Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 335: Senior questions and overly optimistic

Episode Date: December 19, 2022

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Greetings Jamison and Dave, love the show and all your shenanigans! I’m a mid-level dev who has quit my job (TM) a few times. While I feel like I’ve absorbed some good experience from each company I’ve been at, I also feel like my training is not yet complete. At my last company, I hit my ceiling as a dev but I also felt the bar was really low. I had to do a lot of hand holding and fielded a lot of engineer questions that could have easily been Googled and it was really frustrating. But now I’m at a place where I feel everyone else is heads and shoulders above me. The tables have turned! I’m trying to learn as much as I can on my own but I’ve found there are limits to what I can do. I feel like I’m drowning but I’m timid to ask too many questions because I remember how annoying it was to get pinged every 10 minutes at my previous job. What are some tips you have to navigate the murky waters of being a mid-level dev wanting to learn as much as possible to become a seasoned dev without giving off an “intern smell”? Listener Charlie, Nearly all your answers presuppose a software engineer has a good manager and leadership. Why is this?

it takes more than replacing letters with numbers to be a g3t e6r engineer this is episode 335 of the soft skills engineering podcast and i'm your host jameson dance i'm your host dave smith soft skills engineering is a weekly advice show where we talk about all the non-technical things that go into this technical field of software development and and ponder on this trend which i found out has a name oh a numeronym it's a number based word like k9 and u m e r o n don't you mean an n6m yeah as long as the other person already knows what you're trying to say it is pretty efficient for compressing there is the slowdown at first when you develop an entirely new language that's purely context-based because you only know the first and last letter at the

length of the word sorry numeronym it's a n7m sorry oh i feel terrible rookie mistake at numeronyms after yeah after a while your brain just counts letters automatically and yeah you speak like that i18n is the one i've heard the most and then a11y internationalization and accessibility and l10n or lion what is l10n localization localization internationalization's little friend okay they do mean different things though hmm i believe you i will not explain to you what what the difference is but promise i promise i do know i promise that i super know as well dave do you want to thank our patrons yes i do thanks to those that are contributing where they get a shout out one time they are joel prail and the saucy paramecium and to those that are

contributing at the level where they get a weekly shout out they are valentina datafold santa hopar noah frazier log kent c dodds memester josh jenny kim owen chartle craig motlin i love mavis the stochastic parrot alice jost lan flair kashokton ohio patreon.com.au we're hiring ira chan monkey face emoji jonathan king testing is documenting.org oladapafadiyi will angel ganarar okay this this patron has been rearranging the order of letters every month and i'm starting to see i'm finally starting to see the pattern and i love it ganarar capital r in the middle there okay nick hathaway travis sanders brayden canes john grant compilator with a k.se cody sale nick cantar and philip

if you would like to join this illustrious crew of contributors to the podcast all you have to do is go to soft skills.audio and click the support us on patreon button and you can contribute any dollar amount you like to get access to our Slack community, or you can contribute an exorbitant amount of money, both signaling your wealth and virtue. And we will send you an invitation. No, we will not. I said that totally wrong. We will say your name or any phrase or safe for work word or emoji of your choice on the podcast every single week without fail. I'm sure you did a really great job on that. I was looking up what a paramecium is. And apparently it's a single celled organism a genus of eukaryotic unicellular ciliates huh oh i remember looking at these as a

in school don't they have hairs that move them around on the surface wow how did you know that i googled it and saw a picture and remembered oh okay but i thought you just have this knowledge sitting in your brain of like random facts that will come up someday i did have it but it needed to be signaled by or electrocuted a little bit i've probably got some like floating around in my body right now paramecium oh yeah are they mostly uh bad for you i don't know it's in brackish water yeah stagnant basins and ponds not my favorite not my favorite thing to drink well well thank you saucy paramecium for your support usually you just cause infections the sauce is the stagnant water all right should we should we dive into our questions yep will you take the

first one yes this is from an anonymous listener who says greetings jameson and dave love the show and all your shenanigans i'm a mid-level dev who has quit my job trademark a few times well i feel like i've absorbed some good experience from each company i've been at i also feel like my training is not yet complete at my last company i hit my ceiling as a dev but i also felt the bar was really low. I had to do a lot of handholding and fielded a lot of engineer questions that could have easily been Googled, and it was really frustrating. But now I'm at a place where I feel everyone else's head and shoulders above me. The tables have turned. I'm trying to learn as much as I can on my own, but I found there are limits to what I can do. I feel like I'm drowning, but

