Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 334: Personal brand and awkward silence

Episode Date: December 12, 2022

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Long time question asker, first time listener. I recently started to go back through the original episodes of this podcast where a few episodes were themed were around networking, open source work, and building your personal brand. I just wanted to share my “NETWORK=NETWORTH” story. About a month ago my CEO was terminated by our board of directors, a week after it was announced that we were having layoffs for the vast majority of the company. I had been with this company for around 4 years, a lot of my work had been doing open source projects and interacting with various other companies. Unfortunately I was one of the people who was let go as part of these layoffs. I immediately reached out to various folks in the open source world that I’ve interacted with, seeing if their companies had any openings. Within two weeks I was able to interview and get an offer without a technical interview. Building my “personal brand”, interacting with the open source community had turned a pretty stressful situation into one that was relatively a lot less stressful! Listener Stochastic Beaver asks, I’ve recently joined a big tech company remotely and my team is super AWKWARD. No one says anything non-work-related in team chat. My manager is the only one with a camera on in team-wide meetings. I barely saw anyone’s face. When I try to chitchat about their life during in 1:1s, somehow they don’t feel like interested in talking about themselves so I eventually stopped asking anymore. In meetings, my manager is most vocal person within the team and the other people barely speak. As a result, it’s always feels like my manager’s one man show trying to make a conversation and discussion and throwing a joke and the responses are usually some ‘lol’ in the chat. It’s not that the team members are not engaged to the team. Everyone is very passionate and I usually see their work related messages, code reviews, and emails coming back and forth after the evening, even in weekends. Is this normal that all the people are extremely shy in the same team? I like the work and the problem we’re solving but sometimes I find that the silence in the air is suffocating me and I also want to establish a good relationship with my coworkers. Am I asking too much for them in ‘work’? Thanks for listening.

it takes more than automatically adding what is it you're actually trying to do to all tickets to be a great engineer this is soft skills engineering episode 334 i'm your host dave smith i'm your host jamison dance soft skills engineering is a weekly advice podcast for software developers about all the non-technical stuff that helps you avoid getting started on a ticket because you claim there's not enough information on it Oh, okay. I thought this was a recognition that often people ask about how to do something specific when really they want a more general problem solved. Or the opposite, right? Yeah.

The classic XY problem, I think is what you're referring to? Yeah, that's what it's called. Yeah. Or the stack overflow thing. I feel like every time I ask a question, well, no, well, you go ahead. You say it. I was just going to guess what you meant. So maybe you should just tell me what you meant. i just want you to guess now that's a good point i'll just say it i feel like when i ask questions on stack overflow this is often the response yeah which is like what are you actually trying you don't you don't want to do that thing right you don't want to plug your computer's power brick into itself right why why do you want to do that let's do that a better way instead let's find out what your actual problem is actually i make fun of this but it is actually a really good question

for engineers to ask because it happens a lot where people come with a very specific question and it's like this question's a little weird what is it you're trying to accomplish it's like oh well i'm just trying to become a billionaire okay well i think building a multi-level peanut business is probably not really your question like it's built out of peanuts yeah exactly like that the building is made from peanuts it is multiple levels but also it's a multi-level marketing company okay they misunderstood what that meant yes how do i build a multi-level office oh what is it you're trying to accomplish well what i'm trying to accomplish is scamming all my friends and family out of their money oh okay well i can help you with that

i feel like that xy problem is common across disciplines not just software i imagine it happens wikipedia says that it is a communication problem encountered in the following applications help desk technical support software engineering and customer service well good thing i can edit it hang on and friends and family trying to build auto mechanics i don't know now the flames fire directly into my face when i step on the gas how do i make the flames fire straight up in the air i guess you could lump auto mechanics into technical support in in some for some definition of technical support sure my car's making this noise but it needs to make a little noise

