Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 300: Manager move and cultural or personal

Episode Date: April 18, 2022

We are celebrating our 300th episode by publishing unique songs about the podcast. To get access to the songs, join Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/SoftSkillsEng In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Greetings! I have been with my current company for a number of years, and was recently promoted to Engineering Manager. I enjoy working here, and have a great manager and team. A job posting at another company recently piqued my interest (great salary, appealing company values, fully remote) and got me thinking, would it look terrible if I applied for, or switched jobs, so soon after a promotion to management? How can I figure out if communication problems with a team member are cultural or personal? My teammate immigrated to the states. We occasionally stumble over conversation and misunderstand each other. I think this is exacerbated by being remote. For example, they will ask a pointed and direct question that sounds like a challenge to my approach to a problem. When I attempt to answer, it’s clear we are nowhere near the same page and I need to back up and provide more detail. I am working and have worked with others who immigrated from the same country. I’ve had similar difficulties connecting before that I have not had with other teammates from other regions. However, this is not universally true of every teammate I’ve had from this area. If it is a cultural style, I would rather learn to adapt. I’m not interested in suggesting everyone need to conform to my cultural sensibilities. But if I can determine it’s a personal difficulty, we can work on it together.

it takes more than 300 episodes of the soft skills engineering podcast to be a great engineer this is episode 300 of said podcast i'm your host jameson dance i'm your host dave smith this is a weekly advice show for technical people about non-technical stuff and i guess technically we have not done 300 episodes because we skipped our 100th episode. Do you remember that? Yeah, the pressure was too much, so we just didn't do it. We went from 99 to 101. Yeah. In the subsequent 199 episodes, we've grown a lot and matured, and now we can stand up to the pressure. Yes. As we'll demonstrate now with our smooth delivery. Yes. This episode is sponsored by hired hired is a great way to find your next job you'll hear more about them later jameson you

want to thank our patrons absolutely thank you so much to craig motlin rum and code i love mavis the stochastic parrot alice just andrew pollock the yeet your job podcast ian walter aranduna patreon.com.au we're hiring ira chan monkey face emoji jonathan king testing is documenting.org oladapo fadye rmrf prod ragnar harson timmy garibrant nick hathaway travis sanders braden canes john grant nick cantar and philip john basile thank you to these folks some of whom have been here for many many many episodes yes thank you and we've got something special we do that i'm gonna build up yeah just how about a few awkward pauses first okay yeah what if we talk over each other because of zoom lag some more so you wouldn't think that we would just

let the 300th episode come and slip by without any acknowledgement, would you? Well, we have a special offer. We thought to ourselves, what would old Renaissance European royalty do after 300 podcast episodes? And the answer is they would commission works of art, which we have done. We have commissioned the creation of five songs in various styles about this podcast from some amazing artists that, I mean, okay, maybe you didn't see them on the stage of the Grammys, but it turns out with the internet, you can get some really good music from,

frankly, quite talented people. We have commissioned five songs and we are going to make them available to our patrons, but we would like to show you a preview of one of them right now. Jameson, shall we roll the tape? Absolutely. Let me press the tape roll button.

Ka-chunk! dave and jameson are here to help you now please help us please help us great advice and jokes that'll make you laugh out loud we've got 300 episodes maybe that kind of proves that we actually know what we're talking about maybe okay that was your teaser that was just a taste imagine how much more yes is out there these songs were hilarious and frankly i was amazed that you can type some letters into a website and then a few days later you can have a song artists are so underpaid yes that's my big takeaway from this wow these people are really good dave did you already mention the the way folks get these oh i forgot you want to tell

yes so if you would like access to these songs or want to join the crew of wonderful patrons and get invites to our slack team you can go to softskills.audio click support us on patreon the songs are available only to the ten dollar month and above tiers because somebody's got to pay those artists right there is a 1.5 million dollar tier that we added to test if you would like to subscribe to that you do get the five songs as well i mean it's really your choice you can either pay 10 bucks for the songs or 1.5 million yeah but do that pay us once and uh you'll be able to see well technically i think you could probably see them on patreon all right don't listen to this next part if you're unethical

