Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 298: Thanks, and goodbye and fessing up

Episode Date: April 4, 2022

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Earlier I decided I would quit my corporate engineering job in 2022. I’d stagnated, I wasn’t writing as much code as I wanted, and my company made me write our services in an internal domain specific language (DSL), which I don’t like. I’ve put off quitting due to anxiety reasons and not knowing exactly what I want to do next. I’ve even thought about taking a short gap to figure things out, but maybe that’s just me being a dramatic young person (I graduated university in May of 2020). However, now my company has done something terrible and promoted me to a second level engineer! And my manager has actually listened to my feedback! How could they? I still want to leave because the DSL ruins my coding skills and won’t transfer elsewhere. I work with great people. Also, I play an important role in the group because we’ve had so much turnover this past year. I don’t want to fall into the trap of thinking “the grass is always greener on the other side”, but I think leaving would be best for my career. How can I approach this without giving the impression that I’m flaky or ungrateful? And should I stop deliberating and quit my job sooner rather than later? I started a new position three months ago for a large pay increase, I am a fully remote software dev on a team of mostly local developers. My manager-to-be left the company a week before I started, and has not been replaced. The onboarding has been extremely lacking, I don’t have a mentor or buddy, I have very little l communication with my direct manager, and I have very little guidance on what to actually do, so I have been doing… nothing. Some days I do not even open my laptop. How do I start the conversation with my manager that I need something to do, without revealing openly that I have been doing nothing for the past three months?

it takes more than thinking of an intro to be a great software engineer this is episode 298 of the soft skills engineering podcast i'm your host jameson dance i'm your host dave smith soft skills engineering is a weekly advice show where we talk about all the non-technical things that go into the fantastic and wonderful career of being a software engineer and at one point we used to say it takes more than something technical like it started with it takes more than code and has now just evolved into something it like went to madagascar and evolved into a really weird thing basically yeah in on an isolated island for yeah yeah not a lot of like evolutionary pressure so it's got large bills or i don't know we better stop talking about that

dave do you want to thank our patrons oh i do let's say a big shout out to the following people who contribute at the level that gets them shouted out every single week they are craig motlin rum and code i love mavis the stochastic parrot alice jost andrew pollock 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, testingisdocumenting.org, Ola Dapo Fadiyi, William Angel, that's William Angel, Ragnar Hardison, Timmy Garabrant, Nick Hathaway, Travis Sanders, Brayden Keynes, Ibot Winrar, Nick Kantar, Philip Jambasil. Thank you so much for contributing. If you would like to contribute and have your name, emoji, or anything in any other

language that we will attempt to pronounce on the air, then you can go to softskills.audio and click the support us on Patreon button where you can put money into a box and databases will be updated. And there will be a number on our database that goes up that makes us happy. And then we'll save. It all starts with the digitization of the coins that you insert into the website. Yeah. Thank you so much. We appreciate it. And it really, it helps us keep going it pays for expenses but more importantly it uh do i want to say this i might want to edit that out i'm trying to figure out how to say this with like how to say that like it makes me feel good that you pay us money so i want to keep doing this

i don't know maybe we just leave it in jameson just loves money so much he's a money lover what can i say well what i really love is evil and so i love money as like a pathway to love evil or something like that great okay now i'm trying to remember basic grade school math do i love money squared love of money is the root of all evil or do i love like so if you love money and money is the square root of all evil then yes you love money squared but then i love evil squared uh well money is the root of all evil i gotta write this down hang on this is now an algebra podcast okay money equals square root evil if we square money squared equals evil i don't know what i just convinced myself of okay yeah okay i got it i i love evil yeah

so i love money squared that's right yeah yeah you got it yeah so so mathematically proven and and thus patreon contributions make me the square root amount of love happier yes so you really have to give a lot of money to make jameson happy it's worse than the logarithmic i mean it's an n squared you have to put in n squared money to make jameson incrementally happier yes so keep it coming and just know that every marginal dollar you put in makes jameson a little bit less happy than the previous dollar it's fantastic we have been astonished and surprised and overwhelmed by the amount of support that people give and it it's the support behind the money i think that makes the difference to me like someone cares enough about it and just

wait until you see jameson's yacht and then you'll realize yes that was all platitudes i have like a newspaper floating in a bathtub yacht i'm gonna read our first question go for it this is from an anonymous listener who asks earlier i decided i would quit my corporate engineering job in 2022 i'd stagnated i wasn't writing as much code as i wanted and my company made me write our services in an internal domain specific language dsl which i don't like i've put off quitting due to anxiety and not knowing exactly what I want to do next. I've even thought about taking a short gap to figure things out, but maybe that's just me being a dramatic young person. I graduated university in May of 2020.

