Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 347: New untrusting manager and crappy project management

Episode Date: March 13, 2023

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Our small team where I work as a senior software engineer has a new engineering manager. They don’t trust me at all and verify simple technical things like how git rebase works, in the middle of meeting calls. I feel micro managed. Calling me on slack (slack huddle) without prior notice breaks me out of my flow. Recently they called an “Architecture meeting” and ended up talking about 2 spaces vs 4 spaces and other trivial stuff. I just felt like the facepalm emoji for the entire time of the call. They are technically good, but lack depth. For some reason they think know better than everyone else in the team. Unfortunately, they are my boss. How do I politely tell them, in a professional way, that they have to back down and trust the team? Any help would be highly appreciated. Thanks a lot. Federico asks, Hi! I’m a junior engineer. Our project managers are really crappy. I keep getting wrongly managed and “exploding” projects, where in the last days everything goes wrong with the client. Should I take a project management course so I can organize better my projects and discuss with project managers how to prevent this? I don’t know how to make them work like they should.

it takes more than waiting for your co-worker to stand up and walk away from their desk then taking a screenshot then changing your zoom background to that screenshot to be a great software engineer this is episode 347 of the soft skills engineering podcast and i am your host james and dance i'm your host dave smith and maybe i'm actually in your chair do your eyes deceive you i don't know that's what it looks like on zoom yeah i mean where am i i had a i had a co-worker oh oh you gotta finish the intro i have i yeah it's like a musical phrase incomplete that has left me in distress soft skills engineering is a weekly advice show about all of the non-technical things that go into the technical field of

software development and now i'm prepared to hear dave's story i had a co-worker who we were fully remote at the time and he grabbed a screenshot of me and a screenshot of another engineering manager and then he photoshopped both of us into his zoom background so it looked like we were leaning over his shoulder and watching him work it was awesome nice i had a co-worker who did some pretty nifty things with video and and themselves appearing in the background and yeah it was it was cool i envy that kind of skill that says photoshop and video editing skills are skills that i have not honed in a long long time back when i used to use gimp pretty regularly nearly 20 years ago i can use the power of ffm peg to reduce the frame rate that's my that's my

and make animated multimedia skills yes me too thankfully their stack overflow is just full of the magic command line required to do that yeah yeah i haven't yet reached the point where i remember it yeah no it's like it's like tar you don't remember that stuff yeah or no it's our sync that's the one i can never remember dave do you want to thank our patrons yes i do before i get too carried away all right uh we have a one-time shout out for our patron this month. And the name is Get the Book, Why Does My Neural Network Not Learn on Amazon? Good name. That's a good name. Weekly shout outs go to Systematic Guy, Anthony Ongaro, Kyle Boss, Connie Lee, Santa Hopar, Noah Fraser-Lowe, Kent C. Dodds, Jenny Kim, Owen

Shardle, Craig Motlin, I Love Mavis, The Stochastic Parrot, Alice Jost, Gnadenhutten, Ohio. I told myself I would remember how to pronounce that and I still didn't. I'm sorry. At least we no longer have that awful name now we have better names okay patreon.com.au we're hiring ira tan monkey face emoji jonathan king testing is documenting.org oladapofadi will angel pronounce like that town in ohio slash scotland with an unpronounceable name will angel by the way special place in my heart for will angel and the names in patreon all right arunga nick hathaway travis sanders brayden canes john grant bartek takowski cody sale nick cantor and philip jambaseel if you'd like to join this group go to pay uh go to pay where do you go soft skills.audio and click the

support us on patreon button and if you make a material impact of jameson's family budget we will say your name or emoji or unpronounceable city of your choice these haircuts don't come cheap can't you tell my my impeccable expensive grooming habits yeah thank you we appreciate your support and it keeps the show going so thank you so much i also want to thank a sponsor of the show this episode is sponsored by red hat compiler which is an original podcast talking about tech topics big strange and small you will hear more about them in the middle and even more about them if you go listen to their podcast thank you yes you'll hear more that's true well said sorry i don't know that really tickled my fancy when you said that oh good uh do you want to read our our first

