Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 309: Missing boss support and new manager, who dis

Episode Date: June 20, 2022

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I am working on a devops team building the shared services that our engineers depend on: log aggregation, CICD, Monitoring, K8s clusters, etc. The team is myself, my boss (lead devops engineer), and a handful of pretty junior people. I feel pulled in a bunch of directions. I’ve asked for written documentation from my boss to help establish expectations and processes. Think branching strategies, who owns what, what should be prioritized. I want to make it easier to train up the junior people on the team and enable us to push back when devs ask for stuff with no context of what it will take to finish. Nothing has been written. It’s starting to get to me because without that it’s very difficult for me to push back on requests from the developers on our various teams. How do I tell my boss that I feel like he’s letting me down and that I’m drowning because it seems he just can’t be bothered to write down some base information? I have been working with my manager for almost a year to be promoted. I have been making a lot of progress on my tasks and as a developer. My manager agreed that I would be promoted in the next month or so if I kept it up. Then he quit to go to a new company. I now have a new manager and I feel like I have to start from scratch. Not much has been translated over from the old manager to the new manager about my progress. The new manager is now telling me there is no way they would hire me as a mid-level dev. I feel like I wasted a lot of time with the old manager and that the new manager is not seeing my value to the company and all the work that I’ve done to this point. I’m not going to quit or anything but I just wanted to rant. thanks for listening. Show Notes Writing strategy and vision documents: https://lethain.com/strategies-visions/

it takes more than knowing how to comment out code in every programming language to be a great engineer this is soft skills engineering episode 309 i'm your host dave smith i'm your host jamison dance soft skills engineering is a weekly advice podcast about the softer side of software development and doesn't really include commenting out code but do you ever wish you could comment out something you said verbally a couple minutes ago? All the time. I don't do well speaking off the cuff in important business situations. And I find myself wishing that I could be writing stuff down and editing it and then sending it out when it said what I actually meant. Right. A while ago, I had someone tell me that they really appreciated how clear my communication was when it was

written yeah i can't help but notice uh how narrow that feedback was yeah yeah it's interesting yeah i would like to comment stuff out or or have like a time machine standard you know solve solve every problem with the time machine classic okay i gotta ask you what's now we're gonna get a little bit hard skills just just a little bit bear with me uh-huh what is in your opinion the weirdest comment syntax of any language you've used oh i don't know if i've seen anything too wild the weirdest one i know of yeah i just don't know of any that seem outrageous i guess semicolons are kind of weird to me closure uses those yeah probably some other stuff too but i don't know i i don't know one that's like a smiley face emoji or something

that would be awesome if there's like an emoji it's like an emoji it's like the speech bubble emoji okay that would be so cool i gotta wrap this show up because i need to go write a code transformer yeah that allows me to put in the speech bubble emoji that would be so so cool okay so i'll tell you my two weirdest okay the first one is uh in basic the rem token you type rem yeah rem that's a comment that mean well i just i actually didn't know until i've used it before but i didn't know what it meant until just now and it it stands for remark huh i'm gonna make a remark in the code here okay i i think it would be cool if you could just type the word verily just verily at the beginning of a line means the rest of that line is a comment right you're

gonna hold forth okay i gotta tell you the second weirdest one though okay do you know the comment syntax in sql uh is that the is it dashes or something yes it's two dashes but here's where it gets so weird the official language like specification says it's the comment indicator is dash dash space and so some engines insist on that space being there and some are like no you don't need to put in the space and so you can do dash dash and then if you don't put a space in some database engines give you super hard to understand error messages huh that sounds like knowledge born of pain it is i have the scar tissue it's tingling right now actually yeah i guess xml's comment syntax is kind of well it is weird and it isn't because it it's also

it kind of looks like xml i don't know we better get out of here okay okay this is the sound of me running out of the room and shutting the door and locking it i want to thank our patrons who supporting the show at the level where we shout them out every single week thank you to memester josh owen chardell craig motlin i love mavis the stochastic parrot andrew pollock aranduna kashokton ohio patreon.com.au we're hiring ira chan monkey face emoji jonathan king testing is documenting.org oladopo fadje will angel my neighbor has smelly feet nick hathaway travis sanders brayden canes john grant nick cantar and philip john basile thank you thank you so much all right this episode is sponsored by revelo revelo is a great way to hire engineers

