Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 337: Helping the principal and Manager conflict

Episode Date: January 2, 2023

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I am a mid-level engineer with ~5 years of experience (1 year at my current company). My team has recently hired a new principal engineer, and I’m wondering how I can help the principal engineer. There is, as always, some organization-specific context that I am familiar with, and the principal engineer is not. As a mid-level IC, I am not used to being a repository of knowledge for engineers that many roles above me, and have only ever been on a team that hired engineers at my skill level or below. Are there general tips on how to provide help for someone who has much more experience than I do? I have been in the industry for 5.5 years and have had 5 managers. My newest one (call them “S”) has been my manager for 4 months. Our communication is terrible. We do not understand each other and I am usually left feeling like I missed something or I am not interpreting his question correctly. I literally have told him “I am not sure what you want me to say” because that is better than “wtf”. I ended up crying in a meeting because I was so frustrated and confused. I know and trust my team mates. This is only the second time in my career where I just did not get along well with someone. The meeting was supposed to be some feedback for him and me, some career development, and some goals for 2023. It ended up with him giving lots of examples of technical deficiencies, the fact that I am unable to work independently (which is not true, I ask more senior engineers for help), the fact that I give him pushback (no duh why at this point). He even said I was careless because I made some silly copy paste errors in my code (which we all do and is human). [Sidenote: he does not code. He just sometimes asks questions on prs or gives nits.] I do not know what to do. His manager J used to be my manager. Should I talk to J about my issues since he knows both of us well? Do I go to my manager with ways that I would prefer our 1x1s go and how I personally like to get feedback? Do I ask for a new manager? I know he says he wants me to succeed, but nothing in the last 4 months have made me feel like that is true. I am a young woman in engineering, and I have never felt less trusted by a coworker. Especially the fact that I cried makes me feel like I may have lost more credibility to him. What do I do? Please help. I love my team. I just hate my manager.

it takes more than a decision to catch up on advent of code tomorrow to be a great software engineer this is episode 337 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 the technical field of software development dave are you an advent of coder no this is the furthest i've ever gotten and i'll just leave it to your imagination how far that is but not very far is it a daily thing yeah yeah it's a it's yeah a daily thing there's like two problems each day oh cool and they're fun they're very well written there's always a theme to them i think this year's theme is something to do with elves

like helping them pack and i've never finished nice apparently there's a leaderboard and i was reading about it and some people get the solution in in like single digit minutes which is how long it takes me to read the problem the first time and not understand it and have to read it a bunch more times well they're using chat gpt i uh there have been people that have done that wow apparently it didn't give correct solutions after the first couple days but there was someone that made an interpreter for their own programming language that they created that didn't have an interpreter yet and use chat gpt to run code that they would write in their language which is cool what they fed so they fed chat gpt a description of their language and said like here i don't know

here's a language here here's how it works execute this code in this language oh my goodness yeah that's really cool it is super cool that's really really cool it's kind of scary to think like who knows if it got it well i guess you know if it got it right in these questions because it tells you i don't know i feel about ai in 2022 how i felt about bitcoin and crypto in 2015 which is like there sure are a lot of people that don't know very much about this saying put all of your money in this thing like and i'm a little skeptical but there are some cool things happening very interesting this isn't at all what the show is about yeah i know we got we got pretty far out of out of yeah let's talk about patrons okay dave do you want to thank them absolutely

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and if you pay enough that it makes jameson jump from his chair then we will add you to the list of things we say every week on the show i'm not even in a chair right now so you'd have it'd have to be a lot to make me jump from my chair while not being in it it'd have to make me first sit down out of shock and then jump again that's a tall order residual shock that's a tall order but i think i could come up with a number though that would do it we really appreciate it it it helps support the show helps keep it going helps pay for the cost of putting this out and trying to think of some outrageous purchase that it might fund for you helps fund your your research into motorcycle shoes your passion that someday will exist

