Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 295: Underleveled at FAANG and lazy tech lead

Episode Date: March 14, 2022

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Love the podcast, love the banter and jokes, keep up the great work! Now, for my predicament: Good news: I just got my first job at a FAANG! Bad news: I’m coming in at the lowest level of software engineering despite being in my mid-30’s and nearly 10 years of non-FAANG experience. Given that it is my first Big Tech™ company, I understand being down-leveled, but I did not expect to be downleveled THIS much. I’m glad to have finally “hit the big leagues”, but I’m not thrilled that I’m on equal footing with a fresh college graduate. Hurt feelings aside, what is the best Soft Skills advice on how to catch up to the mid-30’s engineers who joined a FAANG fresh out of college? My plan is to tell my aspirations to my manager once I start and see how they can help me perform as well as possible in order to promote quickly, but I can see how that might come off as greedy or entitled. What do you think? Should I do anything about a lazy tech lead? Since covid and working from home, my tech lead went from a frantic micromanager to a lazy coaster. They seem to do 1-2 hours of work per day. They set their slack status to ‘away’ so you can’t tell if they are at their desk or not. They’ve stopped coding completely, but we have an excellent PM so there isn’t much else for them to do. Sometimes during stand-up you can clearly hear them driving their car. Even asking them for help/advice on slack can mean several hours waiting for a response. Management hasn’t noticed because we are a large team who all work really hard, so the feature output is still high. My dilemma: do I count myself lucky that they are no longer micromanaging and keep my mouth shut? Better the devil you know etc. Or, do I gather some evidence and tell their boss? I could be learning so much more from an engaged tech lead, and the team might feel less toxic. Final doozy: due to some incredible stock market gains I have some heavy golden handcuffs so #1 priority is keeping my own job and not creating an enemy that gets me fired.

it takes more than having continuous failure instead of continuous integration to be a great engineer this is soft skills engineering episode 295 i'm your host dave smith i am your host jameson dance soft skills engineering is a weekly advice podcast for software developers about all the non-technical stuff that goes into software engineering such as how to fail that actually is something we talk about a lot i mean if you're failing at least if your tests are failing at least you have tests right that's true we are having a debate at work about deleting a whole bunch of tests that we are frustrated by which is really interesting maybe it's worse if you didn't have the test you wouldn't have the debate therefore tests cause contention i know but

we also wouldn't have to maintain the tests well i have i have prior experience of deleting a whole bunch of selenium tests and my life getting so much better yes i'm probably this probably reveals that i'm bad at testing but that's okay i'm comfortable admitting that yeah because you're in good company literally everyone this episode is sponsored by hired the best way for engineers to find their next job go to hired.com soft skills to enroll sign up matriculate i don't know whatever the verb is and you'll hear more about you will hear more about hired later on in the show all right do you want to thank our patrons dave yes i do want to thank our wonderful patrons this week we have a one-time shout out for

osaki nishitsude shimasu which is japanese for pardon me i have to go now that was incredible dave really well i don't know i don't speak japanese yeah it was convincing to me easy to impress a non-japanese speaker i've never spoken japanese in my life never tried it i've watched a student of the japanese language okay well thank you to that one time shout out patron we have weekly shout outs for the following people craig motlin roman code i love mavis the stochastic parrot alice jost andrew pollock the yeet your job podcast ian walter arun duna cameron hall patreon.com.au we're hiring ira chan monkey face emoji jonathan king testing is documenting.org Ola Dapo Fadiyi

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Philip John Basile You know, I think enough of these names rhyme that we could actually create one of those songs out of these names. It's just names. That'd be cool. It's kind of like the capitals of the nation or the bones in the body.

Yeah. Those songs. Let's do it. Okay. 300 episodes is coming up that's true it's coming i know that's that's what our listeners demand of us is rhyming uh patron thank you if we get a big enough patron contribution we probably could find a like limerick author who would who we could commission to create such a thing sure i don't know how much those people run maybe they're very expensive

they're in high demand we'll have to find out i need okay if they're cheap i'm gonna i'm gonna like mechanical turk my tweets over to one so they can rhyme all my tweets that's a good idea all right would you jameson do us the honor of reading our first question today absolutely this question is from an anonymous listener who says love the podcast love the banter and jokes keep up the great work now for my predicament good news i just got my first job at a fang that's facebook apple amazon netflix google or or one of the similarly sized megatech companies bad news i'm coming in at the lowest level of software engineering despite being in my mid-30s and having nearly 10 years of non-fang experience given that is that it is my first big

