Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 280: Async communication and how to quit not nicely

Episode Date: November 29, 2021

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Questions Starting to work on a team that is split across time zones. With a majority of the company based in one time zone and a handful spread in others. I want to emphasis the importance of asynchronous communication. I have found Slack to begin to feel like I need to respond ASAP instead of when it is convenient. If we were to say slack is used for asynchronous communication, is asking the team to use signal or even text appropriate for a quicker response? What is a good way to reach out to team members in cases where a response is needed more immediately? After about 1 year at my developer job, I was moved to work for a client company helping them launch a new product. This other client had different plans, it turns out, and now I’m just testing their API for them. That’s fine but I never get questions answered and I hate my job with my client and hate my job with this company that sells me like a cheap piece of meat. I want to quit, I will quit, but I have a lot to say about why I’m quitting. How can I NOT be nice about quitting and the reasons I’m quitting, and still feel comfortable showing my face in the industry again? I haven’t quit a job before, and this is my first job in the tech industry. Searching how to quit a job always comes with “remain light and positive.

it takes more than getting two problems through the advent of code every year to be a great software engineer this is episode 280 of the soft skills engineering podcast i'm your host jameson dance i'm your host dave smith soft skills engineering is a weekly podcast where we talk to you and answer your questions about the non-technical things that go into the technical field of software development have you ever finished the advent of code no i've only read about it and not that much about it i've yeah i've probably done two or three problems every year and it feels like it's it's one of those resolution-y type things so it starts in december and then i end not having fulfilled it and then i start trying to fulfill my new

year's resolutions and kind of like it's a track record of failure leading into making all these optimistic resolutions of how i'm going to change my life it doesn't level set you and make you choose resolutions that you won't fail on having just finished failing no it it makes me think i'm just not trying hard enough or thinking big enough i'm gonna walk into this booth and then i'm gonna come out like superman a different person with superpowers starting january 1st perfect and then you've been doing this for how many dozens of years oh maybe this time it'll maybe all those where practice runs yeah oh yeah preparing you for this year yes yeah i only have to become perfect once that's fair done it that's so lots of failure but i believe i'll get there someday

do you want to thank our patrons dave yes a big thanks to those that are contributing at the level that gets them a weekly shout out they are andrew pollack an invisible iframe click jacking attack trans rights ian walter arun dhuna kashoktan ohio cameron hall patreon.com.au we're hiring ira chan monkey face emoji jonathan king testing is documenting.org roman denisov fizzbuzz influencer oladapofadihi karen sveinsen will angel ragnar hardison nick hathaway travis sanders dennis bogdano of brayden canes john grant i bought winrar nick kantar philip john basile and bites of wisdom.com with a y if you would like to join this illustrious crew you can go to softskills.audio click the support us on patreon button and if you contribute your retirement nest egg we will read

your name out loud and if you contribute any dollar amount we'll give you access to our slack community on the first week of every month sold sounds like a deal all right should i read our first question yeah go for it this is from an anonymous listener who says i'm starting to work on a team that is split across time zones with a majority of the company based in one time zone and a handful spread in others i want to emphasize the importance of asynchronous communication i have found slack to begin to feel like i need to respond asap instead of when it is convenient if we were to say slack is used for asynchronous communication is asking the team to use signal or even text appropriate for a quicker response what is a good way to reach out to team members

in case a response is needed more immediately oh man this question kind of reminds me about some of one of the things i really dislike about our modern age can you guess what that is electricity sans serif fonts i see sans serif fonts on my screen right now is that it i don't know what is it i feel like you know here we are back in the olden days there was basically i don't know one or two ways to get a hold of someone and you could either go find them in person you could call them on the phone you could send them a letter and it was pretty clear which one you needed to do based on any situation but now yeah if you were in love with them you sent them a letter or you went to