and by motorcycle shoes i mean shoes that are motorcycles they're like wheelies but powered powered powered heelies you know so you want that to be in the world i guess that's what i'm saying um should i read our first question yes go for it okay this is from an anonymous listener who says i am a mid-level engineer with about five years of experience one year at my current company my team has recently hired a new principal engineer and i'm wondering how i can help the principal engineer there is as always some organization specific context that i am familiar with and the principal engineer is not as a mid-level i see i am not used to being a repository of knowledge for engineers that are many roles above me and have only ever been on a team that

hired engineers at my skill level or below are there general tips on how to provide help for someone who has much more experience than i do oh that's a great this is a great question so you're an individual contributor and there are people who rely on your expertise but who are more senior than you and this is like a bit of a conundrum did i read that right i think so yeah yeah it's you're used to helping out folks at your same or lower experience levels right i have some real suggestions i don't have any funny suggestions i talked about like stupid yeah i said my dumb ramblings no one cares about about ai already i feel like i've used up my quick something funny i mean of course there's always there's always the mode where maybe you have ambitions

to become this principal engineer, in which case the strategy is feed the principal engineer incorrect information to the point that they make irredeemable mistakes and then take the job. There's a range, a narrow pathway to walk there because if you feed them incorrect information that is harmful enough,

as a principal engineer, they could potentially kill your company. They're supposed to be working on big, important, impactful company-wide, depending on the scale of the org things so you have to make it useless not harmful i guess so that's the that's the range so harmful only to that person's career yeah i'm assuming you don't want to do that though that sounds i there have to be people that think that way out there but boy i would hate to work with them yeah i think what i would do

is pause a lot to make sure i am answering the questions they're interested in i feel like there's two there's two modes that you might be answering questions here one mode could be like i want a very broad lay of the land so maybe you're sprinkling in some extra detail and going on some tangents or kind of ranging wide but that's useful because that will help the principal engineer know like oh you mentioned the i don't know the access system i didn't even know that thing existed or that it had a name so that's that's cool that's like extra stuff to add that i can dig into later and then another mode is to answer specific questions about uh kind of narrowly focused things and i think it would be useful to check which mode

the questions are being what what kind of answer the principal engineer wants yes do they If they want a really broad overview and you're going into the detailed history of git blame on this module that has some... And then, in 2008, you'll never believe what style they implemented here. Guess what kind of white space they chose. We call this the tab era from 2008 to 2010. It was a silly time. it is very challenging when you're providing answers to people who are more senior than you to understand the context within which those answers make sense and not get into the mode

of just giving them more and more information you know yeah and i say that being on the other side on the receiving end of this i often find myself having to say okay stop you've gone too deep let's come back and i had kind of a i don't care about that thing you're talking about i mean i love you and i think it's great i care listen i care about you right but the information someday i want to hear more about this thing not today right now exactly and so i often have to be like okay stop pause i've only got 20 minutes and then i've got a whole day full of meetings and i got 20 minutes to get this information so i'm gonna have to stop you and and ask this so i really like your suggestion to to make sure you're asking what they want and then pause frequently to say

am i on the right track it's almost like you're in a job interview you know like getting feedback from the interviewer it's it's interesting because now that i'm talking about this i feel like this could be a good approach to use that folks of all different kinds of skill levels as well it's not like it would be bad but you might have a stronger idea of like here's what this person needs if it's someone at or below your skill level where yeah like like you said you want to check in more often i i received a compliment one time from my boss that was like you know so much context and i felt really good and then as in all things i found a way to interpret that into something negative where it was like wait a minute you're oversharing

i'm wait on yeah hang on was that just them telling me that i need to shut up and get to the point where i feel that pain of like i'm so proud of all the stuff i know right like i've worked hard to i don't know understand all the gnarly inner details of this thing that i poked at yeah like you worked hard to get that information i'm gonna share it with everyone exactly yeah and and you'll be excited too i just know you will be so i'll share it i was in this situation maybe a year ago where i had put a ton of analysis into a decision we needed to make as a business i was in a vp of engineering position and i was presenting my decision to the rest of the executive team. And I got to a point where I said, okay, here's part of the decision. And I

