Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 304: My subordinate is smarter than me and confused in meetings

Episode Date: May 16, 2022

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I just hired someone as my direct report who is very, very smart, and has a great background. Ivy undergrad CS, Ivy grad school, and big tech experience. This is great! Except… he’s definitely much smarter than me. I slacked my way through a liberal arts degree, and have worked only for small startups my whole career. I’ve gotten by, but I’m no 10xer. How do I be a good manager for him considering all this? I want to help him grow in his career and be a good resource for him, but I don’t know what I have to offer. Should I just give him my key to the nonexistent middle manager cafeteria, and say, “I work for you now? Hi, I have a question about how to handle being confused in certain team meetings. It happens when the meeting is about discussing a certain problem to solve and most participants are much more up to speed with the issue being discussed. What ends up happening is that they discuss things fast, while I am hardly following and wondering if I should even be there. That is painful to me, because I’m aware that I’m not contributing much, while my time there is wasted and spent half trying to follow and half stressing out thinking what I should do. I guess that in order to contribute I would need to ask to be brought up to speed. Which I find a bit tricky because I’ll be asking myself: is it because I missed something? Or is it because of something I actually couldn’t possibly know? And secondly, should I have it clarified, which would disrupt the discussion and draw it out for others (especially if I need to go back to something that the group already went over)? Or should I address this completely differently, for example by requesting meeting agendas and preparing questions before the meetings? I’d love to hear your thoughts on how to tackle this, because it’s a pain every time it happens.

it takes more than typing get rebase into your performance review to increase your rating to be a great software engineer this is episode 304 of the soft skills engineering podcast and i'm your host jameson dance i'm your host dave smith soft skills engineering is your weekly advice show where we talk about the non-technical stuff in the technical field of software development and someday we'll have a rebase for time. And then I will destroy the timeline by rebasing wrong. You mean by resolving conflicts. Sure.

Get, rebase, reset, dash, dash, hard, stone age or something like that. We'll try again. We'll go back and try again. It's perfect. That's not what this is about though. Indeed. Today's episode is sponsored by Hired,

the best way to quit your job and get a new one. We'll tell you more about them later. We are also supported by these fantastic folks on Patreon. Thank you to Jenny Kim, Brian J, Meemster Josh? Yes. It's in Leet speak. Owen, Shardle, Craig Motlin, Rum and Code, Isla Mays, The Stochastic Pair, Alice Jost, Andrew Pollack,

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And you'll get an invite to our Slack community, which is, let's see, they have a nice timbre to their voice. I'm trying to think of a new adjective. Yes. Soothing to listen to through your headphones. That's the adjective. Soothing to read the words they type into Slack. Yes. And if you contribute above $10 a month, I think you can even listen to our commissioned artworks

of songs about soft skills engineering on Patreon. It'll unlock them for you and also unlock the love in your heart. Just make your life better in general. Jameson, just real quick, I noticed you mentioned the lower bound on the contribution level for accessing our songs, but I don't think you mentioned the upper bound. yeah there is a limit of one and a half million dollars on the tier list in patreon i think i know that affects some of our listeners so i just want you to be aware i felt like in the interest of completeness yeah that's that's like the qa vibe in you well you have to say both bounds yeah of course

could just say one also don't don't go don't go enter a negative number because that will really hurt us you know although if you want to contribute at the million and a half dollar level i can give you a small discount if you just give it directly to us instead of go through patreon and make us pay the stripe fees on that yeah platform fees yes platform fees of of my salary i switched away from trouble okay dave do you want to read our first question yes this comes from a listener named average andy average andy says i just hired someone as my direct report who is very very smart and has a great background ivy undergrad cs ivy grad school and big tech experience this is great except he's definitely much smarter than me i slacked my way through a

liberal arts degree and have worked only for small startups my whole career i've gotten by but i'm no 10 xer how do i be a good manager for him considering all this i want to help him grow in his career and be a good resource for him but i don't know what i have to offer should i just give him my key to the non-existent middle manager cafeteria and say i work for you now you're the boss now it's like the it's the reverse i am the captain now yeah look at me you are the boss now yeah how can i be a good manager for him considering all this this is interesting there's a premise in here that uh-huh to be a manager of someone you have to have like a super set of their skills

you have to be able to do everything they can do better right and do some other stuff that they don't think that's true yeah yeah yeah like you have to be able to replace them with no one noticing except that things will get even better right the performance will improve yeah i don't think that's true i think it's you can manage someone who is great at their job and be great at the job of managing them without being able to be great at their job right and i'll leave it to dave to tell you how so the the way that you do this uh if you are less competent than the people who report to you is through an elaborate web of lies and deceit

to cover up your weakness. Step one, never let them know. Yes, no one can find out. You just have to really lean in on the imposter syndrome. Well, okay, there's also another thing to key off of here, which is that this person went to an Ivy undergrad, Ivy grad school, big tech experience. You slacked off in a liberal arts degree.

