Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 271: Too quiet and quitting too much?

Episode Date: September 13, 2021

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Questions Listener Lisa asks, Hi Dave and Jamison! How do you answer the statement “You’re very quiet. Like really quiet”? Me? I tend to give a small smile or recently, I said “I know.” I’m a software developer in a large defense company and I’m on my third and final year of my rotational program. I just rotated back to the same area as my first rotation, so I know a couple of folks. However, I’m not SUPER close to these people. My team is fairly new, but most of the members started at the same time, unlike me, who started just three weeks ago. I want to try to know people and get close to them, but at the same time I know my energy lowers after a couple interactions. I have always been known to be quiet, but I don’t want to be known as the odd developer out on my team. The team seems to already know and like each other. I still talk, but only when I have things to say. I tend to stick to doing actually work, while others walk around and talk to people. Especially in the environment I work in, I assumed that we should limit ourselves to mostly chargeable time because we would have to make up the time we spent talking about unrelated work topics. It also doesn’t help that most of my team sit around each other, while I’m in a separate area. I think it would just be awkward for me to stand over their area just to talk, then having to make up that time later on. Should I just accept that I’m mostly an introvert even though I want to belong/to be part of the team? I feel like I want to talk to everyone, but at the same time I sometimes can’t relate to what they’re talking about or I’m just not interested in some of their topics. Aside: I feel like there’s a lot of extroverted developers here and it’s different from what I’m used to. Hiya! I haven’t listened too all your episodes, but out of the ones I’ve heard, it seems like you both suggest quitting our jobs. How many jobs have you quit? My dad had told me a couple years ago (when I was looking for a job) is that if you quit too many times, potential employers would think that you aren’t committed or are only looking to get more money. Is this the case? Will companies think that if I quit multiple times?

it takes more than quitting your job to be a great software engineer this is episode 271 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 talk about the non-technical things that go into the technical job of software development and regularly tell people to quit their jobs and are usually hypocritical because mostly we do not quit our jobs. But today is my last day of my current job. Hey, look at that.

Today I am authentic to my podcast persona. I mean, we'll do hundreds of episodes before you quit your job. So you're like 1% authentic. Yeah, that's true. Patrons, you want to read our patrons' names or special words they want us to say? You bet.

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all you have to do is support us on patreon along with hundreds of your friends so that this list becomes so prohibitively long that we can't possibly read it all out loud it's the only solution to scale it's brilliant thank you so much we really appreciate it keeps the show going it pays for the hosting for the editing for the the expenses of the show which include the fine caviars that we require to fuel our bodies to give the quality advice that we give that's true should i read the first question go for it all right this is from a listener named lisa who asks hi dave and jameson when that's not the word how what's going on uh i just guessed i was like there's a word it's got a w in it when has a w

in it okay hi dave and jameson how do you answer the statement you're very quiet like really quiet me i tend to give a small smile or recently i said i know i'm a software developer in a large defense company and i'm on my third and final year of my rotational program i just rotated back to the same area as my first rotation so i know a couple of folks however i'm not super close to these people my team is fairly new but most of the members started that started at the same time unlike me who started just three weeks ago i want to try to know people and get close to them but at the same time i know my energy lowers after a couple interactions i have always been known to be quiet but i don't want to be known as the odd developer out on my team the team seems to already

know and like each other i still talk but only when i have things to say i tend to stick to doing actual work while others walk around and talk to people especially in the environment i work in i assumed that we would limit ourselves to mostly chargeable time because we would have to make up the time we spent talking about unrelated work topics it also doesn't help that most of my team sit around each other while i'm in a separate area i think it would just be awkward for me to stand over their area and to talk and have to make up the time later on should i just accept that i'm mostly an introvert even though i want to be long or be a part of the team i feel like i want to talk to everyone but at the same time i sometimes can't relate to what they're talking