explained it. And then I said to the executive team, you may be wondering why I did this and not that. And my CEO just raised his hand and said, we're not. And I realized I had overshared. His loss. Yeah. Oh yeah. I'm like, oh man, too bad for you. yep you missed all the great jokes that i put behind this pathway this tangent the reason why by the way jameson like why i love your suggestion so much to pause and ask if you're on the right track is because most people myself somewhat included are polite enough to let you just go and ramble even if you're just completely off the path of what they need to know about

and so you're really at that point when you start doing that to someone you're just wasting your breath because it's like okay not only have you moved into a territory i don't care about but i don't have enough context to follow all the things you're talking about now and you lost me so this is just like words bouncing off my skull you know for the next five minutes so you don't want to do that in the same way that you wouldn't want to just talk to an empty wall you know so yeah it's a really good idea to pause and be like is this the kind of info you're looking for it's great yeah if the person you're talking to is polite then they start doing this arithmetic in their head of like what is the cost of me interrupting this person and saying i

don't care about what you're saying right now is it is it worth the pain that that will inflict on our relationship that's right you you think that they're they're just sitting there soaking up all this wonderful information but really they're going okay should i interrupt them now now i'm gonna give it one more minute oh do i have enough relational goodwill with this person i don't know yeah you see the tears rolling down their cheeks and you think oh i've reached them they understand and really it's them like i'm dying this is so boring i'm gonna die in this zoom i think it's a really valuable skill to learn how to summarize one of the things i love to do as an engineer is write post-mortem incident reports and uh you know

the temptation is to write every piece of information you can find about what went wrong. You know, it's like right before the server failed, I noticed that the hibiscus in the corner was facing northeast, which was unusual, but I'm noting it here for completeness, you know? And so understanding your audience and just throwing away information that they don't care about is really, really an important skill. And I don't know any other way to do it than by practicing and so i would suggest that when you're in a situation like this where you need to share a bunch of information at the end instead of saying do you have any feedback for me you can say hey can you tell me which part of this information was the most valuable to you

like what was the takeaway because a lot of times these people what they're actually trying to do is form a cohesive narrative about what happened or what exists rather than understanding every detail so that they can synthesize like you have yeah so help them shortcut to the narrative yeah because that's what you're for you have all the details i do that on the opposite end a lot where i try to summarize what i think the narrative was supposed to be that i was picking up and i should keep track of how often it seems like i get it right but it's it's pretty often that i'm not right that i feel like oh yeah i got it i totally got it you you you meant to say this thing and they're like not at all not at all or sometimes it's like yeah good job like here's what i actually

meant you know right right oh you learned something uh yeah i like that well have we answered the question i have one more idea which is you are in the business of information conveyance here and you know if we learned anything from the internet with tcp it is that when information has been conveyed you need the receiver to reply to confirm that the information has been received and so not everyone will have the not every like receiver of this information will have the the wisdom to stop at the end and say i'm going to say back to you what i think i heard and you tell me if it's right or wrong and so you can proactively elicit that by at the end saying okay i just shared a lot of information with you tell me what was your takeaway and the

reason this is important is especially if you're talking to someone up the org chart like in this case a principal engineer the reason that's important is because you need to know what the narrative is that they're going to carry forward because it could shape your future in a strong way that you're not prepared to handle you know or that's wrong yeah you know yeah and so if they walk away with the wrong narrative or the wrong summary you need to correct that before the conversation ends because putting that genie back in the bottle painful and time-consuming that's a great point you you might think you just told them a story of epic struggle and triumph and their takeaway is like wow they sure suck at their job and took forever to do this trivial

thing and probably they're not going to say that no here's my takeaway you're bad at your job but you know like yeah you might be able to pick something up yeah yeah you could try setting this expectation at the beginning of the question answering session by saying there'll be a quiz so pay attention yes yes and then you quiz them look before every conversation beforehand just prepare a 10 question multiple choice quiz and then proctor the quiz then you get to do everyone's favorite thing proctor what a good verb proctor and gambler in time oh yes now we've answered it surely do you want to read our next question dave yes here we go this comes

