Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 387: No juniors and manager forced to return to office

Episode Date: December 18, 2023

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Hello Dave and Jamison, I wanted to say thank you for your podcast. It’s been a great wealth of information and comic relief. Can we bring back the guitar intros? I work in the technology arm of a large corporation. There are no younger engineers. I am one of the youngest at just shy of 30 (my first tech job after going back to school). I receive praise for my eagerness to learn and grow and how much I try to engage with the org. I feel like if we hired more Junior engineers it would both increase the engagement of the org and give senior engineers more of a sense of purpose to pass the torch. One of my favorite engineers from whom I get the best advice has been here for over 20 years and they are awesome! I also get great advice from people on my team but some of them are cruising or in a “couple years till retirement” mode. Should I try to convince management to hire more junior engineers? Is there anything I can do to relate more to older org members? Hi Dave and Jamison! I’m an engineering manager tasked with getting the team back to an open office (hybrid). My team works very well remotely, with the occasional in-person meetup. I believe that in terms of productivity, work-life balance, engagement, and turnover, RTO will negatively impact the team. I’m torn between representing what I feel is good for the team and supporting the company’s decision. I’ve already expressed my concerns with management, and the overall sentiment seems to be that anyone who doesn’t like it can find a new job. Aside from this, I like my job, team and company and don’t want to quit over this. Any tips on finding a balance representing team needs and implementing higher-up direction?

it takes more than sitting at a private slack channel huddle on your own just to look busy to be a great engineer this is soft skills engineering episode 387 i'm your host dave smith i'm your host jamison dance soft skills engineering is a weekly advice podcast for software developers who are trying to be productive working from home but also want to make sure they never look like they're not working working from home i'm never not working the working from home story yes coming to theaters next year yeah that's funny because that's both that's a failure mode in both ways you can actually never not be working if you work from home and then there's also this

suspicion of what if they're not working what if they're doing their laundry yeah yeah And that's what the private Slack channel is for. That's right. I wonder, can you change your status icon? Because you have status icons in Slack. Can you change that to the headphones? Then it just looks like you're in a huddle. I bet you can.

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forget those korean skincare routines the true secret is actually if you watched our youtube videos you know that well no i don't donate to our maybe that's why my skin could use some work because i've been thinking about our patreon yeah i've been thinking i need to donate yeah well we better ask and answer some questions do you want to read our first one dave yes i do this comes from an anonymous listener who says hello dave and james and i just want to say thank you for your podcast it's been a great wealth of information and comic relief can we bring back the guitar intros oh there's a deep cut oh i did play guitar yesterday i did my once a year we have a family christmas party and that was also the last time i played last year so i'm fresh it's

been only one day instead of 364 days since i last played guitar oh yeah i don't even remember which episode that was but i'm pretty sure it was double digits yeah long time ago okay let me continue i work in the technology arm of a large corporation there are no younger engineers i am one of the youngest that's at just shy of 30 my first tech job after going back to school i receive praise for my eagerness to learn and grow and how much i try to engage with the org i feel like if we hired more junior engineers it would both increase the engagement of the org and give senior engineers more of a sense of purpose to pass the torch one of my favorite engineers from whom i get the best advice has been here for over 20 years and they are awesome

i also get great advice from people on my team but some of my some of them are cruising or quote in a couple years till retirement mode should i try to convince management to hire more junior engineers is there anything i can do to relate more to older org members this is so interesting because at my first full-time job 30 would have been by far the oldest person on the engineering team times times change young young is relative maybe these people are actually those same people you worked with and now they're all close to retirement yeah just like me yeah cruising in a couple years till retirement mode couple dozen years to retirement i mean theoretically isn't that the pitch for working at a startup and getting equity is like you're

actually only a couple years till retirement because this is going to go huge and then it's going to be worth a ton and then you can yeah you can you can chill you can chill with your twenty thousand dollar payout from your stock options yep you can retire from your car payment for one year you can buy part of a honda civic congratulations oh yeah so i mean should you bring junior engineers into you know it's interesting because james you're saying that i guess your company was composed of nothing but junior engineers and i mean we did not think of ourselves we were we were arrogant arrogant prodigies yes you were elite yes i had the i had a similar experience one of my first jobs out of college which i was at for seven years

and we hired almost exclusively new hire meaning new to the industry hires like new grads i guess you would call them junior engineers the name never even occurred to us and boy was it a magical a wonderful time we had a couple of older you know more experienced people in the office who were kind of guiding and directing and you know interfacing with the customer and kind of being the the adult supervision in the room but everyone else was like less than five years of experience less than 10 years of experience and we just did fantastic work and and boy was it fun so i'm thinking like let's just pitch to management to let go of all the more experienced people and replace them with people that know how everything works let them all go create a squad of

