Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 377: Short Tenure Promotion and too much free time at work

Episode Date: October 9, 2023

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Hi, I’m a senior software engineer at a big tech company, where I’ve been employed for precisely one year. So far, the feedback I’ve received has been overwhelmingly positive. My manager has even mentioned that her superiors are impressed with my performance, and my colleagues have shared their positive feedback as well. While I’ve been told that I’m doing exceptionally well and may be on track for a promotion in my upcoming year-end review, there’s a slight concern. Given that I’ll have been with the company for just over a year at that point, my relatively short tenure might affect my chances. During my mid-year review, my manager advised me to tackle more complex problems and take on larger tasks that have an impact on multiple teams to bolster my promotion prospects. I don’t really know what to do with this advice since I don’t know what else to do besides passively wait and hope that these famous ‘complex problems’ come my way. I feel like whether or not I get to prove myself in a big way to secure the promotion will come down to luck, is there anything I can do to reduce this luck factor? I recently started a new remote job as a lead engineer at a startup. Previously, I was working for an agency and was almost constantly busy. Additionally, I was held extremely accountable for the time I spent working through submission of daily timesheets. Now that I’m at a startup, I’m struggling to not feel guilty when I feel like I have nothing to do. My area of the product moves much slower than everyone else’s, so while everyone else is constantly busy, I feel like I’m making much less impact. My manager, the CTO, is fully aware of my lighter workload and is fine with it. My question isn’t necessarily about how I can make more impact. It’s about how to make peace with the idea that I’m not being productive for 8 hours every day. When you’re in an office, you feel like you’re working even when you’re not, because you’re physically there. When working remotely, I tend to feel guilty when I’m not physically sitting at my desk writing code, even when there isn’t really any code to write. Do I need to just get over myself and feel more grateful for all my free time? Or is there another way of looking at this that I’m missing?

it takes more than completing all my assigned annual company training at the same time to be a great engineer this is soft skills engineering episode 377 i'm your host dave smith i'm your host jameson dance soft skills engineering is a weekly advice podcast which we recommend you listen to at the same time as doing your corporate training i'm just imagining that scene in the matrix where Neo wakes up and says, I know Kung Fu, but you wake up and say, I know security best practices. I know PTO policy. Isn't it amazing how these corporate trainings, they, they, they morph from, oh yeah, I do want to learn about security best practices to exactly how does this system work so that I can click through it faster. Yeah. Let he who has not used the dev tools

to enable the skip button, cast the first stone. Yes. I did have a whole team where it felt like the knowledge spread like wildfire. Someone figured out how to hack it a little bit and then other people iterated on it. And it really was a nice team building experience to like get around the stupid hoops

that make you jump through to make you watch it. team building through corporate it training yep that is innovative that's synergy it really was probably worth the price it brought us together all right i want to thank our patrons i would like to give some shout outs to i like chicken i like liver meow mix meow mix please deliver never is not just a crater on mars flamingo emoji trash panda the computer science book.com kyle Thank you so much. We appreciate it from the bottom of our hearts. You keep the show going.

You provide joy to our lives. the sun shines a little brighter knowing that uh that you listen and support us if you want to join this group you can go to soft skills.audio and click support us on patreon and then do the thing they have in their flow i don't know they want you to give them money so i assume it's easy yeah any amount will get you it's probably an invite to yeah they probably pay a lot of people to work really hard to make that convert well yeah any amount will get you an invite to our slack team and any amount of a sufficient size magnitude we'll say magnitude okay we'll get you a shout out all right you want to read our first question dave you know i do that's why i came here

today good all right this comes from an anonymous listener who says hi i'm a senior software engineer at a big tech company where i've been employed for precisely one year now i think this this question came in not recently so it's been more than a year now it wasn't too long ago okay Now it's a little bit less precisely one year, but not too far off. Okay, continuing. So far, the feedback I've received has been overwhelmingly positive. My manager has even mentioned that her superiors are impressed with my performance, and my colleagues have shared their positive feedback as well.