but technically you could probably sign up and grab the songs and cancel before your card is charged but we'll know crafty we'll write a sixth song about you yes or rather commission yeah this is like the the ancient rap battles they commission yes some artist to make a fresco where their rival duke looks stupid or something like that but it'll be all about that one patreon user who bamboozled us on patreon yes yeah so if you want to check out the songs that's what you do go get them and then and then join slack and tell us whether you loved them or hated them whether you just can't stop listening on repeat like me just kidding i'm not actually listening to them on repeat but they are pretty

good you soothe yourself to sleep with the gentle lullabies of insert genre here yeah we had and we did have so quite the variety of genres so there's something for everyone in the five soft skills engineering episode 300 celebratory songs yes all right should we answer some questions though i think that's what we're here for and it's time to do that why don't you take our first one sure this is from an anonymous listener who asks greetings i have been with my current company for a number of years and was recently promoted to engineering manager i enjoy working here and have a great manager and team a job posting at another company recently piqued my interest great salary appealing company values fully remote and it got me thinking would it look

terrible if i applied for or switched jobs so soon after a promotion to management it depends on whether i work at the company you're leaving or the company you're joining right do you think well let me ask you this jameson if you are on the company that this person is joining would you think it was weird that they left a job so soon after a big role change? Yeah, I would honestly pause for a little bit. Some of this is scar tissue of being around for some short manager tenures

and seeing how disruptive that is. And I just really don't want to go through that again if I can avoid it. But yeah, it's a little bit different than as an IC where job hopping is a bit expected and maybe you jump in somewhere, you just hate it completely or I don't know. hopping jobs after being promoted as an ic feels like it would raise fewer eyebrows and anyways

you just update your linkedin to look like you had that title the entire time you were there right that's a common pattern i'm afraid yeah it is some people put separate entries for different titles which i appreciate because i can tell kind of how it went some people just joined as a staff engineer 14 years ago yeah clearly right out of college yeah yeah what was i saying yeah i think so if they hire you they didn't care i guess true i think more than in different situations you need a compelling story why you're not going to do the same thing to this company and and it's this weird balance because it's not it's at will employment probably if you're in the united states so technically you could just join and then leave right away. And you want to keep some escape

patches in case it's horrible. But you also want to give some assurances that that time was different. This time I'm here for the long haul. Yeah. And it's easy to explain. If it's only one instance on your resume, easy to explain. Probably won't even raise any questions. But when you're doing this for the third time, that's when you're going to have some real smooth talking to do. Yeah, I think I would still dig into it a little bit if I were a hiring manager. But I mean, clearly, I can provide a much better environment. I'm way more desirable to work with than current jobs. So this would never happen to me. Of course not. That's what I'll convince myself. No one would ever leave you?

I think we've talked a lot about how the company will survive without you. Obviously, the blast radius is going to be larger if you were just barely promoted into engineering management than if you were left as an IC. And so you might have some hard feelings left behind, especially if your situation is pretty good. I don't know. It says your job is fully remote at this new place. Maybe you could just move somewhere else and avoid those people. Yeah. Never see them at the grocery store.

Yeah, exactly. When you said, especially if your situation is pretty good, what did you mean by that? I mean, if folks know that you are not happy, in my experience, I have seen people, even if they liked working with you, sort of be supportive of someone deciding to quit, even if it makes their life at work more complicated or trickier. They just know, I mean, yeah, they weren't happy here. They had this problem. It makes sense. even though i wish they were still here you can see how this is better for them if it's if things are great then i think it could look like you used getting promoted at this company to leverage

an offer for another company which we haven't referred to the office in a long time but is a plot in the office is it rob low is he the guy no he just looks like rob low there's some executive that they're going to put in charge of a bunch of the paper company branches and they do a big reorg and shuffle stuff around then the executive leaves to join staples like right afterwards oh yeah i remember that the competitor yeah yeah and oh yeah because i think that was when they were going to close michael's branch i don't know anyways the yeah the source of all wisdom the office says this is bad or can be bad yes i will say that a lot of people worry about this in individual contributor roles you know what's going to happen to my team when i leave and i think a

most of the time when individual contributors leave, the team is fine. You know, like the team absorbs, they kind of share the load, right? Okay. Let's say you have a 10 person team, one leaves. Well, if each person absorbs 10% of that person, then that's, you've paid the debt. But when it's a manager, usually one person is picked to absorb that load. And it's usually that person's manager or a peer manager to take on that load. So that person's load doubles usually. And so it actually is a bigger deal like quantitatively than individual contributors leaving yeah if it goes to the that person's manager they will do a bad job at it i think that's a pretty pretty general principle they will not have time to invest fully in it even if they're great as a manager they will

