Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 381: Doing less and bad reference

Episode Date: November 6, 2023

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: My company is doing performance reviews. While writing my self-review, I was shocked by how much I had accomplished in the last 6 months. I’d led our org to adopt multiple new technologies and supported other teams in adopting them, to great effect. But looking back, I wish I could trade half the accomplishments on my self-review for time spent taking better care of myself and my partner and kids. I’m not working crazy hours; I work a pretty regular 40hrs per week on a flexible schedule (with 3 young kids, this is, in fact, a crazy schedule). I’m on track for the promotion from senior to staff, maybe in this cycle, and I’m wondering: would it be crazy for me to propose that I stay in the senior pay band, and start working 4 days a week? I’ve also considered scheduling personal time during the day. But I know I’ll be fighting an internal work-time-clock forged by years of cortisol flow. What’s your advice for lightening up a lead foot? A listener named Aisha says, 6 months ago I quit my first job out of college. It was a very toxic and hostile workplace. I sucked it up for almost 3 years, but it got so bad that I had to quit my job without another lined up (yikes, I know). I was a great employee, and was always given excellent performance reviews. After giving my boss plenty of notice, I asked if I could use him as a reference and he said yes. It’s been a struggle finding another job. I’ve submitted hundreds of applications, reviewed my resume with mentors, and attended workshops for interviewing skills, but nothing helped. Out of sheer desperation, I had a friend pretend to be a future employer and call my boss asking for a reference. As I suspected, he was providing a bad reference that included outright lies about my work ethic and me as a person. I have no idea why he would do this. I am at a loss of what to do. The obvious thing to do it not include that job on my resume, but without it I basically have zero experience and a large gap between graduating and now. :( I have contacted some of my old team members if they could be a reference instead of my boss, but none have gotten back to me as of yet weeks later. Please help! What do I do?

it takes more than finding a to-do comment from eight years ago and finally doing it to be a great engineer this is soft skills engineering episode 381 i am your host dave smith i'm your host jamison dance soft skills engineering is a weekly advice podcast for software developers about all the non-technical stuff that go into making you a great engineer i feel like if it's been long enough then when you finally to do the to-do it's not a work task anymore it's an act of of charity yes i don't know why it just feels like it becomes a good in the world it's an entropy reducer yeah i also love seeing those comments it makes me feel like i've wandered into a cave and discovered these cave paintings by my ancient ancestors or something like oh people have been

here forever i people have been here for longer than we thought yeah they've left records of themselves who were these people what were they like oh they didn't know how time zones worked either we're not so different you and i we had so much in common to do handle time zones correctly handle daylight savings time yep sometimes i get really cynical about old to do comments i think to myself if no one has fixed this for eight years maybe it actually doesn't need to be fixed yeah yeah and then you have to think about the the point of that to-do comment and it it turns out it wasn't to make a task to follow up on it was to get someone to just do the thing and and take this

shortcut and get it done now so they could feel like it would be handled later it's like a an indulgence or something i love how people are like well i wrote it to do because i was under schedule pressure you know and it's like well eight years later no one's done it yet it's really been eight years of pure schedule pressure uh actually yes it has been prioritization pressure that's what we like to call it yes positive yes yeah yeah laser focus more wood behind fewer arrows pressure we would not allow ourselves to be distracted my stuff like daylight savings time only happens twice a year come on yeah yeah it's only 16 times since this comment was made

all right all right should i should i thank her patrons please do thank you too nick cantar braden canes john grant travis nick hathaway jonathan king ragnar webto awesome n10 testing will angel ira chan monkey face emoji patreon.com we're hiring craig motlin the stochastic parrot owen shardle jenny kim cody sale if you would like to join this illustrious oh wait not yet i can't see dodds valentin at datafold santa hopar the computer science book.com trash panda never is not just a crater on mars i like chicken i like liver miyamix miyamix please deliver full stack contractor looking for job corp to corp type hero.dev and a one-time shout out to matt decker probably said that wrong i'm sorry thank you to all these people who support the show