question i do this comes from an anonymous listener who says our small team where i work as a senior software engineer has a new engineering manager they trust me at all they trust me oh i accidentally a word yeah i edited this one you can blame that they don't trust me at all yeah that's a big difference in the question it's just a little i mean a little different okay they don't trust me at all and verify simple technical things like how get rebase works in the middle of meeting calls i feel micromanaged calling me on slack via slack huddle without prior notice breaks me out of my flow recently they called an architecture meeting and ended up talking about two spaces versus four spaces and other trivial stuff ah i just felt like

the facepalm emoji for the entire time of the call they are technically good but lack depth for some reason i think i accidentally another thing but lacks lack depth here they lack depth for some reason they think they know it but uh they know better than everyone else in the team unfortunately they are my boss how do i politely tell them in a professional way that they have to back down and trust the team any help would be appreciated thanks a lot i wonder if this is a new manager in new to this team but also new to engineering management because this sounds like a failure mode of someone who has been an individual contributor and is now a manager where they're they're they're like don't worry i'll tell us how to do tech stuff yeah i know

i know things don't worry i'll tell us how to do it yeah this is i feel i feel this because when i first got into tech leadership it was really hard to let go i still remember very vividly that the first day that i came into work and a member of my team had done something without me knowing they were going to do it it was it was a little disorienting yeah that was a long time ago how does it feel now yeah now it feels like awesome yeah that's what i was gonna say i i i'm so excited when people do stuff it's great yeah it's like oh you did that and i didn't know this is what scalable this is this is leadership right here that's right this is leadership i didn't even have to lift a finger

i'm gonna go take a nap the aura of my presence inspired you to do stuff that's right wait wait so you're saying the essence of leadership is do nothing things get done you take credit yeah that's that's the basis of of your speaking tour yes i've got a new book coming out uh someone else wrote it i don't know what's in it but it's selling like gangbusters and i'm gonna go do a tour now oh calling me on slack without prior notice oh that would bug me so much how much how much you want to bet this person has a visceral reaction when they hear that slack huddle noise yeah what is it like do do do do whatever yeah i don't even remember but uh probably because i'm the caller more often yeah you never oh i've never actually heard that so i do a lot of huddles but

call you um yeah that that feels like such a faux pas the calling someone on their computer without just calling someone yeah it's it's it's as shoulder tappy as you can get remote yeah but isn't that i think it's a bit of a generational thing because i don't mind being called on my computer it's like oh someone needs to get my attention really yeah but i i grew you know i'm a little older than you jameson yeah yeah not a ton you're not afraid of the phone like i am no that's right like i i spent my high school on the telephone trying to get girls to like me and uh and so when the phone rang i got excited i'm like hello you know who's it gonna be oh it's for my brother dang stupid fine yeah i'll get him yeah that's that's interesting some of that is

might be your role as well though like i i've you might expect to be more interruptible because you are yeah or because i don't actually leadership role and but yeah yeah and you're napping all the time so yeah exactly it's like oh beauty sleep i guess no honestly i do actually send people messages i don't i usually don't just dial people up straight up i'll i'll send them a message on Slack or text or whatever. Um, and people do that to me generally too. So that, that has become the professional courtesy I've noticed. I think that specific concern you could address directly. It feels like it could be connected to the whole trust thing, but also, uh, is, is just such a separable. Yeah. It's separable. And it's, it feels like it would be easy to say, Hey, when you

call me it stresses me out because i'm usually in the middle of something and i wonder is this an emergency am i about to get fired or whatever like is there a way that you can uh how can how can you help me preserve my focus time while still getting the answers that you need that's a good way to couch it when you started going down this track i thought you were going to say something and my question was going to be jameson would you really tell your boss please don't call me uh no i i would say how can you get the answers you need and how can i preserve my focus time though yeah i think that's a great great way to frame it you want to talk about tabs versus spaces for a minute more than anything in this world like this person's boss yeah an architecture