While I've been told that I'm doing exceptionally well and may be on track for a promotion in my upcoming year-end review, there is a slight concern. Given that I'll have been with the company for just over a year at that point, my relatively short tenure might affect my chances. During my mid-year review, my manager advised me to tackle more complex problems and take on larger tasks that have an impact on multiple teams to bolster my promotion prospects. I don't really know what to do with this advice since I don't know what else to do besides passively wait and hope that these famous quote complex problems come my way. Oh, I've got some ideas for you. Let me finish reading them.

i feel like whether or not i get to prove myself in a big way to secure the promotion will come down to luck is there anything i can do to reduce this luck factor oh boy oh it's time to talk about incentives yes promotion oriented architecture yes will be the theme for today complex problems everywhere you look if you but apply distributed systems to things that don't need to be distributed every problem is a complex solution waiting to happen if you take anything you currently do and say but what if it has to scale up 10 000 times it is now a complex problem yes or implement your own data store i mean yeah ah, we could have used DynamoDB for this

or whatever your company's fully hosted, totally managed database solution is. Or you could identify a requirement that necessitates your own data store. You do have to solve that data store problem before any of the peers who make decisions on promotions, before any of those people get wind of what you've done. Let me put it another way.

You got to make sure your data store has not been in production very long before your promotion, or else this whole thing falls apart. You're saying because they'll have noticed that it's like a shell script or something? No, they'll have noticed that it's terrible and they won't. You got to make sure you get the promotion before someone asks the question, why didn't we just use a hosted database for this? Yeah. I was thinking that you need to, well, yeah, there's a specific window because you do need to do it early enough that they hear of the massive impact it's having but not so early that they then have time for the inevitable backlash yeah exactly trickle into their ears you don't

want someone to have time to go look at the code and notice oh this just pipes everything to dev null and that's why it's so fast we nailed the cap theorem all three it turns out those are a series of yes or no questions and if you answer no to all of them then you can i guess that's a valid solution right yep it's consistent nope available nope partition tolerant nope i solved it it's fast let's see i i feel like i've said almost exactly these same words advise me to tackle more complex problems and take on larger tasks that have an impact on multiple teams to bolster my promotion prospects it's it feels cliche because i it's so vague and obvious and meaningless that like okay but what do i actually do which i think is your

question like sure okay i would love to have wide impact across multiple teams yeah send it my way please yeah yeah please send me the wide impact i think i mean i think by definition well i think that's just one of those phrases i sometimes say because i think it makes me sound smart and it doesn't actually if you're paying attention to what i say there's not some axiom i'm defining and then there's going to be coherent logical proofs i mean when you strike that not by definition by what i feel yeah by what i feel yeah you're gonna have to go identify something yeah i think it is unlikely that someone is going to hand you the promotion ready problem yeah they will just i mean it happens to some people but if it's something truly mind-boggling it has not

boggled any minds yet. It isn't out there being worked on. Yes. I think when it comes to promotions in these big tech companies, and this comes from the perspective of someone who worked in a big tech company for four years, is that promotability is about 50% circumstance that you find yourself in, and then 50% your response, your effort, your abilities. And both of these are totally necessary. And I found that the circumstances were actually really, really hard, hard to come by. And I had a manager and a skip level manager who were really enthusiastic about me getting promoted at my big tech company. And they were constantly talking about it, looking for opportunities. And they knew, they knew that it was their job to find these opportunities and put

them in my path. And so that was actually really good. But the problem was that the opportunities really weren't there. And so they would kind of fabricate these opportunities and they put me in some really awkward situations to do this cross team, you know, air quotes, cross team impact thing where they would be like, Dave, you need to go to this meeting and make sure you really like influence the outcome of this decision. And so I would go to the meeting and I would realize this problem is already being solved by perfectly capable people. And to have me just insert myself was just really weird and it wasn't just like it wasn't just my perception that it was awkward it was like this is unnecessary they're already on track they have a solution in mind but my managers

just didn't really know what had been done and and these people were in actually a totally different organization that reported to a different vice president and so they were like yeah go go go over there you know go go impact that and i'm like yeah guys this is just not really gonna work there's also another concern that is in the question i've been here i'll have been with the company for just over a year at that point and tenure does certainly impact promotion i have seen cases where someone has performed very well and if they had been there for two years they would have gotten promoted but because they weren't there long enough they were not and the reason i heard was it's it's kind of circular and weird but this happens it's impossible for

someone to grow that fast we we like we would have mishired this indicates that we leveled them wrong not that they have progressed that much yeah so it's sort of like it takes a while for someone to show they've really grown to that level i think is maybe the less snarky way to say that so they might want to see longer periods of consistent performance and and that might be a circumstance that you cannot overcome no matter what you do and that's why you came here today for me to tell you you cannot overcome