on patreon if you would like to join them you can go to softskills.audio and click support us on patreon where any donation will get you an invite to our slack team which is now thousands strong if we all got together we would need an auditorium of some kind which would be cool or a cafetorium like my elementary school had ah and then we could have sloppy joes all together that'd be cool man yeah why don't they make conference lunches they've gone too fancy they need to really go the other direction and serve like cardboard pizza triangles and boxed chocolate milk yes oh that is quintessential american elementary school lunch right there yep man i'm surprised i'm surprised that we're all not super fit and

healthy after lunches like that growing up weird well i know i am and i owe it all to the gallons of chocolate milk i consumed as a child carried over to this day it still sustains you my bones are so hard calcium rich chocolate milk oh yeah uh yeah please please join the patreon if you are interested we appreciate it it supports the show it it helps supply our chocolate milk needs to keep our bones from dissolving into sand every moment you don't subscribe to patreon it's a moment that jameson's bones get weaker the big dairy lobby has convinced me that i'm but a gust of wind away from shattering into a million pieces if i don't drink a ton of milk

all right okay should we do a question yes this comes from an anonymous listener who says my company is doing performance reviews while writing my self-review i was shocked by how much i had accomplished in the last six months i had led our org to adopt multiple new technologies and supported other teams and adopting them to great effect but looking back i wish i could trade half the accomplishments on my self-review for time spent taking better care of myself and my partner and kids i'm not working crazy hours i work a pretty regular 40 hours per week on a flexible schedule with three young kids this is in fact a crazy schedule yes can confirm i'm on track for the promotion from senior to staff maybe in this cycle and i'm wondering would it be crazy for me

to propose that i stay in the senior band and start working four days a week i've also considered scheduling personal time during the day but i know i'll be finding sorry i know i'll be fighting An internal work time clock forged by years of cortisol flow. That's the other thing that makes up Jameson is the chocolate milk flow and the cortisol. What's your advice for lightening up a lead foot? Great question. I love the cortisol reference. Yeah.

It's been forged. It's almost like how the Grand Canyon was forged by little particles of sand being whipped through the canyon by wind and water. Yeah. In that same way, our own habits are forged by decades of cortisol flowing through our brain. That's the stress hormone, right? Yes, it is. That's the one that you release when you get stressed? Mm-hmm.

Well, what do you think you would do if you said, congratulations on your promotion, and someone said, no, thank you. I would like to just do less, please. I would like to do less for the same money, which makes sense. Kind of like a promotion. Yeah, it's like an accounting trick to have an equivalent cost to the company. Like, I am not going to take more of your money. I am going to take more of your money in the sense that I'm going to exchange it for less of my time. You know?

Yeah. Like, keep my pay flat and my hours down by 20%. I predict they're going to say no. Yeah. I agree. I don't think there's a compelling reason for the company to do this that outweighs the pain it would cause them. Four-day work weeks are a thing that I've seen become more popular over the years. But just barely more popular. Yeah, they're still very niche. They're definitely

at the level where you've heard of them on Twitter enough that they seem like they're happening, but really nobody is doing them. Yeah. A couple of months ago, I spoke with the CEO of a company. In fact, Jameson, a CEO of a company you used to work for. I saw that. Well, I didn't see you spoke with them. I observed that while I was stalking you. No, I saw them post about a four-day workweek. I observed that through my binoculars from the parking lot. Yeah. Yeah. So this CEO told me that he deliberately chose a four-day workweek for this company.

And I said, how's that going with your investors? Because I know that they have VC investors. and he said fine because i control more than 50 of the seats on the board so they don't have a say yeah he loves it he's like look for it it's like i am not in this business to get super rich and have a big transactional payout because we ipo'd or sold the company i'm in it for the lifestyle so and i just thought how the heck did you manage that with vc investors like that never happens but he has been very shrewd with his company but but boy is it the exception to the rule. I've been to his house. He's super rich already. Come on, man. That's how you do it. I always tell people that the secret to getting rich is first get rich and then you can really

