Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 359: Competition and awkward in person

Episode Date: June 5, 2023

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Hi Dave and Jamison! What do you do when one of your immediate teammates is constantly competing against you? I really don���t like competition. Ignoring the competitiveness + praising his value did not work. Some examples: Leaving code reviews comments showing off obvious knowledge which does not really add value to the PR Constantly harassing you to pair on trivial matters (I think because “pairing with someone less experienced” is a trait desirable in our engineer scoring framework) Picking up a bigger version of whatever ticket you just did Trying to be the first to “answer your question” in public without actually answering the question (this makes it difficult for me to actually get answer for question I ask because other would think it’s “resolved”) Part of me feels flattered that somebody who has more years in the job sees me as worthy of competing against, but at some point it became annoying and counterproductive. Appreciate your thoughts. Please don’t tell me quitting my job and saying goodbye once and for all is the solution😂 I am graduating this year and have received two job offers. They are both very similar in terms of pay and benefits, the only difference is that one is fully remote and the other is hybrid (2x a week in person). I would normally jump on the chance to work remotely, mainly due to the fact I am a bit socially awkward and shy. However, I am conflicted if I should accept the hybrid offer as an opportunity to work on my social skills and experience working in an office sooner rather than later. ‌ Should I just accept that my personality isn’t suited for in-person? Have you ever had anyone on your team be socially awkward/shy? How did you feel about them? PS. Have you guys ever thought of releasing merch? I’d love to buy a “space lawyers tshirt”. Thanks!!!

it takes more than not understanding star wars references to be a great engineer this is episode 359 of the soft skills engineering podcast where i am your host jameson dance i'm your host dave smith and i do not understand star wars references most of the time soft skills engineering is a weekly advice show where we answer your non-technical questions about the technical field of software development a large fraction of which is based upon star wars so i've been able to overcome that that issue through perseverance and grace lives with imposter syndrome every day i was talking to you about this but i was not mentioning that core critical component which is that i don't yeah i don't know i think i've seen all i've seen the first six

movies like once each and then some parts of the the newest ones but definitely not the repeat viewing kind of immersed in the culture stuff maybe i should just just so i can really get rid of that imposter syndrome i think it's too late you had to do it in your childhood where it would get baked into your dna it'll never work now i'm trying to think what was baked into my dna instead i don't know biker mice from mars do you remember that cartoon was that around when you were a kid i know you're a little bit older so maybe you missed that one or like pokemon that was on all the time when i came home from that one's um i missed that one too but you know of it yes i do know of it and i watched it that was about the same well the generation after me actually maybe

even what i would consider two generations maybe not in the biological sense but just kind of two waves of culture like the high school since yeah it's like two yeah two high school generations after me was that the right after me was pogs was that i think pogs was right before yeah see that's i think i came in kind of at the end of pogs i vaguely remember pogs in kindergarten yeah so pogs were coming out right when i was growing out of childish things although i never grew out of star wars james i'm not an imposter well clearly it's not childish it's serious it's serious adult stuff that's why it never goes out of style eating paste i do remember munching on that in kindergarten maybe that's what's in your dna generation alpha

so it's holding you together yeah i hope that upcoming generation alpha is staying true to their roots and also eating paste is generation alpha the new is that a new name for the next generation yeah it it's alphabetical so millennials are technically generation y generation one that's why they're the zoomers it's because generation z and then generation alpha is after that and then i don't know if they have a catchy nickname so they're so they're so it's a base 26 number system and they've overflowed the uh bits on this and they're just going to alpha now yeah i guess we could figure out who was the previous generation alpha and then maybe do some interpretation to figure out are they going to like pin their petticoats up or something whatever it was

26 generations ago turns out you're exactly like them it's a zodiac yeah yeah did you say generation y is millennials yeah because you're gen x yeah right i am yeah millennials are gen y but they just millennials i i did hear gen y a little bit but millennials definitely overtook and then zoomers okay it's just so much of a cooler name than generation z no one really calls them zoomers though right what i mean i hear that i do i hear gen z because my children are gen z and they refer to themselves as gen z oh maybe it's a maybe it's like a pejorative i think zoomers is what old people call them oh yeah like you yeah like me you're such an old because i fear them yeah dynamicism and strange new ideas and okay i think you were haircuts that

rightly my haircuts when i was young those were good cool haircuts but nowadays these young people have their weird strange haircuts okay i think you were on the cusp of correctly bringing us back on topic and i agree i was and yeah i'll try again okay software is also not what this shows about but more related than generational differences yes let's let's thank our patrons okay here we go i'd like to thank thecomputersciencebook.com kyle boss valentin at data fold santa hope arnoa frazier low kent c dodds jenny kim owen shardle craig motley and i love mavis the stochastic parrot alice jost at least we no longer have that awful name flux and off the hill ofification is common in lanfair ganadan hooten ganadan hooten ohio ganadan