Oh, I'm so old. However, now my company has done something terrible and promoted me to a second level engineer. My manager has actually listened to my feedback. How could they? I still want to leave because the DSL ruins my coding skills and won't transfer elsewhere. i work with great people also i play an important role in the group because we've had so much turnover this past year i don't want to fall into the trap of thinking the grass is always greener on the other side but i think leaving would be best for my career how can i approach this without giving the impression that i'm flaky or ungrateful and should i stop deliberating and quit my job sooner rather than later hmm the dsl ruins my coding skills it's probably true maybe they're

programming in ook how could they listen to my feedback what's that it says my manager has actually listened to my feedback how could they it's like how dare you how dare you listen to my feedback i love it yeah it's like when you when you get all ready to have a big argument and you storm in and the person's like oh yeah some very reasonable points totally agree yeah feels it feels like you're like swinging at a punching bag and totally whiff and then stumble forward and meet the resistance that you expect can i just say i like this question because instead of saying should i quit my job the question is how do i quit my job faster like you really understand who you're talking to in this question you know your audience yeah

how can i approach this without giving the impression that i'm flaky or ungrateful well you are probably anthropomorphizing the company too much maybe maybe your manager or a couple co-workers might think oh that's flaky or that's ungrateful but the company as a whole is much colder than that it's evaluating you on on dollars and cents and input and output and one way to think about it is the company has placed a bet on you by promoting you and increasing your pay and hoping that the long-term payoff of that bet in terms of retention and greater productivity will be positive. But it's a bet. It's not a transaction. They didn't buy something. They made it more likely for you to grant them future labor. So you don't have to

come up with a reason that makes the company feel like you did the right thing, I guess. And you have a very compelling reason for why you want to quit. And the fact that they listen to your feedback does not obligate you to stay now if i work with you all of that goes out the window yeah you have to justify why you're leaving yeah i will make you sign one of those i'll pass you a note in a meeting that says check here if i will never quit and then you check it and pass it back to me i don't know how else to say it besides it seems scarier than it is like the company has had people quit before. People will quit again. And all the people that you're worried about upsetting have also quit jobs, probably for crappier reasons than you are thinking about

quitting this one. Yeah. Some of them might quit any day now. Yeah. Maybe some of them are already in their two week notice period and you just don't know about it. Yeah. They'll just disappear one day. I feel like the best thing I can do right now to help you feel better about quitting faster is to tell the story of quitting my first job. Would you like to hear? Yes. Okay. The age, the day, let's see.

How can I make this sound really old-timey? I was wheeling the cart full of punch cards. Yes. I joined this company right out of college, and it was a group of engineers who had been together for literally 20 years. Some of them maybe 10 to 20 years. they were all very close they hired a group of new college kids myself and two or three others and after a year and a half it was it's just not working for me i was shipping shelfware i was

writing all this code and they were selling it to customers who were just putting it on the shelf and not using it i don't understand how this company stayed in business but they did and i just felt so bad about that i just wanted to put my software into the hands of people who are using it now that i'm 20 years into my career i actually would be very happy to go back to putting software into the hands of people who don't use it they don't complain about bugs very much but anyway they were all so close to each other so i but they were the pay was low the job was unsatisfying and i found what seemed like a better job better pay 20 raise and much cooler applications that were actually in use by real customers and so i quit and boy was i nervous though walking into

that conversation i'm like oh man they are gonna hate me they're gonna be so mad they've invested all this into me yeah and quite frankly some of them actually were a little upset because it was like we invited you into this club of members who have been together for 20 years and you had the audacity after a year and a half to exit that club the leader of this group like he didn't talk to me for the next two weeks until my last day i think i i passed his glass office window at one point and he kind of raised a hand to kind of like be like see ya but nothing didn't didn't speak to me so this was probably the worst case scenario i could imagine and even it was fine it was fine you know yeah about 24 hours later never looked back it hasn't mattered once and i think your

situation i think most exits are actually much much better than that another option is to fill yourself with existential dread at your like meaninglessness and it's it's a big deal if you think you're super important and and you'll be missed but if if you're just like a drop of nothingness in a sea of larger nothingness then that drop going away doesn't matter because nothing matters that's the other approach that i could recommend is is just get really sad and then quitting won't make you any sadder how can i yeah giving the impression that i'm flakier you can also say that you can just say i i'm very grateful for you listening to my feedback thank you for the promotion it still doesn't address these core underlying concerns i have about this

