Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 306: Sabbaticals and betray my team

Episode Date: May 30, 2022

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Listener Þór asks, Dear fellow binary smiths! I’m a Nordic software developer with about a decade in the industry under my belt who has recently returned back to the office, following a half a year long medical absence during which I helped my partner get through her second tough cancer treatment in as many years. I am now contemplating taking a sabbatical for some months to reset myself, as the ordeal has had a big impact on me in many ways. As sabbaticals are not a common occurrence in my parts of the world, I worry about what impact taking one could have on my future prospects once I start looking around for employment again. How does one frame having a “mental health” gap in the career when interviewing? Are they considered a “bad” signal by hiring managers? For the first time in my career, I’ve been given the opportunity to lead a project at work. This was something I really wanted and my teammates supported me. We agreed on the technical design and I recently started implementing it. However, I’ve been thinking about finding another job for a long time. I’m demotivated. Each week, I feel bad about how little I get done at work. It negatively impacts my self esteem, a lot. I never acted upon the desire to find another job because I have a great manager and skip level. Recently, my manager and skip level both announced they’re leaving the company. I’d like to pursue an opportunity at another company that seems to be a great fit for me but I don’t want to leave my teammates holding the bag for the project I’ve been working on. I’m the only backend developer working on it and my teammates trusted me to take ownership of it. It doesn’t feel fair for me to complete the more glamorous responsibility of coming up with the technical design and then leave when it’s time to do the “grunt work”. On the other hand, there’s probably at least six months left of work on this project and the company I’m interested in joining may very well not be hiring in six months. What steps should I take to not betray my teammates or myself, taking into account that my manager and skip level leave within a month and probably won’t be replaced by then?

it takes more than pronouncing ampersand as ampersand amp semicolon to be a great software engineer this is episode 306 of the soft skills engineering podcast and i'm your host jameson dance i'm your host dave smith soft skills engineering is a weekly advice show where we answer all of your non-technical questions about the technical field of software development and make just outrageously funny HTML encoding jokes. Yes. Never fail to get a laugh from the crowd. We should move on from this intro as fast as possible.

Dave, do you want to share this feedback? We should move to the ampersand. Oh, is it RT? The arrow that points to the right? I don't know. But probably we just exposed ourselves to some kind of cross-site scripting attack. Oh.

We pronounced the mouth sounds of HTML-encoded characters wrong. Now we have an alert popped up in our brains. Yes, that says simply XSS in it. Congratulations. All right. Yes, let us move on. We got some feedback from a listener that we'd like to share. Shall I go for it?

Please. This comes from a listener named Jackson, age 39, and Elsa, age 8. Those ages will be relevant. Jackson writes, not a question, rather feedback from my eight-year-old daughter, Elsa, who is an avid fan of the show. I like to listen to, from an eight-year-old's perspective, boring tech and management podcasts. However, soft skills engineering is my daughter's favorite. I asked her the other day if she was really listening or just staring out the window, and she confirmed she listens really carefully. I then asked if she understood it and if she thinks about how any of it applies to her.

Apparently, she was having some collaboration challenges in grade two. They were trying to organize their talent show submission, and it wasn't going well. But Elsa has been learning soft skills, so she told the group what she thought clearly and nicely and didn't mind when things didn't go exactly how she wanted. She also assures me that she understands when you're joking and promises not to call her teacher a jerk and rage quit school. Thanks for the show and the multi-generational value you produce. Thank you, Jackson. What an amazing story.

