Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 38: Going Over Heads and Firing Just After Hiring

Episode Date: December 5, 2016

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: When is it appropriate to go over someone’s head? Should I fire the new engineer that we just hired (and who relocated to take the job)?

hello everyone and welcome to episode 38 of the soft skills engineering podcast i'm your host and also your favorite class tadpole that you had in elementary school jamison dance and i am your host and aging sycamore tree dave smith and this week we have become druids apparently we are one with the animals i was thinking sycamore tree before you said tadpole just so you know that's how really that's in sync we are awesome uh i think you can transmit thoughts over skype i guess we want to take a quick second and thank dev mountain we'll talk a little bit more about them later but they are sponsoring this podcast and if you want to learn how to program you can

go to devmountain.com uh do you want to i think we have a comment from the listener dave do you want to read that yeah we have a comment from listener wally who asked about avoidance a few episodes back and he wrote in after hearing our answer this is like the stump the chump moment where we get to find out if we completely ruin the lives of our anyway he wrote quote i want to let you know how much i appreciated your answers in my particular case what i had decided to do was give myself some time to give in to those other jobs that were distracting me it took a day off of work at home by myself i did some drywall electrical and plumbing projects by the way Those are not soft skills, just so you know.

Non-computer work that had been sitting on my to-do list. When I finally did end up getting back to my regular job, I was able to focus much more now that some of those other things were off my list. So there you go. Thanks, Wally. Great comment, and glad you got your avoidance problem all squared away. Mm-hmm. All right, I will read our first question.

When is it appropriate to go over someone's head? This is from an anonymous listener. when i already said that part i have a manager i have a manager who steals the credit of the people who are actually doing work by passing themselves off as the lead developer but they are almost completely non-technical huh um i'm just trying to think of a scenario where this can actually succeed it's like throwing out random buzzwords well you know i just uh i just connected the hebrew jubber to the flubber log and uh i'm not great the system worked the j queries and distributed the kubernetes and did i mention i'm the lead developer

so it it seems like that would only work if they were faking it to people that were even less technical than they were yep yeah there's a lot of weird stuff managing up yeah it definitely is yep um yeah i actually really like how it's kind of a general question and then a specific instance of of a thing to judge in that question um would i mean what would happen if you went over someone's head like would they believe you if you just walked into this person's boss and was like yeah this person's taking all the credit well that's because they did all the work then you try to convince them and they're just completely unconvinced

no i'm pretty sure they did they i mean they they showed me it they showed me the migrated j queries yeah okay that's like the worst case scenario right what do you mean well like where you it's like the uh it's almost like gaslighting right like you just completely can't convince anyone that your boss is actually i think it could get worse than that like this this is kind of stepping in the realm of politics where you might make your manager mad and then they might not like you anymore i might do things to make your life worse or or the boss might be annoyed like this underling dares approach me i don't know all kinds of horrible things could happen the great non-deterministic land called

politic land yeah so theoretically you would think that politics would be a thing we could talk about on soft skills like i'm not talking about government politics just corporate politics like this but i don't think i've worked in super political environments just because they're they've mostly been pretty small so there hasn't been enough um like substrate for politics to develop it's kind of like you need like a big enough chunk of bread before it can get all moldy okay and just like a little crumb is not going to get moldy it's just gonna dry out a crumb can only have a tiny bit of mold anyway right yeah i i'll do an experiment i'll see if crumbs can get okay check that out for me but i know i agree there's like this critical political

mass yeah like microsoft has politics the two-person startup doesn't it has a relationship between two people not to say that can't go sour but it's probably not political yeah yeah like oh you know john my my business partner in my startup he's trying to take over the uh the sales arm wait he already owns it yep even though i own 50 of the company he's trying to do more than 50 of the work how dare he um i i also haven't seen a ton of politics either in my day but i'll tell you what i do not like going over people's heads um oh it's it just feels so bad except for and james and i were talking about this before the show and i just want to get this caveat out there right away which

is if there's abuse or harassment or illegal behavior you absolutely need to go over the person's head no problem no questions just do it there's too much at stake there but for things like this that maybe are a little bit that are annoying but maybe not illegal I recommend confronting the person directly well when you say confronting you take a scary thing

and you make it sound even scarier that's true maybe talking to them maybe have lunch together and you're in front of the other person but it's not a confrontation or you can sit next to them

