Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 324: Understanding accents and mega soft skills

Episode Date: October 3, 2022

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I’m currently a junior engineer. I often struggle to understand speakers with accents. I became aware of this when I listened to a coworker in a meeting and barely understanding anything, but when I asked my other colleagues, it seems they got it completely. I know how to handle this in relaxed situations, but how do I handle it when the stakes are higher? (i.e. talking to higher levels and not wanting to ask too many questions based on my inability to hear them, interviews, …). How should I prepare to respond to these situations productively? Hey fellas, As a backend dev of 3 YOE, I have what I would describe as average technical skills and much stronger than average soft skills. This has been reflected in my feedback across all of my jobs and while the feedback has always been very positive, almost all of it relates to my interpersonal and communication skills, as opposed to my technical chops. I’m wondering what’s the long term outlook for this is? I frequently receive more accolades and recognition from leadership than my colleagues whose technical skills and code output are objectively far superior to mine, simply because I communicate better and am more charismatic Given management’s favorable view of me, I have been ascending the ranks quicker than is warranted, beating out those that are much more qualified from a technical perspective. While I am able to complete the work that’s asked of me, I can’t help but wonder when I will stall as a dev and no longer be able to meet expectations, nor is it really fair to anyone involved. At this point, I can’t help but feel that I would be able to contribute more in a position that utilize my skillset more favorably, but I’m unsure what roles would be a good fit for someone like myself. Thanks guys!

it takes more than replying to every code review comment with that's out of scope for this task to be a great engineer this is soft skills engineering episode 324 i'm your host dave smith i'm your host jameson dance soft skills engineering is a weekly advice podcast for software developers who just don't want to incorporate code review feedback please submit a reproducible minimal test case what is it what's that thing they ask you to do in open source projects minimal reproducible yeah it's like a minimal reproducible example or so there's some minimal reproducible example yeah i'm sure that's not it but now it will be through the power of this podcast um yeah you just need to ask for enormous amounts of work from people asking you

for changes that's right i'm not convinced yet please cite several studies yes or go perform them well you know what they say people who love their job will never work a day in their life and so will people who insist on unachievable standards for feedback yes i should thank our patrons that's what i should do should i do that now yes it's in scope all right thank you so much to these folks who support us at the level where we shout them out every single week thank you to kent c dodds theodore savin memester josh jenny kim owen chartle craig motlin i love mavis the stochastic parrot alice jost andrew pollock no cheating land fair

Kshakton, Ohio, patreon.com.au. We're hiring Ira Chan, Monkey Face Emoji, Jonathan King, testingisdocumenting.org, Oladapo Fadye, Will Angel, who does not have stinky feet, then who has stinky feet, Nick Hathaway, Travis Sanders, Brayden Keynes, John Grant, Nick Kantar, and Philip John Basile. Thank you, thank you, thank you. even to that town that makes me sound silly every time i say the name um if you want to join these

these folks and help support the show help us keep it going you can go to softskills.audio and click support us on patreon and if you do we will uh reward you with i'll just like applaud a little bit and you'll feel it and you'll get an invite to our slack community and your wildest dreams will come true can i get the applause without the slack invite yeah you can redeem the slack invite for for more applause if you return it then i'll applaud again that's a deal oh my gosh oh man all right should i read our first question please please do okay this comes from an anonymous listener who says i'm currently a junior engineer i often struggle to understand

speakers with accents. I became aware of this when I listened to a coworker in a meeting and barely understanding anything, but when I asked my other colleagues, it seemed they got it completely. I know how to handle this in relaxed situations, but how do I handle it when the stakes are higher, such as talking to higher levels and not wanting to ask too many questions based on my inability to hear them or interviews, dot, dot, dot. How should I prepare to respond to these situations productively the only winning move is not to play never do any interviews never speak to anyone at a higher level than than yourself in the company find a company that does all communication through slack text text only but i yeah i mean you i don't know how much of a joke

that is but uh that is a nice benefit of of async communication is that it's easier to understand And you don't get an accent in text. Yes. But also, that's only one part of my suggestion, text only. But the second part is everyone speaks Esperanto. Level the playing field. Ah, okay. Yeah.

I mean, some people are going to learn Esperanto more quickly, though. So it won't stay level, right? Yeah. Well, no playing field can stay level. That's true. Unless there's the playing field leveler machine that just smashes it down over and over again. Every week. As soon as someone learns Esperanto, bam, you switch languages.

