Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 365: Rerun of 307, side hustles and telling me when you are stuck

Episode Date: July 17, 2023

This is a rerun of episode 307. Enjoy! In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I work for a big bank. I recently found out I am severely underpaid. I have only received “exceeds expectations” ratings since joining over 5 years ago. I rage-interviewed at a bunch of FAANG companies, made it to the final rounds of all, but always came up short on the offer. Expectations at my current job are low. I’ve been putting all my extra energy and time into my own startup idea with a group of small people, that shows a lot of promise. I so desperately want to leave my current job, but I can’t prep for interviews and work on my startup at the same time. I never interviewed since joining the bank over 5 years ago. I truly believe my startup can ultimately be my escape, but I’m just grappling with the fact that it may take years before I can quit vs. if I got a new job I’d have much better pay and not be depressed at my 9-5. P.S. are you hiring? I’ve recently been placed as tech lead for a small group of 3 people, myself included. One of my teammates seems to be having a hard time communicating in a timely manner when they are stuck on something or when their task will be late. I’ve spoken to that person a few times individually on the importance of communicating early and often, but it seems like that person is happy to just muddle on until the time runs out. I’ve had to jump on to finish some work that was time sensitive and I’ve gone to greater lengths to slack dm on how things are going. It’s getting old. I don’t want to be micro managing. Each time I bring it up with them, it seems to get through but never manifests in action. I’m not sure if this person realizes the impact that lack of communication has especially in a remote first setting. A sense of urgency might be helpful in some respects. At one of our 1on1 dm chats the topic of imposter syndrome came up and we shared our mutual struggles with it. I’ve tried to encourage that person that my dm’s are open and can help but I can’t keep checking in. There should be some ownership on their end to getting help from me. How do I get this person to communicate more, share blockers or confusion so we can finish our work on time and learn on the way? Love your show, long time listener, first time caller.

Today's episode of Soft Skills Engineering is a rerun of episode 307 from last year. This episode is about how to handle a side hustle and people who don't tell you when they're stuck. Please enjoy. It takes more than using Alice and Bob when talking about cryptography to be a great engineer. This is Soft Skills Engineering episode 307. I am your host, Alice. i'm the attacker eve isn't that usually the uh yes and bob is uh bob is out sick today

yes it's just alice and eve fighting actually it's a really easy attack yeah what it is it's alice talking to eve but thinks eve is bob yeah it's an eve in the middle even the middle soft skills engineering is a weekly advice podcast for software developers about the non-technical stuff that goes into being a great developer such as cryptographically attacking the hr department to change your performance rating i heard you say the word that starts with crypto don't you mean cryptocurrency yes cryptographically attacking the blockchain which is obviously where your performance rating is stored that way no one can alter it it'll be good i swear you have to mine you have to mine your performance rating now i just want to riff on the horrible dystopian

nightmare that would create but instead i'm going to thank our patrons thank you so much to the folks who support us at the level where we shout them out every week thank you to memester josh owen chartle craig motlin rum and code i love maybe it's the stochastic pair alice jost andrew pollock aaron duna kashokton ohio patreon.com.au we're hiring ira chan monkey face emoji jonathan king testing is documenting.org oladapo fadier will angel ragnar harrison timmy garrowbrant nick hathaway travis sanders braden canes john grant nick cantar and philip john basile thank you thank you thank you thank you to the hall of champions with you all of you we'll be remembered forever and dine in great feasts it's kind of like a viking vibe i guess i don't know yes but

in patreon yes which is why we send a free viking helmet with those really big horns to every patreon patron you could do some serious arbitrage if that was true because i bet you could sell those for more than a dollar we have a sponsor though yes this episode is sponsored by hired the best way to quit your job and get a new one you'll hear more about them later on in the show all right jameson you want to read our first question yes this is from an anonymous listener who asks i work for a big bank i recently found out i am severely underpaid i have only received exceeds expectations ratings since ratings since joining over five years ago i rage interviewed at a bunch of fang companies

made it to the final rounds of all but always came up short on the offer oh that that's like it's got to interrupt that's so sad but i love the idea of rage interviewing that's like the maximum amount of time it can take from you as well oh yeah expectations at my current job are low i've been putting all my extra energy and time into my own startup idea with a group of with a small group of people that shows a lot of promise i so desperately want to leave my current job but i can't prep for interviews and work on my startup at the same time i have never interviewed before since joining the bank over five years ago i truly believe my startup can ultimately be my escape but i'm just grappling with the fact that it may take