I'm timid to ask too many questions because I remember how annoying it was to get pinged every 10 minutes at my previous job. What are some tips you have to navigate the murky waters of being a mid-level dev wanting to learn as much as possible to become a seasoned dev without giving off an intern smell i like that it's a vivid metaphor okay that i i swear we're living in a simulation and i'll tell you why this question says i feel like my training was not yet complete which evoked a mental image for me of star wars the original series your training is not yet complete i think i don't know who said the line but it evoked that image and the very next question in our backlog actually made a reference to ben kenobi and anakin skywalker from the

prequels which for this one moment i will admit do actually exist so that i can acknowledge the simulation that we're living in are you offended by them well i can't be offended by something that doesn't exist so no okay disgusted by the idea of them if they were to you right yes they're as good as normal star wars that's how i feel to you that's the most offensive thing i think i could say right now oh jameson like the only thing we disagree on yeah yeah this is interesting yeah i bet what go ahead what is the intern smell smells like fresh coffee and enthusiasm being delivered on a tray to all the team members hey everyone fresh coffee and and lack of cynicism

what does cynicism smell like interns smell like the opposite of that whatever the room i'm in smells like that's what cynicism smells like to you yeah i guess so yeah this is interesting you're you're worried about being the person you were annoyed at at your last job. Yes. Okay. I was going to say, I expect that you are not asking things that are easily Googleable, but there's a skill in knowing how to Google a question. And sometimes you don't even have the foundation of knowledge to know what to Google. So maybe to you, they were easily Googleable because you knew the answer already. Like you knew the magic phrases. So I'm going to start by planting some doubt in your mind before I tell you that they're probably good questions,

But maybe the other questions were good questions to the asker. Yeah, you're asking questions about context that is not public knowledge of the system. You're not going to be able to Google what the engineer who left four years ago was thinking when they built this system that way. Right, of course. Or abstractions that are internal or things like that. Asking why a lot of the time is a good question and is not easy to Google for. So you're saying that when you have a very specific question, you should try to hide that question inside of a more reasonable question that no senior engineer will balk at, such as, could you please share the historical context that led to this sequence of design decisions?

What's the hidden question? The hidden question is, why am I getting this null pointer exception? Oh. Obviously. Please share the decisions that led to me typing this code right here that doesn't work. Show me the architecture decision record where we decided to use a language with null so I could blame it on that. And then your engineer sits back and goes, hmm, I see you found another null pointer, except you're struggling to debug, eh? Yes.

It's me again. Null pointer kid. It's me. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So if there are questions that you could not reasonably figure out by looking around at public material, that's a good sign. There's also some feedback you'll get from the company. Different places have different tolerance for questions. I have worked at places where there's kind of some grumpiness, and it's sort of like a begrudging willingness to help up to a certain extent. And then after that, you get the grumpies. You're on your own, kid.

Yeah, yeah. And I've worked at places where people go out of their way and put in intense amounts of effort to answer questions and make sure that all of your follow-up questions are taken care of. Thank you for the question. I like the second one. And here's three more questions you forgot to ask. I'll go ahead and answer them now. yeah i i love that vibe in the second one but it's not always like that so if you see rolling eyes or if you're in slack and you see the rolling eyes emoji it's funny because like

which one of those is communicating a stronger feeling is it hard so let's see sometimes i conflate the rolling eyes and the like left and right looking eyes that mean i'm looking into this oh i'm offended a lot basically is what that yeah the eyes so okay now we got to get to the bottom of this because there are the rolling eyes and then there are the eyes where you make them look to the left and the right and then there are the eyes that are just like looking and maybe looking one direction but to me those all mean very different things where the left and right looking eyes are sort of like the i don't know what's going on here kind of like looking around in confusion the staring eyes mean i'm looking into this thing and the rolling eyes if you like

