Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 39: Brilliant Jerks and One on Ones

Episode Date: December 12, 2016

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: How do I deal with engineers who are skilled technically but rude and demeaning? What should I talk about in one on ones with my manager or reports? We also cite Questions for our first 1:1, a blog post by Lara Hogan.

It takes more than great code to be a great software engineer. This is Soft Skills Engineering, the podcast, episode number 39. I'm your host, Dave Smith. I am also your host, Jameson Dance. Welcome, everyone. Today's episode is sponsored by our good friends at DevMountain. Yeah, DevMountain is a coding boot camp with locations in Salt Lake City and Provo, and they can help you learn how to program or learn how to program differently

if you already know how to program. so you can check them out at softskills.audio slash devmountain that's right thank you dev mountain so what's new jameson it's freezing it became winter all of a sudden actually in utah i guess you're out it's always cold there huh in boston yeah i think it's cold i don't think it's it's actually not too cold here yet it's been a little chilly but not too bad people keep warning me yeah um that it's coming but i haven't seen it yet so i started snowboarding again this year after a long time of not doing it very much and i went back into the park for the first time in 10 years probably and i i can confirm that i am an old man now oh that's what i discovered

oh knees hurting and not even that i'm just like rolling up to the rails and everyone around me is 16 oh yeah and and i'm old and i'm worried that if i fall down then i won't be able to work anymore and then my family will suffer and all these kids are like i'm gonna go upside down four times like i just want to point out that it only took us 39 episodes for this podcast to devolve into complaining about the weather and old age the height of scintillating discourse That sounds like it's a signal to talk about literally anything else. Maybe we have some questions that we could answer instead. Please, questions, rescue us from small talk.

Okay, I'll read the first one. How do you deal with engineers who are rude and demeaning? This is from a listener named David Suarez. I'd like to know how to deal with someone who doesn't have soft skills at all, but is awesome at hard skills. I have a work partner who knows almost everything, but definitely no one likes him due to his bad habits um and then he goes on to describe some behavior the the ones i want to focus on he screams a lot all the time and makes jokes which i assume

are like mean-spirited jokes it's normal to find him talking about the failures of each person on the team ouch he keeps like a failure list on his whiteboard yeah here's the failures i've seen this week i've man i don't even need this guy because i keep a detailed list of my own failures so constantly turning in your mind and yep like these voices that just tell you all the things you've failed at yeah the thing that will not help our listener is i think the value of talented jerks is generally overrated in most cases and i would not hire them if if i were in charge of building a team and that's the easiest way to deal with this is build a team that works well together because this by in my definition this isn't working well on a team even if your code

is just glorious so create a copy of the universe where your team does not include this person is that what you're suggesting no well not quite i'm saying for other people if you find yourself in a position to potentially hire this person um first of all you need to design an interview process that can detect this yeah second of all i think it would be easier to copy the universe yeah but second of all in my mind it's a pretty strong negative and it would be hard to find a case where technical skill would outweigh the fact that it's a nightmare to work with someone okay so playing devil's advocate here let's say this person cranks out amazing code product that customers love um and but he also ruffles the feathers of some of your teammates what do you do is it worth it

i find it hard to believe that this person uh has enough empathy to build products that users love if if they treat people like this so in my head he's more like a just super talented at just raw problem solving and algorithms and that kind of code he's good at like whiteboard interviews yeah just crushes whiteboard interviews inverts and then reverts binary trees so fast but if let's say this mythical person exists who is both um good enough at people to build something people love and bad enough at people to make them miserable i would not want to be on a team with that person and unless they can carry the team by themselves like they're going to drive people away they will carry the team by themselves because there will be no team to carry yeah well

it's fine because they're they're made up and we can give them all the necessary skills to do it all by themselves yeah so even if you think they're worth it in the pain you deal with the cost to the rest of the team there are people that will quit sooner there are people that will not come to this company because guaranteed this person has a reputation and if you ask your friends about this company like if i work there i'm telling people don't don't come here because this guy's horrible don't come here i'm just trying to find a new job yeah the cost of replacing one engineer in lost productivity due to ramp up can be measured in tens of thousands of dollars so unless this engineer is worth like multiples of that you know because not only is it uh that's

