Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 274: Announcing resignation too early and why are my ideas rejected?

Episode Date: October 18, 2021

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Questions I’m a technical lead and I’m planning to take the usual advice and quit my job. The catch is, I have a not-yet-vested interest in staying until the new year. My manager mentioned in passing that he’s doing resource planning for my team for next year. Should I indicate that I’ll be looking for work in the new year? I feel like I have a guarded relationship with my manager, so I don’t feel like it’s a safe space to say just anything. But I know it would be helpful for him to know that I’m leaving. I work at a consulting company and I’ve been outsourced to one of the biggest banks to work on their iOS application. My problem is every time I propose a solution, it bounces back and is never accepted. In my opinion our way of doing things is wrong and I lost motivation and enthusiasm to work on the project. I shared my concerns and thoughts and always got the pat on my back but never found a solution. In these kind of situations, how do you motivate yourself to keep going? Should I look at it as improving my people management skills or should I quit? Thank you both of you. I don’t feel alone when I listen your podcast and I’m simply thankful your existence.

It takes more than not accidentally activating your YubiKey to be a great... This is Soft Skills Engineering episode 274. 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 aspects of keeping your finger off the YubiKey. I just realized this means you speak fluent base 64. Yep. Well done.

Yeah, I was telling Dave before the show started that when I worked at Walmart, pretty much every day someone would dump their YubiKey into the general Slack channel to 40,000 people. It was just a good way to start the day. App channel, YubiKey. Well, that would be a bad YubiKey. it detected if you were in slack somehow and it prefixes it with that channel yeah oh you're in slack this is probably what you want all right i want to thank our patrons thank you to the following people who support us at the level where we shout them out every single week thank you to ian walter arun duna kashokton ohio this

is dobby patron.com.au we're hiring ira chan monkey face emoji jonathan king testing is documenting.org, Roman Denisov, Trans Rights, Fizzbuzz Influencer, Oladapo Fadei, Kiaran Sveinsen, Will Angel, Ragnar Harrison, window.alert, open parens, double quote, you have been pwned, double quote, close parens. We fixed our XSS vulnerability. And so that we escaped it correctly this time. Nick Hathaway, Travis Sanders, Denis Bogdanov, Brayden Keynes, John Grant, Taras Harouk, Nick Kantar, Philip John Basile, and Bites of Wisdom with a Y. thank you so much consider yourself thanked yeah once is enough right we can just you just they'll remember next time yeah i hope so yeah if you want to join this group if you

want to join our slack team also which is where we send invites we don't we're recording a little bit off our normal time and i'm gonna blame instead of the normal problems that cause me to mess up i'm gonna blame any mess ups on this this change okay so i can't speak english not because I don't speak English well normally, but because we're doing this a few hours later and I have a specific window when I can podcast and it's out of that. The podcast crop has gotten too ripe. It's starting to spoil. Nice. Yeah. We'll invite you to our Slack team. It will be great. If you want to join, you can go to softskills.audio and click support us on Patreon. All right. Do you want to read our first question, Dave?

Sure thing. This comes from an anonymous listener who says, I'm a technical lead and I'm planning to take the usual advice and quit my job. The catch is I have a not yet vested interest in staying until the new year. My manager mentioned in passing that he's doing resource planning for my team for next year. Should I indicate that I'll be looking for work in the new year? I feel like I have a guarded relationship with my manager, so I don't feel like it's a safe space to say just anything. But I know it would be helpful for him to know that I'm leaving. hmm should i indicate that i'll be looking for work in the new year it's october right now so that's what like two months away yeah am i doing date math right you are yeah no absolutely not this feels pretty clear no you don't gain anything if they are on top of it and you are not incredibly sneaky they might have some suspicion that you're considering leaving and their resource plan should include what happens if people that work here now don't work here anymore it's still going to make their plan i don't know it'll be worse for them but that's what the money's for wait what now that's what the money's that's why they get paid yeah

like i don't know that's their job they can they'll figure it out the money is there to soothe the pain of you quitting is that what you're saying yeah i think so or just like compensate your manager for the the upheaval in their plans right they'll i don't know maybe they'll have to work a little bit extra or ship fewer things but again that's that's what the money's for that's what their job is yeah i don't see any good thing that could come out of this especially if you're trying to meet so meet some kind of vesting date with like bonus or options or stock or something yeah i think it's probably unlikely oh i keep cutting you off you go ahead no i was just agreeing with you oh yeah i mean if you cut me off while agreeing with you that's pretty

