Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 296: Low performer and frantic manager

Episode Date: March 21, 2022

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Hi! long time listener first time caller. i am the CTO of an early startup with 15 employees (12 engineers). 3 months ago, we hired a new engineer whose output is quite low compared to other engineers on the team. i have brought this up with him many times and tried to coach him on his debugging skills, time management skills, etc. After months of this, I am not seeing any change in output and am growing frustrated. At this point, I suspect that the engineer is just spending very little time on their tasks compared to others on the team (who admittedly often work late into the night). I don’t want to fire the engineer or micromanage his schedule, but am concerned that their slowness will impact our culture and product. Do you have any ideas on how I could help this engineer improve? Howdy fellas, I started my first SWE job out of college at a startup in the bay area and work in a team of three. Myself, my technical manager, and one other developer who comes from an adjacent field. I came three years of interning as a developer at a very relaxed company with 3000+ employees. I’m finding I have a lot more ownership over my work now than ever before and I really enjoy that! What I don’t enjoy is watching my manager run around like a headless chicken. Between managing all our jira boards, creating POC’s for a complete redesign of our core services, interviewing candidates, planning features for our existing services, and doing regular sprint work they have too much to do and not nearly enough time for all of it. This results in many things that are critical getting scrambled, forgotten, miscommunicated, or just dropped for lack of time on their part. I’ve tried to take some of the small tasks from them that aren’t necessarily a manager’s job such as managing the jira board and help desk tickets. Unfortunately they insist that they don’t want me to take over small tasks like that because they can handle it, but the same issues from them being overloaded persist. I think the team over all would be a lot more effective if they were able to focus in on particular tasks, but since they won’t let me help what else can I do?

it takes more than typing my sequel when you mean myself to be a great software engineer this is episode 296 of the soft skills engineering podcast i'm your host james and dance i'm your host dave smith soft skills engineering is a weekly advice show about the non-technical parts of the technical field of software development maybe this is prompted by review season i feel Like, we just got through that. So you're taking a look at MySQL quite a bit. You keep all your performance data in a relational database? Yeah.

I've been looking deep within MySQL to do some introspection. Does this happen to you with other words that are close to programming terms? I'm trying to figure out. Yeah, like, I can't type the word custom without typing customer anymore. i can't type the word engineer without finishing it off and writing engineering for some reason my name is dave and i'm a software engineering yeah exactly person software person sometimes i type get with an i instead of an e oh yeah i'm gonna go i'm gonna go get that but that that's just that could be that's just the texas pronunciation yeah some

southern charm get over here i uh i grew up in texas you may not know that about me you're allowed to say it then i am and you know i remember when my my best friend wrote the word pen p-e-n and he spelled it p-i-n and i thought what are you talking about here when you wrote this word give me a p-n oh you you need a pin no a pin oh there's like four more letters in the way that you say it pn yeah there's a few extra vowels in there yeah that's delightful all right shall i keep talking about texas things or just move on let's just move on okay we have a great sponsor hey this episode is sponsored by hired which is the best way for engineers to find their next job pay attention carefully to the rest of this show and you will learn how

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big tube we have individual toe socks and we'll accept nothing less and that's what your money goes towards do you have to put are they each you have 10 of these and you put them on each toe i'm thinking just the socks with toes built in okay because i was thinking it'd be really cool if you if you had individual socks that you have to place around each toe ah especially if you have staff that does that for you yeah that's like conspicuous consumption look at how useless and wasteful this is and thus behold how rich i am if you want to join this group you can join or go to sorry soft skills.audio and click support us on patreon and any dollar amount will give you an invite to our Slack team. And whatever amount is written on that page that I can't remember,

will get us to say some words that might be your name or might be something else. And we will attempt to pronounce it in any language. Dave, you set the bar really high last week, I think, as a non-native or at all. I don't know, I said non-native. Like, I don't natively speak Japanese and also don't at all speak Japanese. Not only am I not fluent, I'm not even not fluent. Yeah, exactly. Well, hopefully someone who speaks Japanese can chime in and score my pronunciation. I'm going to guess it was bad.

