Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 355: Driving kids instead of team and jk i quit

Episode Date: May 8, 2023

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: My architect is too busy with his kids! His kids have had a lot of school and medical issues over the last few months and he’s ended up flexing a lot to take care of them. This causes meetings to get rescheduled or scheduled far out in the future, which is contributing to timeline delays on some large projects that need more attention. I don’t want to be rude and insist that he put the company above his family, but he needs to be driving organizational alignment, not his kids! I’m stressed out by not knowing when he’ll be available and having to do extra work or take important meetings without having him as backup! ‌ Can you help me understand what happened here? I was put on a ‘performance improvement plan,’ and it became pretty clear to me from the negative feedback at my first review that I simply didn’t have the skill to perform at the level that was being asked for. Instead of immediately looking for a new position, I decided to take some personal time off to work on myself and my mental health, and to use the remainder of the performance improvement plan time to prepare myself emotionally and financially for that. I didn’t blow off work, but I also wasn’t invested in the performance improvement plan either. A few days before my final review, I quit instead of being terminated. Management seemed really confused and angry when I quit. Why would they be so upset if they were about to terminate me anyway? One in particular started backtracking and pretending like I wasn’t going to be terminated.

it takes more than an editor setup you've tweaked so much that it has become sentient to be a great software engineer this is episode 355 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 things that go into the technical field of software development and i suppose it's non-technical figuring out how to like reason with your editor instead of give it commands yeah exactly negotiating cheer it up yeah it is going to be amazing when the first agi turns out to be an emacs config it wouldn't it be beautiful though if the the lisp community they they came back yeah because they are the ai original ai community right from the 60s and it's

like oh yeah it turns out remember that configuration language we created that was like a subset of a lisp dialect it's ai now that'd be so funny which means it is the likely outcome. Yes. Your editor is now neurotic. Congratulations. Did you see the standup reports? What did you get done yesterday? Well, yesterday was a little unproductive. I spent a lot of time trying to console my editor. Yeah. I had to talk it down a little bit. I was ready to quit and become a word processor. That's when your manager says, well, that's okay, because the previous day your editor was trying to console you. Yeah, that's fair. You could both benefit that's not what this show is about though soft skills engineering is a is a podcast we

answer your questions that are about the technical field of software development uh and bring you great joy dave do you want to thank our patrons yes we have uh weekly shout outs for the computer science book.com kyle boss valentin at datafold santa hobart noah frazier lowe kent c dodds jenny kim owen charlotte craig motlin i love mavis the stochastic parrot alice just at least we no longer have that awful name fluxinus in a hill of hillification is common in lanfair quill gwynn okay good night in houghton ohio patreon.com.au we're hiring ivory chan monkey face emoji jonathan king testing is documenting.org oladapafari encore this shout out sponsored by will angel

ragnar oh it's back we've done we've completed a full rotation of ragnar um that's that's impressive okay nick hathaway travis sanders brayden canes john grant bartek tatkowski cody sale nick canter and philip john basile and we have a one-time shout out for dance smith and jamison dave all right if you'd like to contribute to the show and have us say your name or have us attempt to say whatever you want go to softskills.audio and click the support us on patreon button if you contribute enough to make a material impact to jameson's heart then no jameson does not have a heart condition sorry i didn't want to i didn't want to say that it's a furnace

fueled by by patreon donations if you don't want jameson's heart which is a furnace actually a nuclear furnace if you don't want it to run away in a chain reaction and cause a meltdown go to soft skills that audio click to support us on patreon button any dollar amount will get you access to our slack community of hundreds of like-minded individuals all echoing in the chamber of echoes whatever we tell them to say which is totally not the truth but kind of funny to think about please and thank you so much for everyone who supported the show we really appreciate it all right jameson would you like to read our first question sorry i'm distracted by that's a real word it is i didn't know that it is it's like a real word that was made up in the

