Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 330: Mixed signals and not ready for senior

Episode Date: November 14, 2022

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Dan asks, Hey friends! How do you get ahead when your manager gives you mixed signals? I was told there would be lots of opportunities to work on exciting new projects when I interviewed for this role. After six months this hasn’t really happened and I’m beginning to get concerned it never will. Half the team is working on ‘new things’ while the rest of us are working on maintenance work. This is meant to be rotated but my colleagues tell me this isn’t the case. I’ve asked my manager in our one on ones if I can work on the next piece of new work but have got some odd responses. They told me if I want to work on better projects I should look in my managers calendar and invite myself to anything that looks good. This seems bizarre. Is it normal to lurk your managers calendar and just turn up at meetings that ‘look good’? I’ve worked at small but mature companies for about 3 years now, and I feel that I’m soon coming to the point where you would expect me to be a senior engineer given my years of experience (which I’m aiming for!). I’ve struggled a lot to come up with ideas to add value to the team outside of the standard sprint tickets. I know these things aren’t “required” in the job scope, but often with teams at smaller companies, I worry my manager might think I’m not ready for a senior role if I’m not actively thinking outside the box about the team’s goals beyond the tickets I’ve been assigned. I do have a lot of initiative and independence, but the thing is I’m just not very creative. As much as I love tech, it’s difficult for me to dream of non-trivial ideas that would actually make an impact. I feel that if I want to progress in my career, I’m going to have to get better at seeing the bigger picture. What tips might you have?

it takes more than 30 minutes creating a flow chart and another three and a half hours to line up all the arrows to be a great engineer this is soft skills engineering episode 330 i'm your host dave smith i'm your host jameson dance soft skills engineering is a weekly advice podcast for software developers about all the non-technical stuff like getting those darn arrows to line up and minimize the number of times they cross each other is that what they mean by visual programming i don't know it's where you create your uml diagrams and then visually make them aligned just getting all the arrows just your ascii diagrams yeah the yeah the the the neatness of the arrows corresponds with the service level you can offer of availability what if what if you

created a software business that essentially is like a no code business but in the pricing tiers are actually based on the quality of the code it outputs where it's like do you want the no bug tier that's more expensive than like the occasional intermittent bug tier looks like we'll have to get on a sales call to discuss your needs which is a catch like a secret phrase that means this will cost you five to six figures right do you want the pricing tier where you get five percent uncaught exceptions or one percent uncaught well the problem is we might be competing with the developers they could get because they might be able to produce similar levels of exceptions imagine imagine having to ship software that has

a known and predictable bug rate like that'd be so hard and it's greater than zero next hackathon project yeah greater yes yeah known and predictable bug rate of zero that's not what this is about and also i want to thank our patrons thank you to valentine at datafold santa hopar noah frazier lobe kent c dodds memester josh jenny kim owen shardle craig motlin i love mavis the stochastic parrot alice jost that was cheating jameson land fair that was pretty good i got that go go go part down kashokton ohio patreon.com.au we're hiring ira chan monkey face emoji jonathan king testing is documenting.org oladapo fadie will angel rocket ship emoji but rocket ship is hyphenated

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all right Jameson do you want to read our first question? yeah this is from a listener named dan this one is a blast from the past from 2020 so dan this advice might not be timely anymore for you but i hope it helps someone else poor dan hey friends yeah poor dan how do you get ahead when your manager gives you mixed signals i was told there would be lots of opportunities to work on exciting new projects when i interviewed for this role after six months this hasn't really happened and i'm beginning to get concerned it never will half the team is working on quote new things while the rest of us are working on

maintenance work this is meant to be rotated but my colleagues tell me this isn't the case i've asked my manager in our one-on-ones if i can work on the next piece of new work but have got some odd responses they told me if i want to work on a better project i should look in their calendar and invite myself to anything that looks good oh this seems bizarre is it normal to lurk your manager's calendar and just turn up at meetings that quote look good that's a little weird i guess your manager didn't specify the definition of good so you could show up at some pretty interesting times yeah i mean show up at all the other one-on-ones yeah or i saw that you had a severance discussion on your calendar so i showed up now i'm part of a new thing i saw you had a