No one will get ahead. We are all learners. Next week, it's Klingon. Oh, language of the week. Tolkien, Elvish, Klingon, Esperanto. Okay, I've got the first three weeks laid out. We only need a few hundred more. Yes.

I mean, who said it has to be a human language? It could be a programming language. Oh, yeah. This week, we communicate completely through Visual Basic. Me.raise, you.approve. You crash your company by writing 10, go to 5, or I don't know, whatever that is. I've never written basic or a visual basic. I'm tired of this conversation.

5, colon, 6, colon, go to 5. do i handle this okay i'm not gonna say this is a actually never mind i am gonna say this is a good suggestion this is a great suggestion and it's easy to do all right yeah okay everyone should be able to pull it off simply hold on let me go let me go get my popcorn hold on okay all right now okay all you need to do is create a culture of taking notes during meetings which if it already exists is really easy to do and if it doesn't can be kind of hard i wonder there's a bunch of different possibilities here this could be maybe it's maybe it's like an expat maybe there's someone living in a different country where they work with folks and work in

that country's native language maybe it's a company that employs people from all over the place so there's kind of like a melting pot of different accents but it's possible that you might not be the only person struggling to understand this despite the fact that your colleagues all misled you into thinking they got it completely yeah like did you understand anything that person said and they all went yeah for sure it's actually a practical joke and it's not like you can quiz them because you didn't understand what they said so you have to isolate them into different rooms and then ask each of them to tell the story and then check for inconsistencies okay yeah so that's once that's done then you create the culture of taking notes in meetings which i have found

so helpful in so many ways it's really helpful to clarify like when stuff needs to happen because of a meeting i feel like meetings are are less off less likely to just end up with talking and then no outcome or action because someone's someone's kind of propelling it forward by writing down what is happening uh it's really easy to share with people who weren't there because you can present the notes and and if someone does a good enough job taking notes then then uh they can get the gist of it um it's also easier to detect misunderstandings in general not just from accents but like if you are saying something then you go look at the notes and see that the notes say a different thing than what you intended you can you can maybe correct that yeah instead of

just assume everyone understood you and then and then years later figure out like oh the car's upside down instead of right side up yeah i don't know whatever the consequences and let's not pretend like this is limited to spoken language accents because i was born speaking english and i am often misunderstood when i speak and i found that when people write notes of what they heard me say i am sometimes a little surprised like yeah oh that's the opposite of what i wanted to convey yeah so this is this is like a universal technique right having a note a note taker and i think it solves many more problems than just i i struggle to understand certain accented spoken spoken english yeah which is which is why i think it's especially effective in this

situation because accents can be a tricky sensitive cultural thing right you don't want to come across as as uh kind of like insulting other people or saying that they're whatever the language they're speaking in their their accent is too uh harsh if it's your native language or if you're trying to understand it, it's kind of, if it's the other direction, it can be kind of vulnerable to say, I actually do not understand this language very well, you know? But if you pitch it as this thing that has universal benefits, it just so happens to help you understand what's going on in the meeting if you have trouble with these accents. Yes. I've also found accents it's for me become a lot easier with exposure yeah yeah um and and the more you can immerse

yourself in it the easier it can be to understand and so you need to pick up like whatever kind of entertainment media is exported by this culture just start diving into it yeah it's totally a learned skill i think don't have a fixed mindset on this like oh well someone speaks with an accent i'll never understand them it's like oh that's a that's a bad attitude this is absolutely something you can develop. I know firsthand, I've spent a lot of time with people for whom English is not their first language that they were born speaking. No one is born speaking, but you know what I mean, right? Yeah, yeah. And it's great. It's absolutely something that has developed and is totally doable. When I was a child, I moved from

