Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 292: Haunted by former co-worker and awkward manager endorsement

Episode Date: February 21, 2022

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I recently joined a new company that pays me much better and has much better engineering practices than my previous job. I referred a great engineer who was hired on a different team. Then, another engineer from my old job applied for MY team and is currently being interviewed for the role. This engineer is one of the reasons I left my former company! They have an impressive resume and interview well, but are unable to complete even the most basic tasks and have no interest in improving their skills. They asked me to put in a good word with my tech lead, but if anything, I want to encourage my tech lead NOT to hire them. I’m not a part of the interviewing process but I feel an obligation to let my tech lead know just how bad this developer is. Help? Thanks for thinking I’m neat! I think you are pretty neat too! In my most recent 121, my manager asked me to give some feedback on another colleague on whether I thought they would make a good Engineering Manager. My genuine thoughts about my colleague are that they’re pretty good technically, they have good communication skills, are friendly, and just generally a good team player. Outside of work, we’re pretty good friends and so I really want to see them succeed. However, I can’t shake the feeling that they wouldn’t necessarily be a good Engineering Manager and I can’t figure out why. What are some other (not so obvious) qualities that you think are important for EMs, since on paper, I would think they tick a lot of the boxes.

it takes more than saying don't you mean simple every time someone calls something easy to be a great software engineer this is episode 292 of the soft skills engineering podcast i am your host jamison dance i'm your host dave smith soft skills engineering is a weekly advice show where we answer your non-technical questions about the technical field of software development and wax philosophically about complecting things and watch Rich Hickey talks and then start to talk like him. One of my team members uses a word

that I think is much better than complecting. What is it? Intertwingle. For version two of his talk, he will use that. All right. This episode is sponsored by Ops Level. Ops Level makes shipping great software easier. you'll hear more about ops level later i want to thank our patrons thank you to these fantastic

entities who are contributing to our patreon so that we say words words of these entities choice thank you to the stochastic parrot alice jost andrew pollack the yeet your job podcast avery sturtzel ian walter aranduna kashaktan ohio cameron hall patreon.com.au we're hiring ira chan monkey face emoji jonathan king testing is documenting.org oladapo fadye i escaped from tarkov but i can't escape javascript ragnar harrison timmy garabrant nick hathaway travis sanders dennis bogdanov braden canes john grant i bought winrod nick cantar and philip john basile thank you all of you yes all of you people or abstract concepts especially you stochastic parrot

i'm reading this book about information processing and data modeling and it's full of very philosophical questions like what what even is a name okay so now i'm thinking about about that is monkey face emoji really a name like yeah i guess if you if you define it widely enough sure oh is that the rule it's got to be defined widely i don't know it's like uh you have a bajillion names you are dave but if there are two daves in the room then you're dave smith and if there are two dave smiths in the room then you're hey you and depends a lot on the context uh it's a good book but we got a show yeah i was gonna say it sounds like you're doing a little too much intertwingling okay i will focus if you would like to join this group of entities you can go

to softskills.audio and click support us on patreon and if you do you will get an invite to our slack community to hang out with other entities that's right exchange symbols with entities. Oh, wonderful. All right. Shall I read our first question? Yes. This comes from an anonymous listener who says, I recently joined a new company that pays me much better and has much better engineering practices than my previous job. I referred a great engineer who was hired on a different team. Then another engineer from my old job applied for my team and is currently being interviewed for the role this engineer is one of the reasons i left my former company oh no they have an impressive resume and they interview well but they are unable to complete

even the most basic tasks and have no interest in improving their skills they asked me to put in a good word with my tech lead but if anything i want to encourage my tech lead not to hire them i'm not a part of the interview process but i feel an obligation to let my tech league know just how bad this developer is help oh no yeah impressive resume interview well unable to complete even the most basic tasks and have no interest in improving their skills this person's got management written all over them oh no wait until they're delivering your performance review Yeah Yeah, this is awkward. Well, actually is it you work remotely this person has no way to get a hold of you

