Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 310: Flip flop and architecture astronaut

Episode Date: June 27, 2022

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Hey guys! Love the show! I’ve worked for 8 years as a Software Engineer for a large aircraft company, and while I had a great time there, I left because I was tired of working with old tech and wanted to learn new stuff. I joined a medium-size company, working with lots of fun new tech, but after 8 months I got the opportunity to get my dream job as a Software Engineer at a specific Big Tech company. The problem is that after I started on my dream job, I “crashed” really hard. The people and org are great, but the job revolves around working with a large legacy product, using mostly old/basic tech, and overall I’ve been feeling really unmotivated since joining. After 4 months there, I was called by my previous fun job, and they offered me twice as much as I’m making at this Big Tech company to come back. I’m very tempted, but I’m afraid of screwing my resume by leaving so early. Should I toughen up and stick with my new fancy job, or go back and make more money and maybe be happier? Hello Dave & Jamison, First time, long time - I am 6 months into my first engineering job and loving it! (until recently…) my large team split into smaller teams. On my old team, we had lots of work to do and it was fun. My new team, however, is suffering from “spin-up time.” My tasks have shifted from clearly defined individual contributor type tasks, to amorphous research tasks on large architectural decisions. After about 3 months of this, it feels like this spin-up time is never going to end and we just don’t actually have much work coming our way. On the one hand, these are more senior engineering type tasks and I could probably learn a lot if I stay to see these through. On the other hand, I am certainly not at a senior engineer level and I miss spending my time coding. It was fun and I was learning a lot from that too. I fear that I may be atrophying as I haven’t done much coding for multiple months. On the third hand (I have three hands), I could definitely be making more money elsewhere. Should I stay and be patient, or is it time to take the magical SSE advice? is the economy crashing? I need help!!! Thanks, you guys are the best, Johnny Threehands Show Notes Architecture Astronaut: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/04/21/dont-let-architecture-astronauts-scare-you/

it takes more than blaming an outage on your two-year-old getting to the keyboard to be a great software engineer this is episode 310 of the soft skills engineering podcast i am your host jameson dance i'm your host dave smith soft skills engineering is a weekly advice show about the non-technical stuff that goes into the technical field of software development and adjacent technical fields where do we draw the boundary is it like doctors that's a technical field technically right right up to but not including accounting okay and law well some kinds of law yes yeah i wonder this has to have happened before right someone has to have left their key their computer logged in in the days of remote work and then a kid comes up and just

like drools on the keyboard and it happens to put like select update rm dash rs slash yeah yeah set id yeah one something like that delete from users semicolon yeah what a very specific drool pattern this child has well with a million toddlers and a million drool patterns you'll eventually get an outage but also you'll get like a functioning unix yeah too oh my gosh this virtual memory allocator is so elegant that's not what the show's about though no indeed no indeed this episode is sponsored by revelo revelo is a great way to hire engineers for your team go to revelo.com soft skills if you need to hire folks and we'll tell you more about revelo later on

we also want to thank our patrons who support us at the level where we shout them out every single week thank you to memester josh owen chartle 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 oladapo fadye will angel my neighbor has smelly feet nick hathaway travis sanders braden canes john grant nick cantar and philip john basile thank you thank you thank you if you want your name on this list or to just support the show financially uh you can go to soft skills.audio and click support us on patreon and that goes to pay our editors pay our hosting costs and pay for dave's expensive what what could it be expensive

scale fighter jet replica hobby with built in with with real engines like one 30 second scale you got really into engines yeah yeah i got swept up i thought you were gonna say my scale baby drool pattern maker system that's like a mechanical turk for baby drool millions of babies at your service yeah i think this is the beginning of a of a sci-fi villain origin where you think i just need a million babies you can find so that they're drooling on a keyboard i need to harvest harvest some babies you just have this call center vision in my mind right now full of babies imagine the noise and the smell as far as the eye can see babies i mean you could you could so okay babies have lots of outputs right you could you could

oh boy make a baby use drool and spit up and diapers and screaming and when they sleep and like you know just kind of as an entropy generator yeah well lots of different ones right so you have one infinite set of babies drooling on keyboards and then another infinite it's the same babies but now they're like screaming at microphones that turn it into keystrokes right this way we have to kidnap fewer babies wait that's a good thing yeah well okay it's easier i'm sorry my moral compass is a little uncalibrated on this stuff okay i'm on paternity leave right now so babies are on my mind and i guess this is my subconscious saying like i hate them now or something i don't know my baby's great all these other babies though oh man we better we better

