Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 373: I have no vision and not-so-positive environment

Episode Date: September 11, 2023

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Love the show, you guys have saved my bacon more times than I can count! I interviewed at an organization for a Senior Engineering role, but the interview went so well, they actually offered me the option to accept a Staff role! I definitely didn’t feel ready for that, but I accepted as a way to stretch and challenge myself. The company has been through some internal churn and re-arranging for most of my time there, and I bounced between a lot of projects, which means I’ve now been at the company coming up on 2 years, but not really had the chance to grow into the role. Now, I’ve been here awhile, don’t have a lot of excuses, and am bad at being a Staff Engineer. My biggest failing, is that I lack a bigger vision for our project, beyond just meeting customer needs for today. I’m not even sure how to start building that bigger vision! In my current project, this is especially apparent, because we do need to meet internal customer needs, but the end goal is a larger platform. We need features that inspire new avenues of work as well as enable current ones. How the heck do I even begin to start imagining what this bigger vision could be? Moreover, once I have that vision, how do I get buy in for that vision? My inability to do this kind of forward thinking has been a boat anchor around my ankles my entire career, and I’m lost as to where to even start. Help me guys, I love my job, but I fear I’ve become the embodiment of the Peter Principle. Help me chew my ankles off to save my career Listener Trevor asks, ‌ I work as a data scientist at a small company. I joined the company specifically because of the positive work environment. I do mostly software development and until recently have only received positive reviews. Recently we had a heated meeting with the CTO and CFO where we demonstrated that a customer’s request wasn’t feasible. The CTO challenged and expressed disbelief in our numbers which we had thoroughly analyzed and confirmed as accurate. I felt like their reaction was due to our results conflicting with our business needs. After that, my manager began pushing me to prioritize data science tasks. He attributed the outcome of the meeting to my lack of attention to detail, even though the results were accurate. He also said this would affect my next performance review. We reached a resolution when I apologized and committed to improvement. I’ve only received positive feedback since, but I still feel the assessment was unfairly based on such a brief meeting. Now I view the company and my manager differently. Without the positive work relationships with management and colleagues, I’m not sure what is keeping me here. Our tech stack is outdated, and there’s reluctance to change practices. For example, we didn’t have a CICD pipeline until only a few months ago. Additionally, the performance review and promotion schedules are nebulous and irregular. I’m uncertain about my next steps. Should I address the perceived unfairness of the meeting feedback? Or would it be better to start exploring other job opportunities?

it takes more than adding mountains of metrics and logging in the hope of getting something useful to be a great engineer this is episode 373 of the soft skills engineering podcast i'm your host dave smith i'm your host jameson dance soft skills engineering is a weekly advice podcast for software developers about all the non-technical stuff not including logging and metrics oh this one hits home it always feels like it feels related to refactoring although from another angle where like it's therapeutic you're adding stuff it feels vaguely better than before vaguely productive vague it feels productive yeah you're doing anything no but it's better in fact the software might even run a little slower as a result

better add some more metrics around that you have to measure the slowness d thank you for adding those performance metrics now would you please add some performance performance metrics so we can know how well the performance metrics are performing some performance performance metrics metrics i mean metrics and logging are good but right now i'm dealing with this dilemma of like oh i'd like us to have more we have so much to do and are they going to tell me anything that i don't already know yeah they told you it's not working right good they told me we have bugs in the area that is buggy they told me the call that scans the whole table is slow but now you know how slow that's true now you have a quantity to your

quality that's that's true now i can make the number go down it's really true but that's not what the show is about it's not it's not it's about softer fluffier fuzzier things it's about thanking patrons yeah i would like to extend some soft fuzzy fluffy thanks to nick kantar braden canes john grant travis nick hathaway oladapofadie ragnar jonathan king webtau awesome n10 testing will angel monkey face emoji irishan patron.com we're hiring tuscarawas ohio craig motlin i love mavis alice jost owen shardall jenny kim cody sale kent c dodds noah frazier the re-elect jameson dance committee santa hope are the re-elect jameson dance boogie brigade the the computer science book.com and trash panda thank you so much you uh have elected to contribute