meeting about tabs and spaces i can't think of a more fundamental unit of architecture some might say it's the building blocks of all architecture yeah i mean if you're if you're in working if your production systems are built in the language white space then this is about vital semantics not just styling so that's right it's crucial oh and i noticed i actually i think i misrepresented i said tabs versus spaces but it's not even that general it's two spaces versus four spaces you need to be the rabble rouser and propose three spaces let's no no no yeah compromise yeah yeah let's meet in the middle three spaces it's the most reasonable solution uh i also wonder if this is

again part of a misguided desire to do things and it's part of an effort to define like standards and it's just the lowest value easiest to arbitrarily say here's the decision type of standard like maybe this results in some linting being turned on and yeah i don't know i can't i can't think of a trying to think of a a reasonable explanation like a charitable charitable explanation yeah um i think as a new manager it's actually really hard to know what's important you know when you when you're an individual contributor the way you know what's important is that your manager assigns you a ticket and that's what's important also as you get more senior you can you can advocate for stuff to say this is really important but it's a

it's a small subset of what the team works on right yeah even when even at a senior ic role yeah and suddenly when it's all on your shoulders it's like i and i i struggle with this a little bit too i see something it seems important i saw it recently which makes it seem more important right uh and i and i'm like well i just want to circle the the team right now and let's get this sorted out you know yeah but all all too often when i let a little bit of time lapse and then i look back on the thing that i thought was the number one priority a few days ago i realized that a few days have gone by and it has never come up so how important could it really be yeah i i feel that too sometimes where where my sense of impact can be easily overridden by by this emotional

reaction to something is not the way i think it should be right in the world and like that that means it's important because things should be the way i think they should be and i just noticed it yeah which is probably the worst time to solve a problem honestly it's like right when you noticed it i just noticed it noticed it and it so happens that i also immediately know exactly what to do about it yeah just the instant i notice it and it's the number one priority what are the odds well really high actually yeah they have to back down and trust the team so i'm gonna give what i think is advice i've heard you give before dave which is can you express this in terms of impact or cost on the team if you can point out maybe there's an effect on morale maybe

it makes it hard for the ics to contribute and feel ownership of of solutions if if the manager is kind of stepping in all the time maybe they make the ics do stuff that is time wasting and wrong and that's like this thing you propose this is a little bit harder because it gets a little we're confrontational but this thing you proposed caused us to go down this rabbit hole and then we lost x weeks trying to yeah like recompile our database with four spaces instead of two in the source code uh yeah you can say to them hey it feels bad when you don't trust me or it feels like you don't trust me and that and that feels bad um and that might work okay and it and it might not that might work depending on their level of empathy or how much they care about

your relationship yeah but if you can point to the impact it is having on the output of the team that's that's ultimately one of their main responsibilities is help the team get stuff done like more stuff and the right stuff and if you can say hey this is making us get less stuff done that might help out i don't see a way to have this conversation that would not be a tough conversation though because you are telling your boss hey like you're doing this thing that's really harmful and i really want you to stop and there's some ego involved of like they probably think they're right and i don't know because remember people do things that make sense to them so yeah there is something about the situation that makes sense to your boss yeah maybe you

could turn it into like a i'm gonna say this is like a socratic method but i'm only saying the word socratic so i seem smart but what if you uh socratically question your boss like what what is your motivation in calling a meeting to discuss two spaces versus four spaces like what outcomes were you hoping to go for and turn your boss introspective did you achieve those outcomes yeah it's like no important outcomes to achieve and then just proceed to give your boss a performance review i give you a needs improvement yeah least least valuable rating our small team new engineering manager i also wonder this can get controversial but this is a new engineering manager you already work here maybe you have some relationships

within the organization already and is there a way you can uh raise a flag internally um to to their boss or something like that to say hey uh can you help give them this feedback again that can get tricky and it's fraught territory to to try and pit your boss's boss against your boss yes you will usually not be on the winning side of that engagement in my experience yeah i mean if you're if you're trying to say hey they should be fired um yeah you will usually lose yeah right or you'll win in a time scale that is long enough that it will still make you sad right but if you if you're trying to say like i i don't know how to deal with this and i don't know where else to go can you help me figure out how to deliver feedback to my

