Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 302: Bad boss movies and well-written emails

Episode Date: May 2, 2022

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: My boss keeps recommending bad movies. I watch most of them but I feel bad because they’re not good and I don’t want to disappoint my boss. They are ‘okay’ but are really mediocre. Do I just ignore my boss’s suggestions or should I keep watching these terrible action-heist movies even though I don’t like them? Does it matter if my emails are well written? I’m a software engineer. I asked my partner how I should word a part of my email. After reading my email they were appalled. They said that it was “abysmally written and lacked refinement”. I’ll admit that it wasn’t my best written email, but who cares? It was just an email letting a team member know that I had followed up on a ticket a while ago, so it wasn’t like this was going to a client or something. Plus I felt like the email conveyed the message that it needed to. In my mind as long as the email isn’t offensive or covered in grammatical errors and conveys the message, isn’t that good enough? My partner argued that I should write my emails more eloquently since my “terrible” emails will reflect poorly on me. I told other engineers care more about the content and less about how well-written any given email is, but they wouldn’t budge. In addition to that, some of the emails I’ve gotten from our senior and staff engineers seem like they were written with someone who has the English skills of a middle schooler and they seem to do fine for themselves. Thoughts? Show Notes This episode is sponsored by Compiler, and original podcast from Red Hat. Check it out Reference to the Dragon book on Wikipedia Robustness principle: Be liberal in what you accept and conservative in what you send

it takes more than using regular expressions to replace all the instances of the word parser with regular expression in the dragon book to be a great software engineer this is episode 302 of the soft skills engineering podcast i'm your host jameson dance i'm your host dave smith now if you're thinking that intro makes less sense than the intros normally do we are recording this late at night so in in the calm light of the morning i might have no idea what i'm talking about is this the compilers book yeah yeah the dragon book is the famous compilers book that like nobody reads i'm pretty sure i've recommended people read it before i've never glanced at a

page i just like i heard from someone oh that's the compilers book and then years ago wanted someone to think i knew stuff about compilers so i told them to read the dragon book right of course i just pulled it up and saw the cover on wikipedia so yeah i can tell it's good yeah it's it's got like it's like the highest quality 3d rendering that you could get in 1986 of a dragon and a knight attacking the dragon yeah i couldn't tell you if it's good or not all i can tell you is it is the dragon is wearing a t-shirt that has words on it that say something computery but the it's just too the resolution is too low yeah they didn't have the technology the knight has a shield that says the word syntax on it though so i know that that's definitely compiler-y yeah now is the

dragon your code you're slaying the the bugs the dragon is the bugs in your compiler i don't know okay well and and i'll never know because i'm never gonna read that book okay i will not recommend it again not because it's bad but because i will never read it speaking of compilers this episode coincidentally is sponsored by the red hat podcast called compiler which we will tell you more about later on in the show i would like to thank our patrons so i will this episode we want to shout out all the folks who contribute at the ludicrous level of ten dollars a month or more wait no twenty dollars a month or more and you know what leave it in well it's it's ten o'clock anything goes okay the witching the witching hour yeah the witching hour i am allowed to get the

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If you want to join this crew, you can go to softskills.audio and click support us on Patreon and you get me to say words and at any amount, you get an invite to our Slack team, which is popping off. It is.

Trying to think of new adjectives to describe it. It's popping off. I haven't used that one yet. Yeah. To the questions. To the questions. Yeah. Can you read the first question, Dave? Yes, this comes from an anonymous listener who says, my boss keeps recommending bad movies. I watch most of them, but I feel bad because they're not good and I don't want to disappoint my boss. They are okay, but also really mediocre. Do I just ignore my boss's suggestions or should I keep watching these terrible action heist movies, even though I don't like them?

