Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 329: Falling behind and can't get a management job

Episode Date: November 7, 2022

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I’m a few months into my first full time job, and the learning curve is immense. I feel like I’m falling behind and not keeping up with my work, as well as not understanding things that should be simple. I often feel I am wasting time on a lot of work that I do. How do I know if this is just an anxious feeling, or if I am legitimately falling behind? I am currently a staff engineer and have a career goal to move into management. I have been with my current employer for 15+ years and positions to promote into just don’t come up. The tech i work with is not very technical, there is no coding and its incredibly specialized. I have applied and interviewed for manager positions outside of my team/company and i get the same feedback that i am well qualified, but there is someone with previous manager experience that beats me. I see it being forever if not impossible to get a manager position due to people needing to retire etc. If i go to another engineering position i feel like i would need to start over in a junior spot. What other options do i have.

it takes more than completing ticket number 666 on halloween by accident to be a great software engineer this is episode 329 of the soft skills engineering podcast and i'm your host jameson dance and i'm your spooky ghost dave smith the ghost of the host soft skills engineering is a weekly advice show where we answer your non-technical questions about the technical field of software development and make belated references to halloween because we can't we can't let it go it's not late it's just so good it's 51 weeks early yeah we just want the spirit to last the whole year that's right do you want to thank our patrons yeah let's do it we'd like to thank those that are contributing at the level that gets them a shout out every single week they are

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for his house to keep the hot stream halloween going all year long and we will read your name allowed on this show every week and if you contribute any dollar amount we'll give you an invitation to our slack community where you can have a great time and meet a bunch of like-minded fun silly intelligent and great smelling people slack is ab testing that feature and we've we've gotten in on it yeah the smell we're in the treatment status this episode is sponsored by compiler which is an original podcast from red hat devoted to simplifying tech topics providing insight for a new generation of it professionals you can hear more about them in the middle of the show thank you to compiler for sponsoring you want to read our first question dave you bet i do all

right this comes from an anonymous listener who says i'm a few months into my first full-time job and the learning curve is immense i feel like i'm falling behind and not keeping up with my work as well as not understanding things that should be simple i often feel i am wasting time on a lot of work that i do how do i know if this is just an anxious feeling or if i am legitimately falling behind yeah you could so you could feel like you're falling behind or not feel like you're falling behind and you could in reality be falling behind and in reality not be falling behind oh yes you're wondering you have a two by two truth table which quadrant am i in yeah exactly i so clearly feel like i'm falling behind but am i actually right so that one you're in that row

Now, which column are you in? It's a coin toss, 50-50. Yeah, flip a coin and then act as if. Exactly. Whatever it tells you. You are not falling behind. Oh, good. Yeah, not keeping up with work,

not understanding things that should be simple. I will ask questions that I cannot get answers to, but what evidence do you have that you are falling behind? Learning curve is immense. that makes quite a bit of sense to me as a first full-time job even in a new job the learning curve can be immense when it's not the first full-time job so yeah there can be a bit of a shock because you're learning all the stuff that's specific to your company and all the stuff that is kind of more generic about having a job as a software developer as well i think i think you could

answer this question that you just asked pretty reliably which is what is your evidence that you're falling behind. And it is a looming, growing sense of existential dread lurking above your head. And what more evidence do you need? I got to where I am today by paying attention to my gut. And my gut tells me I'm falling behind because I feel bad. This feels like a good case to pull out the old talk to your manager advice. That's not what I thought you're gonna say oh quit your job advice pull out the old quit your job yep no you're definitely no i think this has a stop the only choice is to get out of there before they realize now you've settled the question is this just a feeling or am i legitimately falling behind

you are now behind question answered your your manager should have some idea of whether they think you are falling behind or not and and again there's still like there's this maybe impossible to define actual objective standard of falling behind your manager thinking you are falling behind is a pretty decent proxy for that in terms of like impact on your career yeah so they might not know what you do but also that'll tell you more than just the feeling of existential dread that you have hanging over you this is the question that no one wants to ask their manager hey manager am i falling behind well you know i didn't think so until you asked this question it's weird you have enough time to think about that