Bad to very bad. If I can type it into Google Translate and then have a computer read it back to me, then I will attempt it. Okay. All right. Shall I read our first question? Yes. Okay.

This comes from an anonymous listener who says, Hi, long-time listener, first-time caller. I am the CTO of an early startup with 15 employees, 12 of which are engineers. Three months ago, we hired a new engineer whose output is quite low compared to other engineers on the team. I have brought this up with him many times and tried to coach him on his debugging skills, time management skills, etc. After months of this, I am not seeing any change in output and am growing frustrated. At this point, I suspect that the engineer is just spending very little time on their tasks compared to others on the team, who admittedly often work late into the night.

I don't want to fire the engineer or micromanage his schedule, but am concerned that their slowness will impact our culture and product. Do you have any ideas on how I could help this engineer improve? This is so close to being the easiest question to answer on this show. And then I feel like the question asker threw a couple little tweaks in there to add more nuance to make it not the easiest question we could answer. Yeah. Well, actually, what was the easiest question we've ever answered i don't know it's a good question not this one yeah you came close question but then veered away since you have an early startup 15 so what seems obvious to do from a a person with equity in this company which is fire this person um okay the only thing that

gives me pause is the fact that other engineers admittedly often work late into the night yes and And there could be something there. If the reason this engineer is less effective is solely because they don't work late into the night, then you will probably have this problem repeat itself with other people who are also not willing to work late into the night. Right. And the fact that you've got 12 of them, well, 11 engineers who are willing to work late into the night is quite remarkable. Yeah, they must not be, I don't know, going on the internet very much. What lies have you told them to motivate them to work so hard? We're all going to be billionaires. The internet actually went down forever once you started working here. So you actually can't see what is happening in the job market.

That's right. You can't see other jobs. You can't play any video games. And also, you live here now. Yeah. I mean, worked with them for months. Many times coached him on his debugging skills, etc. not seeing any change in output and i'm growing frustrated that seems pretty clear yeah at a 15

person company you are probably unlikely to have robust hr procedures to to do a lot of formal documentation and follow these steps and stuff and assuming you're in the u.s you're probably in an at-will state which means that as long as you're not discriminating against someone i believe you can terminate employment at any time so technically you can fire them probably pretty easily if you're not discriminating which you should not i don't see that in the question explicitly like also this person is pregnant and that's a problem for us or something like that yeah you are allowed to discriminate people on the grounds that they are terrible podcast hosts though which i have been the victim of a few times yeah hard hard to argue with though if we deserve

it hmm yeah i mean i what do you do to coach someone like this you've you've sat down with them. You've tried to teach them. You've tried to help them learn time management. I'm sensing two things in this question. One is you don't actually know what's going on that's causing the low output. And I would be inclined, that's number one. And number two, you don't really know what to do about it. But I would be inclined to ask the person, why is your output so poor? We've talked about time management. We've talked about debugging skills, and I've paired with you a lot we've talked a lot why is your output so low and don't do it in an you know use a really calm approachable tone of voice when you ask that question which might seem hard to do but ask him

maybe he'll say oh i've been diagnosed with this terrible disease you know or yeah i've had some tragedies happen in my personal life and it's like okay we can work with this yeah but you just don't know right now and you can't solve a problem that you can't describe my other job is just really taking a lot of time away from this job i think you mentioned kind of implicitly that part of what you should do is especially if you haven't said it already is say to this person you are not meeting expectations in some way i would expect you to get more than more done than you are doing. If you have worked with them around specific skills, but have not said that overall as a problem, you should certainly say it, but it's not always correctable. That's true. If this person

is doing a lot less than all the other engineers, then all the other engineers know. They're not going to be surprised by that. And there's a possibility that they're all frustrated by this person and are going to be happier if they're working on a team where everyone is delivering more equally, I guess. Yeah. And may I suggest that in addition to telling this person that they're not meeting expectations and describing specifically how they're not, I would suggest you follow that up with a written version of that in an email or otherwise and say, hey, just wanted to reiterate what we talked about. Here's where I'm seeing you not meeting expectations. You know, you took three weeks to deliver this feature. I would have expected that