1800s which makes it a real word now if i'm reading this right okay it just got made up long enough ago that it's definitely real maybe it's not i don't know i'll ask my editor but before that i'm gonna read this first question which is from a listener named flexed out my architect is too busy with his kids his kids have had a lot of school and medical issues over the past few months and he's ended up flexing a lot to take care of them this causes meetings to get rescheduled or scheduled far out in the future which is contributing to timeline delays on some large projects that need more attention i don't want to be rude and insist that he put the company above his family but he needs to be driving and driving organizational alignment not his kids

i'm stressed out by not knowing when he'll be available and having to do extra work or take important meetings without having him as backup huh driving organizational alignment instead of driving his kids i love it huh this is interesting i feel like for most of my career i've been very pro take time away from work pushing people to take more time off and be more careful about taking care of themselves and their family's needs but not the opposite yeah i haven't done a lot of like no you have to be here let your children starve our shareholders are priority one but what about the organizational alignment if you're off picking your child up from their surgery who will align the organization it's not gonna align itself yeah so it's interesting to

see the opposite thing happening like no this is this is a problem i have a lot of sympathy for someone who's got demanding family circumstances and i think it's important to acknowledge that we'll all go through ups and downs on this front where there will be there will be seasons in our lives when different priorities are more easily or more difficultly attended to you know it's not every day that your kids are going to need you to the degree that they need this person right now but it is that day for this person so there's a really difficult conversation here that i'm going to skip over which is like do you actually have to spend less time doing stuff with your kids i'm saying you i'm talking to the architect that would be a fair conversation for this person's

boss to have with them uh maybe a maybe a better conversation to have is like i need you to help me prep for this like if you're not going to be around for for some of these important meetings or if things are blocked on you like i'm i'm holding the bag and i need to be able to do a job so so there's some amount of collaboration and preparation that you two could do together beforehand to make it so that stuff goes more smoothly while this this guy's out yeah i agree with that however that's probably not your job not to say that you shouldn't do it or help with it but i'm kind of zeroing in on some some failures that have taken place now to where this person's work isn't being covered and let me just preface it by saying one of the most awesome things about

being a software developer is we have really flexible schedules for the most part. And we can do work at any time of the day or night. We obviously have to do a lot of coordination and collaboration, but it's not like we're working in a hospital and a patient just came in and we have to be there. You know, the patient can come in, the metaphorical software patient can come in and six hours later, it's okay if we're there, you know, to take care of the patient. So in this scenario, I'm asking myself, where's the manager to make sure that this job on this team is getting done? Because there's a person here who has a job, that job's not getting done. And in the individual contributor case, that's usually just means your productivity goes down.

But in the case of an architect style of person, which by the way, I interpret to mean they do like system designs and they basically facilitate the work of others. in their case when they're not doing their job it means multiple people can't do their job possibly the whole team is if not blocked at least severely restricted or slowed down and so if i'm the manager of this team and i know that my architect is going to have extended periods of unavailability i'm gonna be very keen to set up some kind of like you said jameson some kind of plan where they can either do the work in advance or have a schedule that works in such a way that the team's not going to be blocked because the because the stakes are a lot higher when you have

a person that the team depends on like that yeah i'm imagining maybe a decision is made without this architect present and then the team goes off and starts to build it and then the architect comes back and it's like whoa whoa whoa whoa wait you can't do thing x that will have these huge terrible consequences it's not just that you're blocked like maybe you waste a lot of time you Like you actively do stuff that has to get thrown away because of this. Exactly. Totally possible. It sounds like you're nearing one of the standard answers, which is talk to your manager about this.

