Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 362: Running the clock down and updating linkedin without freaking people out

Episode Date: June 26, 2023

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Greetings from Germany! My job is creating a customized Windows installation image with PowerShell & C#. It takes about 2 hours to build and test an image. Sometimes I have to wait until the end to see if a change did actually work or not. During that time I usually browse the web / watch Youtube / read a book. This makes me feel like an impostor, because I am maybe working 10-25% of the time. Since I’ve only been with this company 1 year, 6 months, I don’t really have any other things to do in that time. Most of my colleagues have been with the company for upwards of 10 years and work in multiple projects at the same time, so they don’t have this issue. On the one hand, I don’t feel like I’m doing anything wrong. On the other hand, it feels like fraud. Should I feel guilt and if so, what should I do about this situation? I am a software engineer at a large tech company in middle America. I like my job, like my leadership, and am fairly compensated for my work. In fact, I’ve been told I’m about to be moved up a level! When (if 😅) I get the new job title, I believe the responsible thing to do is to update my resume and LinkedIn account so that if (when 😳) my management or role changes for the worse, I can take your advice and find a new job. However, I haven’t updated my LinkedIn profile since I graduated college. How can I update my LinkedIn without worrying or upsetting anyone? To complicate matters, my entire team moved on to better things in the last six months, so suspicions are already high.

it takes more than being annoyed your tests are not passing and then finding a bug in your code to be a great engineer this is soft skills engineering episode 362 i'm your host dave smith i'm your host jameson dance soft skills engineering is a weekly advice podcast about how to question your entire existence when your tests just won't turn green only to find out it was your fault all along. I usually jump to kernel bug because one time I read an article about it being a kernel bug.

And then find out I missed a semicolon somewhere. Right next to its neighbor, the compiler bug. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I can count on zero hands the number of times that has been true for me. I don't know. I don't remember it ever being true for me.

I know I found bugs in kind of the dev tools and build stuff but i don't know if i've found yeah i don't know you gotta do more hardcore stuff yeah you're just too not hardcore enough clearly did you see that google disabled iou ring in all of their machines everywhere disabled what it's some new kernel feature that i promise i know all about but will not explain it's something to do io i don't know it's some relatively new kernel feature but they disabled it because they found a bunch not a bunch a lot of their capture the flag vulnerability things that people have found and and and exploited and then escalated to them have been through iou ring and they got tired of paying the bounties so they turned it off

yeah so i think what my point is is that i'm like google where i only use stuff that's been hardened enough i'm wise like clearly because of your wise technology choices technology never fails you yes i let other people find the failures and fix them for me and then i just fail myself all right i should thank our patrons yes so i will thank you too trash panda the computer science book.com the re-elect james and dance boogie brigade the re-elect james and dance committee santa hope arnoa frazier lobe kensi dodds jenny kim owen shardle benjamin earl if you would like to join this illustrious crew go to soft skills.audio and click the support to some patreon button craig motlin i love mavis the stochastic parrot alice jost to tuscarawas

ohio when i saw you read that one i thought that looks so easy why is dave having a hard time and how foolish i was patreon.com.au we're hiring ira chan monkey face emoji jonathan king web tau awesome friend and testing oladapo fadye the re-elected jameson dance committee there's two of those and they must battle to find out which is the true supreme re-elect jameson dance committee nick hathaway travis sanders braden canes john grant cody sale oh sorry cody please hire jameson sale nick cantar philip john basile thank you thank you so much for all of your support both financial and in the words you say that tell people that i'm great and they should re-elect me i don't know if i've ever been elected to any position actually i uh i'm

sorry i wasn't listening to anything you said because i was trying to figure out how to pronounce that name in that city in ohio it's real i can confirm i looked it up so if you want to help support the show you can go to soft skills.audio and click support us on patreon and any amounts you contribute will get you added to our slack team which is great full of wise people who teach me stuff i do learn things and sometimes i i stroke my chin and nod and add to my bank of wisdom from the stuff that folks say or sometimes i just laugh because it's funny and happy yeah yeah that's what i'm there for to laugh yeah i'm there to just giggle alongside everybody yes that's an important contribution makes life better yeah so any amount will get you added

to our slack team and enough dollars will get you to say stuff will get us to say stuff you can say stuff yeah you can if you want yeah thank you thank you we appreciate it should you uh no i'm gonna be bold dave will you read the next question nope i instead will read some feedback from a listener on a previous episode how's that that's okay i guess okay we got this from a listener named jules who said hi i have a little feedback for you too on the question improving without feedback from the episode on june 12th by the way i i did edit this for brevity, just so you know. Also, I took out all the negative parts, so it's only filled with praise. You edited it for ego, for our egos. Just kidding. Did not do that, just for brevity.

