Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 315: Poor feedback recipient and rubber duck

Episode Date: August 1, 2022

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Do you have any advice on how to give feedback to people who don’t take critical feedback well? There’s a person who joined my team with the same job title and level as me (senior product designer/L5) more than a year ago, and since then he has shown that he not only lacks a lot of skills to be considered senior but also lacks the self-awareness to see where he falls short and how he needs to improve. There have been multiple occasions in our 1:1s where he has alluded to critical feedback he’s gotten from people on our team (including our manager) and has written it off as irrelevant or untrue, will come up with excuses for his poor performance, and will make off-hand comments about the person as a way to discount their credibility. Overall I feel like this is part of a larger display of narcissist behavior; I’ve noticed that the only time he’ll listen to suggestions is if you make it not sound critical and sandwich them in between compliments. Up until now, I (hopefully) have avoided being on the receiving end of his negative comments, but since I’m trying to go for promotion, my manager wants me to give him more guidance and tell him directly the feedback that I’ve brought up to her. Seeing how he’s reacted in the past, I’m unsure how to just start giving him unsolicited feedback and am afraid of what he’ll think and say to others about me as someone with four less years of industry experience trying to give him advice. I’m also afraid that this will damage our working relationship as I’ve seen how despondent he becomes when things don’t go his way. I’ve told my manager these concerns and her response was that it isn’t on me if he reacts poorly to my feedback, but I feel like putting in the energy to give him feedback that he probably won’t even listen to is exhausting and isn’t worth the possibility of him becoming more adversarial towards me. What can I do? Any advice?? I recently joined a new company following the patented space law certified strategy of quit your job. I have a senior colleague who has been there maybe 8 months more than me. Whenever he has a problem, he likes to call me away from my desk and start explaining his entire problem to me. I have no knowledge of the real codebase yet and am not even an experienced programmer as I barely have 2 year of experience. I just stand there and nod and give various quips from time to time to pretend I’m listening. This can last up to 30 minutes and happens numerous times a day. If I say I’m busy he just waits 5 minutes before calling me over again. I cant get any work done because of this. How do I deal with this senior team mate that uses me as a rubber duck. Should I just buy him an actual rubber duck ?

it takes more than seeing another devs editor setup becoming jealous and destroying your whole workflow to be a great software engineer this is episode 315 of the soft skills engineering podcast and 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 of the technical field of software development it's been a long time since i just absolutely destroyed my whole workflow and spent like three unproductive days in response to jealousy over someone else's environment oh i'm smack in the middle of it but it's worse because uh i'm a manager so i don't have a lot of time to code so instead of spending three days it's like three days of effort spread over like three

weeks i haven't been able to type a line of code in my editor successfully for several days now sorry i'm late to the meeting i was fighting an editor config yeah there's definitely a part of my brain that is like if i just replicate their editor setup i'll be like them yes it will transfer to me their skills and knowledge it hasn't happened yet but i haven't found the right editor setup yeah clearly to do that yeah there's there's probably like an emacs plugin to do that oh yeah to transfer all skills and knowledge yeah if it can't be done in a lisp family emacs plugin then it can't be done i work with lispers now and there's a lot of jokes about how everything needs to be manipulated with x s expressions and it's kind of true like i've been impressed at how

how much of your workflow can be turned into s expressions yes there's probably like an email client that you write using cons and write your emails with that all right uh that's not what this show is about no do you want to thank our patrons dave i do i want to give a shout out to those that are contributing at the level where they get a weekly shout out on our show they are nathan sack on memester josh owen chardall craig motlin i love mavis the stochastic parrot If you'd like to join this list of things to try to make us say, all of which are real words, by the way, feel free to go over to softskills.audio and click the support us on patreon button and if you

contribute at that level we will say whatever you want that's safe for work to say on this podcast and if you contribute at any level we'll send you an invitation to our slack community the first week of every month so thank you to everyone who's done that yeah it is kind of interesting how shouting out names was sort of the traditional original use and it's certainly evolved since then to be much more performance art focused which is great this episode is sponsored by hired the best way to quit your job and get a new one you can go to hired.com soft skills or you can hear more about them in the middle of the show or you can do both those things up to you all right shall i read our first question please do okay this comes from an anonymous listener who says