block scheduled for attending the doctor and uh i just thought i'd come along come along with you check that out yeah yeah i'm glad you got that looked at yeah you had to go pick up your car well we got to know each other better on the ride there and back have you seen rotations like this that are like quote rotations but actually aren't no i i haven't seen i've seen rotations done where a team gets assigned just bug fixing or you know there's a rotation of people who just fix bugs i've never seen it be promised to rotate and then not but i have seen it exist and work yeah i haven't ever seen that get paused either i wonder if it's meant to be rotated but my colleagues tell me this isn't the case

huh i was promised a rotation back in 82 i'm still here um this might be tough to get going because i assume the people working on new things will not be pumped about rotating into work on maintenance work yeah that's why the rotation stalled out it's like oh yeah we yeah we rotated once uh and then never did it again because the people who rotated off all quit. Yeah. So now we start you on maintenance and when you threaten to quit, we'll rotate you into the new stuff. Yeah. That's weird. Maybe that's a thing you can push them to solve, but you're asking also about, is it, is it weird to lurk on their calendar? Yes. That, that is weird. I wonder if they're just super busy and feel like they don't

have time to sit down and think about opportunities for for dan so they're trying to tell dan like i don't know look around find something and and my look at my calendar is is one way you can find something i don't know i guess i'm trying to imagine a world where this makes sense but it doesn't make sense to me yeah exciting new projects so i have seen that dynamic in general a lot where there's there's the exciting new work and then there's the maintenance work and someone wants to go from the maintenance work to the exciting new work and that can be tough to pull off

and is sometimes dependent on forces outside of your control but also like a lot of things benefits from you saying I would like to do this thing I've seen cases where the maintenance project was like too critical or there wasn't an opening on the new team

then you had to wait for someone for an opening to to open up to the non-maintenance stuff can you just finish the maintenance work yeah right just finish it yeah like i don't know you take your car in they fix it why can't you just do that with the code take the car into the shop fix all the maintenance items and then you just maintain it and then you're done maintaining it yeah listen just it's been maintained yeah just maintain it just go maintain it really hard for like a week and then it's maintained i've actually had several people ask me what when i worked at a megacorp with thousands of engineers working on their their e-commerce experience i've had a lot of people not a lot

a handful of people ask me like isn't it done like what what do what do people do there because the site is there and it it works like i can go buy stuff there's just this hidden world of like i don't know so i'm trying to think of a metaphor and failing how about compare it to software yeah it's like a class with private methods i guess you can't see them but they always they somehow change even though the code doesn't change well yeah because you keep the you keep the public interface the same and you just wildly refactor the underside yeah i mean actually fun to give you something to do it is true because i also worked for a megacorp and it seems like a big portion of the company's

engineers were constantly working on a deprecation and replacement effort you know like this service doesn't do what we need anymore or the volume of traffic it needs to handle has exceeded its capacity or we need a new feature built but product thought it would be easy just to add one button on the screen but it turns out we're gonna have to rewrite seven microservices and build a whole new like data layer and so we're doing that now to get that button you know yeah or maybe and maybe it's just the case that when software gets big enough even the tiniest tasks just take so much work that you just have this huge team that is working on like one percent of the roadmap that they would have worked on when they were smaller

yeah it just takes a hundred people and they can get done in a year what used to take a couple days but that's maintenance for you yeah it's interesting there's just so much entropy it seems like it would be like it's it's software it's this artifact that doesn't change itself i don't know i guess we're getting off topic a little a little shouldn't ever do that but yeah it's weird you can you can put it out there and then it just it just doesn't it ceases to function at some point it's a weird thing to think about ones and zeros even in the simplest of worlds it ceases to function because of outside stimuli like oh we depend on a library that is now has moved on inversion scheme and now has security vulnerabilities if we don't fix it

we're gonna get attacked successfully you know yeah so like even in that scenario yeah and then sometimes they're like well the api changed so now we got to rewrite our part if everyone could just stop changing yeah that's what i was thinking we wouldn't have to change our software listen we're gonna do a we're gonna do a handshake with all the hackers out there look just stop trying to break into our software systems then we won't have to rev these libraries anymore they're fine as they are and then our companies can lay us all off it'll be good then we just have to go to work on those pesky data center people them with their machines that like need ongoing work oh yeah like come on hardware that can't you just plug it in forever well i feel