make some money. That's a great point because a common concern from a company's standpoint, especially if they're a small startup with a 40-hour workweek or four-day workweek, I'm sorry, is if anything goes wrong, the board will say, well, stop doing that. Nobody does that. Clearly, that's got to be your problem. If things are not going great. If anything, you'll be arguing with the board to go down from a six-day work week to a five-day work week. Yeah, they're going to say, I don't, I probably, I don't know. I don't really care how much you're working if you're making tons of money. But if you're not, then no, please don't do that. So it is telling that this person does it because they can say to the board go away shoo be gone i don't even know why we have these

board meetings i don't care what you say and i don't need to they wouldn't say that i know i know it's a good person but obviously good person giving four-day work weeks to everyone i mean it's pretty cool it's like very employee uh centric anyway yeah so james and you said right on your knee-jerk reaction was they're gonna say no i agree with that and but i have a different reason for it. What's your reason? When management gets questions like this, and I've seen these kinds of questions surface all the time, the first question they ask is, what's everyone else going to say? Yeah. Very hard to give someone a four-day work week and work that out because everyone notices. Oh, yeah, that person doesn't work on Fridays. Sorry. Yeah.

What? Can I not work on Fridays? Can I do that? Yeah. And so management just does not want to tackle that problem for everyone all at once. Even if they know that you are so productive and so good at your job that they would be happy to keep paying you what they're paying you for only 80% of the hours. And there are people on every team like this who I know would be just as productive as the median team member with only four out of the five days working. I still would probably say no because it just opens up such a Pandora's box that ultimately leads to everyone being on a four-day workweek. And that ultimately does bring the company's productivity way down. And so I guess you could counteract that. Now I'm thinking about this seriously for the first

time, but I guess you could counteract that by saying, all right, we're giving you all a 20% pay cut commensurate with the 20% reduction of hours. And we're going to hire 20% more people. And we're going to offset that. It'd actually be 25% more people. I don't know. And we're going to offset that by having everybody work four-day workweeks. We're just going to have more people doing more work. Could you pull that off? I don't know. Yeah, I think your point is correct that the company does not want to accidentally create a policy with an exception. It's a giant nightmare. But there's nothing except your cortisol flow preventing you from taking advantage of the flexibility of remote work to have a chiller lifestyle, I guess is how I'll put it. And I

think you mentioned you'd be fighting an internal work clock forged by years of cortisol flow. I think that is an easier fight to win than convince the company to let you work a four-day work week. I think even if you offered to take a pay cut, which you're not, I think they would still say no, just logistically. If you're a very senior, I see a lot of your time is collaboration with other people. And it's not just about your pure output. So if you're losing a whole day of meetings that's that's a pain in the butt even if you're very productive in the other four days they're going to be people whose schedules don't overlap or i don't know i think people who need you when you're not there yeah like your family oh yeah like your family no

your work family obviously is more important yeah you'll be sitting on your deathbed wishing you had spent more time at the office i i do think that's going to be tough to do well i don't know maybe it'd be tough to do after a promotion. I assume there would be higher expectations placed upon you. Yes. But I think I would look back into how can I carve out a couple hours in the middle of every day? It's just on my calendar as like, I don't know, secret doomsday planning meeting or something. Yeah. There is another option. You could approach your company and say, I would like to become a contractor for this company. And the reason I say that is because with a contractor status,

you now no longer have all the same expectations of an employee. And I've actually worked on teams that had a contractor on the team who had different hours and it was assumed that they were supporting other clients. And so we knew this contractor's only with us, say Monday, Wednesday, Friday, or something. And that gave the company license

to have the contractor be on a different schedule than the full-time employees because there was a category difference, you know? And so they didn't feel compelled to apply the same hours to those two categories. Yeah, it wasn't setting a policy for everybody. It was just a different kind of thing. Huh. It's a good idea.

Certainly some risk in becoming a contractor where they can just say, hey, don't come in tomorrow. We've ended your contract. Or ever again. I mean, they can technically do that in the US at least. It's just a little harder. For full-time employers, employees. Yeah. Hmm.

Maybe that's what this person wants anyway, you know, and work for multiple companies and just embrace the full-on contract life. Yeah, if you do want kind of maximum flexibility, then that is a way to do it. It's very easy to get sucked into working more for more money if you have an hourly rate, but if you can be disciplined about it, then yeah, you can certainly get more flexibility. Well, I don't know. Have we answered the question?