from an anonymous listener who says i have been in the industry for 5.5 years and have had five managers my newest one let's call them s has been my manager for four months our communication is terrible we do not understand each other and i am usually left feeling like i missed something or i am not interpreting his question correctly i literally have told him i am not sure what you want me to say because that is better than wtf i ended up crying in a meeting because i was so frustrated and confused i know and trust my teammates this is only the second time in my career where i just did not get along well with someone the meeting was supposed to be some feedback for him and me some career development and some goals for 2023 it ended up with him

giving lots of examples of technical deficiencies the fact that i'm unable to work independently which is not true i ask more senior engineers for help the fact that i gave i give him pushback no duh why at this point he even said i was careless because i made some silly copy paste errors in my code which we all do and is human side note he does not code he just sometimes asks questions on prs or gives knits i do not know what to do his manager jay used to be my manager should i talk to jay about my issues since he knows both of us well or do i go to my manager with what with ways that I would prefer our one-on-ones to go and how I personally like to get feedback?

Do I ask for a new manager? I know he says he wants me to succeed, but nothing in the last four months has made me feel like that is true. I am a young woman in engineering and I have never felt less trusted by a coworker. Especially the fact that I cried makes me feel like I may have lost more credibility with him.

What do I do? Please help. I love my team. I just hate my manager. Oh, rough one. Yeah, that sucks. I'm not sure what you want me to say because that is better than WTF.

i love it i have a bunch of as is traditional questions that have no answers here i wonder why there's this manager switch from j j is the previous manager yep current s is the current manager so maybe there was some organizational growth maybe j was great and got promoted or something maybe s is a first-time manager that's what this sounds like to me it does sound like that yeah the meeting was supposed to be some feedback for him and me that's classic let's have a meeting where we can discuss feedback for each other and that's this list of grievances i prepared 15 concerns yeah yeah i spent four days preparing what do you have to oh oh nothing okay well let me let me share my stuff okay yeah i'll just i'll use the time

oh yeah that's no fun careless because i made some silly copy paste errors in my code whomst among us he does not code he sometimes asks questions on prs or gives nits that's how i give feedback on prs now as a manager too so that one has me questioning myself i'm like nits though really jameson i bet you don't i don't say knit like i have this now now i'm now i'm doubly questioning myself i use the word knit to mean like feel free to totally ignore this thing this is not like a major concern this is like a i don't know if this if this touches you deeply then explore it but you see unfortunately the word knit was prefaced by your name which has the title manager on it which means not knit do not ignore i have put not knits before so i hope

that the fact that i am explicit about when i care enough to block things or make changes means it's clear but yeah there is definitely some implicit stuff being communicated by the by the organizational structure positional authority carries a lot of weight with some people yeah i have come to appreciate that not everyone but some and boy i don't know managers giving knits like oh you forgot to indent this i'm glad to know my manager's keeping an eye on my indentation sounded like a backhanded compliment it was okay well now i'm gonna go find a pull request that had a knit and see if i'm being annoying or not but well not now i'll do it later i'll just think about that at night when i'm trying to fall asleep perfect that should

that should help that'll solve it so what do you what do you suggest for the question asker well i mean when when a manager goes to the effort to give a litany of concerns like this i'm concerned that this manager has lost trust and isn't really looking for ways to coach you to improvement or success but is just kind of dumping problems on you if the meeting was set went something like this instead like hey i have a list of concerns and i have i have crafted those concerns into proactive actions that you can take that i think will help you level up that's a very different tone than here are seven things you did wrong over the last six four months or whatever you know yeah so i worry about this relationship and i'm not sure there's much i don't know i'm not sure

what what could be done to salvage it so i spent many hours of my life reading this book called thanks for the feedback that is about pulling useful feedback out of difficult situations like this and i'm scrambling trying to remember like wait what did that book say quick what's what's something from there there's there's a section in there about feedback that is difficult to hear because of the listener or sorry not the listener the relationship that you have with the person delivering the feedback and sometimes that can make it so that feedback that is useful or helpful for you you reject because like in this situation you you don't like your manager right so like stuff they say is clearly dumb and wrong and i'm gonna one of the things you might do is spend some