to the show to the level where we shout you out every week and for that we just did it if you want to join this group go to soft skills.audio and click support us on patreon where any amount we'll get you an invite to our slack team and any amount of enough whatever your currency unit is we'll get you a weekly shout out and turns out you can buy gratitude you have bought our gratitude yes if you do that thank you we really appreciate it do you want to read our first question dave all right yes this comes from someone who calls themselves peter principal love the show you guys have saved my bacon more times than i can count all right continuing to read here i interviewed at an organization for a senior engineering role but the interview went

so well, they actually offered me the option to accept a staff role. I definitely didn't feel ready for that, but I accepted as a way to stretch and challenge myself. The company has been through some internal churn and rearranging for most of my time there. And I bounced between a lot of projects, which means I've now been at the company coming up on two years, but not really had the chance to grow into the role. Now I've been here a while. I don't have a lot of excuses and I'm bad at being a staff engineer. My biggest failing is that I lack a bigger vision for our project beyond just meeting customer needs for today. I'm not even sure how to start building that bigger vision. In my current project, this is especially apparent because we do need to meet

internal customer needs, but the end goal is a larger platform. We need features that inspire new avenues of work for us as well as enable current ones. How the heck do I even begin to start imagining what this bigger vision could be. Moreover, once I have that vision, how do I get buy-in for that vision? My inability to do this kind of forward thinking has been a boat anchor around my ankles my entire career, and I'm lost as to where to even start. Help me, guys. I love my job, but I fear I've become the embodiment of the Peter Principle. Help me chew my ankles off to save my career well said dedication to climbing the corporate ladder yes oh this one hits home because i identify with this person a lot i feel like i am weaker at

vision than in many other areas so i'm waiting for dave to tell me the answer and then i will do what dave says in my own life as well oh well the most visionary thing you can do is make something up i i mean i think if you say the words ai you've you've been visionary i have a vision it's all ai sprinkle some ai on it i i feel like we're now seeing the sprinkle some blockchain on it kind of recede into the rearview mirror and i am grateful i would rather have to sprinkle some ai on it oh you would trade these two hype trains yeah this i would way rather have the ai hype train than the blockchain hype train it's true i understand why you're saying that i mean at least

you're not tempted to go throw your money into ai yeah i've only spent a few bucks a month on open ai speculated with tens of thousands of dollars on dodgy pump and dump schemes dogecoin yeah i i'm i'm latching on to the word platform here so i hear this a lot especially at bigger companies in fact when i worked at a big company i got i felt this pressure people always build a platform yes turn it into a platform and i'm like oh okay so i we were building an internal software tool used by we probably had like a dozen or two different teams who used our service air quotes platform yes and we always wanted to expand it and create a more self-service platform that more teams could use and the company was big enough that it could be hundreds if not thousands of

teams could have benefited from it probably hundreds in this case and i really i did lack the vision to pull that off and i was i was always very impressed with people who could take a they could look at a set of needs from a set of uh customers or problem sets and then devise an elegant platform that could meet all those needs and then be extensible for more. I was always very

impressed with people who could pull that off. I feel like it takes some guts, too. I guess it doesn't take guts to just say the word platform over and over again in every meeting, but to really do this, you are predicting the future to some extent, and you're betting on something that

isn't obvious. Otherwise, it wouldn't be vision, in air quotes. It would just be like the list of tasks to do. Yeah. And I think for every attempted... There's a lot more attempted and failed platforms than there are successful ones. But we only ever hear about these successful ones where the founder had a vision. I mean, I don't know. I'm just thinking of something like GitHub. It's like someone took a look at Git and said, you know what Git needs? They need a cloud-based pull request system. you know and what a gamble right like nobody nobody was really thinking in those terms but boy did it pay off and it enabled a whole bunch of amazing workflows and thousands and

thousands of teams use it every day and so like people look at that kind of vision and they say oh just do that do that one yeah it's hard to have a vision like that yeah go have one yeah i feel like all the really successful examples you could point to are also kind of singular it's not yeah super easily repeatable just go make a just look it's like github but for insert your company name internal project so staff engineer i think this this feels right that you would expect a staff engineer to be thinking further ahead and bigger picture than the short term kind of get this project done so i can understand the expectations that you It's not clear if they're placed upon you or you're placing them upon yourself, but that matches up with what I would expect a staff engineer to do.