it no matter what you do that's what I was hoping you would say that's exactly the answer I wanted I mean there's like a class of problems that is easy to tell it worked anything that like makes a

number go up or down by a lot it's very easy to point to If you can save bandwidth and bandwidth costs money, then you can say I saved X gigabytes and that equals X million dollars or whatever. I mean, those are probably not just laying around because the company pays a lot of people to optimize stuff. But there could be something there. I don't know. And some of those, I mean, if they aren't solved, I'm sort of assuming there's sort of like an efficient market hypothesis at play in here. where I'm assuming stuff that isn't optimized yet is hard to optimize

because the things that are easily solved are already all solved, which is another bummer of an idea. All the good ideas are gone already. So you'll never be promoted. Just enjoy. Yeah, exactly. But that's not true. I mean, I don't know.

I said it's 50% circumstance, and it is. I think that. But still, you could find yourself in the right circumstance, And at that point, your 50% of your effort kicks in. But I promise you, like at these big tech companies, you are not just going to get a promotion because your manager likes you and your team has good feedback about you. That is not how these things happen. You will be required to demonstrate impact that is commensurate with the level that you're

shooting for. Yeah, I think there's this assumption that I think feels true that in general, it's sort of the lake wobegon problem where every manager thinks their their people are above average and the most talented at the company yep so there's this inherent upward pressure of the the direct managers are gonna maybe over recommend or over evaluate their people and the company as a whole has this opposite overall downward pressure to say well if we just make it harder then maybe that'll counteract for the fact that like people want to get their people promoted yeah and and make no mistake there is strong economic incentive for the business to reduce the number of promotions

while simultaneously incentivizing the behavior that is promotable because it means that they'll get more labor and better labor more quote impactful labor for less money yeah yeah i mean there are budgets here so you are allocating scarce resources at some point yeah but i i think one more i'm gonna break from my uh my past and suggest something that might help instead of tell you why this is impossible one thing you could do is ask like what what is true now that wasn't a year ago or two years ago or three years ago like that's that's the source of a lot of optimizations or improvements or changes is some technology or skill set or market or like something has changed so that it is now a good idea to do something that wasn't a good idea

before. And if you can recognize that, that can point out the opportunities. Maybe your dev null database is now robust enough and battle-hearted enough that it's actually time to put it in production. Or maybe the Kubernetes alternative has become mature and you can be the savior of your entire organization by ripping it out or something. Yeah. And I like that mindset because quite frankly at every team i have ever been on i have looked around and i have seen major problems that need attention and a lot of times people just don't solve those problems because i don't know there's a hundred reasons not to solve a problem you know risk of failure it's not a top priority right now this or that reason i get used to them that's why i don't solve them i just i just just

like like yeah that's how it is of course of course we only have the top row of the keyboard like why look at how efficient we are at working around it yeah i've got all these workarounds in place that i've really come to like yeah the one that i'd like the least though is where i have to use my mouse for some of the keys and my fingers on the keyboard for the others it's tricky the virtual on-screen keyboard it's the full body suit where i have to do specific dance moves that i'm particularly attached to yeah i mean the fitness results have been great for you Yeah. Anyway, I would say while on the one hand, I am pretty cynical about these promotion processes, especially when your manager is saying, yeah, you're doing great. And then you concluding I'm going to be promoted or even being told you're going to be promoted at these big tech companies. Now, I have found the opposite to be the case at smaller companies where you want to raise or you want a promotion.

The beauty of small companies is that there is a huge backlog of major problems that need to be solved all the time. And solving them is so much lower effort in the form of coordination and getting approvals and there's not entrenched processes as much. And so you can just get these things done. You can just go do a thing. Exactly. You just go get it done. whereas at these big mega tech companies it's like oh well that's not how we do it we've we've evolved to the current process over 10 years and thousands of engineers what makes you think that

in a one year time period you can come and uproot all of that legacy and the answer is your hubris is what makes you think that just kidding but they'll beat it out of you hey larry wall said that's an essential characteristic of a software engineer right it's true yeah thinking thinking that you are the one is it hubris laziness and what's the other one off by one errors oh anyway so there probably are things that you can do but but so again let me just let me let me kind of revisit what i was saying at a small company there are simultaneously more options to do things and more flexibility on what a promotion or pay increase is required or what actions it requires the processes whereas at a big company there are fewer opportunities that are obvious

