if you have a podcast on like this one yeah i got youtube pulled up on your other monitor i worked with somebody who swore that they could just watch a movie while they worked uh-huh and i actually don't remember how productive they were anymore so maybe they could i don't know that would not work for me though yeah but it would make it so i did not notice awkward silences for sure unless there was an awkward silence in the movie at the same time there's awkward silence in in the call i think you would actually look forward to awkward silence it's like man i wish this meeting would quiet down so i can finally

hear this dialogue yeah i've definitely well i'm gonna let some awkward silence build up oh man this is killing me jameson are you there are you on mute you'll never know there is something really powerful about being in person and being able to make eye contact with one with someone until they just are they just succumb to the eye contact and are forced to engage you yeah this does feel like a problem that is exacerbated by being remote oh yeah i have felt this myself and i have talked to other folks who have felt this i remember a conversation with with one colleague who, uh, was, was coming from a more in-office culture and was very frustrated

by the lack of engagement in meetings, cameras off. Yeah. Not a lot of participation. Some of it is, uh, there can be this developer attitude of leave me alone. I want to get my work done. And that attitude is harder to sense when you're in a meeting in person, but if it's remote, like if you could in person turn your face off then you would you would maybe feel this same way someone could just like blank out their face and you just saw a big static oval in front of their head when they didn't want you to see their face uh but you can't really do that so you missed that signal but it's uh it's very clear in remote meetings when people do not want to be engaged yeah what do you do about it is it possible you have different expectations about what your work

environment should be like and by that i mean maybe these colleagues don't think you should be having these meetings maybe they want to work asynchronously and over text and and and part of their reluctance to participate is not just that they want to make you feel uncomfortable and make you break out into song to break the awkward silence but it's that's just not the way they want to work maybe there's some disagreement in the right way to work on a team i've seen this before too i've seen a breakdown between people who want to work synchronously and and collaborate heavily in meetings uh remote or in person and people who want to just like email rfcs back and forth for everything and that's the interaction you have is kind of reading and writing back and forth

and that led to sadness on both parts because one party is upset with all the meetings and the other party is upset that nobody ever talks to them so uh you could try raising that in a retro and then seeing if suddenly everyone starts talking once you once you lampshade it once you lampshade it oh do you not know what lampshading is uh this is from tv tropes i haven't been to tv tropes in forever instead of reading from wikipedia i'm going to read from tv tropes which is like wikipedia i guess okay lampshading is a writer's trick of dealing with any element of the story that threatens an audience's willing suspension of disbelief by calling attention to it and simply moving on so it's when you uh you point out an awkward or

sometimes it can be like fourth wall breaking stuff or i don't know yeah it's like you point out something that is sticking out already but then you just don't say anything else about it other than to point it out yes and why is this called lampshading you hang a lampshade on it i don't know where this came from maybe tv tropes will tell me if i read hang on the podcast is canceled because i need to are you familiar with the tv tropes uh like vortex that it sucks you into no so do you know what tv tropes is no oh man okay well maybe i'll destroy your life i just see i just pulled up the website i see there's a lampshade sitting on the logo though yeah it's a wiki of tropes in fiction basically and every article links to about 70 other articles of

other tropes and then like several hundred examples of media that use the trope in the article and you just like follow the oh my gosh follow the cycle this seems like a website i should not ever open not because it'll suck me in but you know it could be a time suck but that's not why it's because this seems like the kind of website that once you become familiar with its content every time you watch any piece of entertainment you're going to be like oh that was just 17 tropes strung together i know all of them why that's from page number 17 of the yeah tv tropes guide yeah possibly seems like a great way to ruin movies sometimes they ruin themselves okay back to what to do you've tried waiting up to 15 seconds and

that didn't work okay maybe 16 is the magic breakthrough you tried picking up the slack and that didn't work yeah i think you need to have some agreement of some discussion about ways of working and and this discussion will probably be filled with awkward silences oh Oh yeah, for sure. Maybe you have an email discretion then too. I don't know if that's the way they want to work. I was thinking, so you've got the scrum master here who's on your side, right?