about or i'm just not interested in some of their topics i'm an introvert am i doomed to a life of loneliness and isolation i mean rewarded is more like it if you're an introvert right that's true congratulations so i have a very easy answer to this question how do i answer the statement you're very quiet like really quiet oh you already do it i give a small smile that's what you said yeah it's a statement it's not a question you don't have to say anything you're quiet plus you're yes yeah yeah you're reinforcing it i acknowledge that you have stated that i'm quiet i feel a kind of mean girls like energy coming off this statement i feel like this is like a thing in high school of like you're really quiet and it's it's like how's that gonna help

the quiet person feel quick draw a bunch of attention to them how's that going to help them feel better and more included i know it's weird yeah i don't know i wonder what they're trying to achieve by that yeah i mean it's like you're quiet hmm you have green eyes yeah thank you huh thank you for observing yeah yeah there's a bunch of stuff all wrapped up in here so i i wonder if they're trying to encourage you to speak up more and this is their way of doing it there if they're saying they would like to hear from you more I think so hopefully it's it's not just like the hazing of look you're different yeah yeah let's oh gosh let's hope it's not that yeah I but haven't you had people on your teams where you think you know this person

is very smart and I wish they would say more of the things that they know on the team like in team contexts yeah i've given that feedback to several people where i i wish they i wish the team knew more of what they were thinking and did they change some cases they did in some cases they didn't it's it's a hard thing to change about oneself i think my observation has been that when i for the few people i've known that are like that uh when i've shared the feedback with them that hey i want to hear your voice more in meetings i think you have important things to say it's the kind of thing where they don't just change like next week they were the talk of the town like that's not the right word next week they were they were the you know the loud and

boisterous one in the meeting um i've never seen it turn over that fast but sometimes over the course of years they just like bust open the door like kramer and there's a bunch of applause as they enter the room hey the formerly quiet person who is now super loud and outgoing is here now that i got that feedback from dave that's all it took i'm the life of the party now finger guns all around indiscriminate firing of finger guns every direction with no regard for human life for metaphorical human life yeah oh man all it took was that one feedback session now i've pivoted to become a motivational speaker for quiet people to tell them hey why don't you speak up more and change their lives? Exactly. So, so short, long story short,

in that case, people don't, you know, if you do want to change this about yourself, it's not the kind of thing that happens overnight. I think what I've seen is that people, it takes them time to observe that their ideas actually are good and welcomed. And it just kind of takes time to build up that muscle where you feel comfortable and confident speaking in a group huh anyway that that's my observation is that of the few people i've known who have made that transition it was like a multi-year transition so buckle in yeah you're in it for the long it's gonna take a while i think there's also so there's there's a couple things going on one is maybe the team wanting more input from you but there's also a sense of wanting to be

more socially connected or feel more included in the team the question asker talks about how everybody gets together in chats and sometimes they talk about things that i'm not interested in or don't have much to say about so so i feel like they they want to be a part of that but don't really know how and maybe that's separate from contributing to a like a technical debate or discussion although that's certainly one way to talk more is trying to take up more space or put more things out there in technical discussions what about the social stuff of i mean what if everybody is a fan of what's that bicycling sport where they just cycle around in circles on that that angled the velodrome it's almost like a race car track velodrome is that what it is yes there's

a name well the velodrome is like the name of the place where it happens but there's uh a name for the event i can't remember what it's called cycling okay what's it called track cycling there you go i think so yeah what if everyone's an avid track cycling fan and they're talking about the ludicrous display last night ludicrous i know that reference famed famed track cycling star but yeah what if what if i mean how do you this is kind of a broad question how do you find common points with people yeah that's true that's a challenge can be and and it's not like you can just change what you like well now i like track cycling yeah i did see that ludicrous display last night i was involved and there's another dynamic here that i'm reading in this question that

