Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 278: PM to engineer and pressure to stay after quitting

Episode Date: November 15, 2021

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Questions Many engineers want to go into product management, but I’m the reverse - a product manager who wants to move into engineering. What advice would you give to someone pursuing this path? How would you recommend I spend my time while jobfinding? What type of job should I be looking for? I have a computer science degree but I’ve worked as a PM for 10 years, so… it’s been a while. I’ve pursued various side projects over the years and have a basic working knowledge of lots of things (e.g. android, ios, react, python, computer vision, firebase/serverless functions, databases, algorithms/data structures) but not much depth in any area. I know one option is to convert at the company you’re already at. Take that off the table for a moment and say it has to be at a new company. I recently just quit my first tech job for higher pay at another company. Upon turning in my two weeks notice, my boss coxed me into agreeing to work as a contractor to finish a project I’ve been working on. His argument is that no one else on the team has been involved in my project, is familiar with the tech stack, and has any time to help anyway. I’m finding I don’t have time after the 40 hours I’m putting in at the new job but don’t quite know how to sever ties. I feel like I’m the bad guy. Family and friends all say that It’s not my problem and I should move on… being familiar with the project and company, I can’t help but feel differently. How can I sever ties and get over the feeling of being the bad guy, especially after kind of leading on my employer about contract work the last two weeks, or how can I convince family and friends that this is something I should do to avoid burning a professional bridge.

it takes more than adding an ops suffix to everything you do to be a great engineer this is soft skills engineering episode 278 i'm your host dave smith i'm your host jameson dance soft skills engineering is a weekly advice podcast for software developers about all the non-technical stuff and this is a place where we do podcast ops that reminds me of that tweet let me see if i can find it okay you've been doing some tweet ops twitter ops lately yeah tweet ops now i'm doing some google ops click ops and keyboard ops is this the original one i don't know i can't find the original but here's a good instance of it you sobbing you can't just point at everything using a merkle tree and call it a blockchain me pointing at git blockchain

you can't just point at everything that what would it be everything that develop developer related and call it ops oh yes you can point to it yeah you point to active directory and call it it ops actually i i call that ops ops if you extend that far enough then you can extend it to cover every single other role at your company i guess sales ops i've heard that as a thing before oh yeah and people ops yeah i have i've also heard oh my gosh it's already happened it's over the ceo is company ops exec ops exec ops would that be like a chief of staff i don't know okay maybe this has already

happened it's gone dude this train is out of the station you missed it train ops has left the station ops it's it's like pig latin at this point all right i'm gonna read a listener oh go ahead you just you just read the comment i was gonna say something stupid okay well i'll read the comment this is from a listener casey you mentioned on episode 277 wanting an inverse of lgtm for when you close a pr without looking at it we use obe as in overcome by dot dot dot events the ellipses must be spoken as a wistful pause the speaker should feel free to insert some um and oz as well and avoid making eye contact at that time as if the person who just asked what OBE stands for should obviously know that

events is a charitable euphemism for the departure of a linchpin teammate or a harrowing refactor or a dramatic production incident. Thanks for all the laughs and insights. I love that. Harrowing refactor. I am familiar. I'm the cause of some

harrowing refactors in my time. I love it. OBE, thank you. I thought it was, isn't that what you call people who are knighted? Order of the British Empire? Is it really? I think that's the acronym. It's like the PhD of when you get knighted, you get to append OBE to your title.

Okay, let's see here. British. The most excellent order of the British Empire. Oh, yes. Officer of the Order of the British Empire. There's an extra E in there, or extra O that needs to be in there. OOBIE. we got to talk to royalty ops about this

oh and if you add a no in front of it that's a term we used back at amazon called ubi out of box experience which is like the unboxing process of or the first experience with the with the device after you take it out of the box ubi i like that obe cool thank you for that comment i will steal your idea yeah forget whose idea it was originally and claim it as my own absolutely all right this episode is sponsored by hired hired is the best way for engineers to go find their next job they're seeing great success from our listeners we'll tell you a little bit more about them later i want to thank our patrons as well thank you to andrew pollock an invisible iframe click jacking attack trans rights ian walter aaron duna kashokton ohio cameron hall