dsl yeah and do you even have to go that far i mean i've heard people leave just saying look it's not a great fit and it's like you'll wonder for the rest of your life what i mean by that but it's not a great fit the fit of the company uniforms that you make us wear every day is not great the fit these uniforms i mean look at me the giant mascot foam suit i have to wear it does not fit well it's not a good fit oh yeah i play an important role in the group because we've had so much turnover that is kind of a bummer and that that was the hardest part about quitting my last job for me was i felt like the company as a whole uh it's fine they'll survive but the people who would

have to do more work or whose life would potentially become worse because i wasn't there anymore or or would have some kind of morale hits or i don't know some negative effect on on my teammates was the hardest part it absolutely is but i kept in touch with a bunch of them and they're fine yeah that's the thing i think people overstate in their own mind the negative effect that their departure will have on their team you know like how could i leave my team in a lurch like you're not that important you know have you ever thought that yeah and i think that's a much brighter sunnier way of saying the weird thing i was saying about existential dread i feel like that perspective could be helpful to get without quitting sometime too if you're just crushed by

stress of some deadline or i don't know unsolvable untractable problem you can just quit your job in your head or or imagine what would the best thing to do be i'm trying to think of how to phrase this because quitting your job in your head wouldn't if you can get yourself that realization that in 10 years this really won't matter that much then that can help you get through some of the the junky stuff yeah so i have this crazy idea but i want to share it second i want to share a more tractable idea first okay which is that to me it's always easiest to quit your job if you have an excellent opportunity in your hands that you're like i just can't say no to this opportunity it's so great because that's the message you deliver to your co-workers and to your boss look this isn't

about you like you're doing great you've made a great company i love working here i love all the people i work with i love the dsl that you made i love this domain i love this domain specific language i mean it's incredible but this opportunity came to me and i don't think i'm going to have another chance like this to go do something this cool ever again it's i just can't say no and then they feel good and you feel good that to me that's the best pattern yeah yeah i had something like that i had someone quit or tell me they were quitting with something like that they they had a really great opportunity and and we played the salary game and i was like yep you should quit your job you should you should this is great sounds sounds good but you but

also you don't have to like you don't have to convince them in order to successfully transition give yourself permission that i'm hang on i'm sorry i gotta go i'll deal with kids pounding at my door my daughter uh she's six wrote me a note slid it under the door along with the ipad and the note said please can you unlock the ipad i love it i love it i walked over the door already to be like what do you want and then i read this like cute little note she wrote a little tear formed in the side you're right it did it did so i think we can rewind a little bit the thing i think people have to get over is you don't have to get people's permission to leave you give yourself permission to leave without convincing everyone around you that it's the right thing to

do you don't know it to them that's fine and they frankly they don't expect you to they don't expect to convince them that it's a good thing to leave so this doesn't always happen but i've seen this happen in in a few cases where folks leave and the the people that are still there kind of like convince themselves it was the right thing for that person to do or really it's better off this way for some reason and maybe that reason is true maybe it isn't but but but they feel better yeah they feel okay about it usually that's the important thing well i guess the point you're trying to make is that doesn't matter at all. It doesn't matter if they feel okay about you quitting. It doesn't, but it doesn't hurt if people feel okay about it. Like I think it takes

a little bit of the edge off. Yeah. And I mean, you're, you're trying to leave them not in a lurch, right? You're not trying to, you know, you're not trying to convey, Hey, you're all on a sinking ship and I'm the last rat off before it goes underwater. You know, that's not what you're trying to convey. And then, and I think in the interest of keeping professional bridges intact and not burned, you can do that. It's, it's just a technique, but you still don't owe it to them you still don't owe it to them and can i say my weird comment now yeah please i was just thinking that all the advice we give on this show is about it's like it's all about thoughts it's like okay you need to think this way or you need to tell someone this so that they will think this

way and i thought to myself isn't that weird that so much of what we talk about is just things that you can't touch they're just these like nebulous concepts that float around inside the human psyche and i'm thinking like okay if this was like a home repair podcast you know someone would be like hey should i use this kind of lumber or that kind of lumber and then we could like say well this one has the right properties you need and this one's been treated and whatnot use that but like everything we talk about is just like oh you just need to think about it differently and then it will be solved yeah it's weird right the dream is to go work for the forestry service true touch grass as the kids say if you just think about it differently that forest fire will put

