Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 320: Hot and less hot and no privileges

Episode Date: September 5, 2022

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I seem to be very hot and cold about how I feel about my job. Some days I hate it and think about quitting, but other days, I feel it’s not that bad and can stick around a little longer. The reason for it seems to change depending on the day, but a lot of it seems to center around the people around me (i.e. developers who need me to Google for them, business people who don’t understand how to provide requirements), but sometimes I can’t tell whether it’s an attitude problem that will follow me anywhere or if it’s just time to leave. It’s a relatively small company, so I feel like I would be betraying my manager who has invested a lot in me if I decided to leave so suddenly. I’d like to give my manager a chance to address my concerns, but I’m afraid to sour our relationship if I come across as a complainer. I’m also not confident there’s any solutions to my current frustrations because it seems to be a company-wide issue. How do I make sense of all of what I’m feeling? I really like my company but their project management is atrocious, ad hoc, and “old school.” They’re not giving me privileges to configure Jira in ways that allow me to get stuff done. Is there an effective way to convince my CTO that I’m not going to screw up our secure systems or do I just need to find a new job?

it takes more than booking 5,883,517 years of pto in advance to make sure your int32 pto balance never goes negative to be a great engineer this is soft skills engineering episode 320 i'm your host dave smith i'm your host jamison dance soft skills engineering is a weekly advice podcast for software developers about all the non-technical stuff that goes into being a great engineer i guess that's a good way to find out what unlimited pto really means are we talking 32 bits unlimited or 64 bits unlimited yeah this episode is sponsored by hired which is the best way to quit your job and get a new one you can go to hired.com soft skills or stay with us to hear more all right can i thank our patrons

please these magnificent individuals are contributing on patreon at the level that gets them a shout out every week they are kent c dodds theodore savin nay thin sack on memester josh owen chartle craig motlin i love mavis the stochastic parrot alice jost andrew pollock that town in wales that ends in go go go kashokton ohio patreon.com.au we're hiring irish hand monkey face emoji jonathan king testing is documenting.org will angel who does not have the stinky feet ragnar nick hathaway travis sanders brayden canes john grant nick canter and philip john basile if you would like to join this list of names unpronounceable things and emojis that we say on the air every week you can go to softskills.audio and click the support us on patreon button and if

you give us enough money we will say your name and if you give us any amount of money we will send you an invitation to our slack community invites go out the first week of every month so look forward to those are the are the people who sent in the name of a town do you think they're splitting the cost with the town i'm just imagining the money reading that proposal coming across the desk okay now you want you want what now you want ten dollars a month minutes of the city council meeting yeah don't ask how much in labor it will cost to pay that ten dollars a month yeah i'm gonna read our first question okay there's nothing you can do about it to stop me. This is from an anonymous listener who says, I seem to be very hot and cold about

how I feel about my job. Some days I hate it and think about quitting, but other days I feel like it's not that bad and can stick around a little bit longer. The reason for it seems to change depending on the day, but a lot of it seems to center around the people around me, i.e. developers who need me to Google for them, business people who don't understand how to provide requirements. Sometimes I can't tell whether it's an attitude problem that will follow me anywhere or if it's just time to leave. It's a relatively small company, so I feel like I'd be betraying my manager who has invested a lot in me if I decided to leave so suddenly. I'd like to give my manager a chance to address my concerns, but I'm afraid to sour our relationship if I came across as a

complainer. I'm not confident there's any solutions to my current frustrations because it seems to be a company-wide issue. How do I make sense of all of what I'm feeling? How do I make sense of what I'm feeling? That's like the ultimate question. Why do I feel this way? That's a requirement we can't can't meet sorry i just like how this question started with hot and cold and i'm going to interpret the hot to be the bad feeling hot is i'm ready to quit and cold is the good feeling cold is like maybe i'm not ready to quit it's not i feel i feel so great about this job it's like i could withstand this for slightly longer it's like the opposite of good to great yeah horrible to slightly less horrible at the risk of going on one of our