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pursuing this path? How would you recommend I spend my time while job finding? What type of job should I be looking for? I have a computer science degree, but I've worked as a PM for 10 years. So it's been a while. I've pursued various side projects over the years and have a basic working knowledge of lots of things. For example, Android, iOS, React, Python, computer vision, firebase serverless functions databases algorithms data structures but not much depth in any area i know one option is to convert at the company or i'm already at take that off the table for a moment and say it has to be at a new company hmm well good news you've already written your resume yeah android python computer vision our advice our standard advice has not been outlawed for

this question that's been a trend recently can't tell me to quit my job in fact it's been explicitly encouraged yeah the only way to answer this question is by quitting your job thank you finally so i know you said you can't convert at the company you're already at but if you could the best way to do it would be you're in some kind of like sprint planning or product feature discussion or something and the engineers are bringing up a a wrinkle in your product plan or some complexity and then you say it's actually easy move over and then you just sit at their desk and start typing perfect and now you're writing code they'll love it i was thinking you could do something like that but just create a fake developer who you know i'm presuming that

you're doing stand-up by zoom still so get a fake developer create a new account on your team and join zoom with like a something to mask your your voice join it from two computers and then you know let's say you're running stand-up and you're like hey new engineer what's your status and then you get your voice disguising audio switch over to the other computer and then you can pretend to be a developer on your team and start getting tasks assigned to yourself you know just some nice warm-up tasks and get your skills re-sharpened this seems like an interesting inversion of the the work remotely so you can work like 10 jobs at once and just do the bare minimum you're actually working two jobs at the same company for well i guess maybe you maybe you get

more pay maybe that's easier oh maybe you've unlocked the secret if you're working 10 jobs at 10 different companies you don't have any context right you have like a big part of faking it is going to be trying to figure out what is going on at this company in this half hour you have allocated for it but if it's all at the same company you're gonna transfer that knowledge it's perfect and if you do it 10 times you're one 10x developer at the company or maybe a one-tenth developer or 10 one-tenths developers yes you're one yeah 0.1 developer i mean good news the market for software engineers despite us saying it cannot continue this way continues to get more outrageous in the u.s at least i guess we don't know where this person is located but if

you're in the u.s people are throwing piles of money at vaguely developer shaped things so you're you're in a good situation yes developer shaped things uh true but don't you think this person will probably have to start over essentially as a entry-level software developer maybe those are hard jobs to get anyways because there aren't a lot of them what which jobs i feel like entry-level jobs are i feel like there aren't a lot of places oh go ahead yeah yeah i was i think i was going to say the same thing you are which is that that's the hardest and most competitive area for job seekers in this industry entry-level software developer yeah you you will probably push out someone else though i feel like if you have

years of experience as a product manager and technical developer skills that's the kind of really really lots of companies are looking for entry-level developers that have 10 years of experience so you're you're the ideal you're what they're looking for that no one else can live up to right so i don't think it'll be as hard for this person especially 10 years of experience in the tech industry so you probably have lots of contacts and oh yeah yeah i don't think getting that first job would be too hard you might be able to look like a non-entry level developer you know you might be able to compete with people with one two three years of experience because a you've got a computer science degree and that's going to give you a big leg up i think

like you're going to look the part a little more to job to people that are hiring and b you've been working on a development team for 10 years you know so you're it's not that you're not unfamiliar with the business world and the team dynamics and shipping so that gives you in my opinion a huge leg up yeah i mean separate from what signals to to people that you'd be good as a developer i think you have a fantastic skill set to bring oh yeah where just just like product managers who move in from engineering have a unique perspective and can work on kinds of projects that other product managers wouldn't be able to touch you you'll have some developer superpowers i think from knowing the product side so well and will probably be a pretty big asset to to someone who's looking

