Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 349: Performance review dissonance and being a remote manager

Episode Date: March 27, 2023

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I am a senior engineer looking to make staff. Every week at my one on one I ask my manager what I can do to improve and always receive the answer “keep doing what you are doing”, but when I receive my performance review, I don’t receive top grade or promotion and there are listed areas of improvement. How should I feel about this and what should I do? I’m a software group manager for a medium sized applied research organization that deals with both software and integration onto hardware. I am fully remote while the rest of the company has returned to the office due to the integration work with hardware. I started managing just before the pandemic. What are some effective strategies to deal with this setup? What are some typical gaps or issues to look out for? How can I reassure team members that may be skeptical of this setup, as well as peers and my bosses? I do have full support from above as of now. My rough thoughts so far include: be candid about limitations of this setup, experiment and iterate quickly on communication and collaboration processes, solicit regular feedback, and use it as an opportunity to grow members of my team into seniors and tech leads by having them focus on mentoring juniors and managing integration with other teams.

it takes more than running your performance benchmark from a different directory in order to make it go faster to be a great software engineer this is episode 349 of the soft skills engineering podcast i'm your host jamison dance i'm your host dave smith soft skills engineering is a weekly advice show about all the non-technical stuff around the technical field of software development which means that we will limit our comments about how weird performance stuff can be to this part at the beginning you know link a strange loop talk from a few years ago that has this example of a performance benchmark that changed quite a bit because someone ran it from a different directory which was used as input because the program read the environment and

the directory length change was enough to like kick some stuff out of cache oh wow and then the code got faster oh my goodness that's so cool and so so wet yeah it's uh it made me question reality a little bit you like tweak a thing and think oh three percent faster good time to ship it it shouldn't have made you question reality because benchmarks don't have a lot to do with reality so i think this is just more evidence of that yeah that's true actually i think they talk about a framework for fuzzing all that stuff so that your benchmarks are more independent of like cache locality that is affected by environment stuff they're more fuzzy reality yeah they're fuzzier yeah fuzzy wuzzy was a benchmark all right that's not what this is

about dave do you want to thank our tremendous sponsor i do this episode is sponsored by compiler an original podcast from red hat discussing tech topics big small and strange you'll learn more about the red hat compiler podcast in the middle of this show smack dab in the middle i also want to thank our patrons thank you to the folks who support us at the level where we shout them out every week thank you to systematic guy anthony ongaro kyle boss connie lee santa hopar noah frazier loge kent c dodds jenny kim owen chardo craig motlin isle mavis the stochastic parrot alice jost ganandon hooten ohio patreon.com.au we're hiring ira chan monkey face emoji jonathan king testing is documenting.org oladapo fadie will angel

pronounce like that town in ohio scotland with an unpronounceable name ernga nick hathaway travis sanders braden canes john grant bartek tatkowski cody sale nick cantor and philip john the seal thank you thank you to this group their names etched in the hall of heroes if you want your name similarly etched in the hall of heroes which is the bites of the audio of the show i guess that's the hall of heroes yeah that's the hall of heroes uh then you can go to sasko's audio and click support us on patreon and uh any dollar contribution will get you an invite to our slack team and enough of a contribution will get you to shout you out every week and pay for stuff like this show like this show and anything else we want lollipops i just noticed we started putting

some stuff on youtube and i'm wearing the same shirt today as i was in one of the things that we published suddenly it matters suddenly your wardrobe choice matters yeah exactly but also maybe this can be like a it's like a call to action help jameson buy another shirt help improve jameson's wardrobe inventory just quantity not quality yet he needs two shirts all right well should i read our first question please this comes from an anonymous listener who writes i am a senior engineer looking to make staff engineer every week at my one-on-one i ask my manager what i can do to improve and i always receive the same answer keep doing what you're doing but when i receive my performance review i didn't receive a top grade or promotion

and there are listed areas of improvement how should i feel about this and what should i do how should you feel about it oh no that's a question we should answer you should feel melancholy answered um the following please feel the following emotion now let us know when you're done feeling it and we'll tell you the next emotion Yeah, a sequence of emotions that you must feel. This is like, we're just being too literal on interpreting that question, I think, but it's silly anyway.

