Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 291: Hyper-productive team lead and hyper-unproductive senior engineer

Episode Date: February 14, 2022

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Hi! Thanks so much for all the work you do to put this show out, it’s kept me sane the past year. To sum up my problem…I’m aware this is going to sound like a slightly bananas thing to complain about, but my team’s tech lead is superhumanly productive. About 8 months ago, we hired Sarah. I can’t overstate how awesome Sarah is, but, well, in some ways that’s the problem. My team already suffers from under-resourcing. Rather than pushing back on unrealistic requests, Sarah will churn out 90% of the work required by working crazy hours so that we make the deadline. She always shares the credit and plays up even the smallest contribution any of the rest of us made, so again, that’s not at all the issue. For context, my team doesn’t have a manager, and our leaders are super high up the org chart. The problem is that now leadership expects this velocity from the team all the time, not realizing that this it relies on Sarah’s definitely-unsustainable level of productivity. Many other teams in our org are struggling to deliver due to the same resource constraints we face, so now their work is being lumped on our team as well, because the perception is that we’re The Team That Can Handle It. We’ve already lost one team member this year due to burnout, and the pace just keeps increasing. Additionally, I feel like this undermines leadership’s trust in my opinions. Leadership sometimes asks me how long a given thing will take. I’ll give an honest answer, but then when Sarah delivers the thing much faster by working 14-hour days, it makes it look like I’ve been sandbagging my estimates. How do I approach this? I’ve thought about explaining my concerns to Sarah in a 1:1, but I feel like I’d just come across as lazy and whiny…for all I know, she thinks we all should work like she does, although she’d definitely be too polite to say so outright. Are there any other options, or is this a :partyquityourjob: situation? Hello Hosts! I love the podcast and its light and humorous tone on a not so light subject. Ours is a small team with just 2 engineers in a mid-sized company. I joined recently as a senior engineer. The other person was hired for the same role a few months after me. The problem is that this other engineer doesn’t seem to posses senior level skill-set. I often find them making obvious mistakes and struggling to understand user stories. On most occasions they aren’t even able to finish their work, let alone making technical design decisions. I tried to bring this up in a casual way with them, and they seemed to get a bit touchy and defensive about it and they also seem to have a difficult time in making honest conversations about issues. So I never brought this up again. This situation of them not being able to carry out their expected responsibilities is taxing me a lot as I have to pick up the things they mess up in addition to my job. If this was from a person at a much junior level, that would be understandable. But this doesn’t make any sense to me. I am not very comfortable with the idea of ratting them out to the manager and seeming like a non-team player, but I am also afraid that I cannot put up with them for long while also still maintaining my sanity. If you were in my situation, may I know what would you do differently and how would you deal with this person? Thanking you!

it takes more than forgetting that headcount starts with one not zero to be a great engineer this is soft skills engineering episode 291 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 like managing headcount with off by one errors because you forgot about real life i'm trying to think of the pain that this could cause you i feel like this all gets lumped under the someone got left off the bus that departed from the team building activity in the wilderness or something yeah no we're good yeah let's just start our count all all two of us are here yeah zero one two okay got it is it a compliment to be the zeroth person

or is that an insult i'm the i was the zeroth engineer in this startup i think it's a coveted number in sports sometimes on your jersey oh yeah okay this episode is sponsored by hired which is the best way for engineers to find their next job and you will hear more about them later all right can i thank our patreon our patriona nons yes okay we have a one-time shout out for anna mcdougall and weekly shout outs for the stochastic parrot alice jost andrew pollock the yeet your job podcast avery sterzy ian walter arun dhuna kashaktan ohio cameron hall patreon.com.au we're hiring ira chan monkey face emoji jonathan king testing is documenting.org oladapafadie i escaped from tarkov but can't escape javascript

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an invitation to our Slack community which reminds me I by the time you hear this I hope I sent it out, but we should. I trust future Dave quite a bit. He'll do great.

