Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 339: Coworker double-dipping and building toxic community

Episode Date: January 16, 2023

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I think the new hire on my team is juggling multiple jobs. On several screen shares, I’ve seen them quickly close IDEs with third party code, browser windows with what look like a third party jira instance, etc. Maybe that’s some open source project, or a jira instance where they’re reporting a bug, but it seems fishy. In the latest instance, this person meant to post a link to the Jira issue they’re working on in our company Slack, but accidentally posted a link to a ticket on some other company’s Jira. I did some digging and this is definitely not a public-facing Jira instance. It’s internal for their employees only. Normally if somebody could do both jobs competently, I’d say good for them and they’ve earned both salaries. However, their performance hasn’t been great. We’re still in the onboarding phase and a lot of missteps could be excused by that, but I’m starting to worry that this person’s goal is to offer only mediocre performance at this job (and probably the other one as well) and we’re unlikely to see expected levels of improvement as they continue to get up to speed. Am I being paranoid? Should I raise my concerns with management or give it more time to shake out? Is there a clever trap I can set to *prove* my suspicions for sure? I recently joined a large software defined telecommunication company, only to be surprised that their internal blind space is very quiet and very few ppl are on blind if any, how do I change this ? how do I get ppl to use blind more? without giving away my blind account. quitting my job is not an option due to the economy

it takes more than setting your out of office message in the wrong slack workspace to be a great software engineer this is episode 339 of the soft skills engineering podcast i'm your host jameson dance i'm your host dave smith soft skills engineering is your weekly advice show on the non-technical parts of the technical field of software development i got nothing i don't know Have you been out of office? I didn't put any away messages in Slack. I just didn't show up. Remote work.

No one knows if you're there or not. I was thinking about this. It was really nice to take vacation when a lot of other people were taking vacation because I didn't have that lingering, looming pressure of like, and there's going to be so much stuff to catch up with when I get back. Yeah. Or is something important happening that I'm missing out on right now? nope only all that work that people like to get done when there's no other work to distract them

with yeah it is nice well do you want to thank our wonderful patrons i do a big shout out to those that are contributing at the level on patreon where they get a weekly call out they are andreas realis connie lee valentina datafold santa hopar noah frazier lowe kent c dodds jenny kim owen chartle craig motlin i love mavis the stochastic parrot alice jost if you'd like to join this crew go to softskills.audio and click the support us on Patreon button where you can contribute any dollar

amount to get access to our Slack community or if you contribute enough to make Jameson weep with joy, we will add your name to this list. Name or emoji or safe for work phrase of any kind that challenges us to the limit to this list

and we will say it on the air every single week. And go wild. Don't limit yourselves to the shackles of ASCII. That's right. Give us some UTF-8 bites and we'll we'll do our best those we'll say them in binary this is a unicode symbol 20 532 also known as briefcase emoji zero zero one one one zero zero one one zero one a secret ultimate tier is that when i'm

singing songs in the shower i'll sing in praise to you and you'll just know like your step gets a little lighter and bouncier like oh someone is singing my praises yeah something good has happened in the world i feel so light and happy how could you not want to buy that happiness is my question to you it's rhetorical you can't put a price on it yet you can still pay for it give money for it yes it's weird um one of life's great mysteries you can't put a price on it but you can buy it on patreon which means it's an infinitely good deal that's right yeah all right i'm gonna i'm gonna read our first question okay i think the new hire on my team is juggling multiple jobs on several screen shares i've seen them quickly close ide's

with third-party code browser windows with what looked like a third-party jira instance etc oh my gosh maybe there's some open source project or a jira instance where they're reporting a bug but it seems fishy yeah in the latest instance this person meant to post a link to the jira issue they're working on in our company slack but accidentally posted a link to a ticket on some other company's jira i did some digging and this definitely is not a public facing jira instance it's internal for their employees only normally if somebody could do both jobs competently i'd say good for them and they've earned both salaries however their performance hasn't been great we're still in the onboarding phase and a lot of missteps could be excused by that but i'm starting

to worry that this person's goal is to offer only mediocre performance at this job and probably the other one as well and we're unlikely to see expected levels of improvement as they continue to get up to speed am i being paranoid should i raise my concerns with management or give it more time to shake out is there a clever trap i can set to prove my suspicions for sure okay oh this is wild you actually have evidence of this happening in the real world we talk about it all the time but it's here it's in your face it's happening okay how do you actually go get real proof okay here's the thing you know the jira instance you probably know the company too go get a job at that company as your second job and show up on your first day and be like oh