Probably. Good luck. best of luck with your lead foot hopefully you speed away to the life of luxury yes i don't know okay shall i read the next question please do this is from a listener named aisha who says six months ago six months ago sorry i quit my first job out of college it was a very toxic and hostile workplace i sucked it up for almost three years but it got so bad that i had to quit my job without another one lined up. Yikes, I know. I was a great employee and was always given excellent performance reviews. After giving my boss plenty of notice, I asked if I could use

him as a reference and he said yes. It's been a struggle finding another job. I've submitted hundreds of applications, reviewed my resume with mentors and attended workshops for interviewing skills, but nothing has helped. Out of sheer desperation, I had a friend pretend to be a future employer and call my boss asking for a reference. As I suspected, he was providing a bad reference that included outright outright lies about my work ethic and me as a person i have no idea why he would do this i am at a loss of what to do the obvious thing to do is not include that job on my resume but without it i basically have zero experience and a large gap between graduating and now i have contacted some of my old team members to ask if they would

be a reference instead of my boss but none have gotten back to me as of yet weeks later please help what do i do oh man that is that is so bad oh knifed in the back so bad man what a what just ah this is just a bad person like everyone knows the job market is hard right now you go and do that to someone man i think we should spend the next 20 minutes just talking about how bad this person is and nothing else much like aisha's boss does to them yes when asked for a reference oh oh this sucks oh my honestly i we've heard a lot of bad questions on the show by which i mean you know bad situations this one just really makes my stomach sink it's like a knife in the back well i'll just tell you my immediate reaction to this is go get a lawyer and sue this guy for

defamation i this is like yeah if you're in the u.s this is why people generally don't give bad references is because they are worried about being sued so maybe they're not in the united states i'm not sure but yeah i i mean legally you may be you know space laws are domain and this this is mere terrestrial law but legally you might have a case here but i suspect that if you sue your former employer it makes it hard to get another job yeah you might recover some some damages or something but could you just pay a lawyer to send a cease and desist yeah i guess you could i mean i'm guessing money isn't exactly abundant in this situation to be able to pay several thousand dollars to some lawyer to spend a few hours drafting a cease

and desist letter. So I've never done this, but my dad did this when he had to get some recommendations or references for, this was for graduate school. He had a professor that he really liked. We asked to write him a letter of recommendation and his professor was very lazy and said, sure, you write me the recommendation that you think you deserve. And if I like it, i'll sign it and then uh you can use that which is kind of brilliant because it it makes well first means he doesn't have to do any or they i don't know who the professor was they didn't have to do any work it also put this pressure to make it like realistic enough that they wouldn't have i don't know they wouldn't want to sign something that said i i cured cancer when the professor

knows that he didn't or whatever so it makes me think about like when you ask someone to be a reference can you provide them with stuff to say so they're not just like off the top of their head like yeah i don't know they showed up at some meetings and this i don't think this is what is going on here because this feels like a much bigger gap than could be explained by someone not really remembering what you did or having the the facts on hand it seems like there's something weird going on here. Totally. And I think this person was very creative to have a friend call and act like an employer. That's so clever. I love it. I'm pretty sure I saw a thing on YouTube, which must be true because it is on YouTube, where they had a call-in show.

An important detail is that these guys were all Australian. And they said, hey, my friend, I think the hosts called up some random person somehow and said, hey, my friend has a job that's going to call and ask for a reference. Are you willing to be a reference for them? Give them no details besides the person's name. And the guy was like, sure. And then the other host of the show called this person, this random stranger they had asked to be a reference, asked him a bunch of questions. And he like invented this beautiful life story about their wonderful time together and their camaraderie on the rugby team and his leadership there and all that stuff so you need somebody like that who will just like just make up sweet nothings about you exactly and so