I think you're about to star in like a buddy comedy where this person needs to slow down and experience life, and they've been too busy achieving to really exist, you know? So you have the opportunity to share your slacker wisdom with them. They're furiously typing, and you just stop and say, have you ever looked at how nice that keyboard looks? Just pause for a minute. Okay.

I'm going to appreciate things in life, you know? That's my stereotype anyways. It's beautiful. it's elegant thank you i want to help grow his career and be a good resource so there's there's some some set of tasks that regardless of of if this person could do them or not they won't have time to do and you can be helpful by just being a human who can do stuff i'm thinking of things like like oh i got an idea shine his shoes open doors deliver deliver the coffee yeah yeah you know the things he doesn't have time for

yeah if there's if there's not a standing desk but he wants one you stand underneath the desk and like squat it upwards on your shoulders oh you you would like to stand now one second oh one inch lower no problem okay i know i can't make the desk stop shaking you will have to deal with it uh i want to help him grow in his career and be a good resource for him so one of the things is you have company contacts and knowledge that this person doesn't have okay you just hired them you work here already you can help point them to people who could help solve particular problems for them or point them to like like getting them up to speed

quickly if they really are a fabled 10x-er will have very high returns that you get to take all the credit for perfect as the person who helped them get to the 10x level even faster right like achieve their 10x output here faster or the 100x i mean come on such a limited mindset well yeah i have not experienced the transcendent joy of having someone squat my desk up for me i can only imagine how much faster that would make me at my job yeah so you're saying do things for this person that they don't have time to do for themselves bring context that you that they don't have yet that you can help with and i will say there is something also that you have that they don't well actually i should say you're about to have it after you hear the thing i'm going to

say next which is a total disregard for the superiority of an ivy league degree in computer science so i i really think this person is putting too much emphasis on the ivy league and big tech background yeah i mean i've worked with some people who have ivy league educations and they're fantastic great to work with i've also worked with people who have so-called big tech experience also fantastic but i've also worked with a whole bunch of really fantastic people who have neither of those things who are also awesome and so i i mean while these things are great potentially i don't really think they they make an engineer that amazing i feel like you're missing some cells in the truth table like the ivy league experience or big tech experience that's not

awesome and the lack of ivy league experience that is also not awesome yeah those exist we've covered, covered the gamut. Yeah. Yeah. That's, that's probably fair. I guess I'm just assuming that, okay, like this is a, this is shorthand for this person is very capable. Well, I think that you just hired them. So, I mean, it says here, I just hired someone who's very, very smart and then goes off to rattle off all these credentials. But the fact is like, this is a human being and they're going to have shortcomings, gaps in their knowledge, gaps in their skills. Maybe they have a time management problem, despite the fact that they have excellent credentials on paper. You know, who knows? You will have opportunities to coach this person and help them as their manager,

and you will be able to see things about them that they might not be able to see for themselves. So don't, I would say, do not discredit your own ability to contribute to this person's career, lead them and guide them by virtue of the paper that they bring and the experience that they bring to the job. Yeah, I think I'm just assuming that they're capable and competent, but there is something there of not being intimidated by credentials. Yes. But suppose you're not intimidated by credentials, but they really are outrageously brilliant and capable and just like know how to do the thing so well. Have you ever been in that situation where you felt like you were trying to figure out how to help someone who was so excellent at their job? Yeah. And just

doing so well. I do. And I'll tell you, let me give you kind of the philosophical idea. Then I'll tell you a specific example of when I had the situation. But philosophically, if you have someone that's super capable, your job as their leader is to find opportunities for them to excel. Like apply, this is a, I don't want to reduce a human being to a metaphor, but this is like a tool in your toolbox to deploy efficiently in your team to achieve your team's objectives. Like have at it. It's great. So create opportunities, find opportunities to make them successful. So this happened to me on a team, oh geez, almost 15 years ago, there was this fantastically smart engineer. I was working in an industry where we had

customers who were very hands-on and it was like a kind of a custom development work environment and this particular developer i realized had had grown extreme expertise in one particular area of our product that i think none of our customers had any exposure to like they they knew about the feature they were experts in their own right but this developer was so capable and so smart oh and by the way ivy league graduate degree it is of course this is actually true i'm not making this up. And so I said, hey, how would you like to do a presentation on this topic? The topic was on bit error rates. And he said, yeah, I'd love to. And I said, great. So I scheduled time with one of our customers. I had him deliver the presentation and the customers were just thrilled. They were

like, oh my gosh, you've made us think about this in a whole new light. I never even thought about this. And he went on now after that, he had so much clout with that customer that he ended up going into leadership roles. He's now a CTO for a successful engineering team years later. All thanks to me, of course. Just kidding. Yes. Just one instance. But the fact of the matter is I saw an opportunity.