for your team go to revelo.com soft skills or listen for more all right you want to read our first question your first question verily i am working on a devops team building the shared services that our engineers depend on log aggregation cicd monitoring kubernetes clusters etc the team is myself my boss the lead devops who is the lead devops engineer i think that's what i interpret this to mean and a handful of pretty junior people i feel pulled in a bunch of directions i've asked for written documentation from my boss to help establish expectations and processes think branching strategies who owns what what should be prioritized etc i want to make it easier to train up the junior people on the team and enable us to push back when devs ask for stuff

with no context of what it will take to finish nothing has been written it's starting to get to me because without that it's very difficult for me to push back on requests from the developers on our various teams how do i tell my boss i feel like he's letting me down and that i'm drowning because it seems like he just can't be bothered to write down some base information he just can't be bothered to write down some base information have you tried sitting down behind your boss and wrap your arms around him like that patrick swayze movie from the 80s ghost it's ghost yeah the pen and paper in his hands and just gently guide his hands get him started and then walk away yeah that's probably why your boss hasn't done it yet because no one's

done that we've talked about the tragedy of the commons before and this feels like you are the commons in this situation there's this kind of shared resource which is this devops team and no other team really pays any cost for imposing requests on you or adding work to your plate, it sounds like. And so everyone is just, there are a bunch of sheep grazing on you. You're the commons, you're being grazed on. And it hurts to be grazed upon. I think sheep, isn't that the original metaphor for Tragedy of the Commons?

The commons original metaphor is the wrong word. It's like a field that everyone lets their animals out to graze on. Oh, I don't know. Maybe that it was like a shared pasture Yeah, I think the commons are like it's like this common ground in between a bunch of farms or something like that Anyways, that's you that's you that's your team. Okay. Yeah, the costs are not being shared by the people consuming stuff So I just need to interject here and say that the internet agrees with you. It was all about sheep grazing. It usually does Especially now that I can edit wikipedia again oh i can't wait till all our social networks get that edit button which i'm assuming will

be granted to me for everyone else and then obviously just resolve conflicts that way nothing has been written yeah so so you're getting a bunch of requests coming in this seems like a bigger problem to me than like we don't have written down how our branch strategy works because i feel like that's there's not a lot of controversy in there there's i don't know a few major approaches and you can probably just pick one and be fine but handling incoming work feels like a much bigger problem and much harder to handle especially if you're just doing it yourself so i like that your instinct is is enable us to push back you say enable us to push back when devs ask for stuff with no context of what it will take to finish

they're not supposed to have context though i don't know that you can expect them to have that context. Like part of the purpose of your team is to abstract over, over these resources that you maintain and make it so they don't have to be experts in these resources. So them asking for stuff doesn't feel like the problem. And they're probably going to still come ask for stuff. Even if you have this air quotes solved, I think the problem is you, you might not have a clearly defined purpose for your team where the purpose is both positive and negative. And by that, I mean, we do do these things and we do not do these other things like it it both includes some stuff and excludes some other stuff and if you can define that that gives you something to refer

back to when requests come in at least um or or to help prioritize stuff like if part of the problem is there's a lot of requests that come in that all seem relevant to the purpose of your team then maybe some of them are more relevant to it than others and you do those ones first or something like that but but just having to deal ad hoc with all these incoming requests is a pain and i have been there it's like an avalanche it's like if you ever have the last name that is a verb like dance you will throughout your life regularly have people who say dance do you like to dance and to each of those people it is the first time they have thought of that joke and heard of it and to the person on the other end it is the 10 millionth time and that

imbalance of like there there might be one team that's coming to you once and saying hey can we have this thing real quick and to them it's a little tiny request when i think it's like yeah yeah to you it's like that and now i have 10 million and one things to do and that's it i can't take it anymore and yeah it's it's it's uneven that that uh how much effort it costs them to ask and how much stress it imposes on you to receive that yeah i don't have a solution for that just uh just start thinking it's funny that's what i did with my name i started agreeing with them like that is funny when you say that it just gets funnier every time it actually does i i don't i'm not being facetious here like i i don't know i get a kick out of it now that that there's just

this like shared joke in everyone's head and i get to participate in it all the time it feels like maybe you've reached some level of zen master enlightenment to be able to say it's funny i have with this yes it used to be very frustrating and then I've I've achieved something in life by just letting it go same situation is now a source of joy that was a source of pain yeah so just do that for work everything you should write a book it's like zen and the art of learning to laugh at jokes at your expense i've talked a lot here i feel like i'm i'm having flashbacks to times in my career because i i had a few years where i was directly in this very similar situation of like all this stuff coming in and from a bunch of different people yeah but i do want to hear what