makes this even more complicated which is it sounds like your team is on an hourly billing situation. I read the word chargeable time. Oh, yeah, yeah. And I used to work in an environment like that. And it was the kind of thing where if someone dropped in to my office and wanted to chat for 30 minutes, that meant that I was staying 30 minutes longer at work that day and not getting home to my family. And that was always a weird piece of tension where it's like, I'm trying to balance having good working relationships with my coworkers, but also not having to stay late every day to have those good working relationships because we were on this hourly billing and i couldn't in good conscience charge my customer for the 30 minutes of chatting about the velodrome

do you think some people just do though they just kind of lump it all in and say that's that's part of the job yeah it's like yeah i think so i think they do and maybe you should too so yeah it's like you're carrying around a big ticking clock and then every time someone comes up to you or you walk walk up to them you slam a giant button on it it stops ticking yeah what's up how's it going and then you walk back and start the clock ticking or if they if they walk over to your desk you let out a big sigh and press the button punch out forlornly press the button yeah gotta get one of those old school punch cards where you clock in and clock out so there is something interesting here i'm latching on to a phrase i still talk but only when i have things

to say. I believe that is a common pattern for people who are happier to be the quiet person in the group. But may I suggest that if you are that kind of person, you don't necessarily need something to say. You might also consider having something to ask, and it might make it a little easier for you to integrate. It's like, okay, so you don't have common interests, which means you don't have a lot to add to the conversation you know like i just don't know anything about track cycling so i can't add anything but you can ask questions like oh what is the world record for 100 kilometers on a track cycle on a velodrome you know sure you could ask that kind of thing and i think that might make it easier for you to get plugged in to the group even though you

can't materially add to the conversation it's 579 meters long that's a lot of loops it is so the track it's a surprise it's kind of weird that you picked this topic but i actually did watch an athlete try to break the i think it was 100 kilometer record on one of these tracks he failed but i watched it 52 miles an hour holy cow no that would be kilometers an hour no it says they may exceed 85 kilometers an hour or 52.8 miles per hour uh maybe for a short period of time that would be a ludicrous display well yeah for for 100 kilometers yeah that would be rough yeah that is a secret hack to small talk as well if if you're sitting next to somebody people like talking about things that you ask them a lot lots of people do anyways maybe you'll find

someone who's just not interested but people like talking about themselves or things about themselves and there's sort of like a mindset shift that you can go through sometimes where you you realize that anybody can be interesting or anything can be interesting i feel like i've gone through that and and it sometimes i shift back and nobody's interesting too but but like there's just fascinating everything is so deep right every career is super deep and has all kinds of really in-depth specialized knowledge or technical details every i don't know every random hobby has like its lore long history and there's there's just everybody has some wild experience that yeah they might not be good at explaining if they're telling a story but you can

kind of pull the details out of them and figure out they save the universe somehow exactly if you develop that skill of asking questions that elicit interesting answers boy you can really you can really fill the time because people yeah if you ask the right questions people will talk even people who don't normally talk a lot if you develop that skill of asking them questions like what's that for why does that exist what oh man people can really talk and they love it too yeah you know generally i'm not saying everybody loves to talk about themselves but maybe every living person does all right so you've ruled out the undead yes we need something more useful then because that's it's not gonna work yeah i agree with your point that it does buy a lot of goodwill

people people are flattered by your interest if you can be genuinely interested especially and they don't sometimes it's hard to have someone actually listen to you i feel like i participated in a lot of conversations where everyone is kind of fighting for their turn yes so they're not listening they're just waiting for you to shut up so they can say their thing and yes yeah oh man so it can be really nice to talk to somebody that that is interested well i think this is why you are such a pleasant person to talk to because you're perfectly willing to let the loudmouths just talk and talk and talk and they love you they're like wow no one listens to me that's good yeah there's there's room for all kinds of people on a team too a team doesn't have