boss on this thing if you have a relationship with this person if you don't that makes it trickier if you're just like shoulder tapping the next person in line and i that i believe if you're going to go over your boss's head you do have to tread very cautiously and one way to tread cautiously in my in my opinion is by uh making it more of a consultative session where you're asking for advice on how best to work with your boss as opposed to tattling on them and and telling their boss they're doing a bad job yeah the message will come through by the way even if that is a message you want to send yeah yeah i mean just just the act of talking to them will communicate something. So a little over two years ago, I got back into official formal people management after

being out of people management for four years. And one thing that I really appreciated that my team members did for me was they would explicitly say, Dave, we want to do what you want. We want to support you and we want to execute your vision and we want to align our daily work with your desires for what what you want us to do and I was like oh oh that's really nice to hear because I think new leadership come in and they think oh my gosh I'm gonna screw this up my team's gonna hate me they're gonna secretly resent the things I asked them to do but knowing explicitly like having it explicitly stated that your team actually wants to support you and do what you say took a huge load off my shoulders about me coming in and thinking, well, I have to be

very persuasive and convincing. And I can't just say, okay, I've decided and we're going to go this direction. But my team actually told me, Dave, actually, we would just like you to just decide sometimes. And I really appreciated that. So how does that apply to this situation? Well, I think it applies because it's possible that your boss is feeling a little insecure about this position and they're wondering like do i have the trust and the backing of my team or do i need you know am i in kind of convincing mode and so if you actually want to do what your boss says it might be worthwhile telling your boss like listen i support you and i will follow you and i'll follow your direction and it you might find that when you do that and and they uh

they no longer have to worry about whether you're on their team or not you know meant like in spirit yeah then they might back off on the micromanagement a little it it sounds like you feel like a cause of this could be they're trying to prove their metal in a way like see i i know my stuff it could be yeah it could be i know what git rebase is and what i know about it is different than what you know about it right right i know what the right number of spaces are in code it's three yeah i'm gonna blow your minds it's three yeah exactly like you know this this question asker interpreted that meeting about git uh to be like my boss wants to teach me about git but the purpose your boss had may very well have been i want to show you how capable i am so yeah you

nailed it on the head james that's exactly what i was trying to say it's possible not saying for sure but it's possible well have we answered the question i think so good luck always tricky to have a boss doing things you don't like Have you heard about the podcast from Red Hat called Compiler? Yes, Red Hat Compiler just launched a new series called Reroll, where 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 simono 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 i'm gonna ask our next question by reading it i'm gonna read our next question i'm not gonna ask okay it's not for me it's from a listener

named vicarious federico yes yes i will represent federico by reading this word this uh these words hi i'm a junior engineer our project managers are really crappy i keep getting wrongly managed and quote exploding projects where in the last days everything goes wrong with the client should i take a project management course so i can organize my projects better and discuss with project managers how to prevent this i don't know how to make them work like they should ouch stuff blows up you get to you you get to maybe you're working prodigious hours to correct things or or ship stuff at the last minute it's kind of what it sounds like yeah i also kind of get an agency vibe i hear the word client and and exploding projects and yeah so maybe this is this

is contract work for other folks not not uh long-term employment where project management is really crucial in those environments yeah limited schedule limited budget you can't just work on it till it's good you know yeah not that not that otherwise budgets are unlimited and schedule is unlimited but it's a little bit more sensitive when it's like i paid you twelve hundred dollars you have to get this done in four hours you know yeah well what do you think so the way that i'm thinking about this question is if you go take a project management course and then take over their job and show them what a good project manager works i think it'll end great uh what could go wrong probably one course is enough too right to just be great

so i can understand the frustration here because as a as a developer this kind of happens everywhere in a lot of different roles a lot of roles depend on other roles and and decisions made by those other roles can very profoundly impact the stress level of your job but yeah this is certainly a thing um where where schedule or budget overruns kind of end up on on your shoulders to correct potentially so i can see why this would be frustrating i bet that the project managers are frustrated too i assume that they're not doing this because it feels like the best way to manage projects you know what i love when i'm a project manager i just love when everything goes to crap at the end of the project i'm getting yelled at oh this is my favorite i think it would