for a very product focused developer unless you want to run away and just like hide in in the ops trenches or something because you're so fed up with product stuff the ops trenches trench ops trench ops that's yeah that's what you do if you're a soldier you're digging a foxhole you're performing trench ops that's right shovel ops so i do feel like it since it's been 10 years we should probably make you aware of a few small changes in the industry since you were you know studying computer science 10 years ago first of all we've all started using pascal so you know we it's made some consider it a slide backwards but that's what everyone's doing now so brush brush up on that what else we stopped indenting that that just fell out of style after after a long

period of hanging around at the edges lisp has come roaring back into the second most mainstream programming language yep nobody would have called it but there it is there it is so watch out yeah just keep an eye out for those things and you'll be fine we use lisp at my current job it's great you use lisp or a language inspired by lisp closure is a lisp it is a lisp right yes we use a lisp i guess that that a is a big qualifier yeah really important we do not use common lisp so uh yeah the question back that's the question oh sorry back to the question i i think the question is what do i do to start practicing and get ready and i think the number one thing you're going to have to do is prepare for that interview because the interview process is not designed for

people like you it's designed for people who are who have read cracking the coding interview cover to cover spend a lot of time on leet code and you are going to look different you have a bunch of intangible value that you can bring to a team you know but in terms of just reversing that link list so beautifully you know you're not there right now so i would say to to bring the shape of your aura back into that more developer shaped thing that that money that money is looking for i think maybe cracking the coding interview do some interview practicing or while you're at your current company pick up some small developer tasks like just tell your company hey i want to get back into development can i is it okay if i pick up one or two bug fixes per sprint it's a good yeah

i like that i mean you're not your goal is not to convert full-time at your company i you mentioned cracking the coding interview and interview practice i i think you should bomb you should go bomb some real interviews yeah just just go interview and take some interviews at places that especially your first ones at places you might not be super pumped about working um two things could happen one you could get excited during the interview process which is good and two you get you get the the early failures from not being practiced at the process out of your system you can still fail in the interview process at any point but they're just like i haven't had someone stare at me and say what do you do next go you've got 30 seconds in a long time and you

you can practice that but again hiring is so frothy right now that you can get real world practice very easily yeah that's true that's a good idea so i i learned portuguese a while ago and someone who was helping me learn said the way you learn a foreign language as an adult at least is you make 50 000 mistakes you you just have to mess up a bunch to get it right and there were people who were scared to speak it because they didn't want to say the wrong thing but then you just never learn it i feel like you could take that same view of interviewing of you just have to bomb some interviews and instead of preparing until you can breeze through perfectly through the interview process i love it so get some low stakes interviews for jobs that you probably

wouldn't accept and just go do it or yeah yeah if you have a dream company don't start there yeah yeah yeah make that number 50 000 yeah exactly once you've perfected it i would also say you you're at your current job there are resources all around you i already talked about picking up small development tasks. If that's a little too onerous, start participating in code reviews by reading as much of the code changes that your team is making as you can. Really go deep on these code reviews and try to figure out what's going on. Understand it. How do you deal with the... Presumably they have other work to do at work and they're going to not do that work as much to do code review, which maybe I guess you just don't tell anybody. Yeah. The bug fix thing seems

harder because you're going to get funny looks and people will say why would we have you do that much slower than our engineering team and not do the product stuff that they are not going to do then you just shrug and say i don't know just trust me please i don't know what else to say besides practice and and dive in you're you're in a good situation i agree i think actually one more thing that you need in this specific case but you also need in general when you're switching jobs is you need some kind of narrative why you're doing it so it's it's gonna look a little weird and and you need to explain why you want to make this change in a way that doesn't make the interviewer think that you have like been driven out or failed or i don't know you're you're you're

gonna be useful and not harmful so if if you are quitting because you hate talking to people and you want to just like stare at computers all day, find a, find a, a more positive way to explain that. You should have an explanation because people are going to ask like, what, what's the deal with this? Agreed. I just, I just hated product management for 10 years and I finally cracked. Yeah. And I was fired from my last job for cracking under the pressure of hating product management. Yeah. Okay. Have we answered the question? Yes, I think we have. Hey, Jameson, have you heard about the great resignation is it that charles dickens book wait no the entire population on earth has started taking our advice of quit your job