to be composed of everyone with the same level of i don't know extrovertness or or outgoingness um i think it adds it adds richness to the team so you don't have to necessarily act the same way everyone else on the team acts there's something kind of interesting too about a team where everyone just is like very in sync but it's it's a different feeling than the feeling of everyone complements each other so ask questions clock out very deliberately and obviously right i think that's the advice dramatically dramatically yeah you need a giant red button that you can slam i'm now socializing i bought i got into arduinos several years ago and then dropped it all like i do with most of my hobbies and bought a giant red button and hooked it up to a like a it's like a

spell in a video game smash this button and then it cast this one spell and it was one of the most satisfying feelings in life it made it it was worse for the gameplay like it took longer okay i was worse off but it's just so good to go bam and then something large and impressive happens on the screen i've always wanted something like that to kick off deploys or do something technical for my job oh yeah that'd be fun like a foot pedal to approve the deployment yeah or to ssh into the i don't know ci server or something it'd be kind of funny if it was something very mundane like open your email client like it just opens jira

have we answered the question almost let me just say that uh this is a common refrain where i think a lot of engineers find themselves feeling like well let me not necessarily feeling this way let me put it this way i think a lot of engineers are are quiet and i've seen i think jameson and i have both worked with many engineers who we wish would share more um more of what's on their mind and then the other side of that same coin is that there are actually a fair number of engineers who are just perfectly happy to talk and fill all the space. And I think that as a team, you really need less of that and more of the other. So in other words, I think the ideal team is where you have a critical mass of people

who are willing to contribute their perspective to conversations. On the one hand, you have one person who overtalks everyone and doesn't leave space for others. and on the other extreme of that spectrum you have a team full of people who won't contribute at all to the conversation right in the middle there's this beautiful zone where enough people contribute their perspectives and it's it's not the same people every time that you get good decisions and good outcomes so i don't know what to say to advise you to kind of change your mode but it is an important and good thing to do to learn how to be able to speak your mind and share your perspective. And it's useful. It's not just about you or your career or how you look.

It is useful objectively for your team. You're letting the person who's talking too much get away with it too. That's right. It's your fault they talk too much. You got to fight for justice. Take up more space so they have less room to blather on. Sometimes I've also found that some people just need more time to think before speaking. And I really appreciate that. And I think you can you can do this in person with like hand signals like just or even with verbiage where you just say i i want to think about this give me just a moment to process that and give your mind just a minute to percolate the thoughts and then maybe you'll have something to say instead of letting the conversation go so fast where it's like okay well the people who are verbal fast

verbal processors get to decide what we're doing today and every day um yeah but try to like slow the pace down to of the conversation so that it matches your brain's verbal processing pace i like it good advice dave will you please read our next question you're darn right i will okay this comes from a listener named thomas who says hiya i haven't listened to all your episodes but out of the ones i've heard it seems like you both suggest quitting your jobs are we that obvious thomas continues and says how many jobs have you quit my dad had told me a couple years ago when i was looking for a job is that if you quit too many times potential employers would think that you aren't committed or are only looking to get the money get more money is this a case will

companies think that if that will think that if i quit multiple times i'm not a hypocrite today i've quit one more job today a hundred percent of the podcast episodes that we record today jameson has quit his job how many jobs have i quit i mean if you count so maybe maybe if you count software engineering jobs when i have started in my professional career three four five i guess yeah i think only five software jobs well it also depends i consulted for a while and there were some clients that i i they wanted to keep working with me and i did not i don't know if that counts as quitting though i i count moving on from consulting to a full-time gig as one quit one quit okay that makes sense it could be many micro quits though

as opposed to a monolithic quit yeah well i'm thinking more of like standard units is a mic is micro a standard unit yeah sure it's a one one hundred thousandth oh well then that's too small it's a centiquit you need 100 contracts to equal quitting one job is it like a desi quit like one tenth yeah yeah okay is that desi i thought it would be deca i don't know i've never had to say that word it's a decameter like what's a decimeter it's decameter it's 10 meters it's got to be decameter a decameter is d-e-c-i-m-e-t-e-r is equal to one-tenth of a meter oh okay a decameter is 10 meters i've got it back is that d-e-c-a yeah okay yeah now i know that's pronounced decameter by the way what i'm just kidding there's no way