Hutton, Ohio. Patreon.com.au We're hiring Ira Chan, Monkey Face Emoji, Jonathan King, testingisdocumenting.org Ola Tapafadiyi, Encore, this shoutout sponsored by Will Angel, Ragnar, Nick Hathaway, Travis Sanders, Brayden Keynes, John Grant, Bartek Tekkowski, Cody Seal, Nick Cantor, and Philip John Basile.

If you'd like to join this illustrious crew, which I used to be able to say in one breath and no longer can, so that's progress. That's data-driven indication of progress. You can go to softskills.audio and click the support us on Patreon button, and if you give us just an insane amount of money, we'll say whatever you almost whatever you want or will try to say whatever you want to within the character

limit of the patreon name field and if you contribute any dollar amount at all you can join our slack community where people actually have a lot of fun and say a lot of good stuff there's been a lot of advice giving recently on where do i go what do i do after being laid off i've been very keenly following that the advice is great over there i mean there's hundreds of people they have good things to say so anyway feel free to join and uh that's all i got jameson on the patreon front you did a good job now i'm gonna read a question does that sound okay i approve all right this is from an anonymous listener who says hi david jameson what do you do when one of your immediate teammates is constantly competing against you i really don't like competition

ignoring the competitiveness and praising his value did not work some examples leaving code review comments showing off obvious knowledge which does not really add value to the pr constantly harassing you to pair on trivial matters i think because pairing with someone less experienced is a trait desirable in our engineer scoring framework picking picking up a bigger version of whatever ticket you just did trying to be the first to quote answer your question in public without actually answering the question which actually just makes it difficult for me to get an answer because others would think it's already resolved part of me feels flattered that someone who has more years in the job sees me as a as worthy of competing against

but at some point it became annoying and counterproductive appreciate your thoughts please don't tell me quitting my to quit my job and saying goodbye once and for all is the solution got us that is unfortunate oh tricked us yeah we've kind of we've kind of cooled down on the quit your job thing recently yeah we're changing with the times uh yeah see we may be old and out of touch, but we're trying to stay as in touch as possible. Oh man, this is so crazy. This would be really frustrating to me to have someone being like this. I mean, look, I have a lot of experience with this because I constantly feel like I need to be better than Jameson on this show. You may have noticed that my answers are always longer, and I always get the better

questions i get to read them you what else you carefully place things in the right order yeah i mean it is a competition we have i was actually about to push send on the vote to say who's better dave or jameson and send out the survey but maybe i'll pause until this question has some time to fade well once this is over they'll really know who's better stand back and watch this roll my sleeves up i got nothing this would suck i i know some people really thrive on competition and i hate that direct one-to-one you're working at the same place towards the same goal but also competing with each other competition i i hate that some of the the most frustrating experiences of my work career have involved times where i thought i was observing competition instead of

collaboration to solve a shared goal such as this podcast no i uh your your competition is on such another level that it doesn't even come across that way to me i'll leave it to you at whether it is higher or lower oh boy but honestly this doesn't even feel like competition to me this just feels like straight up man what's the word for this behavior it's it's not even a playing field it's not it's just like i'm trying to show you i'm better which i guess is a form of competition but this it's not like a a healthy you know oh look i did one more ticket than you this week let's see if you can do more than me next week you know that would be a comp like a friendly healthy competition this is just straight up disparagement i mean oh i don't know it's weird

yeah it feels pathological i'm reading between the lines and it's it sounds like this question asker might be at least newer in their career than the the competitor and i could see that being really frustrating because maybe there's this external vibe or question or concern of how much does this person really know and then if you have someone else who's who's worked for longer and more experience in their career putting forth this message that the answer is not very much which is kind of what they're doing by, by trying to take you unwillingly under their wing unhelpfully. Yeah, exactly. Sort of communicating to others. You mean squashing you under their wing? Yeah. Yeah. Squashing you under their wing. I like that. This person really needs my help.

