Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 333: Unsure about management and I shall decline the offer

Episode Date: December 5, 2022

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I have been at my job for 5 years since I graduated college. I love who I work with and what I do. My question is more about the future. I have a family now and I love my work/life balance and limited meetings as an IC. I used to confidently say “I want to be a manager and eventually a CTO.” Now I am less sure. I would love to help people achieve their goals, but I love coding and do not want to give that up. The thing I love the most outside of coding is bringing engineers together. I am in charge of a monthly meeting for BE engineers to share what they work on. I am good at getting engineers to show up to events. I have hosted other demos and events and potlucks that even the most quiet, introverted engineers show up and have fun. What options are there for engineers who love coding and want to have a bigger person impact, but are not 100% sold on being a people manager? I recently interviewed at a large tech company. I did three interviews at the remote “onsite” and did well in two of them but flunked the system design one. Since I was interviewing for a mid level position, I feel like I missed some things that are inexcusable. I’m a very growth and career oriented person so I’ve been doing my due diligence and have been heavily studying system design concepts since. I haven’t received a response yet but I expect a rejection and I do think it would be fair, given my SD performance. However, if they miraculously come back to me with an offer, I would decline it, because this would mean their hiring bar is low and that’s not the level of colleagues I’d like to work with. I know this sounds very self righteous and so I’d like to hear your thoughts on it, since you guys are always very insightful. Thanks! Show Notes https://thesystemsthinker.com/the-ladder-of-inference/ ‌

for rages beer to gap oh wait sorry takes more than being one column off on your keyboard to be a great software engineer this is episode 333 of the soft skills engineering podcast i'm your host jameson dance i'm your host dave smith so i sound less insane that was a really funny joke about that's that's sort of what it looks like if you try to type it takes more than while being one column off on your keyboard. One column to the right. No, left? Left, to the left.

Yes. Again, signs of funny jokes. You explained them all. But that's not what this is about. This is a weekly advice show about all the non-technical things that go into the technical field of software development. And I really mixed it up by talking about the intro

before I gave the tagline of the show. That's great. I guess after 333 episodes of feeling the need to change. Finally. We need to be inclusive here and give a shout out to our Dvorak keyboard layout users. I don't know what it would be in Dvorak if you were off by one call. I don't know either. And then we are going to brutally shame the Colmac users as they deserve.

I don't know. As you know, Colmac is another thing that isn't quirky that people like. Colmac. This is the first I've heard of that. oh designed in the 1800s so you know it's good yeah it has stood the test of time if this was base 11 this would be episode 300 right in in decimal in base 10 it's 300 no no in undecimal base 11 yeah it would be the it would be the the digits three zero zero right uh yes i'm just gonna say yes i'm gonna say yes too because it lets me talk about how these numbers

go to 11 like the knobs on the amp and spinal tap we should use undecimal more dave do you want to thank our patrons i do right after i finish this calculator uh let's see base 10 base 11 uh okay so listen if there's one thing we're good at around here it's not going down tangents, but I just found an online calculator that claims to be converting 333 in decimal to base 11. Oh, I was way off. And it says 283. Yeah. Okay. Well, we got a few more to go. Yeah. Or we missed it by a lot, or I don't know. Okay. Well, if you didn't already know this, listen, I already knew this about myself. I cannot convert between decimal and undecimal accurately in my head yeah no need to rub it in my face

well i do i do have good news there is one cool number though which is that episode 333 in base 10 is 333 in base 10 coincidence uh the calculator i found also shows what it is in german it's like binary septenary swedish okay cool okay i think that's all right we just lost 50 of our audience but that was by design we have filtered out people who don't care about base 11 number systems all right shall i thank our patrons please okay these folks are contributing at the level where they get a weekly shout out they are valentine at datafold santa hopar noah frazier low kent c dodds memester

josh jenny kim owen chartle craig motlin i love maze this the stochastic parrot alice just that was cheating jameson lanfuere kashokton ohio patreon.com.au we're hiring irish and monkey face emoji jonathan king testing and documenting.org hola da pofari will angel rocket ship emoji but rocket ship is hyphenated orangar nick hathaway travis sanders brayden canes john grant cody sale nick cantor and philip john basile if you'd like to join this group go to soft skills.audio and click the support us on patreon button where any amount will get you a sweet sweet invitation to our slack community invitations go out the first week of every gregorian calendar month what other

you know we've done enough tangents 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 slash softskills, or you can wait to hear more about them. That's the end of those words. Or you can wait to hear more about them. Dave, do you want to read our first? If you haven't heard, keep waiting. Keep waiting, and then you'll know.