tech trademark company i understand being down leveled but i did not expect to be down leveled this much i'm glad to have finally hit the big leagues but i am not thrilled that i'm on equal footing with a fresh college graduate hurt feelings aside what is the best soft skills advice on how to catch up to the mid-30s engineers who joined a fang fresh out of college my plan is to tell my aspirations to my manager once i start and see how they can help me perform as well as possible in order to promote quickly but i can see how that might come off as greedy or entitled what do you think oh this is a good one i like it this reminds me of of classic tech movie billy madison are you familiar with that i am totally about technology companies i haven't seen in a long time it

probably doesn't hold up very well but from when i was like 12 which is when it was awesome this guy has to go back and like go through all of the grades kindergarten through 12 or something yeah as an adult man right yeah and he he becomes like the king of the third graders and i think the fourth graders beat him up or something like that but but this could be you you could be a queen slash king among these people yeah they'll they'll ask you like how do you cook food and what's it what's it like to vote and tell me what it's like when you can rent a car yeah that's true yeah so so enjoy that yeah enjoy being the king of the children yes i i went to college for for a while with a an engineer who had worked professionally for

a few years and came back and was so old was like 25 or something yeah but was just ancient to me then and and it was fun to talk to him because he had a very different life perspective which was useful that doesn't make you any more money though sorry that just makes your life enjoyable well that isn't that isn't the money the interesting angle here because this person probably got a big raise to go get down leveled to work among the new college grads hopefully yeah that was probably assuming that happened there was probably a a big whiplash of emotions oh yeah excitement about the big fat raise and then despair about what you feel like you you could have achieved but did not if you had only known more it is interesting so i have a guess

which fang company this is but i'm not going to say it out loud but i think it's one i know pretty well and that's because not all fang companies focus so much on junior level engineers but i think that many people have this experience where they join a fang company thinking they're going to be surrounded by all these amazing more senior more skilled more experienced people and then they get put onto a team like like in this case you've got 10 years of experience you can put on a team and actually it's just you and everyone else has zero to two years of experience in the industry sure they're smart and great and amazing but it's not what you're expecting saw that happen a lot interesting and the down level thing oh my goodness so common yeah that's

that's what i was going to ask about so i could see that but that's separate from being put at the same level as those much more junior folks as well yeah it's right at 10 years you're kind of right on the cusp of that, like more senior group of levels and the more junior group of levels, which I'm guessing you just, the interview just wasn't quite good enough. And you just kind of teetered on the fence and then fell down on the more junior side. But this is very, very common. I saw people, I mean, this is a little bit of an exaggeration, but I saw people who were like, look, I was the chief technical officer of a company of 200 engineers. And now I'm managing one small team in a corner of this building of eight people you know and making more money

but it's kind of a it's like a core tenet of fang companies they're like i'm gonna pay you more to do a job you're super overqualified for and you're gonna do a great job and they do often yeah what do you do if you want to get paid even more i mean the question here is how do i catch up to the mid-30s engineers who have been at fang companies for their whole career i think is what what we're asking here yeah right that's tough it is tough because you're going to spend the first couple two three years just figuring out how to be a an engineer at this company and that usually involves a whole bunch of super specific knowledge that just takes time to acquire and time to absorb the culture and assimilate this is interesting because i wish i could

put this person in a in a petri dish and study this we've talked a lot about the value of experience and one of those values being it can be easier to pattern match against things that you already know and kind of pick up new stuff because it matches paradigms you understand already uh you a pretty senior or pretty experienced engineer are going to be learning all these new very proprietary weird specific systems that you've probably never seen before along with all these brand new college grads and and it'd be fascinating to see how you both absorb that yeah like does experience outside of this company compress in how much value it gives you i bet it does that make sense yeah and i bet it does because i think superficially you might

find that these new grads seem really fast and capable but i think you know the the goldfish water story where the old goldfish swims by these two young goldfish that are talking and the old goldfish says water's nice today and that they swim past and then the two goldfish look at each other and go what's water i have heard that yeah and i think that i think that's very common at fang companies for people who have been there from the very beginning they don't actually appreciate the sophistication of some of the things that they're working on or the tools that they have at their disposal but when i joined a fang company some years ago i remember thinking oh my gosh this company has solved so many problems of software development that most other companies I've been

at, well, all other companies I've been at didn't even acknowledge existed, you know, and then you just suffered from some of these problems and be like, well, that's weird. Well, moving on, you know? So I think it'll happen where you have a greater appreciation and that will probably help you to articulate more clearly to your peers, the value of some of the things that you do and be able to explain better and motivate people better to follow some of the practices and use some of the tools more effectively, which will help you move into a leadership. I think I don't mean formal leadership necessarily, but it will help you be perceived as more of a leader because you're able to articulate things. You know, when I would ask more junior engineers, you know,