impressive yeah it's because i already knew like oh he's probably agreeing with me and everybody else knows that too so let's just save some time you you cut keep on rolling you cut me off mid yes all i got was through the letter y and you cut me off why wait for all of those other sounds besides the y you know when you're going through some command line program and it asks you to confirm it doesn't make you type y e s you just type y that's true that is true i have wasted just press enter to confirm yeah or i'm doing this in three two one regardless yep okay yeah i think it's unlikely that you will be fired right before you can get your payout but not impossible and and the upside for you is i don't know feels i don't know what the upside

would be. You make your manager's resource plan better when you don't work there anymore. I don't know. So I was going to say we should do an in-depth pro and con analysis, but I think you just covered it. So, okay. I thought of a thing. If you are 100% quitting, there's very little benefit. If you are quitting because of some circumstances at your job, if you're going to quit anyways, you could try to express your dissatisfaction a little bit more and see if it gets changed at all. Often the threat of someone quitting or being unhappy enough that you think they might quit is a good motivator to shake off some organizational cruft. And it shouldn't take that, but sometimes it does. Like if the company thinks, oh, people are fine with this, I don't

horrible overbearing process and then find out oh star star engineer soft skills audio listener is about to quit or maybe isn't maybe isn't about to quit but seems unhappy we better change everything to appease them but again i wouldn't say hey i'm quitting my job in on january 1st once everything vests i would i would say hey this specific thing is really frustrating for me what can we do to change it it sounds like you're saying and maybe not even that yeah i mean if there's if there's nothing, if the reason you're quitting is like, I don't know, the CEO was mean to you or something, something that's not going to change, that's part of their job. Yeah, then maybe it's not worth it. But if it is, I don't know, maybe there's a different team you could transfer to. Maybe

you can change some process. Maybe you could get a raise if it's compensation based. So there might be some options. And the benefit to you of bringing it up to your manager is maybe you get the things you want without having to go through quitting a job, which can be traumatic, despite how cavalierly we recommend it sometimes. It's a big upheaval in life. But sometimes you just got to quit. I quit a job recently, and I really enjoyed the people I worked with. And it still just felt nice. I felt like less of a hypocrite for recommending that people quit their jobs all the time. Okay, I think you're right. Can I just say that when I read this question, it said, I have some not yet vested interest in staying. My manager mentioned,

yada yada should i end and i was like no just stop right there and then and then the question continued you know should i indicate that i'll be looking for work in the new year i have a guarded relationship with my manager definitely no double no i don't feel like it's a safe space to say just anything okay triple no but i know that it would be helpful for him to know that i'm leaving okay just stop like there this is so clear cut to me just shut your mouth work the next two and a half months, collect your money and move on. And exactly zero people will be surprised when they see what you've done. But I know it would be helpful for him to know that I'm leaving. So I feel like you got to triple no. And maybe that last sentence rolls one no back. So it's only

double no now. I have a guarded relationship with my manager. You know what? Maybe the reason you have a guarded relationship is because you haven't risked enough, right? You haven't been vulnerable enough with your manager. And it's time to roll the dice. Just say, hey, I know we haven't seen eye-to-eye. I know you keep a list of all the things I do that annoy you, but I just feel like I need to share this. I'm just going to put everything on the table and I'm either going to lose it all or we're going to have a great relationship after this. But either way, I'm still quitting. That's right. But I'll go away with nothing. I'll lose all my invested stock. You might have a better resource plan. At least you'll have a good transition plan.

that's a good way to think about it you're like right how much is it worth your whatever you're gonna invest in january to to like buy a transition plan for your manager yeah i've got i've got thirty thousand dollars in bonus coming i think i'll i'll give i'll i'll buy that oh yeah countless hours of pain but think of how much money it'll save him if you absolutely feel compelled to help in this situation probably the best thing you can do is navigate a way to find your replacement before you leave or you know as a hybrid approach start all the knowledge transfer and the stuff that you know you're going to have to do eventually start it now so that when you do leave it's less abrupt in other words just start putting in place

all the motions that you would do in those last two weeks right now, including maybe finding your replacement. And sometimes you can do this, like if there's an open rec somewhere else that looks like the rec that you're currently filling, you can accelerate the hiring for that rec, knowing that you're actually hiring your replacement. And then I think you can kind of check the box for your conscience to know that you've done everything to help prepare the transition and still collect your bonus. But I don't know if I can help you with healing that guarded relationship with your manager yeah while you were speaking i was thinking you you could just tweak the resource plan take your manager's resource plan copy paste yourself and add another

one next to you and so your manager thinks oh we really gotta we need two of this kind of skill so that's weird i thought we only had one one opening for that but i guess we need to hire one more and then you just all right you just sneak it in you pad the resource plan knowing that you'll be gone. Yep. All right. I will read our next question. Not even going to ask if it's answered because I know it was. This is from an anonymous listener who says, I work at a consulting company and I've been outsourced to one of the biggest banks to work on their iOS application. My problem is every time I propose a solution, it bounces back and is never accepted. In my opinion, our way of doing things is wrong and I lost motivation and enthusiasm to work on