Dave, do you want to read our first question? I will read our first question. It comes from an anonymous listener who says, I've been at my job for five years since I graduated from college. I love who I work with and what I do. My question is more about the future. I have a family now, and I love my work-life balance and limited meetings as an individual contributor. I used to confidently say I want to be a manager and eventually a CTO. Now I am less

sure. I would love to help people achieve their goals, but I love coding, and I do not want to give that up. The thing I love the most outside of coding is bringing engineers together. I am in charge of a monthly meeting for back-end engineers to share what they work on. I am good at getting engineers to show up to events i have hosted other demos and events and potlucks and that even the most quiet and introverted engineers show up to and have fun what options are there for engineers who love coding and want to have a bigger person impact but are not 100 sold on being a people manager this sounds a lot like a developer advocate role doesn't it or not not this role that they work out right now but but if you love coding you love getting groups of engineers

together you love yeah events and demos and that's that's yeah that's what all right advocate is shortest answer ever i know a few developer advocates and it can be brutal even if you do like speaking at conferences but but often that's part of the job is you go speak at x number of events a year or something like that and that can be stressful it's a lot of travel yep uh it can be a lot of work to put these talks together but it is like you get to write code you get to hang out and talk to people you're trying to pitch them on some products um you're not generally working on core customer facing features you're more focused on sales but it is like sales through writing code and yeah talking to developers and gathering groups of developers yeah yeah in fact

if you're good at that you could probably be a very successful developer advocate sometimes i also hear this called a developer evangelist uh are there other synonyms here a dev whisperer uh yeah i don't know i don't know of any other synonyms this was like the shortest answer i'm and i while you were giving the answer i thought to myself jameson is a neural network that can take a three paragraphs of text and turn it into a two-word job job title and i'll bet you you could build a valuable service where people could just write a few paragraphs about what they want to do in their life and the computer will spit out a job title and then they can go search for those jobs i'm googling precision versus recall to remember which one is which because i just i'm going to

say developer advocate every single time that's high precision low recall all right that's what i am high precision low recall you identified 100 of developer advocate jobs yep and you correctly identified less than one percent of all jobs yeah i love coding do you not want to give that up what i don't know is like how much hands-on keyboard coding time this is it you say you like the life work life balance and limited meetings my sense is work-life balance can be rough with all the travel maybe not every role but i have no idea maybe maybe there are a bunch meetings i just know the parts of the job that i see which is like as a as a humble member of the industry that that like gets presented to by these people i don't know how they're how they're

evaluated though is it like number of is it is it really sales is it like number of leads that you generate or or tied to revenue or something like that or is uh it probably depends on what you're doing i mean if i knew developer advocates who worked for google and they certainly weren't commissioned on sales of any kind because they were usually advocating for an open source project yeah they i think i i think i remember hearing that they were paid based on like events they attended numbers of people who came to events that they organized talks they gave things like that but i could imagine a world where you're selling software um and uh the target audience is software developers and you are commissioned i could imagine that i'm i'm very tunnel visioned in on

this answer now are there other answers how could there be you said the right answer very high precision you know lots of things in life are relative and have trade-offs this does not there's one truth here and i've i got it i wonder if there's like uh the problem is i'm thinking of other roles that they all feel like they might well they all i have one other idea i'm saying they all having a vibrant engineering culture where developers participate and swap information and and like are actively talking to each other is is i think really valuable in in morale and helping people know stuff so they can get more stuff done this almost sounds like an internal like i don't know engineering cultural leader of some kind but i don't know what