okay anyways that's a desi quit yes a desi quit there's also a dodeca meter which is equal to 12 meters okay just kidding just that makes sense okay so how many how many quits are you up to then yeah i think five five and how many years oh man uh what year is it what year is it that's the question people don't ask? 13 years, I think. Five quits in 13 years? So your average is 13 divided by five. So like 2.6 years per quit? No, six actually. Technically six. Counting today? Yeah. I thought of another job that I quit. Another job just snuck in there. So your average tenure is about two years. Yeah, I think so. Okay. What about you? Should I subtract the job I was fired from and call that a firing not a quit hmm i think so yeah should i count the job i had while

i was going to college that was on campus that you know of course i would leave when i graduated as a quit yes also count that okay yeah i think so you could i mean maybe you could have stayed on as a professional all right so i've quit eight jobs and you know i'm gonna try to avoid the fence post-error here, which means I've had nine since 2001. So 20 years, 2.2. We're very close to each other. Okay. Interesting. I had this impression that you had way longer tenures than I did. Well, I think I have examples of longer tenures. Like for example, I was at one job for seven years and another job for five years and another job for four years, but I had a six-month startup stint uh oh actually okay two of these quits were the same company because i went back

so that kind of confuses things a little but i started out my career with three jobs that were all less than two years in length so a year and a month a year and four months and a year and five months were jobs one two and three but after that it was five years then a startup for six months then back to the previous company for two years, and then five years, and then four years. And now I'm 10 months into my current job. My dad told me, okay, if you quit too many times, potential employers would think that you aren't committed or are only looking to get more money. I don't think there's anything wrong with looking to get more money from your job.

Yes, we have. That's fine. I feel like this attitude is shrinking. But for a lot of years, I felt like in the industry, it was almost taboo to even talk about money. It's like, well, we all know that we do these jobs out of the goodness of our hearts, and isn't it great that they pay us? But I feel like lately,

money has become a more central feature. I've, how do I put it? I've worked with a few people who are very clear about, yeah, I like the job and I like the people. I like to make money and I want to make more of it. And it was actually kind of refreshing in a way, because instead of wondering, is this person dissatisfied? Are they secretly looking around? I just kind of knew like, yeah, here's their motivation. If I can meet their financial needs and keep up with their financial expectations, then they'll stay here. And if not, then they won't. And it's very clear. So I don't think that's too bad. i mean obviously companies want to spend less money so there are some incentives to keep costs down but right employees want more money and turns out everybody kind of knows both those things

usually yeah like it's no your your manager is perfectly clear about this probably yeah and you would be happy if you had more money yeah what's what i find so interesting about the whole conversation is that when people go into a negotiation for a new job uh like i said they're In the past, more so than now, people are sheepish about asking for more money. Like, oh, I don't want to appear greedy. But what's hilarious is you're negotiating with someone who probably just months or ones of years prior was doing the exact same thing you were with the exact same objective, which is maximizing their money or total package. And so it's like, why do you treat yourself so differently than they would have treated themselves? Yeah.