Chicago to Minnesota, and they all have weird accents in Minnesota. But not Chicago. Everyone else besides me had the had a weird accent yeah um and i didn't want to point it out to them because i didn't want to make them feel bad but it was kind of hard to understand and soon i was blending in with the natives saying things like a bagel instead of bagel seriously yeah don't you know i put my bagel in the bag no is that i put my bag on the bag yeah i think it might be that yeah but i don't know i lost the skill as you can tell but uh delightful experience i don't know how you could ever understand bagel it's just like that's a different thing how would you eat a bag it doesn't make any sense although reports of saying don't you know are widely exaggerated

oh that's too bad i don't think i heard that very much that's too bad yeah i like it better when my stereotypical view of the world is confirmed as accurate does it match your stereotypes that it gets like 50 below zero sometimes yes all right well that one true okay check it off oh thank you i feel a lot better now yeah okay so i had an interesting experience once with a couple of people from england and they uh they said to me uh well not they said to me they were speaking about accents and um they they said there is no mainstream neutral british accent he said the closest we come is by talking the way the newscasters talk and i thought that's interesting and then they also went so far as to say that their ears were better than my ears as a as an

american at understanding different accented english because they grew up exposed to a broader variety of spoken english just even within people in england this this was their assertion i mean you have those colonial ears rebel low quality ears yeah and and i i had the audacity to say to them that i felt that i had a neutral english accent and when i said that out loud these two guys just started laughing so hard because they were like no you have a thick american accent it's so bad and then i thought to myself i don't i don't think i speak with a with an accent but clearly i do if you're british wait when you said i i do not have an accent you meant english as a whole to to like the global population of english speakers well i think that's how they took it to

sound but okay but what i really meant to say was i have a neutral american accent like i think it would be very difficult for you to pin me to a geography based on the way i speak english yeah and uh but of course they took that to mean they were like ha ha ha you ill-informed narrow-minded american i mean they just had a great laugh at it isn't there the mid-atlantic accent a consciously learned accent of english used by early 20th century american upper class and entertainment yeah it's like this fake made-up accent yeah like it was big in movies in the early 1900s we should bring that back i'm trying to think of uh yeah like the franklin dylan roosevelt accent that you hear in recordings and stuff i should be listening to you but guess what

i'm doing looking at youtube for mid-atlantic accent examples yes i am i'm sure you said good stuff okay well now i know what i'm doing with my afternoon huh yeah watch out for some changes to the podcast i love i love that this accent is totally fabricated it didn't evolve on its own it's like people deliberately chose to speak differently so that they would sound more educated wealthy or higher status it's incredible imagine the first person to do this though like they sound like an idiot how how bold is that person right well i'm just gonna make up an accent i mean it's like just as bold as when celebrities wear weird fashion and then suddenly everyone's wearing that fashion right it starts with status yeah and then morphs into the language probably

not the other way this is my this is my non-linguistic expert guess i believe you of course you do see i speak with a mid-atlantic accent yeah well have we answered the question uh i i think so so in in summary uh focus on written spend more time getting exposed to people who speak differently than you that's probably a good thing anyway there's like fringe benefits to that you know yeah and uh develop a mid-atlantic accent so no one can understand you either yeah you'll you'll yeah if you if you are like you need to kind of draw everyone towards a common made up accent yeah all right i should read the next question go for it so i will i always do what i should okay good this is no exception hey fellas as a back-end dev with three years of

experience i have what i would describe as average technical skills and much stronger than average soft skills this has been reflected in my feedback across all of my jobs and while the feedback has always been very positive almost all of it relates to my interpersonal and communication skills as opposed to my technical chops. I'm wondering what the long-term outlook for this is. I frequently receive more accolades and recognition from leadership than my colleagues whose technical skills and code output are objectively far superior to mine, simply because I communicate better and am more charismatic. Given management's favorable view of me, I have been ascending the ranks quicker than is warranted, beating out those who are much more qualified from a technical

perspective. While I am able to complete the work that's asked of me, I can't help but wonder when i will stall as a dev and no longer be able to meet expectations nor is it really fair to anyone involved at this point i can't help but feel that i would be able to contribute more in a position that utilizes my skill set more favorably but i'm unsure what roles would be a good fit for someone like myself lots of questions baked into that one yeah i can tell you have much stronger than average soft skills because when you listen to this podcast so puts you in the upper quartile already it's like in the upper 95 percent okay what's the what's the did you see what i did there it's like the noun for that top for that five percent a 20th aisle you're in the

