Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 345: Head of Engineering vs writing code and Voluntary Severance

Episode Date: February 27, 2023

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I have around 14 years of experience and was recently promoted to a Head of Engineering role. I am now leading an engineering department of around 75 people. I’ve become increasingly ‘hands off’ with coding, and it’s been at least 2-3 years since I wrote code regularly. My role is completely hands off technically. I’m questioning whether this is the right role for me. I want be more hands on, but I worry my skills are now so rusty that I’d have to start over and spend all my spare time learning to code again. Do you think it’s realistic to get back to a hands on engineer role at this point? Have you seen it done successfully before? Does walking away from this leadership role make it harder to potentially take on other leadership roles like CTO in the future? Hypothetically speaking, let’s say that you were pretty sure layoffs were coming to your company even though they say they are cutting costs everywhere else that they can in order to avoid layoffs. Now let’s say that, hypothetically, in anticipation of this you took some interviews and received an offer from a company that you believe will ride out the upcoming economic downturn fairly well, and, hypothetically, you accepted the offer. Would you go to your manager and offer to take a voluntary severance, and in doing so, would you let them know you had something else lined up or would you leave that out and present it as just taking your chances while your severance checks were coming in? Thanks for doing what you do. Show Notes https://charity.wtf/2019/01/04/engineering-management-the-pendulum-or-the-ladder/

it takes more than slapping a cue on it to be a great software engineer this is episode 345 of the soft skills engineering podcast i'm your host jameson dance i'm your host and lover of cues dave smith soft skills engineering is a weekly advice show about all the non-technical things that go into the technical field of software development where sometimes the answer to a problem is a cue and sometimes the problem is a cue well someone else put the answer today is a cue the problem tomorrow is a cue yes the same today's answer is tomorrow's problem that's that's probably a good summary of software development it totally is it totally is the here the villains of tomorrow are the heroes of today yeah and the villains of yesterday the

heroes correct you know it's like oh what a mess i've inherited yeah don't worry those words will be said about you this mess was someone's solution to another mess actually to the same mess you're about to create so you know it goes in cycles sometimes it's a double-ended queue and i had to type it into twitter so i could remember that pithy quote and then which one claim credit for i don't know that was something about today's today's uh problems yeah the the hero developers of today are the villains of tomorrow oh man that that just really it actually hurts my soul to think that out loud because i know it's true and i know i've been that villain you know what it's sort of like how that younger generation is always full of irresponsible disrespectful whippersnappers

and and then you get yeah you're young you feel like your elders are wrong you get old you find out you were wrong the youngsters are wrong the new the new youngsters are wrong yeah well i had it right oh man no i you know what i find out i was i'm just every every 10 years i look back and i'm like i was such an idiot that cycle has not reduced in intensity it's a sign of growth i guess but what were you okay i'm still an idiot 20 years ago were you like way more of it oh i was like i was like super idiot 20 years ago okay 10 years ago i was like i was like pretty serious idiot and so now i don't know yeah i'm sure i'm an idiot now you got to figure it out yeah for now the present always feels so right

okay enough pontificating shall we uh thank our shall i thank our sponsor today yes this episode is sponsored by the amazing compiler an original podcast from red hat discussing tech topics big small and strange go check out red hat compiler anywhere you listen to podcasts maybe even this very app that you see on your phone right now maybe they're listening on their computer okay but probably not using some application yes okay okay i'm gonna thank our patrons um thank you to these folks who contribute at the level where we shout them out every single week thank you to anthony ongaro kent c dodds oladapo fadye monkey face emoji i love me i love mavis santa hopar jonathan king connie lee braytech tatkowski nick cantor ira

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have us say words that's right the more trolling the better all right shall i read our first question oh yeah okay this comes from an anonymous listener who says i i have around 14 years of experience and was recently promoted to a head of engineering role i'm now leading an engineering department of around 75 people. I've become increasingly hands-off with coding, and it's been at least two to three years since I wrote code regularly. My role is completely hands-off technically. I'm questioning whether this is the right role for me. I want to be more hands-on, but I worry my skills are now so rusty that I'd have to start over and spend all my spare time learning to code again. Do you think it's realistic to get back to a hands-on engineer role at this

point? Have you seen it done successfully before? And does walking away from this leadership role make it harder to potentially take on other leadership roles like CTO in the future. I have some good news for you. What is it? I'm seven years ahead of this person in experience, and I've done exactly what they're asking if it can be done.