the chief fun officer the chief fun officer yeah i'm just imagining all the chief financial officers i've known how utterly unfun they've all seemed it's the mandatory fun yes uh chief fun officer time to bring up the spreadsheets this feels like one of those jobs where having been a developer would be essential but i don't know if you would actually write any code as part of that job if it existed even i don't even know if it exists yeah yeah you could be like a you know what um you'd be like a hype man right like uh or uh what's the name of like you arrive at a court and someone announces the honorable so-and-so baron of such lands you know doesn't that person have a name uh all rise for the honorable the hype is that the bailiff the you don't usually

rise for the bailiff yeah and the bailiff is more the enforcer i don't think that's what this person wants okay yeah probably not to put people in jail yeah i don't know i feel like you getting one good answer used up all of my i know the rest of the words i had well it was so good now we're just filling time why don't we just be efficient go on to the next question well let me let me offer one more obviously less valuable piece of input here but it i want to to make something clear that a lot of people i think believe but it's not true and that is that if you want to go into management actually two things you're going to get two for the price of one first of all you can go into management and still be a coder so you can have your feet in both

worlds in fact i have managers on my team that do that right now and i love it you know i i love it i love being on a team with a manager who codes and i love having managers that report to me who also code because i know that they're super connected to the in the trenches on the ground ground truth they're more reliable for accurate technical information and their opinions carry more weight. So that's, first of all, keep that in mind. You can actually be a people manager and a coder. You probably can't be a CTO of a reasonably sized company though, and also be a coder. So maybe that's not in your future. And then the second thing is you can dip in and out of people management. You know, it's not a one-way door where you can only go through it once and can

never go back. In fact, I've gone back and forth a couple of times in my career where I've spent a few years in people management, then a few years as an individual contributor, and then a few years and people management and and maybe individual contributorship is in my future too so you know you can sometimes have what you want but not at the same time so in this case you know you want a code but you like working with people and helping them achieve their goals maybe instead of insisting on being able to do both at the same time you can satisfy yourself by doing some at different times in your career so it's not balanced in this in a one day time window but it is balanced on like a four-year time window that makes sense i like those answers and i think

together they add it up to be a better answer than my one answer just go search for developer advocate jobs and you're good 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.

But the beauty is, it's totally free for engineers, and we would love for you to go try it. Go to Hired.com slash SoftSkills to check it out. Hired.com slash SoftSkills. Quit your job the best way and check out Hired. Should I read our next question? Go for it. This comes from an anonymous listener who said, I recently interviewed at a large tech company. I did three interviews at the remote on-site and did well in two of them, but flunked the system design one.

Since I was interviewing for a mid-level position, I feel like I missed some things that are inexcusable. I'm a very growth and career-oriented person, so I've been doing my due diligence and have been heavily studying system design concepts since then. I haven't received a response yet, but I expect a rejection, and I do think it would be fair given my system design performance. However, if they miraculously came back to me with an offer, I would decline it because this means their hiring bar is low, and that's not the level of colleagues I'd like to work with. I know this sounds very self-righteous, so I'd like to hear your thoughts on it since you guys are always very insightful. thanks all right thank you for that nice compliment i have some insight since you said we're very insightful you should have studied before the interview oh just got them out of order yeah although i don't know i feel like every time i interview

i my first interview not deliberately but in practice is a throwaway one because i forgot how to forgot how to interview it's just me like remembering oh yeah this is the kind of stuff that they ask that i probably shouldn't be trying to remember on the spot i'm glad you're studying it now so what's that oscar wilde quote um i wouldn't want to be a member of any club that would have me or something like that uh-huh i would yeah yeah yeah yeah or the quote from my good friend who after spending our entire youth enjoying a certain band which will remain nameless attended a live concert for this band and looked around at the audience and said i've been a lifelong member of a club i don't want to be in

i refuse to join any club that would have me as a member well that's groucho marx oscar wilde said i don't want to belong to any club that would have me as a member which is less punchy than i have come to expect from him but that's okay so you're saying that if they accept me and i perform so poorly i don't want to know who else they accept yeah it's just poor judgment and believe it or not i've been in this i've been in the situation too where i did an interview i've actually interviewed at two companies and i thought to myself a little bit different situation but i thought wow these questions are real softball questions like they they really did not fully explore my skill set and i wonder and worry