like i've failed to produce a good answer uh i mean okay so even though it's the case that we haven't seen this specific scenario i have seen bait and switch all the time in hiring it happens a lot people are like yeah this is the best place to work ever and then you get there and then you're like oh didn't realize i was going to be a visual basic developer oh by best place to work ever i meant that only to apply during the time period of our interview with with you and i like this moment is so great now it has reverted back to normal i could not have anticipated this but after the interview it went right back to the way it was before so i mean bait and switch is pretty common you know that you've come to learn that while you're

interviewing you have the most leverage you'll ever have because your company is trying to convince you to join them and your options are really it's pretty easy to walk away from that you know, assuming you already have a job or other opportunities, it's pretty easy to say, no, no, thank you. And the company knows that. So they're going to put their best foot forward. They're going to offer the most attractive, appealing situation they can, but then reality just can't help, but come in and, and dash that, that fake offer to pieces. And now your leverage has changed. And so if you want something to change, you kind of, I believe you have to be willing to use that leverage. And unfortunately, that leverage is leaving, I think. And you don't

have to drop that bomb on your manager's desk on day one and just say, look, this isn't what I thought it was. I'm quitting. But you could say to your manager, listen, you told me there was a rotation. And your manager's, I mean, in this case, you already said that. Your manager's response is, yeah, take a look at my calendar. If you see something interesting, just hop on there. Which is like delegating the only part of the manager's job they shouldn't delegate. by by rotation they meant the earth continues to rotate there is a rotation somewhere in the universe um i should look and it's possible that you could occupy the exact same spot in space

as the other team doing the fun new work at some point if you get on the rotation correctly yeah you just i mean you won't do the work but yeah and and of course rotating you just do that by getting on looking at your manager's calendar to find out where the what latitude and longitude that needs to be but that that honestly is a really really weird reply and maybe let's just assume it's genuine and your manager is like look i don't know what you'd be interested in there's a lot of new projects that come through why don't you just tell me what you'd be interested in and so i mean i i would be tempted to give to treat that at face value and actually try it take a look at your manager's calendar just you know every morning look at your own calendar look at

your manager's calendar and see if there's any interesting projects on there you just pick between the two you say today i want my manager's calendar but it is it absolutely is bizarre and and no it's not normal to lurk on your manager's calendar and show up to meetings that look good but i i would try it yeah maybe this is another way of saying um like you said i don't know what you're interested in and you seem you might have the other side of that problem which is well i don't know what you're interested in manager like what's important to you what kind of upcoming problems do you see what kind of opportunities what's what's the vision or at least what are you doing next week yeah like ideally your manager has some understanding of upcoming work that needs

to happen or at least upcoming opportunities and can can enumerate some of them to you if you have some idea you want to go pitch to them that's a possibility too but it's probably easier to move from the maintenance stuff to the new thing if you're solving a problem that is already important to your manager yeah that's i think i would probably ask around a whole bunch of other people too and just say hey i'm trying i'm looking for something cool to get on to but this just doesn't sound like the super supportive kind of environment and honestly i think you're whoever hired you and promised you this either they misled you on purpose or you misunderstood what they said one way or another something went wrong in the hiring

process here they had the best of intentions i'm sure they intended you to work on the new thing. Yeah. Well, have we answered the question? I think sort of. It's going to be a rough situation. I'm not sure that's a great answer here. You know? Yeah. It's a crappy situation, I think. Well, we did. I mean, technically their question was, is it weird? And we did say yes. Yes. Okay. There you go. Perfect. Question answered. Also, sometimes rotation looks like rotating to a new company yeah that's true it's like epicycles is kepler the the dude who no galileo galileo was the the person who overthrew that theory right epicycle a small circle whose center moves around the circumference of a larger one