I think you did a thorough... Oh, by the way, just for background, this was the question asker who said, hey, none of my coworkers or teammates will give me any constructive feedback. They all just say I'm doing great. And relevant to this point, she's a woman, which is what Jules is going to talk to about here. So let me read this. I think you did a thorough job of answering the question at face value, but as a web dev and a woman who's gone from junior up to staff engineer, I think there's a strong chance that there's some imposter syndrome and internalized bias going on. She may be overqualified for her position, and truly, they have no criticism to give. When I was young, coding and computer science were heavily male, and it took me 10 years into

the wrong career before I got past the dissociation between women and tech and realized that it was by far the thing I was best at. I've been lucky to find the career full of support, opportunity, and fairness but bias is still very much looming in the background maybe the asker is just a big fish who needs to join me in the big pond i love the show and listen almost daily great feedback yeah thank you that's great feedback and a recruiting pitch too yes join me officially hiring we can share i was gonna say we could share contact info but all we have is a social security number and a credit card so i guess we can share that instead we trust that you can use that connect all right you'll get in touch one way or another add me on linkedin by sending me

your credit card number eventually the police will connect us in court yes all right all right should i read the question i would first question i would be honored to hear your voice reading in the first question then i will greetings from germany my job is creating a customized windows installation image with powershell and c-sharp it takes about two hours to build and test an image Sometimes I have to wait until the end to see if a change did actually work or not During that time I usually browse the web or watch youtube or read a book This makes me feel like an imposter because I am maybe working 10 to 25 percent of the time Since i've only been with this company for one year and six months

I don't really have any other things to do in that time Most of my colleagues have been with the company for upwards of 10 years and work in multiple projects at the same time So they don't have this issue On the one hand, I don't feel like i'm doing anything wrong on the other hand it feels like fraud should i feel guilt and if so what should i do about this situation i like that on the one hand just fine on the other hand fraud it's like extreme oh boy well good news i know the exact right answer but i think we should talk about only wrong answers first i'm incapable of delivering wrong answers so i will remain silent until it's

time to get the right answer i declined to participate in your fraud dave this foolishness what do you think why not why not simply say the right answer we'll save everyone time uh i'm not actually sure we've ever delivered a right answer on this show i mean there's no play video games on that list yeah maybe that's it maybe so you've got read book watch youtube browse the web maybe you just haven't found the right time filler yet that will make you not feel guilty so video games maybe exercise maybe you think my employer wants me to be healthy because it keeps their health insurance costs down so i'll i'll go for a run Well, this is in Germany.

I don't think it works that way. Well, it's a little broader, but it still works. You know, like I'm going to keep our tax rates down. My fellow citizens want me to be healthy. Exactly. I'm contributing to lower taxes by exercising while I wait for my PowerShell bill to finish. Yeah. You could, I was going to say real things.

Let's see. What are more fake things? You were so tempted. Legos? Yeah. yeah i mean really anything you could do in two hours is the thing you could do oh while you're waiting most marvel movies are two hours it's about right yeah what about watching okay now i'm gonna start putting i'm gonna dip one toe into the right answer waters what about watching

youtube videos about building windows installation images faster yeah what if you make a video of the installation process and then watch it while it's happening and it's like you're paying close attention to your work but you're actually watching youtube at the same time are you saying record the progress bar as it goes across the screen in like a screen recorder then you get that transgressive kind of buzz of of watching youtube but it is your work on youtube yeah you could live stream it on youtube and then watch it then it's real time then you don't have to worry about it being you're watching a live stream of a video of your work that's happening also right in front of you yes okay hmm all right on to the real answers well now i have to have real answers

too oh i'll give you some more time then with some fake ones what about gossiping with your co-workers about how hard other people work unnecessarily i hmm so i worked in an earlier job on a big batch process. It had to parse a bunch of XML and dump it in a database, basically. And it took several hours, kind of sped up over time as we changed things about it.