visit them or you catch them at the airport yeah now i feel like not only are there lots of different methods depending on the urgency but actually i have to keep a mental list more of a mental mapping of preferred communication mechanism by person yeah you know like i feel that too my my mother-in-law prefers voice call my my good friend prefers text my other friend prefers slack my other friend prefers linkedin message my other friend prefers email you know what i'm saying this sounds like a problem begging to be solved with a layer of abstraction can't you just build the universal communication adapter and you just put it in one thing and then it knows how that person likes to receive it and then you don't even know how it's being delivered

yeah you can you can you can build a ui to let the person select how they would like it to be received unfortunately because this has to unify and abstract away so many different delivery systems it has to have a performance sla of about of the least of the lowest common denominator which is which is snail mail so it's like a four-week message latency and it'll it'll upscale your snail mail letter to video if that's the input format you choose but it's gonna be pretty low resolution there's got to be some deep learning thing where you like hand it a letter and then it generates a video of you saying that letter saying the letter i was thinking i was thinking like a facetime video bot that just shows you a video of a piece of paper

that's our mvp yeah we're iterating on the snail mail part of it yeah i feel that i'm trying to think of all the ways i talk to people steam chat discord signal text email twitter direct messages you you mentioned signal and and it's funny because of course signal is for your privacy and security conscious friends but it's funny because it's like is this the signal type of privacy conscious person or is this a telegram type of privacy conscious person or is this a is this a one-time code right snail mail letter encrypted with a this message will self-destruct yeah yeah i feel your pain so now we're doing this at work are you doing it at work you feel like you have multiple different ways to communicate with the same people at work

that's yes but i'm i'm now i'm just channeling the question asker who said you know we use slack for asynchronous communication but slack which by the way was born to facilitate synchronous direct messaging primarily is now being considered an async communication channel so we're now leaning into signal or telegram for more immediate responses like that's what i'm reading in this question do you think slack was made to to do synchronous communication i feel like slack was originally created to do synchronous chat direct messages and group chat and they've only recently rebranded themselves as the asynchronous communication hub because i gotta tell you if if they really think if slack really thinks it's an asynchronous communication technology

they are just so wrong because it is so easy to lose messages in slack if you just don't happen to see it at the right time like it's gone gone forever yeah i have like 75 inboxes in slack you know yeah again you need the universal inbox to unify them all you need your notification panel that just takes in email slack signal you just read it in one spot yes i'm sure there's there's got to be a sass product out there that does that so it's it's time for me to link to the same article i link to whenever this comes up which is an article written by 37 signals called is group chat maybe making you sweat and it's basically about what you just described dave of the overhead that chat causes if you're using it as a synchronous communication method and

expecting responses right away and like tracking people's online and offline status and trying to keep up with the the fire hose and messages yep i don't remember what their conclusion is but it was basically like chat is hard to do well yeah uh let me scroll down really quick skim it's the internet skim skim skim skim skim conclusion is uh it looks like an ad for using base camp the product that they sell use the thing we sell all right that's the conclusion surprise surprise but this it's also interesting because this company built campfire which is one of the i think that's the first that's the chat software we used at my first technical job outside of school is that still around i don't think it's still around yeah it was campfire

it was hip chat and then slack just i don't know why slack just took over that world yeah i remember being all hipster about slack and saying oh this is like irc and hip chat and campfire and why is it so cool and then everyone started using it and then that's why it's so cool because everyone already uses it right yeah i think campfire is gone okay anyways so they know they have been around this space for a long time yeah and they say it's hard perfect so not solvable is what you're saying i think throw some slack at it is not a solution and that's that's been that is slack's pitch to solve the problem is use slack and and pay us money please and then the problem will be solved right but the problem that solves is now you can search through

your chat history instead of not search when you weren't paying slack any money yeah i i miss email sometimes when it comes to things like this it's so much easier to follow a thread of discussion in email and it's so much easier to keep communication async because you can't get into this habit of like two people are there at the same time so they just toss messages back and forth rapid fire between each other and everyone else right who is not there just has no context no way to participate i yeah i don't hate i hate junky email but email for communication with your team that is meaningful discussion i feel like is pretty useful yeah i feel like i totally agree with that i feel like when people get into slack conversations about things that they tend to be