that's fantastic i'm trying to think of something i can say that won't make that that won't be dumber you know like i don't know all kinds of stupid jokes but that's just cool yeah yeah way to go elsa and if elsa's listening hey great job don't quit don't quit your family and get a new one right and also elsa's dad we cannot be held responsible for any deep mental trauma yes we may have enacted on your daughter yes i look forward to her thriving career in tech though dave i want to talk about our sponsor all right this episode is sponsored by ravello which is a great way to hire engineers for your team you can go to ravello.com soft skills to hear more or to do things and wait

and listen to this podcast to hear more yes all right shall i thank our patrons yep okay we would like to thank those people who are contributing at the patreon level that gives them a weekly shout out they are memester josh owen shartle craig motlin rum and code i love mavis the stochastic parrot alice jost andrew pollock arun dhuna kashaktan ohio patreon.com.au we're hiring ira chan monkey face emoji jonathan king testing is documenting.org ola dapo fariyi will angel ragnar hartesen timmy garabrant nick hathaway travis sanders braden canes john grant nick kantar and philip john basile if you would like to join this crew go to softskills.audio and click the support us on patreon button and if you do that

and actually give us a little bit of money, any amount of above $0, we will send you an invitation to our Slack community where you can join in the fun and festive conversations. I was thinking about how this could go. We ask, should I do this next thing a lot on this podcast? And what if you just said no? I want to ask you, can I read this next question?

And do we just hang up if you say no? That was the end of the podcast. No, you may not. catch you next week well but maybe i don't know you said no i think that's it it's over it's just the end to avoid that risk i'm just going to read this next question or this first question nice job this is from a listener oh boy taking a risk here thor i googled how to pronounce it and that's what it said so i'm i'm gonna nice work trust this website on the internet who asks hello fellow binary smiths i'm a nordic software developer with about a decade in the industry under my belt who

has recently returned back to the office following a half year long medical absence during which i helped my partner get through her second tough cancer treatment in as many years oh that's brutal i'm sorry to hear that i am now contemplating taking a sabbatical for some months to reset myself as the ordeal has had a big impact on me in many ways as sabbaticals are not common occurrence in my parts of the world i worry about what impact taking one could have on my future prospects once they start looking around for employment again. How does one frame having a mental health gap in the career when interviewing? Are they considered a bad signal by hiring managers? Ah, yes. Hmm. You know, it's kind of interesting. I feel like there are enough stories

about famous tech people taking sabbaticals to go do stupid stuff. Like what? I don't know. Oh, I decided to take up bead archaeology or I don't know. I'm trying to invent something that sounds dumb. Okay. I'm offended by that. Cellulose-based computing where I calculate by growing grass in specific shapes. Yes. It's got very low clock speed.

Measured in months. Yeah. This binary adder will produce a result in one year from now. In seven seasons. How's the binary adder crop coming in? I wish I could get more rain so I could get my answer. Yeah, but a humble XOR switch farmer. This is a really good reason to take a break from work.

So I don't think it matters that much. But if someone asks, you have a great answer for, hey why did you not work then you can tell them because my partner got cancer and i was taking care of them and i needed some time to recover and then just stare at them while they feel awkward and bad because they were hoping to ask a gotcha question catch you out in your slackish ways yeah i don't know this is this is like the tiniest crappiest silver lining of a very horrible life event is that you have a good reason for not going to work yeah exactly a good reason for a resume gap yeah yeah you could literally just put curing cancer on your resume too curing get yes i cured

i helped my partner cure cancer it was awesome i mean n equals one but it was really really good yeah i mean you see all kinds of news articles about rat studies so this is certainly newsworthy and resume worthy to have done it for one person do you think there's a stigma for saying i took some time off for mental health? Yeah, I could see that. I could see that being, I don't know that I would agree with the stigma, but I could see that being a red flag to some folks or maybe closing off some opportunities that might otherwise have been valuable to you because the person doing the gatekeeping is looking at that signal. Maybe the job would be fine, you know, but. Yeah. I think that one of the questions that you will come up against that will not be said out

loud, but that will be thought internally and maybe even discussed verbally internally, but outside of your ears to hear would be, okay, is this the kind of person who works a few months and then disappears for six months and then works for a few months and then disappears for six months? Is that this kind of person? And so it would probably be helpful. Well, I mean, I guess I was going to give you some mitigation strategies for that, but I think just being aware of that might help you to know that those kinds of things could happen. I'm not saying it's a good thing, but I am saying that I think some people will think that. Yeah. The question asker said they're Nordic, so there are some cultural things going on here