i mean that was that was a thing in ptolemaic astronomy right it was the thing before they before the heliocentric model oh they thought everything was swirling around the earth yeah and then they invented all these weird like loops and this is a sign of a good joke when you have to look up something on wikipedia and then spend a while explaining it out loud and then by the time you read the last paragraph you have a good laugh yeah oh the payoff oh that wikipedia page tied it all together nothing made sense till i saw this sigma formula at the bottom a sub j times epsilon raised to the i power oh i get it now funny a hearty laugh 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, both. The beauty is it's totally free for engineers, 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, do you want to read our next question? Yes, I do. This comes from an anonymous listener who says, I've worked at small but mature companies for

about three years now. And I feel that I'm soon coming to the point where you would expect me to be a senior engineer given my years of experience, which I'm aiming for. I've struggled a lot to come up with ideas to add value to the team outside of the standard sprint tickets. I know these things aren't, quote, required in the job scope, but often with teams at smaller companies, I worry my manager might think I'm not ready for a senior role if I'm not actively thinking outside the box about the team's goals beyond the tickets I've been assigned. I do have a lot of initiative and independence, but the thing is, I'm just not very creative. As much as I love tech, it's difficult for me to dream of non-trivial ideas that would actually make an impact. I feel that if I want to

progress in my career, I'm going to have to get better at seeing the bigger picture. What tips might you have? Hmm. I like how the question asker described the companies as small but mature, which I feel like, you know, that's how I want to describe myself. Small but mature. i'm you know short for my age but very mature yeah senior is so context dependent one way to get a senior job is get a different job and then there is guaranteed some company out there that will hire you well we live in a new world now yeah maybe maybe before last month yeah maybe uh maybe anyways but but standards vary so much between companies that it's it's i would say fairly common to get hired at a different place with a higher job title especially

yeah when the job title is senior oh yeah it's kind of lost all meaning absolutely i don't know if it's lost meaning it just there's just no shared definition there is no shared definition In fact, there's quite the opposite. There is a huge, broad interpretation of what senior means. You know, to some companies, it means, you know, one year of experience plus. And to other companies, it might mean 10 years of experience. At some companies, it means you're essentially a tech lead leading a team of engineers, maybe eight engineers. At other companies, it just means, you know, I've been writing code for a little bit longer than other people on the team. So that's the good news for you is if you really want the senior title,

and that's what's important to you, it's very easy to get. And I think this is a good time to tell the story where I was in a director role and one of our engineers came to my CTO and said, hey, I've noticed some of the other people have senior in their title. Can I have senior in my title? And my CTO picked up the phone and dialed the HR leader at the company and said, hey, could you please change in our payroll system? Could you just change this person's title as a senior software engineer? The HR person says, yep, clickety, clickety, click, pressed enter. And And then CTO hung up the phone and said, congratulations, you're now a senior software engineer. So that's the good news.

I mean, probably you don't, the way this question is phrased, I'm assuming that it's not quite that simple where they currently work. Yeah. But yeah, depending on how much you want to stay at this company or how willing you are to get a different job, that is a solution. I also, this question asker, I also don't think they're asking how can they get the word senior bolted onto their title. I think what they're asking is, how do I develop the creativity and big picture vision to be able to do things that are more impactful at the team level instead of just doing my individual duties? I feel like I get a lot more satisfaction out of fixing something or solving someone's problem or kind of like implementing a thing than coming up with the vision of what should happen. So I don't think I'm honestly this great, very great at this either of like looking at what is and seeing what should be, which is sort of what you're describing. Thinking outside the box about the team's goals beyond the tickets I have been assigned. So one thing you could do, which is more scope than thinking about the individual tickets you've been assigned, but still sort of defined, is you could try and take some ownership over the thing at the next level above tickets.

Maybe there's some shared project that you're working on and previously you've just been taking tickets and doing the thing in the ticket, but maybe you can start to participate in or take some ownership over deciding what goes in those tickets and having an understanding of the full scope required to solve the problem. and that's that could be easier because someone presumably has identified a problem or or an opportunity already you're not just trying to sit down and think what should we do it's like we want to we want to speed up our i don't know database backups or something like yeah and then you have yeah this thing you can focus on yeah that and that's a good point you prompted in me something that i think i've naturally done in the past that has served me well which is shifting your mindset from looking for creative new things that you can both think of and build to become more senior and impactful versus look around at your team and see what