the project i shared my concerns and thoughts and always got the pat on my back but never found a solution in these kind of situations how do you motivate yourself to keep going should i look at it as improving my people management skills or should i quit thank you both of you i don't feel alone when i listen to your podcast and i'm simply thankful for your existence oh wow that's great to say i feel like yeah i feel like i i can meet those expectations i can keep existing i can now really nice you to say consulting yeah yeah giant bank rejects all the good ideas to make the app better i'm pretty sure this person is talking about my bank i've been using an ios app for the last i don't know almost 10 years and it looks pretty much

the same has all the same problems yeah you wouldn't believe how much effort it takes to just keep treading water though true at least it hasn't gotten worse yeah that's true it really hasn't and that's impressive i have a few thoughts here so some one of my thoughts is from my time at a giant megacorp and there's a lot of the analogy that was used there is it's a big ship and it takes a long time to turn it if you are sailing i don't know sailing piloting some giant cargo ship and you spin the wheel you're not just gonna immediately start to see the ship maneuver so so some of it is expectations expectations if you are even if you're trying to operate within a team there's still the pressure of a team inside this giant corporate environment that

kind of tends to slow things down or might make it harder to be autonomous or make decisions maybe it's a good idea but it's unclear if the team has the authority to do this thing or change some way about something about how they're working so yeah some of this feels like big company stuff and getting change done at a big company is uh it's the stuff of many agile consulted careers you can you can go join a lucrative speaking circuit if you figure that out but generally it takes a lot more consensus and convincing and repeating yourself than it takes at other places you can also join that lucrative speaking circuit even if you don't figure it out i share my concerns and thoughts motivate yourself to keep going yeah so that's

that's one thing it could just be it's hard to change things the other thought i had is kind of related to that it's there could be specific context you are missing because you're a consultant about why that change won't work right if you come in and say hey this this api framework is old Let's replace it with the new one. And they know that they have all these hard deadlines to hit. And it's, I don't know, the team doesn't pick up new frameworks well, or there's some onerous approval process to add new open source projects or something. Like maybe there's a reason that you haven't uncovered and you need to either listen to them or dig into why it doesn't happen specifically. And there could just be some some objection that they have not expressed to you that makes it hard. They can't just do the thing. And you need to uncover that to make progress towards it. Maybe. I wonder how many, you know, when you say uncover, I wonder how many layers of the onion you'd have to peel back before you figure that out in this giant org.

Oh, I'm trying to think of some examples. So I worked at a place that had to be PCI compliant. And that immediately just carves off a very large swath of potential solutions to problems. And it took people a while to get the shape of PCI compliance and what that meant for architecture. Because there's a ton of things that seem really obvious and easy that you just can't do without spending way more time or money than you would expect to on them. So maybe it's something like that. It could also be that just nobody cares. I don't know. You work at a big bank, maybe the people are not the most motivated to revolutionize their technology stack or way of working or something. Yeah. You know, I think there's a big dynamic we should talk about in this relationship, or an important dynamic, which is that you're a consulting company and the bank presumably has a bunch of employees. And sometimes in that arrangement, the whole relationship exists in that way because the bank doesn't want your input.

They just want you to take the task assigned to you and do it. And so it is quite possible that this was a deliberate choice and that nothing you do will fix this. That's it. I was just thinking maybe there's more. Nope, that's all I got to say about that. It's a possibility. Even if they're not overtly thinking that, it does feel some places keep consultants at an arm's length and they're very much not on the team. And influencing a team is hard already when you're embedded deeply within it. But if you're kind of seen as an other, then it's going to be even harder to get stuff changed. So I think join full time. Yeah, that's what we're saying. Yeah, and then quit after you still can't change it.

Yeah. Hmm, should you quit? I mean, maybe you could just ask for a different contract or something. I don't know how long you've been consulting, but maybe you've had better experiences at other places. And that can definitely be true. There are companies that treat contractors and consultants as first-class members of the team,

and there are companies that don't. So it could be that you just need to find a better match. But if what you are looking for is a lot of ownership and influence over the ways that you work, I think consulting, if you're not the expert coming that they hired you specifically to ask, hey, how should we change our process or pick this tech stack or I don't know, some specific problem, it's going to be pretty hard to change. And it's much easier to have the cred to do that as a full time employee. Yeah, that's true. So that's a long way of saying quit your job. Change your job, I guess, is what you're saying. Yes.