it might make it easier you don't have to look them in the eyes adversarial uh have you done this or seen this done well um i've i have not had this specific situation where my boss took credit for my work but i've definitely the thing you described where um someone kind of takes aside someone who's who's their boss and talks to them talks talks out an issue with them um like me talking to my boss yeah or yeah yeah or seeing someone else do it with their boss uh i don't know if i've seen it it's seen someone else do it these tend to be private moments yeah but um you just like do it in a glass cubicle in front of the whole office it's like raised on a platform on a megaphone enter the conflict zone

i've done it um when i've had issues with people and uh i know it's scary and it's the kind of thing that keeps me up you know like i've scheduled a lunch to meet with someone on monday and like i can't sleep all weekend right that kind of thing yeah but i find that if i just say the facts and get them out on the table people usually except for one case in my experience usually respond pretty well but you really have to stick to the facts and and you can't say things like or rather if you say things like um hey you got to stop doing this you know then you're going to you'll probably get a negative response. But if you say things like, when you do this,

I have this reaction, or it makes me feel this way, or I've noticed this outcome among the team, suddenly you're just stating facts. And then the person isn't quite as much on the defensive. They still make it defensive, but hopefully not as much. Sure. I'm trying to think about my own experiences. And Dave and I were talking before the show

this is so hard for me i hate conflict i hate it uh and and one chunk of the appeal of going over someone's head is you push that conflict on someone else like in in the ideal situation of this working out you talk to your boss's boss your boss's boss talks to your boss the issue is resolved and you didn't have to have a scary uncomfortable conversation in like your fantasy world yeah yeah exactly so it so it can feel better uh it's like i can see the appeal and and when i have done it directly with with someone i had an issue with like i had the same like sweaty palms uh rapidly beating heart and and i don't know nightmares maybe uh you said specifically that you would rather do it in person though right like you mentioned lunch or meeting to

talk with them directly why would you suggest that because well the alternative would be some kind of written form and while the written form you don't have to face the person and so it might seem like an easier out the problem with written form is you don't get to control the tone and the person will interpret your writing in whatever tone that strikes them you know and uh you also they don't get a chance to ask you questions right away you know and so what i've seen happen is that these emails tend to drag out you know long email with all your concerns and then a long email response defending your position it's like a facebook argument over politics you know like i don't see those usually going well and and i haven't had great experience resolving conflicts

over email too i think that being face-to-face helps you to have more empathy for the person you can see what they're feeling in the moment and you can um hopefully share better what you're feeling i think yeah maybe it doesn't work for everyone though because if you're too terrified to speak then might not go well let's say let's say you're a person named jay massoon and uh asking for a friend yeah asking asking about my friend jay massoon who when he does this has a tendency to just like totally sugarcoat anything he says because he doesn't want to cause conflict to the extent that sometimes he doesn't even clearly express himself so the other person doesn't understand what the actual issue is so like what did we just talk about yeah like

or or i mean i've left feeling unsatisfied like i didn't i didn't you know actually say what what the problem was so of course it's not going to magically fix itself so i have sent emails that weren't angry or attacking or anything but it was just so much easier for me to think through make sure i was saying what i wanted to say then on the spot with the person and so in those cases how did the situation come out with your email uh it came out super great but that was because of the person who i sent the email to not i i don't know how it would work in general like just the person i sent the email to is awesome and and amazing and has a lot of empathy and uh really wanted me to understand their concerns and and why they were acting the way they were um i haven't

had it backfire horribly ever but i haven't done it that much either now that you mentioned it i think i have actually seen this uh once or twice in my life where someone sent me an email and said hey there's some certain behavior and i responded uh to that and we worked it out and it was great um but yeah i think i know what you're saying for me it probably depends on how complicated the situation is you know like if you feel like you're gonna have to write a two or three page email to get the situation fully explained it's probably too much and you should probably go in person but then but then again if it's harder to communicate in person how are you going to communicate all that info i think i would recommend to your friend james soon to find a trusted role

play partner who can play the part of the other person and help you practice that's a good idea you know so you can actually have words yeah that you're ready with oh man i swear there was a time when i did this recently i'm trying to think back maybe you repressed the memory no i don't think i repressed it i'm pretty sure it was when i was leaving kawali um it was it was like a hard discussion for me to have and i think no i just practiced it with myself actually i like wrote down a bunch of different stuff oh like sample phrases yeah yeah like i wrote out an email edit it until it read like i wanted to and then i didn't send it i just like went and talked to them did you have this piece of paper in your hands no no i wasn't like holding it up with my hands