problems there are. And I guarantee you there are problems all over the place. And if you can't see them, just ask around a little bit and then work on those problems. And I'll tell you one place to start. Talk to your product manager and say, hey, product manager, what are some of the problems with working with the engineering team? Just ask for that idea. And maybe your product manager will say, every time I sit down with the team to do sprint planning, they tell me that all the specs that I've written are not sufficiently developed. And so they always get kicked back to product and they can't get started in this sprint. And so we're always behind. That's just one example. And you could help with that. You could be like, hey, how about you set up an hour meeting with

me before sprint planning and I'll help you figure out which of your product specs need to be more fleshed out before they're ready for the engineering team. That way you don't have to do that in front of the whole team. And boom, you're senior. You're contributing at the senior level. You've now made a material impact to the team's processes. But you don't have to be this creative genius who just magically comes up with new code patterns and new technology. You can just look around and find the problems and then go after solving them i like how your example was was not coding as well because i think that is one of the things there is some consensus on that the more senior you get the more your your output is is not directly hands on the keyboard and is kind of yeah spread across

larger groups and and more processy kind of meta work things yeah exactly i once had a company defined senior as a force multiplier for others, which means that by having you on the team, other people can get more done than not having you on the team. And that's actually the best way, I think, to think about senior contributions. Because, yeah, it's one thing to code faster individually, but it's another thing to help seven other people code faster or solve problems better. Yeah. It's a lot easier to point to the code you wrote and say, look at what I did. so it does get fuzzier and harder to attribute value and show output but it usually comes with more money which is a fine trade-off where my manager might think i'm not

you could also just straight up ask your manager like do you think i'm ready for the senior role what do you what do you think i need to work on to get ready for that and then your manager will come back and say look just check out my calendar and look for senior opportunities on that that's the promotion process it's yeah you find like there's like one calendar slot hidden throughout the year that's like whoever whoever attends gets the senior have you ever done one of those escape rooms it's like uh yeah it's basically the same thing but it's your manager's calendar okay that's how you escape your current level yeah also you know some of the ideas we've thrown out are kind of bigger, and maybe a little bit uncomfortable. But another thing you could do

is look at your peers, your other developers on your team, and see what struggles they're having. And you should be able to, you know, start to develop an eye for this. And here's one way to do that. Next time you're in stand up, and one of your teammates shows up and says, I haven't made any progress on this feature today. And then they show up the next day, and they say, I didn't make any progress on it. And then they show up the next day and say they have, they haven't made any progress on it. Don't ignore that. Instead, after standup, you know, to not embarrass them in front of everyone, but after standup, connect with them and say, hey, is there something I can help? Like, hey, could you talk me through what your challenges are right now? Just be a sounding

board, if nothing else, and find ways to unblock your peers. You know, like, it could be that easy. Like, to me, that's a senior contribution. And then just make note, make a note of what you've done. And then at some point, you'll bring that to your manager and make sure that it's on their radar and they know that you're contributing behind the scenes to make other people effective. Yeah. I'm going to have to get better at seeing the bigger picture. We haven't really touched on that part very much. I'm trying to think if I have anything useful to say there. I mean, a lot of the things we just said are bigger picture. I think that the question asker here has a bias about what bigger picture is. And I think they probably, they perceive that

senior engineers are the ones that come up with the big revolutionary ideas like everyone we're migrating away from this framework to this new framework which i created you know and it's like we're gonna we're gonna move to event sourcing across the whole company yeah and it's like yeah these huge changes yeah and and honestly i think those are the more rare contributions that a senior engineer makes and also the riskiest ones because those can go bad very visibly you know and that might scuttle your your opportunities to become seen as a more senior person in the eyes of your manager yeah and even if they don't fail they're often further away from from user or business value so they're they're it depends on the setup of your company but you you might pull

off this huge project and all the engineers are cheering you and then your manager's like but the buttons look the same. Like they, they take, it takes the same amount of time for an API call after this year of work. Well, have we answered the question? I think so. Good luck. I think being senior might not be as challenging as you think it doesn't, or rather it doesn't have to be as grandiose as you think. That's my bottom line. Yeah. Awesome. Well, what can people do if they want to ask their own questions. Go to softskills.audio and click the ask a question button.

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