what do i do oh you want to impress your friends okay right let's get you a haircut that was really funny oh man well should we thank our sponsor yeah this episode is sponsored by hired which is the best way to quit your job and get a new one you will hear more about them later you can also go to hired.com soft skills to bump our numbers up i don't know yeah that makes us look good tell them jameson sent you and uh this is not an xy problem i actually need to do this all right shall i thank our patrons yes the following folks are contributing at the on patreon at the level where we shout their name out every single week they are valentine at datafold santa hopar noah frazier logg kent t dodds memester josh jenny kim owen

chartle craig motlin i love mavis the stochastic parrot alice just that was cheating jameson if you would like to support this show and get your name announced or whatever safe for work thing you want us to say go to soft skills soft skills.audio and click the support us on patreon button and uh any dollar amount will get you access to our slack community and only a substantial contribution one which makes jameson's heart skip a beat will be considered for saying any name or

word of your choice on the show your name will be etched in the annals of history the annals of history are just the backlog of the soft skills engineering podcast the reruns all right should i read our first oh you read my mind yes i will now read your question listener not dave's question okay long time question asker first time listener i recently started to go back through the original episodes of this podcast where a few episodes were themed around networking open source work and building your personal brand let me just take this moment to disavow anything that i've said ever in the past all right hopefully that clears things up okay back to the question i just wanted to share my network equals net worth story about a month ago

my ceo was terminated by our board of directors a week after it was announced that we were having layoffs for the vast majority of the company i had been with this company for around four years a lot of my work had been doing open source projects and interacting with various other companies unfortunately i was one of the people who was let go as part of these layoffs i immediately reached out to various folks in the open source world that i've interacted with seeing if their companies had any openings within two weeks i was able to get an interview and an offer without any technical interviews or without a technical interview sorry building my personal brand interacting with the open source community had turned a pretty stressful situation into one

that was relatively less stressful nice i'm really glad that worked out for you this is it might not work out for everybody i guess uh and and it feels like a lot of things had to go correctly for this to happen a lot of my work has been doing open source so a lot of your work at the company was on open source which is awesome and and a thing a lot of people aspire to and lots of them do not achieve i'm sure that helped yeah interesting to hear how you how you got that that'd be cool yeah i mean this is this is a great this is a great example of why it's important to know a lot of people who can help you in bad times right i mean that this is great and now as with the tradition of our show i just feel compelled to say something silly in this serious situation

where someone lost their job and got lucky and found another one quickly do i have your permission to do so jameson you have my approval i was i'm just gonna poke fun at the question ask her just a little because i love you but i just thought it's i was reading through here and I thought, oh, there's a little detail in here that got mentioned that didn't directly contribute to the question or the comment, but I think I'm going to play armchair quarterback, or not armchair quarterback, armchair psychologist for just a moment. It's interesting how the question asker mentioned that the CEO was laid off and a whole bunch of other people and me. It was like, listen, I was laid off, but so was the CEO. So, you know, it's cool, right? Like,

it wasn't just me yeah and i just thought to myself that's exactly what i would say too if i were telling this story like yep listen i don't want you to get the wrong idea i was laid off but they also fired the ceo so really no one was safe yeah you find the most competent or recognizable person who is laid off exactly attach yourself to them it's like when the jedi council laid off yoda and also me yoda and i we walked out of there with our heads held high that's right i mean arm in arm my head was a little higher than his because he's like a foot tall yeah anyway yeah so can we talk about personal brand for a minute

sure i i remember jameson years ago and and i i'm glad you added the little disclaimer at the beginning of this one one of the risks of doing a podcast for this many years is that i guess your and my let's just say i'm gonna venture to say the word wisdom which might be inappropriate but wisdom levels may increase with age and we may come to regret some of the things we've said in the past but i am remembering i do very much remember the episode where we talked about personal brand and i remember jameson had a visceral guttural reaction to the word and if i recall correctly you didn't even want to say the word am i remembering this right probably i i still feel it yeah say it now gives me the squigglies yeah yeah the squigglies are bad in this case