Yeah. It is your manager's job to fix this. Like this is why we have managers. A major reason. And it could be, I mean, yeah, we don't know a lot about the architect's life situation. So maybe it's unpredictable. if it's predictable that feels pretty easy to schedule around yeah have your architect say here's when i have to do stuff and then put the meeting somewhere else exactly um so i'm assuming

because i'm assuming it's harder than that because hopefully anybody could recognize and fix that the key word here is medical issues which to me says unpredictability it's like oh we have to go in for a test oh no the test results were bad now we're going to be in the hospital for two days you know something like that that's hard yeah that's just hard for everyone i mean now i'm going to be speculating on on stuff your manager might be thinking but one thought i would have is is okay this architect has the skills and knowledge to do this but they they don't have the availability right should i just get someone else to do it and maybe the other person the other architect filling in this role might have less familiarity but because they're around more

that's a better trade-off than somebody who really knows the domain but doesn't have the the time to participate in this this like expensive coordination totally possible i think you kind of pointed this out too but you could make the coordination less expensive um it's very easy to wave your hands and say async make things async but have you considered using a chat tool or or writing stuff down uh and then having other people read it which does not come automatically from writing stuff down i have learned through sad experience people don't read it um yeah yeah like you can talk a big game about acing you can write a lot of stuff and then if nobody reads it until the meeting right the synchronous meeting then yeah suddenly you're still suddenly it's

synchronous the meeting is a semaphore yeah you just have extra steps it's a joint no it's not a semaphore it's a join call on your thread on all the threads we've got the team is a thread pool you're going to call join on it or whatever the wait for whatever and the meeting is the thing you're calling wait for okay anyway this is getting out of hand how can you deadlock in this scenario yeah that's what we need to dive into you're at a meeting with several philosophers dining that they're dining side you have yes n minus one forks yes what was i saying oh yeah async waving my hands and saying async yeah not the face um if if you can it's present a have your architect present a plan get feedback on it and then have some kind of decision if you can

figure that out asynchronously one you'll be uh far far ahead of most organizations in the world but two hopefully less disrupted by interruptions and schedule stuff i'm also assuming that the architect might have time just at a different point in the day but if if they don't have time then then it's not just they can't make the meeting it's like they also they can't do the right like there's not enough hours in their work week to get all the job done yeah and if that's the case your manager needs to like this is now a resource allocation problem where the resource they were using to provide architect services to the team is no longer able to provide the full complement of those services necessary for the team so options are pretty clear there you either

need to replace that person with someone who can or supplement them with someone else in addition to them who can provide some and this leads me to my next point which is that if you go talk to manager about this you are maybe unintentionally expressing enough concern and ownership that you might walk out of that meeting with a new title or at least part of a new title or the duties of a new title without any of the recognition or pay congratulations yeah that's fair you just got a title upgrade but maybe not a pay upgrade you got you got a responsibility upgrade doesn't that feel nice think about all the scope it's gonna be great yeah that that phrase driving organizational alignment makes me think that some of what the architect is providing is like the the gravitas

of their presence and and recognized expertise to just say like hey this is the right thing to do and we are doing it and and that that might be harder to replace than knowledge of the system you're working in um i i noticed that when i worked at a giant megacorp yeah a lot of the times the very experienced mega ultra hyper principal distinguished engineers it wasn't just that they were very talented although they they were and knew their stuff technically it was that they would say like this is what we should do and then people would listen and people would align yes they would drive organizational alignment by saying this thing maybe it was their idea or maybe with someone else's, but that would be harder to replace with someone else, less recognized or

senior. You'd have to build that up over time. It's not an overnight solution to that problem. Start now, I guess. The best time to plant an architect is 20 years ago. Is that what they say? Have we answered the question? I think so. Good luck. And hopefully this is a temporary circumstance, both for you and also for this person who is going through a challenging time with kids and medical issues that is not fun so we wish we wish them the best yeah i'm assuming it's not good medical issues it's like we found out yeah your son has superpowers and we're studying them we're studying your child's amazing intellectual capabilities the world yeah no that is i mean that's possible but unlikely well dave do you want to read our

next question yes this comes from an anonymous listener who says can you help me understand what happened here. I was put on a, quote, performance improvement plan, and it became pretty clear to me from the negative feedback at my first review that I simply didn't have the skill to perform at the level that was being asked for. Instead of immediately looking for a new position, I decided to take some personal time off to work on myself and my mental health and to use the remainder of the performance improvement plan time to prepare myself emotionally and financially for that. I didn't blow off work, but I also wasn't invested in the performance improvement plan either a few days before my final review i quit instead of being terminated management seemed

