Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 358: Sticky Note Scandal and startup appeal

Episode Date: May 29, 2023

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: During our next team meeting I jokingly gave a status report on the state of my desk and referenced the note. I believe this was the first time someone had publicly acknowledged the note writer, and it invoked a very passionate response from my teammates expressing their own annoyances with the anonymous writer. ‌ It began to escalate the following week. Copy cat writers began writing their own sarcastic notes, and junior devs were (jokingly) doing handwriting analyses to find the culprit. I participated in none of this. However my manager pulled me aside to say he is now forced to address the situation due to someone filing an official complaint that I was “instigating workplace harassment” and that I created a “hostile, unsafe environment”. He informed me we will be having a meeting with HR regarding this incident. I have never had a meeting with HR before. I am very afraid of potentially losing my job due to this. I find this whole situation ridiculous and feel very frustrated. Please help me not make this a bigger mess than it already is. Aaron asks, Last week I listened to a show where Jamison announced that he was looking for work, and specifically looking for small to medium startups. I have only worked at larger tech companies, and currently enjoy my position within one of the largest. However, I’ve always wondered what it would be like to work at a startup. What makes startups appealing? Is it still reasonable to expect a good work/life balance, or do you go in expecting a big shift in how you dedicate your time?

it takes more than going to tashi station to pick up some power converters to be a great engineer this is soft skills engineering episode 358 i am your host dave smith i'm your host jameson dance soft skills engineering is a advice podcast for software developers who like doing more than just picking up power converters with their friends and wasting time i don't know what this is oh what is toshi station this is an outdated reference to the star wars day may the fourth because this is from episode four a new hope when luke skywalker is being asked to do a chore by his uncle owen and he goes in his typical whiny voice but i was gonna go to toshi station and pick up some power converters and his uncle goes he really is like the whiniest superhero and his uncle says

you can waste time with your friends later luke and i'm like who wrote this script it's so weird like picking up power converters waste time with your friends this makes no sense anyway yeah just for fun we got it we actually got a bunch of intro suggestions on may the 4th in our slack community and i just forgot to do them on may the 4th so you're getting them on whatever today is for you around june the 4th is when this might release june the 4th be with you well should i thank our patrons yes please thank you to the people who support the show such that we shout them out or something out every week

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This comes from an anonymous listener who says, there is someone in my office who is an anonymous note writer. The notes are annoying, but harmless. At one point, there were nine PSAs in the break room alone. My breaking point was I was gifted my own personalized note asking me to organize my desk. I love it. Okay. During our next team meeting, I jokingly gave a status report on the state of my desk and referenced the note.

I believe this was the first time someone had publicly acknowledged the note writer and invoked a very passionate response from my teammates, expressing their own annoyances with the anonymous writer. It began to escalate the following week. Copycat writers began writing their own sarcastic notes. Of course they did. This is wonderful. And junior devs were jokingly doing handwriting analyses to find the culprit. it. I participated in none of this. However, my manager pulled me aside to say he is now forced to address the situation due to someone filing an official complaint that I was, quote,

instigating workplace harassment and that I created a, quote, hostile, unsafe environment. Oh no. He informed me we will be having a meeting with HR regarding this incident. i have never had a meeting with hr before i am very afraid they're great it's fine i am very afraid of potentially losing my job due to this i find this whole situation ridiculous and feel very frustrated please help me not make this a bigger mess than it already is oh my goodness right until that last couple sentences i was loving the story and then i'm really escalated took a turn for the worse for the dire oh my goodness i mean there's a lot of obvious finger pointing to do at the anonymous complainer slash note writer because yeah they

have to be the same person right clearly the kind of person who would write nine anonymous psas would also be the one who had been anonymously complained about you instigating workplace harassment for acknowledging them yeah exactly yeah i want to i don't know i want to make fun of them but also this no amount of levity can convince hr this is actually no big deal i know like it is a funny situation and also this is the least funny department of the company that is right in fact they're almost anti-funny it's like our whole job is to crush funniness and defend the company from humor yeah because there's there's some risk of of offense and harm and lawsuits and yeah i have known hr professionals that i liked and got along well with but i have