move on yeah okay maybe i should read our first question yeah get us out of here okay this comes from an anonymous listener who says hey love the show i've worked for eight years as a software engineer for a large aircraft company and while i had a great time there i left because i was tired of working with old tech and wanted to learn new stuff. I joined a medium-sized company working with lots of fun new tech, but after eight months, I got the opportunity to get my dream job as a software engineer at a specific big tech company. That's capital B, capital T, big tech. The problem is that after I started on my dream job, I crashed really hard. The people and org are great, but the job revolves around working on a large legacy product using mostly

old slash basic tech and overall i've been feeling really unmotivated since joining after four months i was called by my previous fun job and they offered me twice as much as i'm making at this big tech company to come back i'm very tempted but i'm afraid of screwing my resume by leaving so early should i toughen up and stick with my new fancy job or go back and make more money and maybe be happier there's a lot of airplane metaphors here we got crashing yeah We've got a literal aircraft company. I guess that's not a metaphor. It's actually an aircraft.

Yeah, unless their org chart is shaped like an airplane or something on purpose. We've got bad news about your team. They have to be dissolved because the landing gear are now out of alignment. Oh, man. Interesting. The numbers here that I'm imagining are just staggering. you went from working at an aircraft company as a software engineer not exactly known for being top of the industry on pay for software engineers then landed a big tech job which undeniably has

got to be a pretty big pay raise then double the big tech company's salary to go back to the aircraft company that's got to be like a triple pay raise from the original wait is this i interpreted this as going back to the company before big tech yeah that's what i interpreted not the aircraft company oh let's see here because they they had oh aircraft then another company that was fun and then big tech and i think oh god okay my previous fun job meaning not my aircraft job okay that that strikes me as a little more realistic i'm like wow but boeing really got their crap together on salaries where's all this money coming from i we don't actually know if it's boeing i'm just that's the only large aircraft company i know of in the u.s and i think this is

that's all anyway boeing or airbus i guess but it's neither of those you're saying is a medium-sized company working with fun tech to go back oh yeah that's very interesting i wonder how much of a raise it is from their their previous salary at the medium-sized company because i imagine it's more than probably still pretty big yeah i imagine it's more than they were making on their last stint there yeah so i mean double the big tech company and undoubtedly the big tech company was a raise even from the medium-sized company so more than double right i mean wow that's crazy yeah i've also not every big tech company pays really really well and a lot of them are also well compensated in equity yeah true which is great if the numbers only go

up and they have not they have not gone up lately they have finally not only gone up yes it's been a good long run it has it turns out i wasn't a great investor i just was born at the right time right you all this time you thought you were just amazing at i thought stocks yeah well all these stupid people haven't figured out the problem you just buy stocks and then they go up right and then you get the big deal yeah easy and then you retire yeah and then after that you work for the rest of your life because you're never retiring as is traditional i have an unanswerable question which is do you think that do you think this person's unhappiness is because of this job like i didn't look at when this question came in that's pretty recent there's a lot of reasons you could have

crashed and you you might be assuming i was happy before at this medium-sized company i'm unhappy now at this current big tech company therefore if i go back i will be happy and that might be true but there might be other burnout can follow you you don't always automatically just leave it behind if that's what this is i see if it's burnout yeah or or if it's if you're being followed literally by someone and that is stressing you out and making you crash they will also be able to follow you like you're looking over your shoulder on the street and there's always someone back there with with like a wide brim hat and sunglasses and a trench coat yep have you heard of the movie it follows no what's that it's a horror movie it's good and they stole one of my nightmares as a

child which is that somewhere in the world there is a monster and it's just walking towards you okay at at normal walking speed and you don't know where it is and you can't see it easily and and you can't have any warning of... But it's always coming toward you. But it's always coming towards you. And if you move location, it just changes direction and starts walking towards you. Yeah, it just goes towards where you are now.

So you just have to keep moving. Yeah. So I think... I guess what I'm saying is if there is someone following you, then yeah, you got to switch jobs because now they're coming towards big tech. You got to throw them off.