the person means this is a joke and if you don't means like i'm i hate you so so much i just have to wonder whoever whenever the committee decided to go ahead and bring emojis into mainstream language use if if they were motivated by the tenet that english doesn't have enough ambiguity in it we need to just go ahead and inject some visual imagery that will undoubtedly mean different things to different people i would use an emoji to preserve the illusion that i am thinking smart things right now the starry eyes sure yeah the starry eyes one yeah that seems appropriate here i'm i've actually just deployed the paramecium eyes emoji hairy single-celled eyes yeah that sounds horrifying but yeah there there might be some context clues of how annoying you are

you could also just ask like hey is this annoying is this too much is getting in the way of of your work and some people might tell you and that i would recommend doing doing in real time either by video call or in person because what's going to happen is you're going to ask that question over slack and then you'll see like so and so is typing dot dot dot then not typing and then a minute later so and so is typing and you're like oh crap yeah that that is a that's a really interesting like sideband method of communicating information yeah you always know something tricky is going on you said in person or over video yeah and i was wondering how you feel about the singing telegram as an alternative method of communication i feel great about it okay

shows that extra touch actually it wouldn't be too hard to these days with chat gpt could probably just generate the lyrics for you maybe even the harmonies now you just got to find some voice talent oh that's interesting i wonder if someone has tried to do because i've seen people write code with chat gpt and i wonder if someone has tried to generate like some kind of textual musical notation i don't know i haven't seen notation yet but i've seen lyrics yeah i guess i'm wondering like i don't know i bet you could say write me some guitar tab yeah you probably could they should look into that they do that same group opening i has a project called jukebox that i don't yet i don't think it's yet open to the public but it has generated straight up fully

produced music with words instruments and everything every day i reassure myself but surely my job will never be replaceable by that it's just the country singers that are going to lose their jobs yeah first it was just the professional chess players right they've all been obsolete now okay what was i saying look for contact signals that it's it's that it's too much yeah yeah now i'm going to pause for you to say smart stuff okay that's my next move nice move go is that is that what your chess ai told you to do yeah I have an idea so one thing I like to do when I start a new job no matter how senior or junior I am is I like to keep a question accumulator because one of the things that

the question asker mentioned is I remember how annoying it was to get pinged every 10 minutes at my previous job yes that is annoying it is impossible to get work done with with interruptions that have a 10 minute period so instead I like to write down my questions in an accumulator and then I go put time on the calendar of people who I think can answer those questions and I'll actually sit down with them either at their desk or on a call. And I will put the questions up in textual form for us to reference together. And we'll just work through them top to bottom. And the beauty of this is you know when you're done and you've defragmented that person's calendar so that they have one segment where they have all the question answering they

have to do. And they'll probably be very grateful to you for that professional courtesy. yeah that's also convenient in another way i find that often i will ask questions that at some later point i will uncover the answer to i just didn't know it when i asked that's right so batching them up that way lets you also uncover the answers you would get if you just kept going yes and you can you can even apply a debounce algorithm to your question list where you say anytime i mutate the question list i impose a 24-hour timeout on actually asking any of these questions. That way you might actually find that over the next 24 hours you discover some of the answers and you don't have to bother anyone at all. Yeah, I like that. Everyone

is heaven and shoulders above me. I mean, this is what a lot of people want, right? Isn't it a common desire to want to work with people who are just really talented so that you can learn from them? I think you're in a good situation because of that. Didn't ask too many questions. Another thing that you could do is have some kind of like regular mentorship relationship this is similar to your batching up questions thing because that's a thing you can do with a mentoring relationship is bring batched up questions but it doesn't have to be exactly that if if there's someone who is kind of your your go-to person that you can explore stuff you aren't familiar with that can be useful it can be useful to have a guide to lead you through the the spelunking through the