elite prodigies yes who are just inexperienced enough to know how bad of an idea this is or do not know so they don't know and then just run it put them to work you know everyone that's older is always wrong about stuff good thing we're here to be right about stuff yeah and there's twice as many of us because you can afford that many yeah this is this is interesting because i think i've gone on the record saying i love working with a mix of experience levels on a team because there is some excitement and enthusiasm that comes from folks earlier in their career that are still learning yeah there's there's way more they i don't know actually i'm about to say lies i was gonna say there's way more they don't know than that they know but that's true about everybody

but like they're so conscious of how much there is to learn and are excited about it and diving into new things and but it's very common to work at places that say we only hire senior engineers because we don't want to deal with the headache and the overhead of like training and and we just want people that know how to get the work done and we don't worry about teaching anyone how to do the work and i do think there's you can certainly hire junior engineers that need a ton of hand-holding and are are quite long bets to pay off productivity wise but you can also hire people that are very junior but are very good at pulling in the information they need and it might not require as much hand-holding but still bring all that energy and excitement and enthusiasm so

i guess i'm kind of like agreeing with you and disagreeing with management a little bit it also depends on the size of your company if you have like three engineers and then you hire a junior then a quarter of your engineering team is junior and maybe that's the wrong ratio for you maybe you want a more senior team overall but it sounds like this is a big company lots of engineers and you should be able to absorb some excitement and enthusiasm and cheaper salaries yeah that's how you pitch it to management yep my my advice has always been do hire whatever level i happen to be at the time and it's so weird because when i was um you know when i was inexperienced and fresh out of college

and getting started i was always pushing well of course we should hire new grads they're the best they know what they're doing they're high energy i mean look at all these people were so successful and now now they haven't learned any bad habits they've only learned the good stuff so far only good stuff and now that i'm literally 20 years displaced from that time i'm like you should only hire really seasoned experienced engineers i would rather have two experienced engineers than five junior engineers and i would rather pay my experienced engineers several times as much as the what i would pay the junior engineers exactly and shower them with praises and yes headpats and all kinds of good stuff uh it is weird how my advice has evolved like that because

now i really do i look back on those times when i was fresh out of school and i think that was such a fluke that would never i could never replicate that that'll never work again but i don't think that's right i i just i i can't believe that numerically that that we just got that we were just this one in a million chance and had all this success. Because we literally hired like 50, somewhere like 25 to 50 software engineers out of college and just had enormous success at that company. But I don't even know if we did things well, because as I look back and I think about- Yeah, how would you know? Yeah, exactly. It was the most successful software

company you've ever been at that time. Yeah. I think at the end of the day, what i really know objectively is i had a ton of fun did we deliver our products like as fast as we could have with a more senior team i don't know did we have good solid architectural guidance and good principle good software development principles i don't know but boy did we have a lot of fun yeah yeah i i do love the the focus on eagerness to learn and engage with the org and one of the things that comes with experience can be a certain amount of cynicism which you may have identified as cruising or a couple years until retirement mode and if you've seen enough like mind-bending new vision presentations from a new senior management hire you're going to kind of like

they're going to kind of lump together you know it's going to get tough to rally the troops and get pumped about this new move to the cloud or whatever the thing is that that they're super excited about but juniors are more easily pumped by that because they haven't they haven't bumped up against the dissonance between reality and and eloquent speeches in company meetings yet as much so there's there's some of that that it can bring more excitement and enthusiasm and you can also rush headlong into dumb things more easily yeah is that true i don't know maybe i i think if you're more experienced you you i'm trying this out i'm doing the thing where i say something and see if i feel like it's true after i said it maybe you you fail more by avoiding

rushing into things and and so you miss out by being overly cautious more but you're unlikely to just like go all in on some brand new thing as recklessly that might turn out well or might be a failure because you've learned caution. Does that feel true? I mean, it feels like it should be true. Like, you know, as a senior, more experienced developer,

I don't make some of the bad decisions that ultimately have a multiplicative effect on productivity loss. You know, it's one thing to say, well, I showed up at a job and I'm doing my job and I'm a junior engineer and I made a bunch of mistakes and whatever, and it was just my time wasted.