you say dave before i i just take it over the whole time well i i'm trying to think back over the last couple of decades. And if there have been times when I needed my boss to do something that they weren't doing, and was I willing to go ask them? And I think I have done this very rarely because most of the time when I needed something from my boss, it was something that I felt they lacked the skills to give. And so in that context, asking them to do it just didn't seem like the right thing like for example i had a at one point i had a really non-technical boss and i needed support on certain things but they were technical in nature and and i just thought i can't ask this guy to to do this stuff he just can't you know like it would take years to train up so i just

never did and then i'm trying to think to myself what okay what if there were situations like this where it's like i just need you to write some stuff down well the way i kind of operate with this stuff is I would just go write it down and then show my boss and be like, is this okay? Yeah. Perfect. And then if he says yes, then there you go. This was now effectively written by my boss and I can put it in front of people. Yeah. That's a great idea. What you shouldn't do is write it down and then show it to a bunch of people and then have your boss find out that this is what you've now defined your team to do and not do. Yeah. I got to tell you, as someone who is a manager. I love it when my people come to me with fully baked ideas and they're just looking for my

sign-off as opposed to coming to me and just saying, Hey, I've got this really ambiguous problem and I just want you to solve it. And I'm like, yeah, I'm happy to, I actually will do that. I will solve problems that people bring to me. I'm not the kind of person who says only bring me solutions. I actually really dislike that leadership style. It's like, let's solve it together. But if you bring me a fully baked solution and you're just asking for my sign-off, i'm like oh it's wonderful wonderful it's like a gift yeah i'm like wow you've really put some thought into this i love it i will sometimes sign off on ideas that i don't even think are all that great because i just want to encourage people to do more of that like this isn't what

i would do but i i don't care you have my full approval i wouldn't say the first part i would just say you have my full approval as you mutter under your breath the second yeah the first part it's not what i would do so one one thing i would expect your boss to do in the situation where there's a ton of work coming in too much to do is is help prioritize stuff and defining the purpose of your teams you can say yes or no to things and order stuff is one way to prioritize but you could also just say hey boss i got another request where should this go in the list of a thousand things i have to do and start surfacing the problem more to them if the abstract requests for like write down what i can say no to aren't working then you might be able to surface some of the pain to encourage

them to write it down or at least like arrive at a working definition of what you can say no to by taking the stuff your boss says don't do and then kind of like turning that into a into a thing you don't do does that make sense you're saying like figure out the boundaries of what your boss's actual policies are by just yeah i mean assuming that they exist it's it's also possible that they could just say yes to stuff and it's not really a defined rhyme or reason oh man this reminds me of a story that is so funny i just i worry it's going to take too long to tell it Well, should I do it? We better not then.

No, of course you should tell it. Okay. So the theme here is you don't know what your boss's policy is. They haven't defined it. And so you're just kind of trying to figure it out by bumping into it. So years ago, like we're talking 15 years ago, I was working at a company that had a meal reimbursement policy when you took interview candidates out for lunch. And they would, of course, the company would pay for you and the interview candidate.

But then, of course, at most sit-down restaurants in the US, you leave a tip. And the amount of tip you leave is traditional due to 15% to 20%. But when you're using other people's money, it's very easy to be generous with your wait staff. And so sometimes we would tip just very generously. The finance department in this company, and this was like a medium-sized company, maybe like 500 people, they started rejecting a subset, a portion of the dollars for reimbursement. So let's say you left a $15 tip. they would only reimburse like $14 out of the 15. And the engineers on my team just thought this was

so funny. And so we actually printed out a chart and we put it on, we taped it up on my door to my office and we decided to binary search the policy. So we had, anytime anyone took someone out for lunch, we asked them to write down what percent they tipped on the chart, you know, and then other people could walk by when they were going out to lunch and they could look at that and look for spaces that hadn't yet been explored and we were trying to like zero in on exactly where is the line where it's no longer reimbursable and after about four or five attempts we had what we thought was a pretty good line but then they moved the goalpost because i think they heard they heard those rumor that the engineers were tracking their reimbursements as a game and they