why do we do it this way? And they're like, I don't know. And then I would look into it and I'd be like, oh my gosh, it's genius. And then I could articulate that and say, oh, this tool exists for these reasons. And here's all the problems it solves. You've probably never heard of some of these problems check them out you know and that was very helpful for me when i was there that makes sense so so it's a lot of what you're saying the benefit is is you are probably more aware of the problems that some of these things might solve yeah i think so interesting we still have pretty much avoided answering this question i think your plan is great tell my aspirations to my manager once i start and see how they can help there was a concern baked into that question too

right i might come off as greedy or entitled yeah i don't think you will i think that's a misperception what do you think james i don't know that kind of humble down home mom and pop facebook company really they really treat each other like family over there you'd be breaking the social contract it's like if you pay someone who invites you over for thanksgiving dinner you know it's just it's just rude yeah no i think they they will be fine if you come in and say like give me that promotion you morons you screwed up real bad then sure you'll be greedy and entitled but if you just say i i want to get promoted quickly how can i do that that's fine that the the answer to that is

probably like do things that your manager is excited about and and should make their life better so they they should be your ally in that you have a one other advantage is well not advantage this is a silver lining which is it's it's much easier to be promoted from at a lower level it generally it it feels like a i don't know a pyramid tree there's like a logarithmic decrease in the number of yeah it's it is like a binary it's like a it's like a tree but there's like 10 children of each node so it's like extremely hard to traverse if you're all trying to go up to the same node parent node yeah so so you're in the easy spot where um often these places will expect promotion from this first level uh not all of them i think but catching up to folks

in their mid-30s who have been there you're never going to catch up to what the stock price was when they joined so that you must give up on yes or get a time machine you can be their butler you can drive one of their spare ferraris or whatever but i feel like what am i gonna say that's useful here nothing perfect i will tell you that managers at these companies love i in my opinion they love it when their team members want to get promoted quickly because these companies tend to have very clear criteria for what you need to do and they're all things that the company wants you to do to get promoted and so when you come to them and say i want to get promoted what can i do your manager's like great

this is a this is a team member that i can really deploy and get a lot of value out of and they're going to make me look good and make my team look good because they're going to be hard working and it's going to be awesome so i would say cast all your concerns aside about looking greedy or entitled consider that what you're saying to your manager is i want to do more and be more so i can be more valuable to you and our team and it's a totally different perspective than saying i want more money now please yeah i think there are also probably worse cases than what you've described of of this really clear alignment between things that are good for the business and things that help you get promoted there's certainly some weird incentives where where at some places

or some teams or some levels there might be a lot of politics or relationships or it might be kind of a zero-sum game but especially at the lower levels i think all of those constraints are relaxed so i guess start sharpening your knives now yeah the ones you stab into the backs of people yeah so that they're good and sharp by the time you need to get from like that level two to level three or whatever yeah and just so you know this this is a metaphor right i just want to confirm yes okay absolutely as i slowly put my knife down i've heard it said that part of why google has all these projects that they spin up and shut down is because a nice way to get promoted is like make a new thing and then it just kind of

does its job and get someone promoted and then turns out to be not worth it so get shut down right i don't know if that's true or not from not having worked there but it is said the most trustworthy source yes the it is said source many are saying yeah have we answered this question i think we're i think we're getting pretty close i will say it you very much might have an uphill battle here it can be very challenging i mean the reason i'm assuming here that the reason you were down leveled into this spot is because you were just a little short of the final destination and i have watched people go through that struggle and spend years not being able to get to the level they thought they should have been at and then they sometimes leave because it's just the

opportunities just aren't there and i think one thing you have to know about these big mega tech company fan companies is that a big component of your ability to move up in level is opportunity and a big component of opportunity is luck so did you land on a team that actually has the kind of opportunities you need to demonstrate next level skill time will tell do you have a manager who's going to be a good advocate for you and be able to make a case that's compelling to their manager to approve the promotion time will tell you know are your co-workers going to be supportive and and work with you because you in order to get promoted in a lot of these places you have to demonstrate influence over other people that are often your peers. Time will tell. So all these

things have to align for this to work well for you. I would recommend finding people at your company who have gone down this pathway before you and ask them, what kinds of experiences did you have that led to a successful outcome? And then try to see if you can pattern match those and share those with your manager. And because your manager is going to be your best partner here, might also be your worst enemy, but hopefully your best partner. And share those specific examples with your manager and see if they can help you navigate that. And also, by the way, your manager might also be new to this culture as well. And so they might not know. And by culture, I mean the company culture. They might not know the processes in and out. You might be the first

person they're actually taking through this promotion process. So there's a lot of challenge here. And I would say, be careful not to get too down on yourself if it just doesn't go swimmingly. because i think this the deck is potentially stacked against you there is some of this that is not in your direct control which is i think why assuming you're performing really well there there are outcomes where you still are not promoted but if you do it for long enough then then hopefully you kind of get the right circumstances combined with the right performance one last thing i'll say is make sure you you figure out what expected timelines are Um, some places, uh, promote faster than others.