that I don't have a good grasp on. I do believe that any resume concern is resolved by a frothy enough hiring market that's true and if if you're in the u.s right now and you put like sabbatical to bury the bodies or something on your resume you'd be like that's fine yeah you would you would be able to get hired somewhere corpse disposal sabbatical or something like that what do you think fertilizes my your binary adder it's me it runs on the blood of your enemies is that what you're saying well i mean technically it runs on the compost that was with the enemies oh man uh that's horrifying

sorry i have a couple questions that are unanswerable by the question asker so i will ask them to you, Dave, is this a sabbatical from the same company? Is this a break from working for a time? Because those feel pretty different. Yeah. If it's a sabbatical from the same company, I think you can hide it in your resume very well. Yeah. You know, you don't need to say, like, I also don't put my vacation time on my resume. Like, hey, I just want you to know, I took two weeks off this summer of 2021 while I was working at this place. Yeah. And even if I took six to nine months off of leave while i was working somewhere i probably just wouldn't put that there on the resume that's a good point i don't put my parental leave yeah i do however

record the time sheet of minutes spent looking at twitter while i'm not thinking about recruiting because minutes looking at twitter while i'm thinking of recruiting are that's actually recruiting right yeah sometimes i start recruiting and then i assume i'm just laughing at nonsense uh everybody knows recruiting is no laughing matter how does one frame having a mental health gap here yeah i think i'm having a hard time putting myself in the position of a company who would look at this and think like sign of a bad employee if you have a a air quotes normal work history and then you have this gap of i don't know six months a year whatever and are looking for a job again if it's several years long then maybe there could be some concern about have you kept

your skills up to date but if it's that short i don't feel like i mean people are unemployed for that long and and i think there'd be way more stigma with having a gap caused by not being able to get a job yeah that's why i would just call that a mental health break uh it was really hard on my mental health to keep failing these interviews so i gave up and became a an amateur world of warcraft enthusiast oh i had a point and what was my point taking a sabbatical oh here's my point i think people would be jealous like in a positive way not not look at you as as a slacker the fact that you would be in a financial place to do this is pretty rad or maybe it's just a nordic thing i don't know maybe maybe the social safety net

is taking care of all of your needs. But either way, I'm jealous. And it feels like a cool thing that you get to do that I'm envious of, not a sign of your weakness or unsuitability for employment. It's like if I found out someone had a really large exit from a startup or company they worked at or something, and then just decided to stop working for a little bit, that would be rad. And I would ask them for a loan. No, I wouldn't. But I don't know. Certainly not in the US, to me, and I don't think to most people. The only thing, Dave, you kind of touched on this when you said there might be a question of, is this the kind of person who disappears a lot? And I think that's where your story is really helpful, that here's why you went on sabbatical, or here's the

purpose of it, here's how it ended, and especially the narrative about how you have reset yourself and you're recharged and ready to go. That feels like a much more appealing prospect and person to higher than someone who, I feel like my concerns about someone joining and just flaming out would be lessened if I knew that they had taken some time to reset themselves. Yeah. Well, have we answered the question? I think so. I think you're good to go. Take all the time you need and then be prepared to go into great depth on your findings in your farm-based computing efforts. Yeah, that is like a cheater way of doing that is you go on sabbatical, but you do stuff on your sabbatical that sounds really good in an interview. That could be a fun sabbatical or a

miserable one. I leave it to you. Hey, Jameson, have you heard how easy it is to hire engineers right now? Given infinite dollars, it is easy to hire engineers right now. I don't have those. Yeah, it's tough. I want to recommend a company that helps you hire engineers in Latin America. It's called Ravello. Tell me about it. I've been hiring engineers in Latin America for the past two years, and they are awesome. I've worked with a few different companies who provide engineers from latin america but none of them were really great i recently discovered ravello ravello helps you find skilled software engineers in latin america they only provide full-time senior engineers with at least five years of experience they don't force you to pay for things you don't