it's weird you're not so busy that yeah you just can't even stop to consider yeah huh i'm gonna be watching you yeah you know i have i actually have a a suggestion for how to word that question in such a way that it doesn't plant a seed of concern in your manager's mind tell me well it's pretty normal it says a few months into your job i'm gonna i'm gonna assume we're like 90 days yeah it's pretty normal to sit down with your manager and say hey i've been here 90 days i'm having a great time love the team love the leadership on the team just you know you got to insert a little brown nosing in there a little butt kissing um yeah i'd like to get some candid feedback on how i'm doing in my first 90 days you know am i performing up to your expectations

is there any areas for improvement you know and and just throw that question out there that way instead of instead of implicitly anchoring the conversation around whether or not you're doing bad because what you'll hear in response to a question of hey i'd like to check in after 90 days and get feedback on my work is you might actually get some positive feedback like hey i've been very happy with how fast you've ramped up you know but if all you do is say i want to know how bad i'm doing on a scale of zero to bad you know you're just gonna get discussions about whether it's bad or not so i wouldn't use that yeah maybe after you get into it you could say like thank you for the feedback about all those things what about what about the the amount of

output are you yeah exactly if you don't get the answer you said like you can sneak it in yeah if all they do is talk about your shining personality and you're like, yeah, but I could still be falling behind. Yeah. And to be fair, I have been in this situation before. The bigger the company for me, the harder it is to ramp up or stated more empirically, the higher the effort to come up to speed and be productive, I found, because there's just more to know. And after about six weeks, I sat down with a more senior engineer and said, hey, is it normal to feel completely unproductive after six weeks. And he just looked at me, the other engineer looked at me and just laughed and said, it's normal to feel that way after 12 weeks. And I was like, oh, I don't feel

so bad. Well, good. See ya. Not that I'm feeling unproductive. Yeah, no, I was asking for a friend. Yeah. Not understanding things that should be simple. Yeah. Not keeping up with my work. So that could be a bunch of things that could be you being uh not as experienced at estimating or or maybe not yet learning that it's always longer than you think kind of thing like what is what is keeping up mean is this is this you not hitting self-imposed timelines maybe there's something to improve on there there are external deadlines then then that tells you something else but uh then then it's more about well what do i need to change to meet those not how do i give more accurate estimates not understanding things that should be simple yeah i wonder about i wonder

about that you know as someone who's brand new to the field it's probably very hard to calibrate um what you think should be simple because in software i think what if i've learned anything in the last 20 some odd years is that things that look simple on the surface can often be very complex yeah i wonder if this is about comparing themselves to how it appears other people they work with understand these things like oh sub subsystem x i can't even begin to fathom what it does and someone else has been working on it for like five years right right i was just thinking they were given a task to vertically center a div it's getting easier all the time dave as i know css standards all you have to do is learn this whole new css framework yeah hey remember

flexbox yeah that's like now learn grid as well and on top of all the other css basics look it'll be fine wait a minute maybe you feel like you're falling behind because every developer is falling behind as technology gets more and more complex you could okay here's what you could do you could project this outward and say it is the world's fault that this stuff is not simple enough for me to understand like hey look everybody there's this complicated thing here and and i'm super smart clearly i should be able to understand hard stuff and i still don't get it how do we make it simpler and that's where you go i don't know i can't even understand it how could i make it any simpler wasting time on a lot of work that i do we just all accept the fate that we're doomed