Yeah, what should I do? So looking to make staff, looking to see how I can improve. I have a couple thoughts here. One of them is if you are not having an explicit conversation with your manager where they say, I think you are ready to be promoted and here's how we do,

like, here's what I'm doing to make that happen, then you're probably not gonna be promoted. Yes. not not always i have yeah i have received out of the blue unexpected promotions before but that was a long time ago and it seems like the industry has shifted away from that yeah and there are some places i've worked in a place where where the party line was you don't say you're putting someone up for promotion because what if they don't get it and then they're sad but i still feel like most places that have structured promotion processes your

manager involves you in that if they think if they want to put you in it i guess yeah so the fact that you didn't think i want to be promoted and i think my manager is going to put me up for it maybe the question doesn't include that but this happened but it feels like the manager is saying i don't think you're ready yet without saying that and so keep doing what you're doing means like do more for longer and then we'll talk about it keep doing what you're doing is something i say when someone's doing a really good job and i don't know what it would be like to have your manager say that to you over and over and then show up on your performance review and and get a bad rating and room for improvement i think i'd be pretty upset like i thought it was your job to tell me

to do my job yeah and uh here i am keep doing what you're doing i don't receive top grade so it doesn't say a bad rating it says not i don't receive top grade so maybe they didn't get whatever the top rating is which i guess to some people is a bad rating well yeah anything less than 100 a plus is below average it's just kidding rating inflation yeah the cynic in me wants to say your manager's not doing a good job and i just have i have this vision of a manager who's like oh crap i gotta do performance reviews uh what am i gonna write on this form i don't know i guess meets expectations okay i'll put that in uh oh it says i have to have three areas of improvement or it won't or the form won't accept my it won't when i click the submit button it says this field is

required okay i guess i'll make up three areas of improvement shoot i didn't know i was gonna have to do this oh maybe i'll just copy and paste this other review i did you know that's the cynic in me has this image conjuring up yeah if if done well a performance review should be a summary of discussions you've had throughout the year so there should not be surprises there can be sometimes and maybe the act of having to write down the review in like a more formal setting reveals some more insight to your manager but ideally the stuff on there as areas of improvement are things you've talked about before because your manager before that point has said hey let's help you get better at this thing i think you need to improve the performance review shouldn't be this

reveal of like surprise here's what you need to surprise i have three areas for improvement for you today it's like christmas yeah and by the way you're not getting as good of a raise as you would have and by the way uh that promotion you've been dreaming about also out of reach probably should have told you this over the last 12 months but i didn't yeah it's man i'm being really snarky today it's kind of like a backstop to make sure at some point you say this stuff the manager says this stuff yeah but it should be said earlier i i've certainly not done this at times in my career as manager yeah because this is hard work yeah it's a ton of work and you have to it's like a lot of small things you have to do over a long period of time yes small hard things cram it yeah yeah

you can't cram it and there's never enough time to do this and there's always other things to talk about and this is one of most managers least favorite things to talk about i think yeah you know like i'm going to make a habit of every month telling you the things you're not doing well no one wants to do that but actually if you want to have an unsurprising performance review you kind of have to do that yes and what should you do about it i think you should take responsibility for pulling this stuff out of your manager which kind of sucks be nice if they pushed it towards you but they're not so you can and i think a way you can do that is is maintain a some kind of record of like here's the stuff that you've said i need to improve on and then you

check in on it regularly are these still the things you think i need to improve are there new things or have i done yeah have i improved enough for you to say nice job that's done yeah Yeah, like you need to turn these vague things that happen at a performance review into regular, more clear conversations. So like, there's tools to do this, but also typing words in a text box can work. ideally you have some kind of like to-do list of okay i need to improve at giving critical feedback in code reviews and here are like five things i will do to to work on improving it and show that i've improved it and then you check in on them with your manager regularly your manager you're gonna wear out your manager though they're gonna be every week i'm exhausted you're just always doing things better and i just can't keep track of it

it would be you you really want to make sure the stuff that your manager thinks you need to do better are things that will like lead to you being recognized by the company as well because if it is just random things that they made up because they had to fill out a section of the performance review then you might put a bunch of effort into improving it and there isn't like a clear criteria for how improvement shows up and what it does for the company why they care and so you still might not get promoted even if you if you chase the wrong stuff because your manager has not thought carefully about this because at some point at some point your manager has to take that promotion or raise for approval to other people and other people are going to say what's your rationale

for giving this promotion to raise and your manager is going to be like well have you seen the quality of this person's github pr comments and they're going to be like i don't care about that yeah what's what about what's major for revenue yeah exactly yeah yeah did you retain some customers this year what you know did you do anything for this business besides make better comments to other developers you know which by the way also a valuable skill but not one that your hr director or uh or executive team or whoever approves these things is likely to recognize as valuable yeah yeah that's also where it could be useful to talk to other people besides your manager so your manager needs to be enthusiastically supporting you in most cases