going to happen multiple times right you could lose several co-workers over a person like this sure so unless they're worth that much they're probably economically they don't make sense to have on your team just cold economics so we've given a lot of advice that is helpful for people that aren't this person asking the question what do we tell david so first of all screaming at your co-workers in my opinion is absolutely not okay you need to get a manager involved because that is an unsafe environment and i don't think i mean if you just take a strictly cold look at the situation you could say my co-workers are not productive and they're quitting and this person needs to be talked to and screaming is an acute easy to identify behavior that a manager can sit

down with them and say when you're upset with someone you cannot scream at them in this company and that's a manager's job to deal with that so if they're not dealing with it you need to tell them about it yeah and if you are the manager i'm sorry it's gonna be a hard conversation you're probably gonna get screamed at that's so funny and so sad the other thing is that point about uh him talking about the failures of each person on the team that just sounds so demotivating like yeah yeah i don't know i don't think failure motivates people very well and i don't think rubbing their faces and things that either they're weak in or are i mean they're probably if their weaknesses people have they're definitely self-conscious about them if they're like if

someone made a made a prod oopsie like they don't feel great about that either and and just making a list out of it is is not gonna help anything i wonder why he does that is it like to prove that he's better than them or is it some kind of he doesn't have great social skills from what i'm reading maybe it's like sadistic comedy or something or or is is it his way of like trying to motivate the team or improve the team like look at all this crap we you screwed up and and that's just how he thinks that it could make people better well if that's the case then the conversation with the manager should be a little easier because he has good intentions yeah you can just redirect them i mean no no one's purely evil like there's there's something

behind that yeah i wonder if you can find that as a manager i'd probably ask them like why do you make a list of people's failures and and flaunt that information around like what are you hoping to achieve what outcome do you want and get them to become introspective about it Sure, he's like, I don't know. I just like to I just like to make fun of people. I think it's fun I just like it when my co-workers cry So, um, i've noticed two different mindsets so If you have problems where people are making mistakes on your team, which by the way, welcome to the real world Every team has that

There are two different mindsets of people on your team you can think either a I don't want to get yelled at by my jerk co-workers. So i'm going to try not to make them a mistake or b i want things to work well and i want to do the best for my product my customers my teammates and between those two different mindsets you might get similar behavior but i think you're going to get better outcomes if it's a motivated from a place of wanting to do the right thing instead of being afraid of getting yelled at by an individual so my question if i was talking to david and in real life right now i would ask why haven't you talked to this person like what is it that's stopping you are you afraid because they're a really good contributor in other ways like

they're they produce really good code or a high volume of bug fixes or something like what is it that you have given this person a blank check to be rude for like why is there something about him and and i'm afraid the answer might be well he's been around so long that he knows everything about the product and he knows how all the code works and he's the only person that knows how to navigate this code base that he wrote 10 years ago and i would say to you if that's the answer um just because they've been around long enough and they know all the quirks of the crappy code that doesn't mean they're actually a good engineer and there's a really good chance that if they do get let go that it'll be okay they are they'll they can be replaced i've actually seen that on a team

um i i saw a team where there was someone who was pretty essential to the team and they ended up leaving and that the team was a little bit terrified but what ended up happening was uh without that person to rely on the rest of the team had to just kind of step up and dig into the stuff that person did and it was i think it was healthier overall people were a little bit more responsible instead of just saying like oh this person's got it i'm not going to worry about it they blossomed yeah they did blossom i i think we're a little bit wary of of people that we think are indispensable leaving but i think people are generally pretty capable of stepping up i think so too but they have to be challenged you know yep um the other thing to do just as a coping mechanism

in the meantime you know say you're waiting for action to be taken by a manager um is try not to take it personal this person obviously has some real problems um and it's clear that they aren't just after you but it's easy for me to say that but it's really easy in the moment to feel like you did something wrong and they're yelling at you because of something you did and so try to tell yourself it's not me it's him you know he hates everyone he doesn't just hate me even though he's yelling at me right now it's not my fault sure that's hard to do by the way it's very hard to do but with the help of some very loud heavy metal music it's easier you just got to get yourself a little more pumped up every day for work