to take a week for someone at your level with your experience. You know, spell that out. Make it clear. You'll thank us later when you have a written paper trail that you can refer to. Is this an in case you get sued thing? I wasn't thinking about lawsuit. I was just thinking about when it is time to make a case for terminating this person. If it comes to that, you're going to want all this stuff written down. This is a 15 person startup. I feel like making the case to who, right? Like this is the CTO. They're probably going to say, hey, CEO, you know, that person that we all know very well that doesn't get stuff done. I think we need to let them go. And the CEO will probably say,

yeah, I think you're right. Yeah, you're probably right. I mean, it wouldn't hurt. Yeah. Even still, I'm the kind of person that likes to keep all this stuff written down and cared for just in case, you know, I don't know. Here's how I like to make decisions. I like to write all this stuff down and then look it over myself and try to read it from a third person's perspective and see if I've convinced myself that I'm making a good decision. And until you do all that written down and say, okay, do I have a case here? Is this an objectively the right thing to do? And have I given them enough opportunities to improve to where I can let them go? And if I can't answer both those questions, yes, then I've got to

keep working on it. Yeah. So I like to do that when writing. By the way, Jameson, And the way you answered this question, I just want to let you know, I think it does meet expectations. And I'll send a follow-up email later to let you know. Okay, thank you. I will print it off and leave it on my desk for all to see. Jameson meets expectations dance. I read an article the other day that was on the Orange website, I think.

I think that's where I found it. that basically said, ask yourself if you would enthusiastically rehire this person if you were looking for people with their same skill set. And if the answer is no, then they're probably not going to work here in a year. And you should take more deliberate actions to either address that or help them move on somewhere else, which is like the way that you make yourself able to sleep at night, but still fire people. You get to say, I'm helping them work at somewhere where they'll be more effective yeah they'll be a better fit yeah really this is really hard for me but they'll be better off ouch the world really is all about you jameson you know nobody thinks

enough about the people who have to fire and how painful it is for them yeah they'll survive i don't know i feel a little ruthless about this question but i think the answer is pretty clear I think I am leaning towards being more aggressive than even you are, Dave, where you're kind of saying start a process that might end in them being fired. And you're saying end the process that will end in them being fired. I mean, yeah, if you're spending one-fifteenth of your, probably of your company's expenses, probably a salary is by far the biggest expense at this point on this person and they're not delivering. That's a really large fraction of your company's total money going to this person who's not making it work. Yeah. There could be a very reasonable reason why, though.

Yeah, there could be. And you owe it to yourself, to them, to find that out first before you do anything. And by the way, in addition to just asking them, you could also very carefully ask some of their peers. Like, hey, what do you know about so-and-so? How's their work? You know, how's their life? Anything I should be aware of that might affect their work performance?

You know, things like that. Good questions to ask. Yeah. All right. 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 SoftSkills to check it out. Hired.com slash SoftSkills. Quit your job the best way and check out Hired. Okay, should I read our next question? Okay, let's do it.

this is from an anonymous listener who says howdy fellas there's not even a little cowboy hat emoji i'm disappointed no but appreciate the howdy nonetheless yeah howdy fellas i started my first swe which i think means software engineer job out of college at a startup in the bay area and work in a team of three myself my technical manager and one other developer who comes from an adjacent field i came with three years of interning as a developer at a very relaxed company with 3000 plus employees i'm finding i have a lot more ownership over my work now than ever before and i really enjoy that what i don't enjoy is watching my manager run around like a headless chicken between managing all of our jira boards creating pocs for a complete redesign of

our core services interviewing candidates planning features for our existing services and doing regular sprint work they have too much to do and not enough time for all of it this results in many things that are critical getting scrambled forgotten miscommunicated or just dropped for lack of time on their part i have tried to take some of the small tasks from them that aren't necessarily a manager's job such as managing the jira board and help desk tickets unfortunately they insist that they don't want me to take over small tasks like that because they can handle it but the same issues from them being overloaded persist i think the team overall would be a lot more effective if they were able to focus in on particular tasks but since they won't help me