never had a meeting that involved hr in any official capacity no matter what my role in that meeting was that didn't feel high stakes um because there is always that like it feels quasi-legal where like the thing that that uh how do i explain it even i just won't you know what i can do what i want i choose not to explain that good oh i find the whole situation ridiculous and feel very frustrated yes i can see how you would feel frustrated go ahead okay i think the answer here is you need to leave some anonymous post-it notes on the hr person's desk that are that are just annoying enough to make them feel the pain that you've been feeling but not annoying enough to cause another hr incident i think you need to find out where

this meeting is going to be held oh no and where the hr person is going to sit and then you need to leave some notes at their desk saying hey it's me the person who complained about a hostile unsafe environment this is my true record where i actually was just kidding before and it's no big ignore everything before this winky smiley face the most frustrating emoji oh my goodness yeah i think i i agree that it seems ridiculous and would feel very frustrating you cannot expressing that frustration and calling it ridiculous to hr or or anything won't help yeah it certainly won't help i i think if i were you i would try to be to have some kind of record of what actions you took when and if that can be corroborated by other people in some way i think

that would be useful because you want to be able to both acknowledge i can see this is a serious thing that you're worried about and and here's here's my perspective on what happened and the more you can focus on what happened unless i think as soon as you start talking about what you intended or what you meant then yeah you're in defensive mode at that point yeah you've already lost as they say yeah it becomes very subjective and then it's sort of like your intentions versus this person's feeling of like why i felt like it i felt harassed so it doesn't matter that you felt like you didn't want to make a big deal out of it and the fact of the matter is someone did feel harassed. And I don't really know my harassment law very well. But it could very

well be that as a, like a butterfly chaos theory, flapping its wings kind of situation, you kicked off a series of events, quite inadvertently, that did result in someone actually being harassed. And that's, I mean, it's a big deal to get harassed. But, you know, at that point, what do you do? I mean, do you try to disconnect yourself from the sequence of events? you know try to say i'm just a butterfly flapping my wings in central park i didn't cause the hurricane you know yeah i think you stick to what happened and which what yeah what what you observed and what you did and if the hr department tries to discipline you in some way or pin it on you unfortunately it's not this isn't a legal system where your rights are carefully protected

like there's not a lot if if they decide to do something that feels very unfair to you you can sue the company that's always a fallback but that's a pretty it's it's kind of that or nothing else you can quit so are you saying that if you if you present the risk of a lawsuit to hr do you think suddenly they would start defending you or trying to appease you instead of this other person if you pose a bigger threat to the company oh no i think they would try to get you out yeah i think i don't know what's your goal i think you should be clear on on your goal in in in this it in attending this meeting with hr should be to figure out what i don't know what the what the evidence they have is present your own evidence and and try to make the case that

this isn't worthy of yeah some kind of discipline or action against you i i could see this being a situation where management or someone needs to step in and say hey let's tone it down maybe stop writing the anonymous notes stop kind of publicly shaming the person who's writing them or whatever is happening in the aggregate. But that's not really your job to propose the action. But it is your job to protect yourself. Exactly. Yeah.

Yeah. So I think that's what I'm saying. I think you should focus on protecting yourself. And unfortunately, you are right to be worried. I think it's probably unlikely you lose your job, but not impossible. Yeah, I agree. They are not protecting you for sure. Yeah, exactly.

HR is not here to protect you. They're here to protect the company. That's their stated objective. It's true at every company. Now, I'm reading a little bit of the narrative here where you made a joke in a public forum where you gave a status of the cleanliness of your desk. Got it. Then other people started writing anonymous notes that were sarcastic and probably hurtful, at least in some cases. Now, what I believe has happened here is someone has jumped to the conclusion that you are writing those notes, the hurtful ones. And that's because you're the only person who's made any public pronouncement about the notes or even acknowledge

that they exist in public. So I agree, Jameson, that if I were in defensive mode here, and I would definitely get there quick, I would probably try to document exactly what I did and did not do. And in my, you know, from this telling of the story, this is a very clear cut and dried case that you are have no, that they're completely innocent. What you did is reasonable, not harmful not hurtful and definitely not harassment in my space law opinion so if i and then i would try to get that written form in front of my manager as soon as possible so that my manager also knows and can and can do a little bit of defensive mode for me with hr as well and then i would also add to that i would say the fact that i am being put at risk for this has created for me