to get a promotion but especially if you feel like they don't necessarily have a clear vision of like what exactly you should do differently or or you aren't getting maybe they have it and they're i don't know unwilling to say it to you because it's scary or something like feedback from others on how to get better can be useful here as long as you then like bring it back to your manager and and get some kind of agreement that like this is good stuff to work on yeah this actually matters this will move the needle on my raise or promotion yeah so maybe maybe the areas of improvement aren't all directly from them but they they hear them and agree like yes if you did that it would be great you would be better at this thing that the company cares about i think if i was in this

situation and i was bold and courageous i would go to my manager and say thank you for this performance review. I appreciate the information. You gave me a rating that is lower than I would like to hold myself accountable to achieve each year. I want the top rating and I want to do what it takes to get the top rating. Please help me achieve that this year. What can I do? And make your manager do the job, do the hard intellectual work of coming up with a concrete direction for you to follow this year. Because I'm just reading, kind of reading between the lines here. And also there was a little more information that we edited out for brevity that uh the person said it feels like my manager just made something up to put on the form um but it's like make them do their job

now you know it's like and by making it clear to your manager that you want the top rating that will now be on the forefront of their mind so that as opportunities to discuss it arise a they won't be dissuaded from talking about it like they won't feel awkward about it because they know you want it and it's like you would you would like them to talk about it even if it means them telling you you're not doing something well and b you give them a real concrete description of what you want which will help them deliver on what you want you know that one one way to not get a promotion and not get a raise is to not ask for it i'm not saying you'll never get one if you don't ask but the chances go way up if you do and so if you want that top rating ask for it but don't just

say give me the rating say give me a plan to achieve that rating and earn it i do think there is a little bit of a sometimes the top rating can be hard to describe in a concrete plan of like do these things and you will get the top rating because it's true if some places call it exceeds expectations like you don't know what exceeds looks like that's like asking what's what's even better than your favorite kind of ice cream like you can't imagine a flavor that is better if you just know this exceeds if it's there you'll exceeds my favorite yeah i didn't actually know it until i had this new flavor have you had gelato it exceeded my expectations for ice cream so i i think the top rating in some ways uh can be hard to explicitly plan for with your manager because the plan you

make up could be you could think of that as like fitting in with what you expect for the role like yeah expect someone at this level to do this kind of stuff so let's make a plan to do it and to exceed you got to do more than that stuff so yeah something that's not on this paper that i put in front of you yeah do do well i uh i am an artisanal basket weaver does that count i guess the letter of the law so one thing you can do in that case this depends on if you have a career ladder that is somewhat structured is look at what the expectations are for levels above where your current level is. And if you, if you do a great job at a level above your current level, that's probably exceeding expectations. So, so like try and do the next job and do great

at it. Um, that's one way to do it. That's not always possible and depends on opportunities that might not exist. And if, if it's like the next level up is have a major impact on the industry as a whole maybe there's not a thing to do on that right now you know but it's an option it can be tempting in this situation to force your boss to be so prescriptive that it turns into like a legal transaction yeah like you all right you promise you promise i'm gonna get this rating if i do this thing a year if i find any way to check these boxes you know and then uh you know try not to make your boss feel like you're trying to get the braids or get the promotion on of technicality you know and so one way to do that is to say listen could you point out to me

if your company rules allow this the people who got the highest rating this year and tell me some of the things they did that stood out to you to make them deserved of that rating and then watch those people and try to get close to those people and figure out what it is that they're doing that's got the attention of your boss and and the organization to reward them so highly and try to pattern yourself after them at least in the ways that your boss has said uh that made them worthy worthy we're not worthy worthy of that rating try to get close to these people i just imagine you breathing over their shoulder because they are the enemy once once you eliminate them your boss has to give you the high rating that's how it works uh it can work that way at some places

oh man get out um have we answered the question i think so good luck it's an all-too-common problem to have a boss that you feel might not be doing night might not have as much of an interest in your success as you do in your success and so it's always good to help them along give them you know help them know what you want and then uh don't box them in a corner and work with them as a partner so good luck yeah have you heard about the podcast from red hat called compiler yes red hat compiler just launched a new series called re-roll 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 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. Shall I read our next question?