If you just tell your tech lead, hey They will make me miserable and then the person doesn't get the job Then a lot of things have to happen for this to come back to to affect you deeply The person has to find out that you yeah told the truth about their abilities And then they also have to be able to contact you somehow in person Because if they just like ring you up on discord you just don't answer ah okay well i was gonna say it's easy to prevent people from bugging you virtually but i think the experience of women on the internet proves that completely wrong yeah

it's turns out you can't ruin someone's life with just the internet yes yes okay i i take back a little bit of my gusto i don't know man i feel like part of what they're paying you for is is to avoid dire mistakes like this this feels like a pretty valuable thing i would certainly want to know if there was someone on my team who had feedback that was terrible. Oh yeah. Someone we were interviewing. Oh yeah. That's essential. And if your tech lead or management, a manager or recruiting team, if they're worth their salt, this is not the first time that someone has approached them with this feedback. They know how to handle it. Probably. Yeah. I could imagine a world where you are honor bound to call someone out in public. You never talk about them behind

their back you call them up on the phone or ring them up on discord and say hey i'm about to kill your job here i just wanted you to know because i want to be up front i don't think that's the world that we live in and yeah i think your your manager and recruiter team can provide a valuable screen that will at least leave this person guessing maybe they'll suspect but then all you have to do is message them and say hey whatever happened to that job offer Oh, yeah. How'd the interviews go? Oh, the play dumb rule. Yeah. Yeah. I heard they went pretty well. What happened? Weird. Oh, man. And this is where you can hide behind the plausible deniability of interview processes often just drop candidates between the cracks and you never

hear from the company again, no matter how hard you try or how many contacts you have inside. You just can't find that candidate in between the cracks ever again. So you can use that. You're saying ghost this person? I'm saying that you can always hide behind the fact that there was an administrative snafu that prevented them from advancing through the process, and you just haven't been able to get it fixed. That's going to get really awkward when your former coworker reads back the rejection letter that they were sent. With your feedback in it? Yeah, exactly. And I quote, anonymous question asker says, I would die before I worked with this person again.

I mean, if you're looking for motivation to build up the courage to go and tell your manager about this, I think all you have to do is think about two, like weigh the pain and the balance. On the one hand, you have the pain of telling your manager that they shouldn't hire someone and risking that it gets back to the person. Okay, that's pain level, you know, pain bucket number one. But in bucket number two, you have the pain of working with this person for another several years.

And I think it's pretty clear which bucket you need to go pick up. Yeah. Do you think there's a tiny chance that the question asker's evaluation is incorrect and this person actually is great and it'll just be better here for some reason? Maybe they were held back by their previous environment

and this is what they need to blossom it does happen sometimes when people jump to a new company that they kind of reinvent themselves and so there is a chance of that and if you want to just be the most optimistic hopeful human being you could gamble on that but yeah do you like taking very large risks for a very small expected value and a gigantic possible negative outcome yeah yeah i i think you just well okay here's what you do you can anonymously tell your tech lead the feedback set up kind of a secret agent dead drop thing leave a note under their chair or something like that and and say you have like anonymous sources that i mean you're the anonymous source but you're protected by another layer of anonymity your sources are also anonymous sounded better in my

head so you you pay a you pay an anonymous mule to deliver the message is that what you're saying yeah yeah and then don't sign it person x or whatever and also don't say when i worked with them at my previous company as you can easily tell from my resume yeah maybe you can keep it vague honestly this is a dumb idea but you could make it less dumb if you really don't want to get involved too personally and keep it vague when you worked with this person so maybe it doesn't have to be the previous job it's gonna not work very well if the interviewer said and i know an anonymous question asker and we got along so well i can't wait to reunite with them and have our very collaborative work relationship renewed yeah i don't know just

tell your tell your tech lead yeah just don't tell tell your tech lead you'll be good just tell yeah so that's your answer yeah i think that's my final answer okay it's a boring one but that's a good one it's a good one go for it good luck hey jameson have you noticed there's a special kind of pain that software teams feel when they get big enough? Pain of open floor plans? No, I'm talking about the pain of owning a huge pile of services, but having no clear ownership. This makes so many routine things harder than they need to be, like knowing who's on call, onboarding new hires, finding out who owns what. If you're lucky, you have some spreadsheet or maybe like four spreadsheets that list all the services your teams operate with manager contacts