But it was long and long enough that you couldn't start it and wait for it to complete and then go on to other things. You had to kind of figure out something else to do. And I'm wondering if this is a cultural thing because I felt like I just had to do

i i couldn't not work that was hmm hmm like you couldn't read a book yeah i feel like that would be just completely unacceptable you had to do something that made you uncomfortable is that what i'm gathering yeah i think so well now that i'm thinking back on it there were a bunch of other things i was working on at the same time too so maybe this was maybe that was it maybe it the thing, the question asker pointed out that there were actually multiple projects. So I had natural things to multitask with. I do remember I spent a lot of time trying to improve the importer and fixing it and rewriting it and trying to make it faster. And that's always something you could do while you're waiting for it to run. I don't know the technical details here. So maybe there

are hard limitations for why it takes that long, but you got two hours to try and make it take fewer than two hours next time yeah that's true and then every time you want to test your optimizations it's going to take a couple hours to know if it worked yeah but i think i have an assumption embedded in in how i'm thinking about this which is that you should be trying to do more you should do more stuff you've got to produce this image produce it faster and make sure that you can do other things at the same time or produce more of them or faster updates or whatever. And I'm wondering if that's just a cultural thing that is not common everywhere. Yeah. I mean, if you were working as a cash register worker taking payments, but there was

a long time gap between customers who showed up, would you feel bad for reading a book or watching YouTube? No, I worked at a dry cleaner in high school and I hated our customers because they made it so i couldn't do my homework how dare they come in and make me work can't you see i'm trying to do homework or learn how to juggle or skateboard inside the dry cleaner skateboard inside the store yeah i totally did the linoleum was pretty dinged up how many times did you send your board flying into a glass display case? Never. I was either that good or just not doing anything hard. Couldn't get the board off the ground. Yeah. Well, I don't really know. I mean, the company is paying you to produce

these images. It takes a couple hours to produce the images. I mean, if the company really wanted more images faster, they could certainly create an incentive for you that would make it explicit that that's what they want. We're going to pay you a bonus if you can produce X number of working images in the same time span. Even still, I think people feel better about themselves when they are on the clock and they are doing things to do better work than they were doing before. And so if I were in this situation, I would be trying to find ways so that I could productively spend my work hours and not just read or watch YouTube videos. So that's kind of how i feel about it that's what i would want to do one way to think about it is also how can you

use this time to get better and i don't know about you but when i browse the web slash watch youtube slash read a book i don't often feel like i am developing in some way i'm usually consuming and passing the time but i am not a more skilled human being or more more able and capable of doing stuff yeah and if if you want to grow in your career being able to figure out how to take this thing that takes a long time and make it take less time is a good exercise to go through and a good story to tell as well throughout your career to say, hey, I joined, I did this thing. This is the job. Here's how much better I made it. That's pretty attractive to employers, I think. Oh, yeah, for sure. So here's how I would go about that. I'm just going to pretend for a moment

that I'm a queuing theory expert, even though I'm not even sure what I'm about to say has anything to do with queuing theory. But I think queuing theory makes you sound really smart when people say it. So that's the main reason I'm going to say it. So in queuing theory, you have this concept of queues. And I sense that what... I just imagine you ending there. What I think is going on here is you've got a single queue through which you're pushing all these images. So you probably have one computer where you test these images. And it takes, well, let me just use the percentages as a guide here. So between 10% and 20% of your time, you say,

is spent actually working, and then the rest of it is spent waiting. Well, if you had two computers, now you could actually be testing two images at the same time. And that 10 to 25% of your time idle would go to 20 to 50%. No, wait, yeah, sorry, 10 to 25% working time would go to 20 to 50% working time, because now you've actually got two machines. So while one machine is testing or installing your changes, you can actually be trying out another change on another machine. And surely you have a whole backlog of stuff you're supposed to be working on. Wouldn't it make sense when you get through one item to go ahead and kick off a build that that's going to verify that and then start to work on the next item while that previous one is running. Then

if one of them doesn't work, they're both not blocked on a single queue. There we go, queuing theory word again. At least I think queue is part of queuing theory. I'm pretty sure about that. So you can then scale this up until you actually are 100% utilized instead of only 10% to 25% utilized. So between 10 and 4, somewhere between 10 and 4 computers, and you've got yourself a full pipeline with no stalls and no idle time. So I would probably ask my employer for more machines if if that is the case and see if i can actually get this thing running so they're all humming all the time and i've constantly got a test going and i'm constantly working on the code changes for another one yeah i imagine the trigger that causes this there's some change to the system