an unsafe environment that I'm not comfortable in, knowing that if I simply make a lighthearted joke about the cleanliness of my own desk, as asked, you know, as referenced by an anonymous note, and suddenly now I'm having a conversation with HR, what do you think that does to my own psychological safety working here? It's not great. And so I would probably just include that just so they know, like, look, what you've done here is bad. And I think that they'll be like, oh, yeah, this i mean if i if it was a reasonable person they would probably i don't know just now i'm i'm gonna predict what they're doing there's no way i would say that no you wouldn't say the last part no no way would you say the the first part but just not the last part yeah i'd say the first

part i'd say here's what i did i had a note on my desk i referenced it here's what i the more you accurately you can recount what you said i think that's that's better and and i responding to an anonymous note in this lighthearted manner i don't think contributed to a hostile work environment yeah but i wouldn't push back and say actually it's you because i think they will win hr never loses right yeah i don't think they will ever yeah i mean if hr is contributing to a hostile work environment then then the department will implode yeah i don't know i'm I'm sorry. This is hilarious. And in time, the fact that you got called into HR over it will become hilarious as well, become part of the humor. But it's not right now. And especially now

when the market's tough, the fear of losing your job, it's a much bigger threat than it was a few years ago. If this was two years ago, I would encourage you to be a little bit more bold and standing up for yourself but today i don't know man scarier i have one more suggestion i think if you can talk to your manager earlier about this and try to figure out kind of where they stand and what kind of weight they have if they really have your back and and can back your story up and help confirm it and kind of work with HR to resolve this, the likelihood of an outcome that is good for you is much higher than if they are there to witness the decree handed down and say, yep, you were wrong. Yeah, you need to arm them with information and don't assume that

people just know what you did and didn't do. People fill in all kinds of knowledge gaps with weird... What's the word? Oh, hallucinations. That's what we call that today. Yeah, that's true. Yeah. And so just don't assume that everyone knows everything you did. So get really clear with all the people that matter in this conversation ahead of time. The last thing you want to do, it's kind of like how we say, if you wait until the day of your performance review to share all the good things you've done with your manager, you waited about three to six months too long. Yeah. Yeah. Well, good luck.

Good luck. What a major bummer. I hope in time you'll be able to write a hilarious post-it note about this. Oh, I hope so. Boy, I would love to hear how this goes out or comes out. Would you mind, you know, if you're willing to do this, would you mind submitting another question on our form? And we may, you know, we'll honor your desire for confidentiality. But boy, I would love to hear how this comes out because you just, this is almost like

an episode of The Office, I think. It does feel very, there's a word I can't think of. it feels very neat and engineered for maximum drama out of minimum drama how can we squeeze the most out of what is not that dramatic of a situation that's right office that's right workplace environment all right yes shall i read our next question go for it this is from a listener named aaron who asks last week i listened to a show where jameson announced he was looking for work i am i am looking for work and specifically looking for small to medium-sized startups just to clarify yes also other stuff too to make it even more vague i have only worked at larger

tech companies and currently enjoy my position within one of the largest however i've always wondered what it would be like to work at a startup what makes startups appealing is it still reasonable to expect a good work-life balance or do you go in expecting a big shift in how you dedicate your work time? Great question. Startups versus big tech companies or big companies of any startups. Oh, sorry. I'm interrupting you. Go ahead. Not at all. Since you're the one that's unemployed, you get the floor. Oh, perfect. One day I'll be the unemployed one, but today is not that day. Yes. This is the universe correcting itself. You get a job, so I get more time to speak on the podcast. I worked mostly at startups and had a brief stint in a, not brief, I guess

it wasn't brief it's the longest single job in my career but a stint at a giant megacorp and i have not found the work-life balance to be radically different between startups and big companies me too i think there could be some startups where the expectation could be outrageous work-life balance differences i feel like that's often more on kind of the founders than on by the time they're hiring employees. But you can throw your whole life into a big tech company just as much as you can at a startup and can have reasonable work-life balance at a big tech company just as much as a startup. And I think when some people say startup, Jameson, they might be thinking of companies a little different than the kinds of startups you