Go for it. I'm a software group manager for a medium-sized applied research organization that deals with both software and integration onto hardware. I am fully remote while the rest of the company has just returned to the office due to the integration work with hardware. I started managing just before the pandemic. What are some effective strategies to deal with this

setup? What are some typical gaps or issues to look out for? How can I reassure team members that may be skeptical of this setup as well as peers and my bosses? I do have full support from above as of now. My rough thoughts so far include be candid about limitations of this setup, experiment and iterate quickly on communication and collaboration processes, solicit regular feedback and use it as an opportunity to grow members of my team into seniors and tech leads by having them focus on mentoring juniors and managing integrations with other teams. Huh.

This is hard. Yeah. Especially in a management role. Yeah. Yeah, we've talked a lot about how hard it is to be the only remote person on a team. And then to be in charge of that team, even harder, I think. I do have full support from above as of now.

As of now. If I were above, I would not give full support. I would be worried about this setup. You would give partial support? I'd leave it ambiguous. Do I have? support i don't know you'll never know how supportive i am what does that glance out of the corner of jameson's eye mean the supportive glance or an unsupportive glance oh could go

either way it's like mona lisa the the mona lisa performance review you're not sure if it's a good review or not if you could master the mona lisa face when you're on the the giving end of a perform actually really any business interaction uh can benefit from the mona lisa phase strong negotiation tactic but are they happy are they saddened by this how can i reassure team members that may be skeptical of this setup boy oh man i actually have an interesting data point on this which is that uh when i was working at a big big tech company at the time the pandemic started and we all went remote about a month into this situation the company surveyed oh man probably 10,000 people, and asked them how satisfied they were with the remote work arrangement.

Now, this is a little different because everyone was remote, but it'll tie in here in a second. And it turns out there was a strong inverse relationship between people's level on the org chart and their satisfaction with being remote. Turns out the lower the level you were, meaning the less managerial responsibility you had, the less leadership responsibility you had, the more happy you were with remote work and the higher you were on the org chart, the least happy, the less happy. I don't know how to say that. The people on the top hated it. You had management hated remote work. It was very, it was a lot harder for them. They felt to do their job in a remote setting. And so I'm looking at this situation and going, well,

that's you now, like you, it's a lot harder for you to do this job in a remote setting than it is for someone who's an individual contributor to do their job in a remote setting, typically. Yeah, and it's even harder because the folks that you are trying to work the most closely with are all together. So much of management involves looking at, I'll call them passive signals.

Like you're just kind of looking at what's happening and trying to infer stuff from that. And if you're all remote, those passive signals are more likely to happen in places where you can still participate in them. But if everyone is on site, there's a lot of ways for information to travel among the team as they work that don't include you at all. And not maliciously of like, we're going to hide stuff from my boss. It turns out you can still do that when you work remote. You can still talk to your

coworker about your boss behind their back. That's right. Maybe easier. Yes. Yeah, that's true. But just, I don't know, if two people are hashing out an idea, if they're not doing it in a document or Slack or something anymore, if they're doing it on a whiteboard. You're not going to see that and know, oh, there's this thing that I might have to go pitch to somebody to get ready for. There's just lots of ways for the same way that you would struggle with this as an IC, lots of ways for you to miss out on communication. I think it'll be hard as a manager, but even harder because those are bigger parts of your job than as an IC. Yeah, I agree. The way I have a mental model of this is imagine yourself as being a face on a

little box that's tucked away in the corner of the building. And the rest of the team is all in filling the rest of the building, doing activities, talking to each other, working together, laughing together, eating together, walking down the hallway together. And you're trapped in this little box that has a speaker that lets your voice out. And it's in the corner. And every once in a while, the team has to go and talk to that box. And that box, it does write your paycheck. So it's an important box to keep happy but still it's just a box in the corner tucked away oh and i just think how hard would it be to be that box yeah this is gonna be tricky to pull off one of the things that you need to do is create habits of of the team working in a way that includes you

because it'd be really easy for them to work in a way that excludes you even without deliberately trying. So maybe that means that you care more about keeping some project management status in a tool up to date. Or maybe it means that even though the whole team is on site, you focus on more of a written culture of design documents that you exchange back and forth. There's a bunch of different ways you could do it, but it won't happen by default. The fact that you're a manager means you might be able to push it to happen more than it would if you were an IC on an in-person team that was remote where that's really hard to just say like hey everyone work a different way for me but yeah because because you're the box that signs their paycheck you do have some power