oh fancy meeting you here and but then you're in sort of a prisoner's dilemma of like who's the rat yeah you now have incentives you both have incentives to well it's not really a prisoner's dilemma i guess whatever the i'm sure there's some clever thought exercise involving a trolley or something yeah there's some game theory name for this that i don't know but yes you can both rat each other out my idea was different it was from the other side to say try and hire this person for a third job oh oh you create a fake like create a fake job listing somewhere yeah and then yeah see if they apply very targeted advertising craft a job description based on what you know about this person that would be too good to pass up of course then they might

just quit your job and take the fake one i mean quit their current job yeah because they're like look i only do two jobs at the same time not three that would be crazy and unethical yeah three three crosses the line you know that famous rule of ethics where you can do a bad thing once yes it's okay but twice two bad things is bad that's right classic philosophy of ethics it's yeah twoism i believe is the name for that school um uh or twoist yeah oh my gosh okay if they quit that solves your problem would it be too on the nose to say hey you seem really productive like you you just go to them directly in your own slack instance you seem really productive i feel like you could do

two jobs at once and i know this other company that's looking and like just that way you don't have to target ads directly to meet them or whatever or like you just you just tell them hey go work at this other job which is the name of the company they're working at is that what you're saying no i think i'm giving help me get that again i think i'm crossing the line all right so so you said what line sort of like arrange so that a job posting that they would take appears in front of them somehow by target ad somewhere drop a piece of paper yeah i'm saying cut out the middleman and say message them in slack saying hey you want to get in on this racket of two jobs at once oh check this one out so you're saying just straight up entrapment yeah but that feels

that feels dishonest oh that feels as opposed to yes the other one feels fine for some reason we're we're finding the ethical boundaries here as we talk about them dead reckoning yeah dead reckon through we've run into a wall there's the wall yeah we'll have to reverse engineer a philosophy out of this later right it's like training a model but it's us yeah what would you so i wonder if there's like a generational divide here because i feel like my stereotypical view of like gen x plus is like this seems bad and like maybe millennial younger there it might be more likely for people to say like get that bag you know um screw big corporate yeah generation x and older is like i gave my soul to you and only you dear company you know yeah everything i do is

yes the meals like we had a bargain the shoes i wear they belong to you and millennials are like uh i will extract every dollar of value from you at your expense whatever yeah with no regard to your feeling or desires i i'm that's obviously these are obviously a straw man so please all of our uh our three millennial listeners out there please please don't hate me i'm one of them true so there are two others at least yes so that aside i would hate this if i were their co-worker and I suspected they were working two jobs, I would be so mad at them. I would too.

And like 10% of my anger would be like, I wish I could pull this off. I wish I could get myself to do this and be successful at it. Because you know there's enough downtime in your day-to-day where you're not 100% occupied that you could squeeze in at least a part-time job.

Yeah, but the other 90% would be like, it's going to make my life so much worse to try and manage this poor performance yeah because that sucks no matter what the cause and if the cause is like fraud then oh i'd be i'd be really mad yeah you will have to pick up their slack yep they will take longer to onboard if they ever do yeah but i feel like onboarding is a time where where more than any other time you need the most dedicated you have to like immerse yourself in the job so that you absorb enough context to be able that's how i maybe You could pull off two jobs later, but you might never get through onboarding.

That's right. And the fact that this question asker is already detecting performance concerns during onboarding, which is when people tend to be the most generous and have the lowest expectations, the fact that even now in that state, you're already detecting pretty serious performance problems, tells me this is not going to be a successful arrangement for this person, and it's going to be a thorn in your side and your team's side. And would I go to management? I think I would.

I think I would take it to management and say, listen, I'm just going to share a little bit of observation. Do with this as you will. But I've noticed our new coworker has, and just give the facts. Don't even share the conclusion. Just say, I've seen some strange behavior that I think you might want to keep an eye on. and very just very succinctly no embellishments state the facts i saw this jira ticket link which belongs to company x in our slack i saw this on their screen during a screen share which belongs

to another company and then just let management run with that that's as far as i would go would you say so i guess there are two approaches to this one is to say here's the weird stuff i saw another approach is to say it seems like they're struggling yeah like their performance is lower than expected yeah i'm of two minds about that one is if you notice hopefully your your manager is way ahead of you and notice right because i've part of their job but the other mind is if you notice that's also a pretty big signal that like it's bad enough that that even even co-workers who have a like a a small window into what someone else is doing at any time while you kind of overlap have concern i don't know i think i think your peers tend to have a better visibility into your