That's why I leave so many problems for him to solve. Yeah. And I love solving them. It's awesome. Okay. Do you want to read our first question, Jameson? Absolutely. This is from an anonymous listener, I think.

Yes. Yes. An anonymous listener. Okay. Hi, thanks so much for all the work you do to put this show out. It's kept me sane the past year. to sum up my problem i'm aware this is going to sound like a slightly bananas thing to complain about but my team's tech lead is super humanly productive about eight months ago we hired sarah

i can't overstate how awesome sarah is but well in some ways that's the problem my team already suffers from under resourcing rather than rather than pushing back on unrealistic requests sarah will turn out 90 of the work required by working crazy hours so that we make the deadline she always shares the credit and plays up even the smallest contribution any of the rest of us made so again that's not at all the issue for context my team doesn't have a manager and our leaders are super high up on the org chart the problem is now leadership expects this velocity from the team all the time not realizing that it relies on sarah's definitely unsustainable level of productivity many other teams in our org are struggling to deliver due to the same resource constraints we

face so now their work is being lumped onto our team as well because of the perception that we are the team that can handle it we've already lost one member this year due to burnout and the pace just keeps increasing additionally i feel like this undermines leadership's trust in my opinions leadership sometimes asks me how long a given thing will take i'll give an honest answer but then when sarah delivers the thing much faster by working 14 hour days it makes it look like i've been sandbagging my estimates oh no how do i approach this i thought about explaining my concerns to sarah in a one-on-one but i feel like i just come across as lazy and whiny for all i she thinks we should all work like she does although she'd definitely be too polite to say

so outright are there any other options or is this a quit your job situation okay my favorite part of this question is she always shares credit and plays up even the smallest contributions and i just had this like little devil on my shoulder saying because all your contributions are small compared to sarah oh man i don't think you should quit your job this sounds like an awesome problem to have i mean aside from the constantly increasing pace but working with someone very productive doesn't doesn't sound bad it's like hmm okay so here's how you solve this estimation problem you say you say to yourself it would take me eight days to do that but i have sarah so i'm gonna tell my boss four days and then you call sarah sarah i have a problem

yeah i mean this is such a dumb boring answer but you should absolutely talk to sarah about this 14 hour days yeah that doesn't feel sustainable i i hope sarah is getting gigantic piles of money and yeah copious amounts of recognition for this i feel like the worst possible version of this is that sarah is not and is just doing all this extra work and the business is saying thank you for that extra work your reward is even more extra work your reward is visibility yeah people know you are fast and can you put a price on that yeah no of course not that's why we don't we don't even try to do otherwise would be audacious yeah it would it would cheapen the the value to mingle it with mere money to sully this notion with dollars

many other teams in our org are struggling to deliver due to the same resource constraints we face i mean do you think eventually sarah breaks is there a breaking point she has to it's like sarah is so productive she actually her productivity is proportional to the demands placed placed on her and it's like she'll never break the more you ask the more she gives she's invincible purely motivated by the they all said we couldn't do it right nobody believed in us nobody believed i would be able to get this many points done in a sprint yeah they said 35 sprint points was impossible definitely unsustainable yeah i mean there's a bunch of concerns here one is for sarah as a person and yeah you don't i mean i don't know there could be something going

on maybe maybe work is more comfortable than outside of work for a bunch of reasons but 14 hour days does not sound healthy sounds like sarah needs to touch some grass to use the parlance of the children what okay explain you haven't heard touch grass no it's like a way to make fun of someone for being uh sort of like a shut-in or or like so glued to the internet or the the screen that they've forgotten what the outside world is like so they need to go touch some grass okay so it's not it's not a slam on it's not a slam on urban people it's just get away from the computer for a minute i mean they have grass too okay they make grass in cities right yes okay got it you need to go out and touch a cow that's what you need