oh yes that's right apparently we have achieved influencer status we've been telling developers for years to quit their jobs and now we want to tell you how to do it we're ready to reveal the secret i mean you don't just walk out shooting finger guns yes well you do that first but after you do that, there's a new service we want to tell you about called Hired. What is Hired, Dave? Hired is the biggest AI-driven marketplace that matches engineers with companies. It is a great way to find your next job. I've been watching this industry for 20 years with a keen interest on hiring in particular, and I've never seen anything like Hired. Tell me about what you're seeing. So I've interviewed about 150 people in the last year,

and I am serious. Every candidate that's come to me through Hired has multiple offers, and they're incredibly high, scary high, like 30% higher than other candidates. Is that before or after the finger guns? Both. The beauty is it's totally free for engineers and we would love for you to go try it. Go to Hired.com slash SoftSkills to check it out. Hired.com slash SoftSkills, quit your job the best way and check out Hired. All right, I will read our next question.

I recently quit my first tech job for higher pay at another company. Upon turning in my two weeks notice, my boss coaxed me into agreeing to work as a contractor to finish the project I have been working on. His argument is that no one else on the team has been involved in my project, is familiar with the tech stack, and has any time to help anyway. I'm finding I don't have the time after the 40 hours I'm putting in at my new job, but don't quite know how to sever ties. I feel like I'm the bad guy.

Family and friends all say it's not my problem and I should move on. but being familiar with the project and the company i can't help but feel differently how can i sever ties and get over the feeling of being the bad guy especially after kind of leading on my employer about contract work the last two weeks or how can i convince my family and friends that this is something i should do to avoid burning a professional bridge very interesting i i just noticed at the end you asked us how to answer both sides of the question not how to either how to convince your family and friends that this is fine and solve the problem one way by well that solves the problem of your family and friends thinking it's not fine it

doesn't solve the problem that you don't have time after the 40 hours at your new job or or quit and i'm not going to answer the second question sorry i'm going to answer the i'm not going to answer the family and friends question okay they are right it turns out we are your family and friends yes and we are unconvinced yes so i the first time i read this question i got a slightly different image of the situation right now the image i am getting is this person has quit their job they are now working the new job and getting pressure from their old job to please come back on a contract basis and help us is that how you took it too it is yeah and i'm assuming i mean maybe the contract pay is a somewhat higher than their previous pay at this company but maybe it's

it's probably still less money than their new job if it's a much higher paying gig right and boy does that seem like an opportunity you know it turns out my time is now worth twice as much as it was two weeks ago yeah and since it's a contract with no benefits it's worth twice as much as that yeah yeah if they're just straight up paying you the same your annual salary turned into an hourly wage then you're being underpaid as a contractor that is that is a general true statement let me just channel this boss and and use words that are really frivolous and silly to make the situation seem more clear hey hey friend who quit the job it's your old boss here my name's dave you used to work for me yeah i know i i used to work for you yeah that's right okay you do

remember me good yes i remember your name remember how i used to pay you half as much as you're making right now look i just really need you to to take a whole bunch of time away from your personal life and let me pay you half as much as you as you're making now to come do some things that you are completely not obligated to come to all right just sign here please and turn over like your firstborn child is collateral right you cannot you cannot undo this once you've signed it yeah it's it seems so obvious from the outside that you should not do this thing and i can see you feeling bad about it if you if if you got cornered and your boss made you say yes then figuring out how to say no after you said yes can feel a little bit more complicated

yeah very tough good news you don't work there anymore what's the worst they could do yeah yeah i mean burning bridges yeah there's a little bit of that yeah i can see it leaving not a great impression but based on your description of this work environment it does not sound like a bridge i'd be too terrified of burning or or at least with the manager i mean i assume the other employees won't care or will be fine with this idea of you quitting and you actually don't do work for the company anymore once you quit yeah i'll tell you jameson i think you and i've had similar experiences here every time i have quit my job i have felt two emotions the first one is that i am unloyal to my former employer and the second one is that i am leaving