And you're going to have to keep doing this for the rest of your life. In my nightmares, they could walk underwater. So I'd imagine them just walking across the ocean. the movie does not address that all the all the monsters are within walkable distance of their prey but well okay in the next few years then you're gonna have to become a multi-billionaire and get a ticket on the first spacex flight to mars and just hope that monster can't walk through space or just like live in an airplane right oh like air force one just stay airborne orbiting

the earth good luck walking up here the monster just walks below you on the ground yeah i guess looking up so we've dissected the meaning behind that yeah clearly childhood trauma should i toughen up and stick with my new fancy job i think you have a few options and one of them the worst one is that big tech is big the big part is part of the name and it's true there is probably lots of internal mobility there so you could get a new job at the same company which might be less frustrating and maybe look a little better on the resume yeah because what we've got here is we have eight years at one company eight months at another four months at another

and now you're talking about jumping back to the previous company yeah that doesn't bother me actually doesn't bother me at all it doesn't doesn't either like you you had to go experience some stuff and you learn things And I'll tell you, the narrative here for future companies, so the question was, I'm worried about screwing up my resume. No way. Not a chance. Because here's the narrative. I stayed eight years at one job. I can do longevity. No problem. And my second job that I left after eight months, they spent the next four months putting together an offer package to bring me back. They liked me so much. So that narrative to me overwhelms any job hopper narrative that you might be worried about on your resume. yeah plus if you're worrying about screwing up your resume it's for the company after this medium-sized company you might be going back to because right they want you back so it doesn't matter what your resume says to them like that's true and as long as you stay there it doesn't

matter what your resume says yeah yeah i i would not be worried about the resume you may never need your resume again oh this could be it because the monster catches up right stay there long enough right exactly i don't know i i'm not seeing a lot of reasons to stay at big tech uh yeah some people are are enamored with the with specific companies and that always fades like and that seems to have been the case here right i mean yeah it was a dream job i had a dream job to get as a software engineer at a specific big tech company and then when you walked through the front doors you were like not that great here is this pile of spreadsheets yes please maintain the vb script that right automates this it's true a lot of big tech companies

they've they've got a lot more money than like a typical early stage startup or medium-sized company and they get way more leverage out of their software engineers and so as a result they can employ software engineers to do things that medium-sized companies just couldn't afford to do such as listen your job is to sit at this terminal and restart this service every 45 minutes because it's got memory leaks we're just so busy doing other things that we need you to do this for the next few years 2009 rails right i mean the times the amount of times i've heard that kind of story you know i'll tell you a specific one we've got this pearl script you know it's critical to our business function and we have a whole team around this pearl script to just keep the darn thing

running no you may not rewrite it that's too much risk there's too much money tied to this pearl script so yeah you just have to keep it running fix bugs as they come up and it looks like that's you if you have enormous piles of money you just keep adding developers as long as the marginal benefit is is worth it and that means putting developers on some really boring problems sometimes very common where yeah if you have 10 developers you cannot afford to have one of them focused on like automating email spreadsheets to ping a dashboard somewhere to wake a vp up or i don't know whatever dumb made up thing replace it with something useful but boring right you just focus on the core essential parts but another interesting thing is is this

question reads like they they wanted to work at this company not at a specific on a specific thing at the company it wasn't like they learned about some i don't know some framework or or some internal team that they knew about yeah or some some project or something it was like i i just want to go work at fang well not just but and thing is a brand right i i like i like this company yeah i like their brand not i want to work on this cool thing that i know that they have and so maybe if you can find some of that it would be useful but i agree with you dave that there's no resume risk here i think it's fine yeah now what i would weigh here is not so much the resume risk i would weigh the opportunity cost of leaving a big tech company where there even though there

are lots of like boring jobs just you know to to paint a really wide brush here which is what i'm reading into in the question. But also, there are a lot of really unique problems that you can only find in big tech companies. And so that's the opportunity cost of leaving, I think, is that you'll never be able to work on one of those problems. Either it's at a scale that no one else does, or it's on a product that no one else could ever afford to build. And maybe there's only two of them in the world. You know, I'm speaking from experience here. And that was awesome for me, at least to work at a big tech company. And I suspect that's probably part of why this person actually went there. And so that's what I would weigh here is my job sucks today, but I might be

able to find some other job in this company that's really cool and unique and fun. Weigh that against going back to my medium sized job, medium sized company and making even more money. Like these are both pretty good options i think they are it feels like one more wrinkle i will throw in is the the macro environment of how risk averse do you want to be and where do you feel like your risk is lower for if we're going through a tech downturn in some ways a big tech company might be more stable in some ways it might not we've seen lots of layoffs from well-known tech companies so there's no guarantee of stability but maybe you know something about the the medium-sized business and their financial viability