cool question situation yeah question oh there's no answer to this one yeah i don't think there's an answer that doesn't involve some pain yeah definitely painful situation definitely i mean besides quit your job and get a new one yep well we'd love to hear for you hear from you david to hear what you did and um what the outcome was so good luck cool do you want to read our next question dave yeah i would like to so this question is about one-on-ones and it goes like this what should i talk about in one-on-ones with my manager or reports so like a two-part question as a manager or as a manager i have never had regular one-on-ones as a manager ever you are you are so low maintenance look at you or i'm just beyond help

um so i'm gonna schedule my one-on-ones with jameson i don't bother um maybe they were scheduled and somebody just went out and partied for an hour another successful one-on-one jameson responded very well you hear like the dinging of a ping of a pinball machine in the background or something jameson managed i had heard about the idea of having weekly one-on-ones but i'd never seen them so i just heard weekly one-on-ones and i was like oh cool that means once a week i will meet with a member of my team so i i did that when i was a manager but you got the math all wrong yeah yeah it it wasn't weekly with every member of the team it was i don't know

it's kind of cute when i look back at it it's like baby's first one-on-one it's it turns out it wasn't about you the whole time james what's uh what's the point of a one-on-one oh boy why do we do them or why should why should you do them i think that in a one-on-one you are more likely to uncover problems that there's no other vehicle for uncovering um problems such as interpersonal problems complaints about culture personal issues things that would impact a person's ability to do good work sometimes don't come up in other forums it's like if you have a good enough team you don't need a product management process or you don't need to have like sprint planning meetings or whatever like the perfect

team will just do great work but most teams aren't perfect and you need some infrastructure around them to help them so one-on-ones are like uh kind of like yeah an infrastructure to help your team be happy and productive i guess cool i like that so what can you ask your manager in a one-on-one ask them how much they make how much do you make but to protect your privacy just express it as a multiplier of my salary so i've had unlike jameson i am high maintenance and i have had regular regularly scheduled one-on-ones for the last five years um although actually before that i did not i don't think i ever had a one-on-one for about 10 years prior but what i have done is i have a google doc where i write down things i want to talk about with my manager and i just

have this running list and i check them off as we talk about them and so every every one-on-one is different you know i just write down the things that come up come to mind during the week or during the month and then when we sit down together i just go through the list with them so um that can be anything it's pretty much like anything but a status report basically you know i mean there are other forms for that so i'm trying to think of some examples but um stuff like hey uh i noticed that our team has low velocity right now what do you think's going on or um i'm having a hard time focusing can you help can you coach me or i want to level up in this area what do you recommend or i work with a co-worker who screams all the time and points out

how wrong everyone is that is a that is an excellent topic for a one-on-one yeah um or uh i heard this acronym what does it mean or how does the organization work like how is it how are we organized um is the company getting purchased that kind of question anyway those are the things i asked except recently i had an epiphany um for for two years i was a manager and i did one-on-ones um i probably did a hundred or so in over the course of two years. And probably more than that, actually. But one of the things that people rarely if ever asked was, what can I do to contribute more to my team? Or what more does the company need from me? Or who can I help on the team? Who needs help from me? And as a

manager, those are wonderful questions. I would love to have someone ask me those questions, because it shows that you are ready to take on more and to be more focused on what is needed rather than what you need. Now, obviously people have needs and I'm not trying to discount that. I've got to make sure your needs are met. But if you want to really move up

and get more responsibility and ultimately be paid more, you should be looking for opportunities to serve your company and your team in ways that they need. Yeah. It's like John F. Kennedy. ask not what your country can do for you how do you like my jfk is it better now because you live

in boston yeah oh yeah improve your kennedy impression everyone in this city sounds like diamond joe quimby from the simpsons you just ask your manager what more can i do for the company and they're like well you can take a pay cut it'll be great yeah you can work more hours for less money um one thought i had while you were talking is uh more about the purpose of one-on-ones is it feels like an investment in people in in helping them develop and i i mean do you do you feel like you grew as an employee as a developer as a team lead manager because of your one-on-ones as a manager yeah you know i i had such bad vision i was always just thinking so tactically like hey this needs to get done or you know this i need approval for this or i never really sat