textbook tangents i gotta disagree with you on hot and cold is hot the good one i think hot is good and cold is bad like i'm hot about my job means i want to stay here i'm cold about my job means i don't want to stay here this is i was thinking like hot under the collar like i'm so fed up like angry i'm gonna explode yeah but then cold feels weird to be like really pumped yeah cold is i love it so maybe this is hot and cold it's it's cold is like like i suppose i suppose this job i suppose all right it depends i think it also depends on what material is like standing in as as the thing that is hot or cold is it like really hot outside and it's it's a drink you have to drink then hot is is probably bad right cold is good if it's a

shower most of the time probably hot is good okay well i i thought i thought it was your heart i thought it was another metaphor layered in here where it's my heart is hot about this meaning i love it or my heart is cold meaning i don't love it but then if you get too literal it's probably bad if your heart is too hot or too cold frankly die yeah they're both bad you really want to be you really want your heart to be at a room temperature actually wait no that's too cold get out of here uh back to the question okay if i did this is not answering the question but if i had to predict i predict that this person will not work at this job in like three months this feels like a gonna quit this job type of vibe there's this stuff here that i'm not sure can be

addressed and even the way you phrased i'd like to give my manager a chance to address my concerns which is wise because possibly they could and then maybe you'll avoid some pain if if turns out to be a good place to stay but like this feels like you you're you're not gonna be there because these concerns sound hard to address frankly i'm gonna take your prediction of three months till quitting time and i'm gonna raise you one more prediction which is three months after that this person realizes that the next job is exactly the same i don't know they're not all the same well we have two examples here uh i think right of of the things that this person is either hot or cold about depending on which of the seven metaphors we've already presented for you yes today yes one

is developers need me to google for them okay you could probably find a place where you don't need that and number two business people who don't understand how to provide requirements that's all business people yeah it also depends on if that means the requirements they give me are not right and if that's okay the case then yes that will happen at your next job too like or versus what what's the alternative i guess there's some absolute definition of correct in in the world there's there's some like level of completeness which is possible for humans to achieve and they achieve that through tickets in your project management software and and you've seen this somewhere done correct no i'm saying like this doesn't exist uh everywhere i've ever

worked no matter how clear they clearly they document requirements there's always some ambiguity uh that you need to just make judgment calls on or talk about yeah um and you might just be wrong too you might think something's a requirement and then it changes i i agree with that and i think it is unreasonable to expect business people to come to you with perfectly fleshed out requirements even even somewhat fleshed out correct requirements i think is is too high a bar it is extreme i think developers underestimate how extremely challenging it is to translate problems that people observe in the real world into software requirements that can be implemented that is so hard yeah so it it's possible to be bad at it for sure and very unclear would that be hot or

cold at it uh i think i think we need to change the axis and instead it's like pleasant smelling or foul smelling because then it's more clear which one is bad or good that would be foul smelling okay got it because if if you if you think that you're good at it and you're really bad at it that's one way to you think you're really clear but it's super ambiguous you change your mind all the time or i don't know you think you smell good but you actually smell bad is that what you're saying yes the yeah the teenager problem i think it is possible that you could develop a better uh kind of product relationship with the people that are working on requirements and and the pithy easy answer here is is you just need to talk more so if they give you requirements

that you are concerned about you you just talk to them about it and ask them how why do they think this is the right thing how do they how certain are they that these aren't going to change what if it takes way longer than they expect like i don't know you you dig the the information out of them by talking that's right which i just realized while i said that you you could say by and then a lot of other verbs that would be way worse okay you dig the information out of them through car batteries and cables um you don't have to torture them you just have to talk to them oh i got it i got the torture metaphor that was uh that was a stretch you went straight to torture that was interesting like what do you do to dig information out of people oh there you go it's

kind of aggressive kind of went back to your kgb days yes reflecting on those i mean i know what i do developers need me to google for them yeah that that one's rough developers need me to google for them man that's painful that nobody knows everything someone will always ask questions that someone else knows the answer to i wonder if this is about like they they don't have clear expectations of of what do you do before you tap someone on the shoulder to ask a question right like maybe this person is the the experienced font of wisdom and people are just used to asking them questions but they're questions that could be answered if you just search the docs or google like you said and and maybe there's a i don't know like a team conversation you could have about that