i'm glad you clarified because it was not clear to me but yeah the uh i think that when we say personal brand, we have this idea of someone who is more interested in promoting themselves than they are in being helpful and useful to others. By which I mean, if you had to take time to, if you had to choose how to spend your time, you would choose to spend it creating marketing material about you instead of creating solutions to problems or contributing to the success of team of a team or contributing success to an open source project or helping out a friend you know it's like for some reason the word personal brand carries that connotation for me yeah it's slightly scammy almost yeah exactly trying to trick people into thinking you you i don't know know more than

you do yeah it's like it's like the opposite of imposter syndrome it's like i'm proud to be the imposter yeah but that's not i think not everyone thinks of that when they say personal brand you know and when i think about you know what is my personal brand it's not something that i focus on as a primary goal to build my personal brand what i tend to focus on as a primary goal is to be as helpful and useful as i can but then if i take a step back and look at it i go oh i guess that's my brand right yeah my brand is not self-congratulation self-promotion and buying ads on twitter so that i can advertise my own self's awesomeness right i mean if if your goal is to be as useful as you can then i think the ends justify the means right if it takes a little bit

a little bit of growth hacking then why not a little bit of financial fraud maybe well it's not a it's you're not wrong because if no one knows how helpful or useful you are then your helpfulness will actually be limited so some self-promotion is necessary yeah and i think there's just a balance to be struck here and i think we've met people who have struck the balance too much on the vacuous substanceless shameless self-promotion and not enough on being actually helpful and useful and it's those people that give the term personal brand a bad name because they're the ones that use the term the most and the most loudly they go to conferences about their personal brand yeah if a tree falls in the forest does anyone hear it that's how it goes

right no matter how many people are wait yeah shoot there was one aspect of the tree hang on the tree falls in a forest and there's no one around does it make a sound is that it that is a saying that i've heard okay that is i feel like applicable to what you said earlier where if if you develop some great skill and knowledge at a thing and you desire to use it effectively and also maybe help other people develop that skill and knowledge you got to talk about it it's for the greater good if you if you have this weird guilt you can't get over like i do then just think about how the ends justify the means like all great people do just kidding it can be tricky there wasn't technically a question here yeah there wasn't

but i felt like it was an opportunity for us to respond to maybe a soft criticism of our distaste for the idea of personal brand and investing time and effort into that because i think what's actually happening here is this person has presented a scenario that you and i totally agree with they invested a lot of time like where they got laid off or yeah like i agree with the decision to fire this person i'm just kidding no what i mean to say is uh uh this person decided to invest time in making connections with other engineers in doing valuable things for open source projects and being able to then have access to a network of friends when the time came that they needed it. And I'm sure we'd be willing to extend a hand to people that find themselves needing

help as well in the future. And that's something I absolutely agree with. Now, would I slap the label personal brand on that as the primary motivator for all this work? Probably not. Like that wouldn't be the primary thing I would say, but I would say that this person has invested in human connection, in being useful and helping others. And that's a great thing. And it paid off. you don't know maybe they maybe they pay a photographer to take these classy shots that they use as headers for all of their pull requests custom logo that they slap on every github comment there's one other principle i wanted to talk about which is the idea of making your work

durable all right you'll you'll do work for a company and it will get deployed and have some effect within that company but often especially if you don't work on open source things like this person you work at a place for years and then you leave and there's not much you can publicly show for it besides the experience that you have and and kind of the capabilities you have and even that you can only really show through your own description of the situations yeah but if you can find some way to create some kind of durable artifact legally without stealing stuff or walking away with a hard drive full of source code or whatever that you can point to and and bring with you maybe you keep a lab notebook and then you kind of like

redact the the private stuff for the the trade secrets or whatever maybe you write blog posts based off your work experience something like that that is a form of of proof that you can pull out of proprietary work that you kind of get for free with open source work because everyone can just look at what you yeah does that make sense yeah it totally does and i think it's great you know to be able to have kind of a portfolio that you can show yeah a portfolio that's a good way is that the word yeah and some people do a better job at this than others and and honestly a portfolio is it's usually not a deal maker or breaker in my experience when hiring people in fact i think i have very rarely gone in and read people's code that they link me in github