shaking in front of me like reading it in a in a terrified voice no but that that would have been a great visual i'm sure so this is like we've kind of entered into the realm of general conflict resolution but let's yeah that's true let's go back specifically to the situation where we have this manager who's stealing credit and i think um i think in this case since it's quite possible you have a slime ball manager right like i mean if if yeah that's if we take this at face value don't do that don't be that guy first of all that manager but secondly i think in this case you might want to back into the situation a little bit rather than coming out at them and saying you need to stop stealing credit for our team's work which they might not even know they're doing

instead you might want to say i think our team would benefit from having more recognition and praise from the rest of the company um what do you think we could do to maybe you come up with some ideas of ways that you could help facilitate that recognition and then if it goes well your manager might see how great it is when you actually pass the praise to the people who deserve it both for them and for the people and then they'll blossom into a beautiful rose so so that assumes that that there's like a outer a thin candy shell of slime and then inside is like a gooey chocolate center of goodness i i don't know i guess i'm just skeptical that that someone who is inclined to steal credit for other people's work is like

one one subtle compliment away from changing their behavior yeah it's a big maybe a big leap it could also but it could very well be that this person doesn't realize that that's what's happening you know it could just be that this is what they thought they were supposed to do like i don't know yeah i'm really trying to give them the benefit of the doubt maybe maybe they have not had a good manager and their manager is still their work too maybe they've never been praised like this you know yeah yeah it's a tough situation but i would not go over their head personally so would you go over their head if you tried to talk with them directly and then it didn't work um i mean what if so you're saying don't do that it's it it's bad but like is it

worse to here's what i might then to be stuck in this situation after you've tried to address it already i think i think it might be worse and here's what i would do instead when i see my team do something that's praiseworthy and i want to recognize them for it and make sure my boss can't steal the credit first i will write an email to the broader organization or team and i will call out the individuals who did awesome stuff and say exactly what they did and why their contribution was so great and and uh send out that praise that way then your manager can't retroactively steal their thunder and because your manager is not technical he can't uh he doesn't actually know what they're doing so you have the inside track and you can you can

beat him to the chase or cut what is it cut to the chase i don't english good and you could uh preemptively praise the team before your manager i think the phrase is power wash to the chase yep what do you think about my preemptive strike option i i think that's a great idea you you hoist them on their own petard wait what's a petard uh i don't know actually i don't even know that's the right phrase on his own petard it's from shakespeare of course it is to be harmed by one's own plan to harm someone else oh or to fall into one's own trap uh-huh taste of your own medicine no way yeah a petard apparently is a bomb and it would blow you up after being hoisted onto it no like your own bomb would explode under you lifting you

up into the air oh okay shakespeare kind of went off the rails there i think listen willie i've got some i've got some issues with your prose and i think you could really fix it up if you took my advice uh yeah i i love that idea um preemptive praise mode it is like venturing a little bit into the political realm but oh but if you're considering going over their head that's already venturing in there so here's the thing it's the right thing to do anyway so even if you weren't trying to you know cut this guy off at the knees before you can steal your praise it's still a good thing to praise your co-workers to the broader organization yeah we had an episode about this like i don't know six or eight weeks ago um in response to matt zabriskie's blog article about

communicating your efforts and like it's totally a great thing to do so so yeah i don't care if you have a bloodthirsty praise stealing boss or not it's still good and i mean who who wouldn't want to work with someone like that too that that makes other people feel good and feel valued and feel like their work is recognized that's awesome cool question answered question answered just do what dave says as a general principle and you'll end up just like me uh do you want to read the next question dave yeah so this comes from listener anson anthony and it says we just hired someone a few weeks ago and now i realize it was a huge mistake he is hard to work with and not learning quickly enough what is the best way to handle this

situation should we just keep working with him hoping he'll improve over time or should we cut our ties now and hope for the best also he moved to the area to take the job so i would feel bad if he got fired ouch so you you have some insight about relocation having just relocated for your job is that anything you can share is it oh yeah yeah i'm about 30 days into a job i relocated to the boston area and uh one of the terms of the relocation agreement is that i stay with the company for a certain amount of time and if i leave early i have to repay all the relocation expenses which is a sizable amount of money so that's something to just a little extra thing to consider in this situation dave's boston yacht did not pay for itself let's just put it that way

yeah that's that's a relocation perk i have two experiences that i'd like to share one is uh i worked at a job where someone was hired who was um it was quickly apparent that they were not up to the the requirements of the job and they struggled and the organization helped them out a lot to try and get them to improve. And it went on for over a year. And in the end, we, we let that person go. Um, and it was painful and kind of sad. And we feel like it was kind of our fault because, uh, it was kind of a hiring error. Uh, but it just stretched out for a long time in another job. There was a person who was hired who um they struggled and were difficult to work with and didn't get as much done as as we