and on-call schedules, but you probably don't even have that. I've definitely felt that pain. Well, this is where Ops Level comes in. Ops Level is a product that replaces that old spreadsheet that no one trusts with an always up-to-date catalog of all your services and teams. And Ops Level takes the friction out of launching new services by providing guardrails that let developers focus on writing code instead of chasing down people and getting approvals. When I worked at Amazon, we had tools like this. I can't imagine living without them, but small and medium-sized companies they can't afford to build them and this is why you need ops level i've lived without them it's rough the rolodex of people who've worked there a long time

is not as scalable as ops level go to ops level.com soft skills to solve this pain and learn how ops level makes shipping great software easier end the suffering go to ops level.com soft skills all right should i read our next question you better from an anonymous listener thanks for thinking i'm neat i think you're pretty neat too oh cool in my most recent one-on-one it actually reads one two one and when i first read this question i was like most recent 121 is this like a college course well in my most recent one-on-one my manager asked me to give some feedback on another colleague on whether i thought they would make a good engineering manager my genuine thoughts about my colleague are that they're pretty good technically they have good

communication skills are friendly and just generally a team player outside of work we're pretty good friends and so i really want to see them succeed however i can't shake the feeling that they wouldn't necessarily be a good engineering manager and i can't figure out why what are some other not so obvious qualities that you think are important for ems since on paper i think they would tick a lot of the boxes okay i'm sensing a theme on today's show and i feel like the previous question was easy mode version of this question like this is hard mode yeah i can't figure out why my gut says bad manager but on paper everything looks fine is that what i'm reading here i think so i can't shake the feeling there wouldn't necessarily be a good

engineering manager i can't get past the i can't figure out why part i feel like you have to have some inkling of why are they really rude to the wait staff at restaurants and thus indicate that they're a terrible person in in a power relationship yes whenever there's a power differential yeah time to climb i will build my throne of the waiter's skulls i will send back this glass of water until the heat death of the universe oh man i mean i guess there's two things to focus on here one is i can't figure out why and talking about how can you how can you figure that out and have a little bit more insight but the other one is what are some other not so obvious qualities you think are important for ems

well i would start with incredible stamina for long and plentiful meetings yes it's like number one requirement true i mean the level can go up or down depending on the culture of the company but i think it's pretty universal that an engineering manager at a company will have more meetings than an engineer and maybe that's it maybe they put whoopee cushions under everyone's chairs in meetings they're they're just causing some ruckus don't have good meeting etiquette maybe that's the reason you couldn't figure out like oh yeah i forgot about all those whoopee cushions i don't know why i couldn't figure that out yeah stamina for meetings the ability to repeat yourself that's true the ability to repeat yourself that's true

but really it is interesting you have to be not only willing to repeat the things you say but also willing to do repetitive things you know part of being a manager is consistently like watching the store so to speak you know and it's like sometimes that consists of looking at the same chart for the 50th time to see if anything has moved you know yeah it's a good way to put it it's kind of like you're a you're a sentry and usually things are fine but boy do you have to pay attention in case they aren't you can get lulled yeah i can't figure the not obvious qualities i think a lot of it can be learned but especially if you're becoming an engineering manager you'll probably be bad at it and so you need to be humble and open to learning even while

you're in a position of authority and for some people that's that can be uncomfortable you're supposed to be someone's boss which means it's hard to admit weakness or or that you don't know something and some people try and overcompensate for that and bluster a lot and and that's rough i don't know this is a very deep topic what qualities are important for ems this is infinitely deep you have four minutes to cover this fully so i suggest you get talking concise speaking i yield the floor oh man i i think you have to be able to balance supporting people and helping them grow through challenges some of which are caused by their own

actions and evaluating people's effectiveness and output and it's sort of like two opposite viewpoints one is very supportive and coaching and really on your side the other one you kind of have to put on the soulless corporation hat of like how many output units is this individual delivering compared to how many input units they're being compensated. And some people have trouble flipping back and forth between those two modes. I don't know. That's it. I think those are the only things. Yeah, there's probably nothing else. There's probably never even been a book written on this topic. So I don't even know why we're talking about it. I'm so glad there are so many more engineering manager books coming out. It feels a lot better than it did a few years ago.

