Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 378: Too much leadership and awkward zoom silence

Episode Date: October 16, 2023

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I’ve managed an ML team in a small company for ~2 years now. I created an 8 person team from scratch and I’m super proud of the team I’ve built. However, I miss being an engineer and wish I could spend more time coding. I was considering asking for a role change to IC, but out of nowhere my manager offered to me a promotion to head of platform engineering. I would have 3 engineering teams reporting to me - about 30 people altogether. I have trouble saying no to new opportunities but can I put the genie back in the bottle? If I get “Peter principled”, I feel like it would be challenging or embarrassing to return to IC work.

How can I stay close to the ML side while managing other teams? Would other teams feel dejected if they know I had a “favorite” team? Is it just me or do people also find silences over Zoom unbearable? I work in a team that is mostly remote, and I find myself deliberately logging into meetings late to avoid the silence or the stilted, awkward smalltalk. If i’m running the meeting, I kickoff at 1 minute past to avoid having to deal with that dead air. I also find myself too quick to fill pauses during meetings. I never have this problem in person meetings. I’ve been in the same team now for nearly a year and I still dread uncomfortable silences over Zoom. How do I get over this?

it takes more than making a quine out of aws services to be a great software engineer this is episode 378 of the soft skills engineering podcast and i am your host jameson dance i'm your host dave smith soft skills engineering is a weekly advice show about all the non-technical things that go into the technical field of software development and now i need to try to explain my dumb intro yeah what is a quine this is not a term i've heard of a quine is a program that when ran produces itself as the output yes and i feel like you could probably maybe you like cobble together enough aws services and produce the actual aws services themselves out of running them all it's like running aws on top of aws yeah like is our is it turing complete

i mean i don't know aws has computers so it's definitely turing complete there are computers in it cloud watch configuration right implement cloud watch in cloud watch could we better get out here okay do you want to thank our patrons yes thank you to those who are contributing at the level where they get a weekly shout out they are i like chicken i like liver miyamix miyamix please deliver never is not just a crate around mars flamingo emoji trash panda the computer science book.com kyle boss valentina datafold santa hopar nikent c dodds jenny kim owen chardle craig motley and i love mavis the stochastic parrot alice jost muskingham ohio patreon.com we're hiring ira chan monkey face emoji jonathan king web tau awesome end-to-end

testing ola dopo fadi will angel ragnar nick hathaway travis sanders brayden canes john grant cody sale nick cantar you know a couple weeks ago you you said you felt like there was a duplicate on there and now i just got that feeling why am i feeling that way i don't think there's any duplicates so interesting it's nick hathaway and then nick cantar yeah you look that makes me they didn't even have to pay for those extra shout outs yeah that's true well what should people do if they if they want to join this group if you would like to join this crew which has been described as illustrious go to soft skills.audio and click the support us on patreon button and if you give enough money to get illustrious status we'll say your name every week on the show or whatever you

ask us to say that you can type into into patreon if you give any dollar amount you can join our slack community that has now over a thousand people in it which is just crazy and and lovely and illustrious i'll say think of every good adjective and that's what it is all right tasty it's tasty it's delicious would you like first question yes that's what i would like to okay this is from an anonymous listener who says i've managed an ml team and in a small company for about two years I created the eight-person team from scratch, and I'm super proud of the team I've built. However, I miss being an engineer and wish I could spend more time coding.

I was considering asking for a role change to an individual contributor, but out of nowhere, my manager offered me a promotion to head of platform engineering. I would have three engineering teams reporting to me, about 30 people altogether. I have trouble saying no to new opportunities, but can I put the genie back in the bottle? If I get Peter principled, I feel like it would be challenging or embarrassing to return to ic work how can i stay close to the machine learning side while managing other teams would other teams feel dejected if they knew i had a favorite team oh oh so i i guess one of the three teams would be the team you built yeah hmm yeah this is this is interesting half of this question

is the same if you're not considering the role change back to ic but it's interestinger that you are yeah this is like a totally it's a very interesting way that life has just given you this strange situation where you're saying i'm okayish with my current job but thinking about going back to ic and at that very moment your professional life gave you the option to double down on your current job and take it even further you can't script this stuff yeah i think you are correct that it would be it would be harder to move back into an icy role if you take on this head of what do they call it head of platform engineering role it's going to be harder to replace you like the it's it's a lot easier to kind of swap two engineers on a team you know