Yeah. That's like I was reading my own LinkedIn profile or something. Yeah. So you're running a big engineering group. uh i guess big is relative an engineering group roughly the same order of magnitude is same number of digits this question yes as 75 went to went into a uh individual contributor role yeah so i was uh i had i had done people management for a couple of years

and then i went and became an individual contributor at a megatech co for four years and then i came back into the people management and now i'm a cto doing some people some technical yeah so can it be done yes we have one data point it is possible for at least one person how was that were you still writing code when you were uh before you went back to being an ic not exactly but yes and no so i almost never wrote production code and i was never on any critical path for delivery of code for any of the teams. But I would write, and continue to do this in my other people management roles, I would write support, what I call supporting code, which is like not in the product, not customer facing, but gets things done internally. You know,

things like moving data around, creating dashboards that help us manage teams, things like that. And that kept my skills sharp enough that I wasn't completely distant. Although I do, I must admit that when i get back in into code nowadays i write code a little different than the than people do and i look at it sometimes and i go oh like i'm starting to see sample code that's unfamiliar to me in languages that i know well because the languages have moved you know so yeah but it did keep me sharp enough to pass an interview at a megatech co but that required a lot of hours and i think that's probably the answer to this other question is am i going to have to work really hard to get back into an ic role for me yes i spent many many

hours prepping for that and uh i think you probably will have to as well but that's kind of true even if you're an ic though but more so yeah all right so i uh maybe i'm seven years behind this question asker then because i haven't i've been in ic then moved into people management several years ago i haven't moved back to ic i don't know if i ever will maybe i will i haven't done it yet that's because you're so good at the people management right like you know or you just love it or because i was so bad at being an ic there are all kinds of explanations oh is it is the peter principle at play here potentially yeah wait no you have to be good as an ic to get promoted out of it yeah that's true i was writing a fair amount of code for a while still at the beginning

not the beginning but earlier i've not written a ton of code recently but i still do read a lot of code yeah um and that's a good idea skill but it feels relevant it's mostly to contribute to design discussions or uh if i if i can help resolve a disagreement where they need like a i don't know a tiebreaker or something like that but i have tried to write code and i've noticed it is a lot harder for me to just sit down and like bang out a solution to a problem um i it's harder to get started that's exactly what i was gonna say it's like oh there's like a four hour process to get your environment all set up and get everything running if i could just make this one line change i'd be fine but it's like the four hours leading up to that they are the killer

oh mine isn't even the environment stuff although that is a killer wait no i have written code at this job yeah i've written a a mild amount of code but it's it's mild as opposed to spicy yeah it's not often enough that my workflow is like down pat with going through our ci and testing it locally yeah i think i think people underestimate the amount of effort it takes to stay on top of all that stuff as a developer like that's a lot of your day just keeping everything running on your machine and like you said the ci and stuff like that was a lot going on for me the even a bigger barrier than that though has been just like the brain space of of sitting down and and writing the code to solve a problem i feel like it's it takes me i need to to to take like a

running start at it where before i i felt like i could just just decide i'm gonna write some code to do this thing and then do it and now i have to sit down and think i'm gonna write some code to do this thing and kind of like attempt it a few times yeah i don't know i can feel myself certainly being less fluent with it uh but i what is my point here i think i could still uh get an ic role if i wanted i i i do wonder how senior of an ic role would i be able to get i feel like i have a lot of organizational and and design and kind of the non hands on the keyboard skills have been exercised heavily but hands on the keyboard is a big deal if you're an ic yeah and and i think that part is certainly weaker so i do wonder like would it would it feel like kind of a demotion or

something instead of a role change it it certainly did for me when i went from an ic from my role i was a director of engineering i was managing probably like 40 to 50 people and then i went to an ic role where i was a tech lead on a team of like eight or ten people to start and but i was making a lot more money and so i just didn't care yeah maybe that's the key it totally was the key In fact, that company, that was their whole strategy, I'm convinced, is take people who have experience dealing with much bigger problems and much bigger scope and give them small scope and small problems, but pay them much more and your problems will be solved very well. Small problem, big money. Big money and big experience for the problem. Yeah.