complicated and dangerous cave system that is the technical systems at your company here put this headlight on before we open this code yeah and this helmet do not touch that rock or it will all come tumbling down yeah that one that one holds up the whole cavern yeah that's a load-bearing pebble that's a load-bearing npm module that's been abandoned yeah oh you laugh i cry it hits home i have one more idea to offer which is that when you are asking questions i'm really latching on to this word annoying in the original question asker one thing that can make questions

annoying is if it's clear that the question asker didn't do any work before showing up to ask the question you know it's like i saw this i didn't google it i didn't look for other references to this in our code i didn't search our documentation repository i didn't even try it i didn't run the code. I didn't even try to compile it. I didn't get clone the code, nothing. And so if you will come with your list of questions and then under each question, a sub list of the things that you have tried to answer that question and explain that to the question asker, not only will that make them think, wow, this person's great. They really try hard. They are coming to me not out of laziness, but out of a curiosity to learn. And I am the best source clearly after all that

they've done but also it will help them to give you a better answer because they won't waste time with things that you've already tried yeah did you try googling it yeah that makes sense i like that i tried turning it off and on again you might be seeing some pages okay well have we answered the question i think so um i think that just to put a final point on my thoughts. I think that this question asker might be putting too much fear into their inability to ask interesting questions to the people that need to answer them. I actually think that a lot of people like to answer well-formed questions from people who obviously took their time to really formulate the question effectively so that the question asker can have a productive

response. And then again, last thing, after, not, this is not, I said again, but actually this is not a repeat. After you get the answer, be sure to thank the question answer profusely. Say thank you and tell them you really appreciate their time. And just make sure that they know that it's time well spent and that you're going to remember it. And then don't ask them the same question again. Just write down the answers and then don't come back again with that exact same question. Yeah. The singing telegram comes in handy here again for the thank you note. You can write an ode to the question answerer. That's a good idea. All right. Speaking of question answers, that's what we are with that question. Yeah. And that last one was a cry for help. We

answer so many questions and very rarely do people actually send us a singing telegram to say thank you. Saying that was an unmet need that I'm expressing. Yeah, yeah, exactly. I'm subtly hinting at. I could count on one hand the number of singing telegrams Jameson has received as a Thank you for his question answers. I mean, it's a fisted hand, but it is one. I mean, they never say whether that's an upper or lower bound. Like, I could count on infinity hands the number of singing telegrams I've received as well. I could count on 17 hands.

How many? It's zero. Okay. Yeah, they'd just all be closed. Yeah. Okay, Dave, will you answer? Fists. okay sorry now for real that's a message all of its own if you're counting on 17 close fists that

that gets threatening all right yeah will you read our next question yes this comes from a listener named charlie who says nearly all your answers presuppose a software engineer has a good manager and leadership why is this that's the whole question that's a that one hits home oh yeah Yeah. I love this question. It's very introspective. It is. So we were talking about this a little bit, and I think one answer is, I think you said this, Dave, so I will say it, but give you the credit. All right. You'll win the soft skills bucks, or I don't know, whatever the credit is, whatever unit it is.

It's hard to predict behavior of bad leadership and bad management, because there are so many different ways to be bad yeah that that if we're trying to defensively assume if we're trying to defensively like guard against okay but what if they screw up in this way when you bring them this problem it's it's tough to get anywhere i guess there's there's too many ways for that to go south or to explode into a combinatoric nightmare of like yeah quadrillions of that's why we just didn't want to we know the answer we just didn't want to spend 10 universe lifetimes explaining all the different permutations of wrong just for time constraints also we couldn't find a podcasting hosting storage system that would allow us to store that much audio

not yet there's a market opportunity out there for some combination decision tree podcast storage. So why do you think this is, Dave? I think it's because I'm hopelessly optimistic and I've lived a charmed life. Do you think you have had bad leadership or bad managers? I think that I have had unskilled leadership and managers, but I have not had bad faith actors as leaders i think people who actually don't have the best interests of their team at heart they exist i just don't think i've had them in my own team i think i'm the same yeah i've definitely had people who i i disagreed with some of the things that they did or ways they approached problems but i feel like we were definitely working towards the same goal but i you know