like the there's there's less that's less load bearing so i think you're correct there that i don't know if it'd be embarrassing i guess i could see that maybe but certainly if you tell your boss they're going to not want you to do that i suspect not not go back to i think so yeah that'll be disappointing this uh this brief foray into running a large org that has caused a lot of upheaval and i want to cause even more yeah exactly i think you gotta at this point you have to make a choice and stick with it because yeah this isn't the kind of dip your toe in the water yeah sure i'll try that job for a couple months like no you got 30 people counting on you now and the the ripple effects of someone moving in and then quickly moving out of that

position are just oh they are long lasting and high impact so you gotta double you gotta decide yeah how can i stay close to the ml side while managing other teams so i'm assuming that well i'm not assuming the question asker said this that the ml team is part of it and there's other non-ml stuff i i think the answer is you can't really not if you are not not as close as you have been yeah and i imagine that the ml team would have a different manager and you want to make sure that that person is empowered is the dumb business word to use like if you are trying to hover over it because you're interested in it, it's going to be tough for them to feel like they can own the team and make decisions and do the thing. So I think you would be choosing to step

back from that. Do you think that an all-powerful head of platform engineering can't just do whatever they want? You can do whatever you want. The consequences for doing whatever you want are wider reaching than if you are an IC doing whatever you want. Yes, they are multiplied by literally 30. That is the number. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, your focus has to be on making this organization as effective as you can, not on learning the cool machine learning stuff. Yeah. And if that's really what you want to learn, then maybe it's not the right

job if that's the thing you're excited about. I will say it's really cool that your manager has such confidence in you that they want you to lead to essentially triple your scope of influence on this organization that's a huge vote of confidence so congrats to you on the other hand that vote of confidence is part of why i think you're feeling so much so much struggle right now because you know what the organization wants you to do and now and that became even more clear with this offer to lead this this triple team organization and now you're going to disappoint them if you tell them you're not going to do it even more than you would have disappointed them before this offer was on the

table yeah i mean i i think there is some room to have an interest in the individual technology and it's not like you you just completely lose track of tech if you're in a like a manager of manager's role but it is hard to find the time to dive really deeply into it i know some people who are outlier levels of smart and talented that somehow find the time to keep up and and excel at some some new technical stuff but most people i know that are in manager of managers or above roles there's so much complexity of just like keeping a big group of people going in the right direction yeah just reading all the emails will take enough time i i do think it's useful for you to not lose touch technically as long as you are not trying

to stomp all over the decisions and input of the people actually doing the technical work it's useful for you to have some context to know what they're talking about and it sounds like you have that already from your work on on the ml team but you'd have to kind of get that on the other teams as well yeah so in in a way i feel like if you take this on like if you're digging into technical stuff it's probably going to be the non-ml stuff the stuff the other two teams do yeah it'll be some of that every leader has some amount of bias and expertise that they bring with them. And also interests. Some leaders are more interested in machine learning. Some are more interested in backend, frontend, different technologies. And they tend to meddle, at least

I do. I tend to meddle more in the teams where I'm interested the most. And that's kind of one of the privileges of leadership. It's like, look, it's a hard job. It's a really hard job. But one of the benefits is you get to choose how you're going to spend your time instead of having someone else choose for you. And so you can definitely carve out time for that. And I'll also say you can help make time for you to keep your interest levels satisfied by hiring really great engineering leaders who will run these teams on your behalf. So then you're now kind of a proxy leader for these teams, but not the direct leader. And if you play your cards right, you can work yourself out of kind of the day-to-day leadership responsibilities to keep

the teams running. And you might even find that if you hire capable enough leaders who are going to replace you and who will do your counterpart's jobs on the other teams, that you might actually have plenty of time to go deep on things like machine learning and provide strategic vision and direction for the triple teams. Huh. That sounds optimistic to me. Yeah, maybe. I see your point about if you kind of hire well enough and build a talented enough org, a lot of the day-to-day stuff is not on your plate anymore, and that can free up some of your time. but i guess i question whether that means your work time is now going to most effectively be spent diving deeply into a technical topic no it wouldn't be most of your time it would certainly

would not be most of your time but it could be you know you could carve out a solid day per week where you do nothing but dive into that stuff yeah so it'll never be it'll never be the volume of time that it was when you were yourself an individual contributor but what i'm saying i'm saying that as a leader of leaders, you actually might have more time to be able to dive into things that interest you than you did as someone running a single team. Because running a single team actually has a lot of time consuming stuff to take care of it, you know, or that are required for that job. You got to do like sprint planning and backlog grooming and team one-on-ones. And I'm guessing here, you're only going to have three direct reports. Whereas now you have like,