For me, it's a little hot on the requirements. I don't know. I think a lot of companies define staff engineer differently, but I tend to think of staff engineer as tech lead for one team. So you are responsible for the technical direction of somewhere between three and eight engineers, and you're helping guide that team to deliver on its roadmap, on its goals. But I would actually say this kind of vision where you say, look, I'm trying to get you to create this, basically essentially define a product that's going to be something that enables new work that we can't even imagine today. That, to me, is a little bit more than staff engineer, I think, maybe principal. engineer i think you've just contributed to title inflation dave no i'm deflating it i'm deflating it i'm saying i'm saying that oh wait maybe you're saying you have to be a principal oh you're inflating it oh you're right oh shoot staff that's a team lead principal principal is what really does this kind of thing oh you're right i'm my bad and if someone had written in and said i'm

a principal engineer and i'm being asked to do this i would have said no no no that's for distinguished engineers that's a level a level above you yes i and i don't even obviously i don't even know what inflation means. Features that inspire new avenues of work as well as enable current ones. I mean, I said I'm bad at this, so my advice is going to be bad. I suggest you give it anyway. When I have seen this done well, someone is combining observations they have with a conviction that they have. So they go out and collect data about what the needs are and ask how people are using it now or what kind of stuff they want to do. Sort of like the customer research thing but just just doing that is not the vision and and i think if you can synthesize those into

some kind of principle or broader overarching theme that that's where you get the vision out of it so talking to people to understand what do you mean by can you say the part about theme again i i lost it there so this is hard to talk about in the abstract this is what i mean this is just similar to vision same problem so maybe they build a ci system yeah at their company okay and there's like i don't know it's too slow and it'd be great if the logs let you dig in at different levels a little bit more and like there's there's a ton of incremental improvements you could see to the system and tons of stuff that the users are probably asking for and just saying like here's all the feedback we wrote it down and prioritized it in order is i think would

not qualify as a vision yeah because it's not tied together by any coherent theme or outcome it's just like it will do the stuff people want better than it does now yeah so so i think the the step to turn it into a vision is to do that is to say what is what is in common from the stuff people are asking for or or or even it might not be things people are asking for but like the needs you have uncovered by talking to people about it or that you see based on your experience i think and what's like a oh go ahead no no you you finish your thought no i'll go i'll be a visionary yeah don't stop me i know what am i thinking just let the vision flow it's gone it's it's blown away like dandelion seeds no i think if you can use those as input and pull together a like couple

of sentence summary of of here is what the organization will be capable of when we are done the the vision is what helps you work backwards to decide what to work on so you kind of yes grab all the data out there and observations figure out what you want the world to look like in n number of years, two, five, whatever, and then kind of plan in reverse from that. I feel like that's as close as I can get to explaining. Yeah, I like that. I like that. I'm not sure I've really done this very well, but I do have an idea for how to get started. And unfortunately, this idea, the way that I describe it is almost definitely going to make me sound like a huge schmuck. I guess by giving that preamble, I hope I'm mitigating some of the schmuck

sentiment that that's going to come come over the wire here when i clearly a schmuck would never say that yeah exactly how can i be a schmuck when i just self-accused yeah being a schmuck okay yeah so you're good here's what i would start with oh man i just thinking about the words i'm about to say make me feel crappy but i'm just gonna say this i would actually start with becoming very cynical and assuming everyone who you talk to about this is stupid okay now i I don't mean literally like you think they're a bunch of idiots, but just try to put that mindset on like these people are a bunch of idiots. They don't know what they're talking about.