kind of would have liked and they were let go pretty quickly um and it feels like the the like pain per day was about the same and it was just so many fewer days in the second instance it was like 300 extra days for the first one yeah and and things did not get better not to say that things can never get better but we we in both cases we kind of gave them chances to improve and in one case we just acted on on uh i should i i don't mean to say we it wasn't i wasn't the manager in the second case but um they were given a chance to improve and then they didn't really improve and it was just clear it wasn't a good fit and they moved pretty fast and it was much healthier for the team overall um in in the first case there were kind of some not really morale

problems but it was just like the team just felt uh a little bit let down by the organization that that they kind of had to pick up the slack of this person so much yeah do you have any insight into how those two people did afterward as far as what they did at other jobs or like yeah i mean if they rebounded quick or if it was just totally devastating and permanent permanently damaged the one that um bounced out pretty quick i i wasn't on their team and i didn't work super closely with them so i don't really know that much um the one that that stuck around for a while i think they're doing fine um i mean they they got another job and they didn't die i don't know it doesn't feel great to get fired but no no yeah but in either of these cases we're

relocation expenses an issue and that's i know like that's one thing to get fired it's another thing to get fired and say oh and you owe us and you owe us a bunch of money and you're stranded in this strange place yeah oh yeah oh boy that makes that just breaks my heart well those sound like two not great situations and this doesn't sound like a great situation either but but my argument is i feel like the second the second situation was handled better like in both cases the person was given a chance to improve and given some notice hey like things need to improve but in the first one we just really were we didn't want to like hurt someone's feelings we were just kind of scared and it turns out that that's not a great way not a great reason

to to keep someone on a team yeah so when i was reading this question i kind of fixated on a couple of words and they were should we just keep working with him hoping he'll improve and i had the thought if you just keep doing the same thing you're doing then he's not going to change i mean if you don't if you stay on the same track he's going to stay on the same track that's a good point think of how many times you've just like sat up and radically changed your life and maybe it's happened a couple times maybe but not not very very often just usually there's free will usually there's some impulse right yeah well i mean sometimes you'll like read an inspirational book or like hike a mountain be like i'm gonna change everything and you do it but

i think for most people that doesn't happen very often without some kind of outside stimulus like you said yeah like usually something really bad yeah i just had the best ice cream and it's just inspired me to become a more mindful person and just be kinder to my fellow human beings it was so good it raised me to a higher plane of existence so i wouldn't expect i mean i would not take that approach um clearly this person needs help they need they definitely need to change or else they're going to have to be let go i think and you know i i told myself when i went into management a couple years i will never fire someone without um telling them up front or beforehand that their uh performance is not good

yeah if it's a performance related issue and i think you owe it to every person as a decent human being to say your performance is not on track you're hard to work with and here are some examples of the behavior that we want you to change if you're going to be successful here you really got to do it and you never know maybe they'll just be like oh okay i can change you know you've got to at least give them the chance i think yeah that to me seems like an empathy thing where if i just got fired one day having no idea that there were any issues i i would just feel horrible and i i would i would want to have a chance to improve yeah you'd be really confused yeah and at that point it's like you're not going to get the feedback you need

and so you'll just spend the rest rest of your life wondering what happened yeah you know what did i do yeah i i 100 agree with that i'll i've heard some people talk about performance improvement plans and how their their processes processes in place at some companies to do that but sometimes they turn into like a uh cover your own butt type of thing where like we need to show we tried so we can't get sued it's just a paper trail yeah yeah like we sent them this packet that says shape up so that when we fire them later on i don't know that that feels soulless and evil but i think that the principle of giving people a chance is is sound if you decide that you absolutely are going to have to part ways one of the things i'd recommend is putting

a time limit on it and talking to them about it where you say you have two months or you have three months. We've decided we're going to let you go. And if you really want them to have a soft landing, you can say, you can either stay here for that period of time, and then you can announce that you're quitting. That'll give you enough time to find a new job. Or you can leave now and we'll give you that much pay. We'll give you two months worth of pay or three months worth of pay and call it a severance check. It's up to you. And I think the success of that arrangement will depend on the area you live in and whether there's a lot of jobs that this person could go find you know if if you're the only gig in town and uh you give that offer to someone they might

just i don't know that might not be great but if there's lots of other opportunities this is a great way to give them a soft landing where the ball's in their court to choose how they want to do it when you said that earlier my first instinct was like wow that sounds really expensive when we talked about this before the show and and some companies just might not have the spare i don't know however thousands of dollars however many thousands of dollars it would be but after you just said it this time i i was thinking like it should be expensive because you you messed up like if you are firing someone uh your company has failed them in some way either in the hiring process or in the training process or in putting them in a situation where they can succeed not