to say work a different way for me but limited though limited influence yeah yeah yeah and you want to make sure it's not overly burdensome on them right like they should still be able to do their jobs efficiently even though their manager is remote because if i was your boss and i heard the team say it really sucks to have a remote manager because it makes us have to do all these extra steps that we wouldn't have to do. We'd be like, well, okay, let's just not do that. Yeah. Let's fix that. Yeah. It's not a quick fix, but it is fixable. Yeah. I was thinking about this and I thought, if I was in this situation, because I was in a situation similar to this pre-pandemic, I was the only remote team member of my team. I wasn't the

team manager, but I was essentially the technical lead. And I got to say, being in a technical lead role actually makes this easier or a management role, any kind of leadership role, because there's already a natural desire for team members to keep you in the loop talk to you consult with you and so they'll they'll pay the extra friction cost to do that because it's just natural to do so that is that's a tailwind that you have going in your favor but i reinforce that by going and visiting on site at least once a quarter i would fly out spend a week with the team i'd be there in person with them all week i would usually work extra hours to make sure that i had plenty of facetime with everybody while i was traveling and then i would go back home and it helped a lot to

have a little in-person connection with the team regularly i have an idea a team managed by a remote manager will not have some of the same advantages as a team managed by an on-site manager but we'll have different ones so okay the question asker says something about like be candid about the limitations of this setup you you can also flip it to say not just like here's here's what's tough about it but here are some good unique things that we get from this i don't know what those are that's your job to figure out but i'm sure they're there and if you can make sure that it's clear this isn't just like if this is a trade-off where you get some good things in exchange for other tough things instead of just here's all the good things we don't get from

having a remote manager that could make it easier to to show the value of this setup to the organization yeah make everybody jealous that that you're on a team that has a remote manager that's that's the goal look how cool it is because we get to do thing x like not show up to work on friday or whatever it is working for a remote manager is great they have no idea when i come and go or if I'm even out. Yeah, exactly. One thing that I tried to do when I was in a remote management situation, everyone else was remote too, is you have to use your calendar a little bit more aggressively than you did when you could just count on in-person random interactions happening to take care of some of your management responsibilities. And what I mean by that is if

there are key team members that you need to have frequent touch points with, organize your calendar in such a way that you will naturally interact with them the requisite number of times per week. So for example, I had a couple of directors reporting to me at my last company. We were all remote. And I needed to talk to them multiple times per week. But I didn't organize three one-on-ones with each of them each week. Instead, I strategically dispersed our meetings throughout the week so that I would have touch points with them throughout the week. So for example, on Monday, we had our staff meeting. On Wednesdays, I had all of our one-on-ones on Wednesdays. And I deliberately did that on a different day from Monday so that I would have a little bit of time

to elapse and I would have another touch point. And then on Friday, we had kind of an all hands team celebration day slash recognition time for what we'd accomplished in the week. And that was another touch point opportunity with them. And so I spread those out. Sometimes you might think, I'm going to front load all my meetings and get them done with for the week. But I think when you're in a remote management situation, you want to actually disperse those throughout the week so that you never go more than 24 to 48 hours without having contact with key team members that you need to talk to regularly.

That makes sense. Because you would have that anyways, if you're in the office. It's not like... Right, it's every day, right? Yeah, it's not like you just wouldn't see them for days. I could see some people thinking, well, that's really, feels very Big Brother-ish.

You got to check in on them. But yeah, I mean, you would have that. And I agree with that, which is why you don't want to make it a check-in. Like, hey, every two days, I'm going to meet with you for 30 minutes. You can tell me what you're doing. like no the meeting has another purpose exactly you don't want to you don't want to do that so

the meetings that i set up had different purposes than check-ins but they always served that purpose like oh hey we're done hey can i talk to you for a minute about this or that that came up today you know it's like the perfect time it's just like walking between meetings in the hall at your office but you just have to force those to those moments to exist on your calendar yeah well have we answered the question i think so good luck it's not an enviable position if i you know i'm feeling a little cynical today so i'm just going to say if i had to predict i think this will be a frustrating experience for you and probably long term it will be hard for it to pan out well but you can probably also make it work with a lot of a lot of work you know a lot of effort

yeah good luck yeah best of luck to you you're trying to it's like you're trying to damn a river by hand like you're trying to you're trying to change something that is pushing against you so yeah it makes sense it would require consistent effort for it to not revert back to the the default state which is manager in the same level of remoteness as the team yep well what should people do if they would like their own questions answered dave go to soft skills.audio and fill out our form the ask a question form thank you so much to everyone who does that we very much appreciate it we do really do thank you for asking thank you for listening we will catch you next week We'll be right back.