itself out yeah if you you know what i know that pack weighs like 80 pounds have you thought about talking to your manager though if you're like i know you lack the physical strength to swing this axe for 10 hours a day but what if you just called a meeting together and expressed your concerns to your co-workers it's pretty messed up life we work in a weird industry oh i just hope no one outside of software engineering ever listens to this show because they'll just be like i hate those guys okay hey jameson did you hear about that new job market report from hired the town hall was a buzz with it yeah so one of our sponsors hired uh just put out a new report called the 2022 state of

software engineers and they're actually in a pretty good i would say they're in a pretty good position to analyze the market the job market especially as it relates to salaries in 2021 because they facilitate so many engineering hires and we want to tell you about it we do they gave us money to tell you about it they are also giving money to town criers and we're like in a competition to see who converts better for them. Yeah, I noticed a few interesting things. I think one of the biggest trends I noticed was variance in salaries is going down.

This was true for geography. So salaries rose faster in smaller markets than in larger tech hubs. Outside of the US, salaries rose faster than inside the US where they are already lower. And differences between business sizes, the cash salaries seem to get closer together. this this has to be a remote thing right like a pandemic fallout thing yeah that that's a theme

that i saw consistently throughout the report is that and i kind of expected this salaries in small cities have come up they they came up more for remote jobs than they did for local jobs in those small cities yeah so you know long story short you don't have to relocate to san francisco anymore to start commanding a salary that's closer to san francisco salaries yeah that was very interesting to me. They did focus a lot on remote skills as well. And a couple of relevant things that confirm all my biases are that strong communication skills and soft skills were rated as very important to work remotely. I mean, they didn't come right out and say it, but you should listen to the Soft Skills Engineering podcast if you're a remote

software developer, obviously. Next year, we will sponsor them. That's right. It's a plug our podcast in their report. There were a couple of interesting findings on specific geographies. In the United States, Austin had the biggest year-over-year salary increase at 9%, which doesn't sound like a lot. But remember, it's an entire city full of software engineers all moving up at 9%, which means some people went way higher than 9%. Some didn't move at all. So that was big. And then outside the US, Toronto had the biggest move at 14%, which is, I think, that's absolutely huge for a year-over-year average salary increase for a single city.

Yeah, I wonder if the days of US tech salaries being dramatically higher are closing, coming to an end. I think so. I mean, I think a lot of companies in the US are reaching out over the national border to hire folks. I know I did this last year. And I think a lot of other people are doing it too. So I recommend you go download the report at hired.com slash soft skills report. You can get your own copy, your very own PDF to store on your hard drive. You can read the report. There's a lot of interesting data in there, especially around the job market that I found the most interesting was the data that they have on all the different jobs that

have been offered on Hired, which again, is a lot. We also want to tell you about a webinar where the Hired company will be presenting job market trends to help you stay on top of salary and benefit trends, keep track of skills that are in demand, how to stay relevant in job searches, and so on. There's a lot of, there should be a lot of interesting content there. It's a one-hour webinar on May 5th at 1 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time. There will be a Q&A session at the end. You can find access to that or information about that at the same link. That's hired.com slash softskillsreport. Let's put our cards on the table here. They're going to try and convince you to make them money by quitting your job and then getting a job through Hired. That's right. But

good news, your interests might align here. That's right. You might be able to make money while you make them money so yeah it could be useful yeah so go check it out hired.com soft skills report can i read our next question please do okay i started a new position three months ago for a large pay increase i am a fully remote software dev on a team of mostly local developers my manager to be left the company a week before i started and has not been replaced this is not going well so far the onboarding has been extremely lagging i don't have a mentor or buddy i have very little communication with my direct manager and i have very little guidance on what to actually do so i have been doing dot dot dot nothing some day some days i do not even

open my laptop how do i start the conversation with my manager that i need something to do without revealing openly that i have been doing nothing for three months oh ouch oh man well you could look at this as as you delivering some really good news to them which is that you're about to get infinitely more productive oh man wait this is more math okay so any amount of productivity divided by zero productivity equals infinity yeah you're gonna do not a number amount more work than you were doing before oh my gosh oh this is so hard yeah look you just need to think about this differently like what's going on this is so strange that that this situation happened yes i mean i it's like you found the perfect loophole to get paid to do nothing you

found it you're the only remote developer your manager left who was probably the one that was responsible for seeing that you got work given to you just in time and now you're getting paid to do nothing you found it are you saying rest invest i would feel terrible in this situation just for the record me too just terrible oh my goodness i mean not like there's a ton of security anyways in in doing a great job but i would feel i would feel the risk of of someone discovering me very deeply and and i think that would eat away at me maybe this is what has happened to the question asker it's just like this sense of paranoia right like what if someone notices yeah yeah what if they uncover the truth how could they have not already uncovered the truth like

someone knows someone knows what you're doing maybe your manager maybe this this i don't know You said manager in the question, but maybe it's your manager's old manager. Maybe they know and they're just like, I wonder how long they'll let this go. This is going to be fun. Why don't we spend a little of our payroll budget on this experiment? Yeah. For my entertainment. I mean, I can just imagine the right manager being in that situation at your next one-on-one.