years before I can quit. And if I got a new job, I'd have much better pay and not be depressed at my nine to five. P.S. Are you hiring? My employer is hiring right now. We are hiring front end developers. I thought the question asker was referring to the podcast. The podcast is offering fantastic internship opportunities that will really deepen your experience level and not pay you any money right but you'll get so much exposure oh man you'll have to slather yourself with sunscreen you're gonna get so much exposure to avoid getting horrible burns from the amount of exposure you're gonna get oh you got me good with that when i had to cough oh man oh so much exposure but yeah my employer is hiring if you want to go to shortcut.com and then click the

links that look like they'll take you to job postings oh now i think you added that ps are you hiring just so you could pitch your you're hiring nope i i didn't but i will take it oh man big big bank first job five years totally unsurprised that you're underpaid i never interviewed since joining the bank over five years ago i can't tell if that means they haven't interviewed the whole time they've been at the bank or they've never interviewed before like this is their first job but either way i choose to believe first job okay in case you cared they they figured out the secret reviews are free ratings are free if you don't pay people yeah exactly they're comp based on them so i'm sure this bank did some study where they found

that if they gave everyone exceeds expectations that they could underpay everyone by 10 and they were like do it i don't think you could keep that quiet though yeah the big bank there's there's enough people that would have to conspire that someone would spill the beans i'm severely underpaid i wonder if this is also is this underpaid at the bank or kind of compared to industry because those could either one of those could be true i i choose to believe at the bank first job underpaid at the bank that's that's our chosen interpretation of this question okay which is weird because banks have a lot of money why can't they just have some like everyone we're opening the vault as much it's like a mr beast style bonus the vault is open

as much money as you can carry out that's your pay raise one customer every year loses their entire account balance and we have a lot of customers so it's fine i have a dumb suggestion for you which is don't prep for interviews just go interview i don't know if that will give you a job at fang but it can get you a job at plenty of places yeah and there's only five fangs but there's like 50 000 non-fang companies out there where you could work yeah plus the hiring freeze is uh is real yeah that's true at least it's it's a thing yeah i think you can do both your startup and interview is that what kind of where you're coming down here jameson i think so i think the

question asker is assuming they will need to do a lot of prep. I did edit that bit out. They did a bunch of prep for their FANG interviews. So they're assuming they will need to do a bunch of prep if they want to interview again. And interviewing is like anything where if you practice, you can improve your skill at it. Yeah. But you just need to interview well at one place to get a job. So you're saying optimize for number of companies you interview with rather than optimizing for interview prep time i guess or just use the interviews to prep for interviewing you just need to find that one company who has a really low bar and you just coast on in there and it'll probably be better than your current job expectations at my current

job are low yeah so you could go maybe you'll go somewhere that has low expectations but pays well right which is a lot of companies right now yeah there's certainly some goings-on happening that might make that number smaller this is a yeah this is an interesting meta point as well i'm assuming that it'll be easy for you to get interviews based on past hiring trends but there are some concerning signs in in the macro environment to use fancy business persons and by macro you of course mean visual basic macros written for microsoft itself yes the visual basic macros that run the simulation that we are all living in right which in turn governs the economic principles that we think are reality. Yeah. Tech is going through a downturn. Inflation

is high. Lots of market uncertainty. Stocks going down. Some companies are laying off or freezing hiring. So the golden spigot might be drying up. The golden spigot. Yes. The famous golden spigot of tech money. This has been the longest run. Now, I'm not saying it's over. Let's be clear but boy has this been the longest run of just rocket ship hiring and salary growth in one industry that i've that i could imagine i mean when i started in this industry we were just coming off the heels of a major correction and it was hard to get a job anywhere as a software engineer that changed course within a year or two of me starting out my career and has just accelerated ever since until now it would be really interesting to see how useless the advice

quit your job and get a new one becomes when it's hard to get a new one right or if it becomes hard to get a new one i want yeah our podcast may not age well i think can you believe before this market downturn i was not worried about it aging well my biggest fear was that the market would go down and then then our podcast advice would become less relevant hmm i have a hard time multitasking so i i have a i can't do a job and do major other stuff like a job interview that is kind of professionally related at the same time i can interview oh you mean like for the startup yeah i i would be unable to do a startup and a job at the same time yeah i would just uh collapse in a pile of guilt because i would not be good enough at managing my time to be really efficient at my

job. So I'd either work fewer hours or at the job and just get less done and be really guilty or I don't know, I guess there are lots of ways I can make this go wrong for myself. But suffice it to say that this would be hard for me in general. So and it would be even harder if I had a job I was really engaged with. Yeah. So you're saying maybe it's an advantage that your job is low demand. Yeah. And maybe so you're really looking for a unicorn out there. Not the not the billion dollar valuation unicorn but rather i need a job that pays me more than my bank and also demands as little or less than my bank demands of me so that i can do my startup yeah that's a tall order consulting might be a thing but again oh yeah then you can really set your hours i'm gesturing