Yeah. Look how much help I'm giving them, which they desperately need. Yeah. That, that kind of sucks and, and could be frustrating as well. You know what, you know what this person needs right now they need a pr comment where i lecture about red black binary trees this is going to be great yeah you know what now's a good time to talk about mark and sweep garbage collection in this pr in a language that exposes no ability to affect the garbage collector at all if only this added a button to our ui time to talk about i don't know pointers yeah It's too bad JavaScript doesn't have pointer arithmetic, because if it did, dot, dot, dot, three paragraphs later. Yeah, it would be so much more efficient to animate this by adding a CSS property.

Oh, man. Yeah, there is one thing that I look at here and think, is this me? Yeah. Which is, I, at work, suffer from a desire to have people know that I know things. Okay. You mean just like this person we're talking about, apparently. Exactly. Yeah.

Someone says a thing. I know something about that thing. Just want you all to know. Doesn't matter if it's helpful or not. I also know something about this. Exactly. I do that. And it's so annoying.

And I know that I do it. How does that manifest? Tell me about it. Like, what's your behavior? oh it's like asking how the fish swims dave i don't know i just i just swim okay i i think some of it is in prs like that of it's not quite as annoying and it's not saying here's what you should do but but something like oh this reminds me of a cool idea of maybe someday we get here on this thing that i know stuff about or i don't know i i should probably ask some some

colleagues how this manifests but it can be useful because knowing stuff is useful and important if it helps achieve some kind of outcome but if the outcome is now other people know that i know this then that's usually not very helpful yeah sometimes frankly it is helpful because it helps people know what kind of thing i could contribute to or they could talk to me in more technical detail about especially as a manager you kind of need to figure out like where the abstraction layer is that that is less useful to talk about with your manager but certainly it was not all in in in it's not all useful so i still think this is more aggressive than what i did and there's certainly the competition part of it of trying to like publicly make it look like you don't know

stuff that they know is bad yeah i actually have a hard time imagining a world where you come across as rude or competitive because you're sharing knowledge it's just not in your nearly annoying yeah maybe maybe highly annoying yeah i don't even think that honestly that's in my nature what do you what do you do so i wonder if how do you tell someone to to back off when they're trying to be your unasked for mentor basically oh yeah this is like mentor encroachment yeah it is it's like mentoring eminent domain like we'll just take over your career here because we need to it's for the good of me yeah oh boy i mean how do you jeez i mean you could fight fire with fire and just out compete like oh really that's your best

algorithm for detecting cycles in a graph really i see you haven't been exposed to the tortoise and hare algorithm beat them at their own game even bigger pendant more pedantic yes double down on the pedantry. Well, I honestly don't have a great answer here. Surprise. I don't think there's a comfortable way out of this. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I think the only things that you can do are going to be real offensive to this person. Before we go down that, though, can I just get clarity on one of these things? I'm curious what your take was on pairing with someone less experienced is a desirable trait in our engineering scoring framework. Did you read into that like I did, that there's some kind of formalized or written framework that says something about who you pair

with and whether that scores you points or not? I read it just as a career ladder. So a staff engineer spreads knowledge and helps level up other engineers, that kind of thing. Maybe there is an actual numeric score here. I didn't quite take it that way. Okay. Well, let's go with, I think your interpretation sounds right. So you've read, this person has read on the checklist of promotion requirements that people in more senior roles tend to pair with people in more junior levels so that they can help them level up. Okay. Let's take that for granted. Is that what's happening here? Do you think this person might be posturing for a promotion, trying to you know spread the feathers and is that the right word that's our second feather reference

today that probably isn't right but they're trying to there's no way we could have two correct feather references in the show only zero or one of them barely know what birds are yeah i wonder i wonder if that's an incentive at play here yeah it it certainly could be it might just be a prestige thing i wonder if this person is collecting a portfolio of the things they've done like look at these helpful comments i wrote i'm going to give you a list of them in my in my performance review doc yeah it could be that it could be also just a prestige or social thing where it it just it feels good to feel like you know more and you're dispensing that knowledge to other people that know less yeah but certainly there are professional incentives