just started reimbursing all of them like they i think they must have just they must have moved the line way out of there but anyway we just had so much fun with that we're like hey real life binary search with dollars and and finance policy let's do this it was really fun but you've you've run into the problem i mentioned earlier which is people can just decide to do other stuff exactly and then your search you're trying to it's a non-deterministic search algorithm yeah exactly yeah yeah so anyway getting back to the question here how do i tell my boss he's letting me down I don't think you want to go and tell your boss that he's letting you down. I think you want to sit down with your boss and say, we have a problem that I need your

help solving. The problem is, and then lay it out and be unemotional about it and describe the problem in the most objective terms you can find and explain to the boss what's going to happen if this problem doesn't get solved, which is it's going to lead to burnout. We're going to make bad decisions and the team's not going to be working on the most important things because we don't have a clear strategy for handling that. And then I've shared an article in the show notes called writing strategies and visions. This was brought to me actually by one of my team members, who's just really excellent

at this stuff. And it's, it's a process for writing a strategy document, which I think is actually what's missing here is that you don't have a strategy for how to deal with competing priorities and open questions on the team. And if you'll, if you'll follow this pattern, either you or your boss together to write a strategy document that describes this problem and then describes possible solutions to it, I think you'll find that you can solve this problem effectively without having to sit down and say, you're letting me down. Yeah. It's a good call out on both those points of posing.

You've proposed a direction for a solution, even if you haven't written up the whole strategy ahead of time. But the question mentions that this person is the lead DevOps engineer, and this kind of work might be a little bit out of their comfort zone because this is not traditional lead devops well i guess depends on how you define it this is certainly not the kind of like technical making systems work lead devops engineer stuff this is much more like team coordination people like enablement stuff so they might just not know what to do you know yeah they might not and that's harder you know if they don't know what to do yeah i think if they don't know what to do you also might need to be careful of ego because you depends on the manager a lot or the boss i

guess but some bosses are fine with revealing they don't know what to do and kind of like bringing you into that and some might get a little snippy or defensive or feel like they need to protect their reputation but either way i feel like if you want this problem solved 100 if you want to guarantee that something happens then yeah you have to do the thing dave said of of like write a solution and say can we do this thing or or like unless you object we're going to do this thing yeah i think that answers my question can't be bothered to write down some base information i think i've answered it did i miss anything any answers i skipped did you skip any answers yeah we have a script for this i assumed that you did and that's why

I thought you were working from a script. I was just following along. Oh, man. I thought you were writing the script this whole time. All right. We've answered it. The question is answered. That's what the script says.

So we will move on. Yes. Okay. 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 u.s 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 Ravello today. You can go to ravello.com soft skills to check it out that's r-e-v-e-l-o.com soft skills do you want to read our next question dave yes this comes from an anonymous listener who says i have been working with my manager for almost a year to be promoted i have been making a lot of progress on my tasks and as a developer my manager agreed that i would be promoted in the next month or so if i kept it up then he quit to go to a new company painful i now have a new manager and i feel like i have to start from scratch not much has been translated over from the old manager to the new manager about

my progress the new manager is now telling me there is no way they would hire me as a mid-level dev i feel like i wasted a lot of time with the old manager and that the new manager is not seeing my value to the company and all the work that i've done to this point i'm not going to quit or anything but i just wanted to rant thanks for listening you're welcome yeah wait there's no question he just needed this person just needed to be heard well our work here's done we have heard you and listeners you've all heard this person too so you've helped yeah thanks for listening like this is listening at scale this is a bummer i don't know how you get around this i have been on both sides of this as the

new manager coming in and trying to pick up context and coming to a different evaluation than the previous manager and then having to work through that with the the report and as a person getting a new boss and try and carry my boss's context over i thought you were going to say that you've been the new manager who came in and came to a different conclusion and that you've been the old manager who left and abandoned your team's promotion? Oh, I'm sure I've done that too. Yeah, I've probably done that. I think I did a better job about not abandoning people right before they were going to get promoted by me. But if you hear a squawk, that's my chicken that i keep in my office no it's a it's a little child a baby yes i'm soothing the baby to sleep

by talking about work drama about how to handle difficult office situations everyone's favorite lullaby so not much has been translated from the old manager i think i i don't know if this will make you feel better or worse but it is possible that even if a lot was translated from the old manager to the to the new manager the new manager would still just disagree it's possible this could be a problem of not enough information it could also just be a different perspective or different expectations or standards so you might be in the same spot your manager had put in a bunch of work to transfer context over maybe not but maybe yeah and this is yeah it's so hard having consistent criteria for promotion and leveling that are objective and and clear enough that you can