drive many hours away from your big city find a cow and touch it the therapeutic benefits of cows yes yeah so there's concern about sarah and and can she keep this up long term and it sounds like no definitely not it it doesn't seem very healthy certainly i i don't imagine sarah will reach the end of her life and on her deathbed say, I sure didn't see my friends for two years, but I delivered so much shareholder value. And I will never regret the amount of sprint points that I shipped. Yeah. Oh man. One of my favorite lines from that now getting kind of old TV show called 30 Rock was when this big corporate guy is on his deathbed. You know, he's, he has like lived and breathed corporate life and on his deathbed he goes i wish i had met i had spent

more time in the office it was awesome so what do you do you think it's possible for someone in this situation to approach sarah and actually say sarah i need you to work less and produce less because you're making us look bad here's how i would approach it um sarah clearly is ultra mega super hyperproductive individually. I think your team might be better off if Sarah spent more effort on helping the other folks on the team go faster instead of just sprinting even faster by herself. It's not just that you're worried that she's making you look bad. It's like you're worried that she's setting up unrealistic expectations for the output of the team when really it's just the output of the sarah so if you can change her mindset from just get all of

this stuff done to help the team have capacity to get all the stuff done part of that involves helping them accurately kind of present how much they can they can do that might be a little bit easier to bring up then you cannot work please stop you're killing us by working so much yeah Maybe a visual would help here. This visual, just a warning, it's going to make you feel real bad. But maybe you create a bar chart that shows the contributions by some unit. Figure it out. Sprint points, number of tasks delivered, whatever. You put this on a screen where it's got your name and the other team members' names and Sarah's name. And you point out the just sheer differential between Sarah's bar and everyone else's bar. and then and then i think and frankly this might be good for her to to to focus on leadership but and then you can say look imagine how much more velocity as a team we could have if you could bring the rest of us up to like you know 50 from where we are even if it means you coming down a little bit and then you show the multiplier there because you know there's the mythical 10x

developer people talk about it a lot whatever mostly to make fun of the concept of 10x but i think here we have a 10x developer yeah but even it with one 10x developer if you can make everyone else be like a 2x developer you can probably outpace the 10x developer plus four 1x developers if you know what i mean by leveling all of them up and then sarah could have some vacation time yeah if you want to make all of you feel even worse okay i have a second slide that is the bar chart of all of your salaries because i'm sure that sarah has not paid 10x the dev salary yeah for sure so then what you do is you make a third slide that is the like dollars per sprint point delivered and you'll see just how low sarah really is on that chart yeah yeah you got to get

those numbers up or lower the overall average right just yeah which is fine just bring everyone down yeah bring everyone down to your incredibly productive level i thought i'd come across as lazy and whiny yeah that's a risk i mean people have different capacities not everyone is the same and i think it's i don't imagine sarah expects everyone to work as many hours as she does or get as much stuff done as she does. It's also possible that she has a bunch of feelings about this too. Maybe, maybe part of why she's working this hard is because she feels like nobody else is carrying their weight. You know, like there might be some good topics for discussion to come out of this. I would be curious to know how she feels and thinks about it. Is it just,

I just really want to do such a good job. I'm really driven to succeed and to be promoted. Is it like, I'm terrified this is going to fail and I will be blamed for it. Any number of things motivating this behavior. Yeah, you get to do a chunk of manager work, I guess, if you want to improve your life. I think you should talk to Sarah about it. She'd be too polite to say so outright. That sounds fine. She's polite. She's not going to yell at you. Yeah, that makes it even easier. She might just silently think less of you. Right, that's right. Have we answered the question? I think so. I'm trying to think of what happens if you do nothing here like if you just let nature take its course sarah burns out and then your team here okay

here's what i think happens sarah burns out takes an extended vacation or quits and then the rest of your team basically reduces its capacity by 50 like the team's capacity is down by half and then management notices and then they fire you all so you probably want to go ahead and get this done get this taken care of now. Yeah. Alternatively, you could accept that as the determined outcome and just not do any work. Because if Sarah is doing 90% of the work, then you not doing any work is not going to make that big of a difference. And it might not even be noticed, honestly. Yeah. Just rest and vest, as they say. Oh, boy. Don't do that. Talk to her. okay yeah this is a conversation 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? Yeah, 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 soft skills to check it out. Hired.com slash soft skills, quit your job the best way and check out Hired. Okay, Dave, do you want to read our next question?