having twice as much work or some much larger amount of work it's tough to just smoothly absorb and that's right and this isn't the kind of work that you can just say i'm gonna go faster and absorb it no it's like these are these are things like you have seven one-on-ones you have to do each week now yeah now that this person left you have to do 14 and it's like okay i guess they're each going to be 15 minutes instead of 30 minutes or whatever i'm gonna listen faster yeah exactly can you talk faster on these one-on-ones please tell you what you record a video and then i'll listen to it on 2x speed and that's our one-on-one or you you just multitask and you do one two at a time in the left ear and one in the right ear yeah that's called a two-on-one that's

it's perfect yes so yeah it'll it could be frustrating for the team you're leaving and it could be a little weird looking for the team you're going to but probably not a big deal yeah i think you you seem like you're less concerned about this than i am maybe again maybe i'm just sensitive to this because i had some recent my past manager turnover and i know how much it sucks to be on the staying side of that yeah but it's at well employment and i don't know even if it is briefly chaotic hopefully you could have strong enough relationships that people would understand that this is something you're excited about and it's better for you oh that's the thing we should talk about this is generally true about other jobs and job

offers but the more you can phrase it as like i think you've said this a few times i couldn't turn this down this was just too good yes perfect opportunity the less painful it will feel or the less like rejecting your current company the folks there will feel which is i think you do have some responsibility as an engineering manager to to not like firebomb the place on your way out and yes trigger an exodus of employees from lowering morale yes also true all right well that's all i got me too good luck and uh let us know if a firebomb situation ensues after you leave hey jameson have you heard about the great resignation is it that charles dickens book wait no the entire population on earth has started taking our advice of quit your job

oh yes that's right apparently we have achieved influencer status we've been telling developers for years to quit their jobs and now we want to tell you how to do it we're ready to reveal the secret. I mean, you don't just walk out shooting finger guns. Yes. Well, you do that first. But after you do that, there's a new service we want to tell you about called Hired. What is Hired, Dave? Hired is the biggest AI driven marketplace that matches engineers with companies. It is a great way to find your next job. I've been watching this industry for 20 years with a keen interest on hiring in particular, and I've never seen anything like Hired. Tell me about what you're seeing. So I've interviewed about 150 people in the last year. And I am serious, every candidate that's come to me through Hired has multiple offers. And they're incredibly high, scary high, like 30% higher than other candidates.

Is that before or after the finger guns? Yeah, both. The beauty is, it's totally free for engineers. And we would love for you to go try it. Go to Hired.com slash soft skills to check it out. Hired.com slash soft skills. Quit your job the best way and check out Hired. Okay, do you want to read our next question, Dave? Sure thing. This comes from an anonymous listener who says, how can I figure out if communication problems

with a team member are cultural or personal? My teammate immigrated to the States. We occasionally stumble over conversation and misunderstand each other. I think this is exacerbated by being remote. For example, they will ask a pointed and direct question that sounds like a challenge to my approach to a problem. When I attempt to answer,

it's clear we are nowhere near the same page, and I need to back up and provide more detail. I am working and have worked with others who immigrated from the same country. I've had similar difficulties connecting before that I have not had with other teammates from other regions. However, this is not universally true of every teammate I've had from this area. If it is a cultural style, I would rather learn to adapt. I'm not interested in suggesting everyone need to conform to my cultural sensibilities, but if I can determine it's a personal difficulty, we can work on it together aha you're working with someone who came from texas just just kidding hey i'm i grew up in texas just so everybody knows i was talking about myself

yeah moved to the united states when you left the glorious country of texas i left the republic of texas and came to your stupid other country stupid worse yes not not large and flat place texas where's all the sprawl i know we call it big sky country jameson uh isn't that montana you're right actually i don't even know i don't even know we call it lone star state texas invaded montana and captured that motto and took it back to their own country yes we have you know i am a cowboy coder uh this is why i'm from texas decorate your desk with a little flag a little flag what state are you from one of those wussy countries that isn't proud you drape your desk in a giant texas flag and if anyone steps on it which they