be very easy for them to get very defensive if you took a course and said good news i figured out how to do your job better than you know how oh thank goodness easy yes this is exactly what i was hoping yeah finally finally someone took a course so they can do my job better and and even if you're right even if you do learn how to do the job of project management better than them if you tell them hey you're doing a really bad job and you should instead do it like this and and the stuff you tell them to do is is the correct thing to do in that situation they're not going to do it like they're not going to listen to you and say thank you for that advice turns out all of my all my stress was caused by me being bad at my job yes and and i now am good at it and and have no ego

at all about i can just see them sitting around with their project management friends after hours man i was so grateful this junior engineer just told me the things that i needed to do differently yeah i don't see that going well and like jameson said even if you're right probably can't go well i think you have to try to solve this problem together with them and and say have i've noticed that we keep ending up in these situations and and if there's any if you can uh kind of show some vulnerability by by showing like a way that you maybe have contributed or engineering has contributed maybe stuff took longer than you said it would take or something like if you can make it uh the less accusatory of you are doing a bad job right and

the more we have the shared problem, um, you can, you can make the discussion, the easier it will be to get them involved in solving it. And maybe there are constraints you don't understand. Like maybe, maybe the client demanded a discount like halfway through the project or, yeah, I don't know. Yeah. Yeah. Or maybe they just have a million projects going on. Right. What you said is exactly what I was just thinking, which is see if there's some way that you've contributed to this problem and ask the project manager, if there's anything you can do to help, because I think what's happening here is you're only seeing one perspective on this like jameson said there are a thousand reasons why projects go wrong and only like 950 of them are developers faults

so there's a chance there's a chance that the other 50 are actually happening here but there is a chance you're contributing and i think you should be willing to hear that and work together because even if it's not your fault even if you didn't contribute anything you are on a team and your livelihoods depend on satisfying these clients and doing a good job together. So even if it's not your fault, it's, I think it's great to take a shared ownership attitude about solving it. Yeah. I mean, you're kind of in it together, right? Like, yeah, you hate it. They probably don't love it. It's probably not like we've, we've handed off the project to explode to the, to the engineer and our work here is done. Like it probably isn't very fun for them to deal with

the the outcome of an exploding project so yeah you do have a shared problem here and and if you can solve it together it'll be much more likely to happen if they feel like we're working together with this engineer to to get better and less reactive and and have fewer fire drills less that's very different yeah that's very different than this uppity junior engineer doesn't know anything about project management and is here trying to tell us how to do our job and who took don't understand the pain and yeah i agree i think when i was younger in my career earlier in my career i think that uh i had a proclivity to see the world only through my eyes and i under appreciated how frustrated my non-developer peers and colleagues would feel about situations

especially people doing project management where i was like oh what's what's even the point of you you know you're just you're just putting things on a calendar that are never right you know and it's like you don't even understand that i'm having this important debate about two spaces versus four spaces yeah you don't know me you don't understand what we're building and i've really changed my tune on that in last week when i grew up um and i've really i honestly i've really come to appreciate how much cross-functional effort it takes to deliver a software product that works well for for customers and users so yeah like try to empathize a little bit with what's going on here and try to understand the root of the problem and there may be things you can do to

help and maybe the project manager is going to say look the reason this project blew up is because we didn't get timely status updates from you for weeks and then when we did get the status update it was nothing like we expected and now the plan is all shot to heck and and uh you know if you could give me like a status update every three days i could keep this project i could manage this client you know yeah i've heard that from customer success people a lot it's like if you can give me more timely information i can turn it into a message that the client will will accept but if you wait too long it's we're going to look really bad you know and then it's going to blow up in our faces sure well have we answered the question i think so good luck good luck i hope

things get less explodey for you sounds like a stressful situation yeah i agree all right what can people do if they want their own questions answered dave go to soft skills.audio and click the ask a question button thank you so much to everyone who fills out that form each week we love reading your questions and it's like food for jameson's soul i mean you should just watch his face light up as he's reading these things chicken tacos for the soul it's famous i don't even know what that book is about but chicken tacos for the soul yeah it's my own spin on it okay okay that's not funny we've got to get out of here thank you for listening we will catch you next week.