Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 288: Too excited about learning and furious boss when quitting

Starting point is 00:00:00 it takes more than copious amounts of deadline padding to be a great software engineer this is episode 288 of the soft skills engineering podcast i'm your host jameson dance i'm your host dave smith soft skills engineering is a weekly advice show where we answer all of your non-technical questions about the technical field of software development and this show will take Four hours, I predict. This 20-minute show will take four hours to record and we'll publish it in three months. Prepare to be delighted as we exceed the timelines.

Starting point is 00:00:39 I mean, not exceed. I mean, yeah. Beat the timelines. I don't know, whatever it is. That's right. The estimates slash deadlines. Do you want to thank our patrons? Absolutely.

Starting point is 00:00:50 Big thank you to those that are contributing at a level where we shout out their names every week. They are Andrew Pollack, The Yeet Your Job Podcast, Avery Sterzi, Ian Walter, Arun Duna, Kashoktan, Ohio, Cameron Hall, Ira Chan, Monkey Face Emoji, Jonathan King, TestingIsDocumenting.org, Fizzbuzz Influencer, Ola Dapofadiyi, Karen Sveinsen, Will Angel, Ragnar Hardison, Nick Hathaway, Travis Sanders, Dennis Bogunov, Brayden Keynes, John Grant, Ibot Winrar, Nick Kantar, Philip John Basile. If you'd like to join these folks, go over to softskills.audio and click the support

Starting point is 00:01:19 us on Patreon button. And any amount that you contribute will get you access to our Slack community the first week of every month and if you contribute enough if you give us a large enough portion of your retirement funds we will say your name or an emoji or any work appropriate word of your choice on the air every week whatever you type into that patreon box yeah pretty much it says here that jameson is a poopy poopoo pants contributed okay both my so i have a two-year-old and a six-year-old and they've both achieved the level of maturity that they can tell each other jokes about boo-boo pants

Starting point is 00:01:57 and they both think it's hilarious. Nice. That's on my mind a lot because it's hilarious. Clearly. Should I read our first question? Let's do it. Okay, this is from an anonymous listener who says, I am working at my first job as a software engineer

Starting point is 00:02:11 for about two and a half years. I really enjoy working as a programmer and I'm super excited about the tech industry in general. However, sometimes I feel like I'm too excited about everything. I spend a lot of time reading blog posts, watching tutorials, or taking online courses. I think about what books to read and what languages to learn all the time. Not everything, but a big part of it happens during my working hours. While I know that loving to learn in general is considered a positive trait,

Starting point is 00:02:34 I feel like I might be taking it a bit too far, and I should focus more on the actual tasks that I have, especially because I think my coworkers spend much less time keeping up to date with everything. What is a reasonable amount of time to spend on these things during working hours and beyond? How do I know I spend too much time not working on my actual tasks? How can I make sure I learn the right things that are useful to my career? Love the show and wish you the best. Thank you for your advice You're welcome. We love the show too. We agree

Starting point is 00:03:04 We do love it Yeah, I wonder how much time this person spent away from work writing this question how obsessed with typing perfectly into the google form yeah i just before i before i read this question i just want to research how google forms works i'm going to spend a few days just reading about it and checking the chrome inspector on all these api requests that it makes how do you build remote sync and multiplayer and conflict resolution first i must understand before i can ask this question that's right so i feel like i've seen very different behaviors by individual engineers about this yeah and the only thing that the company cares about is are you

Starting point is 00:03:51 getting stuff done most of the time for some definition of like enough stuff that can be fuzzy and hard to nail down but if you are seen as a productive member of the team who's contributing and getting stuff done then i'm pretty sure that nobody will care that you're spending a bunch of time learning stuff that's true if you are not then they'll suddenly care very much that you're spending a bunch of time at work learning stuff instead of doing stuff well addendum to that they might care if they find out that you're only using half your time to produce what you have produced even if it seems like a lot so you're saying i could get twice as much output out of you for the same price yeah stop all that learning stuff stop it yeah long term what's that um there is

Starting point is 00:04:32 yeah i mean there's there's some argument that the company wants developers to learn and keep up with technology but i don't think i've been anywhere that has a hard and fast and adhered to policy for here is how much time developers get to learn stuff i've been at places that said they had 20 time and it was kind of fuzzy and vague didn't really exist i've been at places that just kind of looked the other way while some developers who had that personality type just did it on their own without any explicit encouragement or discouragement. Yeah, but I've never been somewhere where it was an agreed upon policy and everyone did the thing. Yeah, me neither. There's a lot. I will say in our industry, there's a lot of unspoken rules about time management,