that you're putting on this image so someone will come along and say hey make a new make a new image for us because we upgraded the whatever yeah and then you produce that and they distribute it to folks but i think what you're saying is get more machines not so that they can come tap you on the shoulder and then you make four images at once no exactly instead of instead of one but so that you can be consistently running this and tweaking it and making it faster yeah exactly so while one test is in progress you can be working on another on the next request and then at some point you'll have to put them together right like you'll have to test them all together and then ship a image that is composed of all the changes and that'll take two more hours yeah yeah also if

this can lead to kubernetes might be a good thing or might be a bad thing but you you eventually end up with some cluster of compute power that you need to deploy on these tasks and then you get it that could be fun that could be if look if your life is just and i know it can occupy all of your time i know for sure if you want you could have zero idle time if you're trying to yes kubernetes is a gas it will expand to fill all the space all of it and then it will be leaking out the sides on weekends too okay have we answered this question i think so okay good luck all right let's see here oh my turn it's you will you read the next one this comes from an anonymous listener who says i'm a software engineer at a large tech

company in middle america i like my job i like my leadership and i'm fairly compensated for my work in fact i've been told i'm about to be moved up a level when or in parentheses if with a sweat a smiling sweat emoji is that the right way to describe that the nervous laughter emoji yes when if i get the new job title i believe the responsible thing to do is to update my resume and linkedin account so that if when in parentheses with another emoji uh this one is the big eyes little mouth blushing eyebrows up emoji right did i did i get that right are you saying that's the name for it or is that your description this is my description of it oh okay does it have a name yeah i'm sure it okay does i only know the face emoji flushed face okay i only know them by

their four-digit Unicode ID. Sorry. Okay. Anyway, let me actually just reread the sentence because it's totally lost now. Okay. When or if I get the new job title, I believe the responsible thing to do is to update my LinkedIn and resume so that if, when, my management or role changes for the worse, I can take your advice and find a new job. However, I haven't updated my LinkedIn profile since I graduated from college. How can I update my LinkedIn without worrying or upsetting anyone? to communicate matters my entire team moved on to better things in the last six months so suspicions are already high yes the old update the linkedin which makes people around you realize you're updating your linkedin so as a recent linkedin enthusiast part of my job hunt yes i'm

pretty sure there's a way to update your linkedin and say don't send out notifications about this I think you can also, I don't remember if it's opt-in or opt-out, but there's some way to control whether LinkedIn broadcasts, hey, everybody, check out this new thing on the LinkedIn. That won't stop it from showing up if people go look at it. Right, but it won't. But if you're worried about, yeah. That is called, so I just looked at my LinkedIn and there's a checkbox when you add a new experience that says notify network, default off. turn this on to notify your network of key profile changes such as a new job and work anniversaries updates can take up to two hours there you go if you do turn it on you have two

hours for the fuse to go all the way into the gunpowder for the electrons to yes soak yeah it takes time for the electrons to fully soak to marinate yeah right well that was a very tactical idea jameson thank you use my current current experience without worrying or upsetting anyone i think so suspicions already high i have a pithy answer which is that if people notice that you've updated your linkedin you can tell them i haven't updated it since college and i wanted to reflect my current experience because i'm excited about this new promotion or whatever i think there's a reasonable explanation. But if your whole team moved on in the past six months, something is going on. You might not be one LinkedIn explanation away from resolving.

Yes, well said. Is it inherently bad if your employer knows that you've updated your LinkedIn? I mean, what is truly the concern here? I think the concern is that it might communicate i'm getting my ducks in a row to go look for another job yeah and why is that a concern is it are you worried you're going to get fired because they think oh he's looking for a new job let's let's cut that one off yeah they're on they're on the way out anyways it's certainly a thing that could happen it could happen especially in this in this current market but it could also happen that they hear that you're updating your linkedin profile and they want to sweeten your job for you to make it more attractive to stay yeah as a manager i regularly have