And you plucked this diamond in the rough out of the swamps of the Ivy League system. The eye for talent. Can you imagine? But the point is I could have thought, oh, man, I got to keep this guy under wraps or maybe I should hand over the job to him. But no, instead I thought, you know, I'm going to give this person an opportunity to show their amazing strengths and get them some visibility so they can have even more and bigger opportunities to match their intellect and their capabilities. So I did. And it worked out great. So that, I think, is what your job is as this person's manager.

And guess what? You don't have to go to Harvard to know how to do that. Yeah. I've done this the wrong way before, which is I worked with a very, very capable engineer. Just excellent in all of the ways I can think of. and in in one of our early one-on-ones i think i was trying to communicate the sentiment that i i am not here to tell you how to do your job i'm here to make you more effective but instead what i said was you are much better at programming than me and i have nothing to

teach you there and then like went on to the next topic so so i think the vibe i gave them was more like i'm useless not like i'm gonna help you help you deploy your great skills yeah don't do that like imagine what happens if you hand the middle manager key over to this person they're not going to like perform better magically knowing that their manager is is useless i'm trying to think of some of the some of the things that i ended up doing that were effective with this engineer a lot of them were like communicating context or like making sure that yeah like business decisions traveled down to them or that the engineering feedback they had kind of traveled back up to influence business decisions and making sure it wasn't lost in the chatter of

all the stuff that people hear. And I think I did okay. I think I was valuable still. Yeah, I agree. Despite my early flubs. You absolutely were. I wasn't even there and I know you were valuable. Thank you. I also think it's actually great to have people report to you who are more capable and smarter than you. In fact, it's way better than the opposite. it i so i played city league soccer when i was a little kid city league soccer is the one where like you just pay and show up and then you can play there's no skill at all no tryouts yeah

nothing and one year i was on a team where everyone was bad and i feel like that was that was the best i ever played because i i felt like i was the leader of the team okay how does that apply to this situation so i think i'm i'm contradicting you yeah like you were like even better than the coach yeah imagine if you're so capable that that your team looks to you as this like oh infallible perfect superhuman big fish little little pond syndrome yeah wouldn't that feel great until you have to like do stuff yeah no right and depend on your team it was fine as long as they just gave you the ball right yeah i i made some great plays myself listen team you have one job give me the ball i don't care what else you do goalie just you can just take a nap just give me the ball

keep feeding me that's what i said i have people on my team right now who report to me who are smarter than me more capable more experienced and better at my job than i am and frankly i love it and i use it i leverage it all the time i ask for their advice i ask for their help doing things and then they deliver things. And I'm like, oh, I could not have done that. That's very impressive. And I'm learning from them. So, I mean, you can take this as an opportunity to be intimidated and worried and vulnerable, or you can take it as what I think it really is, which is an opportunity for you yourself to have an excellent, high-executing team, learn from them, and grow yourself. So that's how I would approach this whole thing.

Yeah, same. The advice Dave gave, that's the advice I give. perfect have we answered the question i think so let's call that one good 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. Shall I read our next question? Go for it. This is from an anonymous listener who says,

Hi, I have a question about how to handle being confused in certain team meetings. It happens when the meeting is about discussing a certain problem to solve and most participants are much more up to speed with the issue being discussed. What ends up happening is that they discuss things quickly while I am hardly following and wondering if I should even be there. This is painful to me because I'm aware that I'm not contributing much while my time there is wasted and spent half trying to follow and half stressing out thinking what I should do.

I guess that in order to contribute, I would need to ask to be brought up to speed, which I find to be a bit tricky because I'll be asking myself, is it because I missed something? Or is it because of something I actually couldn't possibly know? And secondly, should I have it clarified, which would disrupt the discussion and draw it out for others, especially if I need to go back to something the group already went over? Or should I address this completely differently,

For example, by requesting meeting agendas and preparing questions before the meetings. I'd love to hear your thoughts on how to tackle this because it's a pain every time it happens. Ooh, this does sound painful. Yeah, some of my more frustrating work experiences have been feeling like this, where I'm sitting in a meeting and there's important work happening that I cannot comprehend. And people are, it's not even just a useless meeting where people are discussing stuff I don't understand. Things are happening and decisions are getting made and good ideas are being generated judging by the reaction of the other people who understand them. And I just sit there and have no idea what is going on and feel like I'm useless and utterly unwilling to disrupt the good vibes to ask what a computer is or something like that.