and there are more ossified processes for achieving that promotion and so it is you know the the circumstances are kind of against you a little bit but that doesn't mean that it's insurmountable and there certainly are big problems that can be solved by you if you are creative enough to go look for them yeah well have we answered the question which is a great which is a great way of saying, we did not answer your question and we don't know the answer to your question, but we think it's probably possible. Good news. It's possible. I know that's not what you asked. You asked, what do I do? And our answer is it's possible. You know, actually just one last thought on this, Jameson, some while back, maybe a few weeks ago, we got asked a question, which

was from someone who is getting pressure to build a quote platform on their team. You know, the question was, I'm always getting pressure to turn my team's work into a platform. And it was like the same. It was kind of the same thing. It was saying, look, you've done this work. How do you then take this software that you've created and make it so scalable and generally applicable that it can service more people in more use cases with the same code? And that's the kind of creativity and problem solving that's required, I think, to get a big promotion at these big tech companies. Yeah. It's hard.

Yeah, it is hard. All right. I was not promoted in my time at a big tech company. Neither was I. And look where we ended up. They were right. Just kidding. Okay.

Okay. You want to read our next question? I do. I want to read our next question. This is from an anonymous listener who says, I recently started a new remote job as a lead engineer at a startup. Previously, I was working at an agency and was almost constantly busy. Additionally, I was held extremely accountable for the time I spent working through submission

of daily timesheets for the time I spent working. Oh, okay. That makes more. I was like, you were held accountable for how long it took you to submit your timesheets. No, that's not what they meant. Now that I'm at a startup, I'm struggling to not feel guilty when I feel like I have nothing to do. My area of the product moves so much slower than everyone else's. So while everyone else is constantly busy, I feel like I'm making much less impact. My manager, the CTO is fully aware of my lighter workload and is fine with it. My question isn't necessarily about how I can make more impact it's about how to make peace with the idea that i'm not being productive for eight hours every day when you're in an office you feel like you're working even when you're not because you're

physically there yeah when working remotely i tend to feel guilty when i'm not physically sitting at my desk writing code even when there isn't really any code to write do i need to just get over myself and feel more grateful for all my free time or is there another way of looking at this that i am missing oh you yes there is another way of looking at this what's that it's time for you to tap into this new industry that has sprung up over the last three years of people who have two undemanding jobs. Aha. Fraud. Yes. Oh yeah. There's a name for this. I forgot. It's called the fraud industry. It's called stealing. I've never had one undemanding job. I don't know how people have two. I can take an undemanding job and make it demanding. I feel like I have to in

order to be to feel good about myself it has to be hard i think that's what this question asker is feeling they're feeling the gap between hard and what they currently have in a way there's some parallels with this and the last question because it's sort of like i know they well they're not asking about how they can make more impact but that is one way you could fill up more of your time is like take on more stuff do more scale cross team you know like find find things that you could usefully apply yourself to yep and this is like no we're good just chill i wonder if this is a temporary state or a permanent state i have had times where i have deliberately had slack on my engineering teams and sometimes that is a useful tool it can be maybe some some

time to help the team recover maybe there are downstream dependencies that i'm waiting for but i don't want to switch the team to go work on something else that then they're gonna have to switch back off to or like there's there's a cost to being very highly utilized and sometimes the cost of slack time is is worth it is lower than that cost does that make sense yes so i guess a question i would have is my manager cto is fully aware of my lighter workload is fine with it I would ask your manager, hey, is this going to change? Like, is there something coming that then is going to just allow me to fully dedicate myself to it? Or is this kind of the speed things move at here?

Yeah, or is there a change or is it in a normal ebb and flow of the development process here that there are times of less intensity? And then there's times of more than reasonable intensity that balance that out. That might be in your future. Yeah, maybe you're at like the low point and the high point's coming. Exactly. Or the high point and the low point. I don't know, whichever way.