Starting point is 00:05:19 I think. Do you feel that way? I'm ready for you to speak them. Actually, maybe I should say it differently. It's not that there's unspoken rules. It's that there are no rules. I think teams who have leaders who say things like, you must spend no more than two hours per week on self-professional training and improvement, I think, and X number of hours on bug fixes, and X number of hours on writing documentation, I think those teams tend to fail because people are so different from one individual to the next on how they allocate their time for maximum productivity, that if you try to make rules, i think you end up with the least common denominator and bad things rules are bad

Starting point is 00:05:57 yeah that's where i am rules are bad okay just just whatever man yeah do what feels right so if i look at the question specifically have you received any feedback that you are prioritizing incorrectly are things taking you longer because you're distracted by by poking at stuff because that's a pretty it's very hard to talk about this in abstract but it could use you to identify in practice oh like me question asker appears to be taking too much time away from my job responsibilities of producing stuff to do my other responsibilities of learning stuff yeah yeah obviously the business wants you to do stuff and there's a cynical view where you say stop learning how to do stuff just do the stuff you already know because that'll that'll give us more output

Starting point is 00:06:43 right you can learn stuff on your own time that's not what we pay you for and there are people who do that they put in a full day of work where their work is applying the stuff that they already know and then they're so excited about tech that they go home and learn new things i feel like there's a continuum though where i i pretty regularly as an ic encounter things i need to learn that are directly related or applicable to my job so there's some framework and i need to like learn its weird api corners or something like that yeah and that feels very clearly like a good use of time but if i'm at work and i'm just thinking like i wonder if i could port our web app to a game boy and then i just start going down that rabbit hole that would teach me a lot but seems

Starting point is 00:07:27 less directly connected to the work that i'm doing so i i guess i think what i'm circling in on is that if you are trying to learn stuff that feels pretty closely connected to your work that's much easier to justify time for if you're just kind of idly satisfying your your hobby of technical things or intellectual curiosity about how stuff works then you probably have to think more about am i getting enough stuff done that nobody's going to care that i'm looking at opcodes for the nes or something like that oh man yeah i feel like i might have to walk on eggshells with this question because i do too i'm trying so hard not to say like you can't learn stuff at work that feels so bad i know i'm like i love you can't only learn stuff at work too you have to

Starting point is 00:08:17 do work i don't know i don't know when i'm okay two and a half years into the career here i would say learn as much as you can until it starts to cause problems at this at this point in your career you're young i mean you're i don't mean to say young as an absolute age but you're early in your development career, there is a lot to learn. You should be soaking it up. And trust me, after 10 years, you will stop learning. It'll come. Don't worry. Your brain is full. Yeah. It's not that you'll completely stop learning, but you'll stop having this excitement about just soaking up every piece of knowledge that you can get your hands on and thinking about what to learn next. That will stop. So I would say just enjoy it. Lean into it. Learn more. Do

Starting point is 00:09:01 less at work and just see see what happens you know eventually someone will call you out on it and then you'll know you've crossed the line so back it off a little bit and get back to your nice productive balance but i don't know i'm just so excited for this person who's just so into this i think if you can answer the question of how do you objectively measure productivity then this becomes really easy to solve because all you have to do is like meet the objective measure of productivity and then whatever else you do should be not a problem we hear people say that all the time of like i've heard this about work hours especially it's whenever you want as long as you get your stuff done and then theoretically if you can do your work in an hour

Starting point is 00:09:40 a week then that's how much you work i've never seen that work out that way well i'm seeing it a lot more with the remote work situations than i have when we were in offices that's for sure but yeah you're gonna have to pay attention to some fuzzy unclear signals to figure out is this enough stuff or not it is really valuable to have an explorer on an engineering team who's kind of bringing in new ideas and here's here's what's on the cutting edge in industry because not everyone is like that and and it's it's useful to have fresh insight or fresh fresh fresh cream fresh that's not what it is i agree well have we answered the question i i think maybe i think we might want to throw a couple of caveats on here. And the first caveat I want to share

Starting point is 00:10:28 is exemplified by a character on the internet named Tom Seven. He also goes by Sucker Pinch on YouTube. He's so good. Oh, you know Tom Seven. Tom Seven is probably the most underrated content on YouTube, as far as I can tell. He does the most wild stuff with computers, things you would never imagine doing but you really have to you have to be a software developer to appreciate it or maybe an electrical engineer to appreciate what he has done and so if that's the kind of stuff you're learning about and doing in your time at work i would say stop that stop that right away the world only has room for one tom seven although i will say if you are doing that please make a youtube channel and share it with me