this is i've heard about people feeling pressured to learn about sports or some some other hobby that maybe their boss or lots of people at the company are into i have not heard about this specific one of yeah watch these terrible movies watch these terrible movies i love it i i don't think there's such a thing as bad movies anymore because if any movie is bad you just get to claim it's actually a cult classic right it's not terrible it's just it's terrible on purpose it's it's ironic yeah exactly this is just a future cult classic that's right it's a it's a nascent cult classic you just got to you you loved it before everyone else did this direct to dvd in 2022 steven seagal movie is not bad

and 30 years from now theaters across the nation will be full of people yelling quotes at midnight screenings that's right it's like the rocky mountain what would not the rocky horror picture show yeah as they dig up their old dvd players from old pawn shops to be able to play this thing yeah it never went to streaming or movie theaters you could only get it at redbox outside of walmart it was a limited run in just a few red boxes right we had to drive i had to drive all over town to find this i'm not deranged i just like cult movies yeah i just classics you're like you're like the venture capital investor of cult classics you have to watch 10 of them to get one hit

in 20 years yeah for every rocky horror picture show which i have also never seen in like like the dragon book there's a thousand steven seagal direct-to-dvds 10x return is is it's hard to come by yeah you okay what if you add so stand up is is or sometimes is what i worked on yesterday what i'm working on today any blockers you can add a fourth section which is movie reviews yeah how many stars yeah or thumbs up thumbs down Or I guess you could do what Netflix does and only do thumbs up or nothing. And then you kind of have to just figure out. Yeah, like the absence of a review is an implicit thumbs down.

What do they do now? You can thumbs up movies. You can't see other people's ratings, but you can see this percentage of how likely you are to be into it or something like that. Does that sound familiar? No. Well, it might also be wrong. I don't know. Okay.

But I think what I'm getting at is you could just tell your boss, this movie is a 100% match for your tastes and interests. Right, right, exactly. Okay, so instead of sharing your personal opinion, you try to predict your boss's alignment with the movie. Is that what you're saying? I think you already can. You just take your opinion and invert it.

One minus your opinion. You got that. and the dialogue was gripping it was 95 awesome i do like the stand-up idea where it's like okay yesterday i finished my code review today i'm going to tackle this bug no blockers and steven seagal in contract to gill in 2016 was four out of five stars oh okay take it further uh add if you're doing sprints add some stories for the movies that your boss is going to recommend you need a good three hours set aside to watch that like land before time john wick crossover where the little

little foot dinosaur goes to avenge his tiny friend or something like that and and so you're saying that needs to come out of your work time i think so i mean if you have to watch it so you don't disappoint your boss then yeah like why are you complaining when your boss is literally assigning you work of sitting down and watching movies put it on the sprint board and be like oh look what's at the top of the kanban board today you okay what type of movies do you think your boss would despise oh man you could start recommending movies to your boss be like okay i'll take your recommendation but i'm gonna trade you one and this is a one-for-one situation you gotta watch mine and i'll watch yours i'm imagining

there are these like very avant-garde art house critically acclaimed maybe not many people being shot in right exactly movies you gotta find you're gonna need to find the right inverted ratio and rotten tomatoes of crowd pleasing being exactly the opposite of the critical rating and i think you've got yourself a winning combination there yeah black and white is probably a good sign yeah oh yeah subtitles are probably a good sign oh yeah for sure unless it's like my wife really loves kung fu movies those have subtitles but also some of them are black and white as well yeah so maybe not but your boss would love those movies yeah exactly so that's off that's and they do kind of rock to be fair in this case your boss might be correct yeah yeah huh do i ignore

terrible action heist movies action heist movies i'm actually suddenly i'm in the move to to go watch like an italian job kind of movie how many of them are there i don't know i didn't realize action heist was a genre but i kind of like it that's like oceans 11 right i think so okay well thank goodness we have google to tell me the 88 best heist movies of all time yes i know what i'm doing for the next 44 days inception is supposed okay that's on the list i guess that makes sense inception's a heist yeah they're they're except they're inserting an idea not stealing something it's like reverse theft your boss probably doesn't like it yeah he he okay well yeah we don't know the gender of the boss i'm assuming it's a he because this is like a very masculine energy

thing to do just like throw your arm around someone and be like you look like the kind of person who'd enjoy diehard 17 you should really watch it i think you'd like it just be like so out of touch with what the person actually wants look tomorrow tell me how much you liked it yeah i forgot what my original point was gonna be i don't know it was really good though i think you should dedicate your time while watching these movies to look go learn machine learning learn about neural networks and train a model that does nothing but predict given a few facts about a movie whether your boss will like it i think that'd be really cool be a good use of your time level up your skills and then you can show your boss like look i have the perfect system i've