Or maybe, maybe actually in a few months there will be even less work to do. Yeah, this is the busy season. What if you sit down with your CTO and they're like, actually, this is the most intense you will ever experience here. I get over myself and feel more grateful for all my free time. If someone came to me and said, I don't have any work to do. Are you okay

that I'm not working full time? I would say, no, what are you talking about? There's so much to do. Maybe a different way you could approach this is to be very clear about whether you are meeting expectations. Are you achieving all that the company expects you to do? Are you getting all this stuff done as quickly and as high quality as they want you to because they might be there's a possibility that there's not stuff assigned to you but they're sort of like impress us what are you what are you going to do with uh with this freedom you know and if the answer is like ponder the question i will ask the soft skills engineering podcast for several weeks they might be sad about that yeah i mean i i think that when i'm in a situation like this which has not been very often

in my work life. But when I'm in a situation like this, my psychology will eventually stop me from doing this. There is a cognitive dissonance that comes when you are getting paid for full-time work, but only doing part-time work for me. And eventually it will force me to leave. And it won't even be obvious or overt why, but I'll just be like, I can't stay here. And I actually had that at one company where, I don't even know, I probably shouldn't even say this, but I felt like I was overpaid for what I was doing. And every morning I woke up thinking, is this going to be the day that the company tells me we realize you're overpaid and we're firing you? And this eventually, on the one hand, you think this is great. You're overpaid.

On the other hand, it eventually wore down at me and I thought, I got to get out of here. Yeah. Which I did. And so that's just economically really stupid, but that's where I was. And I think that's going to happen here. Or maybe you've got the ability to tamp down that side of your brain that's telling you something is wrong. Yeah, I would be plagued with guilt and invent stuff to do. I mean, this is some developer's paradise, right? Imagine you can do whatever you want. You can refactor, you can make all these improvements that you never have time to do, all these tasks, all the fixes that don't provide the business value that allows them to be justified. but you can begin the great rewrite that will linger for seven years

cause everyone to curse you what if you started a book club at work are you saying what if you took all the other people that have so much to do and you distracted them from doing their thing to make you look a little normal

that's leadership yeah I think manager CTO is fully aware of my lighter work learning is fine with it Yeah. I would be plagued with guilt. So I think I would feel your same feeling. And I can't imagine a CTO saying, no, it's fine. Just don't work very much. If you feel like you have nothing to do, that's what we pay you for. Nothing? That's bizarre. To do nothing. That's bizarre.

it does feel a little weird i'm also i've never worked in an agency and being held extremely accountable for the time you spent working through the submission of time sheets maybe maybe the contrast is just so intense that it's that's what's tricky here it's not like the the whip does not crack as openly and regularly and forcefully but there still is some expectation of of getting a lot of stuff done i feel like at a startup i would expect that pressure to be like the same or more just just more focused on the product and less on like you got to put these hours in yeah i i had the same like we have to achieve these business goals and holy crap are there a lot of them and we're so far away yeah yeah i'm surprised this must have

been either a very intense agency or a very lax startup yeah i i keep going back to this but i would just just be super sure that i'm meeting expectations with what i'm delivering yeah and check in very regularly yeah and especially in today's climate i mean i'm i'm looking around at all these companies that are doing cost cutting like crazy and layoffs all over the place and i'm thinking to myself yeah if i'm thinking to myself if i were a cto and my cfo came to me and said you got to cut 10 of your budget now who am i looking at you know what like what what people and you said who because payroll is definitely the most expensive thing yeah exactly unless you're unless you're like renting gpus or building rockets or something right it's all

payroll 100 and that's why i said who yeah also because i just love terminating people it's like my favorite. But yeah, I'm looking around and I'm like, okay, well, this means people have to go. Who's it going to be? I mean, in this case, it's like, well, let's take the least productive people who have the least demanding job and let's stop paying all that money for that. And so if I were in your shoes, I would actually not just chill and take this for granted and keep working in it. I would be finding ways to create a valuable contribution. Pretend like you have a promotion looming that requires you to make, quote, big impact cross team.

And that promotion, it has the shape of, you survived the layoff. Yeah, you've been promoted to continued employment. Yeah, I like it, Dave. All right. I agree. Hear, hear. Yay.

Well, good luck. Did we answer the question? Yes, I think so. Good luck. It's crazy. I'm sure there's a whole bunch of people yelling in their headphones right now saying, you know, just enjoy it. Shut up and don't raise, don't keep your head below the radar.

You're fine. Don't look a gift horse in the mouth. Why don't you channel that yelling into leaving us feedback? We would love to hear your thoughts about it. If you go to softskills.audio and click ask a question, you can actually state a statement and not ask a question. Rebel. Tell us to slow down and enjoy life.

like future me will wish I had said that's probably true alright thank you so much for listening we will catch you next week