i regularly try to identify who are the most mostest keyest most essential essentialist people on a team and also who is a flight risk that's kind of one of the terms or who seems likely to be on the way out. And often those are used to produce plans and then do things about with those plans to try and either lessen the flight risk or reduce the bus factor or just kind of make things better so that there's less of a risk of someone leaving and causing harm to the team or the projects. I think that's what you're saying. You're saying if they find out, oh, the question asker is updating their linkedin maybe they want to leave that might give them a chance to intervene and make it better for you so it really can go either way though if they're already looking for

someone to leave and they're like look this person's leaving anyway it'll just be better for them you know to give them a severance package on the way out let's let's lay them off i guess that could happen but it could also just as easily go the other way especially if you're a great performer which it sounds like you are you've got a promotion on the way it's fantastic yeah so why don't you just make them feel a little uneasy look i'm loyal to you but not that loyal you could buy my loyalty with a little more money the loyalty you can trust the loyalty that is bought with money that's right oh goodness i haven't updated my linkedin profile since i graduated college i i do think that's a pretty reasonable yeah explanation it totally is people

put people put promotions on their linkedin all the time it's the same reason that you post on other social media when you do something exciting and and you want everyone to just know how great you are that's why we use social media linkedin is no exception it just happens to be for business yeah i see people in fact i see people every day well every time i go to linkedin which is every couple of weeks maybe every few weeks every your daily browse of linkedin every day that i go to linkedin i see people you're either a recruiter or you are looking for work yes those are the two reasons to go to linkedin every day sometimes i get sucked in on the stupid news feed and i just scroll through it i'm like why am i scrolling this like sure i guess i know some of these people but

jeez my realtor's cousin posted an article from the ceo of exxon mobile i guess it's important for me to read? It's about sky-high leadership. Yeah, yeah. There's definitely a vibe. This picture of an email sent by the CEO is a masterclass in communication. That's my favorite LinkedIn clickbait. So yeah, people do it all the time. I wouldn't worry one bit about it. And if you're a little worried, just go ahead and check that checkbox, notify my network, turn it off, and probably no one will even notice. And if they do notice, they won't care, especially if you do it right after the promotion. It also requires your co-workers to have looked at your LinkedIn profile probably pretty recently, because I doubt they have a very

firm mental model of what your LinkedIn profile is like, just sitting in their head. And then you to change it, and then to look back and notice, wait a minute, it's changed. I browsed your LinkedIn profile 90 days ago and I could have sworn it didn't say that you got a promotion and now it does. What's going on? This is a little suspicious. Yeah. And the fact that you recently got a promotion does not alleviate my concerns. That's no excuse. Tell me what's really going on. What's really going on? Are you loyal? Are you secretly reading LinkedIn? I think you're okay. Maybe they'll ask you, this indicates you've been on LinkedIn

in. And so you're probably sad. What can I do? What can I do to make you less sad? You're like, thousands of dollars will make me less sad. How about that? I know money cures sadness. So maybe some of that. Well, have we answered the question? I think so. Good luck. I think you're totally fine. This is a normal question, though. I remember being kind of new to the industry and just worrying, what will people think if I do this? What will people think if I do that? i just didn't have good calibration on it well calibrate yourself on this one it's fine the thing that people will be mad about you probably aren't worrying about yeah don't worry you're probably not thinking about the thing that will actually upset people but you will do exactly trust me

you will be blindsided if you're worrying about it it's fine oh that's good that is so true but it didn't even know i was wrecking my career i'm so sorry all right question answered yes what can people do if they would like their own questions answered go to softskills.audio and click the support us no not the support well you can also click that look i'm not going to stop you from clicking support us on patreon before you ask a question but if you only want to ask a question and not shower us with all of your extra money you got from following our crappy advice you can click the ask a question button where you will see our beautiful form if you fill out that form you will join a different illustrious

crew which is the crew that has submitted questions in the past we love reading your questions we read them every week they absolutely fuel jameson's desire to get another job it's not just about it's not just about the money he knows that if he stays unemployed for too long you'll stop listening oh anyway also we just want to say a big thank you to those like jules today thank you for listening and thank you for writing in with your feedback we love getting other people's perspectives because we have a very narrow keyhole view on life and we just love hearing other people's perspectives especially if our advice failed you catastrophically we want if you survived we want to hear about it yeah if it feels bad enough we won't hear about it yeah we'll

hear about it from your next of kin yeah let them know before you take our advice if i don't make it through this performance review yes send this email to jameson and dave oh my goodness all right all right thank you for listening we will catch you next week