what what do they say eight so you know there's some time freed up right there and you're probably not going to be doing backlog grooming and team retrospectives and all all the i mean running a running a modern software engineering team takes there's a lot of overhead for managers to do that well and so you know like you said james and maybe i'm being overly optimistic but what i have found is that as you move up on the org chart to kind of the vertically higher positions you you can carve out more time for you to be able to do that, that kind of deep dive stuff. And just as a case in point for that, consider the CTOs that you've known that run different engineering organizations. We regularly get questions from engineers who are saying,

my CTO is spending so much time writing code that it's ruining our lives. and that tells you everything you need to know like at the very tip top of the engineering organization you got someone who has complete latitude to jump in and do anything they want at the individual level so it can be done i don't know we probably probably get like five or ten of those per year yeah it's a common pattern so now you can be that person usually something is on fire that is that is not the code yes it's usually and it's you're saying that that would occupy the cto's time no i'm saying usually they're they're they're hiding in the code if that's the case oh i see yeah they're hiding from something they should be doing like you know what i don't want

to think about people stuff time to go write a new database when you said they're hiding from fires i thought i thought for sure you were saying fires that they themselves created by getting too involved in the code oh yeah i don't know different kind of fire but then also you can also think about ctos who are out full-time fundraising with the founder you know yeah and it's like there's a huge spectrum of activity that a cto can engage in and i think that tells you what you need to know about the latitude that you can have as you get into these indirect leadership positions where you're leading leaders well have we answered the question i think so it's except we haven't said what we want them to do. What would you, if you had to pick yes, go for the new position or no,

go for IC, what would you say? I would go for the new position because I am interested in that kind of work. And I've found great satisfaction in tackling new leadership challenges at work. I feel like the time I learned the most about management was when I was a, when I've been a manager of managers. Oh yeah. And I like learning that stuff. Yeah, me too. So I think that's, that's my Jameson worldview answer. I would say yes, but for slightly different reasons, which is you might feel like you are going to be stuck in this position, but you're really not. But hear me out. You are stuck in it at this company. And I kind of got foisted into a director level position once as well. My first time leading leaders. And I did that for two years and then got an

opportunity to go be an individual contributor again at a different company. And I took it. And it was fine. Actually, I think it set me up for success later. And then four years later, I decided to take another leader of leaders position. Kind of a director level is more like closer to an executive level. And it was awesome. It was great. Those four years away gave me much needed perspective. And they reminded me like, yeah, there are actually there's a whole frontier of interesting leadership problems to be solved in the engineering world. And frankly, the world needs good engineering leaders. It's actually very hard to find them because most engineers are just perfectly happy doing individual contributor work. And so the people that do

get promoted into those positions, well, I mean, they're not all great, let's just say. And so the world needs people like you, people who are not clamoring to be the leader, who are reluctant leaders, I'll say, which I think they've worked very well in the engineering leadership roles. So I would do it. Oh, go ahead. No, you go ahead. I was just going to say the fact that you're aware of the Peter Principle is a solid mark in your favor. Yes.

It means you're not totally clueless about your ability to screw this up. Yep, exactly. And you will. And that's fine. One other thing, it's probably easier to get an IC role than a director level manager of managers role. so just in terms of of scarcity this is probably a harder opportunity to come across absolutely and so that's why that's another reason to take it because you might not get another opportunity for a while especially if you go join another company as an ic and especially

if you stay at this company and become an ic you'll probably be permanently i don't know i don't want to read too much into that but i'd say they probably won't approach you again for a while about that yeah and it's sort of like the if you do it once it it is a lot easier to do it again yeah if you want to exactly get the experience under your belt and even if you spend the next two years hating it at least you'll learn a lot i promise you'll learn a lot and and that's another reason that it will it'll be valuable yep all right now surely we've answered surely yes and if for no other reason than the time has elapsed that we need to say we did dave will you read our next question yes this comes from an anonymous listener who says

is it just me or do people also find silence over zoom unbearable i work in a team that is mostly remote and i find myself deliberately logging into meetings late to avoid the silence or the stilted awkward small talk if i'm running the meeting i kick off at one minute past to avoid having to deal with that dead air i also find myself too quick to fill pauses during meetings i never have this problem in person meetings i've been in the same team now for nearly a year and i still dread uncomfortable silences over zoom how do i get over this you know what you need to do you need to train yourself and your team to be okay with the awkward zoom silences by just hanging out all day in a zoom call you don't have to talk you don't have to be in a meeting you're