to look like you are helping someone else learn yeah and ideally those incentives are actually to help someone else learn, not just appear like you are. I don't know how you get out of this without saying, please stop doing this to the person. Well, I have some thoughts on how you could approach that, but it's going to depend a lot on the culture of your company and team. You know, in the teams that I've worked on, I try really hard to establish a culture that feedback is welcomed. And in our team, if you don't graciously accept someone's feedback, that's actually a bad thing and so if you can if you have that kind of culture where feedback is receivable I would sit down with this person and say hey I have some feedback for you I want to go

over some of the answers you've provided to my questions and some of the comments you've left on my code reviews and I want to share with you the level of helpfulness that they were or weren't and then I would give concrete examples and say here I asked for what color I should make this button and you left a comment about you know garbage collection it's like this didn't actually help me move closer to my objective and then go through it one by one and just say i appreciate you're trying to help it seems like maybe you could be more helpful by staying on topic what do you think yeah that idea no i think it's good from that i extrapolate that you're saying do that for each thing. Don't sit him down and say, back off, buddy. Talk about the specific behaviors

that feel unhelpful and maybe don't address this issue that it feels like you're trying to force me to be your mentee and I don't want that. Yeah, I'm not super inclined to... Or trying to compete with me is, I guess, the more direct... Exactly, because that's your perception. There's something else going on here potentially that's causing this person to behave in harmful ways that I think would be hard for you to know without asking or without them telling you, you know, that maybe they're going after the promotion. Maybe they really don't like you and they just want to make you look bad. You know, there's a lot of different ways this could go down, but in the end, the behavior is the only

thing you can ask them to change. I guess you could ask them why they do it. Like, why did you write this question or this comment? Yeah. I don't know. But the problem here is that there is something motivating this behavior that is going to be hard for you to a find out what it is and b do anything about it to change it the motivation that is i like your point about talking about the behavior there's a concept called the ladder of inference where you start with observations you see in the world and you basically make assumptions and assign motivations and end up at kind of your interpretation of why that thing happened okay and at each step on the ladder there's room to get stuff wrong because you're kind of extrapolating yeah and and so if you say

yeah hey hey you're trying to compete with me or you're trying to make me look bad or whatever then you're you're kind of jumping off the top of the ladder and trying to do some kind of sweet wrestling move and land on them the diamond cutter yes the diamond cutter the constantly harassing you to pair on trivial manners so oh boy that one i mean could you just say no i think one way i would say that is thanks for the offer i really want to focus on this right now or i've got it like yeah or i'll reach out if i'm how i can reach out if i'm stuck yeah like thanks for the offer i'll reach out i love that the first to answer your question in public i don't know how you navigate this delicately the an undelicate thing to say is thank you i still have the

question does anyone else know yes i mean that's that's a little passive aggressive but it's powerful you know it's like thank you for the info it doesn't answer my question just very very bluntly but also professionally and clearly yeah it it it would be pretty blunt but i can't think of a less blunt way to do that yeah without because because i can see the problem you're trying to avoid which is this person just talked probably for a while and no one else they don't want to belabor the point even more well and if it's a if it's if it's in written form what i've noticed actually this is true in both written and verbal form when you ask a question and somebody gives a long answer whether it's right or not most people check out they're like okay i see

there's a lot of words there it's probably it's probably taken care of they probably got it yeah like that that's an indicator that the question has been answered and if you don't follow it up point you know because if i'm scrolling through a pr comment like a comment thread and i see your question then i see a long answer and then i see a very short answer from you saying thank you for that info it doesn't answer my question then i'm like oh now i'm re-engaged you know now i now i'm gonna go look at your question a little more closely but it does i gotta say this this person's behavior is not helpful i mean okay maybe that was the most obvious thing i could say but when someone does that they are they're literally taking the incentive away from others to actually

help so not only have they not helped you answer your question by giving a wall of text or a long verbal answer but they've also demotivated the people who can answer your question from providing that answer so it really is just harmful and i would probably sit down and explain that to them maybe it'd take a lot of guts though would you would you talk to your manager i feel like if you've taken away, quit your job, talk to your manager is another fallback answer that we can use. They might be able to help you navigate these power dynamics. They might also provide another perspective because maybe you think you know stuff and you don't. Maybe your manager says, oh, or can say, actually, I think they had a good point here because I've seen they brought