won't let me help what else can i do oh boy i just love this transition from a giant company that has more than enough people to do all the things they need to do to real life i had a twinge in my heart when i read that paragraph about run around like a headless chicken too many things to do critical things are scrambled forgotten miscommunicated or just dropped for lack of time and i felt it that is that is that's my fear which sometimes i'm sure i act out in real life but i'm always worried about because there's there's a lot of very disparate things to do yeah i felt this too i think i'm actually worried this might be one of my team members yeah i'm trying to count all of the teams that i'm on and if any of them could

be construed as having three people where I am one of them. Yes. Yeah. But rather than trying to destroy the anonymity of this person, what do you think they should do about this situation? We should talk about that. Yeah. So interesting. So, okay. So we have three people on the team. Yeah. You see, there's a certain, here's my theory about team engineering on a team. There is a certain fixed amount of overhead that comes with having a team. Like we've already talked about JIRA boards and someone creating proof of concepts and interviewing and planning and stuff like that, there's a minimum fixed amount. It's like a constant minimum overhead required. And so the smaller your team is, the more that overhead impacts your overall output as a team

and the less you can delegate because there's just not enough people to delegate. And so it sounds like this manager is saying, I just want to absorb all of this. I don't want my team i've only got two team members who can focus full-time i want to keep them full-time focused on the problems we're solving and i want to completely insulate them from all this stuff yeah this manager is big o n log n but with a really large constant yes and n is small right now and it's two yeah and it's two so the constant is done there's this constant that's like 35 hours a week yeah delegating can be really hard because especially if you are how do i put this if you really like things being done a certain way probably the person you're delegating to is not

going to do them that way so when you said big o earlier it was the o did it stand for the word obsessive big obsessive and login yeah so it sounds like you've tried to talk to the manager and bring up specific tasks that you think you could do or take on have you described the problem generally like you've described it here that it's not even about the specific tasks it's about the team overall suffering because of how distracted the manager is because you've tried to solve it which is admirable it didn't work and a thing you should do with problems especially if you have a good manager is talk about them with your manager and it just so happens that this one involves your manager but it's not a i despise you or you chew too loudly type of thing it's it's a

our team is suffering because you're split so much what can we do to fix that yeah that's exactly the conversation i think that needs to happen here this sentence here is key many things are scrambled forgotten or miscommunicated or just dropped because this person insists on doing all of this without sharing the load. And frankly, with a team of three people, one of which is a technical manager, if they can't stay on top of the planning for that team, it tells me that maybe they really lack some of the skills for doing this administrative stuff. It's not a team of three there's only so much work you can generate you know it's it's a small team yeah and so if one person can't stay fully on top of that then maybe the answer is actually not spreading that

around on the team but maybe the answer is bringing someone in to help like maybe you need a scrum master so-called scrum master or something like that yeah i wonder sometimes i feel like engineering management i mean i guess this applies to a lot of jobs but i feel like i feel it more deeply in engineering management that that there is an infinite amount of things that i could be doing that would be helpful and good that's true no matter how much i'm doing there's always something that feels really important that i don't have time to do or don't make time for i wonder if that's kind of a feeling that your your manager has that there's just there's all this important stuff there's one-on-ones and planning and career growth and hiring and and planning this off-site

and, I don't know, doing a sprint backlog grooming or something like that. And they haven't clearly identified what the things they have to get done are and are just trying to do everything that seems important. Yeah. And as a result, because important things aren't actually put at the top of that list,

the important things sometimes get dropped along with the unimportant things. Yeah, this feels a lot like doing the urgent things. Yeah. And so you're kind of always rushing to the biggest, most pressing fire, even if it's not the most effective thing to be doing right now. It's like the thing that feels the most pressing is how you work on stuff. I'm saying you. Really replace you with me.