Well, maybe they didn't negotiate. so it'll make them feel sad and you can't have that yeah definitely not can't have that yeah well companies think that you're just looking for basically will it be bad if i quit multiple times i hope not i mean there's some there's some number of if you have a short enough tenure enough times in a row it'll start to look weird but i pretty regularly see like 18 month tenures and a series of them in a row and that doesn't feel like an obvious red flag or anything yeah and that really we're getting to the crux of the question i think that if you have too many yes it can be a red flag but how many is too many and also the number at the early part of people's careers i think the

expected average tenure is lower but then later in your career i think it's expected to be higher and if i see a 20-year career full of six-month stints that will definitely raise a red flag in the hiring process that will need to be explained it doesn't mean you're not going to get the job but it will you will need an explanation like are you going to leave this company in six months time i think it also depends a little bit on the job i think if you are in some kind of leadership role there's sort of an expectation that you stick around a little bit more and provide a bit more stability so if you were a director or something and you had a bunch of six month stints then i would think we don't want to bring in a director that is responsible for so much of this org

but we'll stick around for six months and kind of shuffle everything and not have time to have an impact you're kind of steering a bigger ship that moves more slowly at higher levels but an individual contributor then you can come in and make contributions in a shorter amount of time what will companies think if i quit too many times i think they'll all think well that's just because they didn't work for this company but we're different we'll keep them because we we have solved all the problems that caused them to quit the other company yes we don't have an attrition problem yeah yeah man it sure took them a lot of tries to find us poor that's for them just all this time they've just been searching and what were they searching

for this company this company it's perfect we're here yeah also this is very dependent on the market being frothy for hiring developers and it is especially frothy right now i feel like we've been saying that for years but it feels more true than it was a few years ago it is true strange right yeah i thought we had reached peak frothiness but there was more turns out that's a common common trope in our industry though is oh i thought that was the most that could ever be of this thing. Nope. In terms of salary caps, in terms of stock prices, in terms of market frothiness, in terms of number of boot camps that can exist. How unethical your CEO can be for how long before there are any consequences. It turns out the ceiling is much higher than anyone

anticipated on any of these dimensions. Yeah. So long story short, in this industry, your dad is probably not correct. Or I should say, and I'm speaking here to Thomas, your dad probably is calibrated differently on what looks like too much turnover, not turnover, too much flightiness. He's probably calibrated very differently from what this industry today is calibrated for. Yeah. We didn't even talk about the generational thing of longer tenures were much more common. My dad is getting a pension or will get a pension pretty soon from the first job that he worked at after grad school really yeah from how long ago was that i don't know like almost almost 40 years ago how long did he work at that job i think he worked for seven years

enough to get a little pension huh short yeah it wasn't it's not like pay for your whole life money but there's just this expectation that the relationship lasted much much longer yeah yeah well and that's absolutely a generational thing my my dad had one job his entire career i mean he worked for one company really yeah one company right out of college holy cow worked for some 30 something years and then retired with a pension the world has changed let's just say a little bit and sometimes i am envious of the older ways you know i can't wait to see what the zoomers do with it actually that's i don't know for sure but i think there might be some zoomers that i work with at my new job oh and i'm excited what's the age i don't know what the age is there are

people who are like tiktok natives though that's how in my head that's what okay cut off is i'm excited to hear what music is cool again yeah it's like led zeppelin still cool yeah oh yeah for sure it's barely 50 years have we answered have we answered the question i think so i think so cool well good luck thomas may you quit many jobs ahead of you in your career yes get out there and quit what can people do if they want their own questions answered with the same advice every time go to soft skills.audio and click ask a question and just we've added a checkbox there that says just please tell me to quit my job like i'm just asking this question so you can tell me to quit my job and we'll just answer those a little more quickly we'll just play the same

snippet of audio we'll get a soundboard yeah perfect and we just want to say thanks to everyone who has submitted questions in the past you are the lifeblood of this show thanks so much for asking all those questions we have a fair number in the backlog but we are committed to getting through all of them right now if yeah if no new questions came in we've got material for a few years but we plan on eventually recording multiple episodes simultaneously, 24-7, once we get the technology for it. So we will catch up.

That's called quantum recording. Yeah, we have some problems to figure out. Mostly a cooling problem. I'm confident, but we'll get it. Well, it all depends on the price of GPUs coming down. So we're just waiting for that chip shortage to clear. All right, thank you for listening. We will catch you next week.

Thanks for watching!