work performance than your managers often because they're relying on you directly you know yeah i guess it depends on how how like independently you are working yeah having said all this and and basically concluded that this person is cheating they are they are cheating the system there is a charitable explanation for what's going on here that's not actually cheating and that is they got an offer to come work for your company it's what they want to do it's what they intend to commit themselves to a hundred percent but they are off boarding from their previous company like maybe they couldn't negotiate a quit date that aligned well with the new company's offer and so maybe they're ramping down maybe they're handing off material and so they are juggling

two jobs for a little while and that other company is very appreciative of them sticking around for a few extra weeks to get things wrapped up so that is possible and so to test that theory i would let this go a little longer than you might be comfortable so you can so you can say okay it's been long enough now they're definitely not off-boarding it could also be for being charitable they could be they could have quit their other job fully but they're they can't say no and someone is begging them please please like yep you're the only one who knows this system and help us out a little bit on it also possible but i i would be less charitable i don't know if if that's what's going on good news they can talk to their manager about it now that's just classic twoist

philosophy being less charitable it tends to go hand in hand reduction to two the name of the fallacy um if they were performing really well i would be more inclined to say maybe maybe this work its way itself out but i would not want to pick up the slack of someone who is struggling because of unethical choices not because like they need help yeah exactly and they do need some help with their ethics they do and and getting fired for trying to have two jobs at once i'm sure it's in their employment contract somewhere like yeah they probably yeah don't have another job so if If not, that needs to become boilerplate in all these employment agreements. Yeah.

It's a new world, man. Yeah. All right. Have we answered that question? Yes, I think we have. All right. Shall I read our next one? Would you like to?

Yeah. It's like you knew where I was going. I know. It's almost like I read your mind. Yes. All right. This one says, I recently joined a large software-defined telecommunication company, only to be surprised that their internal blind space is very quiet. and very few people are on blind if any how do i change this how do i get people to use blind more

without giving away my blind account quitting my job is not an option due to the economy all right we all have to start by explaining what blind is do you want me to explain uh sure imagine only wrong answers though okay imagine all of the human misery of 4chan okay probably with like less of the political and racist stuff but maybe some of it there i don't know just a little bit uh but but only about work okay it's it's an anonymous space to talk about how horrible your company is it's it's like per company so it's an anonymous work gossip forum is that yeah basically so you often see like oh i heard layoffs are coming or did you hear what preposterous salary so-and-so director is or nuggets of interesting information that i've

found difficult to prove but always pique my interest and and people being like very salty all the time yeah very strong negative slant bordering on toxic wait yeah completely toxic bordering on the on like the inside border that's like how i border on the border of utah in that i live in utah you're bordering on your state's border but nowhere near the border you're deeply inside yes okay hours away in the middle of it uh yeah blind blind is a uh i agree it with everything you said it is it is exactly what we would expect from an anonymous group of employees that belong to the same company if you took away the anonymity it would be nothing but professionalism and and uh positivity you

know yeah i guarantee it but anyway it can be useful for example i probably shouldn't even say this but you if you work at a big company it can be useful because people will share information that is otherwise that you should have but otherwise can't find things like you know how are raises going to be this year and how did i perform on raises compared to everyone else you know because people will just offer up their raises and it gets and the numbers get to be big enough or that the samples counts get to be big enough that you can actually have some confidence that that it's accurate yeah i found that to be useful maybe i mean the fact that it's anonymous also makes me wonder is this is this biased by the people who are really pumped about it

sharing in my experience the people who are not pumped about it the people who got really bad salaries have no problem sharing that yeah because again people go to blind to complain it's like the number one purpose do you want to feel worse is the main outcome and then there's like a tiny chance that you will learn something that will make you feel worse but also maybe be useful maybe be useful yeah so i i guess i question your motives for wanting to get more people on blind from your company but it's because they want to make they want to make the best blind space like we want to make a non-toxic one what if this is an experiment yeah we're trying to prove the haters wrong and that blind really is a supportive loving community or it's capable of