classified every movie title on imdb and i now have a sorted ranked order list of movies you should watch just let me know which ones you've already seen and you're set for life you could even pitch it as you have this special expertise that you can only access when you're not face to face with your boss and you have a couple minutes to air quotes think aka bring up a gpu instance on aws yeah spot instance yeah hang on let me let me go to my mind palace to search through for the perfect recommendation for you of those two minutes you're going to spend the first 90 seconds trying to type in the captcha on the AWS console login. You have to upload a picture of yourself

holding a sign that says, I solemnly swear not to mine cryptocurrency with this instance. Although they probably don't care. Yeah, they're happy to take your money for CPU cycles. One last suggestion that is only 50% stupid is there's a whole genre on YouTube of people trying to get around copyright restrictions, preventing them from just playing movies on YouTube and making ad money from it by doing

like a 30 minute long reaction to them watching the movie that features all of the top 30 minutes of the movie with like their faces in the corner. So if you don't want to watch a movie, but you you want to know a little bit about what's going on you can find one of those it's like fair use maybe if you squint so that someone can monetize a major hollywood movie without having the the copyright problem hollywood assassins sent to their yeah copyright assassins sent to their house these days netflix has like a 1.5x speed so you could kind of burn through these movies and get the gist faster if you can't find one of those youtube clips i mean we talk about movies recommend something it doesn't have to be a movie like it could be other medium

recommend some poetry yeah here's a book go check it out at your local library yeah it's in a language we don't speak but i think you'll really enjoy it i don't know that's all my best ideas i think it's kind of amazing that we just spent more time answering this question than we do most soft skills career questions on this show and i feel like we got better answers than we often do the new recording time is 10 p.m we are on okay hey jameson have you heard about that podcast from red hat called compiler isn't it the podcast that transforms human voices into bites interpretable by machines yes that's the one like every podcast so the show compiler

comes to you from the makers of command line heroes and is hosted by angela andrews and brent simono yeah i've listened to it a bit i listened to episode 18 which is about productivity and i learned about the co-action effect which i will not explain to you so that you go listen to it i hadn't heard of that before and it was cool they also had an episode on compilers and there were fewer really corny jokes about the name of the podcast right i expected but very informative they had one of the gcc developers on there to talk about compilers which was great yeah i've I've been listening too. It's an awesome show. I liked the episode on how Red Hat ran a long standing, like multi-year, I want to say 10 year challenge for employees to hack their monitors

inside the building to put up a meme image. And I don't want to spoil it, but let's just say that it ends with a business gap. Probably my favorite kind of podcasts are shows that tell outsiders how things work inside big tech companies and have access to people and perspectives that you don't see every day. Very interesting. You can listen to Compiler on Apple Podcasts or anywhere else that you listen to podcasts. And we'll also add a link in the show notes. Check it out. All right. Now the stakes are high for this next question. Should I read it? Go for it. All right. This is from an anonymous listener who says, does it matter if my emails are well-written? I am a software engineer. I asked my partner

how I should word a part of my email. After reading my email, they were appalled. They said that it was not air quotes real quotes abysmally written and lacked refinement i'll admit that it wasn't my best written email but who cares it was just an email letting a team member know that i had followed up on a ticket a while ago so it wasn't like this was going to a client or something plus i felt the email conveyed the message it needed to in my mind as long as the email isn't offensive or covered in grammatical errors and conveys the message isn't that good enough my partner argued that i should write my emails more eloquently since my quote terrible emails will reflect poorly on me i told them other engineers care more about the content and less

about how well written any given email is but they would not budge in addition to that some of the emails i've gotten from our senior and staff engineers seem like they were written by someone who has the english skills of a middle schooler and they seem to do fine for themselves yeah thoughts yes it is amazing the variety of grammar and spelling and punctuation skills that you can find among very skilled engineers very well compensated people yes i make a lot of money to write this bad grammar you know how much they pay me to confuse which there it is right oh man this is a tough one i have a i have a very strong bias i do too can i predict what your biases? Yeah, go for it. I think you spend an obsessive amount of time crafting very clear

and carefully written emails. That's my prediction. Close. I think that I hold others to a higher standard than I hold myself when I read emails. Oh, I was way off. Okay. No, but what I'm saying is I do value a very well-written email. I often write too much. I pride myself on not making grammar mistakes, but I could be wrong on that. You know how you can't see your own mistakes sometimes. Yeah. I pride myself on no one telling me that I make grammar mistakes. Yes. I don't know. No one who reports to me has told me my emails are bad. They must be good. I do, however, put on my kind of like eighth grade English class teacher hat when I read other people's emails. And I'm like, semicolon, nope, comma, nope. Those are two independent