to say ask google before you ask me uh i don't know i mean but i i sense that the whole google thing is really a stand-in for i want to work with developers their jobs yeah i want to work with more skilled talented developers and i'll tell you what that's i don't want to sound rude but that's a pretty compelling reason to change jobs if you feel like that the people you're working with don't and this this could come across as arrogant so please please take this the worst possible way okay working with people no matter how this sounds know that dave is a good person right no matter what no matter what i'm about to say have you seen the young frankenstein where it's like no matter what i say don't let me out of this cage i just put myself in the cage anyway

it it can be it can feel quite limiting to feel like the people around you don't have anything to teach you and there's no more growth left for you at this company you know like you really want to be an excellent engineer but you're surrounded by people who you feel are learning a lot from you and that's great but that they don't have a lot to teach you and that can be that can be a cold i mean a foul smelling situation what about i would feel like betraying my manager or it would feel like betraying my manager if i decide to leave so suddenly and then they say i want to give them notice but i'm afraid it'll it'll hurt our relationship that's i don't know i don't worry about that burn all the bridges you'll be fine just kidding now the fire will be hot right but

Depending on what the bridges are made out of, it could be a foul or a sweet smell. It could be great. Like if they're like cedar bridges. That's exactly what I was just thinking. Sweet, delicious cedar smoke. Yeah. Maybe you could smoke some fish over the bridge fire. I'm afraid to say our relationships, they come across as a complainer.

I don't know if I would say, hey, I'm going to quit pretty soon if you don't fix this stuff. But I think there's nothing wrong with saying, I have these issues that are really concerning to me, and I'd like to hear ideas on how we can address them. And you don't have to do this. I mean, you can just quit, get another job. But if you think there is a chance that they could help address them, then you should bring them up. You don't want to quit and then leave potential options on the table if there were solutions that you maybe didn't know about or didn't think of. I don't think it would be seen as complaining. Yeah.

Yeah, I agree. People sometimes forget that your manager's job, a big part of it, if not the most important part, is to create an environment wherein everyone can be their most productive. And if there are things that are threatening that, especially if it's something that is threatening to cause you to leave, they really would usually like to know so they can work on that with you. Yeah. Even if it doesn't fix stuff for you so that you stay, maybe it pushes the team in a better direction, the feedback you gave or something like that. I don't know. I I don't see a big downside as long as you don't say, hey, I'm probably going to quit over this stuff if it doesn't get fixed. We've talked a lot about that in the past. And you might still do

that depending on your relationship, but that has some potential risk if there are upcoming decisions to be made about who has a job and who doesn't. Maybe now would be a good time to share my pattern for complaining to my boss without looking like a complainer. TM. Please. I like to talk about outcomes with my managers. I like to say, look, these are important outcomes that I think are good for the company. And I'm seeing some impediments to those outcomes. Can we talk about solutions to these problems? And in this case, the outcome is, I would like to have a long, satisfying, and productive career at this company. That's the outcome I'm going for here. There are some impediments here that are making that kind of challenging for me.

And then name it off. My business people don't give me excellent requirements, or I spend too much time typing in Google for my coworkers. I know I'm just being silly about that one. And just share that with them. And when you frame the conversation by giving an intro that is productive in nature, I think your manager will be way better equipped to respond positively and help you with ideas to work through it. If you just show up and say, hey, why do all my coworkers suck? Why do the business people give me bad requirements? It's like your manager might actually get defensive, might actually argue with you about the things that are wrong. But in my experience, if you bring these things to them, outcome oriented, asking for help to find

solutions, they'll engage with you. I've never had a manager disengage from that or get defensive when I do that. And I've never been accused of being a complainer to my face. Well, have we answered the question? I think so. But I have one more idea. I one time had someone come to me when I was in a management role and asked me or told me about a bunch of problems on the team and also told me, I'm bringing these to you because I think you can fix them, which I thought was really excellent because a lot of times if people don't believe that you can fix the problem, they just won't bring you the problem. They'll just leave, you know, or work around you somehow. And so you can also give that as a compliment to your manager to prep their mind so that they're in a good

mental state to help problem solve and not see you as a complainer it's like the crap sandwich you know where you start out with a compliment yeah that's like an advanced form of it though yeah kind of i guess so that is a good point though that that if you can make sure you're framing your discussion as trying to make things better not just venting and ranting but if you do need to vent and rant you could do that too but i recommend not not your boss though Well, or tell them, like, I just need to vent. I don't know. Give them some context of, yeah.