back and asked the big hard questions you know yeah yeah but but still don't you feel like the ability to regularly meet with your manager and discuss stuff with them one-on-one helped you grow and improve in some way even even if you were talking about tactical things growth and improvement i don't know i don't know i was so boots on the ground okay because to me when you say for the last five years i've had one-on-one meetings with my manager i don't know how many hundreds of hours of time that is with them investing in you and helping you answer your questions or help you with your concerns like yeah that feels pretty valuable especially if you're hoping to have people grow inside your company yeah it was i should i probably am having a hard

time remembering are you doing one of those dave things when you're like i never do that that never happens secretly it does i i certainly got coaching in these sessions sometimes like i remember there were several instances where i'd say hey i'm having this conflict with someone or i'm unable to come to an agreement on something and i would ask for help and my manager would walk me through it and those were always beneficial um always and i think that uh yeah for me that was they were great. Yeah. So that's kind of what you would do as a managee. What if you are the manager? I always started mine out with, how are you? Yeah, that's a pretty solid way to start out a lot of English sentences, English paragraphs.

Well, you'd be amazed. I mean, you can start with, how are you? And you could talk for an hour. Yeah. You know, or did you, did you find that there were some people that you had to put more effort in to draw out oh yeah absolutely because i imagine some people they would just talk and you wouldn't need to do much yeah just sit back and but some people would say like fine yeah exactly just look at you and then you'd be like what are you working on and they're like didn't we just have stand-up this morning yeah yeah definitely some people were more chatty than others did you have any goals besides just an open-ended conversation regularly with people was there some purpose you were trying to

accomplish i didn't have any goals that like um were that that spanned all the people in my organization instead i i actually had a another document where i had written everybody's name down and as i thought about them or saw something i would make notes by their name about things that i wanted to talk about with them in my one-on-one and so that would guide the conversation too sometimes sure that's a really good idea i read a blog post that i'm gonna refer to because again i've never seen this done except for when i did it when i was a moron um baby baby's first one-on-one baby's first one-on-ones yeah so laura hogan is an engineering manager and she wrote a blog post uh it's called questions for our first one-on-one and surprise surprise that's what it contains

um and some of it is like how can i tell when you're unhappy and how can i help i thought that was insightful really insightful yeah like asking someone how you can tell when they're unhappy i'll bet a lot of people haven't even thought about that question yeah it's awesome and i think if you are if you enjoy working with people that might be something you could figure out for a lot of people but some people are just enigmas and yeah it's really hard to tell yeah uh there's some about feedback and what's the best way to give feedback and then there's a lot of stuff about how to support people in their goals like what are your career goals how can i help you as a manager um what do you want from your peers and and that kind of stuff and i'll link it in the show notes

but this was a good read for me just what's what what do you what do you do in a one-on-one if you've never done one or you just want an overview of an experienced person how they would do it yeah i think that uh the effectiveness of your one-on-one will oftentimes be influenced by how much structure your company has organizationally and my last company we were pretty loose with things like uh promotions and like um career development and so as a result our one-on-ones my one-on-ones tended to focus on the individual's well-being and other tactical things but not really much except in some cases not really much on like specific vectors that they can follow for career growth and progression whereas my current company is quite different

there's there are very clear guidelines for career growth and progression in the company and so in our in my one-on-ones i've been able to talk about those like they're super concrete but even so if the path to career growth is kind of fuzzy at your company i think it's still your manager's job to have an idea of just like skills growth which is separate from yeah career growth i think your manager should definitely have some idea of things that they think you're good at and things that they think you could improve at and telling constructive criticism is kind of hard to push on to people so that's a really good question i think to ask in in a managee one-on-one like what do you think i could improve at yeah they might be reluctant to just like tap you on the