inevitably will because it's draped on the floor it's so big and you have to challenge them to a duel with your six shooters yeah did you besmirch the flag that extends from my desk to the entryway how dare you i demand satisfaction meet me at noon tomorrow outside the saloon yeah oh yeah the question yes let's see it's crew and already on the same page so the the thing that's pinging around my head is does it matter like you're trying to hone in on is this an attribute of the culture in general of the the home country of this this colleague i almost said i was trying to say co-worker or colleague and i said colleague that's good yeah no i lost my train of thought yeah does it

matter does it matter whether it's cultural or personal if it's affecting how you work together it doesn't it actually doesn't or rather should it should it change the approach a lot like do you handle it differently you know i don't think so i mean i don't think it changes anything about what you do you still got to resolve this communication barrier and that can happen regardless of someone's culture or you know language that they grew up speaking or any other background i think in fact as you're saying that out loud what i'm thinking is the only thing that you would learn by knowing whether the root cause of this behavior is cultural or personal is whether or not to transfer some bias to some other poor person i don't mean poor i don't mean

poor like money was i mean like yeah yeah some other some other victim someone yeah like what's the point of that like it's like oh well oh i see you're not from around here therefore you must fit in this category so what's i don't know everybody knows texans give poor code reviews oh another Texan. Yeah, I guess I just don't see the benefit of even answering that question. Plus, I'll tell you what, having worked with a lot of really excellent people from a lot of different countries around the globe, I can say that if you think with your nice little narrow-minded American ideas of the rest of the world, which we're not exactly known for our geographical and cultural understanding if you think that you can pinpoint someone from let's say london the same as you

could from some as someone from northern england it's like you got another thing coming buddy like these are very different cultures even within what seems to you is the same geographical boundary so yeah i just don't see the value of that of that question now i fear that i've said something offensive you wouldn't get it as a texan yeah i think what this question asker is saying is if it's cultural i will just i just won't deal with it or i will deal with it myself you know like i'll i'll i'll just work through it without asking the other person to do anything differently in other words cultural attributes are more are less mutable than personal attributes yeah or maybe it could get i don't know i was about to say it could get more sensitive to ask someone

ask someone to change something that is an attribute of their culture but that feels way less sensitive to me than than someone telling me to change some part of who i am as a person personality yeah yeah yeah they're both hard right like you got to figure out how to work with people and to me cultural differences and personality differences are in the same category of things you need to be able to work with so this situation seems to recur where you two misunderstand each other and it sounds like maybe some i don't know slightly aggressive feedback or or interactions from from the other person that you think might be partially caused by them not understanding what you're trying to say yeah i think i think you just talk to them

about that like bring up an example well first i would do this not in the meeting where where the challenging happens but yeah just talk to them afterwards and describe so you can yeah you can steal this manager trick the situation behavior and impact you have a bit of a different perspective on it but talk about what the situation was we were in this meeting i was trying i was aiming to present my grand idea for uh the framework we're going to force everyone to move to like from the last episode and when you asked this question i felt like you didn't understand my approach before asking it or it felt aggressive or something like that and and so it threw me off or something i don't know like describe what happened describe how it made you feel and and kind of dig into it

that way yeah i like that and you know you might be surprised i worked with a co-worker once who had kind of an aggressive tone i interpreted his questions his technical questions about my work as challenges you know like almost like instead of saying like why would you do it that way he sounded more like why would you do it that way you know and when we say those two sentences back to back it's like oh yeah one of those carries some metadata with it and the metadata says i'm challenging you. Whereas the first one carried metadata that says, I'm just asking you because I want to know how this works. And I actually didn't, these things are actually hard for me to observe that I might be applying a misinterpretation of the metadata that's

accompanying the speech. And it took me a little while to realize like, oh, I'm actually getting kind of upset now. I don't know what's happening. And then later my coworker, he actually had all the sensitivity to say, oh, Dave, are you, are you perceiving my comments as threatening or coming across as argumentative and i was like oh uh no no it's very collaborative oh i would never yeah and he said pardon me he said oh good because i don't mean for them to come across as combative and i thought oh good yeah well they didn't but it was just a it was a really self-reflective moment for me to realize that oh yeah i'm actually i am applying some meaning to things that isn't there and boy it sure would have been useful to