such yeah okay go forth so how would you okay so let's just take this question at face value you've got an anonymous forum where you would like to be able to connect with your employees who you won't know who they are but you want to connect with them anyway how would you go about convincing people to join an anonymous forum that you are a member of without revealing who you are on the forum and especially given how small the numbers are of current members maybe you don't even want to reveal that you are on the forum because what if what if they are down on the idea of blind and then think think less of you yeah this feels like a an alice bob eve cryptography yes i'm sure there's some way to reduce this to math there's like a diffy hellman blind exchange

yeah exactly yeah communicate this thing without letting other people know that you're even communicating something and also without letting the recipient know who you are you know yeah so i i do know a way to there's a way to do that in the real world in the meat space what is it well leaflets just oh i was gonna say that yeah post post stuff in the in bathrooms like physical paper like you're gonna need a pen and paper yeah you're gonna need to find a printer this might be hard you're you'll need to find a printer print something out don't print it out on your work computer or at the office printer you'll need to hack the security system otherwise you'll be on cameras sneaking around putting taping stuff up to the wall here's what you do you need to find a

mule oh that's true yeah you need like a cells of disconnected yes like deniability each person only knows one link in the chain that's right so here's what you do you you find some people outside your building and you tell them take these leaflets give them to someone else with the following instructions hey find because again you want to you want to put at least a couple levels between you and the and the leaflet depositor and then okay so the instructions are it's like a chain mail like there's a counter on the outside of the envelope that says you know if you are a number greater than one pass this to someone else and uh and then and and write down you know take the number on the envelope scratch it out and write a number that's one lower and

start at five right so then it goes through five hands and then the final instruction is give this to the company that caters lunches at our company once a week and have them place it next to the lunch catering then when you go to lunch and you see that your plan has obviously it will be successful obviously none of the links in this chain will be weak and and break the cycle break the process of course no i mean you're counting on the kindness of strangers and it's similar to blind where like anonymity leads to good behavior it's the perfect paradox you're counting on good charitable behavior to get people to join your toxic community anyway then when when the leaflets inevitably appear reliably at lunch day you you see them and you go oh what's this like really

loud so other people can hear it and get interested and you read it and go this looks very interesting yeah and of course the leaflet says go to blind sign up with our company get all the latest news that management doesn't want you to know yeah it's the perfect plan so i've got a couple tweaks in there um you you might kind of enclose it in some kind of food safe plastic and then actually slip it into the meal so you're like biting into your sandwich and then you get a leaflet a plastic leaflet i would read that i would be very freaked out but i would also that would that would capture my eyeballs the instructions on the envelope say insert one of these plastic enclosed leaflets into each sandwich yeah and then you say don't worry it's not poison which is the most reassuring

phrase you can write on something that reminds me of that twitter joke of uh i'm getting a lot of questions about human trafficking answered by my t-shirt that says i am not involved in human oh man okay yeah so maybe do that yeah if you can if you can get through unseen mission impossible style through the vents or whatever you could you could post stuff in in bathrooms i see leaflets there sometimes but that was in the office before times maybe you don't have offices yeah that makes it more challenging list some spammers to oh yeah like to send emails it's like a phishing yes hire one of these botnet phishing campaigns or something that can they can spam your company email yeah that would probably work actually yeah i'll tell you what

there is a whole industry of i don't know the right word for this but essentially demand generation people who are very effective at filling my email inbox every day with a dozen or two messages about a product that they want me to try yeah they're good at what they do and they and also the follow up i'll get about six more from this in the same email thread over the course of the next month if i don't decisively put a stop to the first email so this is professionally interesting to me because i usually just delete these but more come all the time do you reply and say no thank you do you usually there's like an or not usually sometimes there's an unsubscribe link sometimes i'm worried if i talk to them that's like making eye contact with like a door-to-door salesman

yeah exactly uh i just click the report spam button and then usually i don't hear from them again okay but anyway they're good at their job what if you do what if okay but what if later you do need a new all-in-one security solution for your enterprise needs and you've you've blocked them you're doomed it's you're right it's a risk that i've been taking i've been too cavalier with the spam button i regret my choices yes oh no if only i had enterprise grade waft technology oh woe is me i have okay i have a more serious question which is what are you trying to accomplish by this so getting people on blind is a thing that you can do are you trying to learn more about salary information is it just like uh you you are used to having it at other big

companies and i wonder if there is a different way to find this stuff out without blind that doesn't involve creating a toxic community in your company well it probably does because it's probably going to rely on like in-person non-anonymous gossip networks instead of technical ones it would actually be very fun to create like a secret club where everyone is sworn to secrecy that they belong and you have club meetings every month where you come and talk about your job at every company of sufficient size there that exists guaranteed they've got their secret slack channels or a secret separate workspace or for sure that exists at oh so you're saying this person is asking the question how do i get everyone on blind what they should be asking