time thinking about separate from your frustrations with the communication style this manager are there useful things to pull out of this feedback it was delivered poorly you have legitimate concerns with the relationship but for example unable to work independently you might disagree with the conclusion there but is there some is there some input to that like i don't know did someone complain to your manager to say like this person won't stop bugging me you can't get my work done or i don't know i i'm probably just planting evil thoughts in your head which is not my intention here but but like this would not repair the relationship with your manager but it might help you take some useful growth out of this uh less than useful feedback uh because part of your

manager's job is to evaluate you and give feedback even if it was done poorly you could still improve yourself in some way if you if you examine it and try to see is there something useful or real here despite our relationship maybe maybe or you could just you could just say wtf try that yeah or that that is much shorter you've been holding back for a while so jay was your previous manager right it's possible that jay was like i really like this person and also i have a hard time giving critical feedback so like maybe this is all stuff jay thought before and just never said and now s has said it tactlessly and unhelpfully but like yeah maybe there's something there maybe maybe but i don't know this is a situation where i would i would actually be tempted to go over the head of

my manager to my former manager and i would probably even couch it as hey look we had a great working relationship i could use some advice on how to handle a situation and as always with these things i like to approach them from a from a perspective of growth and what's the word like positivity rather than complaining and negativity and blaming blame finding surely there there is negativity here and there is blame to be had but the purpose of this conversation is not that the purpose is i need some concrete techniques that you can provide to me to help me work better with this person let me help me make the best out of this situation even though our personalities probably don't really jive very well yeah this will have the surreptitiously intended effect

of making your skip level manager aware of some strong negative feedback that you have about your manager because that's where that needs to go because guess whose responsibility it is for your manager to execute their job really well it's your skip level manager's job and it's actually very hard for your skip level manager to get direct feedback on their direct reports except from people like you you know like they don't know how they interact with your team and maybe you're not the only one so i think it would be worthwhile to go in and ask for some advice and coaching on this situation and uh i have no idea what you'll learn but you one of the things you might learn is that yeah your manager actually is kind of struggling and doesn't know what to do and need

some help and need some guidance and maybe need some correction too to kind of rein it in because this is this is a pretty inappropriate and not very helpful behavior i think what about the suggestion the listener asked or made about like do i go into our one-on-ones do i do i try and give some direction of here's here's how i want to receive feedback or here's how i'd like our one-on-ones to go i don't given the history here with these examples i don't think that would i don't think that would work very well yeah you know where this person is just dumping problems on you and negative observations if you were to go back and say well i prefer for you to tell me about this stuff this way i think they're going to be like i don't even know what that means now

i'm just going to add this to my list of grievances now it's eight things tells me how to do my job i don't i don't see that being fruitful i do feel like there's a decision here on whether to engage with the feedback or not and by engage with the feedback i mean work to try to understand what your manager is saying and and like improve their opinion of you or of your skills in this way or like provide or defend yourself against it yeah because because the suggestions i gave earlier were about engaging with it and trying to pull meaning and useful things out of it but depending on i mean this man i'm just being a bummer in this question this could be your manager preparing to put you on a performance improvement plan which is preparing to fire you in most cases

it could be usually there's like a strong warning ahead of time not always but but sometimes and And you could try to like, turn around their impression of you by working to understand why the impression is the way it is and changing that. Or you could try to say like, nah, you're wrong. Here's all the evidence of why. And those feel very different. But those are two techniques to try to achieve a perception shift in your manager's mind. I have a third technique that I think might be more effective. So I believe that your manager doesn't trust you. And who do they trust? Well, probably some of your other team members. And so one technique I've used in the past is if I've done something and my team members have said, wow, way to go, Dave, this is really great.