And then you go out and you start talking to all the people that are using your team's software right now, as many as you can find. But like I said, you assume that everything they say is stupid. And the reason I say that is because your job is to uncover the underlying problems that are making them say the words that they're saying, because the words that they're saying will never actually tell you what to build. You have to go discover those underlying problems. And people actually tend to just describe what they want, but they never actually want what they say. And then the problems tend to be, for whatever reason, they're just hidden. They're

hidden behind the words that they say. And I think the quintessential, like the textbook example of this is when people said, hey, Henry Ford, how did you come up with the idea for the mass produced vehicle. And he said, well, I certainly didn't ask customers for it because they would have just said they wanted a faster horse. And I don't even know if Henry Ford said that. He probably didn't. Let's be honest. I don't even know. But you can see he kind of had a cynical view toward customer feedback. He basically assumed that they were a bunch of idiots and that only he could know better. So please forgive me for sounding like a schmuck, but that is the mindset you have to go in here, is like you're a detective piecing together a murder case, but all of the witnesses have

incentive to lie to you. Now, they don't really think they're lying to you. Like, I want to be clear. And I don't think people are stupid. But when you go in with that mindset, I think you can sometimes pick out the problems and then start writing all these problems down. And when I say problems, you have to be careful not to go super abstract. Like, you know how a lot of these companies will advertise their product? They'll be like, I'll go to some company website. I'm like, what does this product do? And they'll, their main description is we accelerate return on investment. It's a revolutionary platform for innovation distribution. Yes. And I'm like, yeah. Okay. But what does it do? Right. So you do have, you do have to stay away from that

because if you go deep enough on these, these problems, everyone will say, eventually there'll be like, well, I need to do a better job and live forever. You know, It's like, okay, you went too deep. So come back. Oh, man. Imagine if you pivot from building a CI system to biotech to help extend human life. It's a platform for human immortality. That would be visionary.

How visionary do you want me to be? Clearly only a staff engineer could come up with that. Oh, what? Was I too visionary for you? Sorry. Are you scared? are you scared of my vision anyway appears that you lack the vision to appreciate my vision oh man so you know jameson

you know how when you use a product i don't know it could be something as simple as a door handle but it could be as sophisticated as a piece of software and you have all these little problems with it you know it's like oh i'll give you one example in my bathroom i have a cabinet and that cabinet has these teeny tiny little cute little knobs that you use to open it but they they are they're wider at the front and then they taper down to a narrow neck that then is connected to the cabinet right you got the you got the idea yeah you can kind of slip your finger behind it and pull it open well they are just the wrong size on that taper to where my finger gets stuck and i i pull the cabinet open and it pinches my finger and like torques it about one out of a

hundred times and and so i have this problem right where it's like and there is no amount like there is no way that the designer of that hardware of that little cabinet pull ever would have stumbled upon that but i have this problem with it and and and for some reason you know people have problems like that that they want solved but they never just come out and say i have this problem where my finger gets stuck you know they say yeah can you make a bigger knob you know yeah but they won't tell you it's because my stupid fat fingers get stuck in stuck in yeah and so i i think the vision piece here is to say what if we didn't have to use fingers at all what if they just what if we had robots to open them for us yeah so your real

problem is you had to lift your arm up to the cabinet that's the problem i'm gonna solve and actually that's great that's great thinking thank you anyway you're just oh you're so visionary Oh, thank you. I think there's a lot of overlap here with the discipline of product management, because that is kind of the job, is figure out what to do that solves the problem, not does the thing the customer asked for directly. You know, and we kind of made fun of AI for a moment there, but I've actually seen AI, these new large language models, do a pretty darn good job of synthesizing hundreds of feedback, verbatim feedback text from users, and then turn it into themes. In fact, one of the roadmap products that we use, and my current company has a little AI beta feature set in it, and we'll get hundreds of pieces of feedback sometimes. And just reading all of those and keeping track of them in your mind enough to generate cross-cutting themes across all those is very hard for me. But when you tell the AI to go read these 100 paragraphs and then give me a theme, it

does pretty good. So I guess, I don't know why I'm telling you this, but you can kind of bootstrap the vision process a little bit by using some of these AIs. Just ask, yeah, ask one of them what your vision should be. Actually, it's not bad. Because I think sometimes for me, I have a failure to even get started. Like I think down, I'm like, okay, I'm going to put 30 minutes on my calendar and I'm just going to create vision.