do you have any advice on how to give feedback to people who don't take critical feedback well there's a person who joined my team with the same job title and level as me more than a year ago and since then he has shown that he not only lacks a lot of skills to be considered senior but also lacks the self-awareness to see where he falls short and how he needs to improve there have been multiple occasions in our one-on-ones where he has alluded to critical feedback he's gotten from people on our team including our manager and has written it off as irrelevant or untrue he will come up with excuses for his poor performance and will make offhand comments about the person as a way to discount their credibility overall i feel this is a part of a larger display of narcissist

racist behavior and i've noticed that the only time he'll listen to suggestions is if you make it not sound critical and sandwich them in between compliments there is a name for that up until now i hopefully have avoided being on the receiving end of his negative comments but since i'm trying to go for promotion my manager wants me to give him more guidance and tell him directly the feedback that i brought up to her seeing how he's reacted in the past i'm unsure how to just start giving him unsolicited feedback and i'm afraid of what he'll think and say to others about me as someone with four less years of industry experience trying to give him advice i'm also afraid that this will damage our working relationship as i've seen how despondent he

becomes when things don't go his way i've told my manager these concerns and her response was that it isn't on me if he reacts poorly to my feedback but i feel like putting in the energy to give him feedback that he probably won't even listen to is exhausting and isn't worth the possibility of him becoming more adversarial towards me what can i do any advice this is interesting i've i've so i've heard this technique described as the the crap sandwich i've never heard someone who prefers crap sandwiches well only if they know what's happening right yeah i i enjoy that taste please bring it on it's really hard when thinking about giving feedback to people not to fall into kind of pop psychology probably you're not a psychologist maybe you are and then you're very

qualified but i'm assuming that you are not a psychologist and it's interesting it feels like it gives some insight into behavior but i haven't found it useful for helping me take action and what has been more helpful is thinking about what behaviors do i want and how do i kind of describe and encourage those not like what is this person's kind of struggles um although that i don't know it can be related sort of but if i get too far into like modeling this person's psyche in my head i kind of psych myself out of just talking to them about what i think should be better or different so i'm kind of keying off the larger display of narcissist behavior that could be you're probably not going to fix that if it's true like it may not change your actions either right yeah yeah and

there is this is interesting as well because there is a um this sounds like your manager is asking you to do this more as a way to exercise some skills that will be more useful if you're promoted than as a way to get a particular outcome because they even said it's not on you if they react poorly to your feedback but it's not on you like it's not your fault but it does become your problem right i mean it could yeah especially if they start trash talking you to other people yeah i mean if they trash talk everyone to everyone else though then it gets diluted yeah the effectiveness of their trash talk is is lowered i think like the takeaway for me from your manager i think your manager is right the more senior you get the more

capable you need to become of giving feedback to everyone regardless of their personal mode of operation and so if there are people you're afraid to give feedback to then you need to figure out a way to get over that fear because it's especially those people that need to have the documented feedback so that if the day comes when they need to be, you know, if we need to part ways with them in your company because of their negative feedback, but you never are willing to give them the feedback, then you're going to be stuck with them. So you got to figure out a way to give the feedback. Yeah. We haven't talked about Radical Candor for a while. I feel like that book has kind of gone through cycles of popularity and is kind of on a down cycle right

now of maybe there's some downsides to being radically candid but it does start off with a story at the beginning of the book of someone who was hired very successful at their previous job very nice very easy to get along with just really struggling and their manager never told them directly hey you are not doing a good enough job and eventually they just needed someone who could do a better job in that role for the health of the company and they had to fire this person and they were understandably agonized i think the sentence i remember is they they kind of asked their manager why didn't you tell me yeah and the answer is i made a mistake in not telling you right yeah it's always more comfortable in the short term to not give feedback uh and it can

sometimes be more harmful in the long term sometimes not but yeah you're trying to avoid this like why didn't you tell me right reaction i think that's maybe one way to think about it i like to think about this in terms of pain minimization right now this question asker is avoiding pain in the short term by not giving feedback to this person but the choice to not give feedback is going to create more pain over more time in the future i think because either a this person will never improve the things that need to be improved because they just don't have access to the information in the form of feedback. Or B, there will come a moment where this person needs to be let go because they're just not meeting the company's needs. And in that moment,