really confused and angry when i quit why would they be so upset if they were about to terminate me anyway one in particular started backtracking and pretending like i wasn't going to be terminated interesting what is going on one reason they could be confused is because you maybe gave up a giant pile of money that would have come to you if you were terminated yeah this is not very pleasant to hear severance package but if you are fired or laid off you are sometimes offered severance in our industry almost every time yeah like why you're about to you're about to go anyways why would you leave voluntarily and give up five digits of money six i don't know a million digits of money i don't know how much you get paid or what the unit is maybe it's in grains of sand

and then it's a lot of digits i don't know why that would make them angry but i would be confused if someone quit right before the end yeah pip that wasn't going well confusion is what i would expect to maybe they're angry because they put in a bunch of work they prepared this speech that was really gonna like i don't know what the speech would do make them feel better about firing someone or maybe maybe they thought this will really turn their life around this is the inspiration they need going into their next job then you quit and you kind of took the wind out of their sails yeah probably not though um yeah this is interesting pretty clear to me from the negative feedback my first review i simply so what i what i gather from this is there was a

there's a plan proposed the plan said you need to do these things to succeed and then there was a first review where they looked at the things they said you needed to do and said here's what you've done so far and it didn't look like those were matching up very well and then you decided you're going to go somewhere else and kind of use the rest of the time to do that yep does that sound right to you i think so i wonder if the anger that is being perceived here was actually confusion oh actually it does say confused and angry maybe this is really just confusion being perceived as angry and maybe the anger was more like oh you idiot you just stepped away from so much money we were going to give you a four month severance package don't do this

yeah one in particular start backtracking and pretending like i wasn't going to be terminated now that's weird right yeah maybe there's some like legal liability fear or something like that i don't know i don't know because to me when someone quits that makes the whole legal landscape much simpler for the company yeah yeah this is a weird situation though what do you what do you think of the the question askers their use of the performance improvement plan time to kind of prep for their next thing i think that's very common especially at these big companies where the pip process is well understood and consistently applied people get themselves on a pip and they think oh man i'm not getting out of this thing and they just go start looking for

another job in fact i think yeah sometimes i think of a pip so when i give a pip i really do want the person to succeed you know and i try to give them a counsel and opportunities to improve to the level where i think they can remain with us on the team but a lot of big companies just see a pip as a formality on the way out the door and so people get that pip info and they're like okay i see the writings on the wall they interpret it as a professional courtesy it's essentially like the two weeks notice equivalent of the employer giving you some notice and usually it's 30 days plus but it's like professional courtesy we're gonna let you go now you have some time to prepare for your next thing there's also a lot of legal protection i think this provides to the company where they

can show yes we tried our best we're not we're not just it's not like some manager got mad and fired them and and also not because of a thing that's protected legally it's because poor performance and here's all the things we tried to improve the performance yeah exactly it sucks that they often turn into like long firings but it it it does seem pretty common oh yeah for sure and it's also very common for people to react by quitting that's pretty common i've seen that happen multiple times firsthand in fact i've saw someone quit the day the pip was given like hey we're putting you on a 60-day plan they're like okay this is my resignation oh yeah that was a here not it was not me giving the performance plan but it does pose an interesting question

which is like how little could you do in that time window yeah to just keep collecting a paycheck and maybe getting some severance at the end there's something deep in my soul that makes me not want to do that i don't know why like one it's almost like i don't know it's kind of like a romantic relationship like once someone tells you they're not interested in you anymore it's like oh i gotta get out of here you know yeah but it's like what if they told you i'm not interested in you but if you stick around for 30 days i'll give you 30 more days of my affection and love you know let's call it a romantic severance i'm like ah gotta get out of here like it's just there's something so deep that makes me want to run away from that situation so i was put on a pip once

