Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 386: Stuck with toil and how to get a dev job as a self-taught career-switcher in 2023

Episode Date: December 11, 2023

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I feel like I’m stuck. I’m in a senior/lead position technically called an SRE, but I find myself doing all kinds of cleanup work that should instead be spread across teams. My suggestions for automating toil and cleaning up tech debt fall on deaf ears until some principal engineer decides a couple of months down the line some problem is worth solving (then it’s urgent!!1). I’ve experienced this at a few companies now and see some patterns, but I’m not sure what the way out is yet. It seems I need to find the most respected person (and fight them! just kidding), gain their trust, and play politics to get basic problems solved and work properly distributed. I am exhausted. If you want me to lead, then give me the power I need to lead. If you want me to be a cog, then make it a decent work environment and pay enough. I feel like I’m stuck in some sort of purgatory. I’m considering going for a management job, but I think I’d hate it. How can I find a 9-5 that isn’t soul sucking and run by a few people who have the ear of the C-level? As two people who lead engineering teams, have conducting tons of interviews for developers and hired many, what are your opinions on the prospects of career changing self-taught developers landing a decent job in 2023 forward? I have a career in Product Marketing, working very closely with Product, Engineering, and Sales teams. I believe I bring a lot of the “soft skills” to the table and am teaching myself the “hard skills”. My concerns are that it will be incredibly difficult to actually find a job and, if I do, it’ll be an entry level role that effectively resets my existing 9-year career back to the starting blocks. In your experiences, would you hire folks looking to make a career move in anything other than junior positions, or would you be wary of them in favor of other candidates?

it takes more than changing your server's time zones to samoa to make the problem tomorrow's problem to be a great engineer this is episode 386 of the soft skills engineering podcast i'm your host jameson dance i'm your host dave smith soft skills engineering is our weekly advice show about all the non-technical things that go into the technical field of software development like time travel yeah there's more than one way to solve a time zone bug yeah i mean i guess time travel is pretty technical that's true first you must hack the uh what is that the ntp servers ah i thought you were going to say hack the space time continuum which is ambitious nah well i guess you can once you figure out time travel because then you have

infinite time that's right then you can take all the time you need to hack the ndp servers yeah okay swap the order yeah uh i'm awkwardly waiting for you to thank our sponsor okay this episode is sponsored by notion which is the best note-taking app with actually useful ai indeed you'll hear more about them later now i want to thank our patrons thank you to the people that contribute so much love in the form of currency that we shout them out every single week thank you to chase w norton type your.dev never is not just a creator on mars i like chicken i like liver meow mix meow mix please deliver trash panda the computer science book.com valentin at datafold santa hope our kensi dogs

jenny kim owen charlotte craig motlin the stochastic parrot patreon.com we're hiring irish and monkey face emoji jonathan king webtau awesome n10 testing will angel ragnar travis braden canes john grant the unsettling nature of not knowing and nick cantar so good if you want to join this group make us laugh make us cry make us say words then you can go to soft soft skills.audio and click support us on patreon and any amount will get you an invite to our slack team and any amount above whatever the amount says on patreon will get you a shout out yep all right okay dave you want to read our first question yes here we go this comes from an anonymous listener who says i feel like i'm stuck i'm in a senior lead position technically called

an sre which stands for site reliability engineer which i assume is what's meant here continuing but i find myself doing all kinds of cleanup work that should instead be spread across teams my suggestions for automating toil and cleaning up tech debt fall on deaf ears until some principal engineer decides a couple months down the line that some problem is worth solving and then it's urgent exclamation mark exclamation mark the number one that's one of my favorite memes of all time i've experienced this at a few companies now and see some patterns but i'm not sure what what the way out is yet it seems i need to find the most respected person and fight them just kidding gain their trust and play politics to get basic

problems solved and work properly distributed i am exhausted if you want me to lead then give me the power i need to lead if you want me to be a cog then make it a decent work environment and pay enough i feel like i'm stuck in some sort of purgatory i'm considering going for a management job but i think i would hate it how can i find a nine to five that isn't soul-sucking and run by a few people who have the ear of the sea level fighting them is already mentioned yep not an option too bad i so i have not worked as an sre but my i could see how that could devolve into a lot of toil because it feels kind of ops ish yeah i don't know we're supposed to pretend that ops doesn't exist as like a career anymore right right does yeah they just call it sre sometimes