that they have no personal responsibility but like yeah but you have some too yeah yeah so so i don't know the idea that there's some kind of consequence for the company too isn't as scary to me as it was before well think about your two scenarios where you kept that one employee for a year and how expensive was that yeah in in both of those cases there was clearly a failure in the interview process there were just a lot of the issues that caused him to be let go were there in the interview um and and ignored yeah i mean people in the interview process are human and and yeah everybody makes mistakes so i think it was just just a mistake in the first place well whatever you do whatever you decide whatever path you take i promise you this will be something

you will never forget and you know it's these moments that really define us and and uh so think carefully about how you tread here because you'll be thinking about this for a long time so no pressure yeah none at all i do want to ask more about the relocation thing i mean i have no idea what what what to do about that is that um is there a way that you think about the relocation thing do you just say like pay up buddy or do you comp it or do you i don't know if if i were calling the shots i would you gotta i think about this from two perspectives but if i were calling the shots and creating this policy it seems unjust to fire someone after having paid for their relocation and then ask them to give it all back because they didn't choose to leave you

chose to fire them um although you could also argue that they chose by their actions to get fired but on the other hand if employees start to find out that your company will relocate them and then they can just get fired quote unquote and not have to pay back the reload it could be a bad precedent so well i mean some of these relocation packages are like 50 grand too so if all you have to do is show up get fired and you get 50 grand then people might do it yeah sweet perk yeah so i don't know it's that's a tough decision and i and uh i don't really know how i would handle that i have no idea lots of sweaty palms i think is yeah part of my process well i feel like we need something inspirational and uplifting to say because this is a sad question and and we talked

about sad things good luck and uh let's hope that he turns around after you have a nice frank conversation with him one good thing is it's not a bad time to be a software developer looking for work yeah and oh ah here's what you do you quit problem solved it's perfect if you just really can't handle the situation you can bail yeah yeah that's true that's always an option i can't fire you i quit what i was gonna say before that was uh i i think i think there's a lot more context around people's success or failure than we give credit to you see it a lot in pro sports teams where some player will go switch teams and they'll go from mediocre to a superstar or the other way around too and it

turns out there's a lot of stuff in place around them that affects how well they succeed or fail so because this person has not succeeded here doesn't mean they won't succeed elsewhere and you might even be able you might consider it as uh it'll be a better fit for them somewhere else i guess i don't know maybe maybe that helps you sleep at night maybe well this stuff's hard it is hard that's why it's called soft skills yep because they're the hardest they are the trickiest question addressed i think question talked about good luck that sounds really challenging yeah good luck and and if you are are interested in sharing feedback about how it went um we would love to hear yeah that would be great even i mean it's a it's a hard thing to talk about so if you don't

want to talk about it that's totally fine too so uh i wanted to say thank you to many of our listeners who have left us iTunes reviews. We don't get notified when these happen. And so I've just been sitting on my couch for the last nine months. And then one day I was like, I'm going to get on iTunes and look at soft skills engineering. And sure enough, people have left some really nice comments. So thank you. Thank you for that. That was really nice. I appreciate that. And speaking of comments, you can leave comments on each episode on our website. Now, if you go to soft skills.audio and click on the episode title, you can comment and talk to each other. And a few people have started doing that and i would love to see conversation started there especially if

they start with jameson and dave are idiots here's the real answer to this question yeah that'd be amazing yeah this is just a long play to to help us learn more about soft skills from people who are smarter than us and just hear what we say and are like astonished at our ignorance so help us out where can people go if they want to connect with us jameson uh they can go to our website like dave said they can follow us on twitter at soft skills eng um they can actually just follow dave smith on twitter too he's uh dj smith 42 right right and then i am jergason j-e-r-g-a-s-o-n if you want to follow the stuff that we say ourselves um if you want to submit a question you can do that through twitter or we have a form on our website on softskills.audio

and a special thank you to dev mountain our sponsor they help make this podcast possible so we're really grateful for them they also help teach people how to program so if you're interested in learning uh ui ux um javascript development ios then you can go to soft skills.audio slash dev mountain that'll redirect you to their page but we get a little like happy i don't know it shows up in analytics somewhere so that so they know that we helped them we helped yes it's we we really i recommend dev mountain uh they have 12 week immersive courses for web development that i actually used to teach at and they were super great i met a lot of awesome people going through the program both brand new developers and people just looking to get into web dev so it was awesome

cool well thanks a lot everyone see you next week