So what about, does it make it harder to take on a leadership role like CTO in the future? Again, I haven't been through this personally, but my gut feels, no, I feel like it'd be a, I don't know, I think it'd be a nice thing, not a requirement, certainly, but it'd be a nice thing to see that this person is still in touch enough. I actually think that an ideal career for many people is bouncing back and forth between leadership and individual contributor every few years. And I say that because in my experience, the leaders that I enjoyed working for the most are people who are really had good technical chops and they could really converse with me about my day to day work. And I thought they could probably do a better job than me, you know, and so, and I'm not saying that's me right now for my team members, but I do, I did appreciate that a lot. And so being able to bring that, I think is great, but also having, you know, it's like, look, I didn't just step into the people management thing yesterday, right? Like I've got some years under my belt. So, so I'm also reasonably skilled there. So I don't know. I kind of like that. And I don't see any reason why you can't make a very successful career doing

that. I want to shout out episode 195 when we had Charity Majors on as a guest. I think is this the right episode? If not, Charity will be deeply offended. She has a blog post about that very topic called the pendulum or the ladder talks about that, that kind of in-between space where you, you maybe swing back and forth between a senior IC and, and sort of line level manager as a, as a really nice, happy place for a lot of people. Yeah. Cool. Way to growth hack our audience by making them listen to two episodes instead of just one. That's really good. And maybe I got the episode wrong. So you'll have to listen to like a hundred episodes to find the right one you can binary search it maybe i don't know yeah log log base two of 345 whatever that

is too bad they're not sorted by anything we'll never know yeah um yeah so like perfectly legitimate career track i don't think you'll have any problem jumping back in probably will take some work and uh i love it for you and i think you should you should give it a shot yeah especially if you know if you know like this is what i want to do i mean that's a pretty powerful reason to do a thing. Or if you know, I don't want to be a people manager anymore. That was kind of where I was a little bit. Yeah. First time. I kind of wonder how I'd hack it, but I definitely enjoy what I'm doing. But yeah, the motivation of like, I don't, I don't like this. I want to do the other things. That seems like a good thing to follow. Have you heard about the podcast from Red Hat

called Compiler? Yes. Red Hat Compiler just launched a new series called Reroll, where they They describe different jobs in a software company, starting with the CTO, then architect, and more. They've not mentioned the office prankster yet, which is a miss on their part. It's an essential role at any startup. That's true. They also have a series on software technology stacks, describing databases, programming languages, front-end frameworks, back-end technologies, and even test frameworks. It's a pretty cool series. Compiler comes to you from the makers of Command Line Heroes and is hosted by Angela Andrews and Brent Simineau.

Listen to Compiler on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. we'll also include a link to this show in our show notes all right should we read our next question yes please do this is from a listener suspiciously named hypothetically anonymous yeah hypothetically speaking let's say you were pretty sure layoffs were coming to your company even though they say they are cutting costs everywhere else so that they can avoid layoffs now let's say that hypothetically in anticipation of this you took some interviews and received an offer from a company that you believe will write out the upcoming economic downturn fairly well and hypothetically you accepted the offer would you go to your manager and offer to take a

voluntary severance and in doing so would you let them know you had something else lined up or would you leave that out and present it as just taking your chances while your severance checks were coming in thanks for doing what you do do you remember that episode of the office where uh michael uh what is it someone comes in and says i quit and the boss says he fires him you can't quit you're fired yeah and then calls his boss to brag about how good of a job he did and his boss says michael now we have to pay them severance that's what i thought of here yeah on the other side i'm pretty sure i worked as a high schooler at a dry cleaner and i i had a boss there who the only way i can explain their behavior is is to assume they were trying to get fired to collect