You know, and I just stare at the screen for 30 minutes. To do, vision. Yeah. But honestly, challenging to do- And quickly it pivots into adding metrics and logs instead because that's way easier. That's way funner. But look at the graph. That is a thing I do all the time.

It's like, all right, I got to carve out some time for strategic thinking. And then I'm like, oh, I found a bug. bug yeah exactly yeah carefully log this or fix it yeah but honestly when i sit down with chat gpt and i'm like help me shape vision for my product here's here's 12 things i know about it and 12 problems come up with seven creative ideas for how to make a platform out of this and it'll actually come up with i've never had it come up with the killer idea but it'll it'll stretch in seven completely different directions and then i'll read those and i'll be like oh oh i have some ideas now like that's a bad idea but it gave me a good idea yeah i love that like being

motivated by disdain for how stupid its responses were like oh look no no no no it's just so wrong here's here's the right way yeah so start with assuming that the ai is an idiot yeah so cynical here oh anyway okay i want to pivot briefly we probably need to move on to the next question but i do want to pivot briefly onto the question the sub question here which says how do i get buy-in for my vision once i've got a vision do you want to do that one for a minute sure okay go ahead and answer necessary just kidding okay necessary but insufficient to repeat yourself about a million times yes like if you say it a few times no one will remember it it won't stick in their minds at all. You have to be so consistent about it over and over and over

again. I also think you have to give it a name. And as weird as this sounds, human psychology really needs a name for something. Because let me give you an example. Let's say that you wanted to take a whole bunch of your technical, like your architecture of your infrastructure. You've got a bunch of, let's say, like virtual machines all over and you want to migrate to some kind of serverless architecture, but it's complicated. You got these databases and stuff. And so you could name that the following. We're going to move all of our self-managed virtual machines over to serverless architecture along with cloud-based hosted data stores. Or you could call it Project Monkey Toes. Project Apollo. Everywhere I've worked has had to have something

called Project Apollo. Yes. Just give it a name because once you give it a name, people can actually refer to it. And when people can refer to something, it makes it possible to get traction, like psychological traction with that so you definitely need to give it a name i love that project apollo and apollo is the default name i think we should just go with that yeah or icarus that's another good one but like even today for example at my current company there was a project called project kramer and i only know about this project because it did not finish and it was years ago but i still hear the name sometimes and i'm like whoa that these names have staying power so i know it works i like it the other thing you got to do is start writing

You really need to write these things down. Do a vision statement, a few paragraphs to describe what the future world will look like. Explicitly state the problems that you're trying to solve so you can get buy-in from everyone on, yeah, these are important problems. And if you can't convince yourself in writing that these are the problems that are worth solving, they're worth engineering time to solve, then you're not going to get anyone else's buy-in. So write it down until you feel convinced by it yeah if all else fails you should ask your boss what their vision is and then just take it as your own yes and don't be surprised if your boss also has no vision they're like oh i actually i'm really bad at this i was kind of hoping that you would do it

exactly all right have we answered the question i think good luck let us know how your vision goes and also i think oh last thing don't feel bad i hopefully this was implicit but don't feel bad if you're like i'm just i just don't have vision i don't have long-term planning i think 99 of people don't including me including jameson i mean he he said it out loud but now i'll say it dave what's your vision for this podcast my vision for this podcast when we started was that we would maybe do two or three episodes and then we would run out of content that was my vision my vision extends one week into the future which is do the next episode with dave talk to my friend dave next week next week