and I have worked for. I've never actually been part of, and I think maybe this is true for you to a company that is literally starting with you yeah maybe like co-founder or maybe second or third or fourth employee i i have only joined startups that are at least a couple years old i think is the youngest that i've gone to so they're small they're still growing they're still net negative revenue you know cash burn yeah but they they other than that age they have all the other telltale signs of a startup but what they don't have is hey we don't have any money yet or we don't even have an office we just are going to work from my living room you know it's not like that kind of situation for me anyway yeah yeah i think you're right in that it does seem more

likely that you'd be working longer hours when the risk of of immediate failure is is higher and once you're kind of series a series b is is most of the startups i've worked at and then it's less like we have to put in 20 hours straight to get this thing done tonight for this demo tomorrow right and for an investor that we have a meeting with yeah more like i don't know we've got a year runway and how do we extend that you're still chasing after some immediate business outcomes but it's less, the timeline is a little bit longer generally. What makes startups appealing? I can tell you what makes them. Oh, no, I want to hear what you think makes them appealing. Oh, I mean, you said that I had to jump in. There are three things that I love about working for

startups. The first one is you can affect a ton of impact compared to a large company. I've worked at both large companies. I've worked at two very large companies. And by larger, I mean, like more than 100,000 employees for a sum total of probably six or seven years of my career. And the amount of impact I was able to have was very, very small. You're in this giant machine that has so much inertia. Your ability to actually make that machine better or steer it in any different way than it's already going is like minute. I mean, so hard to actually move that. And so at a startup, on the other hand, I can show up and on day one, I can start having ideas that get implemented. And suddenly the company is going in a different direction because of

what i suggested and so impact is just there in droves and i have two more but maybe we should take turns james and you could do one and i'll do some more i'm going to copy you and talk more about impact it's much easier to change things and there's much more untapped ground in my time at a giant corporation most problems had been thought about and and attempted to be solved in some way because you were always extending something or modifying something or if you were building something new there were pretty high costs to overcome to get that from from an idea into production in some way some of those were technical and some of them were organizational where you have to go up seven layers of the tree to to get buy-in and that takes months and that

kind of thing so yeah much easier to make changes and and much more room to attack a problem that nobody else has attacked before which i find very very satisfying on that same theme there's also lower negative effects for mistakes you know if you don't have thousands and thousands of customers depending on your software yet then you can make mistakes experiment with things and learn and it doesn't you know completely wreck the lives of thousands of people and you get a bunch of angry emails and calls and things like that and so that's one of the nice things basically not having customers is great. Yeah, you're right. It is pretty great. Hey, I don't have any customers right now. I can make all kinds of mistakes. Very low impact mistakes. Yeah. Now, that's

probably a good segue to my next bullet point that I love about startups is there's very little bureaucracy. You know, I want to change something about the way I work. No problem. I want to make a big technical decision. No problem. The number of people that I need to get to sign off on that and the levels of how informed those people are is way up. So the number of people is way down and the amount of informedness or cluefulness of those people is very, very high. And also a lot of decisions like that

that would otherwise require forms and processes and approvals at a large company can often just be made on trust at a startup where it's like, oh, hi, my name's Dave. You know, we eat lunch together every day. I remember me, you know, like, you know me. I want to do something different. And they're like, I trust you, go for it.

Whereas at a company, it's like, hi, my name's Dave. They're like, who are you? Oh, sorry. My name's employee number 743-892. And I would like to make a change to our processes. It's like, okay, well, we have office hours for that. Come back in two weeks. Oh, actually make it four weeks.

We're already full for the next three weeks, you know? So a lot less bureaucracy at a startup. I don't want to, I agree. A lot less bureaucracy, a lot more trust, a lot more context shared between you and the people that you work with. And I don't think it's malicious intent or it's not that large companies are inherently trying to make it hard to get stuff done. It's that you have trust and context do not scale to tens of thousands of employees.