more surface level discussion. Email kind of encourages deeper thought and longer turnaround times on your messages. You don't feel rushed to get a response in before someone else does. Yeah. Yeah. I do feel rushed to get a response in before someone else does. And sometimes the response is like a big gif that blows up the thread and then now it's derailed. Yep. So that's a defense mechanism. If you see a thread that's starting to go in a direction you don't want, just start dropping in some hilarious GIFs. If we were to say Slack is used for asynchronous communication, I don't think you can make that happen. I've seen places try to pull that off. There's probably somewhere that pulls it off. But the default way that people

use Slack, especially once you start to bring in non-engineers and you work in more cross-functional teams, the default way is like a phone call that is slower that everyone can see. It's a phone call you type yeah i have been in the process of trying to use slack asynchronously for the past year and i am very close to declaring failure this experiment has now yielded valuable results the results are don't use slack for async one thing i have tried to do is set personal communication expectations and they do basically follow what this question asker said where if i dm someone on slack it's not because it's an emergency if it's an emergency i will page them with our emergency pager service that we use but i tell people that but it's so hard to follow that

when there's all these features built into the tools that tell you when stuff happens right away that's right so my intention is to do it async because often the things i'm asking for are not worth interrupting a developer and kicking them out of flow but even then it still doesn't work you can tell people hey get back to like if i dm you it's it's not urgent and then they still reply when i dm them that's right now there there is a solution to that problem which is a newer a new ish feature in slack which is that if you have a dm you need to send to somebody but you don't want them to stop working right now and maybe you have until tomorrow for them to respond you can schedule the message to be delivered tomorrow what i've wanted that for so long how do you do that there's

a little drop down chevron next to the send button in slack oh my gosh and you can say send later or something like that i use this all the time oh my goodness how have i never clicked that all right monday at 9 a.m dave you're gonna get my hastily typed misspelled message i just scheduled for you oh that that is the primary use case for me is it's a weekend an idea occurred to me i need to let someone know yeah schedule it for monday morning yeah i don't want to get someone out of bed or like especially i work with east coast people and i'm in mountain time so i'm several hours uh earlier than them so sometimes i'll be at finishing my day and have some random idea and want to get it down so i don't forget it but i don't want someone to work at 8 p.m or whatever

bear in mind that even though this is a useful feature it doesn't change the synchronous nature of Slack. It just shifts the synchronous conversation to a different time of day. Yeah. And you just said the word time zone. And I think we should zero in on that for a moment because the question here is all about how do we manage communication, especially async communication with people in different time zones. And I think you just stumbled upon one very useful thing is being sensitive to what time zone people are in and scheduling messages to go when it's going to work for them. Which by the way, I love because when I have people on the east coast i work with i will schedule messages to go to them at 7 a.m my time the next day

and that'll give them time to respond before i get into work you know and it's super nice so if you can do that that's i mean that's pretty darn helpful yeah sometimes i'll even put in the message hey this was a scheduled message so i'm not here you know and then the message comes pops up monday morning at 9 a.m for them another thing i found helpful this is more task specific But if I'm asking someone to do something or collect some information, if I don't say when I want it by or when I need it by, then people can jump to all kinds of assumptions about how urgent it is and how much they need to interrupt what they're doing. Yes. So I try to include, hey, can you do this thing for me? And it needs to be done by like next Friday or something.

Right. And I've had bosses do that for me and it was helpful. So I stole it from them. I love that. Usually what I do is I ignore it and then forget it and never do it. And then it turns out that often they forget too. They didn't even need it. Yeah.