is where is everyone already what or not even everyone but like where's the where's the secret club where's the conspiracy yeah how do i secret water the existing conspiracy yes exactly i say this as a former member of a secret uh conspiracy at a giant megacorp oh not conspiracy there was no ill intent but it was a secret club a secret club for the purpose of communicating information that is not generally available was that yeah it was sort of like we just want to get work done without going through other yeah i don't know it was kind of like a skunkworks thing i guess more than a conspiracy but but it was like a secret separate communication channel that i think was not approved or known about this was working around processes to make it easier to get done

work done effectively yeah shadow it shadow we were partakers of shadow it so and i know i mean i don't know a lot about what you did there but i do know one thing based on your t-shirt it was not for the purposes of human trafficking and we made everybody sign an agreement before they joined saying that so there would be no questions and then we gave them whatsoever after they signed the agreement yeah t-shirt just to make it extra clear i actually have a t-shirt that says i signed an agreement that says i won't do human trafficking so that that adds in a level of certainty that my t-shirt doesn't convey right i think like trust me there's a contract behind this thing yeah yeah maybe maybe you're trying to learn salary information maybe you're trying to learn

scuttlebutt about like upcoming team changes or plans or something like that and and salary information we've talked about the salary game yep that requires you to have one-on-one relationship with folks so you might you might not know like what someone way on the other side of the company a totally different department that you've never heard of makes but you could get some of this information around just okay one one last idea start a channel called blind in your company communication software and put the topic as just write like blind and say it's anonymous and then see if people use it don't worry it's anonymous yeah don't worry your name will not be used against you the name that appears next to every message you write which is your legal name

it is anonymous and then if people ask questions you say i can see you're asking questions that are answered by the notice at the top of this channel what don't you get about this james james johnson from marketing i also thought it was funny that the question ends with quitting my job is not an option due to the economy and i i'm struggling to see how quitting your job would get more people into blind well but maybe there's are you saying for the first time ever quitting your job is just actually off the table for you but you have to have usually you have to have a company email to join the blind space for that company so it would it would make it impossible fair fair point you could i don't

know you could ask people on blind how do i get my company yeah surely you're not the first person to encounter this problem i mean there must be other communities of people who have needed to get started ask blind yeah they want this to happen say i'm i'm trying to be an evangelist yeah ask your account rep at blind how to get blind going better at your company how do they make money who knows can you pay them to like delete your company's workspace or something i think they just feed on toxicity it's like they somehow convert it to dollars they're pre-revenue oh are they okay they're yeah they're focusing on growing toxicity no i don't know toxicity hacking is what i googled what's the revenue model and one of the answers says revenue is

what you extract from vcs oh my gosh they said it out loud that is such a blind answer i think this is a a blind user not an authoritative of course i'm just saying that's exactly the kind of answer i would expect from a blind community member yeah exactly revenue is what you extract from vc it's so ill-intended oh oof uh yeah maybe some maybe some mad stuff i don't know all right well anyway i think we've uh what's the word when you accidentally sell for another company we've done that shield yeah we've chilled enough for blind that's when you do it on purpose i guess but yeah okay i yeah i do want to reiterate uh i just looked at their website again and was reminded oh yeah this is a terrible place by looking at just like the comments random questions popped

up that are highly responded to and active i don't miss it i don't miss i don't miss blind myself having moved on i used to check it every few days and uh i don't miss it one bit all right have we answered the question jameson in your opinion we have okay i think we have very good what should people do they want their own questions answered uh just go to blind that's where you get the best answers but if that doesn't work for you go to soft skills.audio and click the ask a question button where we will receive your beautifully worded and heartfelt questions which warms our souls and makes the tips of my toes tingle every time i read them thank you so much for submitting them every week we really appreciate it what if it made like the

middle of your toes tingle kind of the center of mass that'd be strange yeah yeah like your your toe knuckle tingled that lovely knuckle tingling that that means maybe that means the message wasn't heartwarming enough yeah it's like it was pretty good yeah that's how you measure but that never happens because all the messages we get they're full-on tip of toe tingle yes exactly yeah thank you for listening thank you for sending your questions we appreciate it and we will catch you next week We'll be right back.