And at that scale, the cost of just everyone just doing stuff that they think is right is a lot higher. and the the benefits of of alignment at the cost of making it harder to get stuff done are often worth it to the company so so bureaucracy is kind of a dirty word but it's can be a necessary tool to avoid the chaos of 10 000 people doing whatever they think is right and all trying to talk to each other to make sure they have some shared idea versus 20 people trying to all talk together figure out what they think is right and i'll go off and do that that's that's much more tenable. Exactly. And I think of bureaucracy as kind of like a load balancer on a web server where, yeah, you could go faster if you bypass the load balancer and just go straight to the

web server. It's one less network hop. It's a little bit less processing time. Maybe you shave a few milliseconds off every request, but you can serve a lot more requests concurrently if you are willing to take that little overhead and have a load balancer in your web service. And I think bureaucracy is like that. Well-designed bureaucracy facilitates large-scale collaboration and large-scale progress even though it it reduces optimization of individual resources or people getting things done that's a cool metaphor i like that there is pathological bureaucracy though where you can have like it's like 18 layers of load balancing where it's like they've forgotten forgotten the purpose of the load balancer they just threw more load balancers at it your load balancing cluster has

like 10 000 nodes and there's like two application servers behind it exactly serving one request per minute. Yeah. Oh, that's such a good metaphor. Okay. The third thing I like about startups is variety. When I work at a large company, the chances of getting pigeonholed into one area of technology or one responsibility is really high. That's actually very, very common. You develop deep expertise in one very narrow niche area of the company. Whereas at a startup, you might show up at work today and they're like, hey, guess what? Today you're in charge of IT because our wifi went offline and you need to go to the store and buy a new router. And I find that kind of variety really fun. I like that. Some people like to come and do similar work each day and they've

derived satisfaction from going deeper and deeper in the same niche. But I like to come to work every day and do something a little different. In fact, at one particular startup I was at, there were only two software engineers, just me and one other person, and maybe six other people in the whole company. And our wifi did go offline every day. So I actually bought a little relay that would relay AC power to the Comcast cable modem. And every night at midnight, it would just power cycle the cable modem. And then our internet got,

I wrote a cron job on the server that was sitting next to it. And it would just power cycle every day. And it was awesome. And then our internet was stable. And it was, I enjoyed that. You know, it's like, I did that. It was for the good of the company.

It unlocked the productivity of a bunch of other people. Well, six other people. That's right. And it was fun. And so I enjoy that kind of thing. And you got to put internet of things on your resume. I'm an IoT expert now. Yeah.

I'm going to add one more thing, which is I have often found it easier to connect the work I'm doing to the mission of the company. Where, again, this is a function of fewer layers and fewer people. it just feels like it's much more that the number of steps between the task that I'm working on right now and some end user or customer or being better off or some business outcome that's pretty concrete improving that feels easier to find at a startup than at a big company and and that's kind of related to the impact thing that you mentioned where where because the the your percentage of labor is so much higher at a startup than at a giant megacorp, then there's just fewer layers to work through and a more direct relationship between your work and whether

the company is successful or not. That's right. Which means you can take the blame for when the company fails more so than a megacorp. Yeah, that is true. I mean, yeah, that's a flip side. One of the downsides of startup life is all of these things can be taken to an extreme. So for example, if you like variety and it's like, I haven't worked on the same thing two days in a row in the last two years, maybe you don't like that. What I have noticed at small startups is that people tend to be spread more thin. So you will not be able to give as much attention to things that you would otherwise be able to give at a large company. For example, when I was working for a big tech company, we gave tons of attention to our build and deployment and automation,

test automation unit testing we had the time to do it and we made it and it was awesome it was so good and here i'm like okay just barely got it set up gotta move on like we gotta get things done you know so the thing is constantly breaking it's not perfect there's so much more i wish we could do there but we're just spread thin yeah yeah that's a good point because there's so much room for impact the opportunity costs can prevent deep investment in some things because there's so many other important essential and undone things out there. Yep. And I'll also add that while I haven't directly had this experience, I've heard this from many people, which is the code that software engineers write as fast paced startups tends to be crappy. And that's because you're always in a