Yeah, I wonder if this is a big company thing, because I feel like there's a lot of ways to waste time trying to get things done in a big company that isn't related to the skill of doing the thing. It's like, oh, you got to connect to this secret VPN that is hidden inside a wardrobe that needs like this poem recited to connect to it or something. There's just all these weird access things to get through. but if it is like i need to vertically center a div i don't know anything about css i could see that being maybe it feels like wasting time because you have to build up so much background knowledge and context to understand yeah you can imagine that's true of every single task when you're at a new company for your first full-time software development job every task has all this stuff you have to learn behind the scenes because undoubtedly whatever training you came into this company with did not prepare you for the specifics of the application you're working on and so yeah you're like oh i actually don't know how to add a string to the end of a string in this language

well i'm going to spend 20 minutes making sure i understand that okay you know now you know what's the next thing and it's like 10 more things like that and you're like all right i made a button yeah so for this one i would try and pay attention to the more senior folks on the team and try and look at what kind of patterns they use for thinking about solving problems not just look at what they know that you don't know because you can't really transplant that knowledge into your head that just comes through experience but but often there will be kind of generic things that aren't know this system well that might help you save time like um i don't know maybe maybe you write a test first and that's very helpful in this problem something like that maybe you write

a design doc to help yourself understand the thing and make sure you get feedback on it or maybe yeah learn i'm trying to think of good what what good patterns would be off the top of my head and failing but they're they're there i'm sure well i know a good pattern you should probably think about what type exactly what you're seeing on the screen into stack overflow and then get ready with your copy and paste button it is interesting i feel like i maybe it's telling me something that I don't dwell on stack overflow as much anymore. I need to branch out more into less familiar territory. Or maybe it means you just already know everything. Yeah, that's probably it. That seems less, much less likely. Have we answered this question? I don't know. I mean,

it's so without more detail, we of course can't give specific advice here, but it is very normal for your first job for the first 90 days to feel unproductive. I will say that that's for sure. and so if you really want to know if you're productive or not you just have to ask the people around you because chances are there's a whole bunch of activity going on that you just can't see or understand yet because you just don't have the context for it you know yeah but it'll come in time and uh it's normal to be slow when you're learning so i wouldn't beat yourself up about it too bad but there is a chance that you are actually falling behind and performing badly in which in which case it would be very good to know and then get concrete concrete steps to move

toward improving that so yeah you you would not it would not be fun to be blindsided by that you know yeah well after six months we've decided and by the way we didn't tell you this at all but we've decided you're too slow to work here yeah i guess that's the good point about uh you know where you aren't in that truth table which You're not in the totally falling behind, totally thinks you're not falling behind quadrant. That's the most dangerous place to be. Yeah, that's where you get blindsided. You can eliminate that one.

Yep. Jameson, have you heard about that podcast from Red Hat called Compiler? I want to paint you a mind picture. Imagine a podcast about technical stuff. Oh. Podcast with shining, amazing production value and interstitial music and expensive NPR quality microphones and interesting knowledgeable guests so nothing like our podcast yeah in some ways our our inverse all of these things are true compiler comes to you from the makers of

command line heroes and is hosted by angela andrews and brent simono yeah i've listened to a bunch of their episodes one of them i checked out was on technology stacks and it was kind of a breadth first overview of front end and databases and back end and all the different layers that go into building applications. It was great. This series in particular was a really good foundational intro for someone who wants to understand the world of software development outside their niche. For me, I like the episode on operating systems, specifically where they dive into the difference between user space and kernel space. If this sounds interesting to you, and it should, then go listen to Compiler in your favorite podcast player. We'll also have a link in the

show notes that you can check out. Thank you to Compiler for your support. All right. All right. Should I read our next question? go for it okay this is from an anonymous listener who says i am currently a staff engineer and have a career goal to move into management i have been with my current employer for 15 plus years and positions to promote into management just don't come up the tech i work with is not very technical there's no coding and it's incredibly specialized i have applied and interviewed for manager positions outside of my team and company and i get the same feedback that i am well qualified but there is someone with previous manager experience that beats me i see it being forever