sort of it was at a small company so it wasn't very formal but it was it was effectively a bit like hey it's not going well you need to change stuff let's check in regularly i felt sad and then i was like i'm gonna prove them wrong and just like tried very hard to turn it around for two weeks and then at the end of two weeks was like i don't like this oh and then just and then quit right after that well that's interesting did you actually turn it around it would be interesting to ask my boss because i thought i did this from a long time i feel like i was trying a lot harder yeah it was quite a while ago i feel like i tried a lot harder and delivered more but maybe it was like furious useless activity fixing bugs that don't exist building features no one

wants yeah but i i do remember feeling that like but they don't they don't want me yeah i feel like that was kind of what yeah i ended up at the same place you described of like i'm out of here but you you had like the opposite reaction that i had which is you tried to make them like you and i would just run away well yeah i did both first i tried and then i ran away and i didn't even ask them hey did it work do you like me now i just tried that's because you couldn't bear to hear the answer i'm out of here yes i actually think that's probably true oh boy it's getting deep here on the yeah get on the couch james and we're gonna psychoanalyze this one this is a weird situation i feel like as soon as you enter the world of ending someone's employment at a company

whether it's you ending yours or someone else ending yours like i don't know stuff gets a little weird so i i don't quite understand why they would be upset but if i think about it in on a spectrum of like what kind of stuff happens when someone leaves a company in in like less than ideal circumstances this feels pretty small yeah yeah this doesn't feel like a big deal the listener's behavior sounds totally normal yeah it seems fine maybe you lost out on some severance but i don't think you burnt any bridges yeah i mean it's like maybe you did a weird thing but it's not that weird it's not weird at all i've done weirder at least you didn't try to make them like you yeah that's really weird yeah at least you

you kept like your power like you're no i'm actually too cool i don't even care that's how cool this is making me think of that scene from the office now which i believe we have referenced on the show at least once before maybe more yes someone quits and michael says you can't quit you're fired and his boss is like michael now we have to pay severance what are you doing yes oh it's a yeah it's a weird time in a career it is i i think you're fine and i think that maybe this is just not a thing they've seen before they're used to people either quitting at the beginning or getting fired at the end yeah i think you're probably right or turning it around or maybe i mean another possible explanation is they really didn't intend to fire you they really just

you know and i'll give you a one reason why this might be true at big megacorps they do what's called stack ranking and stack ranking is where they actually are required to allocate a certain number of a certain percentage of every team on this continuum of high performing middle performing and you know performance improvement not all companies have that have it stipulated that someone has to be on a pip all the time but many of these big companies do require you to be to have someone marked as the least lowest performing category on every team and so it yeah there is a possibility that this pip was actually just a formality and they were checking boxes and they intended to take you off the pip and call it a successful exit at the end and so

when you quit they were like oh crap we only picked you because you were randomly selected because we didn't we didn't actually want to stack rank uh and i'm sorry shoot we didn't want to lose you that is a sad lesson in incentives when you you see that happen where people who are they're like willing to put up with being told they're poor performers but still stick around they can be valuable commodities on a team at performance review time because because you know you get to you get to like sacrifice them to the the curve to the process instead of someone else who you feel like might might be performing fine exactly but who is more sensitive to being told they're not performing well yes yeah all kinds of weird stuff can stack ranking not a fan

very painful to administer yeah lots of weird incentives that it creates okay so that's a possibility hopefully that wasn't the case here but if it was you're maybe walking away from a terrible situation anyway yeah yeah it's i mean it's it's certainly not good for the person who is the sacrifice exactly because they usually get poor reviews and lower raises or no raises and yeah not not good for your career to be there but well kind of a bummer answer sorry good luck i'm glad you're on to a better place yeah exactly well good luck to you all right what should people do if they would like their own questions answered dave go to softskills.audio and click ask a question where you can fill out our form and thank you so much to everyone who does that each week

we love reading your questions you are the lifeblood of this show pumping through our Metaphorical Arteries. We will catch you next week.