the google sre book is very clear that that's not what it is but it's not places are not google yeah but then it's full of related information in it yeah it's yeah the book does have a lot of ops related stuff it's sort of like you help the teams to do their own op stuff right right Which is the ideal. I mean, that's awesome. Yeah. But what it might be instead is like a recruiting tool to hire operations folks. Hmm.

Cleanup work that should instead. I feel like ops type roles have this problem, which is that you only get noticed when bad things happen. You never get any credit for disasters prevented or for a smooth continuing operation. Yeah. So it's sort of like hard to justify to folks who aren't in the technical details why you need to do something because everything's fine right now. Why do we have to do this big new project when stuff seems to be working? And it's because they don't have any idea what is involved in keeping things working.

I've experienced this at a few companies and seen some patterns. I can see one thing that is constant across these patterns. Oh, no. Don't say it. It's the question asker. You might enjoy heroics. You see a problem. It's kind of painful to solve.

You jump in and say, I will take care of this thing. It's finicky. It's difficult. It's tricky. It's late at night or whatever. I don't know. There's just some people that seem to be drawn to where the fire is. and firefighting is i think it it appears to be very valuable because you can't see the

opportunity cost of making the fires go away but you do see like oh this this huge alarm was going off there's a disaster and then the disaster stopped so yeah the question asker is a superhero that saved the day thank you but it's a different job than like building a fireproof building i guess it seems like that's the job you want yeah and i you know i've seen this dynamic go down so often where someone who is perceived as having not a lot of authority pushes for something for a long time and then suddenly the right person shows up and poof suddenly that thing that couldn't get done for two years is now a top top priority gotta be done and i've often asked myself what's the difference between those two people like why could the one why did the organization

ignore the one, and then just absolutely fall all over themselves to do it when the other person said it. Same idea, right? And I think there's something to be said for this concept of clout. And clout, it's kind of an amorphous thing, but it basically is accumulated through actions that yield good outcomes that build a reputation where, well, suddenly, I'm actually, let me just be clear. I'm defining the idealized version of clout. Ideally, it is the result of years of reputational accumulation of good outcomes. But then in practicality, oftentimes it's because, oh, well, this person's name is on the org chart very high and controls all of our bonus checks, you know, or something like that. And that's another form of clout. And I think that's

probably what's happening here a lot of the time. Yeah. Yeah, I think you're right. I mean, you do either by the actions you have taken to get into these roles of a principal engineer or the virtue of your position, you do have some clout. And that's what the job's for, right? Sort of like have been asked to exercise good judgment in identifying opportunities for the company. So you might argue that it's working to some degree that the principal engineers get to say we're going to do a thing. And I think you've identified a solution in there, which is, I think you're right. Find the most respected person and gain their trust and play politics to get basic problems solved and work properly distributed. I think playing politics is a pessimistic way to

look at it. But I think there's also an optimistic way to look at it, which is to work together with a group of people you have to figure out how to prioritize stuff and and politics gets used to describe like a this vague bad outcome of of like you have to suck up and do things that aren't related to the work to do it but if you think a lot of times what people call politics is is actually disagreement yeah like and and so it's it's really about persuasion not politics yes you can prevent or present a convincing case for why these problems need solved then it's it's much easier and it's much easier if they are not just you problems like if you go to the principal engineer and say my job is difficult because i have to run around to all these different teams

and do all this toil they will probably sympathize with you but it is unlikely to motivate like a major project to change it but if you say hey these four teams are building the same thing and it's a huge waste of time and i have to like run around supporting it or i don't know if you turn if you can point to how your problems are actually organization problems worth solving then that feels much more convincing yeah i think you're right basically i mean in a nutshell you're saying you got to speak the language of the decision makers and you know that sometimes it's money sometimes it's efficiency problems sometimes it's you know business risk but ultimately in order to persuade someone like you're saying you need to put things in terms