But it's another thing entirely when a more senior influential engineer makes a bad decision and then 10 developers go down the wrong path as a result and they have to backtrack. But there's some amount of risk aversion involved in that. And so maybe you don't make some of the good decisions and kind of smooth out a little bit,

lower lows and lower highs also. I don't know. I guess I'm still making the same argument though. I don't know. I'm agreeing with you. You already agree. That's why you wrote this question. How do you do it? Well, how do you actually come and get the recruitment process going to bring in junior engineers? Yeah. Well, this is one of the easiest management cells ever. It's like, hey, well, okay.

So first of all, you need to identify a need that is going to be filled by your proposed strategy of hiring younger developers. And one such need is, look, we've got a few engineers who are on the last few years until retirement. And if we don't have a strategy to replace them now, we're going to replace them with people who don't have time to ramp up. And given that we know this is coming, let's backfill them with people who are inexpensive relative to their salaries and get them ramping now so that they can have the benefit of rubbing shoulders with these people before they exit the building. That sounds like a great, wise, and kind of benevolent strategy,

I have a different strategy, which is, you know how you get promoted at big companies based on the number of people that report to you? What if you could have more people that reported to you for less money? Ooh. Does this strategy involve letting some people go? Well, okay, I guess if you could.

I'm just more imagining like you have some fixed amount of budget for for headcount to to hire yes and what if that's more people so number go up and then yes so you go to management and say you can make your number go up yeah yeah which that could work does unfortunately motivate behavior at some places yes although i think that that that um so this this was something i observed when i worked at a big tech co as well i believe that that meme or that pattern has actually fallen out of favor over the oh yeah number number do not go up as much now that's true number go down number number go down or it's a different number go up because yeah you know it's like revenue go up headcount go down

yeah yeah margins go up yeah i think that that makes a lot of sense i i love what you said about identifying a need because they're if you say listen i'm lonely because i'm the youngest person here by far they will not that is not a convincing business case because it is not it's not yeah their job to provide you companionship at work that is similar to your own age but yeah i think if you can if you can identify do you have some big new project coming up do you have do you do you see there's all these engineers that could be even more efficient because they're very experienced and could be if they have more folks to dispense their wisdom to then maybe

that's that's a better use of their time somehow something something positive for the company yeah i mean there's all kinds of ways to do this you can also say look there's just natural attrition that happens the next time there's attrition can we please replace them with more junior developers and then make your business case and i think your sound business case is just a few bullets here one is we can reduce costs on the salaries two we can we can have a more engaged workforce both from our senior and junior developers and three you have to have a third bullet because every use case every business case looks better with three bullets that one's up to you yeah we don't want to completely disengage you from this process it is i love what you said

about a more engaged senior engineering group as well because it is it is exciting to be around people that are really excited it's it's fun it's fun to look at software with fresh new eyes and And you kind of re-realize how cool all this stuff is. Or you can, if you're helping someone else understand it. All right. Have we answered the question? I think so. Good luck on your great adventure, your great business influencing strategy process here.

Actually, I have great news, which is if you wait long enough, this problem will go away. Because you will become more senior. And then you'll be surrounded by people. And then you'll be like, we should not hire junior developers. yeah all right should i read our next question dave go for it this is from an anonymous listener who says hi dave and jameson i'm an engineering manager tasked with getting the team back to an open office hybrid my team works very well remotely with an occasional in-person meetup i believe that in terms of productivity work-life balance engagement and turnover

return to office will negatively impact the team i'm torn between what representing what i feel is good for the team and supporting the company's decision. I've already expressed my concerns with management and the overall sentiment seems to be that anyone who doesn't like it can find a new job. Aside from this, I like my job, team, and company and don't want to quit over this. Any tips on finding a balance representing team needs and implementing higher up direction? Yes. This is becoming a more and more common theme that I hear. The theme is return to office or find a new job, which employers are empowered to do by a hiring market that is finally favorable to employers and not employees for the first time in approximately 20 years in software engineering.

Yeah. Yeah. It's a lot easier to say you don't like it, pack up when you're not as worried about them packing up. Yeah, exactly. And let me just tell you right now, packing up and finding a new job, not easy, not easy at all, even for an experienced engineer. Anecdotally, I am hiring and it's the first time i've been hiring since the bottom is i don't know bottom has fallen i was too dramatic but since the market has shifted for software engineering and we haven't finished it yet so i guess still time to tell how it'll turn out but it seems so far like there's much more inbound interest from much more oh yeah quality folks and and i'm spending a lot less time actively begging people to to apply yes exactly so yeah it is like this threat of