In that moment, I will say, thank you so much. Hey, would you mind dropping a message to our manager just to let them know that I did this great thing and what you thought was great about it? And if you can get a few of those done before the next time you have one of these grievance sessions, you might find that your manager's perception shifts, not because you told them to shift and not because you adapted your style or changed your way of working, but because they got new data points from trusted sources. I like that. That is also much more helpful than where I thought you were going, which is quit your job. yeah that's a good point talking to your co-workers might be another way to check to see if there's something to this yes right you don't have to say like would you believe what our jerk boss said about me but more check like i recently heard that i i could stand to work more independently

what do you think about that do you think i yeah i don't know this is awesome and i i only i'm only nodding my head on this one because the question asker specifically says i i like and trust my teammates yeah yeah and i know them and i'm like yeah then you can go to them and and i would ask exactly that question and i might even say i lost my train of thought well that wouldn't be very helpful i say that a lot but you're right it doesn't help contrary to what i read in that business book it's never once helped oh here's what i was gonna say um go to one of your team members and say hey i trust you and i'd like to get some help on a situation i got some constructive feedback that i that x y and z you know can you help me understand where this perception may have

come from and uh you know do you agree with it and what could what do you think i could do to to improve here you know and this is good for you so just in the same way that i'm suggesting have your team members deliver positive feedback to your manager on your behalf, this is a good way for you to double check your manager's feedback to you. Because it's possible that your team members go, no, that doesn't make sense to me.

In which case, you can feel confident that your manager is just wrong. And you can choose to ignore that feedback and find a way to fight it. Or you might find your team members who you trust say, yeah, I can see that, you know, and see if they'll help you through it. At which point, you know,

you know you need to actually invest in this yeah you said you should go to your manager's manager who is your previous manager and i agree with that i think if you can avoid making it a situation where they have to choose between take sides between you and your manager that is a lot easier to do yeah like if you're trying to like set up a battle that'll make your boss's boss life worse harder right and it'll be your fault in your boss's boss's mind yeah kind of indirectly i mean it's yeah you're the messenger your boss's boss can help you without you saying like get them you know like yeah that'll be a lot easier so i i think what you said about asking for coaching and and not making it like a choose which of us you you will side with but if you can get your

boss's boss to understand you are competent but you you're having this struggle then they can help without making it like pick who you're gonna punish yeah and give me things i can do rather than saying here's what i want you to do to my manager yeah but i would go to your teammates before your boss's boss yeah i don't think you want to go straight to your boss's boss that that feels like an escalation a little bit yeah and it's a lot better of a story to tell your boss's boss too of like here's what i did about it already and yeah yeah like here's here's how i've tried to pull something valuable out of this situation this isn't just me coming to you to complain about it well have we answered the question i think so good luck it's a it's a

challenging dynamic it's always frustrating when you are in a conflict with someone who's in a power dynamic where they have power over your life you know instead of on equal footing and i definitely sense there may be some bias going on here that will just complicate things even more but it would be very interesting to find out if your teammates come back and say oh yeah our boss says all that same crap to me i hate that yeah if they don't though then that'll also be very revealing yeah i think the question asker mentioned do i switch teams and it would suck to have to leave a team that you love but boy is it miserable to have a manager you you really don't get along with i feel like it's my life has been

much worse with the teammates that i really like and a manager i really don't like than another arrangement where like i really like my manager and there's some teammates i i struggle with you know yeah it's an outsized impact oh it's dave's law what's that uh remember i think you wrote it down something about outsized impact because of relation uh power dynamic something or other oh i i've clearly i've been working on the elevator pitch can you tell yeah oh i did write that down and i can't remember where i wrote it oh no i'm gonna put i'm gonna find it okay please do oh found it what is it well you wrote down when there are power differences innocent behavior can have outsized impact and i wrote down power

imbalances cause otherwise innocuous behaviors to have outsized negative psychological effects and that's jameson's law where the same law gets interpreted two different ways got it okay well i think the question is answered i agree with dave that this sounds unpleasant and i'm sorry you have to deal with it and i would only do this for a month or two before i'm looking for another place to work or another team yeah all right well what should folks 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 clicks that button and fills out the form every single week We carefully track with detailed analytics on who does and doesn't fill out the form

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