it's a good every week it refreshes vision yeah the seven the famous seven day plan okay all right let's read the next question all right this is from a listener named trevor who says, I work as a data scientist at a small company. I joined the company specifically because of the positive work environment. I do mostly software development and until recently have only received positive reviews. Recently, we had a heated meeting with the CTO and CFO where we demonstrated that a customer's request wasn't feasible. The CTO challenged and expressed disbelief in our numbers, which we had thoroughly analyzed and confirmed as accurate. I felt like their reaction was due to our results conflicting with our business needs. After that, my manager

began pushing me to prioritize data science tasks they attributed the outcome of the meeting to my lack of attention to detail even though the results were accurate they also said this would affect my next performance review we reached a resolution when i apologized and committed to improvement i have only received positive feedback since but i still feel the assessment was unfairly based on such a brief meeting ouch now i view the company and my manager differently without the positive work relationships with management and colleagues i'm not sure what is keeping me here our tech stack is outdated there's reluctance to change practices for example we don't have a cicd pipeline until recently additionally the performance review and promotion schedules are

nebulous and irregular i'm uncertain about my next steps should i address the perceived unfairness of the meeting feedback or would it be better to start exploring other job opportunities asking us if you should quit your job in this climate that's that's a nice move for a while we were like being disciplined in saying you know we're not going to give that advice and now the world has shifted to push us away from giving that advice yeah exactly it used to be self-imposed now it's reality imposed yeah yeah i was talking to to somebody who was looking for a job for the first time since things worsened in the tech market and i mean it's it's everywhere you hear everywhere but just confirmed to me like yep still still different out there still different still

hard so probably you want to take that off the table and figure out how to make this work well i got some ideas on this i i think i have two thoughts jameson let's compare how many thoughts do you have i have zero thoughts i win my thought is i would love to hear your thoughts you have one thought yes okay now i now after all that i have to try to remember if i can actually recall those two thoughts so the first one the first thought was this is why presentation and confidence is just as important as actually doing your homework beforehand and making sure that the information is accurate when you show up in a meeting and you get pushback are you sure that's right and you're

like, oh, well, I mean, we're, engineers are so analytical that when we get a little bit of pushback, we're like, oh yeah, maybe I should go double check this, you know? Yeah. And instead, I think if you've really truly done your homework and you're in a meeting with a couple of executives like this, and they start pushing back on your numbers, I think that's where you stand up and say, these are thoroughly accurate. We scrutinize these. I have total confidence in them, you know? and, and then to kind of pivot the conversation, what are we going to do about it? Because I, you know, what I heard was that the, the numbers were true, but bad, you know what I mean? Like, yeah, that's not what the business wants the numbers to be. Come back again,

please. When they're closer to what we need them to be. Yeah. So saying, so it's like, look, this is reality. I know it's not what the business wants. Let's talk about what we do about it. you know because that's what the executive's job really is here yeah and the messenger got shot yeah i mean i don't think it's unreasonable that they would poke at if they're trying to make decisions off of this data and it's surprising to them and uh it doesn't seem unreasonable that they would poke and i feel like executives are often more willing to prod and poke at stuff in in an aggressive way it's almost their job really because they yeah an executive gets just spammed with information and a lot of it is crap and their job is to cut through

the crap and find find reality and try to make good decisions yeah express disbelief in our numbers which you had thoroughly analyzed and confirmed as accurate but they weren't what you wanted to hear i guess one one lesson learned here is make sure you only tell your cto and cfo what they want to hear they don't they're not exactly interested in reality it would appear yeah i wonder if so i mean we're kind of narrowing in on the present or focusing in on the presentation but yeah i'm gonna do it anyways i think it would be important to i mean you might not need to go through like your jupiter notebook or whatever you use line by line to show and here's how i got the data but if you can provide some high level overview of what the assumptions are like