Let them just sit back and put your pencil down. I'm just venting. You don't have to write any of this down. As you carefully write down, you do not have to write any of this down. Got it. Okay. Okay. All right.

Now I think we've answered the question. All right. Hey, Jameson, have you heard about The Great Resignation? Is it that Charles Dickens book? Wait, no. the entire population on Earth has started taking our advice of quit your job. Oh, yes, that's right. Apparently, we have achieved influencer status. We've been telling developers for years to quit their jobs. And now we want to tell you how to do it. We're

ready to reveal the secret. I mean, you don't just walk out shooting finger guns. Yes. Well, you do that first. But after you do that, there's a new service we want to tell you about called Hired. What is Hired, Dave? Hired is the biggest AI-driven marketplace that matches engineers with companies, it is a great way to find your next job. I've been watching this industry for 20 years with a keen interest on hiring in particular, and I've never seen anything like Hired. Tell me about what you're seeing. So I've interviewed about 150 people in the last year, and I am serious. Every candidate that's come to me through Hired has multiple offers, and they're incredibly high, scary high, like 30% higher than other candidates.

Is that before or after the finger guns? yeah 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 dave will you read our next question yes this comes from an anonymous listener who says i really like my company but their project management is atrocious ad hoc and quote old school they're not giving me privileges to configure Jira in ways that allow me to get stuff done. Is there an effective way to convince my CTO that I'm not going to screw up our systems or do I just need

to find a new job? I think you should try to figure out what need the Jira configuration is fulfilling. Because you can, it's a super flexible tool you can set up in any number of ways. And many of those ways can be painful to people who don't use it day to day or see the pain so maybe there's some process they're trying to follow of like everything needs to roll up to a i don't know a budget line item for accounting purposes and then they add a bunch of required fields to every ticket and makes your life suck or something there probably is some reason though it's probably not just because we we thought about it and if it is sorry because we didn't think about it and if it is then it's very easy to change good news but what i would do is is try to figure out what

purpose those those settings are serving and figure out if there is a way to preserve that purpose but also change the workflow so it is less painful for you because if i don't know how big this company is um jira's used to some really big companies so maybe it's huge if that's the case you will not no one will let you touch the workflow sorry that's just just how it goes but if it is a small enough place that you could have some influence there still are a lot of people that are probably dependent on the existing settings maybe there's integrations and all this stuff so it will need some kind of coordination probably besides someone just pressing a button to say okay now go wild with it so so this is like a side quest at work that

you would take on to fix project management tooling for developers kind of does that make sense it seems like the least enjoyable kind of side quest i could imagine it does yeah i mean i guess an alternative is to say hey cto please you do this i guess it depends on how much involvement you want i already know how that how that's gonna go yeah bring me solutions not problems that's the classic boss deflection when they don't want to do something or if you do bring me problems please please bring me important problems i just yeah i can imagine this one would be perceived as unimportant i guess i don't know it depends maybe if all the developers are fed up by this or maybe it's i've worked at jobs where the cto was like the one manager at the company

of 20 people or something so yeah i'm arguing myself in circles because if it's that small then you should sure whatever just go change it yeah true convince the cto that i'm not going to screw up our secure system. So I'm presuming here that this question asker has not yet tried to convince the CTO, but that we're looking here for suggestions or advice on how to approach the CTO to grant admin privileges to this thing. That's kind of how I'm reading this. And I got to tell you, as someone who oversees access control to things like this, I get very happy when somebody expresses interest in improving our productivity

or the management of one of these tools. So it's not me. Like, I love that. So expressing interest might actually be enough to say, okay, you're the new Jira admin. Whoa, whoa, whoa. That's not what I asked. Yeah, a monkey's paw,