if not impossible to get a manager position due to people needing to retire etc if i go to another engineering position i feel like i would need to start over in a junior spot what other options do i have okay interesting so we'll have to okay 15 years yeah long time yeah really long time at one company yeah in this day and age very very long time okay i'm trying not to say what i'm thinking like it there is like the cynical side of me wants to wants to say something that's not very encouraging what like like they're they're correct or something like that they're right you aren't a good fit i i mean i think man having having accumulated 15 years of experience in a not very technical no coding highly specialized not transferable skill set will

be a headwind in your career search i think i'm very concerned about that yeah i don't think it's insurmountable but boy that is very challenging when you when you look at yourself on the job market and i'm just kind of writing off your own company as a as a career advancement opportunity just based on what's been said here in the question you know yeah yeah like getting promoted at this place is not an option yeah so assuming assuming that's not an option then i really do worry that you you may have to start over at a junior spot like not not super junior though you're saying before you move into management you need to go work as an engineer somewhere else maybe as a developer somewhere else yeah in in my experience i i don't think

i've ever seen someone hire an outside candidate to be an engineering manager who has no management experience but i see all the time internal promotions to manager or i don't even want to say promotion necessarily but i've seen people change tracks internal to a company from individual contributor to engineering manager i've seen that a dozen times probably but i've seen zero instances of a company being willing to hire someone into a management role that has no management experience is that just a unique perspective on my part or do you think have you seen otherwise no i've i've seen the same thing that it's it's i think we've talked about this before it's sort of like the breaking into the field as a developer thing where it's really

hard to get that first job and then once you have the first job everyone wants to hire a junior developer who has already worked somewhere else but getting that first job can be tricky i think that's definitely true of management as well i get the same feedback that i'm well qualified there's someone with previous manager experience that beats me so part of me thinks that it's hard enough i have been in the position of trying to hire an engineering manager and it's it's really hard to find great ems it feels harder than to hire great developers maybe it's just because the population is smaller in general but i i feel like that works in your favor in a way because that means there might be more willingness to look at non-traditional backgrounds where you

haven't been an engineering manager directly but maybe you can present the work that you've done as a staff engineer in in a way that relates it to the job of an engineering manager so maybe you i don't know maybe you've been responsible for a roadmap or something or maybe you've mentored a lot of developers or if you've you've helped make hiring decisions and helped build a team that way and stuff like there's some things that you won't have done and and you won't be able to say i have managed a team of n people for m number of years but you can say i've i've done this subset of the job in this way for this long to make it seem like you're not just like fresh off the street like you have some of the skills yeah yeah that's a really good point because you could you could probably

break down the management responsibilities into what like 8 10 12 different responsibilities and you may very well be able to demonstrate that you have some experience on a good number of those even if you haven't been handed officially the title and that'd be a good growth mindset approach to this problem i think yeah i feel kind of flippant saying this but i part of me wants to say keep interviewing and and eventually it'll it'll work uh there's possibility qualified there's some previous manager experience that beats me you you might find a flexible small early stage startup that's willing to take a risk on someone you know and and you might you might be able to create a win-win situation where you say look i understand you're taking a risk

i'm willing to take an offer that others might not be willing to take because to me it's valuable to get into this management position yeah forever if not impossible to get a manager position due to people need to retire to start all over yeah i i think there is a possibility i guess i'm kind of ignoring the fact that the technical experience is kind of niche yeah and i wouldn't discount your technical experience as an engineering manager and the fact that you're a staff engineer now tells me that you've actually been doing a bunch of leadership already yeah now i flip from cynic to Hopeless Optimist. I have another idea to consider. What is it? Well, I touched on this briefly, but to get a little more concrete, you are a staff engineer. Now I'm going to assume

that that means that you have a people manager that you and your team report to, but that you are also responsible for leading this team, at least in part. And so maybe you could partner with your people manager to perform certain duties that are management adjacent, that are close enough that you could declare honestly to a prospective employer that you are indeed experienced in engineering management. You know, things like helping with performance appraisals, things with conducting promotion assessments, things like, I can't think of any other examples, but those are two like, these are two places. There's probably more to it though. Yeah. I mean, imagine the possibilities are endless, but if you partner very closely with