take this the other direction you know instead of having a friend call and pose as an employer have a friend pose as a sorry as a future employer have a friend pose as a past employer it's perfect yeah especially if you can find an australian everyone believes australians yeah they've just got the most disarming accent for english speakers anyways i don't know just sound like good people yeah i mean i think you did the right thing in trying to find a reference a different reference from your old job and i don't have gotten back to me as of yet weeks later that's weird that they haven't gotten back to you weeks later i wonder if they're like waging a campaign against you yeah that's rough man something weird is going on this is like

telling everyone not to talk to you i mean remember the reason this person left this environment is because it was toxic and hostile so i guess it's kind of it kind of fits that there would be all kinds of toxicity and hostility when you're trying to get a reference out of this out of these psycho disgusting people sorry yeah just so i'm so disgusted by this this is a tough situation because i gotta say finding a job right now is already very hard harder than it's been in i would say 18 years that i've been paying attention as a software developer and so that you already are fighting headwinds and this company is just going to make your life suck i just i don't know what to do about it you're just gonna i think the answer is just keep muscling

through you're gonna have to maybe you know you can you can list them on your resume because the three-year gap really is a very important part of your earning opportunities for future jobs you know and if you have three years of software development experience out of college versus zero years it's a completely different playing field for getting hired much much better like a hundred times better so you do not want to have a three-year gap on your resume but you don't necessarily have to give reference contact info for that company yeah i mean maybe they ask for references for past jobs i have not seen that super commonly and i've applied at plenty of places and not given references i'm trying to think of the past few jobs i worked yeah it seems

to have fallen out of favor a little yeah i don't think i gave references for my current job or my past one or the one before that maybe i don't know maybe i just forgot because i didn't have a traumatic experience to increase in my mind like this people call me when you get a new job though and i give them the truth you're a stand up shows up every week wonderful mostly for one hour a week you can count on him i yes to record a podcast here's what i say i confirm that jameson dance is an employee yes that's my reference the worst possible yeah that's that's what i thought the worst possible reference you could give was was a very loud signal that we hated them and they were horrible but i can't say it because i don't want to get sued exactly but

your boss is just straight up like no i hate them and they're horrible and i dare you to sue me if i got if i got that from someone when i was doing a reference check i would i would think whoa this person must be so so bad because no one gives that negative of a reference when i call they always sugarcoat it a little or dance around the issues because of liability problems but then i think after i hung up the phone i would think back on it and be like wait a minute what kind of person gives that kind of a reference that's that's unusual and i think i would slowly come to the realization that i need to discount that reference but but that's the thing i mean in this type of job market there's that could be enough of a signal to exactly something weird people

don't want anything weird anything that seems risky yeah and i've got 200 other applicants that don't have that yeah yeah so i think even if you convinced yourself there's something fishy going on here that might not be the applicant's fault i wonder if you can get your performance reviews because you mentioned you had excellent performance reviews can you share those instead of a reference yeah i wonder if the hr department at this company if it exists which it probably doesn't but i wonder if they are a little bit more what's the word untoxic like maybe maybe the hr department is just a little bit more impartial to the situation and maybe they could just provide you factual information that can serve as a reference they are also in the business

of not getting sued much more than your old boss is yeah and maybe and maybe you need to uh maybe that's an interesting tactic to take here if there's just no way to stop this terrible human being from spreading all these negative lies about you to your reference checks maybe you need to call up the hr department and report what happened and say this is this just so you know this is something i would sue the company over you know and let let the hr department take that information back to the internals of this company yeah yeah by the way this is all very dangerous territory that i would tread basically i would not take our advice on any of this seriously i think about what i would do and i would be cowering in fear and just trying to

navigate around this thing without with as little contact with that old company as possible including legal contact that's just how i would roll but at the same time i just have this deep sense of cosmic injustice that has been committed here that needs to be righted and you know the reality is i probably would not i would not even try to be the judge jury or executioner here but i really would want to you can use us as a reference you've got excellent communication skills as we've seen from yes you writing in the question the question was very well written yep the work product was delivered on time yes you met the deadline yep we have to figure out the the the rate at which we accept and answer questions on the show i feel like it's pretty small like i don't know