I sure do. This comes from an anonymous listener who says, and by the way, this question is like the opposite problem of the previous question. We're on a theme today. This question says, Hello hosts, I love the podcast and its light and humorous tone on a not so light subject.

Ours is a small team with just two engineers in a mid-sized company. I joined recently as a senior engineer. The other person was hired for the same role a few months after me. The problem is that this other engineer doesn't seem to possess senior level skill set. I often find them making obvious mistakes

and struggling to understand user stories. On most occasions, they aren't even able to finish their work, let alone make technical design decisions. I tried to bring this up in a casual way with them and they seem to get a bit touchy and defensive about it. And they also seem to have a difficult time in making honest conversations about issues.

So I never brought it up again. This situation of them not being able to carry out their expected responsibilities is taxing me a lot as I have to pick up the things they mess up in addition to my job. If this was from a person at a much junior level, that would be understandable, but this doesn't make sense to me.

I am not very comfortable with the idea of routing them out to the manager and seeming like a non-team player, but I'm also afraid that I cannot put up with them for so long while also still maintaining my sanity. If you were in my situation, may I know what would you do differently

and how would you deal with this person? Thanking you. Great question. You're welcome. just already i can tell it's gonna be great yeah tried to bring this up in a casual way with them they seem to get a bit touchy and defensive i think that's impressive that you tried to bring it up with them directly and unsurprising that they became touchy and defensive yeah trying to think of something not boring to say here

i'm just gonna keep thinking maybe maybe we resort to our last question and we say look it's time to make a powerpoint slide with some graphs on it the solution to all of your work problems can be solved by slides all business problems are just powerpoint problems it's like how powerpoint is turing complete it's it's like yeah it's life complete real real world complete i don't know yeah yeah i never brought this up again so there's only two of you you have i i really cannot think of i'm trying so hard not to just blurt out talk to your manager about it, but I can't not blurt it out. You will not seem like a non-team player, I predict. Well,

I have a bunch of predictions. One, your manager should be used to listening to the frustrations of engineers. And if they are not already, you will help them develop that essential skill of an engineering manager's job. Yeah. Now, hopefully they're not touchy and defensive about it too. yeah yeah i think you should tell them you should explain what is frustrating to you to them it is not an unreasonable expectation of a senior co-worker to to pretty productive like that that seems fine and it is not on you solely to solve it and you kind of made an attempt at it but really this is a this is a problem for your team overall it's also a problem for your manager because if if this doesn't get solved then you'll probably quit right it sounds like

your job is kind of sucky right now because you're having to do two of them so so the company's options are either try to address this problem so maybe they coach this person and put effort into helping them maybe that helps them improve or maybe they transfer to something else or maybe they get fired or quit or they do nothing and then the actual productive person quits because they're so frustrated and and then they still have this unproductive person that seems worse So yeah, I think they would rather you talk about it. So I'm going to take a weird track and say, I'm going to assume you are unwilling to talk to your manager about this.

And what can you do to mitigate some of the damage of working with someone who's unproductive? And I would say that one option there is that as a team, when you're signing up to deliver things, you need to understand your team's actual capacity. And the team's actual capacity is not two of you. it's one of you and one of this person. And so don't let the team get committed to doing more than they have capacity for. And so, because what I sense is happening here is you're picking up the slack for this person in part because they can't finish the tasks, but also in part because they probably can't do it on time. And I wonder if given enough time, could they deliver? So you