the pain can be excruciating when they're looking around saying, why did none of you tell me this? Yeah. I wonder if it's worth, question, ask, or mention is talking to their manager and kind of getting some advice about it's not your fault if they react poorly. It might be helpful for you to get some assurances from your manager that they have your back because i can see one way this goes wrong is this person gets really upset at you and then yeah starts talking negatively about you behind your back starts criticizing your work trying to make you look bad and you want your manager to have the context that it's very possible you will offend this person and they will retaliate against you and they need to be aware of it so they can back you up a little

not be overly swayed by that yeah that would be nice to hear that and maybe you just need to ask for that yeah it might not change how your colleague reacts but it might limit the damage to your your working life to them being more painful to work with not like your career being torpedoed somehow i sense a fair bit of fear in this question you know like i'm just really scared about how they're going to react you know i totally identify with that yeah i do i do too Like, well, anyone who's not a psychopath, I think, fear, what's that? I don't care how they react. But, like, you know, you and I, Jameson, I think, are kind of hypersensitive to what people think of us.

Yeah. Which is why I'm so grateful that no one has ever left a negative review of our show on any podcasting platform. If the show ever stops, you'll know we got our first negative review. We couldn't take it. So, we care, right? But I think part of leadership and maturation is understanding that the needs of an organization, the needs of a team, even in this case, the needs of an individual are greater than your need to not feel fear about how someone's going to react or greater than your need to be loved by everyone. There's also, you mentioned there might be a way to give this person feedback that they listen to that feels kind of unpalatable. Your manager mentioned it's not on you how they react poorly.

But I mean, in an ideal world, you want this feedback to be effective. I have bad news for you, which is that most feedback is not effective. This is hard to do well. It's hard for people to change. It's hard to communicate about tricky stuff. There's a lot of ways for signal to be lost in this process. But I think it is worth thinking about, if my goal is to change this person's behavior, what seems most likely to do that?

and it could be examples of how they've behaved and the impact it's had in the past if you need to kind of pat their ego so that they'll listen to it then maybe that's a thing that you just kind of have to suck up and do it's tricky to kind of diagnose over the show what form of feedback will be most likely to be effective with this person but i don't think it's necessarily a horrible wow what a qualified statement i think it is a good sign that you're thinking yeah here's how this person has reacted in the past to feedback uh and and you should use that like that will help you be more effective in delivering feedback to them i do have one question for you dave which is how do you avoid the like what gives you the right type of vibe i can imagine

this coming from either directly or in this person's head when they receive feedback from someone they think is their peer who also kind of thinks they aren't really at the same level and like i mean the way that my mind like mitigates that right away is by see because you're not in a management role over this person right you're not their supervisor you're not responsible for them in that way but your your manager has asked you to give the feedback and so to avoid the what gives you the right or your feedback is crap response i like to couch feedback in like a context where i'm saying look i've observed some things in your work behavior that i think might be harming you and i care about you and i think you can do really great stuff and so i'm going

to share this with you and you may not agree with it i think i sometimes kind of sugarcoat the lead in a little bit here the intro and it's like you may not agree with this i kind of give their i'm putting their mind at ease, right? Like, hey, I'm sharing examples of things I've seen that I think you might want to know about. And if you choose not to act on these, that's your call. I'm not going to be upset. I just want you to know that in your best interest, I'm going to share this with you. And I think that kind of defuses or disarms the situation a little bit so that they can receive this information as just information for them to evaluate. And really, as a peer, that is your job, is just to share things with your peers that you think would be helpful for

them to know as a manager it's a very different situation as a manager you actually do have the authority to say if these things go unresolved we will have to part ways with you right and that's like a context you just don't as a peer you just don't even bring yeah but i think if you just share in that light like in that in the spirit of hey i've got some specific examples of things you can action and i'm sharing them in a kind way i think you've done your duty and you've given them the best chance of responding positively. And then how they respond to that, you've already told them like, look, if you don't want to accept these, that's okay. And you've disassociated their response from how you're going to feel about it. And I think that's a really important thing.