just like doing your work awkwardly silent together so it's like then it will morph yeah comforting silence is what it will become is this like exposure therapy i think so yeah yeah confront your fears head on yeah my wife and i love each other deeply and one of the marks of our love is we can just sit down on the couch next to each other and not talk for like an hour oh really i mean we're like doing stuff like reading or something but oh okay okay it's just It's just, I don't know. It's not awkward. Have you ever tried just sitting on the couch and doing nothing?

Just like looking at each other? We did try that. There was that New York Times article about these questions you ask to develop a relationship with somebody, and it ends with you staring into each other's eyes for five minutes. And she couldn't stop laughing at me. I don't know what that says about our relationship. Yeah, yeah. Probably all good things.

That I'm witty. You have such a good sense of humor. Yeah. Oh my goodness. Yeah. So you're saying, okay, get everyone in Zoom all the time, all day. Just chill. The other thing you could do is go the opposite direction and make sure that anytime you're

in a meeting, you're always sharing your audio and it's playing like Dr. Feelgood in the background or something. So there's no awkward silence. There is no silence. You're just rocking out. Yeah. There's no downtime. There's just rock.

what about what about getting one of those soundboard mixer things where you can press buttons and make it produce hilarious sound effects like slide whistles and like yeah and old car horns and then anytime it sounds you just push one of those buttons yeah every time your boss is about to talk you press the fart button that sounds great yeah okay i you know i wonder if maybe this will be a zoomer thing i feel like streaming is such a thing now and i've seen some people start to get more creative with almost stream like setups in their work things like i've used obs to mess with my background before and it seems like a pretty natural next step to just get the the full experience of a goofy radio morning show soundboard yeah

I mean, I'm on board, literally. I need you to say, I'm going to hand you a piece of paper and you need to say these words and don't think about how embarrassing they'll sound when I chop them up and play them each out of context. Yes. Oh my goodness. I never have this problem in in-person meetings. Yeah, there is a certain awkwardness, especially if you're, as Dave and I are currently doing,

if you keep trying and talking at the same time, Zoom does not deal well with that. It's hard to pick up and transmit that signal of like, I would like to go or you need to go now or that kind of thing. Yeah, it's true. And I got to say, I have never really felt super awkward on Zoom. I guess I've just gotten comfortable knowing that sometimes there's no sound. Yeah. Is that just me?

I think I've gotten more comfortable with it as time goes on. But especially if I am leading a meeting and I'm talking a lot and other people aren't talking, that's when I get real uncomfortable. Yeah. I want some kind of interaction. What I want is feedback. And sometimes that is tough to get. Yeah. And I think there's a lot of factors at play there, but people are just a little bit less likely to start talking, especially when there's more than two people in the Zoom.

yeah there's this really fun well fun depending on your definition of fun card game called the mind have you ever heard of this game it's a great metaphor for zoom calls where no one wants to talk first because what you do i won't spoil the whole game but just go check it out basically everyone sits down with a a hand of cards and the cards in the deck are numbered like one through a hundred and your goal is to silently with no communication work together to place the cards in order on the table face up and the thing is though there are gaps so it's not just all hundred cards you only have like 30 of the cards in your hands so you put down the number 10 and if someone has a number 11 they can confidently play it but if someone has a number 12 they don't know if they should play it

or not because someone might have the 11 and if you play it out of order you get the team gets penalized it's like this fun cooperative game and it's like zoom where it's like okay someone asked a question i would like to answer but is someone else going to try to answer at the same time and are we going to end up colliding you know and you kind of have to read people's minds hence the name of the card game to know if other someone else is going to talk now and that's how i feel in zoom like is someone else going to talk i have found it easier for meetings to be dominated by the usual suspects on zoom yeah because especially if if they're the kind of people who will will just fill the time allotted to them it's because i do that for them

i do that when i'm nervous yeah do you do that too just keep talking it's like i've already made my point but i can't stop talking sometimes i do yeah i think i i'm sometimes but not all the time But I definitely know people who have infinity to say, and it's often useful, good stuff too, but it's a lot. It is a lot. And it crowds out other people's contributions. Yeah, exactly. And that's not quite the same as silence, but that might be a reaction to this fear

of silence is we can't have any downtime. Yeah. We'll fill it, which means that other people who need a little bit of a nudge to step in, they never get a chance to get that nudge. Yeah. The nudge doesn't exist because talker over here has an infinity to say, like you were saying. I like that you said that.