And I think you two should turn this into a game. So here we've got, we know 15 seconds. We know that the people in the meeting will go 15 seconds. How long will they go? And since you and the scrum master are the only ones doing the talking, you guys should partner offline and say, look, we're going to max this out.

We're going to see how long it'll go. Maybe you binary search it, you know, where you say you're kind of exploring the space. Say, let's try 30. If that doesn't work, we'll do 60. then we'll do 120 and 240 and just see how long you could literally just sit there before people just talk or they might just drop off the meeting like time out due to inactivity i'm sorry i got a phone call during the last part oh gosh you're doing it to me

now i just have to sit here and laugh awkwardly until you come back can you hear me i can hear you okay i turned off my phone uh i don't i didn't hear the last part of what you said after um a binary search to see how long they will sit there in silence okay i don't know if you're trolling me right now or if you actually got cut off no i got cut off oh i can't hear you i i couldn't hear you oh my gosh that was so meta okay i threw out this idea and you just sat there in silence it was awesome you could you could try so instead of a collaborative game it could be a competitive game where you try and rack up it could be like golf where you try and have the shortest pauses

okay who can who can say a thing that will elicit responses the fastest or it could be like a lot of other games where you try and get high scores right who can have the longest pause i love it and that's what you use instead of performance ratings to calculate your compensation that's one way to do it is get management involved and just be like hey look we're going to measure the mean time to response for each of you and uh the higher it is the more of a pay of a pay the more we cut into your bonus for the year maybe yeah your uptime for how often sound is coming out of your mouth is really low exactly a lot of long outages yep and we have an sla here that you need to meet i have a question that cannot be answered but has it always

been like this is this a new development if this is the way the team works and and the breaker of awkward silences has come in to break the awkward silences or they've moved to a new process that now involves a scrum master then you're working to change the team's culture and that's going to be hard and that's where it's even more important to explicitly talk about what the team's expectations are for how you engage in meetings yeah and maybe maybe this team has pre-established a pattern where they say, look, we're all going to sit in silence for 60 seconds after every question to make sure we really think through our answers before we speak. And you're coming in here and just wrecking it. It's like that Amazon reading culture where you read the memos in silence

before every meeting, but instead after every question or statement, you sit and ponder it. Yeah. And you're just like, come on, what's going on? Stop it. I'm trying to think of the implications of what you just said. have i come across this before yes how can i get people to engage more you can't well this kind of thing can snowball one way or the other i've seen it snowball from a group that doesn't engage very much virtually and then one or two influential people start doing it and then other folks do so it's it's kind of like someone has to awkwardly turn their camera on first and stare at a bunch of avatars i've also seen it go the other way where if if i don't know the person

running the meeting turns their camera off then suddenly you see them all just blip out slowly yeah one by one yeah then i can finally shed my clothing in the meeting waiting to oh man this restrictive get out of this t-shirt yeah so the point of that is um if you can find someone influential on the team maybe i guess it's not you two the scrum master of awkward silences and you'll never find out who the other influential people are because they're all sitting in silence yeah there's a problem with this plan just james they're working there's several remote jobs at once so they're multitasking right yeah but maybe work on one person if if you can't get the team to agree on it and then it just becomes a shared value organically right i mean the

alternative is you could just be really clear about this and sit down with each person and say i've noticed you don't ever answer questions or or provide any info in meetings uh why is that and then you'll sit there for the next 15 seconds yeah you might not like the answer too they might just say because these meetings are garbage waste of time well that's useful that's useful to know though isn't it one way or another you're gonna learn something valuable here or you'll learn nothing i guess i have to go there's a giant water leak in my house oh so uh i guess the question is answered answered all right well i'll tell you where you can go if you want to get your own question answered all right bye jason

if you want to get your own question answered go to softskills.audio and click ask a question where you can fill out our form there and put down whatever you like for your question and we'll get an answer to it eventually before the heat death of the universe. Thank you so much to everyone who asks questions every week and we will catch you next week.