Well, get a different job. Doing the same thing. And not this job anymore. I think this is a thing you can search for in an interview process as well as try and feel out how open, how fixed a company is in their way of doing things, how often processes change, how often. And maybe you prefer a place that's a little more chaotic and freewheeling, and they just try new stuff all the time. There are some places that are like that, and some that are definitely not. And a good question to ask in an interview to figure that out is to say, tell me about the last time a contractor or an employee had a big idea that you implemented. And if they're like, oh, hmm.

That's not what we pay those people for. You should have asked me. You mean the coders? Yeah, the coders. You should have asked me. Tell me the last time I gave a task to a coder and they did it the way I asked them to. Too long, I say. It is interesting, though.

The question here that's written is, how do you motivate yourself to keep going in this situation? And to answer that very direct question, I have a really hard time in the situation being motivated when I can't be influential. And I will often – well, I'm trying to think. I'm not sure that I've ever been in a situation. Well, yes, I have quit a job over this, where it's like, look, the organization is just not set up for me to be influential and have motivation. And so I went somewhere else. And quite frankly, don't you feel you owe it to your company to put yourself in a situation where you are doing the most valuable thing? When you kind of think about, take kind of a utilitarian view of this and say, I could either work at this company where I'm constantly fighting against demotivation, or I could go work for another company where the environment organically encourages me to be motivated and enthusiastic, and I will produce more and do better and more valuable work. When you think about globally, if everyone optimized that way, we would have a higher GDP. And don't you think GDP is the most important thing we should all be striving for? that's what we always say on this show, right?

It's all about the gross domestic product. Yeah. I think I've gotten satisfaction out of jobs where maybe if I couldn't influence the processes or the meta work, I was very satisfied by the work. But my most enjoyable jobs have involved both of those things where the output I am producing is fun and engaging to work on and also i get to try and make things better around me besides just

the technical stuff that i supply so maybe you could find some satisfaction in just kind of diving into the work but yeah i can i can see this being demotivating yeah maybe okay one one last one last suggestion all right maybe your ideas aren't very good oh and they're not telling you Clearly, look, how could anyone who listens to this podcast have bad ideas? Well, if they listen to us, then we implant bad ideas in their head. Oh, that's how. And then they have bad ideas. Right.

Oh, my bad. Yeah. I didn't think about that. No, but if all you're getting is a pat on the head, your ideas are not good enough. And maybe they're good in abstract, but not good for some specific reasons in the context. But maybe you just need to refine them a little bit more and shop them around a little bit more and try and it seems like this isn't the kind of place where you can just say, hey, why don't we try, I don't know, async stand up meetings instead of stand up meetings, because they just don't want to change stuff from you suggesting it. But if you really want to change stuff, you can just try to try to build up a better case or uncover the real objections. And that might, but probably won't, but might. It'll be useful practice.

Yeah, yeah. Also, let me just say, if you truly are interested in improving your ability to influence an organization where you don't have A, authority, or B, even the right relationship business-wise to have that influence, it might make sense for you to go and talk to some of these people and say hey i've come up with these ideas i'm just going to remind you here was one idea i had here's another one here's a third one and they all ended the same way i would love to have your honest feedback on whether you think these were actually good ideas that didn't get traction or if maybe they were bad ideas or if maybe i presented them in such a way that they couldn't get traction i'm just trying to improve and get better and and i want your un i want your candid and honest feedback and i think you might be surprised at what you learn when when you ask that question that way might also be very painful

yeah that's a good point though there's an art to most most people will avoid saying something that feels mean at least in the u.s professional environment that's sort of the the norm is you don't want to make people upset by saying things they might feel are are unkind so if you just say hey, why is my idea not getting accepted? And the reason in their head is because it sucks or you missed this critical thing or you made this horrible mistake while presenting it. They're not going to say that.

So you need to create an environment where they feel like it is useful for them to give you that feedback and they know that you're not going to blow up at them or get offended and then try and, I don't know, stalk them for the rest of the time at that company, comment a thumbs down emoji on all of their pull requests from here on out.

Like you need to make sure that there's either the cost is zero. Like, I don't know, you can just say, hey, I'm hard to offend this way. Or I don't know. There's lots of ways to say that. Or that there's some benefit to doing it because right now there is a cost to them. The cost is potentially upsetting you and then the bummer that can cause it work. Well, have we answered the question? Well, probably not.

It's a tough situation, but hopefully it's helpful. Good luck. Yeah, good luck. What can people do if they want their own questions answered, Dave? Go over to softskills.audio and click the ask a question button where you can fill out our form. And we just want to say thank you to everyone who has done that. So many good questions. We're very appreciative.

All right. We'll catch you next week.