apply them between people and especially between like different leaders applying them in the same in a similar way is so hard totally true i have not seen it done well i've always there's always some amount of like no matter how much material there is there's some amount of of the leader interpreting the career ladder or the standards or expectations or whatever into like practical pragmatic things that then they work on their team with. Yeah, very true. Oh, man, that's a bummer. I guess I just said give up. I mean, time machine is an option here. That's true. Yeah, if you had a time machine, yeah, go push harder for the promotion or ask your old manager, can you write me like a letter of recommendation that I can hand over to this new person so that

we don't lose progress. I think this highlights that no one will care more about your promotion than you. And that anytime you're working through something like this, there's a good chance that some of the people involved in the process, and this could be a promotion, it could be a big project, it could be anything that takes more than a few weeks to get done, in this case, probably several months. No one cares more about it than you. And so you owe it to yourself to keep careful records as things are progressing. Records of what people said, decisions people made, documenting exactly what the goalposts are that you're working toward. In the case of a promotion, you know, clearly articulating in some kind of written form, what are the things you've

been asked to do? And what are the things you've done and accomplished? And what agreements were made? And if those things have your manager's name all over them, it can really help in the transition. You know, I've seen this a bunch too. And when I worked at a really big company that had a pretty well-defined promotion process, they actually said it straight up. You as the employee are responsible for driving your promotion through to completion and be prepared for the case that your manager changes mid in the middle of the promotion cycle. And so they, they, for them, it was explicit and I really appreciated that. Yeah, that's great. I feel like I wasted a lot of time with the old manager. They're new and not seeing my value. So yeah, that is a good

point that your new manager is not seeing your trajectory of growth. They are just seeing what it seems like you're doing right now and so it's possible that your old manager was sort of like weighing that growth as part of the promotion and your new manager is taking all that out and just saying what are you doing now and does that meet the criteria for this next position it also could be that your old manager didn't think you were ready for promotion and it's just bad at telling you that another relieved someone else can deliver the bad news yeah i mean i keep going back to what the question was but then i remember there wasn't a question so i can just say whatever i want yeah that's true you just got to talk to your new manager and and treat it like you are starting

over because you kind of are and even though it sucks you can deal with reality the way it is or you can quit and get another job and get promoted that way just like the other the other path to promotion yeah i would just ask them okay what what would it take for me to get promoted to this level and then work on a plan to do those things. It might take longer than you're thinking, but it's not going to happen if you don't do that, right? I don't know. I feel like I'm just saying suck it up as my answer to this non-question. You are because there's really no other choice here. You got to start over. Sorry, it sucks, but that is the truth in this case. And you've got a new manager who seems to have totally new expectations. If only you had

made the company so good that your old manager didn't quit thought about your role in this why didn't you change their bosses bosses boss to make them easier to work with your manager's life right yeah this is it's frustrating because there's a lot that's not in your control here yeah most of it even though which actually kind of contradicts what i said earlier which is that you got to take responsibility for these things and document it yourself which i i have to believe that if you had done in this situation it would have been a little better for you yeah still not perfect though yeah so this is one of those valuable life lessons i guess and if you're listening and you're not the question asker then you get to learn a valuable life lesson from

someone else lucky you this does underscore how painful it can be to have lots of manager turnover because yes we've joked a lot about nobody misses you if you leave don't worry about well that's they will miss you deeply you're not going to kill the company if you quit and go get a different job your project isn't going to die etc right but if you're a manager then you might kill someone's promotion if you quit right yes you can the blast radius is a little bigger yes i don't know i keep looking at this baby and forgetting what i was talking about that's a good sign that we've answered the question i think yes the baby is asleep so mission accomplished the content was so engaging that it put a small child to sleep ah yes

i heard that there are a bunch of white noise podcasts on spotify that make outrageous amounts of money oh really maybe that's a market we should be tapping into just yeah we are essentially white noise i mean if you treat us like white noise your career will be better for it yes which people do if they want their own questions answered in the form of white noise sorry that was more like a pink noise i think you're making there oh gosh okay go to softskills.audio and click the uh ask a question button thank you so much to everyone who does that each week we really appreciate all the new questions we do thank you for listening we will catch you next week

I'll see you next time.