Yeah, I like that. Presumably you want the project, the team, kind of the shared endeavor that you are on to succeed. If you can present the feedback in terms of, I think this will help our team be more effective or like, this isn't because I'm a busybody. This is because I care about you the the the project we're working on the success of this design whatever yeah i like that that gives more context okay this is all great but i'm thinking about a revolutionary new strategy i'm calling it the inverse crap sandwich this is where you want to give someone a compliment but you don't want them you don't want to go to their head or grow their ego so you wrap it in two insults okay a leading insult a trailing insult and a compliment in

the middle okay so this is like the what's that sandwich from kfc where the bun is like fried chicken it's one of those oh it's called it's called the double down the double down yeah this is the double down this also is a technique widely used by a gross group of people called pickup artists oh it sounds a lot like negging like hey nice uh i i can't even do it i don't know um i like the idea of repurposing so far out of your element right now it's not even funny listen i've been married for over 13 years i haven't dated someone that i'm not married to for like 16 years so something tells me that even before those 16 years you weren't exactly a pickup artist well i was not but uh i don't know where i'm going here so i i'm not really

familiar with this nagging idea but is it the idea that you kind of cut someone down yeah like pretend like you're not interested and make them kind of want to win your favor yeah somehow it helps people uh want to be with you which is baffling to me and i'm pretty sure it it doesn't i've seen this in salary negotiations used against me by a prospective employer like yeah you know your experience isn't that great you know i did have someone do that once and then later i i asked him about that i did get the job by the way just at a lower salary than i wanted this is like 12 years ago and i did ask them afterwards and they were like oh yeah i feel like it's my job as a manager to try to cut you down and understate the value of your experience

so that i can give you a lower salary and i thought interesting so you're saying that my inverse crap sandwich idea has broad and useful application yeah yes it's been explored widely and maybe this is a an opportunity to repurpose it for a better cause that's right stay tuned for a book called radical crap sandwich apply the double down method and revolutionize your life get anyone to do anything with a chicken bun metaphor i'm pretty sure this would be some kind of deep guerrilla marketing campaign by kfc to get people to eat their sandwich more this episode is not sponsored by kfc but if you're listening kfc marketing team we are open yeah we will double run with that idea okay uh did we answer the question absolutely 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 after the finger guns yeah uh both the beauty is it's totally free for engineers uh and we would love for you to go try it go to hired.com soft skills to check it out hired.com soft skills quit your job the best way and check out hired should i read our next one go for it this is from a listener named anthony i recently joined a new company following the patented space law certified strategy of quitting your job

i have a senior colleague who has been there maybe eight more months than me whenever he has a problem he likes to call me away from my desk and start explaining his entire problem to me i have no knowledge of the code base yet and i'm not even an experienced programmer as i barely have two years of experience i just stand there and nod and give various quips from time to time to pretend i'm listening this can last up to 30 minutes and happens numerous times a day if i say i'm busy he just waits five minutes before calling me over again i can't get any work done because of this how do i deal with this senior teammate that uses me as a rubber duck should i just buy him an actual rubber duck well yes obviously you should do that i feel like i

might have told this story before but a long time ago in one of my very first jobs i was a college student still i had not worked as a programmer professionally yet there was a company that built a software product and hired developers but also people who wanted to become developers to do non-developer things with the promise of eventually we'll move you over never did lots of weird stuff at this company but they had a long time i think most senior person there a developer had been there forever who would do the same thing to me but would not speak to me or acknowledge my existence at all at any other time and would often do it at the end of the day it's like they ran out of work to do came over to me and stood behind me and just kind of monologued from

like 4 30 to 5 and then it was like a an alarm went off in their head it was five o'clock and they just left and went home i didn't know anything about anything now i know that i don't know anything about anything so i know a little bit more i didn't even know what rubber duck debugging was then but it wasn't even debugging stuff it was just like a stream of consciousness from this person that never talked to me otherwise and just like they would just dump information at me that had no value or purpose i am replicating that by telling this story it is only slightly related to this question but was was put into my mind just paying it forward yep uh eventually i quit that job i actually had a a great co-worker i

was working remote at the time before it was cool to work remote and before everyone else was back when you were a hermit yeah there were a couple of instances where i actually i accidentally rubber duck debug something with this developer a couple of times where i would get on a call ask a bunch of questions answer my own questions and then say thank you for your time and uh i came into i flew into the uh city where the headquarters were where he worked and came into the office and he actually did present me with a rubber duck and i was like here you go he really said nothing about it he was just like i want to give you this present and i thought the fact that you're saying nothing right now speaks volumes about what about what you want me to do do this you see i'm saying

nothing this is what i want it's like remember the golden rule treat others the way you want to be treated here i have nothing to say yeah so yes i do think you should get an actual rubber duck to this person i think that'd be hilarious and i think it might i mean you could explain i don't know maybe don't even explain it just be like i want to give you a present for your desk just put this somewhere that you can make eye contact with it i wonder if there's some way that you could leverage this person's experience and kind of like i almost want to say trick benevolently trick them into working with you on stuff that you need to do instead of you just sitting there listening to them explain their problems right you could start to collaborate