compared to kind of what you can think about with big tech. So I think we are in a period now where you have to at least have in your mind a little tiny fraction of your brain thinking about what is the risk if things go bad? Whereas before, five years ago, it was like, how much of a raise will I get if I get fired from this job

by the 10 different people competing for my hand? Right. It might not be like that today. it might just be like seven people competing for your yeah well you're a soft skills engineering listener so you'll be okay there'll be eight people that's pretty sweet deal yeah i think you should go back to your old gig though it sounds like do you want to make more money and be happier or maybe get some big company benefits but just i'm feeling decisive go back to your old company yeah i'm with you jameson cool then we've done it we've answered the question nailed it 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 just 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 revelo 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 someone's always up at midnight. So this is great. Check out revelo today You can go to revelo.com soft skills to check it out. That's r-e-v-e-l-o.com soft skills all right should i read our next question go for it this is from johnny three hands okay hello dave and jameson first time long time i am six months into my first engineering job and loving it uh until recently my large team split into smaller teams on my old team we had lots of

work to do and it was fun my new team however is suffering from spin-up time my tasks have shifted from clearly defined individual contributor type tasks to amorphous research research tasks on large architectural decisions. After about three months of this, it feels like this spin-up time is never going to end, and we just don't actually have much work coming our way. On the other hand, these are more senior engineering-type tasks, and I could probably learn a lot if I stay to see these through. On the other hand, I'm certainly not a senior engineer, and I miss spending my time coding. It was fun, and I was learning lots from that too. I fear that I may be atrophying, as I haven't done much coding for multiple months. On the third hand, I have three

hands definitely hence the name more money elsewhere yeah should i stay and be patient or is it time to take the magical sse advice is the economy crashing i need help thanks you are the best johnny three hands okay johnny three hands uh okay three hands one hand it's good to get exposure to senior engineering work other hand i've forgotten how to code third hand i think i could make more money somewhere else and is the economy crashing yes uh it is that's out of the way i could be making so yeah i i think trying to muddle through big architectural decisions with six months into your first software job tough is not gonna teach you much so it's not surprising that you're having a i don't know feeling a bit adrift there's a few things you could do uh

one of them is is can you make the output of any of these decisions code right like if if all you're doing is writing design docs and diagrams and and things like that you don't have a way to validate a lot of the assumptions in them but often a proof of concept or a prototype is is useful in say i don't know we think that using this using memcache will help us resolve latency by this much or decrease latency by this much or whatever like can you can you turn that into a some code to write to get back into hands-on stuff a little bit yeah and that serves two purposes one it it does the thing i just said where you're you're no longer atrophying you are you're bulking up your code muscles i guess if that's the metaphor we're using but also i think that's the most

effective way often to make these architectural decisions is you have to try them out and kind of see how they work. If you just wave a wand and declare this is how it is, you'll quickly find places where your decision and your model of the world doesn't fit the actual world. So if you can turn these into concrete things, you might be able to get the best of both worlds there of this kind of senior level engineering stuff combined with writing code. I've heard a term for people who just do big high-level architectural things, but then are a little bit disconnected from the facts on the ground by doing exactly what you said, not building proofs of concept, not writing code in the architecture that they're working on. And it's called Architecture

Astronauts. I just Googled it and I realized this is a Joel Spolsky term, I think. I think he coined this term in 2001. 20 years ago was a good time to start forming new terms in this industry, it turns out. Well, I feel like, yeah, but I bet 20 years ago it didn't seem like a good time oh yeah probably now is a good time too that's true because now will be 20 years ago at some point in the future i can't say how long it'll take to be 20 years ago but it'll happen at some point some unknowable time in the future it'll be 20 years ago yeah so i think what you're saying is do not fall into that trap like yeah no matter what you have to you have to be producing some tangible output yeah exactly especially six months into your career i i guess i question how

good your architectural instincts and decisions could be six months into your career i feel like six months into my career i didn't even know the shape of the problems at all i wouldn't be able to even start someone would ask me how to make this faster and i would you'd be like well about like loop unrolling exactly exactly why did we both go to loops yeah because that's that's what's slow right loops are always slow so let's unroll them yeah and then they'll be fast yeah i wonder what the team composition is are there more senior folks on the team is it kind of all people of similar experience levels trying to figure this out or because i i would expect i would not expect a team of folks six months into their careers to