It works. You should start telling people, look, I need this by next Friday. But if you forget and then the following Tuesday comes along, just forget I asked you for it. I feel like I've gone back and forth about how hardcore to become about async communication, how zealous to become. It's probably a better way to say it. and i'm pretty i i used to be all about it and everything had to be written and thought out and take time to to to consider stuff and it's a lot of work it's so much work to write stuff out and

most of the stuff you're writing out is like half-baked and then i don't know i'm just complaining about how hard work is i guess but it's sometimes you need to have a quick half-baked exchange of ideas in order to arrive at something where if you spent an hour crafting a proposal to describe that thing you find out at the end of an hour that it's oh it's garbage that's what i that's what i was gonna say this is especially valuable for bad ideas yeah if we were to say slack is used for async communicators yeah yeah you could say it it depends on how much your team wants to do this i think if your whole team is excited about using Slack for async, you can set it up in a way that encourages that. You can turn off status,

you can hide notifications, spread that culture to new people that join. If it's just you and you say, hey, I would like to communicate asynchronously in Slack, what that means is that you will communicate very slowly, but synchronously in Slack. Everyone will be mad at you because you're so slow to communicate synchronously with. I think the higher level abstraction of this question is, is it reasonable to use a separate system for synchronous communication versus asynchronous communication? And I think my personal opinion on that is not only is it reasonable, but that will absolutely happen. Whatever system you designate as async will become the system that means slow responses. And when someone needs a faster response, they will resort to whatever

system suits that. And in my mind, I have kind of three levels. I have async where it's like, I don't need an answer for an hour or two or days or more. And then I have synchronous where I need a response, but it can come in a few minutes. And that usually is like SMS or signal. And then the final level is I'm going to call you on the phone because not only do I need a synchronous response, I need you to drop everything else you're working

and give me 100% of your attention right now. That's like the ultimate synchronous. Yeah, that's the something's on fire move. And in the days before we all worked remotely, that was I'm going to walk over to your desk. I'm going to stand right next to you until you take your headphones off and I'm going to wait until I have your eye contact and then we're going to talk

does that mean prod will just be down if they don't notice that you're standing behind them you're just patiently waiting well I might escalate by tapping their shoulder oh whoa there yeah yeah I found slack to be in yeah I what I would

do is raise this concern with your team and see if they share it because i bet a lot of them do especially if they're developers that they feel this pressure to make the numbers disappear when they have messages that mention them so i think you might find some support for it i agree you can at least the smaller the group is i think the easier it is to make this work i had it work pretty well on one of the engineering teams that i that i managed and everyone was pretty bought into it but i found friction again when i tried to behave the same

way with larger groups because they didn't expect me to get to it when i got to it so you're saying like it's crucial to establish shared expectations yeah i think i am yeah that is what i was saying if i if i understood what i was trying to say that's how i would have said awesome well okay signal or even text appropriate you mentioned calling on the phone is there yet one more level of even more urgent than the phone call yeah these days since i'm assuming we're all working from home and if you are that even more urgent looks like getting on a plane and then renting a car and driving to their home and then knocking on their front door well that would take hours right but it's it is way longer it's synchronous but it has very high latency ah

that's true have we answered the question i think so it's a tough problem and oh one one aspect of this question we didn't call out that i think is significant that will make it much harder to solve is that the majority of team members in this situation are in one time zone and then there are outliers who are in different time zones. And that's going to make it hard to establish shared expectations, I think.

Yeah, I work at a company now where most folks are, I said East Coast already, and just they're very good about being sensitive to time zones, but naturally the bulk of the communication just happens around East Coast hours. So if you're not in East Coast,

there's sort of a window where you overlap that you try and get all your communication done in. But I haven't ever worked at this mythical paradise where it's totally 100% remote and disconnected from where you are in the world. And you just kind of exchange messages through the ether and don't even know where people are. Maybe that might work better if there are fewer time pressures but often you need to do stuff faster than that for work right okay now we've answered it yes will you read our next question sure thing this comes from an anonymous listener who says after about one year at my developer job i was moved to work for a client company helping them launch a new product this client had different plans it turns out and now

i'm just testing their api for them that's fine but i never get questions answered and i hate my job with my client and i hate my job with this company that sells me like a cheap piece of meat i want to quit i will quit but i have a lot to say about why i'm quitting how can i not be nice about quitting and the reasons i'm quitting and still feel comfortable showing my face in the industry i i haven't quit a job before and this is my first job in the tech industry searching how to quit a job on google always comes with a remain light and positive that's true yeah so first job in the tech industry is maybe first full-time kind of professional adult job yeah the advice you read on google is right the best way to do this is remain light and positive if