What even is a computer? Yeah. Let's back up and start from some first principles. yeah first principles see that's like the executive move totally what question are we really trying to answer here and is that question what even is a computer and can we answer that first can we i mean for everyone's benefit obviously yeah i just want to ground us yeah i want to center the discussion right on my ignorance i mean on

oh man do you jameson do you when you're sitting in meetings and someone asks people to stop and and explain some basics do you get frustrated with them no i don't and if they ask me to explain it i love it i feel great get to show off my shiny brain knowledge oh you want to know what a computer is well it starts with my two favorite numbers you know the number zero and the number one let's talk about those yeah i but but i feel like it if i hearken back to my my years in schooling in book learning i do remember times where i i would roll my eyes at someone who i felt like did not get a thing that everyone else got which is a bad thing to do and i should not do but i think that's the feeling that this person is afraid of of like everyone already gets this

you're just holding us up and i don't know how to tell if you're going to create that feeling or not in the group but i don't feel it for other people that ask me questions or ask questions of the group in the meetings that i am it's a weird juxtaposition right i couldn't possibly cause an imposition on you by asking for clarification on this topic but i insist that you stop the meeting and ask me when you don't understand yeah it sounds like this is a general problem not just a specific thing about a specific topic it's painful to me so there are people who don't don't work well in meetings like the like the tempo is wrong or the the environment is wrong yeah they don't absorb the knowledge by hearing people talk i don't know they they they don't

generate ideas by like reacting in real time and kind of like keeping up to the moving target of what is in the group's head at the time and it's very possible that you're one of those people and you do better asynchronously where you can ponder a little bit and think and write stuff out and read stuff unfortunately you still have to go to meetings because you cannot you cannot avoid them but this might not be like you don't know stuff this might be a yeah yeah you you learn and and perform better in a different environment and then i think your comment about an agenda makes sense of it doesn't have to be an agenda but some kind of pre-work of like yeah there are docs to read about the system you're going to be talking about or if if you just show up fresh you're not going

to get much out of it if you show up as a blank slate. I agree with that. And I think that's probably a really useful thing to do here is to take some of these people who seem to know more than you and try to extract information from them beforehand. And it could just be that you've got some kind of basic knowledge gaps that need to be closed. I only knew about zero. There's a one. it makes so much more sense computer makes sense so like this i think that my next suggestion applies whether you are one of these people that you were just talking about jameson or whether you just have whether the only thing that you're suffering from is a knowledge gap and that is trying to get a hold of information before the meeting and trying to come having consumed that

information on your own time like i have found it to be infinitely better in meetings well that that's a strong word that sorry the mathematician in me that is very small and almost it's important to be precise in this podcast yes it is probably five times better of a meeting experience when everyone comes to the table having internalized the same knowledge beforehand so they have all the context they know what's being discussed so if you can bring yourself up to speed on that that can be a tall order too by the way but if you can i think it'll help a lot and so one way you can do that is by talking to the people who are participating in the meeting and asking them if there's any written documentation or recorded videos or anything that you could consume

beforehand to make sure you're productive and can contribute. Yeah, I like it. There might also be some kind of critical mass of general system knowledge that helps you fit in new things in real time faster. I certainly experience this feeling much more often, for instance, when i'm in a new job and i don't know a lot of the history or or what's going on in general and it takes me longer to to pick it up and would probably take more explanation so this might get better in time as you just kind of learn more until you know everything about all the things happening at your company and and that's that's a good point because time does tend to cure this ill you know just it just takes time to absorb context sometimes

plus the longer you're there the more of the system you'll just have built like you get to throw away everyone else's bad work and do your good work right and then and then it's easy to keep your good work in your head yes that is don't you think that's true it's like a hundred times easier to retain or to have like a working mental model of how a system works that you yourself built as compared to one that you've just observed absolutely i've heard it and actually experience this too as as it's so much easier if you play an instrument to play a song that you wrote than to play to learn a song that someone else wrote interesting just feels natural like of course you play it like this because that's how it is it's a pain every time it happens

you could also try if you don't want to reach out or interrupt the meeting you could try asking after the meeting if you have like a chat channel or something like that like was anyone else unsure about what this meant. And that might uncover that you have a crowd of supporters and it actually is worth interrupting the meeting because there are often other people who have the same questions you have. Yes, absolutely. Have we answered the question? I think so. Oh, one last thing I want to say. It's painful because you are not contributing much. That's not true. You are taking oxygen and you're turning it into carbon dioxide and without that all the trees would die yeah yeah we need you

good work thank you thank you i'm doing it right now i'm saving i'm i'm saving the world by being here on this podcast think about all the plant life you're welcome plants all right i'm all used up. I am too. Good luck. Let us know how it goes. What can people do if they want their own questions answered? Go to softskills.audio and click the ask a question button. You can give us your question and all the personal identifying information you care to give or not, whatever you want to do there. And as always, we have to say thank you. Heartfelt thank you to everyone who writes questions. We love reading your questions. You keep the show going. Thank you for doing that. Thank you. Thank you. We'll catch you next week.

We'll see you next time.