audibly on the podcast to the the macro environment oh but then again hands pointing at the vacuum of the general area yeah yeah so so okay what i'm seeing here is a basic resource constraint problem you've got three things vying for your time your job interviewing and your startup and i'm not even counting personal life here but those three things when you when you are faced with a resource constraint and you have three things you want to do there are only two ways to to attack that problem and they're not mutually exclusive you can do one to the at the expense of the other, but you can do a little bit of both. And that is you can either sequence them in time. So do one after the other, after the other, or you can just do a little bit of all

of them, but you have to take time from one to do the other. So, you know, maybe that means you go on an interview blitz, which I think you already tried with fan companies and came up short. So maybe that's a no-go. Maybe you put your startup on pause for a month. I mean, how long is a month in startup time. It's not the end of the world, right? Your startup is going to be successful and probably measured in years. So maybe put your startup on pause for a month, do your interviews, find that sweet job, and then resume. I think that's viable. Yeah, that makes sense. I would not rely on your startup to be your escape though. Like this last part of the question,

I believe my startup can ultimately be my escape. Maybe, maybe. But I would say most startups fail And it could be a really long time and I think that's too long to suffer through a crappy job I would go try to find a new job put your startup on pause And then bring your whole self back to your startup once you once you've got a decent job. Yeah I think I agree with you and I have no more advice to give so I think we should go to the next question All right, let's do it Hey, jameson. Have you heard about the great resignation? Is it that charles dickens book? Wait, no the entire population on earth has started taking our advice of quit your job

Oh, yes, that's right. Apparently, we have achieved influencer status. We've been telling developers for years to quit their jobs. And now we want to tell you how to do it. We're ready to reveal the secret. I mean, you don't just walk out shooting finger guns. Yes. Well, you do that first. But after you do that, there's a new service we want to tell you about called Hired. What is Hired, Dave? Hired is the biggest AI-driven marketplace that matches engineers with companies, it is a great way to find your next job. I've been watching this industry for 20 years with a keen interest on hiring in particular, and I've never seen anything like Hired. Tell me about what you're seeing. So I've interviewed about 150 people in

the last year, and I am serious. Every candidate that's come to me through Hired has multiple offers, and they're incredibly high, scary high, like 30% higher than other candidates. Is that before or after the finger guns? yeah uh both the beauty is it's totally free for engineers uh and we would love for you to go try it go to hired.com soft skills to check it out hired.com soft skills quit your job the best way and check out hired right dave can you read it yes this comes from an anonymous listener who says i've recently been placed as tech lead for a small group of three people myself included one of my

teammate seems to be having a hard time communicating in a timely manner when they are stuck on something or when their task will be late. I've spoken to that person a few times individually on the importance of communicating early and often, but it seems like that person is happy to just muddle on until the time runs out. I've had to jump in to finish some work that was time sensitive, and I've gone to greater lengths to slack DM on how things are going. It's getting old. I don't want to be micromanaging. Each time I bring it up with them, it seems to get through, but never manifests in action. I'm not sure if this person realizes the impact that the lack of communication has, especially in a remote first setting. A sense

of urgency might be helpful in some respects. At one of our one-on-one DM chats, the topic of imposter syndrome came up, and we shared our mutual struggles with it. I've tried to engage that person that my DMs are open and can help, but I can't keep checking in. There should be some ownership on their end to getting help from me. How do I get this person to communicate more, share blockers or confusion so we can finish our work on time and learn on the way love your show long time listener first time caller ha love it when people say that classic line it does feel good long time okay wow i've had i've had a person like this on my team jameson have you ever had this before yeah i have i've probably been this person honestly oh you've been you've been this

person yeah maybe go on uh spill nope i don't want to choose not to maybe i have maybe i haven't i'll leave it ambiguous oh i i back in my earlier days in my career i actually handled this situation a little poorly maybe i'll just tell you what happened but i was probably maybe three four years into my career so fairly junior put into a technical leadership role and given just a ton of autonomy and responsibility. And I felt a lot of ownership over the team. I really wanted us to succeed. And frankly, we did. But there was one team member who I had given a task to, had given a lot of clear direction, or so I thought, on how to accomplish it. And then I found out like, man, a long time, maybe two weeks later, that, and I had like 15 plus people on the team. So