Maybe at one company, it's a norm that, that six months is a reasonable tenure before you get promoted. Maybe at another company, it's like four or five years, you know, and you should know what, what a, a median time between promotion is and, and where you fall in that timeline. Yeah. I know you said you want to get promoted quickly, but, uh, even just knowing what the average cadences will help you then you'll know i mean maybe maybe for that place quick is every two years or something you know have we answered the question now i think so all right good luck 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 after the finger guns yeah uh both the beauty is it's totally free for engineers uh and we would love for you to go try it go to hired.com soft skills to check it out hired.com soft skills quit your job the best way and check out hired dave would you like to read our next question i would be honored this comes from an anonymous listener perhaps yes that's yeah i left off who it came from so it's truly anonymous

it is truly anonymous i mean all of our i think we've done a really good job of protecting everyone's anonymity on this just so you know yes they're all truly anonymous this one we just didn't write the word anonymous yeah well that's fair point we don't know if it's anonymous or not that's how anonymous it is yeah i mean it's written it could be yeah it could be directly attributed to someone and we don't know and we don't know right i mean it's from what i can tell we did not write the word anonymous directly below their social security number and full name so that's how you know it's anonymous okay let's get into it here the question says should i do anything about a lazy tech lead since covid and working from home my tech lead went from a

frantic micromanager to a lazy coaster they seem to do one to two hours of work per day they set their slack status to away so you can't tell if they're at their desk or not they stopped coding completely but we have an excellent pm so there isn't much else for them to do sometimes during stand-up you can clearly hear them driving their car even asking for help or advice on slack can mean several hours waiting for a response management hasn't noticed because we are a large team who all work really hard so the feature output is still high well maybe not all of you my dilemma do i count myself lucky that they are no longer micromanaging and keeping my mouth shut better the devil you know etc or do i gather some evidence and tell their boss i could be learning

so much more from an engaged tech lead and the team might feel less toxic final doozy here comes the final doozy due to some incredible stock market gains i have some heavy golden handcuffs so number one priority is keeping my own job and not creating an enemy that gets me fired oh interesting this is spicy yes i love the twist at the end the final doozy i was 100 on board with do nothing until the team might feel less toxic which sounds like the team feels kind of toxic and that's bad that's my advice toxic is bad uh i also you know what i want to stick up for driving your car during a meeting as a sometimes meeting car driver person always hands-free of course but um well of course your hands for you

have a chauffeur obviously that that feels like one of the benefits of remote work i don't know you're you're not tethered to your desk if it's a distraction or they're not participating i guess that's bad but don't get mad at me for driving during meetings i think that's the point okay i'm still allowed to do it this doesn't make me bad just because you don't like it that this person doesn't oh okay good i'll erase the last few notes i had taken about you being bad yes my needs are met by this question so it's answered they've stopped coding completely i have a question for you dave yeah do you think their assessment of what their tech lead is doing is accurate or do you think it's possible the tech lead is doing work that is not very visible to them well that's

a great question being a remote tech lead after having been an in-person tech lead is probably really hard maybe they just haven't figured out how to be a remote micromanager yet is the calm before the storm i mean if you could choose i wonder if you could choose would you choose an in-person micromanager or as a tech lead or a remote hands-off lazy person who kind of offends your sense of cosmic justice as a tech lead oh i think it depends on what i wanted if i wanted to also be a remote lazy person yeah it sure would be a lot easier if i had a very disengaged boss so to hearken back to the previous question if you are interested in promotion or advancement you you are missing a critical ally who will know nothing

and be unable to support you unless you uh unless you show up at their house and you pair with them It's an option work with them for more than one to two hours a day from their home When it says work from home, it doesn't say who's home. Is it? Like which home it is that you're working. It would be a lot easier to micromanage up in person than remotely That is true, maybe they're away because that's already happening with someone else They stopped coding completely. So there isn't much else for them to do I could be learning so much more from an engaged tech lead