just ask that question like hey you're coming across kind of strong to me right now is that your intention you know really like hands off like super chill and then he could have just said no and then i would have been like oh okay good i need to recalibrate my interpreter yeah if it's a peer relationship especially you want to be careful to make it avoid to to avoid making it seem like you're giving them feedback on how their behavior is wrong i like the example you you shared dave because the way it was resolved was with you understanding better and maybe there's some i don't know maybe there's some some past experience that has led this person to react this way or maybe that's just how it was done at their previous job you know people ask very aggressive

challenging questions but but seeking to understand why they're doing it and what need they're trying to me by doing it would be useful now i don't know how you deal non-awkwardly with the fact that you think the questions reflect a lack of understanding or a misunderstanding yes because i don't know how you say that without just saying it and then it's uh that could be pretty challenging to people like you asked that question it revealed clearly you didn't understand the brilliance and genius of my idea right or or uh that can come across not just as self-aggrandizing like your example did but also you could say something like you know oh it seems like you are ignorant and maybe dumb and that that's a risk when you try to ask someone and this is how i i often find

myself in the situation where i'm like okay you just said something that triggered that voice in my head that says you don't understand an important aspect of this and we really can't proceed until you get that understanding yeah do you have any tricks for how to how to navigate that without being a jerk i don't know i mean i think you really could ask what what your intention is in asking those questions are you asking to help you understand the idea better and it's just a tone thing like you mentioned are you trying to propose an alternative and and dig into that a little bit and maybe there's maybe maybe you could suggest to them if you if you think it's wrong just like say why you think it's wrong instead of ask the the leading question or or talk through

it by by i keep coming back to this just saying saying what behavior you observed and then digging into why that happened did you observe it incorrectly are you missing something your observation yeah and but but that's challenging because sometimes people don't know what they're missing it's like an unknown unknown you know so you say okay i perceive that maybe you don't have a complete understanding of x and they're like oh no i do well now it's like do i need to give you an exam like a placement test to see where you are or sometimes and sometimes by the way it's me i'm like actually i didn't understand something that you did which made your speech your words all seem garbled and made it sound like you didn't know what you're talking about

but really it was me also a possibility i wonder if it's a language barrier thing too i've worked with folks who are very smart but we just struggled to communicate in the same language and it was really really hard and lots of misunderstandings ensued even though technically they were excellent yeah so maybe you you might be saying cultural versus personal but it could be more language focused could be i don't know what you do about that learn english gooder right tell than that. Take it from me, the goodest Englisher. Take it from I. One phrase I like to use is instead of saying, it sounds like you don't understand something, I like to say, it sounds like you and I might have a different understanding of how this works.

And that way, it's not so much putting it all on them, but it's saying like, look, both of us are seeing this differently. I'm not saying one is right and one is wrong, but there's definitely a difference here can and then i like to say can we try to figure out where the difference is and and explore that together and and that that usually leads to a little collaborative cooperative discussion yeah oh man there's so many nuances here so many things it could be but i think it's hard to go wrong by honestly discussing your feelings about something with someone else or or it's not hard for that to go wrong that that doesn't feel like a bad first step for for many problems i guess well have we answered this question well i think so

good luck let us know how it goes let us know if you think our kind of critique of the question was valid our thoughtful analysis yes right i sense that maybe you and i see this question a little differently from each other when you say you and i do you mean jameson and dave you and i or question asker no i meant the i meant the question i was trying to demonstrate my uh Am I silly? That was a bad idea. Oh, it went right over my head. Oh, no.

Dave, when you acted that way, it made me feel stupid. No. I need to go devour some ice cream to recover. Good work. Good work. All right. Well, where can people go if they want their own question answered? They can go to softskills.audio.

there's an ask a question link and we are so grateful to everyone who clicks that and and provides the content or some of the content for the show you help keep us going and we love doing it there's a reason we're still doing it for 300 episodes what is that reason because i'm not i'm not clear it's because we like it okay there's a bunch of reasons they're all good good it's a good experience for me to participate in i like talking to dave that's a big part of it i'll be honest yeah that's it all right i'm gonna put you on the spot jameson with one last question here yeah should we end this show with another sample from one of our songs as our outro music uh yeah and i'm gonna press

the button to do that now i think it's time for you to quit your job i said it's time for you to quit your job you'll be coding all day still didn't get far if you need the soft skills All right, catch you next week.