unemployment oh boy so some people do this on purpose i guess i don't know i think there's a name for that i think it's called fraud but um in uh in space law we have a different word for that and we won't tell you what it is well it's not pronounceable over uh human audio so even if i said it right now it wouldn't come through because the mp3 encoding can't encode it well there's no air in space so you can't count exactly sound that's right how do you how do you pronounce a radio wave that's right i mean radio waves if we're talking very primitive of course so huh what do you think uh should you go for it this one is this one is interesting i think it's very timely right now because if your company is saying out loud that we're cutting

costs to avoid layoffs i think there's a good bet that layoffs are coming not all the time not every company but right now every tech company i know of is cutting costs like i'm not aware of any that are like yeah we're firing on all cylinders we're gonna hire 100 people this year you know it's just not happening yeah and so there's a good chance it's coming but if someone on my team showed up and by the way i'm not doing layoffs just so you know but we are cutting costs elsewhere just kidding wait if but if someone on my team came and said i've accepted another offer and i'd like you to fire me so i can get severance i would say uh enjoy your other offer your resignation has been accepted but i would not pay severance because like the whole point of

severance is to bridge the gap until you get your next job i thought part of it was to not get sued too yeah sign yes it's to convince the team member to sign a non-disparagement or non whatever agreement whatever the terrestrial law is on that one yeah that makes sense to me and and yeah like what incentive would you have to say okay we'll give you a bunch of free money yeah but is it unethical to say is voluntary severance an option without saying i have another job lined up i mean some some companies will throw that out there but uh and i've heard of it where they say we're looking for volunteers to leave the company we'll pay you xyz dollars but this sounds like it's the situation is that offer is not on the table yeah yeah this is this

is them fishing for it yeah this would be them fishing like how do you so first of all okay let's just say that you just want to go after the money and ethics be darned you're not into two-ism, like our previous episode, which I can't even remember what that means, but I know it was sound philosophy. Then, you know, maybe you could go and ask like, hey, listen, we're trying to cut costs. And if you're quite certain you're going to go take this job, you could say, look, is the company considering a volunteer severance, a volunteer layoff plus severance package as one of its cost-cutting measures? That's a question you could ask, I think. Jameson, do you agree? if you didn't have another offer lined up or if you know if you did like so you've got the offer

in hand you're ready to go or if you didn't either way i still feel like that's a question you could ask ethically it's a little bit a little bit on the edge for me i have like an endless supply of guilt uh so i feel like i would reach into that guilt well and and i'd feel bad about trying to extract money from this company but i could see how someone could think like i don't know if you're if this is going to help improve their situation then you're exchanging money for value so maybe i i don't know they're purchasing your signature on an agreement as well don't don't forget that and your signature is very valuable also don't forget it's like an autograph think of it like an autograph that's right selling them an autograph i don't know i

know that if i found out this is what happened i would be so mad at the as a manager like yeah if i was like you already had a job and you asked for severance yeah yeah yeah i i think this feels slimy to me it definitely has a slimy vibe and i'll state i think the the kind of the underlying philosophy here is you're trying to get money unearned like there's no effort from you on this one there is well that's wrong you're man i don't know i could probably justify this by saying i'm willing to sign an agreement that says i won't i won't hire your people away i won't uh disparage the company publicly etc etc the things that companies want you to sign if you'll pay the severance of course then they'll just be like take a look at your employment contract that

you already signed yeah you probably already signed one of those but you wouldn't have double signed it so i want to say i think this is wrong but still leave room for other people to think it's right because i like to waffle i guess so let me let me ask you this question james and i'm going to put you in a moral dilemma yeah let's say you opted not to go after the severance play and you just took the other offer and you did what normal people do which is quit your job and then go get your other one and then start your start your other job no severance what if you found out a week later that this company your former company offered voluntary layoffs with severance would you feel bad that you hadn't taken advantage of it or waited the week i mean yeah bad in the way that