Turn this from a second person to a first person discussion. Yes. And it's Jameson. Did you write this question? Oh, no, we already talked about this. One of your team members probably wrote it. um yeah i can i can i feel this yeah i totally feel it so i mean it unfortunately there's very little that you can reliably do in your position on this team to fix this you've already stepped

in to offer to help and let's see did the question asker say that they actually were able to do a little bit of help let's see i've tried to take some of the small tasks like managing the jira board but they insist that they don't want me to take over small tasks because because quote they can handle it but you're like you can't handle it yeah you're clearly not handling it and i don't know it's tough because you're either gonna just put up with this mess or you're gonna have to make them feel bad by giving them a concrete evidence that they can't handle it and that's gonna hurt a little bit especially since they're apparently in a little bit of denial about what they can handle does anything particular stick out on the list of

things that this person is doing is like maybe you shouldn't do that yeah like creating pocs for a complete redesign yeah that's that's the one that sticks out the most to me a complete redesign for our core services poc by the way standing for proof of concept oh yes or pretty awesome codes creating pretty awesome codes pretty awesome is spelled oh with an o awesome awesome pretty okay code pretty oh that's more like it that is more like it and doing regular sprint work interviewing yeah and the regular sprint work but i mean it's a team of three right so they have basically you've got they're probably trying to spend in fact that's probably the killer they're probably trying to be a full-time engineer and a full-time

manager but again constant amount of overhead required to manage a team can really eat into that so unless they've got a support structure that they can report into that can handle some of the stuff above them on the org chart then you might just be stuck with this situation and that is an interesting idea you might want to look into which is are you part of a broader organization that could provide support for this manager who is struggling support that could come in the form of project management or something else where someone could come in from a neighboring team or or a leader above them to handle some of this stuff yeah they say they're a startup as well but don't give us size. And that could be a lot of very different numbers of people at the company.

I'm going to assume that resources are constrained in general, though, and that lots of people feel like they have not enough time to do the things they're already doing. I have found that I can, on a small team, do a decent job of managing and contributing if I don't do any architecture or kind of cut out one major area of individual contributor engineering work. but like you said if i try and do the full individual contributor job and also add management then that is a recipe for disaster so maybe maybe you took the wrong thing maybe you have to try and come for the complete redesign of our core services and then that might trigger them to get get really defensive and then it will bring this conflict out in the open more because

you're taking away something they want to do not just something they feel like they can handle Yep. And the other potentially silver lining here is if this is a startup and your team is growing, then this might get better. But it could also get much worse. So the scenario in which it gets better is that the team grows and this leader brings in a manager to actually run the team and do the management stuff that this leader is not very good at, freeing them to be more of a technical leader and technical contributor to the team. Or it could get much worse because you'll get more team members and this same person will try to handle all the administrative functions for more people. They're already failing with two and now they're going to fail with eight and it'll be four times as much fail. so yeah those are kind of the two ways this can go down i think there's good news and bad news good news it could go well and improve bad news the opposite yeah i i think you have you have to i think you should address the core underlying concern you have which is not that you really

feel this deep need to work on and take over some small tasks like handling tickets or help desk things or something like that the core problem is that essential things are not getting done and and how can you solve that i feel like you should be able to have that conversation yeah you should should would you go over this person's head go over their head yes in other words you weren't able to solve the problem through direct communication but the problem persists and they insist that you can't help solve it and go over their head and ask their manager if you know ask them for help solving it. Sure. I mean, if that exists, again, it depends a lot on what startup means. Yeah. Yeah. There's always, there's always some risk in, in skipping over someone to

give feedback that, that there's a big problem or, or something very concerning that isn't getting addressed. You can try it. So to use what you did, there's a chance that that really improves things. And this manager's boss accepts the feedback and delivers it carefully to the engineering manager and helps them improve. And there's a chance it goes really poorly. Now you've pissed off two people, both of whom are above you in the hierarchy. That's right. Yeah. I would talk to them directly first. And if that doesn't work, you know what I would do? I would write in with a new question to soft skills engineering and say,

I tried your advice and it didn't work. What do I do now? I would love that. We get sparingly few of those. Yeah. Mostly because our advice is obviously incredible. yeah it's it's it gets boring to hear all the time wow it was perfect and perfectly resolved all my concerns and i was showered with money or praise or recognition or love and adulation or right etc but mostly money yeah oh my gosh i don't know i think that's what i got for that question okay well good luck let us know how either one of these conversations goes what do you think

people should do if they want their own questions answered i think they need to go to soft skills audio and click the ask a question button. And we need to say thank you to everyone who has done that. We really appreciate all your questions. Agreed. Thank you. Thank you. We will catch you next week.