to say look at these open source contributions i've made because that's just a lot of work as an interviewer to do that you know and and i would rather look you in the eyes ask you a very pointed question and then make a decision from my gut just kidding yeah no but yeah nevertheless This person has pointed out, I think, a slightly different situation, which is that they did a whole bunch of contributions in the open source community, made a bunch of connections, and those very connections were able to offer them employment in their time of need. But notice how they didn't say, I brought all of these open source contributions with me in portfolio form and presented them to an employer who previously didn't know me, and they were impressed by my contributions and hired me. It wasn't that. What was it? It was the actual human connection that led to the hire.

And I think that's an important takeaway here. Yeah, and that might be easier to pull off at a private company where your work is less public, but you just stay in touch with people. Yeah. All right, have we discussed the text? Since there was no question? Yeah, I think so.

And I guess what I'm hoping everyone takes from this is that we do agree that it's a great thing to have a strong, vibrant network of people that you stay in contact with and that you strive to maintain human connection. Like it's a really, really important thing. I think that for me has been the lesson of the last couple of years when COVID struck anyways,

that these human connections are really important. And my work life is actually a big part of my human connection potential. I don't know if James and you have the same kind of thoughts, but I do. So yeah, question answered, I guess. yes 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 after the finger guns yeah uh both the beauty is it's totally free for engineers uh and we would love for you to go try it go to hired.com soft skills to check it out hired.com soft skills quit your job the best way and check out hired dave will you read our next question yes this comes from an anonymous listener oh no a listener named stochastic beaver who asks i've recently joined a big tech company remotely and my team is super awkward that's all capitalized awkward no one says anything non-work related in team chat my manager is the only one with a camera on in team-wide meetings i barely see anyone's

face when i try to chit chat about their life during one-on-ones somehow they don't feel like that interested in talking about themselves so i eventually stopped asking anymore in meetings my manager is the most vocal person within the team and the other people barely speak as a result it always feels like my managers of one man show trying to make a conversation and discussion and throwing a joke and the response are usually some lol in the chat oh that's so sad it's not that the team members are not engaged on the team everyone is very passionate and i usually see their work related messages code reviews and emails coming back and forth after the evening even on weekends is this normal that all the people are extremely shy on the same team i like

the work and the problem we're solving but sometimes i find that the silence in the air is suffocating me and i also want to establish a good relationship with my co-workers am i asking too much for them in work thanks for listening i feel that that one man show vibe sometimes it's it's not even there's a strong culture of keeping your camera on in meetings at my current workplace but just it's just weird to talk a lot in zoom to a group of people yeah the feedback is so muted it is and then if two people try to talk at the same time one of them ends up not being heard and then you have to say what oh can you repeat that it's just oh yeah and especially if you're trying to be goofy or tell jokes that's when you need to hear everybody it's when you need the feedback

It's so true. And I got to tell you, so I recently changed jobs. And my new job is hybrid in-person remote, whereas my previous job was 100% remote. And being back in an office in a conference room full of people chatting for an hour about a problem or in a meeting going through the meeting agenda, it's like a whole different world. I mean, I have just forgotten the joy of being in a room with other people and having these little quips and interchanges that happen naturally between agenda topics that that remote meetings just kill. Yeah. Well, way to brag about it, Dave. Jeez. It's great. Missing on it. What's funny is, Jameson, you and I can have these joking kind of chit chat moments.