with them and then maybe i imagine it would be useful to have an experienced developer who also knows the code base really well kind of help guide you through your stuff so so i wonder if there's some way you could say hey can we pair program a little bit and and i can listen to your stuff and you can listen to my stuff if you can't stand the sound of this person's voice then that is a bad solution because but if you get even more of it like if you just want them to go away this won't work but if you if you want to get some benefit out of it instead of it just being a time suck for you that's one thing you could try i've seen uh some pretty fabulously decorated rubber ducks so maybe that softens the blow if you get one that has like leopard print on it or

something uh i saw something in this question that i don't relate to that kind of struck me which is that i have no let's see i just stand there and nod and give various quips from time to time to pretend i'm listening i have no knowledge of the code base and i'm not even an experienced developer and so this really is a rubber duck session and you're the duck So I'm sorry. But this is the part that I don't resonate with that I wouldn't just not do, which is if someone is explaining a problem to me and there's a part of the problem I don't understand, I will absolutely dive into that knowledge gap crevasse until I bottom out and get the answers I need. And this is just kind of my mode is that I can't stand when information passes by me and I don't know what it is or what they're talking about. And I will often halt the conversation to get the answers. this has one effect that your co-worker might view as negative but that i think for you will

be positive which is that your co-worker will get annoyed that he has to keep explaining this stuff to you and that's the negative the positive is he'll probably stop coming to you for questions if his if his questions just turn into questions getting right you know shoved right back into his face yeah and if he doesn't then you're kind of repurposing these conversations to be more useful for you yes and you just get to be tutored by this person at some point you have to do stuff to it instead of just learn stuff from them i guess that's the problem if you can't ever actually get anything done but i've never seen it happen with with this kind of relationship of a more senior person coming to a more junior person in the opposite relationship i have seen folks

asked to have like some kind of office hours or questions batched up or something some ways so that if a junior person has a bunch of questions they can get answers without interrupting all the time especially if they're kind of non-urgent but important to know stuff that they want to dive into i like that so i wonder if you could just say hey i have like rubber duck hours or something like that like when the duck is on the door that means yeah i'm open for business and honestly like these you're not actually that useful here because you don't have any answers right so so maybe maybe if you could convince your team the members of your team who actually have more experience to set up office hours that would completely sidestep this whole problem because now there's

a designated place to go with these questions and bonus the people actually know the answers yeah i'm sorry i can't possibly help you because i'm just too new here why don't you go talk to co-worker a yes and then you just go back to working i like it heads down fingers back on keyboard clicking away have you considered wearing a large rubber duck suit would that be better in some way than like presenting them with a rubber duck even like a subtle you know those polo shirts that have a little like tiger or something oh yeah yeah on it some emblem just a very subtle little duck embroidery on your on your blouse or shirt or that would be awesome you might have to keep escalating though like if they don't notice your your subtle duck pattern

socks then yeah which they clearly won't you'll have to a b test it until you get past the threshold of noticing you will end up with a duck face tattoo by the end of this that'll be a turning point in your life and great things will happen after that great yeah that's just gonna be the doorway to awesomeness so you know how there's that thing where if you get tears tattooed around your face that's supposed to be like how many people you've killed or something oh i did not know that well uh more uh more seedy cultural yeah it's from jameson dance today than normal yeah welcome to the real world dave yeah there's got to be some equivalent for like the number of ducks you have tattooed

around your face right like this is how many how many rubber duck sessions i've been through maybe a better metaphor would have been like combat aces i guess that's still violent but fair enough more patriotically violent i think this question is answered what do you think i think so good luck hopefully you got some ideas for how to do this and if not maybe just settle in you know you're doing a great service by doing nothing smiling and nodding it's not every day you get paid to just smile and nod for 30 minutes that's pretty cool that's true you're professional smiler and nodder and if you can get some of those fake glasses that look like your eyes are open you could go to sleep 30 minute power nap and your head naturally bobs a little when you're

napping anyway yeah that's true yeah all right what can people do if they want their own questions answered dave go to softskills.audio and click the ask a question button where you can fill out our form thank you so much to everyone who does that every week we love love your questions keep them coming we will catch you next week you