shoulder and be like hey i've made this list of stuff you're bad at but if you ask they might give it yeah yeah and or even if they're just like i don't know um i think it's fair to challenge them and say like you have perspective that i don't you you see everyone on the team in a different way and like i i'd love it if you could pay attention and come up with some stuff yeah yeah and you might be surprised that your manager just doesn't actually know depending on the way your team is structured like it could be that they don't really observe you that much directly and so they can't give too much guidance but along those same lines i by the way i really like that question and another question that's on the other side of the same coin is ask your

manager what they think your strengths are like what you know how what are the value what is the value that i bring to this team how do i benefit it and and then help me to use those strengths more you know yeah that's called strengths coaching by the way and i had a i had a great coaching session about two years ago oh really that's like a real thing with the name yeah i think they call it strengths assessment and then strengths something um basically it's the opposite of identifying your weaknesses and trying to mitigate them instead you identify what you're good at and then try to uh utilize them to the fullest see i would have thought you would just record someone saying them and then just carry it around in your pocket all the time playing on a

loop so you just hear someone telling you how amazing you are like positive reinforcement all day yeah you can turn that on after your co-worker gets finished yelling at you you just know you have it going at the same time and you bump it up you're like it's like two sine waves that cancel each other out you made this query wrong and it dropped all the data and you're like i can't hear you because my manager told me that i have excellent fashion sense and jameson you are the best semicolon writer you're like ah basking the glow your taste in mechanical keyboards is unparalleled just adds some spice to the office cool anything else you want to talk about on this issue

not really um just sounds like we don't have a ton of experience with this one sounds like we managed to talk about it for a few minutes without knowing what we're talking about i think maybe what what i've discovered well what i discovered about jameson is that he doesn't really do this and what i discovered about myself is that even though i've done it a lot i didn't really do it very intentionally no i think the the list thing is pretty intentional oh well yeah but it's so tactical it's just like oh i noticed this i need to talk to them about it it wasn't like help this engineer blossom into a senior amazing engineer you know yeah i think that uh i sometimes have like strategy envy where i look at people that are able to like someone

somewhere has written an amazing blog post i'm sure about like the broad strategic role of one on ones and their grand unified plan yeah and i'll read that thing and be like that's amazing that person's so smart and it works so well but i think tactics are really valuable in practice and i i don't know if it'd be i don't know maybe i'll maybe i'll look up someone that you manage and ask them how their one-on-ones work because i bet i bet they liked them a lot i'm sure they enjoyed them but they probably just weren't that beneficial really i don't know i just there are people at my last company who i would look at and go that person has vision and they think big and strategically and all i can ever do is like deal with the day-to-day issues and i was pretty good

at that don't get me wrong like i was really good at you know keeping all the juggling balls in the air and keeping all the plates spinning and other metaphors that involve keeping stuff in the air yeah but but i never i was never like super good at strategic vision and just being like all right the next the next like evolutionary leap for this team is here you know yeah i think that stuff i love reading it and it like inspires me and i'm envious of people that have it and i'm also sometimes skeptical about its practical effect on the world or its existence in real world yeah it's existence beyond words that people say that make them sound smart in blog posts yeah all right so i think you're great dave oh i'm glad we had this one-on-one together

yeah me too it's been i think you're good at podcasting thank you i think you tolerate me very well you're exceptionally patient i love it well jameson where can people go if they want to ask us a question or connect with us they can follow us on twitter we're at soft skills eng you can also go to soft skills.audio which is our website it has a link to a form where you can ask a question there if you're interested in giving some more detail or you just don't want to use twitter and they can also find all our past episodes there um they can also go to soft skills.audio slash dev mountain to visit our beloved sponsor dev mountain yep you can find out more info about the programs they offer and the the timelines and all that stuff there if you

want to get into ios development ux design or web development we recommend checking out dev mountain they have 12-week courses and they're super cool you know how some fast food restaurants have a secret menu um oh yeah i've heard about that like in and out yeah you can ask for animal style i wonder if dev mountain has like the secret menu where you're like i'm here for the piano course and they're like oh right this way you should ask them that 12-week piano boot camp who knows maybe it'll work out yeah go go do that go to go to dev mountain ask for the piano course ask for ios animal style great all right we'll catch you next week see ya