moments so maybe it's maybe it's a a one-to-many problem whereas one-on-one it actually works okay yeah maybe it just doesn't scale or maybe if your team did a podcast together for like a decade it would be smooth you know what i found i've actually found and this is maybe an actual answer to the question or a tip for answering the question is this person said they've tried doing one-on-ones but even in the one-on-ones they can't get people to talk about themselves you know what i have found is that if you pick up your actual cellular phone and dial the person on the phone and they answer on their phone and you hold the phone to your ear and talk it's like it's much better people are more open yeah i started doing this in my last company where i would just

pick up my phone and call people instead of getting on a zoom and we would just talk and probably nine times out of ten the conversation would drift to something a little more personal and relationship building instead of just interesting you know we're at work this is my chat it's like it's kind of like when people gather at a in a cubicle in the office as opposed to bumping into each other in the hallway you know hey how's it going um it has that vibe um also i think for some reason the cellular network or maybe the you know the plain old telephone system network the pots network is better able to deliver duplex audio without uh clobbering people's audio when they talk over each other or whatnot but anyway for whatever reason it just

worked for me it was much much better you've uh you suggested that millennials approach their natural enemy the phone call it's the only known predator sworn yeah yeah fierce apex predator of millennials well maybe and maybe that's a generational thing too is that i grew up in high school spending a lot of time on the phone talking to my friends and so maybe this just brings me back and as i think about the people i've been talking to many of them are my age my generation and so maybe that's actually what's happening here is uh it's a comfort thing for me and them and maybe it wouldn't work if you were from a different generation i've done i used to go on walking meetings and i would have video off so people wouldn't see me huffing and puffing

which is actually really hard because especially when i start out i'm not in the best cardiovascular shape and there is a a pattern of breathing and speaking that i'm used to at work that's based on me remaining completely still not moving at all not not having any breath dedicated to anything besides just making deliberate noises and when i'm walking it's there's even if i'm not just really gassed uh-huh i i feel like i'm holding my breath part of the time because i'm trying not to let out these big like that's so interesting so maybe i'll maybe i'll try on the phone but standing very still so like when you're sitting down you're dedicating all of your effort to that what that one short story calls squeezing the air through your meat

have you heard that i'm not familiar with that short story is that it is that the whole story the whole story is that this alien civilization discovers earth and they're describing humans to each other and the way the aliens choose to describe humans is they're just meat and then one alien is like well how do they communicate oh i think i have read that one yeah and the other alien says they communicate by squeezing air through their meat yeah and that's the whole that's humanity yeah i need the air going through my meat to be devoted to talking right there's not enough to walk up a moderate incline and talk so i gotta train i guess i gotta train my way up i had some great you know back back when we used to meet you know and we used to work in an office

full-time i had some great walking meetings with people those were pretty effective used to do that i mean yeah i guess you could and you're saying you've done that on the phone now except it's on zoom with the camera off yeah but maybe i should just do it on the phone i feel like my cellular network got much worse as well so the latency is bad yeah try it on the phone again and then you take a few steps you drop off you drop out of the network yeah then a few more steps you're back in yeah yeah it's bad maybe maybe you should invest in landlines for all your team and and get those cordless phones that can go just into just like maybe 100 feet away from the base station people can walk circles in their living rooms or maybe if they have a yard they can

actually step outside oh i don't know how anybody talks without pacing yeah i do too i am incapable of doing when i get on the phone i just walk circles in a room yeah kind of weird uh hope that helps let's see so team feels awkward they they are productive and engaged in the work but not in the squeezing the air through the meat they're not yeah they have no interest in connecting meet to meet this might be a feature for some of these people because there are definitely people that that prefer to operate this way that uh like text um having their camera on can be very burdensome or draining for them i've known people like that where it's like a like a recovery thing where they they need to not feel that eyeball on them where it wouldn't be as bad

if it were in an in-person meeting. So that doesn't really help you change it at all because maybe they don't want it to change. Maybe they're comfortable with the way that it is right now. Yeah, maybe. Yeah. I've certainly worked for teams that have very low interest levels

in connection with one another, social connection with one another, but are still doing great work, productive, like this team has described. i don't know how to change a team like that and i'm i'm not sure that i would try too hard you know because i'm trying to think like what's the outcome you're going for with that yeah i mean is it is it for you to feel more comfortable so and that happens by by way of more vocal chatter in meetings and and more kind of connection about people's outside of work lives