clauses must be joined by a conjunction and comma so i do find myself doing that a lot it's like i can't turn off that part of my brain it just criticizes reading sadly i think one of the things you might be saying is that this question asker said other engineers care more about the content less about how well written it is and that is not i mean like all generalizations that one is not 100 true there will be engineers who will have a harder time if you're trying to convince them of something or trying to if you need credibility they'll get distracted by it right yeah yeah they will have a harder time understanding your idea or agreeing with you if they feel like it is written poorly and that's that's absolutely a fair criticism for certain

classes of people like me like i i actually find myself going okay i need to turn off the part of my brain that critiques grammar so that i can actually get to the core of this idea and i do pretty good at that you do pretty what no i meant i meant to say that the good i do is pretty it's beautiful okay that was your mistake ah okay so now that we're clear on that point to you yes i'll just make a note on the scoreboard here. Just give me a moment. Okay. It's been noted. Sometimes I also do pretty well at turning off that part of my brain so I can get to the core of the idea, but sometimes emails and other written documentation is just so poorly written that I just can't parse it. Like, I'm just like,

okay, I'm trying really hard to understand what you're saying here, but there's just so much run on. I can't tell what this pronoun refers to. I can't tell what we're talking about. And in those cases, I do think it behooves you as the author to just sit down and edit your email before you send it out. Yeah. I can get trapped in editing emails or other work written communication because my default writing style is wordy. I'll just spew a lot of stuff onto the page. And then if I don't delete most of it, it can be hard for people to get through. But I can also just get sucked into like adding and deleting little snippets all over the place like this is going to be engraved in stone or something like that and and sometimes i've found that when i get into that

mode it makes the email worse because i start rearranging sentences but then i don't take care to go like do a full dry cold read all the way through top to bottom and then i'm like oh crap now i'm i'm referencing things i haven't said yet you know and it's like because i rearranged the sentence it used to be at the bottom now it's at the top so yeah anyway i i also can get carried away with that one thing i've seen there's like this class of tech adjacent content clickbaity stuff that's like emails of famous tech executives you know this is a master class in leadership in two sentences yeah exactly look how steve jobs wrote this email but i i do feel like they're always clear they don't always or or always i don't know this vague idea i have in

my head of all these things i've read combined together it feels like they're very clear sometimes they're capitalized and sometimes they're not but it's always very direct which i wonder if that's is that a thing you do if you're the ceo of a giant tech company or is that like correlated with becoming the ceo of a giant tech company you know is it like you are powerful and so no one can get mad at you if you just respond with like a question mark to their five paragraph long proposal or something like that you know yeah like that is it cause or effect of the leadership position yeah i think i'm just imposing advice i'm giving advice to myself which is not what the question asked about which is like make them more concise because they're

probably not very concise that's not what this says yeah terrible emails will reflect poorly on me it also probably depends on how much you communicate with this with the audience already like how much context they have yeah if they never talk to you and this is your one introduction to them you're trying to grab their attention then it's probably worth investing more time if this is yeah to answer a quick question with someone that you work with regularly that they know that you not putting a period doesn't mean that you didn't like ship the thing to prod or whatever right well it says here this i mean this lack of a period makes me wonder did you actually do the thing your sentence says you did i don't know yeah i see that there are no paragraphs

in this email and it makes me worried that you never hit enter on the terminal to actually run that that deploy command because it seems like you don't know that that key exists like is your enter key broken i wonder yeah yeah your terminal is just full of unexecuted commands you just you just keep typing and assuming it looks like it looks like a chalkboard out of a horror movie but and i really fear what happens when you eventually do press return five years of built up saved buffer yeah imagine imagine all this work that's about to go to production right now yeah you know to me like i'll say this good grammar good punctuation and whatnot there's kind of like a minimal minimum bar that you must clear to actually convey your

thoughts and above that i think it matters a lot less than the thing you're trying to say like is the thing you're trying to say actually accurate and valuable and if it's not it really doesn't matter how amazing your grammar is like yeah this is a really bad business idea but dang the grammar it's so good no prepositions at the end of sentences you know no run-ons it's just amazing they know the difference between an m dash and an n dash yes oh and you could tell we are adopting this framework this terrible terrible thing yeah so like no amount of great grammar can make a bad idea a good idea but a good idea can be shrouded and thought to be bad because of bad grammar so there's like this beautiful goldilocks zone where it's like just