that resonate with them you know it'd be it'd be like someone coming up to you and be like well there's this thing we should do it'll be really good and you're like okay what is it well it's kind of technical but it'll be good and you're like well i'm not convinced you know but if you come to somebody and say we are currently they go complain about how political the org is yeah Exactly. It's so political. Not saying political orgs don't exist because certainly they do. But if you come up to a business leader and say, we're currently wasting a million dollars a month. And if you give me two weeks of engineering effort, I can make that million dollars a month go down to $50,000 a month. Something like that. It's like, oh, that's really concrete.

And it speaks the language of the business. And what I've often found is that people who, especially engineers who move up the org chart like this you know these principal engineering people that are mentioned in this question they often are very good at speaking that language they do also need input i mean typically they're not i guess it depends across organizations but sometimes they are not in the code day-to-day enough to feel the specific pain that you're feeling and if it's a big enough org then then almost certainly they're not in your part of the code day-to-day enough so you do have information that they don't have about how about problems they might not see directly you also i think it'd be useful to find out what's important to them

do they have some huge priority to move everything from one cloud vendor to the other for like cost reasons or like what what's they i mean they have stuff what's on their plate yeah because then You're kind of trying to identify what your thing is sort of indirectly competing with. Yes. And if it's not more important, it might not get done. If you can somehow make it related to that thing, then it's probably more likely to get done. What I have found is that every organization has their one, two, or three key metrics that really matter to that organization.

And if you can couch this in those terms, like when I worked on a particularly large system of digital assistance. And the key metric was dialogues. How many dialogues do we get every day from people? And anything you wanted to launch had to either improve that number or at least not make it worse. And so that was the currency. We couldn't save money because we were a money-losing organization. I mean, we could save a little money, but it didn't matter. The money seemed to be infinite. So that wasn't ever it. It was dialogues. And like my current organization, it's like volume like usage we want to see our customers use our product more that's the currency right so you've got to figure out what that currency is for you and then couch everything

your team does to your higher-ups in that currency and you will build clout for yourself although i feel like i'm stuck in some sort of purgatory oh go ahead yeah i mean like we're don't you feel like we're kind of dodging the actual question here which is basically how do i quit this job and find one that doesn't do this yeah one option is a very small company because then you have more control over what you do sort of and there's also often clearer business needs it's like we have to launch this feature to survive and then the trade-offs of tackling other things become a bit starker yeah in other words find a company where everyone is too busy to withhold power from you you know like everyone's running around with their like they're

like a chicken that's that's one of the things about small companies is like autonomy and the ability to just go do a thing is is super valuable and also much easier to exercise if like you win by doing stuff and that's harder at larger companies because there are more you have to build more momentum to do things. You can't just go do the thing. Exactly. You have to build consensus. I'm considering going for a management job. I think I would hate it. Yeah, I think you would. You might from this question. Yeah, I think you might hate it because it sounds a lot like a lot of management. Yes, it is. Some of it's just inherent in the nature of convincing groups of people to do things. Yeah. All right. Have we answered the question? I think we have. Let's

move on to something we don't hate. And that is Notion, which is today's episode sponsor. Notion is a really cool note-taking app, but really it has morphed into so much more than a note-taking app. Like it's a note sharing app. It's a collaboration app. And now they've baked AI into the product. Yeah, it's great. It's really powerful to have. So I use it at work and I've used it at a bunch of different jobs and the integration of AI and your company's notes and knowledge base is pretty neat. I think there's a lot of bogus uses of AI out there, but this feels pretty squarely in the good fit for the current state of AI. Exactly.

You can have it summarize things or generate agendas or it saves time, makes life better. It is way better. You can actually ask questions of the Notion AI and it will use your notes as a data source for answering your questions. And it's like, okay, answering questions, great. But also the responses are also integrated with the product as a first class citizen. So you can say things like make a list with and then give it like a verbal, you know, like a free form description and it will actually produce a list for you. So it's like it's the honestly for me, it's the first AI that I've seen built into a product that actually does things for you and doesn't just answer your questions. Doesn't just hand you the text back. Yeah, exactly.