I have an infinity to say. Yeah. I have worked around, I've seen this worked around a little bit with careful hand-raising etiquette, where it's understood that the speaker will kind of just check to see if people have their hand up, and that means you need to yield the floor. so then you don't have to wait for them to take a breath that's fragile and easily ignored though i guess like just takes one determined person to not give up any time but there's some stuff you can do to make it so you don't need to leave a lot of awkward pauses but

you still have a way for someone to talk that that isn't gonna kind of jump in and push other people out of the way yeah actually i i said that thing about the music i forgot i do that sometimes i play i just turn on music at a low volume it's usually like chill relaxing music i'm not sharing it but okay if just having some that's one of the benefits of a zoom meeting is you get to control your environment a little bit more you wouldn't like bring your boombox to the meeting and crank your tunes but so you're on your headphones wait are you saying that that music playing just for you helps to overcome the dread of having no one talk on the zoom yeah i think so huh you're like i mean it doesn't help them i'll just sit here and enjoy the the music

yeah and if it's a big enough meeting good news no one is listening or paying attention yeah So if there's awkward silence, it's because everyone else is multitasking at the same time. Perfect. It's only awkward if you're trying to pay attention to the silence. Right. And then it's all consuming. Yes. Well, have we answered the question?

I kind of think so. It's basically what? We're saying, don't worry about it. Like, find a way to not worry about it. Okay. Silly answer, guys. But that's kind of what we're saying. I think so.

Yeah. I mean, the question asker is asking, how do I get over this? And I think, you know, I don't know how to tell you to retrain your thought process. But leaning into it, I think, is probably the best answer. Like you were saying, Jameson, like, look, sit there and pay attention to when there are long Zoom pauses, maybe in a meeting that you're not in charge of. And just see, like, is this actually bad? Or is there nothing here? And then just try to convince yourself, actually, it's fine. Like, I'll give you an example. I have noticed in Zoom meetings, when people ask questions and they expect there to be, you know, random answers from people in the audience, they never wait long enough for people to actually put their hand on their mouse, move the mouse to the unmute button, click the unmute button, and then start talking. You know, I mean, how often have you been in a Zoom meeting when someone is like,

okay, does anyone have any questions? Nope. Great. You know, it's like, wait, wait, wait. So what I have found is that I have to actually count in my mind. So every couple of weeks we do an engineering all hands meeting on my team and I ask the team, does anyone have any questions? Like ask me anything style, you know, and I will sit there and I will count to like 20. And let me just tell you, sitting silently in a zoom and counting

literally to 20 seconds feels like an eternity. After like five seconds, I'm like, whoa, this is awful. But 20 seconds is forever. But I do it every two weeks and I realized, you know what it's fine nobody cares it's not a big deal yeah and that's helped me embrace the silence i like that i keep thinking of more stuff to say another thing you could do this might not work for every meeting or every style but if if you have some kind of agenda of here's what we're going to talk about when and here's the next thing then it doesn't completely eliminate the awkward silence but the awkward silence is like the time to make sure we're done with this topic and ready to move on to the next one so it might have a bit more of a purpose or direction than just

no one cares about anything that's happening right now yeah it's not that everyone's camera is off and microphone is muted and they're all laughing at you is that is that like the deep seated fear that everyone has that it is yeah it's like why isn't anyone saying anything it's Because they're all in a separate Zoom meeting with their cameras on, talking about me. And they're all laughing. It's like they're live streaming you in a room together. Look at this idiot. They're all on Discord.

Talking about plans. Oh, my goodness. That didn't really help, Jameson. What a preposterous idea he just proposed. How dare he. I think you just made it a lot worse. All right. My work here is done.

It hadn't even occurred to me that someone might be in a different call laughing at me. Oh, my God. It could help. Making things worse since 2016. Soft skills engineering. Yep. Now that's podcasting. That's what you said a couple weeks ago.

really cracked me up. Yeah. All right. I think we're done. What can people do if they want their own questions answered? Go to softskills.audio and click the ask a question button. Thank you. Thank you to everyone who, I'm just going to give a moment of silence here. Nope, too awkward. Thank you to everyone for writing in the questions. We love reading them every week. Thank you so much. We will catch you next week. See ya. you