it was a lot to keep track of. I couldn't just ask everyone every day how they're doing, you know. and I found out like two weeks later that he had been stuck and I was so shocked like the the idea that you wouldn't call it out this is like my first time experiencing that you know like the idea that a team member isn't comfortable saying I'm stuck and I need help this was the first time I had encountered that now I've encountered that probably I don't know 7,000 times since then because it's actually very common but I had never encountered it until this moment and I think the way that I solved the problem was I was so shocked I was like you've been stuck for two weeks and the team member's like yeah and I said and you haven't said anything to me about this

and the team member was like no and like I think my jaw just hit the floor and I think the message I didn't have to say any words but like the message just came through so loud and clear that I was just absolutely shocked and disappointed and I just actually I actually didn't know what to say and i was afraid i would say something really mean so i just left i just walked out of the room honestly i think that person never did that again and so i just kind of got lucky like i think i actually i probably hurt their feelings a little bit i'm certainly they i know they felt called out and that's not how i would manage it today but i was just like so incredibly shocked that you could go that long and not make any progress and not tell

anyone that i think it came through loud and clear to them so there you go don't do that but it did work for me so there there are a bunch of things that you could do to help this person but there is the meta issue hanging over this of of should this person work here and and there is a trade-off for you spending more of your time helping them be effective and that might pay off in them getting over this issue and and working well and and that's great and it might not you should at least consider the possibility that this is not resolvable for you or not resolvable at a time or cost commitment that makes sense to pay. But I'm going to move past that and talk about what you can do if you're willing to spend the time or if it makes sense to spend the time. It will take

more time. That's the bad news. There's no solution here, I don't think, where it does not distract you from doing other work. You need to basically provide increasing levels of clarity and structure to this person. And by that, I mean, I assume this kind of started off with a vague understanding that people work hard and get their stuff done. And there's probably not a number of stories you have to get done or a number of points or lines of code or some other horrible metric like that. But when folks are not succeeding, it's helpful to add more structure and clarity so that you can be absolutely sure. Even if this metric is a bad way to work in general, for this situation, it will tell us if we are succeeding, succeeding or not. Start by saying increasing levels of

structure and clarity. And then now I'm just talking about one level, which is stick numbers around stuff. But that is the thing you can do. You can say, I expect you to get like three stories a week done over a four week period or something like that on average. And then if it's not happening, then you get to say, Hey, this was our expectation. Why is this not happening? Is the expectation wrong? Is there something wrong with the way you're working? And, and check in that way. By the way, this is getting really heavily into people management stuff. I should put that caveat on here that I would not expect a tech lead to have to resolve this problem, given my understanding of the tech lead role. Yeah, that is true.

Now I lost my train of thought. There's probably some good stuff in there, though. I don't know. I'll let you interpret what I would have said, how you would like. It'd be really good. Yeah. Yeah, but more structure, more clarity. I mean, less autonomy, more observation. You kind of just keep ramping those things up and each time you add more clarity and structure and the expectations are not met then you have to have a conversation saying like why aren't these being met and here's what we're going to do next and at some point that here's what we're going to do next is tell you that you don't work here anymore no i feel like you've just left an ominous silence like i offended you no i was actually i just kind of went into a mode where i was channeling what it would

feel like to be on the receiving end of that and i was like oh well to be clear i don't think you start this by saying hey we're gonna crank this ratchet on you and at the end it ends with you being fired if we if we don't resolve it but at some point a few steps in you have to start once once it becomes a possibility you need to start raising it to people i agree and the earlier the better it's a there is a delicate balance here because you don't want to be in the mode where you're often talking about if you don't do this you're going to be fired because that just creates this level of nervousness that's like constantly there and will impact people's work performance you know so that's like yeah it can be kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy yeah man it's

crazy i'm always telling people they're going to be fired and then i'm constantly having to fire people i keep telling them if they're not more confident i'm going to fire them and then they keep stammering when they talk to me yeah it's like man why can't you just get a whole sentence out without crying because if you can't you're going to be fired so it's really important that you do that so you need to stop crying like right now i think i try the parenting equivalent of that with my kids and it does not work stop crying yeah exactly it's perfect calm down why they don't like where my yeah where my instructions unclear or maybe not loud enough oh boy yeah so you're saying i do i'm actually kind of surprised we're going down this path where

you say this is such a important serious thing that it could result in termination if the root cause is the person does not get stuff done and they also don't communicate about not getting stuff done yeah i think so or sorry the root cause is wrong way to put it if if that problem doesn't resolve then then yes i think so i think that would be grounds to terminate somebody because it it means that they cannot perform at the level of expectations that you want for the job all right but again lots of steps between now and then but you've said you've jumped in to finish work grant gone to great lengths to slack dm on how things are going so here's here's a very concrete step you could try you could say i would like you once a day to send me some kind of status