It's not just text in, text out. It's like text in and oh, look, it just organized my notes for me. It's really cool. Yeah. Yep. Yeah. Notion is great. Their AI stuff is great.

And you should go to notion.com slash soft skills to check it out. All right. So we, uh, dot com slash soft skills. All right. Uh, oh, yes, yes. Let us get to the question. We are, you can tell we're not artificial intelligence because we are kind of dumb stepping on each other's toes.

All right. All right. Jameson, you want to read this next one? I do. this is from a listener named josh actually technically they don't say they're a listener from somebody named josh who maybe has never listened to the show they just found this the form decided to fill it out just stumbled across it surely good things will happen if i type stuff in here here is josh's question as two people who lead engineering teams have conducted tons

of interviews for developers and hired many what are your opinions on the prospects of career changing self-taught developers landing a decent job in 2023 and onward i have a career in product marketing working very closely with product engineering and sales teams i believe i bring a lot of the soft skills to the table and i'm teaching myself the hard skills my concerns are that it will be incredibly difficult to actually find a job and if i do it'll be an entry-level role that effectively resets my existing nine-year career back to the starting blocks in your experiences would you hire folks looking to make a career move in anything other than junior positions or would you be wary of them in favor of other candidates this is a great question i'm

sure a lot of people are wondering about this right now yeah this is a good question i think it has a pretty i think it has a straightforward answer i would not hire someone who had not worked as a professional software developer in anything other than a junior position and having a lot of experience working around software developers i i think would not change that for me i would expect their trajectory once they join to maybe be a little bit steeper if they can pick up the tech stuff quickly because sometimes uh engineer careers are more limited by the like collaboration and communication stuff but i mean i'm i'm just i just can't hire someone who doesn't have the technical ability of a senior engineer as a senior engineer just just because they collaborate well

Yeah. You're going to have to start over, but it'll be great. It'll be great eventually. Honestly, it is going to suck to make the switch because you're basically in the same boat as so many people who have talked to me about starting out as a software engineer. and it really makes no difference whether you have 10 years of product management experience or zero years of anything experience. It makes a tiny difference. Like you mentioned the soft skills and hard skills. Yes, a little bit of a difference on the soft skills. But at the end of the day, you really are paid as a software engineer to be able to produce working product in the form of code. And I have seen so many people just absolutely struggle through the grind of finding that first software development job yeah i do think it's probably well hmm do i yeah i think it's probably easier i feel like i would be if if i'm hiring brand new developers

there's a stamp of like this is a human that can work a job approval that you get from working in tech not not the highest bar software engineer yeah not the highest bar but like it's it's something it puts you in the top 90 percent of people yeah congratulations yeah it will be hard to find a job and i think it is effectively impossible if you oh i don't know there's always there's always some counter example but i i would not count on getting anything besides an entry-level role. Yeah, for sure. I mean, that just is the path. It would be very strange for you to show up with, let's just say, zero software development experience and then be expected to answer really hard questions from other engineers about how to design your software. It's like,

oh, you're a senior engineer? Great. I have some big questions about how we should architect this database. It's like, well, I've never architected a database before. Well, that's why we're going to bring you in as an entry-level engineer. Yeah. Go design our deployment strategy. I've never deployed anything. Yeah. Sadly, it does mean a reboot, but this is why I said it's going to be great eventually. And that is that it's going to take, honestly, it'll probably take you a year to get that first job where you're maybe still working at your old job. Maybe you're doing some side hustles and a lot of self-teaching, but this is what I see. And it's only worse today. This is like, I saw it took a year, a couple of years ago when we were in the absolute

height of the hiring frenzy and it was still taking bootcamp graduates like a year plus to find their first job. So that's going to take a year. Then you'll have to spend about a year or two in kind of that junior status. And that's actually going to be the fun time though. That'll be great you'll be learning so much every day you'll be i don't know i don't know if you remember this james and i know it's been so long because you're very very old now so old so wise but yes but like i remember those that first year out of college it was like every day was just a brain so fun oh man yeah it was awesome it was like fireworks in my mind i had no idea that code could i do remember that it was awesome so this first couple years are going to be fantastic

after the first terrible year. And then what's going to happen is if you really work hard as a software engineer, your so-called hard skills will develop pretty well and your soft skills will help you to do things that a lot of our other engineers probably aren't doing or focusing on, which is becoming kind of influential.