need like a project manager this is really interesting their pricing is awesome because they charge a monthly fee and you know how much they're paying the developers so there's not a lot of indirection there which is not common sometimes you get these opaque invoices and you have to figure out how much is actually going to the developer, how much is going to the company. They do the sourcing and the vetting, and you can interview the engineers before deciding if you want to work with them. And they take care of payroll and benefits, which is great. Yeah, I highly recommend hiring engineers in Latin America. It's a huge untapped market for a lot of US companies. All of Ravello's engineers speak English,

and the time zone is one of the big wins. If you're based in the United States, the Latin American time zones line up really well with US time zones. You don't have that painful 24-hour turnaround problem when you have a question for an engineer on the other side of the world. Yeah. I worked with wonderful engineers that live on the other side of the world and both of our lives were worse because of that. Someone's always up at midnight. So this is great. Check out Revelo today. You can go to revelo.com slash soft skills to check it out. That's R-E-V-E-L-O.com slash soft skills. Dave, do you want to read our next question? Absolutely. Here we go. This comes from an anonymous listener who says for the first time in my career i've been given the opportunity

to lead a project at work this was something i really wanted and my teammates supported me we agreed on the technical design and i recently started implementing it however i've been thinking about finding another job for a long time i'm demotivated each week i feel bad about how little i get done at work it negatively impacts my self-esteem a lot i never acted upon the desire to find another job because i have a great manager and great skip level manager recently my manager and skip level manager both announced they're leaving the company i'd like to pursue an opportunity at another company that seems to be a great fit for me but i don't want to leave my teammates holding the bag for the project i've been working on i'm the only back-end developer

working on it and my teammates trusted me to take ownership of it it doesn't feel fair for me to complete the more glamorous responsibility of coming up with a technical design and then leave when it's time to do the quote grunt work on the other hand there's probably at least six months left on the of work on this project and the company i'm interested in joining may very well not be hiring in six months what steps should i take to not betray my teammates or myself taking into account that my manager and skip level leave within a month and probably won't be replaced by them hmm i feel like i have a pretty solid answer or an answer i'm sure of to this question how are you feeling about it how am i feeling about whether i have a solid answer or not yeah well

what are you thinking what are you thinking for the answer to this question i i would let's both say it at the same time we'll count to three okay one two three go ahead and quit your job i have so many questions for you first of all how dare you consider quitting i know your manager and your manager's manager both left why would you put the company in that position of of you leaving at the same time i don't know this is yeah this is this is quit your job territory also you said you don't want to leave in the state of you did all the important design work and then you left when there's when it's time to do the grunt work you're already not doing the grunt work you're not productive at work so it's fine it's not going to get worse

love someone productive working on the grunt work perfect actually yeah that's a good point the most charitable thing you could do is leave and let someone else do who's working a full work we can take over. So there's this way of describing firing people or quitting that I've heard used by some leaders. And it's phrased as this is what's best for both parties, right? Really, it's best that this person got fired because they're not succeeding here. And the company isn't getting what they need, but the person is not happy struggling in this environment. And sometimes there can be truth to that. And sometimes it's a way to turn off the part of your brain that feels bad for people. But you could flip that around and say, I'm probably helping the company more

if I leave and this gets handed off to someone more engaged than if I stay and just try and grit my teeth and slog through it. If you're really not successful or feel like you can't pull it off successfully, then you're not really doing them any favors by hiding that pain for a little while. Yeah, especially if it's impacting your productivity. yeah also i have only been able to quit my job when i felt this way part of my growth as a human i'm undertaking is how do i this sounds like how i feel when i'm burnt out i feel like i can't be productive and i'm demotivated by how unproductive i am it's the cycle and i have two plans one is to never become unproductive again perfect and my backup plan yeah well that doesn't work the