we hear so often, and maybe this is a kind of an effect of our cynical culture that we live in, but we hear so often about nefarious people. I mean, I won't say any names, but in the headlines just recently, there was someone who billed themselves as essentially the biggest philanthropist the planet has ever seen, but then maybe not actually in reality a philanthropist, you know? And so I think a lot of times we wonder, am I working for someone like that? Is my boss secretly working to undermine me. And then we hear stories about this kind of thing all the time, where people report that their boss was trying to manage them out or had some motivation that didn't actually align with the team's success, or some political relationship within the company

that caused them to make choices that undermine their own team. It's the kind of stuff we hear about it all the time. But I wonder if it's a survivorship bias or a sample bias kind of thing, where there just can't be that many bad actors to where that needs to be our default answer. You know, like if we're shooting for the 80% accurate answer, it seems like, again, maybe I'm just a hopeless optimist,

but it seems like if we're shooting for the 80% case, we're probably got to assume good intentions and decent competency. I was thinking about Hanlon's razor, never ascribed to malice that, which is adequately explained by ignorance. i think is how i've heard it before which is similar to what you were talking about with

with lack of skill it's it's really easy to screw up but be trying to do the right thing and and that can look like incompetence and sometimes the the lever you have as a manager or leader is bigger so your mistakes can have larger impact there's there's kind of more responsibility and more of a spotlight on you so i i feel like i feel like most of the leaders and managers i work with have been flawed humans who get stuff wrong sometimes just like everyone else i work with but the impact of getting stuff wrong can be bigger as a manager so it sticks out more i wonder if that's why and there's there's the power dynamics to go around the go with that like if if you have a weird conversation with a co-worker and you think huh that's kind of awkward

you might say all right back to work yeah if you have a weird conversation with your boss and think that's kind of awkward maybe they're like plotting against me that like that doesn't that that possibility doesn't come to mind as easily with without the difference in in power dynamics right and maybe i'll spend the next few days losing sleep over this awkward conversation yeah yeah so what's that there's got to be a name for this bias right call it dave's law that oh man i was going to call it the Jameson law. No, because that's one of the laws is you can never name it after... Well, I'm being pretty prideful here by assuming that I have formulated a new name-worthy law. But one of the laws is you can never name it after the person who formulated it. It has to

always be someone else. Someone who stole the recognition and who's better at marketing? Yeah. And there's a name for that law and it's not named after the person who coined it. so what is what is the bias here it's it's that like you'll perceive i don't know weaknesses or flaws or failures they'll be magnified in positions of leadership or something like that exactly when there is a power differential in a relationship then otherwise innocuous behaviors have like unreasonable or inequitable impact yeah this is why they've never named a law after me i'm gonna write this down this sounds cool well not cool as in like oh neat it sounded pretty good until i tried to say the words no that's an interesting thought i'm sure there's a name

for this already i i'm too skeptical of my own smarts to think like no one has ever thought this before yeah kind of going back to the original question you know all of our answers presuppose a software engineer has a good manager and leadership i think i think what we the reason i say so often, go talk to your manager about this and here's how you can say it, is because you have to at least try to engage your manager because it is their job. It's kind of like the same way that a company presupposes that it has good engineers working at the company every time they send a JIRA ticket to an engineer to work on. I'm kind of presupposing because it's your job that you can do this ticket. And I think as a manager, we presuppose it because it's actually

in their job description to handle the situation. So we send you there first. But trust me, Jameson and I are both very much aware that not all managers or leadership are going to respond well to that. And so maybe what we should start doing is saying, okay, go to your manager, say this. Then if they say the following, you're good. And if they say anything else, you're in a bad situation with bad manager and bad leadership. And the universe of anything else is so big that we can't tell you what it's going to be, but go ahead and submit another question to our Soft Skills Engineering podcast question backlog. And in six years, we will answer that question and you'll know what to do. You'll be one step further along

down this decision tree. Yeah. Let's just say that the Soft Skills Engineering REPL is very, very slow. I do wonder if there... I feel very snooty while I'm saying this, which is never a good sign but i wonder if there's some amount of like have we have we chosen or been sorted into places where like things are generally all right you know like generally like maybe the situations we have ended up with are not representative of the talent level of management and leadership as a whole i think that's probably true i mean just given for every dave and jameson who have lived a charmed life with a career full of supportive and reasonably competent engineers or sorry leaders there is a a jayven damason pair who