uh go find a new job it's very real and very motivating rough okay so how what do you do if your managers above you you're a team manager and your managers are telling you company policies return to office it says hybrid so i'm assuming it's not every day of the week but you got to return to office regularly how do you do that if you don't actually believe in it this is an interesting thing that comes up in engineering management more so than as an ic and i i i saw this thing from charity majors i feel like she's one of the people we quote a lot on the podcast i can't remember the source but i remember she said it about this difference between ic and management where if a company does something you think is dumb and horrible as an ic you can kind

of like roll your eyes at it and drag your feet and ignore it and i don't know just pretend like like you can grumble about it and and sort of be against the company on it and still just do your job and that's much harder to do as a manager because part of your job is representing the company to other people yes it's a lot harder to say like oh boy i know we all hate this policy but i'm judging your performance and can impact your salary based on whether you comply to it or not and yeah it sort of undermines like it's it's a it can be a mistake to say oof i don't like it but we got to do this thing and i'm gonna make you all do it you know and position yourself as like i'm kind of on your side but i'm actually not on your side because

yeah it's got approach to management yeah yeah like oh doesn't it suck that you're gonna do this thing i tell you to do yeah we're together in this uh even though i'm forced i'm the one forcing you to do it yeah so it is this is a lot tougher if you're an ic it's a lot easier to just grumble about it and remember that question we had a few months ago that was somebody who just said oh yeah i'll come in and then just never just didn't yeah that's way easier to do as an ic than to do with your whole team 100 yeah it's really hard i mean i guess you're gonna you're gonna have to decide how much you are able to change your mind on this policy. Or how much you're willing to be a two-faced liar about your true beliefs. Because there's not really a lot of room in between here.

If you start undermining your company's leadership by saying, I don't support this policy, but I'm doing it because I'm being forced, that is probably ultimately going to leave you with another company because i just there's only so long that management will tolerate that kind of foot soldier in their management hierarchy i mean it is easier to do the i guess the the lower down in the in the is it i don't know maybe it's not you could probably get away with it as a just a single team manager not not a director level you know yeah you could probably get away but if management finds out that you are infecting your team with this mind virus that you don't support the policies of the company, if you consider a company like an organism, their

immune system will come after you to protect the overall organization. Yeah. Eventually, one way or another, that's just not going to work out well because you are not a functioning organ in the body and you need to be ejected. Yeah. I'm not saying that's how I would go about it in my organization, but I'm saying that that is ultimately what's going to happen. And maybe for this policy, it's okay.

hey, maybe there's another one that stacks up against you. And then that's the feather that, you know, the straw that breaks the camel's back. Yeah. I don't know. But it's tough. So, I mean, one way that you can deal with this is you could say, I actually am going to change my mind about return to office. You know, give it an honest look and see if you can come to a place where you simultaneously believe in management's direction and feel that it's better for your team and for you. And I got to say, there are some pretty compelling arguments for it. Now, we've said hybrid here, and I actually think it's pretty hard to argue against a hybrid in-office situation for the most part. Teams really do function better when they have some in-person time. Now,

this person said they already have some occasional in-person time. So maybe the argument here is that that's enough. And maybe that's what you take back to leadership to say, look, here's the policy that I think would be best. It's not once a week, it's once every three weeks or something like that. Maybe what you could do, so maybe if you have some kind of aggregate number you're trying to hit, like the team needs to be on average in office once a week, then you need to identify some sacrificial individuals on your team who will come in every day and then no one else comes in ever and you maintain that aggregate we are on average in office once a week because so-and-so comes in every day because they live next to the office it's a numbers game yes yes

i there is on average someone in the office once a week yeah i'm having a tough time removing my personal preference from this and answering it as is because i i think i would be in the same position of like kind of rolling my eyes at the mandate to return to the office what would i do return to office will negatively impact the team so it sounds like you've already expressed concerns to management anyone who doesn't like it can find a new job i mean maybe i would try again to point out here are the specific people that i i believe are likely to quit if we if we make them come back to the office and and so make the uh if if the concern is a general like my team will be less happy versus we will lose these four engineers on the team that might be easier to weigh against

but i do think the likelihood if if they're pushing this hard it's unlikely that they will decree, okay, you get a special exception. Because probably you're not alone. I'm sure there are other managers in a similar boat who feel like this kind of sucks and is going to hurt my team. And it's sort of like a, if you give a mouse a cookie situation where they start giving out exceptions, then suddenly everyone has a special exception and then they're not returning to office. And they have some reason for wanting to do it. So they actually want that to happen. i i do think i like your suggestion dave another suggestion is just like see how i i mean it depends on how deceptive you have to be to not comply with this like is there like a report you

have to fill out or are they is someone going to walk around and check are they going to ask you are they just going to say hey make sure you're emphasizing return to office and you can say like yep i did it it's it's emphasized why do i emphasize it yes back to work because i agree that if you are actively disobeying that will stick out more and will cause you problems and at some point if someone asks you to do a thing and they pay you money and you say no then they will not pay you money to do that thing anymore yep I think the fact that this team is already coming in person into the office occasionally makes this a lot easier than any other kind of situation. So it says the occasional in-person meetup.