backup plan is figure out how to work through this without having to like throw this job away and recycle it. And I want to practice sustainable employment. So my point here is I'm going to extrapolate from my experience and say, this could be a skill to get better at or something to develop in yourself of how do you improve your ability to work through this kind of stuff that's burning you out or these productivity concerns, because there could be a place where your manager and your manager's manager have not just quit and you would love to stay, but maybe you're still feeling

these kind of unproductive feelings. But still, you should quit this job. Don't do that right now. Yeah. Figure out how to solve that later. Yeah. It's too late. If you had a great supportive management chain,

that might be a good spot to work on it. If only. And actually, frankly, that's probably what was keeping this person at this company. What? The good management. I mean, the question asker said... Oh, the question asker?

Yeah. Oh, sure. They said, you know, one of the main reasons I stayed was because I had a really good manager and skip level manager. And I just thought this is like the corollary to people don't quit their jobs. They quit their boss. Yeah. And it's like, oh, what if that boss quits? What if the boss you don't quit quits? It's like, ah, well. Yeah. What happens is people leave. And this, you know, a lot of times people ask us, should I quit my job? I worry about leaving my team in a lurch. Actually, that's a really common question.

And our answer is usually, it's not actually as big of a problem as you think. But when it's a manager, it is a bigger problem, right? We've been over that, I think, in a previous question. And this is a prime example. See, here you have people that were just holding on by the skin of their teeth. And you, manager, were the only person keeping them at this company. And now your absence is prompting them to leave. Yeah.

Hopefully, it prompts some healthy growth. Yeah. Yeah. On your part and on the part of the company. I mean, you know, you've got a situation where you've got one backend developer. So this company has chosen to take on risk. They've taken on concentration risk on their backend skillset. They've got one person who they're depending on to do their backend work. And that puts a company in a risky situation. That's just kind of how it is. And this will make them see that probably. I mean, you know, it's just one, I'm just looking for silver linings here, but one possible silver lining is that the company will

diversify their skills a little bit through multiple people in the future. And they will have learned a valuable lesson here and you will look like a schmuck. I'm just kidding. You'll be fine. There's a couple of good outcomes here too. One is you leave and the folks still there pick up the project and maybe it's hard for a little bit, but deliver on it successfully. Great. You have not torpedoed it. The other outcome is you leave, it fails utterly. And you get to tell yourself, I was the only thing holding that together. They couldn't pull it off without me. Either way, you did nothing wrong, clearly. Exactly.

Yeah. So it's all positive. Look, people who are the happiest are capable of weaving the best narratives. That's so true. I can't tell if it's like partially joking, I think, but it's absolutely true. People who are the saddest are also really good at weaving narratives too. They're just a different kind of narrative. It's like a Greek tragedy.

Yeah, very compelling either way. Right. Oh, yeah, but it'll be fine. I mean, look, here's what's going to happen. Your team is looking at you. They're looking at your boss. They're looking at your boss's boss, and they're going, oh, my gosh, so many people are leaving. When you leave, you'll be the least of their worries, I think.

In fact, you'll probably announce your resignation at the same day as like three other people on your team. Yeah, I don't want to under emphasize how much it can suck to have a valued team member leave true, but you are right that if one of the biggest signals of people quitting is people quitting as in right attrition breeds more attrition right kind of so so I agree that this should not be a shock to to folks in general. and by the way it's not that people quit and other people quit because those people quit that may happen sometimes but usually people quit at the same time because they're both dissatisfied with the same thing you know and so they did it does tend to happen in batches when it happens yeah so yeah like don't don't don't worry about it you'll be fine all right i think we've answered it i think so too good luck best of luck to you i hope things go well for you what should people do if they want their own questions answered go to softskills.audio

and click the ask a question button and as always from the bottom of our hearts we say thank you to everyone who writes in with questions we really appreciate it from any age thank you for writing in your questions there is a i think that's the new floor from lowest age youngest is probably the eight eight years old the lowest age smallest age number right all right well thank you so much for listening we will catch you next week We'll be right back.