about the skill levels of the people that would be my co-workers if i'm if i'm given an offer so it's kind of like this but not not exactly it was more like the questions they asked just weren't even very good questions to begin with let alone how i responded to them so i i get it i see it i think i've been in this case sort of where i feel like i really bombed an interview but i don't think i thought of it as if they still send me an offer it shows their bar is low it's more like i don't want to see these people again they they know my shame i don't want to go back there you kidding they they know that i always mix up a to b and b to a i can't remember which one encodes and decodes i don't know that seems reasonable i feel like yeah in my case it's like a defense

mechanism of like well i don't like them anyways they asked me bad questions that were bad because i did poorly on them yeah not i'm not saying that's the case with you at all would you well okay i'm going to take this question and turn it into a different question say you were interviewing for this you were trying to hire for this role for a mid-level interview do you feel like is it like a one strike and you're out type of thing like one interview went poorly maybe the other ones went really well but do you do you do you kind of default to rejecting if you have questions or or doubts yeah i don't know i guess so my point is that from reading this question this person sounds like a very motivated and driven uh and smart person that like they probably would do a

good job you know yeah so say you could perceive that despite the fact that they flunked the system design one like wouldn't it be the right thing for the company to do to hire this person assuming that they actually are better than they portrayed on the system design question yeah i think i'm ignoring how they would know that but just like there's there's sort of like a a paradox here of like the fact that you seem this driven seems like a good indication of your ability to do the work but also makes you want to not accept because you feel like that would be them lowering the bar but like the fact that you're thinking about it this way means that it might be the right thing for the company to make you an offer so clearly i can't take the drink in front of you yeah yeah

Yeah, that's what I was thinking. Yeah. I don't know. I mean, I think that this question asker is putting a little bit too much faith in their ability, not their ability, but too much confidence in their ability to assess an entire company's workforce based on the questions that they asked you in an interview and the bar that they held you to in those questions. So also, I will say that I have often hired people, actually pretty much everyone I've hired, there is some skill deficiency in them because there's no such thing as a developer that can answer every single interview question perfectly. And I mean, maybe there are. Okay. I've known a few people who can, very, very small number of people. But the point is that whenever you interview someone,

you are bringing on a, by definition, imperfect human being onto your team. and they may have decided that the skill deficiency that they identified in you in the system design competency is coachable and they think you have the potential to grow into the role and that the other skills that you demonstrated in the interview were strong enough

to offset that one gap and they're happy to bring you on in the hopes that a year from now you're extremely skilled and better than you are today. So I think it would be a mistake to decline the job offer on the grounds that, oh my gosh who else snuck through here you know put a little bit more faith in their interviewing capability and the understanding that everybody is a mix of skill and weakness if if i were the

hiring manager and i decided i wanted to hire this person i would absolutely want to know if if the candidate thought well i did so poorly that means the the bar is low if if i was thinking something like what you were saying dave of like lots of potential here and system design stuff is like uh very experience-based and we can teach that i i would i would definitely want to know if they thought oh the bar is low here that that's why they sent me an offer and because maybe they have evidence that could convince you that isn't the case or maybe they'll be like yep sorry you you seem bad enough to work here but but do you do you think it would be worth it to this is all hypothetical because maybe you don't get an offer but if you do get an offer do you think it'd be

worth it dave do you think it would be worth it for this person to raise their concern about about like the skill level of their colleagues or would that come off as very yeah i mean first of all who are you going to ask during the interview process and it's probably going to be a recruiter and the recruiter won't be able to answer that question reliably because they don't really know how to assess the skill of the people you go work with i know what they'll say which is very their skill level is very high yeah who knows maybe yeah no i mean like i don't know that's what they'll say Yeah, they'll be like, no, they're great. You should take this job because I'm compensated

based on how many offers I get accepted. I mean, because the peers are awesome. So one thing I would probably do, if I have a concern about the skill level of the teammates I'd work with, and it's really important to me to be on the lower end of the skill spectrum so that I can be inspired and mentored and grow,

then I would ask for time with the engineering manager for the team that I'm being considered for. And I would ask that team to tell me about the skill levels of the engineers and give me some examples of some of the amazing contributions that they've done. And that, frankly, that's going to be a much more informative and reliable data source to assess the skill of the team, rather than this admittedly kind of indirect approach where you're like, oh, well, they let me through with that crappy answer.