up this this comment that you think was unrelated but in this other situation i don't know just another perspective that is hopefully more neutral and less charged than this person that you're frustrated that's a good point maybe maybe they will also have your back though and help you figure out ways to deal with this and if it gets testy if it gets charged it's better to have them know something about this earlier so that they can understand yes that thing that you talked to me about yeah it blew up and they have more context going into it than than just jumping straight into the fight yeah you need to pre-share your side of the story before it becomes an issue that's a good idea i usually approach these things in two kind of two different ways with my manager one is i'll

like i'll do something similar to what you said jameson which is approach your manager asking for coaching on how to navigate the situation and and that's you know maybe okay you've already come to us. So maybe you don't need to do that. Just kidding. But how, how, why, what could they possibly say that we haven't already said? But the other thing is, so that, and that is your manager's job is to help coach you through situations like this. So that's fine. That's an important thing they do. But the second approach is you could actually say, I have feedback for one of our team members that I want to share with you. And you know, some managers will say, just give it to them directly. Okay, fine. And you'll say, I already have, but because

maybe you have but sometimes it's important for your manager to hear from their team members peers how they're perceived as performing so in this case you would say something like this person is actually slowing down the development process by asking me to pair unnecessarily leaving unhelpful comments well just those two things really and there's actually another bullet we haven't talked about here that maybe we should but just give that feedback and say hey as their manager i just thought you might want to know this is my feedback for them yeah the asking for coaching approach is more indirect you're giving the feedback in a more indirect way that's right because you're still going to tell them what's going on to say well what do i do about it it

just sounds a little more proactive right it's not just tattletailing yeah i think it kind of depends on the vibe and the relationship you have with your manager i could see a situation where saying just here's here's the facts here's the feedback could be helpful as well yeah maybe better it feels yeah it certainly feels more slightly more passive aggressive to say help me deal with the situation it is this person is doing all this stuff that is really frustrating to me and bad and slowing the team down but but help me sometimes that's how the game works yeah Especially in the United States, we like to be cheerful and friendly and less blunt and direct. Yeah. And it's a positive approach. I mean, you really are saying, I am willing to take

ownership for the part of this problem that I can solve. And I want you to help me do that. But I still want you, you have to be aware of the problem. So yeah, maybe you're right. Maybe I'm too inculcated into my own culture. Anyway, it's a tough one. I think if someone came to me and said, here's the feedback, my instinct would be two things. one say okay let's do some coaching about what you do about it and the other one is the kind of spin off the other process of what i do about it so i feel like the outcome would probably be pretty much the same if if i were the manager in this situation if someone said hey help me work on this i would still spin off that other process of what do i need to do about it yeah so maybe it

doesn't matter i don't know just wanted to bring up the the different approach there you actually brought up the different approach i wanted to take credit for your approach so i could win well it is a competition yeah all right we have talked certainly which i think means we've answered the question yeah that's it should we read our next question yeah this comes from a listener named tad pole i am graduating this year and have received two job offers they are both very similar in terms of pay and benefits the only difference is that one is fully remote and the other is hybrid with two times a week in person i would normally jump on the chance to work remotely mainly due to the fact that i'm a bit socially awkward and shy however i am conflicted if i should accept

the hybrid offer as an opportunity to work on my social skills and experience working in an office sooner rather than later should i just accept that my personality isn't suited for in person have you ever had anyone on your team be socially awkward or shy how did you feel about them p.s have you guys ever thought of releasing merch i'd love to buy a space lawyers t-shirt good call out on a space lawyer's t-shirt time to kick off yet another process in my brain the t-shirt needs to say this t-shirt constitutes legal advice and then in space in parentheses nice hmm so so maybe first full-time job maybe maybe not but first kind of job after finishing up school i have an opinion on what this person should do but i i don't know if it's right or not

maybe i'm just saying the thing that i did which other people isn't that the theme of this show i have an opinion on your question but i don't know if it's right or not i did that last week quite a bit i don't remember if i figured out if it was right or not ever yeah i'm sure i'm gonna change my mind and say my opinion is right before i say it of course it is so if i were you I would take the hybrid role, all other things being equal. Of course, there are lots of attributes that differ between jobs and you kind of compare them on all of those attributes. But if this is the big differentiator between them, I would prefer the hybrid role. And the reason is, I think it would be easier to learn and grow faster earlier in my career with some in-person

interaction. Oh yeah. There's, there's that quick back and forth that is possible in person that is much more expensive and harder to do remotely and requires a lot more, I think it's a lot more deliberate skill and effort to pull off remotely. And I think the average hybrid role is likely to be more conducive to getting up to speed quickly and learning faster than the average remote role for a new early career software developer. Yeah, I agree. I agree for different reasons. Ah, what are the reasons?