like it's not like i could have known but i think i i would i would say gee i wish i had free money oh well okay yeah it just it feels i think the argument for it is you're providing value to them maybe maybe they're up against some really tough choices and this makes those choices less tough like yeah we have to cut five people and we really think they're all incredible and we'd like some volunteers please yeah now we only have to cut four maybe not maybe this isn't the person we would have chosen to cut but oh well yeah but i don't know it just it just feels bad to me all right well i mean i i say whatever jameson feels is probably right yeah i've lived my whole life this way and i haven't regretted it yet if i'm really glad jameson hasn't recorded most of our

phone calls i think the fact that you have an offer in hand that you've accepted already is what feels bad yeah i think if if you've already chosen had kind of like yeah if i'd kind of like started to look around a bit maybe i was interviewing um maybe this would feel less bad but but it's like you're providing them with the illusion of a choice when really there isn't a choice what if you had been severely underpaid for the last five years at this company and you gave your soul to them but they just would not give you a raise and you feel like this little severance pay is making it right then you're probably not working at a place that's going to give you voluntary severance um if you've been severely underpaid that is a good point

uh yeah i don't know i still think it is kind of shady okay but i don't know maybe maybe you have like dire financial needs that you're trying to meet or something yeah i don't know i'm just gonna waffle here and then as i do this is like the first time you've just clearly said i don't know in 345 episodes that cannot be true i feel like i say that every episode and then i end up on one thing i guess sometimes you usually waffle you and then you just go with whatever i say that's how i think about it too but like i waffle until dave says his thing and then i can agree with him and sound like oh i'm safe i can agree with dave sometimes you'll give guidelines and say well if this is important to you do x and if that's important to you do y but in this one

you're just saying i don't know it's very unusual for you okay i'll i'll get back on familiar ground okay i think you shouldn't do this okay no equivocation no extenuating circumstances always and forever don't do it can i throw some what ifs at you the least waffly i will ever be uh yeah i'm just kidding i didn't have any i just wanted to mess with you a little bit reality is complex and you're listening to to most likely strangers give let's say off the cuff advice so what i want to say is i think this is wrong but i but nobody can get mad at me okay so i think it's wrong but the most important thing to me is not to hurt anyone's feelings yes okay got it yeah it's firm firm moral fiber yeah exactly yes that's what i got okay well

i get you know and i'm saying go get go extract every penny you can out of this company even if it means they go out of business and all your co-workers lose their jobs as a result that that's another thing like maybe maybe maybe how do i put it if you extract expensive severance maybe more people will be affected by layoffs than if you had just left to go to your other job So do your team a favor and just leave and stop getting paid. But then again, yeah, like, I don't know. Is it your job to do a favor for your company? No.

Some folks would argue no. They give you money in return for services. That's right. No, I'm waffling again. Hang on. Undo all that. Don't do it. Okay, don't do it.

So the conditions of your recommendation are, if you already have a job offer, which you have accepted, it would be wrong to ask for severance or to take severance in that condition. However, I will say if they just happen to fire you before you told them that you've got the other offer and severance is part of the package, I would take it. I just wouldn't go. I wouldn't go ask for it. I would, too. Yeah, if it were offered. I agree. So to you, the moral crossing the ethical line is asking for it when you already know you have a job lined up and secured.

I think so. Okay. Yeah. It's beautiful. You have a beautiful mind. Thank you. I love seeing inside Jameson's mind through the words he says. I appreciate it.

If you want to see more inside my mind or hear firm advice full of backbone and strong moral fiber, what do these people do if they want that, Dave? Go to softskills.audio and click the Ask a Question button where you can fill out our form. And we have to say thank you to everyone who fills that out every week. We love you. We love your questions. Keep them coming. Just try your best to put Jameson in an uncomfortable ethical dilemma. i live in an uncomfortable ethical dilemma thank you we'll catch you next week