I do want to focus a little bit on this. I can't shake the feeling that they wouldn't be a good engineering manager and i can't figure out why and i the way i read into that was i want advice on how to tell my boss not to promote this person to engineering manager yeah and i think you better you better get your crap together on why you feel that way before you take that message to your boss because if you take that message and they're like oh yeah what what are you thinking and you're like i don't know i just think it that's not gonna it's not gonna go over very well don't ask me those kind of questions this is intuitive yeah you can't quantify this yeah this is gut but i mean if like let's say you do have a clear reason for not wanting this person to move into an

engineering management position what do you tell your manager there was that stabbing incident a few years ago can't quite put my finger on what its relation is to engineering management but which gives me this vague feeling of of no i wonder if this is going to be your boss that would probably affect it a bit too if you want to report to this person feel like that would be good versus if they would be good at it in the abstract well actually they're not going to be good at it let me answer this first of all yeah almost nobody is good at it when they first try and and plenty of people are still not good at it when they've done it for a long time so yeah that's easy they won't be very good can they become good probably if they

put effort in and are willing to learn and suck at it a bunch just kind of the same way you do with everything else i don't know i feel like i'm just i feel like i'm speaking in like airport business book wisdom and that means i should stop speaking just enough of that and that's it again then back to conciseness. That's my powerful conclusion to my best-selling business novel, Lots of Long Awkward Silences. That's the title. Do you think you would ever talk to them about this? That would have to be kind of a close relationship to be able to bring up your concerns with them, but I wonder if that would help clarify anything. I joked before about being, I mean, sure it would be awkward. In the last question, I said something about how you

could be honor bound to tell them up front it is kind of a different situation when you're already friends with them though where you you will have sustained contact with them or not i mean i don't know maybe this is maybe this is the end i'm so excited to have my last conversation with you ever right now yeah yeah a lot of times you don't know that something is the last thing of a sequence but you might in this case let's just marinate in this moment yeah we can't know for sure it's the last one i mean there is the halting problem but you know i'm pretty sure this is it engrave this moment in your mind remember the light through the coffee shop windows oh man here's what might help you if you have engineering managers that you think are good

maybe it's easier to figure out your concerns that are that are unnamed if you're kind of comparing your friend against them and what qualities and attributes they have and maybe that will make it easier to tease out yeah this example is really strong here and i'm concerned friend would would struggle to do that as well or something yeah that's fair that's fair and i found that when it comes to enumerating what the qualities are that make a good engineering manager it's really rife with conflict like with uh with uh internal inconsistencies or paradoxes let me let me give an example the qualities that make a good engineer not a manager but a good engineer are pretty straightforward to describe good at problem solving good communication skills and so

on but then when it comes to hiring or choosing an engineering manager there's like all this weird paradoxical stuff for example you don't want a manager who is really power trippy right so you think to yourself well i want to hire someone who doesn't like to tell people what to do but then you also really need them to tell people what to do sometimes so they have to be comfortable telling people what to do you know yeah or there's probably 10 qualities like that where it's like you want just the right amount like this goldilocks zone in leadership where it's like yeah you got You need to want the job, but also we don't want you to want this job. You know, it's like.

Yeah, you need to have advanced in your career and shown growth, but also stop having any more ambition and just stay here forever. Exactly, exactly. Oh, man, it's such a paradox. We need you to negotiate with reports and help them understand why they shouldn't quit their job and go get more money and also never quit your job to go get more money oh man it's so true anyway so i think that's why it's really hard to pin down like what makes a really good manager it's like what makes a good manager is this insane balancing act where you're

balancing between like the psychopath and the powerless non-leader you're right in the middle of those two things is where you want to be and and if you just vacillate quickly enough between those two ends it averages out to the middle that's that's the attribute of a good manager it's an important attribute for you swing wildly from soulless psychopathy to powerless what did you say powerless non-leadership yeah like yeah like a spineless non-leader okay i gotta go update some job descriptions we're looking for a spineless non-leader who can really not drive stuff forward but who is also borderline psychotic in the way they tell people what to do if you can balance these two qualities we have a job for you is that

the you need like 15 years of 10 year old technology right experience of the engineering manager job position that's exactly that in this new domain all right have we answered the question not even close but we're gonna wrap it up anyway and say thank you so much for asking avoiding answering questions is also an essential important quality for engineering managers so on that note what can people do if they want their own questions answered oh that was a smooth segue go to softskills.audio and click the ask a question button thank you so much to everyone who asks questions every week we really appreciate them we do we appreciate you thanks for listening we will catch you next week

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