be making these big decisions i would expect to have more senior people maybe they're kind of very caught up in maybe they're not they're not like breaking problems down into something that you can work on though they're just off on their own doing their own astronomy yeah i'm gonna guess i kind of have a theory here it says my large team split into smaller teams sometimes when organizations split up it's it's because the the team got big which definitely happened here we see the term large but then you start trying to define boundaries where teams can be productive within those boundaries and sometimes you just get them wrong and you're like hey you listen we have more people than we know how to manage right now so we're going to break this down into smaller

organizational units and why don't you just go handle like uh architecture you know it's like yeah i've been in that situation where actually in during a college class i remember we had a team of three we were trying to build some some program to do something and i remember feeling a lot of pressure to divide up the work into thirds but it just didn't the work didn't want to be divided into thirds you know so i ended up we ended up dividing it up and into kind of false thirds and someone got this job that just didn't even need to exist you know you work on this thing and they're and i remember at the beginning i was like hey here's an idea you work work on the data smoother and they were like what's that and i'm like you know just like smooth the data

and i remember at the end it was like we put all the pieces together the three pieces and made it work together and demoed it and i was like what happens if we take the data smoother out so we did and we're like oh that's way better that's a little mini conway's law in action there yeah exactly that may be what's happening here maybe your team shouldn't exist that's the morbid way of saying what i'm trying to say that is a hard question to bring up though because while i think an outcome of your team not existing is is like well you do other work at this company there's always a little fear in the back of people's minds that your team not existing means you don't have a job anymore that the team ceases to exist by people being laid off or something like that

so there's there's often trepidation to say hey we're not doing anything yeah exactly like are Are you all, listen, business people, are you clear that you're paying us to do nothing? Oh, you don't say. Yeah. What if we just didn't pay you to do nothing? Exactly. Yeah, they could pay you to do something or not pay you to do nothing. My annual bonus is secured.

Yeah, I'm struggling to turn this into concrete advice, though. I guess besides my earlier advice of, what is it? The astronomy, astronautary? Because astronomy is different from what astronauts do, right? aren't i guess they do look at stars yeah that's the same thing as far as i know that's the same thing yes all right so go don't don't be an astronaut anymore on this team i think you you got to get somewhere where you're writing code all the time though that's that's critical at this stage in your career yeah i agree with that but also making more money elsewhere we talked before

about salaries there's this weird your trajectory and salary growth is usually quite high at the beginning of your career but also it is sometimes anchored by where you start yeah if you can't get somewhere that that is not anchored by your current salary and you started low then what am i saying i don't know i think i'm just saying quit your job don't make more money elsewhere and then and then if you get someone who if you get an offer that says well we'll pay you 10 more than we were paying then you were making your last gig then sometimes we try so hard to not be stereotypes of ourselves and we just try so hard not to say quit your job but it's like yeah just quit your job well get a new one first and then quit your job i think that's that's

our what we'll do to account for the times no longer just quit your job and then like walk around whistling saying well let's see in a couple days i'll go look for a job yeah yeah i think i think that's viable so we've got dude proofs of concept maybe quit your job another thing i would do is i would probably sit down with the engine uh with the team leader whether it's your manager or what and just say look i feel like our teams doesn't have clear direction can you help me and maybe maybe it's just you you know there's a possibility that you're just not seeing everything so that's probably worth saying and that saying we don't have clear direction and i'd like to have more concrete direction is a little easier than saying

I think you're paying us to do nothing. Yeah, that's true. That feels like a, yeah, you're bringing up a way to be more efficient. Way to improve the way the team functions. Yeah, that's, you know, and you could try all of these in a certain order. You know, once you pull the quit your job one, then you don't get to do any of the other options. So maybe put that one last.

That's true. Unless you're a previous question asker who quit their job and And now one of the options is unquit their job. Yes, that's true. All right. I think we've answered it. I think so too. Good luck.

Good luck, Johnny Threehands. May your hand count ever increase. I hope next time we hear from you, you're Johnny Dozenhands. Johnny Dozenhands. What can people do if they want their own questions answered? Go to softskills.audio and click the ask a question button. Thank you so much to everyone who does that each week. You keep the show going with amazing, insightful questions that we love reading.

Thank you very much. Thank you so much. We'll catch you next week.