Starting point is 00:11:14 immediately but if that's the stuff you're doing at work you know where it's like i wonder if like you just said when you said game boy like run my web app on a game boy i'm like tom seven would do that that's literally who i was thinking of when i said that that's so awesome anyway he would totally do that and that's not something i would recommend using your work time to learn okay we gotta we gotta pitch or or not pitch there's a word i can't think of plug plug that's the word we have to plug at least one of his videos okay he has one called anagrams but where you can break apart letters anagraphs and it's how you figure out what words you can make out of a set of letters by chopping the letters up into little pieces and then rearranging them to form new letters and he

Starting point is 00:11:59 wrote a bunch of code to explore this and it's kind of mind-blowing i agree all of his stuff is like that it's it's mind-blowing and like genius level of oh yeah oh yeah smarts required to do it but the thing that you're doing is like kind of a dumb joke yes even funnier because of how much work went into this dumb joke it's this kind of person who i'm i'm so glad that he's writing programs to make anagrams and run things on nintendo entertainment system devices instead of building doomsday devices because you know he could do it yeah so i think if you're on i haven't seen yet if you're any oh he does after that oh that's always a good day when you go visit his youtube channel you're like i mean it's kind of old uppest case and lowest case letters oh yeah

Starting point is 00:12:43 i saw that one it was a pretty good one so as long as you're south of that on what you're studying and learning about i think you're okay like if you're studying about the next generation of web frameworks or tools or linters or compilers or static analysis tools or all these things that you could use at work or maybe are using at work and you just want to know more about how they work more power to you if your web app runs on aws or azure and you're learning about the internals or the deep like lower level functions of these things and understanding edge cases of your systems more power to you that's exactly the kind of stuff you want to be studying at work and it will make you better my favorite story from the apollo moon mission program is a guy named

Starting point is 00:13:21 hank i think his name was hank aaron let's see no that's a baseball player john aaron his name was john aaron and i talk about john every once in a while john aaron let's see he was still alive born in 1943 worked on the apollo mission he was an electrical engineer and flight controller and he was the kind of person who would dive into things when they were curious or mysteries and he would just dig and dig and dig until he found out root cause and what happened well anyway he had noticed some weird behavior of some of the electronics on the apollo on the saturn 5 rocket actually and one day one of those rockets got struck by lightning on in its flight on its way into the air and he saw the same behavior that he had seen and stayed

Starting point is 00:14:03 he had stayed up late to figure it out and he's like oh i've seen this before and he was able to say exactly what to do flip the right switches and fall and fail back to the right circuits to save the the mission and save the lives of those astronauts because he had done the legwork he had been curious and learned and gotten to the bottom of mysteries and so he knew what to do in the crisis and so you know i think we should all be that kind of engineer where we just were obsessed with learning we love it and then eventually you'll get old and that will all stop but okay i think i feel like we started off saying like maybe don't do too much learning you can't have can't have too much of that learning but what you're saying is you got

Starting point is 00:14:47 you have to take advantage of it while you can while you care i think so not everyone loses all they're not everyone becomes old in their brain people still like learning new stuff forever but okay most people do become old in their brain they they're full yeah learned what they're gonna learn uh that's called a fixed mindset not a growth mindset that's right and that's the key to being a good cog in the machine i guess our show notes are going to be rich today should we read the next question yes let's do it should you read the next question i should and i will okay this comes from a listener named sabra who says i landed a new job that nearly tripled my salary relative to the job i'm about to leave

Starting point is 00:15:38 yes i was horribly underpaid the stories and tips from this podcast really helped me out but i also landed this job through hired.com which is a sponsor of the show thanks hired any good tips regarding leaving a job when you know your boss will be furious that you're leaving also should i tell also should i tell my boss which company i'm going to when he asks and he definitely will oh man congrats on tripling your salary boy that doesn't happen every day hopefully not i mean if you start at like 0.00001 cents then you can pull it off for a while exponential functions are big yes regarding leaving a job when you know your boss will be

Starting point is 00:16:26 furious that you're leaving oh let me just say i'm completely unsurprised that the same boss who pays you so little that you can triple your salary one third of yeah the market one third of market is also furious when you're leaving it's like should i tell my boss which company i'm going to i i yeah i mean they're gonna find out anyways if you put it anywhere public i haven't found i had one co-worker leave and they were super cagey about where they were going yeah it was really weird i was trying to figure out was there some are they like doing something illegal are they breaking some non-compete or is it some super stealthy startup no it was they went to some publicly traded company they just were weird about it