can experiment with that by just reducing the amount. I say, just all you have to do is just work less, accept fewer commitments. But in reality, your capacity is a real fact that you can't fight. It's like gravity. It's like, yeah, but I want you to fall faster than 9.8 meters per second squared. Okay, I will, right? So anyway, that's what I would suggest is try to reduce the actual team's obligations to match your team's reality in its velocity. And then hopefully you spend less time cleaning stuff up. The other thing you could do on that same topic is to make sure that simpler tasks get sent this way so that you can take advantage of this person's skills and don't make the mistake of giving them the most complex, challenging problems to solve

that you know you're just going to end up solving and instead try to feed them the easy stuff if you can, if you can influence it that way. Yeah. How scummy does it feel to try to document the contribution level somehow this is less about ratting them out and more about like i don't know protecting yourself if you if you get in trouble for your team i feel gross while i'm saying this even so you're saying like a cya document or like or are you saying yeah like help your manager get a jump start on the performance improvement plan i guess i mean yeah maybe and maybe in some kind of dysfunctional environments um the team will get in trouble and then you need to have a record saying like uh-uh isn't me and then somehow

that helps you out that feels kind of gross though yeah i'm afraid i cannot put with them for long while also still maintaining my sanity and another option is to dump this problem on somebody else right okay maybe maybe this person needs to go work on a different project ah and then someone else's problem is solving your problem, right? It's handing a problem to someone else is solving it for you. That's what I mean. Ah, yes. In other words, either way, you're making the problem disappear. Yes. Problem has gone away. And maybe, I mean, maybe there's a better fit for this person's skill set. In my experience, I have, it kind of sounds like this person was overleveled, honestly. Yeah. That they were hired as a senior without the senior level of skill. Right. I

I haven't seen that get corrected successfully ever. Uh-huh. Ever? Without a termination? Yeah. I mean, I've only either seen the problem kind of shoved under the rug and it just kind of is acknowledged that someone isn't performing at that level and nothing is done about it. Or there's some kind of improvement plan or recognition that they're performing below

the level that they were hired at. But it's tough to come back from that, I feel like. yeah it can't it is tough because it's not just it's not just you are productive and now you are not and so maybe something's going on or your habits change it's literally like you need to develop this new skill that you don't have under the pressure of maybe your job will go away if you don't not the not the most conducive environment for developing new skills yeah not a great learning environment it sounds like what you need is sarah on your team yeah you have a distinct lack of Sarah. Yeah. You need to up the level of Sarah on your team. Have we answered

the question? With that last comment? I think so. Okay. I mean, we should name the, I mean, look, we already have a strong theme of the Quit Your Job podcast. So, you know, that's an option. But like, I think we should also extend that to say that our podcast is also all about impossible solutions to common problems time travel often makes the list yeah it's it's great fun for us to just sit back and opine about what we would do if we could change the laws of reality right i mean if i was presented with this problem and had complete omnipotence and control over everything i would simply make this person fast right problem solved easy now you have a now you have a new problem you look unproductive by comparison but don't worry just the monkey's

paw will save you again i i would simply invent the star trek infinite food creator thingy what is that thing the uh protein sequencer yeah there's they're like a post-scarcity society i would simply eliminate the notion of corporations and work for employment for sustenance yeah you got to think bigger if you're not talking revolution you haven't explored all your options oh it's the protein re-sequencer i think okay oh crap i i feel i feel like i maybe have just embarrassed myself yeah you've made fun of me for not knowing stuff about star trek and star wars before yes i did but i'm honest about it i am dishonest about it you star trek hypocrite oh man oh man star trek inventor famous star trek inventor person named something would be

so disappointed in you gene isn't his name gene gene roddenberry yeah okay star trek cred restored i know yeah okay there you go i gave you an opportunity to demonstrate your your command of star trek knowledge with that i think our show is over thank you for listening all right oh we didn't tell people what they can do if they want to ask a question well let's our show's not over then here we go okay if you would like to ask your own question go to softskills.audio and click the ask a question button and we have to say as usual thank you to everyone who does that we love your questions please keep them coming they're so great we learn so much from reading them about what the real world is like and it helps us exercise our imagination

all right now we will catch you next week We'll be right back.