So, what you been working on? Yeah. How do you kick this off? you could tell them, hey, I finished my last work, looking for something new to do, which is maybe the last work you finished was at your previous job, but you just don't say that part. I finished my task from before I worked here. So you're maybe fully joking, but I think it's only half a joke because what I have found is that there is another loophole that often developers well not often but it is an effective way to do nothing which is you actually go to work

part-time for multiple teams and while you're working with those multiple teams you don't do anything for any of them but they all think you must be working full-time on the other teams and so oh you mean internally not like the scammy way of you have multiple jobs at once the slightly less scammy way of you have multiple internal jobs at once yeah exactly okay got it like you like your manager arranges for you to go work on multiple teams like oh can you give part of your time to this team part of your time to that team part of you know i've been in this situation and i don't i've never done the scammy thing of not working intentionally but what i have found is that they will automatically assume that the other teams must be dominating your time if they sense

that you're not outputting as much as they would expect i i saw it happen several times like oh you must be really busy on those other teams and i'm like oh does that mean you're not satisfied with my output no i'm just i'm just bad yeah no i'm just slow and bad but what i'm saying is you could kind of you could use that angle like if you really want to get back on track here you could use that angle and say to your team members like hey i've been wrapping up a bunch of other stuff i'm ready to go full-time now with this team can you guys plug me into your system and you know start feeding me work like all the other team members i mean is the risk that in having this conversation you will reveal that you've been doing nothing and then be fired do

you think that's kind of the ultimate that feels like the ultimate yeah like the the root of the concern here is is if i just say thanks for the three months of money yeah suckers now i'm ready to earn it yeah i think i think that's probably you know that you'll be fired as one aspect of it but i think just being found out would be so awkward and embarrassing that that's probably a risk in and of itself yeah yeah that's a good point good news you are already at risk of being found out yeah now the question i think is are you going to be found out on your timeline or on a timeline that surprises you those are your only two options here or you could just quit i guess three options so the fact that it's mostly local developers makes it hard because it i assume that

it is one way to do this would be to just kind of pair up with somebody else and and kind of start helping them on stuff and ease your way in if they're all very if they're all co-located in your remote that's very hard yes especially if you have not been engaged yes it is a good idea though i like the idea of pairing you could also frame it as a you mentioned i don't have a mentor or buddy you certainly have a lot of autonomy over what you do in this situation but you you could you could bring it up to your manager as like concern that the systems the company has are not supporting me well and how do i get more support how do i get someone to pair up with me to help me on board and be more effective how do i get more time with my manager something like that

because i need it and three months feels like it's it's still certainly within the onboarding time period of of like you're expected to do something but but something certainly not expected in some places to be fully self-sufficient and and totally productive and stuff so i feel like just asking for help and emphasizing the kind of the distance between you and the rest of the team, the lack of connection is tough. Very tough. You can kind of get them on your side to solve the problem instead of ask for forgiveness and ask if you can buy an indulgence. Being remote on a remote team is challenging. Being remote on a local team is next level challenging. Being remote on a local team who doesn't know you're there and hasn't been feeding

you work for three months that's the worst of all yeah i'm i would be horrible at being remote on a local team it is hard large pay increase i mean i assume that's part of the motivation of why they're doing this is is working for a company that can offer them much better compensation that sounds good yeah i think you should i think you should ask for more help in in connecting with your co-workers and pairing with them to learn the systems and getting some defined like onboarding tasks yeah phrase it as a plea for help not a confession i think that's my advice i like that i like that a lot if you just think about it as a plea for help you've solved your problem already yeah the electricity is moving differently in your brain now so so solved our

work here is done that's the output perfect what should people do if they want their own questions answered go to soft skills.audio and click the ask a question button and as usual we want to say a heartfelt thank you we want to rearrange the neurons in your minds to feel our gratitude that's in our minds to say thank you for submitting all the questions in in a pleasing shape yes a warm fuzzy hexagon yeah thank you thank you to those people who are submitting questions thank you to folks for listening thank you for uh helping keep this going we will catch you next week