Starting point is 00:17:09 and yeah i mean i don't know what you get by not telling them maybe your boss is going to go beat up that company because they're so mad yeah your boss will be furious okay look i i can help you assuage your boss and tamp down these furious feelings you could say look why are you mad you saved so much money over the last three years employing me think of all that money you did great every day was a gift you could do it in a public place tell me to meet you at a restaurant for dinner yeah like a crowded restaurant with lots of people yeah like if you're gonna break up with someone and you don't want an awkward scene but then don't don't order anything just just break the news and walk away or leave them with the bill yeah if they start to say

Starting point is 00:18:00 oh i can't believe how are we gonna survive what are we gonna do it's gonna hurt this project you just go yeah sounds rough and then you walk away sounds like that's your job to figure out so if if you are legitimately nervous about this interaction i could see that being concerning for folks if you feel like this is i just know this is going to be unpleasant you could just practice it a few times right practice your your spiel it can be pretty short and direct and i feel like the more direct you are about it the faster this will be over with that's true and good news it'll be a lot easier to have this conversation in subsequent jobs yeah exactly it gets easier every time boss to be furious about you leaving oh yeah this will set like a

Starting point is 00:18:46 low watermark for human behavior you know and from here on out it's just all better but also you'll be prepared emotionally because you'll be like well whatever they say it won't be as bad as that guy yeah i just man i don't know why are people like this i don't know but i want to be there like i i love these stories because just think about this that boss has no power over you you are moving on to a new company they don't control your paycheck they don't make any decisions for you and so you can just have like this almost like take the ad i do this a lot take the attitude of a journalist like i am a war correspondent and my job is not to emotionally absorb all the tragedies that are happening around me but just to write them down as an impartial observer and

Starting point is 00:19:31 just watch your boss's behavior and make careful notes about the mannerisms the facial expressions the weird ticks on his face when the hex color of the shade of purple at their face turns exactly create it in css later exactly and then and just you know just enjoy it and then later just just in the moment you can cope with it by saying oh man i can't wait to tell my friends about this guy yeah this would be a really good story oh yeah i think that will help you muscle through it but anyway that that's how i would handle it like that's how i would emotionally cope with it do you think it's okay to quit over email can you send him an email saying hey i quit here's my resignation effective this date yeah you know i wasn't even thinking about

Starting point is 00:20:15 i was assuming in person but i mean they're probably like gonna come talk to you about it anyways but that might get the initial breaking the news to them part out of the way yeah exactly like set it up so that you can't talk to them for a few hours after you send the email that that probably work these days frankly it's all going to be over video anyway right most likely yeah probably that makes it a little easier to cope with what's the worst they can do to you over zoom exactly they can't even reach through the screen and choke you yeah yet i mean there's the metaverse we'll allow that yeah until we get we all get those full body haptic suits and they can actually be choked yeah that allow people to be murdered through them which obviously is

Starting point is 00:20:57 going to happen yeah the internet you know what the internet's missing the ability to directly cause physical harm instead of like indirectly cause physical harm i don't know your boss would be furious that you're leaving i'm trying to think of of non-awful reasons your boss would be furious that you're leaving and the only things i can think of are if are incompatible with you tripling your salary like if they just bent over backwards to give you this cushy position or huge raise or something to make you much happier at the company and then you turn around and left but it sounds like they didn't because your salary is gonna gonna go up quite a bit in a romantic relationship with someone they're related to oh no why i don't know are they gonna like lose power

Starting point is 00:21:43 over you or something worried that they're not gonna be able to influence i don't know there's nothing there that was a shallow well it turned out it was a shallow well yeah i don't know just it'll be an awkward 10 minutes and then a good lifetime of looking back fondly on the time that you're glad that the spittle hit the camera instead of your face have we answered this question i think so it's a tricky situation but boy would i love to hear about it afterwards if you wouldn't mind submitting another question if you are in a state that doesn't require consent from both parties to record then just sneak a little microphone in there i know i was thinking that too but i didn't want to say it out loud so i'm glad you did yeah i'll i'll take the fall for

Starting point is 00:22:31 that well good luck i hope you're wrong i hope they don't get that furious yeah me too but at the same time i secretly do i hope if they do you tell us about it how about that yeah what should 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 everyone who has done that. We love reading all your questions and you are the lifeblood of this show. We will catch you next week.

Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 288: Too excited about learning and furious boss when quitting

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