we collected this from this many customers over this time period or whatever because it it might be that might address some of the disbelief maybe maybe they think like well surely this can't be representative of our customer base, or maybe it was before we made this big push to ship new features or something. Exactly. Like, does this include that outlier from July of last year? You know, that kind of thing. Yeah. Yeah. Like, is the math right? Feels like a different question than like, wait, this doesn't make sense with what I expect from other information I know about the business. That is so true. Kind of outline the boundaries that is useful in helping them fit it in. I've been on the receiving end of this where I'm in the executive seat getting

a presentation given to me. And I always have these questions that are like, okay, yeah, I know, okay, revenue dipped here, but I know that we lost a big customer in that month and that was super out of the ordinary. So what happens if you just take that anomaly out? Now, what do the averages look like? And I've done that. And I think it kind of frustrates people because they're like oh really like why can't you just accept reality and it's like well i need to know i need to now kind of predict the future you know it's like you gave me a time some time series data points and i need to know if those are predictive or not you know because like we might need to pivot our strategy our strategy or it just means that you know that was a one-time

thing it's not going to happen again we don't need don't need to worry about it yeah what about this this stuck out to me as very weird where the manager said it would affect your next performance review and then you apologized and committed to improvement the apology part feels strange to me unless i mean there's like did the meeting go very poorly did did your manager think it seems like your manager thinks you didn't prep enough or something but but i don't know this apology part feels weird to me i would feel weird if my yeah i agree if my boss made me apologize especially when i didn't feel like i was wrong like i don't know yeah that was a little bit weird to me too it's like okay now that you've apologized i'm satisfied in fact that's a problem

for me and the fix for that problem though i think is not to go revisit that yeah you know you got to let that go now. And I think nothing will fix the past like an awesome performance in the future. So if you show up at your next meeting and you demonstrate the kind of confidence that they're looking for and the kind of information that they need, and I don't mean falsifying information to be what they want, although that would be honestly, that would be just desserts. It's like, well, I'm sure it happens all the time. It definitely happens. I'm not saying to do that. My objective for this meeting is to make them happy.

Exactly. Boy, will I achieve that. I have nothing but great news for you all. Yeah, yeah. Anyway, but I do think that you can show up and you can learn from how that meeting went because like it or not, the meeting did not have a good outcome.

And the question asker here feels like they presented all the correct data, they did all their homework and whatnot, but the CTO and CFO came out feeling skeptical and frustrated. So you've learned a few things about how to manage that, I think, and I'm assuming from these interactions. And now, next time you got to go in and present the information and make sure you preempt all of their, what's the word, like doubt questions, kind of their fear, uncertainty, and doubt questions that are going to come your way. And have it go just tremendously

well. And I promise you, these people will look at you completely differently. They won't forget about the past, but they'll be like, wow, this person got so much better. And the reason I promise you they'll do that is because they want to congratulate themselves on this, on making you better. And it will fix the working relationship, even though it's going to feel a little bit disingenuous on your side, because you're going to be like, oh, I had to do a fake apology and now I'm better, but really my work hasn't changed. But something important did change. And that is your ability to communicate information to different types of human beings than you i think you have it feels like reality forked in this meeting where your manager's

understanding of how it went and what you did doesn't match your understanding of how it went and what you did and i think it all i think it would be a mistake to try to rewind that like yeah i don't think the solution here is is actually convince them that you were right and they were wrong to make you apologize and tell you to do better like that's not there's enough squishy human bias stuff going on there that even if that is the absolute truth it's it's going to be painful to make happen and i think i'm saying what you were saying in different ways but if if you can focus on the outcomes that your manager wants to see from you and give them yeah and deliver them in a way that you both agree then then that's that's what they want and and you

might have this this blip in the past of like yeah that was weird and it sucked and i don't know it's never going to like magically remove itself from our memories but if that was a thing that happened and we've we've moved on and gotten better that feels much different than like carrying around this this it's like a chip on on your shoulder of like yeah they were wrong and they never became right like they never recognized it right and that's gonna suck but you know what this won't be the last it will suck yeah it won't be the last time this happens and you're gonna have to learn how to let that go. In fact, this might be bordering on sappy, but this might be a time to learn how to forgive someone. I feel like you were wronged, honestly. It doesn't feel great to