it kind of sounds like this might not be a manager relationship so maybe this person isn't actually their boss but they are just missing the question asker is not getting good technical feedback from them on on what to do differently and how to think about designs you could schedule a meeting which is the ultimate remote weapon to force someone to pay attention to you i guess this is a more realistic version of show up at their house and pair with them which is show up on their screen and and talk to them they they might be disengaged so if you really want to learn more you can put more effort into pulling that learning from them it will be more painful than if you had a very engaged tech lead but the good news is if they're very disengaged they're not busy with

anything else so it's not like they have a bunch of other work to do that's distracting them maybe maybe you'll be their top priority as just the person who shows up yeah it's interesting if i were in this situation i would just prefer whatever was the opposite of what i was in now so i think if i was if i had the disengaged tech lead i would prefer a micromanager and then once i had the micromanager i yearn for the days of a disengaged tech lead but it usually takes a couple of months before you start yearning that's true yeah so you're saying that your ideal state is like at every two to three months you ping pong yeah they flip flop my tech lead went from a frantic micromanager yes they got to go back

and then back again and you'll need to arrange some world events you're gonna need to arrange a pandemic that lasts exactly two months yeah should be doable yeah genetic engineering it's getting pretty good classic engineer thing how hard could other wildly complex deep subject be right i'm sure i can just read a bit about it yeah i'm sure there's some blogs yeah maybe some youtube videos crisper blog how to do gene editing or whatever teach yourself crisper in 24 hours you know i I think Jameson and I both kind of have this heightened sense of cosmic justice where we just feel bad when someone, especially someone who we report to or someone up in the more senior on the management chain, we don't feel is pulling their weight. You know, am I right in saying that, Jameson?

Do I represent both of us? I think so. Yeah. But as I've gotten older, I've kind of realized, like, I'm not sure that there's much you can do to fix that problem in such a way that it doesn't make it worse until it crosses a line, which is when it starts to impact or harm my teammates. And that's when I, you know, suddenly my sense of cosmic justice prevails because it's more than just me suffering. Yeah, you can defend others. That's right. I'm a freaking hero.

Yeah. Yeah. So if it gets to that point, I probably would make motions to start talking to their manager about how they're doing. And the question asker said the right word, collecting evidence. If you want to go down that path, that's exactly the right thing to do. Write down specific examples of things that they should be doing and aren't. And then when you're ready, bring those in a dispassionate, unemotional, objective way to their manager in a confidential way and talk them through it and chances are you'll find out at that moment that your manager has already been aware of this and has been working for months on this problem maybe you solve their problem maybe

you're you're the oh cool someone put together the evidence i need for hr yeah thanks can i just forward this email i think you did you say dispassionate what was the adjective that you used i said dispassionate but now i'm wondering if that's the wrong word i was gonna say dispassionate makes sense or you think it should be passionate and fiery i just was wondering if i suddenly didn't know what dispassionate meant oh i will not stand for this i'm so dispassionate another way you could help make sure it's dispassionate is if you can tie the behavior to some negative outcome for the business so they missed this meeting which meant that we had to struggle to answer this question for x amount of more hours or whatever if if it's just

i think they're doing the wrong thing that is easier to see as someone being disgruntled and maybe they have a bad relationship or something like that but if if you feel like you can clearly tie it to things that the money machine cares about then it's easier to get it paid attention to and it's also i think probably harder for it to blow back on you i don't know i don't think i've ever i mean i've never done this personally though so incredible stock market gains they work at bitcoin oh the famous company the famous company bitcoin yes have you heard about their ceo yeah yeah well-known stock market hit doge i don't know i think that's all i got what else do you have i think that's it i think good luck

i would say choose your battles carefully here i think just in closing there's probably a few things you don't want to go do which is number one don't start bad mouthing this person to your other teammates that that will make the toxicity worse not better think long and hard about what you really want and understand that replacing this person even if you can successfully replace them it's a bit of a roll of the dice you know and i think you have to assess what the likelihood is that you're going to get someone who will give you the things you're looking for yeah that's interesting i just had another thought your boss's boss or if that's who this person is i don't know this tech leads boss cares more about themselves than you probably just as a human being and

your problem with your tech lead is very likely to be a smaller problem than the problem they would have if they were to fire this person so you're trying to change that balance i guess make make it so that you could do this offensively which would be bad but trying to make it clear that that their life will get better if you make a change if that's what you're trying to make happen not just that you are upset because if if they're just picking between an engineer on the team and a tech lead in a cynical interpretation they probably would be harmed more by the tech lead leaving than the engineers they'd go with the tech lead you know yeah maybe not though i don't know i'll end my advice by discounting it all and then saying but whatever what should people do if

they want their own questions answered dave go to soft skills.audio and click the ask a question button. And we want to say thank you so much to everyone who's done that. You are the lifeblood of the show and we love, love all your questions. We do. We will catch you next week.