my teammates in a bind causing a problem for them yeah and the first time i quit my first job which is pushing 20 years ago now i felt these things in extremes i felt so bad and every time i've quit it gets a little bit easier you just care a little bit less as the years go on because i realize like all the people the boss my teammates they're all gonna do this they would have done this to me at some point too like everyone does this and so when you leave they all go yeah dave left but you know it's okay like it's cool like we're all this is like kind of what being a professional is all about is uh is understanding that people make decisions and if you were in their shoes you'd make that same decision but i get it like engineers we are a loyal bunch

we are not literally like i believe this having been adjacent to many other fields now i believe that engineers generally speaking the average are pretty darn loyal to their teammates and their companies. And I think so. I think so. And maybe that's becoming less so now that there's so much money flying around the tech industry, but it certainly was when I started working in the industry. And I think they feel that way more so than other... I'm not saying that all engineers are more loyal than all other people in all other fields, but I'm saying that I sense a stronger degree of loyalty. It's not just about chasing every dollar that comes to you. People working and engineering feel like a sense of loyalty to their team i wonder if that's a sense of

sorry jameson what i just hear i'm hearing the thoughts in your mind like huh i've never felt that what would it be like to be one of those people with feeling i wonder if if that is guilt manifesting for you don't want to leave people with the the mess that you know you've created like yes i just got to stay a little bit longer so i can i can fix this thing that i foisted upon everybody right okay so absolutely you should quit having two jobs is hard and you're you're in this gig to be pampered you did not join the tech industry to work hard you you luckily joined like the best industry to just be a normal employee in yeah i don't quite know how to sever ties so i feel like this is not a problem of trying to

help you figure out what to do this is a problem of trying to help you sever ties yes agree what words do you say to make it so that you don't work there anymore i've got it get ready to start typing i'm just gonna say it okay this is an email dear former boss i really appreciated the time we got to work together i enjoyed your leadership i loved working on the team and i'm very proud of the things we accomplished together there at the present time i have accepted employment with a new with dollar new employer insert employer here i will no longer be able to provide services to former employer i wish you the greatest of luck in all your endeavors thank you so much for the time we had together yours truly no longer guilty person that's it all right i i recorded it i got

okay good i could hear the keyboard firing in the background yes what do you think is that the letter we should send here that is the meanest nice letter or the nicest mean letter i've ever heard yeah i mean that's yeah that seems fine you could just ghost them if you don't care about burning the bridge at all just stop doing it and don't talk to them again that's probably the worst way to do this we have the generation x approach and the millennial approach pick whichever one you're more comfortable with well i guess i'm putting that out there as as the worst thing that's the end of the spectrum of worst thing to best thing oh you don't think there's a worse thing than ghosting i mean sure there is like you murder your old boss you can make your old boss

disappear yeah yeah that's the worst thing okay we got that out of the way okay well don't do that either oh gosh yeah you could do this over email you could do it over a phone call the most important thing to think is that this is going to be five awkward minutes of interaction with this person and it's going to make the next few years of your life so much better yes if you're being pressured to work two jobs because you don't want to tell your old boss, like you don't want to deal with the awkwardness of them being disappointed that you're not going to work there anymore. It'll be better. It gets better. That's what I'm saying. In this case, I would recommend not a phone call. I think this person, if the boss gets on the phone, they're going to walk

away from that conversation with a commitment and a contract. Yeah, you'll have given your second born child now as collateral and you're making even less so i i think an email is the ideal vehicle for communicating this or you or you could just do nothing and ghost them you could okay the beauty of ghosting is it takes several days to learn that you've been ghosted yeah yeah you have to rule it's like the halting problem too it is you never know that you've been ghosted for real or have the messages just been lost consistently for that long i think one one thing that might help you is is getting mad at your old boss i left this out of the question but it said they're making twice as much money at this new job as their old job which means that they were

probably pretty underpaid at their old job and your boss is was not paying you enough then is trying to take advantage of you still and probably not pay you enough now like get indignant and then that might give you the strength to say i'm i just i'm not going to do this sorry i can't do it and survive the awkwardness yeah yeah good news about writing an email is it's it it puts a lot of barriers between you and that person so yes it does yeah so i i like your approach say hey i i thought i could do this it turns out i can't sorry good luck with your company and your application some guilt they had they might have some guilt about no one else on the team has been involved in my project they're not familiar with the tech stack they don't have