you have very specific grievances maybe bring them up in an exit interview but that's the boring advice of like there's you could definitely burn bridges sure and that can be bad the tech world is small you might work with people that know people that you worked with or you might not now because they know of you from the way you quit or something so that's yeah that's the boring advice it's probably not worth it and also the the other part of that is it's probably not going to make a difference honestly right the company is not going to listen to someone who is disgruntled about the way that like this giant megacorp handles billing and be like okay that's it that's the straw that that's the final straw you did it now we must start this billion dollar initiative to re-imagine

how we do hr systems at this company thank you so much on your way out the door for fixing this company they might know what sucks and and i don't know it could make a difference i don't want to be totally negative but it probably won't honestly and also when you quit the company the people that are there sometimes have to like exile you from their their group to feel better about staying too so true might not be as as well heated because you're not one of them anymore yeah oh man i have so many thoughts about this the uh the first thing that i'll say is that whenever i go into situations like this. I try to force my mind to go outcome oriented. What are the outcomes that I want? And in this case, the outcome you want is to be able to show your face in the industry in the

future. You want a new job. You want to find a company that doesn't suck. And you probably don't want to burn bridges with these people. And so with that as your outcome in mind, you just do whatever it takes to get your outcome which in this case is being nice there's one more outcome they want which is express their displeasure at how they have been treated right but see that's not really an outcome like that that's a the path i know you're i know you're being silly but the path to that or the the outcome that that leads to is that you feel like you've served justice you know yeah you show them what's what right and and you want them to feel as bad as you've felt right which if you've been feeling bad for a while and you're trying to compress that into

one exit interview of time you have to make them feel really bad for that 30 minutes yeah you're gonna have to do some stuff that might and might put you in prison so i you know might maybe not worth it it might burn a bridge with like your future voting rights as a u.s citizen man i really burned a bridge with the fbi on this one but at least they know how unhappy i've been yeah so i want to quit i will quit i have a lot to say about why i'm quitting i think that's fine it's fine to have a lot to say think about it from the perspective of the person who will be receiving the feedback that you say it depends a lot on where you are quitting but it could be someone from hr that you've never seen in your life before

and will never see again and they have no context their job is to make sure the company does not get sued yep and that if you're there in person that you don't like harm people yeah yeah so so if you rant to that person about the the broken i don't know code review culture in the engineering department they will just have no clue what you're talking about it might right it might make a note in your file yeah yeah they were upset about collaboration and that's that's what the summary of your 10 minute rant yes exactly the the other thing that might happen is let's say you do let's say miraculously you do get an audience with actual decision makers who are have been responsible for your pain and suffering and who might be able to course correct the company what if after you share

all this information with them they just look back at you and say i already knew all this yeah that's pretty it's pretty likely you don't know anything they don't know or sorry did i say that right it it's very likely that you that they know everything you're about to tell them already and that they have chosen to create a company like this anyway maybe they don't know how to fix it too yeah and maybe you don't either maybe there's a lot more to the situation than you even realized don't bring problems to me bring solutions that's what your boss will say when you quit in the final meeting oh i had a thought yeah if if if you want your your message to be understood you want to attacking is a good way to put people on the defensive right and if yeah if you're trying

to make yourself feel better and don't care that much about burning bridges then you can talk about how horrible the place it is and how dumb all the people are but if you're trying to say i think you're doing this wrong and you should get better in these ways you need to you can still be forceful and have strong feelings about it but you need to convince them to listen to you not just tell them how bad they are that's right and if your outcome you're going for is just to make yourself feel better about this go talk to someone else about this company yeah yeah because if you talk to the company about the company you're not going to feel better if anything you're going to feel worse when you realize oh they're just smiling and nodding until i leave this room how can i not be nice

about quitting and the reasons i'm quitting yeah again you can be you can be clear about the reasons you're quitting you you should not threaten to harm people or i don't know oh yeah put stinky fish in the vents or do some hijinks that is a good way you could get the attention of the company as you like storm the all hands meeting stage grab the microphone from the ceo and then what then you probably get stage fright scared of public speaking and then leave and you leave what was that about i don't know yeah i think the best thing you can do on i don't know i feel like i'm being a bummer but i i do think you have very little to gain from just letting it rip on on this company i agree if if your purpose here is trying to make this