upper 20th aisle uh there is it that's quintile oh wait oh 20 oh sorry i thought you were saying 20 percentile uh yeah the two i know what you're saying now i the 20th aisle i was so i was trying to say the opposite i was trying to say that if you ranked everyone top to bottom you're above the bottom five percent oh okay top 95 okay which is almost everyone top 90 okay yeah that's probably true you're right also you called us fellas and that just won me over it was a good mid-atlantic use of the word fellows i think yeah it did fit in well okay so boy i've got some good news for this listener. Yeah. What is it? Well, first the bad news. I think you have a slightly incorrect view of how people get promoted and quote, climb the ranks. And it's not exactly all about technical

skill. Let's just put it that way. So that's the bad news. What's the good news? Good news is you're well on your way to a very successful career in engineering congratulations yeah charismatic great soft skills some technical skills is the foundation of of many storied careers yeah for better or for worse and and i gotta tell you it almost doesn't matter what track you take individual contributor you're gonna do great management track great you want to pivot into a neighboring field like product management probably also great like you're gonna be yeah You're going to be fine because it turns out, and this, I don't know, maybe this is something that took me a little while to appreciate about the real world, but your ability to

produce at the individual level is really important, but your ability to communicate what you have produced and collaborate with others and partner is maybe even more important because the best product development in the world, the best code in the world, if it is not properly communicated or conveyed to other people, will never be successful. So don't even worry about it.

Yeah, like this is, you've asked the question. Is that the advice? Yeah. You're listening to the wrong show. You need to listen to the hard skills engineering podcast. What are you doing here? Yeah, exactly. Go start your own.

In fact, maybe you should go start a competing podcast. Nah, don't do that. Maybe you shouldn't. Don't tell our Patreon supporters. I'm wondering what the long-term outlook, more accolades. I can, hmm. So if you feel like you receive more accolades and recognition from leadership than colleagues whose output is far superior, there might be some resentment around that. Yeah, that can happen.

And you might turn out like Julius Caesar who rose to the top and then got stabbed by a bunch of people who resented him. but you could also avoid his fate by using your charisma. See, a charismatic person wouldn't mispronounce that word. Using your charisma powers to spotlight accolades and attention on other people. If there's someone who you feel like is doing great work but does not have the skill or whatever,

for whatever reason, doesn't get recognized like it should be, you can help them. You can point it out. And I think we've talked about this before, but there's this thing that happens where you help point out valuable stuff other people are doing, which is you get like a tax of the credit just by pointing it out. Not even from a like sneaky Machiavellian evil manipulative way, but just some of the vibes of like that awesome thing. It just rubs off on you if you're the one who helps publicize that, hey, this person built this awesome thing. and now and now the person you told that loves both of you i love the awesome thing and i love

you for telling me about it yeah that i agree with that this is a great idea they should love the person who built the awesome thing too so really they should love three things oh right i forgot you just totally eliminated the yeah i mean i just considered that to be one more skull on my ladder of skulls yeah you tell okay so you tell leadership about the awesome thing totally eliminate who produced it and then maybe they'll say you produced exactly you don't say you did but they can fill in the gaps if they want yeah and and it just so happens the gaps will be filled in by tall charismatic handsome people with great how they're so productive sometimes what you don't say is more powerful than what you do

yes i'm not gonna say i didn't build that i didn't build that i'm also not gonna say who did build it yeah i i totally agree like one of the beautiful things and advantages of having skills like this is that you really can make the world a better place for those around you and and like jameson said i do think there's a risk that your peers may grow resentful because they know like they know that your technical skills might not be up to their it might not match theirs unless you're just so good at soft skills that they're they're like oh question asker they're we know they're not really pulling their weight technically but man do they tell a good

story and so we forgive them your soft skills are so developed uh yeah that even the people whose skulls are in your wake are just praising you with their last breath i can't wait to be part of your furniture it will be an honor so yeah i think that's probably the biggest risk here is that your your co-workers will resent you as they come to terms with the hard cold reality that people who are great at self-promotion and great at communication and collaboration and interpersonal skills get recognized over those that don't, despite a skills disparity. That's kind of sad, but I think you can definitely apply your skills to make sure that they get the recognition they

deserve and it'll help level you all up together. But then in terms of like career cap, it's not happening. You know, I read between the lines here in this question, like, will I be able to compete? You know, it's like, yep, because the playing field you're competing on is not the playing field you think. It is not about raw code output, especially as you grow more senior in your career. leadership especially outside of engineering is going to expect you to have these skills in fact quite the opposite your co-workers who you're looking at and thinking they outperform me technically they're the ones i think that need to be concerned about career growth in the long term because ultimately without these skills that you have they will be the ones that are limited so

so this is this is like quite your view that you brought into this question not you jameson but the question asker is really quite the opposite i think of what reality is i i mean there are things you will never be able to accomplish that that folks with more technical skills would be able to and i don't think you can you can't like hide that you don't know what you're doing forever beyond well you can but the higher up you go i feel like there's going to be more of a spotlight on output and delivery and... Oh, I don't think so. I disagree with that.