a finger curls on the monkey's paw. Yes. You want more permissions, do you? Hmm. Hmm. now you get paged when jira goes down right interesting i thought you were going to go the opposite direction and say that you get tingly bad feelings foul smells if you will when someone asks for elevated permissions because you're thinking about the the risk

that that opens up an organization to to have kind of elevated access oh man i just i just don't i I mean, surely, I guess it depends on whether they have one of those curly mustaches and a bag over their shoulder with a dollar sign on it and they're tiptoeing around. Ah, yes. Trying to rob the company of our precious Jira configuration. Yes. Look at their visage and see if you detect evil there. But I only hire people I trust. And when one of them expresses interest in taking ownership over making internal tooling

better, I get thrilled because you want to know how many people have done that in my career? I don't know, maybe two in the last 20 years. Very rare. You said this sounds like the worst side quest in the world. And maybe an outcome here is it helps you put up with it, right? If you figure out, okay, this is kind of painful and I don't like it and I could take on this part-time job at my full-time job to go chase down whatever i need to do to update jira configuration

maybe you'll decide you know what it's not that bad to fill out these four extra fields or i don't know get approval i don't know whatever the bad thing is that you don't like i think it will help you go from i don't like this to i don't like it this much enough to do this much work and and that's a useful thing to look at kind of the gauge of how much pain am i willing to endure in the short term to get rid of this long term minor pain? Yeah, exactly. Unless it becomes an emotional thing and then the answer is infinity pain. Right. This is now a crusade. So if I were approaching the CTO, I would start with exactly what you suggested at the beginning, which is figure out why JIRA is configured the way that it is. And then I would bring that to the CTO, probably in

a written form, like a half pager or one pager and say, I understand our JIRA. Here's why it's configured this way, I'd like to propose making some changes. And to make this easier on everyone, I'd like to have administrative access to make these changes myself, I promise to preserve the requirements that went into the current configuration to make sure those continue to be met. You know, and then that gives your CTO a chance to say, Okay, I see that you've got a complete understanding of why we do things the way we do. And I trust you to be responsible going forward as an admin. Or another outcome could be your CTO sees your list and goes, Oh, well, You missed three important things, and I'm going to tell you them now, and now I trust you to be

an admin going forward on Jira. So I don't know. That's how I would approach it. I like that. Yeah. You're avoiding the image of someone who's so fed up, they just want to go in there and delete everything. Not delete everything as in delete all the work, but just rip everything out. And if it's there for a reason, then the CTO gets to go deal with those consequences. That sounds not fun for them. Yeah. Yeah. You're trying to build trust. give me these admin privileges i will i will be careful with them yeah and it's not not make your life worse it's trust that's very quantifiable because it's not just i trust you have good intentions it's i trust that you know enough to effectively carry this business's requirements

forward like there's trust where you say like for example i i trust my children but they also lack they they lack like when they're young they lack certain skills like i trust them but they're when they were six years old i wouldn't there were certain things we wouldn't say in front of them because they would repeat those things in front of other people then everyone else would know what you were like right so in in that way we i think when we're asking for trust from a business or from a leader, we need to show them that not only are our intentions good, but also our skills and knowledge are up to the task, you know? So it's almost like trust meets competency. You've got to demonstrate both. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. My two-year-old used to ask me to let him drive a

lot. And I would say no. And he'd say like, but it'll be fine. Just let me drive in his two-year-old way uh-huh and so he was asking for trust that's a good point but the competency was just a little low on that one yes he has to pick between the pedals or the steering wheel and neither of those include the ability to see out the windshield would you say that his driving skill is hot or cold oh oh i don't know oh man i mean if you switch metaphors it's clear it's foul smelling it is yeah see that's another another argument in favor of the smell metaphor of good and bad definitely much less ambiguous well have we answered the question i think so good luck good luck what can people do if they would like their own questions answered dave go to soft

skills.audio and click the ask a question button where we will present you a just lovely little form using amazing worldwide web technologies you can fill in and give us details about your situation. And we love your questions. Thank you so much to everyone who has submitted a question. We really appreciate it. You are the lifeblood of the show. Yes. Thank you. Thank you. We will catch you next week.