enough grammar right you're just just enough grammar good to convey the idea you know now i will say this is also it depends a lot on the audience like in this in this example this person's talking to their partner and it's like i'm just telling the engineers that i that i finished a ticket it's like okay yeah don't really care about the grammar but if it's like i'm emailing a vp to ask for approval to do something uh i'm gonna rewrite that email probably four or five times to get to get it as small as possible as grammatically unencumbered as possible and shortened to the point to get my question answered or my or my approval granted you give now longer timeline right now now big timeline

exactly many stock yes what's that rule be be liberal in what you accept and conservative in what you send not in the political but like yeah the other the other way isn't there some one of those pithy programmer laws yeah it's uh yes it's uh joe no not joe john postles postles law liberal in what you accept the conservative what you send or or in other words be generous in what you accept and strict in what you send this is what made web browsers so hopelessly complicated but it is a good strategy for written communication i think especially if you work with folks who have different language skills maybe english is not their first language or whatever language you're

communicating in maybe they have some kind of difficulty in writing like dyslexia is a thing or other i don't know other things besides dyslexia so i think this could be a useful lesson for you to if you see someone else's email that feels like the point is there but it's maybe sloppily written give them the benefit of the doubt that that the delightful placement of their semicolons is not like how smart they are i guess i'm just repeating what you said but saying that it might be language things more than just like they don't know how to grammar if that makes sense Yeah. Yeah. And I've worked with a lot of people for whom English is not their first language. Did you like how I used for whom correctly there? Just wanted to throw that in.

Like it, I did. And I absolutely have no problem looking past grammar mistakes in those contexts. It's no problem at all. It's really easy. In fact, I struggle a lot more reading text written by people whose first language is English for whatever reason, as weird as that sounds. Yeah. I don't know why that is, but definitely the worst emails I read definitely come from people for whom English is their first language. Yeah, you got to have... That's a good point. I feel like if you're speaking or writing in a foreign language, when I did it, I tried hard to communicate

clearly because I couldn't just smash my hands on the keyboard and have something meaningful come out. You lacked the vocabulary to embellish. Yeah. And so you just had to speak like Hulk voice. I wasn't smart enough to be stupid in a foreign language. That's right. That's exactly right. I know exactly how you feel. It's almost like what you were just saying before, like, longer timeline now. That's all my vocabulary I have.

That's how I felt when I was trying to write and speak in a different language. So, yeah, anyway, long story short, if you're sending an update to your teammates to say, I finished the ticket, I don't care at all about your grammar. If you're trying to convey a complex idea, I think, you know, especially if you're trying to convince a team to go in a new direction or you're trying to make a multifaceted complex solution to a problem, I think it behooves you to take your time to make sure the grammar doesn't impede your ability to share the knowledge or share the information you're trying to share. we've talked about grammar a lot here too but it's it's also kind of information architecture and and outlining and organizing and and yeah if you have a lot of context and you're just trying to drop a chunk of information you probably don't need a thesis statement and a summary like executive summary and you know you can you can just say thing done and then hit enter or whatever but yeah the less context you have and and the wider the audience is the more clear you have to

worthy yeah and that's a good point is that emails are easy to forward so get a load of dave big timeline now oh man can you believe it i wasn't thinking about forwarding more like if you're if you're yeah if you're sending an update to a i don't know a team of 30 people or something like that right then it's sort of like the math of it too the time yes spent reading it will be higher multiply it's yeah yeah it's probably worth a bit more your time to tweak the writing like if you send an email to 30 people you're probably gonna have at least two of them read it i think about all that time that's a lot of responsibility on your shoulders i mean most of my emails get zero reads yeah awesome if you could have little

stats like you do on blog posts and youtube videos you know i'm sure people read your email how many liked it yeah like comment and subscribe to this email and you get notifications for emails you wrote six months ago that someone's going into view again like yeah that's interesting my boss is pulling up really old emails what does that mean for me probably something great yeah i'm sure it's i'm sure it's great i'm sure it's to put together this nice reward all right well is that question answered indubitably oh fancy words yes okay what can people do if they want their own questions answered sorry i'm still chewing on indubitably just give me a moment i had to chew on it a little bit just to get it out

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