Well, I mean, if I'm reading into the question a little bit here, this person wants to become a little bit better at being in person and reduce their awkwardness and shyness a little bit. And I think going into an office with your team twice a week is a fantastic on-ramp to that process. It's not gonna be jumping in the deep end

all five days of the week in person, which would be probably really taxing for someone who considers themselves socially awkward and shy. So it's just the right amount of interaction to where you can kind of rebuild your confidence on the three days that you're not there and then go in, do it in person for a while, right? Go home, recuperate. You get to make a comment on Friday and then you get to ruminate over it the whole weekend and Monday and Tuesday. yeah and they go back and then they're on wednesday said by wednesday maybe maybe write up some uh little cue cards you can hold while you're talking for wednesday

yeah ready to write notes on your hand and marker so that they can get all sweaty and smeared and you read them wrong it gives you all the time to plan your your triumphal return but i also agree with what you said jameson i can't i i said i spent the last two years prior to my current job working fully remote 100%? Well, I guess a lot of people did. But I actually joined a new company in November of 2020, worked for two years, fully remote. And it was really hard. And I could imagine that coming up to speed and stuff for engineers on my team was also really hard. And the reason it's so stark to me is that I've now since switched jobs about seven months ago. And I'm in the office three days a week.

It's wonderful for so many reasons. But one of the reasons that are particularly relevant to this question is that people stop by my desk all the time and just ask a little question. It probably happens five times a day. You know, a little question, we take five minutes, you know, a couple of ideas are exchanged and boom, we're off again. And I think to myself, how many times did that just not happen in a fully remote world because the friction is just a little too high?

and i think there's a lot i literally forgot that that happened yeah i've worked remotely since like 2016 oh man and i forgot that was a thing it's wonderful that happened to me it's a it's a really cool experience and man even just even just relationship building you know you're walking you two people happen to be walking toward the kitchen at the same time like oh hey how was your weekend you like these things just don't happen remote you know yeah and there are trade-offs and there are things you can do to make it easier to have those kind of ad hoc interactions remote but it's certainly different still my personality just isn't suited for in person have you ever i don't think that's true

i think if you are aggressively unkind then maybe that's true yeah personality isn't suited for in person if you feel awkward and shy lots of other people do and especially in this profession that you have chosen yeah you are you are much less of an outlier here than in other places plenty of extroverts and friendly people but also plenty of shy awkward people yeah maybe more so than a general slice of the population so i i think you this is kind of like a reverse imposter syndrome where it's like i'm awkward and shy only to come to find out that everyone else is too you just haven't seen them in person yet i never met my co-workers in person for my last job i joined during the pandemic and and just never had any in-person get together and i got so that i was

very comfortable with them but i also think if we met up in person there would definitely be some awkwardness that that first time just i remember that from past remote gigs as well there's for me at least there is some awkwardness to go from the text video interface to the real world interface for sure in fact do you want to hear a hilarious story about that that's awkward for me at my last company i had been there about six months and we organized an in-person event and one of the engineers showed up to that event and walked up to me and and said hi dave and i literally looked back at them and even though i had been on zoom with them every day for the last six months i said oh have we met my my brain just could not recognize this person in three

dimensions and it was a combination of their of their height was off from the from the image that my mind had filled in implicitly and just their overall like persona and demeanor and look it looked totally different to my mind in three dimensions it was almost like i felt like i was face blind you know you've heard about that that phenomenon yeah it was so awkward and he responded he's like no i'm so-and-so and i'm like oh oh oh crap like i just really stepped in it so awkwardness abounds it's just gonna happen and you kind of have to accept that definitely called someone the wrong name in the first meetup that i went to at walmart and it was somebody i'd worked with a bunch did you call them the name of another co-worker yeah i mixed them up with