in another universe had 100 evil and incompetent managers yeah i wonder if it's maybe does it have something to do with like which industry you're in or maybe location maybe there's there's i don't know a less strong software industry in a place that you're working and so that the overall talent level is lower i don't know i it's not really an answer at all but i am wondering if general things seem pretty okay is the is not the norm you mentioned maybe it's the 80 case and and that feels high to me based on my scientific gut i asked my what is that thing named i asked my paramecium my parameciums paramecii what is the plural of that word i asked them uh paramecia i ask my paramecia that's what i mean when i say ask my gut that is correct i just googled it after i

said it that time good job and what and your paramecium said what there was no consensus they were unhelpful talk talk about talk about a power imbalance that paramecium is like one swipe of the hand and we're all dead it said i'm just trying to kill you here leave me alone yeah so is there a more general lesson or principle here besides maybe jameson and and dave are kind of naive which is a good lesson to take i mean there's also another related possibility which is maybe jameson and dave are white guys with beards and kind of like fit the the mold a little bit and and not everyone's experience is the same especially if they come from different backgrounds, that could have something to do with the observation as well.

Yeah. So I guess what you're saying is that one manager or one leader could actually create more trouble for different team members on the same team, depending on how that manager or leader perceives them. Yeah. It could be explicit and deliberate. It could be implicit bias. It could be unconscious. It could be any number of reasons. But that fact alone, if a manager singles out people on the team and treats them poorly, but treats other team members well, is in and of itself one of these indicators that the manager is not the rosy, perfect leader. And so I guess we just haven't been the recipient of that bad behavior. It's quite possible that others on our teams or people surrounding on us surrounding us have been the recipient what's the opposite

of beneficiary where you something actually hard to fishery i think it's bad i think we haven't been the bad of these bad leaders even though they were bad well said i think you should i think we should name a law after you with that kind of wording sherry it's good jameson's law of bad neologisms so what what is the lesson or takeaway here stop listening to us that is not where i was hoping this would go but your logic is i mean i mean sorry i meant listen more listen more that's oh man sorry the marketing team always gets after me for saying Actually, I have a positive spin on that, which is a lot of this is caused by just the general low skill of engineering management.

It sounds really bad when I say it that way. People get roped into it. They don't often deliberately choose and certainly don't study or prep a lot to go into it. So there's a lot of engineering managers out there who are competent technical folks who talk real good, you know, and it turns out that's not enough. So I think part of what we do by presupposing a good manager is help our listeners have expectations of what good behavior looks like. And that can be useful as that percolates out into the world. maybe that will influence leaders and managers to to get better either through the listeners themselves as they go into those positions or or just like if you bring a problem to your boss and

and frame it in a certain way that is helpful that might help them understand oh this is this is like the right way to solicit feedback from people or something like that does that kind of make sense i see i can count all the cents on many hands and you can't count on no hands got it That's right. It does require some hands to count. Yeah. Well, my brain's empty. All right. We drained it. Let's call it. All right. What can people do if they want their own questions answered? Dave? Go to softskills.audio and click the Ask a Question button. And we, as always,

we send out a heartfelt... Sorry, I'm trying to work in the word paramecium here, but a heartfelt... From the bottom of our paramecium. that's right thank you to everyone who has submitted questions we absolutely love them keep them coming the more the merrier you should see jameson's eyes light up every time he opens the the backlog and sees more questions it's like christmas morning every single week i believe in santa again now i'm just thinking about the idea of having a single pet single-celled organism that you you're very attached to you've like anthropomorphized probably more than it deserves you're trying to keep it alive you can you have to use a microscope to even see it

yeah yeah it has like a two hour long lifespan that you're somehow really invested in my paramecium is like 87 in paramecium years I can't miss these essential bonding moments slash last moments together all right well I think that means we're done thanks for listening we will catch you next week