Like you're always the one that the product team goes to when they have questions about, technical questions about how things work. and this will this will absolutely help you leapfrog the long many year process of becoming a senior engineer i think i think so too yeah i think you have an advantage in trajectory but not in starting position exactly exactly you'll have what's the way to say that like you have to start at the starting line with everyone else but you're gonna have like a little rocket ship strapped to your back when you run run the race yeah i mean now that i'm thinking back to it when i first

started i i did not have very many life responsibilities either and it's possible that you might have a family you might have stuff that keeps you from from getting as sucked in to to this new career as you might have been if you were younger so you'll just have to count on your wisdom and experience at learning things to make up for that because you don't have that like raw Mountain Dew-fueled Stay Up All Night Dakota thing enthusiasm. Or maybe you do. I don't know. Yeah, maybe, but probably not.

I don't. I sure as heck don't. I mean, you're nine years into a career. It is so dead. Yeah. It is dead and gone. And Stay Up All Night enthusiasm is like when my child is puking all night. Exactly.

Not exactly the same as doing what I did in my early 20s when I literally stayed up all night to port our c++ code base from a 32-bit architecture to a 64-bit architecture and when the sun rose it compiled successfully on a 64-bit cpu it was awesome yeah this is more like when the sun rose then my son rose from the toilet you're lucky he made it all the way to the toilet oh my goodness i haven't done an all-nighter writing code in pushing 20 years but i did do it a couple times i think i've done it more recently than that but i don't see it in my future yeah that's for sure there is something really magical about working at night when the rest of the world is asleep and there are no distractions there's no

emails coming in no slack messages you're texting that little texting chime isn't is it ringing off the hook oh man yeah but boy do you pay for that the next day or several uh i mean that gets into the trope about engineers starting late right they start their day later they work later to kind of shift some hours i know not everybody does that yeah but you you kind of have fewer in the middle of the day hours where where other people are around we are far off the question though i don't know i feel like this has a pretty straightforward answer you're going to be a junior developer because that's the skill set that is the question and that is i believe but i think i think you can be a really excellent junior developer oh yeah in your background yeah absolutely product

marketing you're going to think of things that no one else thought of like hey this feature doesn't really have any feature discovery uh on it we should probably build that like oh hey what's the messaging going to be around this when i get it you know when we hand it over to the marketing team like these are fantastic phenomenally good questions that you're going to be able to ask and they absolutely will propel you but it is going to suck getting that first job it's going to be absolutely terrible but if you i think if you go in with that expectation it helps and then maybe you are pleasantly surprised yeah they said it would suck but actually it was easy it only took 11 months of grinding it's not because they're wrong and dumb it's because they were trying to

set me set me up well they're trying to calibrate my expectations they're not way to go at their advice giving they're wise sometimes they're so next level sometimes they give bad advice just to make sure my mental state is in a good place yeah we're gonna do something dumb on purpose yeah it's smart in the past we've said that the reason our advice is dumb is because this is actually a comedy show but now we can say it's because you just haven't fully understood our motivation and the actual outcomes we're going for yep neither do i i'll be honest all right dave what can people do if they want their own questions answered go to the website on the worldwide interweb at soft skills dot audio and click on the ask a question button

thank you so much to everyone who does that we love your questions they just they just roll in it's like you know every time a bell rings an angel gets its wings well every time someone submits that form Jamison's heart beats one extra time there are some morbid implications to that is this extending my life or is this like causing arrhythmia I guess we'll find out eventually extra beats added on to the lifetime of my heart is it using them up faster it's using up your fixed number of beats yeah your subscription only includes a certain number of beats and if you use them early all right we better get out of here thank you for listening

we'll catch you next week