company better especially for your co-workers who you like there's really two mutually exclusive options you can either stay and help fix the company or you can leave and not work on this company in any way there is no world in which you leave and also improve the company except in very rare circumstances with very high profile departures but yeah if you really want to fix this company you got to stay and if that's your purpose in sharing everything about their company and how they've treated you badly then you should stay but if you just want to get out just get out and take exiting on good terms as the outcome you're going for. Don't bother a single wit with trying to improve this company. That's what I would do. In fact, I would go one step further.

I had a good friend who left a company once and he was leaving on good terms and he came to us and we had some, you know, as with every company, we had some problems with the company and he came to us and he said, all right, team, I'm leaving the company. I have my exit interview today. why did what reason do you want me to tell them that i'm leaving and all and because he goes look you know whatever i say might actually help improve things so we all talked for a bit and we agreed you need to tell them that you're leaving only for money and so he did he went in there and every question the hr representative asked him he answered the same way i i love this company i love the leadership i love the team i have one major problem and that's i'm just not

paid enough and he did it and then i'm not kidding you within three months we all got raises oh my gosh it was awesome that's amazing what a hero he was a hero see what i mean like outcomes right the outcome we wanted was we all got a raise and he helped facilitate that outcome but that's about the only thing he was going to be able to pull off on his way out the door yeah i don't think you should stay i mean you sound pretty miserable at this job yeah i agree i think you should just you're you're doing what what you should do when you're at a job you don't like which is quit that's right you did it that's the thing to do and then if you want to make it fun ask your team what you should tell them for why you're quitting or if you're not quite confident enough to do that

try to make it a game that you quit without them having any idea why you're actually quitting and that they think you're just as happy as possible and make that your game this by the way goes by another name it's also called professionalism i've seen people disappear mysteriously and no one know why and that didn't feel very good to be there still so i think that might be a way you could be really mean to the company oh just yeah yeah if you have a really good reason for quitting a job then it makes people there feel fine oh they they had to move across the country for their partner's career or something yeah yeah then of course they have to quit there's nothing wrong here right if you just disappear you could have been fired and there could be more laughs coming

yeah you could have i don't know you could have been miserable you could have stolen their core ip and taken it to a competitor you could be the rat getting off the sinking ship first yeah yeah that could be a way to do there you go that's how you quit not nice don't tell anyone why you're quitting and when they do ask you be very elusive yeah it's time to go oh i have my reasons you'll see yeah that's the best one you'll see why don't worry that was a really good answer there you go thanks i i've been practicing i didn't even have an exit interview when i quit my last job yeah yeah and i should have maybe someone will hear this and then schedule one with me but all right well did we answer the question i think so we did all right good luck good job dave be

nice yep remember outcomes oh one more thing that popped into my head about this question i had someone who joined the company was very unhappy really had some grievances against the company quit if i was in their shoes i yeah it makes sense that they quit because they just were not happy weren't weren't meshing but the the way they quit was still very professional and they said i'm taking this other job i've learned some stuff here thanks for your help still knew that we probably would not be working together because we did not like each other very much at that point but tried to leave without harming other things and i that that made me feel better about stuff and left a better impression for other people too that's called professionalism yeah that person did

so you can too all right professionalism the the other subtitle of this show right clearly one of our core tenants here at soft skills engineering clearly what should people do if they want their own questions answered so professionally go over to softskills.audio and click the ask a question button and we just want to say thank you so much to everyone who has left questions for us there are so many questions some of them are more professional than others and frankly we like the unprofessional ones more but we will answer all of them one day you didn't take the opportunity to to just tell the listeners how miserable they made you and burn the bridge with all of them we are ashamed

of some of you no we we love it we love hearing from y'all it's great it teaches us stuff it expands our horizons thank you catch you next week Thank you for watching.