any time to help anyway like you not doing this will cause them problems those sound like problems for your boss and not for you it doesn't matter if you quit it's not it's not your job to fix the problem that you were a single point of failure for this project it should have been your boss's problem to resolve that earlier and now they know that fully so yeah get mad tell them you can't do it anymore if you really want to twist the knife then you say what dave said you wish them luck in their future endeavors yes that's like the death blow to this contract relationship it just it's just the yeah passive aggressive death blow yep yeah i wish you well is like saying it's like like you said it's the nice mean way of saying i never want to talk to you about this company

ever again yeah go jump off a bridge it's not that bad i feel like i'm the bad guy you are not you're not the bad guy people quit like they've said and either the company will be better off for you quitting because they'll fix this single point of failure or they'll go down in flames and you got out of a bad spot but either way it's fine well we answered it right i think so good luck i hope we i hope we gave you the confidence you need to to take this to an end one more thing i would say i quit like now i wouldn't say and i'll do it for one more week or whatever if if you're really struggling to pull away from this if you stretch it out longer it's just going to be more painful and that is true yeah you can just say i just can't do it anymore like commit your last

code in whatever state it was in and then it's their job and then send the email and you're done yeah yeah and let me just say this is going to be a valuable learning opportunity for this manager it will change them because going forward they will not stake the future of very important projects on one person they will establish patterns for sharing knowledge having redundancy having fallback plans and then no one that this person manages will ever be in your situation ever again where they want to move on but the manager has guilt is has to resort to guilt tripping and i know exactly how this manager feels you know sometimes we get stuck in this thing where we we have managed to squeeze work out of an individual and and we don't have a

fallback plan yeah that's a bad situation to be in and it turns out like proper software development costs money. And eventually we all pay full price for it. And that's what's happening here. So this is going to turn into, I think, a valuable, valuable lesson for this engineering manager in the future to have better redundancy. So consider it a favor in delivering an extremely valuable career lesson to this person. Not a favor, send him a bill. Charge him for it. That lesson costs this much money. okay yeah i've i've definitely felt the oh crap what am i gonna do when when yeah someone has told me to quit and me too that is a sign that there's there's too much on that one person

that's right and and this is like the worst way to find out it is it is but well it's it's the clearest way as well it is yeah it tells you exactly how much that person is worth yes yes yes all right well we did it question answered okay good luck if you want us to write the email for you well we already did yeah i mean it you're just gonna need a speech to text converter and you got it yep but i can format it for you if you want to send it over otherwise it's gonna look weird without any punctuation yeah and the way you punctuate it will be unique it'll lend its own nice little personalized spin on it you won't believe where he puts the periods do you think we could create a startup that sells

resignation letters like that are custom made maybe resignation letters as a service i'm pretty sure my brother-in-law did a like break up with your partner for you side gig for a while no he would call them yeah like people would pay him to to let the partner know that they were no longer dating or together or whatever that's the worst yeah oh my goodness i should talk to him more about that yeah this is like the anti-linked in we're basically trying to build a social network where you sever ties with people we're gonna call it linked out yeah seeking funding now all right what can people do if they want their own questions answered. Go to softskills.audio and click the ask a question button. Thank you so

much to everybody who fills out our questions every week. We really appreciate you. You keep the show running. Please look for us on all the social media platforms, including LinkedOut. We will happily disconnect from you on LinkedOut. Starts as a fully connected graph of the whole human race and also every organization. Yes. And then we just kind of trim it. And that's what we do. That's worth a lot of money. somehow we have a we have a graph database of anti-connections it's like oh it assumes all connections exist it's an optimization so we always save quite a bit of space yes i was thinking about the i was thinking about the cost and i realized we should store a list of unconnections

okay not connections wow thanks i just saved you a lot of money it just became a much more valuable venture to invest in that's right the cost the hosting costs are really low great margins All right, we'll catch you next week.