another person i knew who they they were both on the same team oh no knew them both worked with them both and just similar oh no i mean i'm making a lot of excuses i could call people the wrong name under much different circumstances as well even the best of the skill i have yeah yeah but yeah it was it was definitely a weird that happened to me when i was full-time in person pre-covid i remember there were two team members who i was new to the team i had been there a few weeks but i just could not get their names straight i always swapped them well i had been there several months many months by that time it's painful should i have you ever had anyone on your team be socially awkward shy yes tons of people yeah very common it's fine yep you can be

a good software developer and a solid communicator while still being awkward and shy i actually think it's easier to do that remotely frankly i think it's easier to have that text interface and have the time to take to collect your thoughts a little bit more but you can you can be awkward and shy and be great in fact yeah i mean you're in the right profession i think most engineers are actually more comfortable with shy people than they are with super flamboyant and social and out there people. In fact- Dave people. Yeah, exactly. I was going to tell a story about myself. Years ago, I was working as a software engineer in an office of about 50 other engineers. And one of the electrical engineers was talking

about culture and how we're hiring and we want to pick people who have the right culture and this and that and this this person literally said the last thing we want is a whole office full of dave smiths and i was like i mean i agree did they mean it well was it kind of like a like oh they'll kind of give you the head knuckles like oh you're rascal or was it i don't know i can't stand that guy dave i i think i think he was it was a comment on how i was a little bit high energy and i think that felt draining to him. And he couldn't imagine having like 50 super high energy people surrounding him. Yeah. And so, you know, I'm a loud laugher and I'm a little bit jokey and very positive about a lot of things. Anyway, I think that the reason I cite this example is I think that a lot of

engineers are just happier with people who are a little quieter, a little more calm. And maybe that comes, maybe you think that's socially awkward, but I think they might not think that about you there's the kind of shy and socially awkward that that means you kind of speak up less and contribute less i've worked with a lot of people like that and i i do two things one of them is try to make sure that they are comfortable enough with the team that when they have things to say they are willing to speak up they can participate we're not losing out on stuff from them thinking, I wish I could, but I can't or whatever. And then the other thing is sort of just accepting that people are different and there are people who will talk more and people who will

talk less. And I also don't want to fundamentally change who they are. You don't have to become an extrovert or a loud mouth or whatever. Or a Dave Smith, heaven forbid. Yeah. Last thing we want. Yeah. Who would listen? I think you're a great listener, Dave. I think you are an extrovert and talk a lot and are high energy, but I don't, I don't know. I think you're great. It was crazy. Love. Yeah. I don't know. I, I think I will go back to my original point though, that if you're looking for tighter feedback loops, I think those are easier to find with some in-person interaction. If you are going to a remote place,

I think you are rolling the dice a little bit more that they will do remote well, or you're going to have to put in a lot of effort to make up for it to pull in information. Kind of the standard remote trade-off requires more deliberate effort to communicate, and that's even more important if you're a new developer. And I've seen there's a common failure mode

with new developers where they just kind of disappear. They're stuck, they don't want to ask questions, they don't want to bother people and and so you'd have to be more aware of that failure mode and avoid it remotely yeah i think and think about that in person you're sitting at your desk you're stuck you need help you see one of your peers stand up and so you know they're that they've disconnected from their work for a moment so now is a good time to go and ask them the question right but you just can't do that remote you don't know when people are are disconnecting from their deep flow moment for for a little while yeah yeah then you have to do it async you have to drop a

question and wait for someone to get back and someone is going to get interrupted either they will stop what they're doing to come answer your question right now or they might wait till they're ready answer it and then you have to kind of stop what you're doing if you want to engage in real time or extend that cycle of how long it takes to follow up more yeah which is fine and and works but yeah all right well i think that's pretty clear for us we're going hybrid good luck yep what can people do if they want their own questions answered dave go over to soft skills dot audio on the worldwide interwebs and click the ask a question button where you can fill out our beautiful little form feel free to give us as much personally identifying information as you

feel comfortable giving we are not pci compliant though so don't give us any credit cards and we would love to see your questions in fact it's my favorite part of the week is reading all your questions so thank you for sending them gdpr what does that even mean now i'm trying to think up of a backronym for gdpr and i can't go data all dang pull request yeah that's that's what we're all about all right thank you for asking questions thank you for listening and we will catch you next week Thank you.