your engineering manager, you can often offload some of their work and also support them. And it really does create a win-win. And I did this for several years when I was in an individual contributor capacity. I worked very closely with engineering managers at multiple levels and they simultaneously really appreciated it. And it gave me essentially management experience. and actually it was quite it was really quite nice because i got the experience but didn't have all the responsibility hanging over my head so that's kind of the flip side of of find a way to express the experience that you already have through a lens of management you're saying find a way to nudge your job a little bit closer towards some of the work of management yeah do

some job crafting now i do think though that yeah that you are still going to have the headwind of having spent 15 years on a not coding, not very technical job, I'm going to assume you're doing like architecture and systems design and things like that, which is also applicable. And so I don't really know how to overcome that. And it could very well be that you end up needing to get a technical lead kind of position at another company where you can then transition in that company into management. But I don't think you're going to have to start over from a junior engineer spot which is what the question asker was concerned about yeah i'm also assuming that it hasn't necessarily been the whole 15 plus years that they have not written code and worked

on this not very technical incredibly specialized stack maybe that's a more recent thing and they have some previous base of experience in the trenches with with hands on the keyboard typing out code it just hasn't happened as much recently i mean there are engineering manager interviews that don't get deep into the technical side of it yeah it depends on the place there's different philosophies of how strong of a developer an engineering manager should be yeah there's wildly different differing philosophies which will work to your advantage because you'll be able to find people that yeah yeah you'll be able to find somewhere where that's okay because you're not supposed to be on the forefront of writing the production code yeah exactly so could work

out well well have we answered the question i think so it's a challenging situation probably doable gonna have to get creative to make it work because you're not on the water slide speaking of get creative there's an avenue we haven't explored which is it's impossible for me to get a manager position at this place due to people needing to retire and you could uh you got a parent trap them into retirement you have to do hijinks until you force people into retirement to open up spots you got something in mind no i don't know bees i feel like there's always bees involved in hijinks there's something there about uh it being easier to find these opportunities at a place that's growing a lot if it's if it's not expanding then you are kind of limited by the slots opening up

But if a company is growing quite a bit, then they're always kind of desperate for ways to scale out teams. So maybe get a job at a company that's growing fast. Yeah, that's a good point. You're saying find someone desperate enough that they won't actually look at your experience. Is that what you're saying? No, just like, I don't know. You mentioned a tech lead or team lead role. If you can find that or a senior individual contributor role at a company that's growing quite a bit,

I feel like raising your hand and saying, I want to move into management could go better there because there are a lot more spots opening up. It's not limited by people moving out of those spots. That's right. More of them are being created. The beautiful thing about joining a super fast growing company is that there will be opportunities to do engineering management kind of things just because there's no one doing them. Yeah. It's just chaos. Yeah. It's total chaos. And you can leverage that chaos for your own good. And then pretty soon you can say after six months of doing that like hey i've essentially been doing engineering management work why don't we just go ahead and give me the title and they'll be like no problem let me call hr okay it's done

you know yeah yay verily you are an engineering manager all right now i think we've answered the question all right good call what should people do if they would like their own questions answered go to softskills.audio and click the ask a question button where you can submit in our wonderful form all your questions and thank you so much to everyone who does that we love reading your questions there are many of them and the more there are the more my self-esteem just goes up keep it coming does that include the answered ones like if we get through the backlog a little bit does your self-esteem go down yeah it's a perverse incentive so okay yeah okay so if we just stop answering them and let them build up that'll really that'll turn you around that that'll

be good for this shareholder meeting but it won't be good for the next one when people it's a good short-term value you know yeah it's like running a modern public corporation always looking for that quick win at the expense of long-term you need a golden parachute somehow out of the podcast yeah definitely there's something there yeah leave it to the next person yeah walk away with your huge bonus right i'll walk away with millions you'll inherit whoever's next will just inherit a massive pile and everyone wins all right thank you for listening we will catch you next week We'll be right back.