maybe single digit percentages top five percent of all the yes all the of all what's the word vague enough that we can use work product delivered yeah work work product achieved top five percent in quality and recognition yes recognition top five percent question asker i mean worker all right you got it will be a reference check for you yeah i i think the best i think i agree with you dave in that it is easy for us to get worked up and very easy to make your life so much worse but i mean companies are in general kind of soulless but the people that work at them are not and are subject to human foibles and can hold grudges and get mad. And there's probably still ways this company can make your life even worse. So I would definitely be

worried about that if I wanted to go after them. The fact that they're willing to do what they have done tells me that they are probably willing to do much worse, which is why I'm trying to, personally, I'm going to try to cut off all contact with this monster. They will outgun you with the lawyers they have more money than you they obviously have more toxicity and willingness to go to very negative places than you do so i would i would just cut this thing off uh at the knees and oh i mean the fact that even your old team members won't respond to you tells me that your boss has gone just nuclear option on this thing so i'm i'm getting out of there i mean i'm getting well sorry i can't even put my words together i'm so frustrated by this situation

but i i am literally i am cutting off all possible contact and trying to prevent any future contact yeah if you can avoid giving a reference that would be that would be ideal and if you can provide some kind of evidence of excellent performance despite the lack of reference that might help offset the concern if if it's common in the industry or place you are to give references for every job man this really sucks i'm sorry this happened to you yeah this is so bad i mean oh geez i thought we had a system people you know you remember that old seinfeld episode where george is driving a car and there's pigeons on the road but you know they're supposed to just fly out of the way of the car but they don't and he runs over a pigeon runs them all over and he

spends the whole episode saying i thought we had an agreement we had a system i don't swerve you fly out of the way and he was driving with some with someone else in the car and that person was just disgusted with him because he didn't swerve that's what i feel like here it's like we had a system listen you don't trash talk people in reference checks unless it's like oh they were a criminal and they stole from the company yeah like okay you gotta do it but and you certainly don't lie about someone negatively in a reference check like oh yeah top performer no no no bottom performer, terrible employee. I mean, this is so bad. And in this job market, it takes so long to find a job under the best of conditions. And, you know, I've got a good friend who's one of the

absolute top engineers I've ever worked with and has been out searching for a job, six companies and just nothing, just crickets toward the end of the interview process. It is so hard right now. So to go and put this extra baggage on someone to say, oh yeah, by the way, it's a terribly hard thing to carry right now. I'm just going to put 40 extra pounds of weight on your back. here you go now carry it oh anyway very frustrating i'm so sorry for you i wonder if there are any signs that that i mean you talked about how the question asker mentioned the workplace was toxic and hostile i guess those are some signs but why would you even say yes i guess because it's awkward to say no if you're gonna give someone a bad reference or maybe yes i mean look this is a

bad person jameson it's hard for you to understand their motives here because this is not not the world you live in but they say yes so that you'll ask them for a reference so they can trash you oh dear oh dear yes oh dear there you go what else could be said out there oh it's rough out there i'm sorry well well we we helped so much i know i know this is this is just a sympathy episode it's like i don't know what to do if i had tons of money it was just kind of a paradox because then i wouldn't be looking for a job i i would i would be so tempted to go hire a team of crack lawyers you know and just come down on this company yeah for that kind of behavior because that is so bad i mean the dishonesty oh yeah we should start a gofundme

so you can buy some good lawyers you know the world does need to funnel more money to lawyers they're struggling think of the lawyers dave oh what can people do if they would like their own questions answered if you would like a sympathy session out of us for no charge go to softskills.audio and click the ask a question button where you can fill out our form with whatever info you want thank you so much to everyone who does that we love it and a shout out to everyone who has had their questions answered over the years, we would ask you to please write in and let us know how we did. Did you take our advice? Did you not take our advice? Did it work? Did it not work? We want to fill out the truth table

of the outcomes of all of these different answers we've given. We want to hear it. And if we love what you wrote, we'll read it on the air. And maybe even if we hate what you wrote, we'll read it on the air. Because unlike people who give lying negative references, we don't mind the truth. The truth does not bother us and we love it. yes yes indeed all right thank you so much for listening we will catch you next week