me, but it might be time to learn how to let go of those feelings. Assuming that this CTO starts behaving better when you start delivering the results that they want. If they don't, if they just can't adapt and everything you do, they call it a failure, then you got to move on. but if if the next time you present they're like that was great so much better good job then i think you're gonna feel better and it'll be better if you can let go of the grudge from the last time would you i'm just thinking out loud here i mean say you have this a meeting coming up in the future i feel like you want your manager to be on your side going into it where yeah you do you they know what the results are they know how you're going to present them they understand in

much more depth than than you'll be able to show in that meeting because you've gone through them with them so i could see the meeting being tough if you don't communicate the results well or if the results aren't what they what the execs expect and it means that hard decisions are going to happen like i don't know they're people and and so if their plans get blown up they're going to be frustrated but if if if you can accurately communicate information even if it makes them frustrated like you and your manager should both agree that we did it yes it sucked that that like they were mad and maybe maybe they behaved unprofessionally even but if your manager is is upset at you because they were mad and that feels wrong the data not at you yeah yeah where

i mean it's probably making your manager's life work life stressful if if the execs are mad at someone they manage for a presentation but if they agree like yep you you did the right thing you showed the right data and like we'll deal with them being mad if they're on your side this will go so much better yeah so i'm hearing you say have a pre-meeting with just your cto so that you can get on the side of your cto and let them air any concerns they have in that meeting get that all out in the open clean up anything they want you to change anything about how it's presented then go sit down with the cto and cfo yeah now he'll be on your side so there are four people in the question the manager is separate from the cto i wasn't even thinking that but that

that could be useful as well if it's if it's possible yeah maybe it is tough to get time yeah depending on certainly with your manager you should you should go through it in in depth with them ahead of time i had a i actually had a super negative experience doing this once where i was i was kind of the staff slash principal engineer on a project and we had about there were about eight constituent teams on the project and all of those team leads would come together every week and meet with me and and we would go over some of the kind of system level problems that need to be solved well we had a meeting coming up and we were we were pretty much pivoting from okay we've we've designed everything out now we're going to start building it all and so

beforehand i met with someone who was even more senior than me who also attended these meetings and was kind of the adult in the room sorry that probably sounded demeaning but we were all pretty young. So I viewed this person as the adult in the room. And so I sat down with him beforehand and we went over the plan. I talked about everything that we had done. And I talked about how I was going to pivot the project to start delivering now that we've got all the plans and architecture and designs all pretty much pinned down, we can now start coding. So we then walked into the meeting and I stood up and I said more or less what I had said in front of this other person privately. And he stood up and interrupted me right in the middle of the

meeting and was like no you just you cannot do this you have to do more documentation first you blah blah blah blah and he just he spent several minutes just essentially erasing everything i had just said and gave new direction even though we had just spent like half an hour going over everything in his meeting in his office privately beforehand and i was irate i was like look why why did you do that i mean either you did it intentionally to be a jerk or you just didn't have the foresight to know that that would be the right thing to do in the private meeting. And either way, it casts you in a bad light. And I actually left that company within about a year of that because it just rubbed me the wrong way so badly. I think I would have thicker skin about

it now, but boy, that just really pissed me off. So it could go this way too for you. Yeah. And if your manager doesn't have your back when you feel like you are right, and you feel like you've tried ahead of time to align and figure out what they wanted, that does feel like it might be time to do the old reliable. Yep. That's a tough environment to work in.

Yeah, I agree. Occasional disagreement is fine. I mean, correction and feedback is part of their job. But if you feel like, you know, I really tried and it did not work, then that's tough. But I think you can do it. good luck. You can't control other people, but you can control when you quit your job. Yes, you can. And you can control when you ask questions to the Soft Skills Engineering Podcast.

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