yeah which maybe it is and that's fine you know what you could do is have an outage okay and then everybody gets on the call and you're kind of in this foxhole together and especially if there's an outage where you have to wait for something to like you know you're waiting for the database backup to restore yeah it's not like you can do anything right now but you also don't want to just drop off because you need to you need to do a thing right when it's done you just sit there yep and and swap stories and and save the world together so create a fake emergency yeah well no it just make a real one i don't know yeah delete some data it's fine give my permission all right and then they can bond over a common enemy oh you could just make yourself the common

enemy and then your your teammates will bond with each other against you but mission accomplished they're not talking just not to you yes another thing that sticks out to me is this says recently i've recently joined a big tech company and this could be just a timing thing that is perhaps exacerbated by remote work where you're still fairly new to the group and it just takes a little bit longer to develop those personal relationships remotely so maybe maybe give it a little more patience one other suggestion that might or might not be helpful is to see each other in person it's pretty common to have some kind of in-person meetup uh that might depend a lot on the company's stage and also what's going on in in the broader health system right at that moment

um there's a time where that was not an option and i feel like it's starting to return to be an option again but i've i've noticed even if you work remotely if you come together in person for a bit you you take some of that context home with you back to your remote work and that can help break some ice a little bit yeah true maybe they're just tired you see work-related messages in the evening and on weekends maybe they're just they're just feeling sleepy because they're working too much yeah it's like well look i don't have the energy to talk to you right now i'm giving everything i got you're trying to talk to them about their personal lives what if they don't have any yeah maybe they're like i'm embarrassed it's just the work yeah it doesn't feel good to

bomb though i or to feel like you're trying you're throwing out some energy and getting nothing back you know that feels bad yeah uh and is is very contagious once it once it starts maybe see if you can get an ally i don't know is there one person maybe maybe the whole team in a group is is tricky but there's one person you hit it off with and then can build from there maybe and that's probably a good way to go is start one-on-one the other thing you can do is uh oh man i hate to say this because it's such an in-person thing to do and i'm gathering from this question that it's fully remote but the other thing you can do is um games you know find things to do together that are fun light-hearted yeah easy and do it now this is classic in person so i remember

before covid we you know i would see teams get together all the time at lunchtime and they would play card games or they would have topics they would discuss and things they would do together and i think this helped a lot with the camaraderie and i gotta say i've seen a lot of teams try to do this online in a fully remote way and it's just a little weird you know but it can work there's a whole industry that has popped up devoted to trying to make this work though you have a if you want to pay money for this there's a wide variety of options of tools and companies to facilitate that kind of team building while remote interesting you can also just i don't know you can just go play agar.io yeah familiar with that yeah i have children so i am familiar with

that yeah just hop in there with your whole team and try and absorb each other it's like snakes going around and stuff or whatever it is yeah yeah there's there's a snake one i think this one is you're a little like amoeba oh yeah that's right oh wow it is heavily monetized since last time i saw it it's like loaded with advertisements yeah i can buy coins and boosts and get skins oh well that's pretty crucial yes well have we answered the question i think so it's um i think my summary is that this is a uphill battle that you may never be able to win because some some teams especially if you're not in the leadership role some teams are very challenging to to force this but i will say that just trying to bolt like to append social

interactions into the team processes and rituals that are already happening is probably not going to help yeah it's kind of a cliche to say this but it is a cultural thing and cultural change is uh is hard yeah it's hard to do it's a lot of work takes a lot of effort takes a lot of deliberate effort to move it in a deliberate direction i guess it's it's it's always changing just kind of yep because it's a living thing but okay well have we answered the question now i think so good luck good luck what can people do if they would like their own questions answered go over to the worldwide interwebs softskills.audio is the website click the ask us a question button thank you so much to everyone who submits questions in our forum we really appreciate

we will answer all of them one day indeed thank you for listening we'll catch you next week