hurry to get the next thing done because everything is an existential crisis, you know? And I heard this great quote that I will forever remember, which is there are two kinds of startups. Those that die and those that are embarrassed of their code. I should think more deeply about this. I don't feel like I've seen large code quality differences between the startups I've worked at and the big company I worked at. I think you can write crappy code under time pressure anywhere because there's definitely still time pressure at big companies. It's just less existential and more like this project needs to be done by this quarter for important business coordination reasons because it rolls up or because the director said so yeah or this director is going to

tell this vp who's going to tell this executive vp who's going to tell this c-level person yeah i've been trying to figure out if i believe this or not i'm going to say it and then find out if it feels true when it leaves my mouth okay great i think big companies are generally a little more conservative in their general generally a little bit more towards the center of the bell curve in kind of process and pathologically bad scenarios or teams or things like that when you say conservative are you are you kind of thinking along the dimension of risk tolerance yeah and and also certainly not politically more more like whatever the default software methodology of the day is probably the big companies are going to be somewhere towards

the middle of it kind of mainstream like yeah mainstream is maybe a better way to say it maybe avoid the cutting edge. Yeah. And startups can certainly do that as well. They can also be on the cutting edge. I think it is maybe easier to do wildly bad things at a startup because as the company gets bigger, you bring in more people and you get more average mainstream extreme experience in the company and just this pressure towards the center, I think. And at a startup, maybe you hire 10 people and they're all from some school where they, I don't know, had some influential professor who said, you type all your code backwards or whatever. It just seems normal. And then now this is the backwards code startup. I told you I was going

to say it, figure out if it was true or not by how it felt. And how does it feel? How does it feel to you, Dave? It feels right. It feels right. Like I'll tell you, having been at a big tech co before, what I have found is that the switching costs... So sorry, there are two dynamics at play. One, switching costs are high. Because imagine one team switching a technology. Okay, fine. Now imagine 5,000 teams switching a technology. Just the labor is so astronomically high comparatively that it's expensive for big tech companies to change, or big companies at all, to change that kind of thing. Okay, fine. And combine that with the second dynamic, which is that they like to vet things and prove them out and not deploy large scale changes

without making sure that first they are proven and solid. So being proven and solid takes time, switching costs are high. What that means is that even if you were on, even if the company did have a track record of changing to the latest technology five years ago, they probably haven't changed since then. And so now what was hot and new and cutting edge five years ago is now old and mainstream in the best case i guess could also just be legacy right which also happens but that leads to these companies just being on just naturally gravitating toward mainstream technologies and and like you said conservative adoption of risky stuff yeah and i'm not even thinking about technologies also kind of culture and processes and and and those two things i don't have a third

thing so i don't know why i said and certainly not generally true but maybe a broad trend i i think there are appealing things at large companies and startups and plenty of overlap between them and you can do great work at each of them i had better health benefits at a big tech company though i made more money at a big tech company yeah me too more cash more cash better cash situation yeah but was i happier i don't know i think overall i've i've felt more joyful at smaller companies all right have we answered the questions i think so well thank you for your questions thank you for your time listening we appreciate it there are a lot of you now we're looking at numbers the numbers go up big they do number big to the right oh big big number feel

good thank you and if you want to ask your own question you can go to soft skills.audio click to ask us a question button we will read it we will answer it someday we're getting through the list yep the list may be growing faster than we are answering them but if we keep going long enough we'll make it up always be true yeah we'll catch up ai will fix it yeah or demographics we just have to figure out immortality and then we will for sure so that's that's always the last question on the list yes figure out immortality yeah well as long as we outlive every other human we can make good on this promise which i plan on doing so plans on track pay no attention to the wrinkles if you're watching this on youtube those are those are health wrinkles those are vitality

wrinkles of longevity yes exactly each wrinkle represents an added year extra life i will live in the future. That's right. It's a prediction. It's not like the rings of a tree at all. It's the opposite. Yeah. Yeah. Imagine the rings of the tree are how long the tree will live. Yes. And it always goes up. Yep. All right. With that meditation on mortality, I think we'll catch you next week. Thank you.