update of the of your current work it can be in slack and email whatever but each day i want to know how stuff is going so that I know if you are stuck and need more help, or if things are progressing smoothly. Because it sounds like you're doing a lot of checking in. And I would take that idea, which is actually what the question asks is that I don't want to do that. I don't want to ask how you're doing, which actually you can't get away from asking how people are doing. That's actually part of the job of being a leader. But I would take it one step further and formalize it and say, I think whatever you're doing for standup, it's not working. Because standup is where these things are supposed to come up and so if you're if you're doing stand-up and you're just asking

questions like how's it going and the answer is fine then and then two weeks later you find out no progress has been made you're asking the wrong questions in your stand-up yeah what i like to ask in stand-up are questions like which task are you working on today okay then i like to ask when do you expect that one to be insert your workflow here advancing to the next stage going to qa ready for deployment, whatever it is? When do you expect your tasks to go to the next stage? And then lastly, are any of your assigned tasks at risk for not being delivered on time? And I think if you'll just ask these questions to everyone every day, first of all, they'll start answering them before you ask, which is what you really want. And secondly, it'll signal to everyone

that, well, depending on how you respond, it will signal to everyone that these are the questions we want truthful answers to. And what I have found is that if you will consistently ask all these questions. And then when they come back with not great answers, like several of my tasks are going to be late and I've made no progress. If you respond by having the team rally around that person and support them, like, okay, I'm going to set up an hour for you and Alice to go connect with Bob about your problem and see if you can get unblocked. And then they do have a productive, helpful session. Then I think you'll find the answers come more honestly and more proactively without you having to ask. Yeah, that's a really good point. If you freak out, then that's a really

good way to get inaccurate status updates in the future yeah that's like okay how are any of your tasks late and just as a reminder you can be fired if your tasks are late yeah but i think it's like you know we've talked about how getting feedback you have to ask specific questions and when you say can i have some feedback people are like you're doing great yeah but if you say things like how's my writing style, you get more specific feedback. I think this is the same exact scenario, but where as the leader, you need to say very specific questions. When will this task be delivered? What task are you working on? And are any of your tasks at risk for being late? And just ask them very specifically. Again, we run into the theme of no consistent definitions for roles between

companies because I could see a world where maybe there's a project manager that tracks status already. Maybe the tech lead does do that. Maybe the tech lead also does all the people management stuff. And there's a wide spectrum here. So if you have support in status tracking or people management or other areas, then you need to collaborate with whoever is providing that support. But if you don't, then you get to have a growth experience. You will know more things after trying to resolve this. You'll be wiser. I agree. All right. Have we answered the question? I think so. Good luck. Well, actually, let me back up i wanted to i wanted to make one more comment jameson on the we were talking about

you know telling people that they're going to be fired i think there's a precursor to that that's a little softer that you might want to try which is where you say as a software engineer at this company i expect you to provide timely updates and truthful updates of when when things are not moving forward you know like lay that out and i think maybe you said this i just wanted to kind to reinforce that before you get to the more serious you know topic of you're going to be fired i think you've just got to make it really apparent to people like concrete this is one of the job expectations that i have and maybe even write it down you know maybe you have a job description for each person and now we're getting way outside of like technical project yeah manager

kind of role as well into like pip pip territory yeah yeah yeah like you're sorry but you're in the deep end now but it'd be great if you had a written document you could point to and say remember bullet point three is one of the the things we expect you to do in this job you know you'd be surprised like it's that that's a real motivator people are like okay i know this is important i know i'll be judged by how well i do it i can put effort to do that yeah that's a good call sorry if i implied that you you say hey you didn't communicate status no no i don't think you did i've got bad news about next monday and your plans you may have noticed a 20 minute meeting on your calendar next week with hr it just says sync hr sync

catch up with hr i'm sorry no i don't think you implied that i didn't mean to to say that i just just wanted to go on record as saying here's some wording you need and you might need a job description too to help yeah and it is fair to to have have at least one next step be we talked about these expectations you are not meeting these expectations and like explicitly letting them know that it is not working you know all right now i think we've answered the question and actually i think we answered it before but i just had to pile that i appreciate it because it's really important for my ego that i have the last word well too bad because i'm gonna say more words uh yeah so anyway which people do if they want to ask their own questions go to soft skills.audio and click ask

a question thank you so much to everyone who sends us questions every week it is worth the effort of answering them to read these awesome questions i love it we really appreciate it about them dave would you like the last word i i would one day we're going to publish a book with all the questions i think that'd be really fun i'm still trying to give you the last word though no no you got it i'm good okay we'll catch you my ego can take this one we'll catch you next week We'll see you next time.