Therefore, you know, I'm going to skip like dot, dot, dot profit. You know, it's like not, it's not the, it's a conclusion you really have to jump to without a lot of other data points. So that's something I would do is I would say, give me some time with the manager. And I've done this with almost every job I've interviewed for is once the offer arrives, I go, yeah, can I meet with the team if I haven't already spent some time with them? In fact, one time company even flew me out, flew me across the country to spend some time with the team. So we went to lunch and I spent an hour or two with them to ask some questions and talk. And they were more than happy to do that because, you know, the value of a good engineer who finds the right fit and can be productive is high enough to justify a trip.

so that's what i would do in this situation i would not rely on this kind of shaky logical chain to conclude that this team is not good enough for me to work with them are you familiar with the ladder of inference dave it doesn't ring a bell to me okay i learned this from a book called thanks for the feedback which is good for other reasons too but but it has this thing in it it talks about how there there are basically a bunch of steps between when you observe some objective fact about reality and when you arrive at some kind of action you're going to take based on it and at each step you're adding more assumptions and kind of guessing a little bit more so you start with a fact and you climb up and eventually

you end up with like here's my interpretation of the the motivation of the person who acted this way if the fact is like they sent me an offer and then the motivation is like their company is bad so they they have a low hiring bar and and yeah they're really they think i'm i i clear their bar barely but that means i don't want to work there i'm butchering this but but uh the point is that if you recognize the things you're doing as as steps climbing this ladder you can check those assumptions that you make at each step so i bombed the system interview maybe you didn't uh i've i've talked to plenty of candidates who thought that they did really poorly in the interview and they didn't they did great or or like they did fine and and what they thought was bombing

it was really like they got really nervous but they yeah their their skills worked you know they just like were anxious um which makes total sense because interviews are nerve-wracking so if you find yourself leaping from i bombed the interview to i don't want to work there because their bar is low then then see if there's things you can check in between that thing that you think you observed and the conclusion maybe there's a few rungs on the ladder that you didn't acknowledge yeah yeah maybe there's no rungs at all like you can't get there from here yeah maybe yeah i would check to see did you really bomb it if you if you thought you did well you'll find out and then yeah you talked well yeah oh no that okay i i see your point

like regardless of of the uh interview outcome decision whether you get an offer you actually don't have enough information to conclude whether you really did bomb the system design part so you're saying i mean i wasn't there so maybe you did like maybe they asked you to design twitter and and you like drew a butt on the whiteboard or something i don't know they were like that's the most amazing architecture i've ever seen how did he know the cloud but yeah i guess when i hear bomb the interview i imagine there's a spectrum of of uh results that you could lump into bombing and some of those might be like you did pretty

fine you just felt bad about it yeah so so check that dave you talked about checking if their hiring bar is low by talking to the or checking if the i guess that's another assumption is like their hiring bar is low therefore the quality of the team members will be low and and you can check the quality of the team members sort of by talking to the engineering manager so that was a lot of words but google ladder of inference if you want to hear a better explanation about this all right that was time well spent and i'm just trying to think how what can i infer from what you just said that the show is wrapping up yes that's it what can people do if they would like their own questions answered go to softskills.audio and click the ask a question

button thank you so much to everyone who does that we love love your questions please keep them coming don't even hesitate to send us your question or if you just want to write a haiku or send a weird story we'll read it we're not above that we will definitely read it yeah you know there might be a a smidge of exaggeration in the promise that we will answer all of them we absolutely do read every single question that comes in that we do for sure and we haven't not answered all of them yet so you can't be sure we haven't not answered wait we have not not you lost me does that mean we have answered them all no like we haven't failed to we haven't stopped doing the show yet okay which is when you'd be able to tell okay we they didn't answer my question

right right okay because the show has stopped and my question was not a part of it you don't you don't know that yet but even for the questions that we did cover on the show i'm not really sure we've answered too many of them okay that's fair so that just means the backlog is bigger than any of us believed oh just like real life where that thing you thought was done turns out to be hiding a ton of work yep oh i just got sad yeah on that note time to end the show uh thank you for listening we will catch you next week We'll be right back.