I wonder if it's the situation where some people moved away or, you know, like sort of the assumption that, oh, we're remote forever. And now, like I've heard of companies saying, okay, you have to live near an office again. Yeah, you might be right. I was assuming here that the occasional in-person meetup meant that they were getting together and not having to fly in and get a hotel, you know? Yeah. Yeah. And that's the point I wanted to make is that that makes it much more complicated. Like, I have a good friend who actually joined one of these big tech companies before the pandemic as a remote employee.

And now the post-pandemic policies are everyone returns to office. And they're just casting a huge net. Yeah. And not giving any latitude for people who actually joined pre-pandemic and were already remote. And now this person is left going, oh, crap, there is no office near me. Yeah. You know, and I'm not going to uproot my family and move across the country to go work this job. So what do I do?

And they're basically saying, well, it's actually really scary because basically it's like you're insubordinate if you don't come to an office by X date. And that means that we're going to terminate you without and you won't be eligible for severance. Oh, no. it's like the worst kind of layoff because yeah it's like you're going to be fired with cause it's like well you just didn't show up to work yeah you know it's like it's like no one on my team lives in this city yeah like what am i supposed to do ah anyway this is a really tricky situation but it's like like so many things with the pandemic we made a bunch of changes and at the time most of them were actually really favorable for software developers yeah you know

at least for people who like to work remotely which is a lot of software developers and now we're having to pay the piper back a little bit and and i believe we're never going to go back to full in office like i think that we will have forever more software engineers will have a more flexible hybrid approach but now you're being pulled back if your team is already in person i'm like look just suck it up and sorry i didn't mean to say in person i meant to say if your team is already in the area and you're talking about bringing them back say once a week i'm like look this is not this is not a hill i would be worth that i would be willing to die on with my career reputation and job at this company i would just bring it bring them in if you're

gonna have to disrupt a bunch of lives i would man i mean i'd probably go to leadership and just be like hey look here's the situation i've got seven people who are gonna have to relocate their families for this. Are you sure you want to make them do that? And just get it there. And then I think you probably could play the Michael Scott role a little bit here and say, look, I'm on your side. I don't want to force you to do this, but this is company policy. I've fought for you as best I can. They've said, no, I'm sorry. You're going to have to be in person once a week. If you can make that work, great. I'd love to have you stay on the team and if you can't this management team is going to let you go yeah you know and i think

that kind of that kind of keep that skirts the i don't know it kind of lets you keep one foot on both sides of the fence of i'm a corporate salary man who just does what i'm told and i enforce policy on you but sheesh do i feel bad about it yeah but right exactly but it's like this is out of my hands and at the end of the day everyone knows that there are certain things that are out your hands and so yeah ah i'm thinking about what you said at the beginning about some of the benefits of it and i'm wondering if you can if it's like a once a week everybody comes in on the same day you can make that a different type of working day than normal like you you can do things when everyone is in person that you would not be able to do alone so why don't you just only do

those things that day you know like go out to lunch together do a bunch of whiteboarding kind of like exciting brainstorming stuff you know like the the fun kind of high energy rapid back and forth stuff that yes that in person is really good at this is why i'm a fan of hybrid approaches and why for my teams i'm only hiring in nexuses where we already have people you know who they can actually get together regularly because i find that once a week is a fantastic in-person cadence for engineering teams there's so much i come into the office that one day a week when my team is all together in person and there is so much collaboration so much in person just back and forth like and a lot of relationship building you know i see people actually connecting with

people and i think that's also really valuable for a team so that's kind of where i just you know not that anyone asked but that's kind of where i fall yeah on the opinion of of in person versus remote yeah well have we answered the question i think so good luck i would love to hear how this turns out. This is very, very pertinent to the moment. Yeah. A lot of people in that situation. Best of luck. Tricky, tricky spot. Dave, what can people do if they want their own questions answered? Go over to softskills.audio and click the ask a question. Well, I just merged click and ask and realized we need a new verb in English. It's a klisk. It's the klisk, the ask a question button. Wait, klisk the button. It's already implied that you're going to ask a

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we can make this language we're basically the shakespeare of user interface terms yeah or the 1984 one or the other exactly alright thank you for listening we'll catch you next week