Really? Mm-hmm. I mean, I believe the higher you go, while there may be more of a spotlight or more demands on your output, the type of output that you need to produce will shift in nature. It's not just going to be

how many features can this person crank out or how many bugs can they fix or how much code do they write. It'll be things like what business impacting output can they deliver? you know like what partnerships can they forge what processes can they define that help the rest of the team perform better how can they motivate an entire team to deliver more than they would without you like these kinds of things and that's where frankly that's where the biggest

recognition lies is in those kinds of outputs this is my opinion yeah i mean that sounds a lot like management as a career path it's certainly like if you go into management it's like 90 percent that right or maybe 90 might be a little high but like 70 but there's also a bunch of other career paths like technical leadership you know like i've worked with some of the world's most amazing really senior engineers very tenured and i gotta tell you they navigate a lot of soft skills challenges understanding competing priorities between teams understanding social dynamics understanding. But did you feel like they had weak technical skills? No, they were pretty darn good technically. However, I'll tell you, not all of them. Here's an example. My team was facing a

very challenging intermittent bug in our software at one of these mega tech co's. And so management knew that we were struggling with this for like a week. And they said, why don't we bring in a principal engineer to help consult and get you guys back on track? And I said, great, bring them in and that principal engineer sat down with us for like four hours and at the end of the four hours we were no better off they had no idea what was causing the problem like they didn't help at all but the choirs of angels that you heard when they walked into the office it was soothing it was nice yeah lifted you up quite a bit uh yes so like it i just don't i don't know also like your ability to crank out code right now three years of experience you're cranking out the code

do an average technical skill great um the kinds of technical problems that you will be called upon to solve in the future might actually be a little different than just cranking out code you know the kinds of technical problems will be more like cross-team dependencies architecture you know systems thinking systems problem solving things like that and maybe you will be great at those because the same skills that make you good at interpersonal relationships might also make you good at inter-process communication they share some of the very same first letters those words uh interesting i don't know that's a theory i think you're a little bit further on the spectrum of like i feel like i i want the hard technical skills to maybe matter a little bit more than you

think they do for the future career growth fair enough but maybe i'm wrong and maybe i need to work on my soft skills enough so that i can understand how right you are let's can you hear the charisma in my voice jameson obviously i'm right yes i can't i know you're i know you're probably right and i think the truth is probably somewhere in the middle you know at the end of the day like no amount of charisma and smiles and glints in your eyes and that little twinkle sound that makes when you smile and your white teeth show, you know, like no amount of that can compensate for just a lack of technical skill.

But I'm really latching onto the fact that it says I have average technical skills. Okay, so you're not worried like there's a thing they'll be asked to do that they just cannot deliver it. When that happens, it really is career limiting, no matter how friendly you are about it. If you just can't deliver, you know, but.

You can't deliver with such a winning smile though. I'm going to write this down as delivered. because you just, that smile, it's just captivating. Yeah. Well, have we answered this question? Well, let me just wrap up by saying there is a cynical view here. And the cynical view is that you can always find someone

who's willing to hire you and promote you if you say the right things. And we all know someone like this who kind of climbed the ranks but really doesn't have the skills or the contributions to do so. so like i would hope you would avoid that path like i would hope you would continue to develop your technical skills and be a genuinely solid contributor but then complement it with these

great skills as well yeah okay that's all i had to say about that all right well if people want to hear more of all you have to say what can they do they can go to soft skills.audio and click the ask a question button we get so many of these questions every week and we just love them thank you so much for sending them in we really appreciate it we do appreciate it thank you and we will answer all of them or we'll be dead and there'll be nothing you can do about it except replace us with someone who has better soft skills uh that's true strike that we'll do all of them okay yeah that's better than dying anyway yeah all right thank you so much for listening we will catch you next week

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