Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 391: Post-staff and direct or a jerk

Episode Date: January 15, 2024

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Hey guys! I’m a young engineer in a specialized area of infrastructure. I’m pretty good at what I do, and I’ve been through some leadership development programs, so I’ve advanced to a “Staff” role quickly, just based on observing the age of my peers. Tech titles are completely mysterious to me, so I’m wondering - how much “up” is there from where I am? What’s the top of the IC ladder? Do ICs ever become executives? The idea of being a manager and sitting in 1:1s for hours sounds awful to me, so I’m not excited about that side, but I’ve heard, allegedly, that there is room on the IC side for promotion as well. I’m a goal setter, and I kinda feel like I’ve hit a ceiling, so I don’t know where to set my target anymore. I don’t even know that I care about titles that much, but I very much like the pay raises that accompany them. Thanks! Johnny Droptbales: How do I tell if my manager is a direct communicator or a jerk? Should I trust my gut on this (he’s a jerk)? I’ve been working with my manager for a year now. He’s fairly fluent in English, educated, and keeps up with broad knowledge of our team/domain. He often connects different aspects of our work to discover discrepancies, bugs, and interesting ideas. I’m trying to wrap my head around his communication style. Here are a few examples that stand out: I refused to take on a new small project because I was concerned about meeting the deadline on my high-priority solo project. He gave me feedback that I missed an opportunity to demonstrate context-switching skills, which would look good for a promotion. I responded with my own reasoning, but he wasn’t interested and just moved on to the next topic. He insisted on a new weekly requirement for our on-call pager rotation, which is to come up with one idea to improve the experience. When I asked why asking for help on a problem wouldn’t be enough, he answered that he expected his engineers to have been hired for their critical thinking and leadership skills, and they should be able to demonstrate those. Recently he’s been leading weekly meetings to improve the on-call experience. He tends to ask very direct questions – we’ll look at a bug ticket, and he asks, “What is the root cause?” “Why do we do this?” “What are your ideas to solve this?” When pressed, he insisted this was a brainstorming sort of conversation, as opposed to a Q&A.

it takes more than reassigning pager duty rotations to a junior engineer during the holidays to be a great engineer this is soft skills engineering episode 391 i am your host dave smith i am your host jameson dance soft skills engineering is a weekly advice podcast for software engineers who want to get out of pager duty rotations it's a little christmas gift for you the gift of on call don't worry our alarms never go off on holiday yeah have you ever wanted to demonstrate more accountability and ownership have you ever wished to wake up in the middle of the night or get out of that important family event that you're enjoying to go stare at your computer are you getting too much sleep i hope you don't actually do that that'd be brutal

but in my experience the on-call rotate maybe i'm just lucky i don't know the on-call rotations i've been on have been almost like overly willing for people to take other people's shifts which is good because you can always find someone to help it's like everyone everyone wants to help out someone else so sometimes you feel like i don't know i don't have any words there edit that out i guess everyone wants to help out someone else dave i want to thank our patrons all right so i will go for it thank you so much to chase w norton type here.dev never is not just a crater on mars flamingo emoji 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 kent c dodds jenny kim

owens charlotte craig motlin the stochastic parrot patreon.com we're hiring ira chan monkey face emoji jonathan king webtel awesome intent testing will angel ragnar travis braden canes john grant the unsettling nature of not knowing and nick cantar thank you we appreciate your support to the amount that we say words every week if you want to join them you can go to soft skills.audio click support us on patreon and then do what it says there you can get an invite to our slack team you can get yourself or it you know what it can be someone else you can shout out someone else maybe you want to shout out a world leader from the 1700s for some reason right shine the light on their accomplishments yes go for it you know who doesn't get enough credit world

leaders you know the best way to give them that credit an obscure little podcast with four listeners yes thank you we appreciate it let's get to our questions all right i'll read our first one this comes from an anonymous listener who says hey guys i am a young engineer in a specialized area of infrastructure i'm pretty good at what i do and i've been through some leadership development program, so I advanced to a staff role quickly, just based on observing the age of my peers. Tech titles are completely mysterious to me, so I'm wondering how much up is there from where I am? What's the top of the individual contributor ladder? Do ICs ever become executives? The idea of being a manager and sitting in one-on-ones for hours sounds awful to me,

so I'm not excited about that side, but I've heard, allegedly, that there is room on the IC side for promotion as well i'm a goal setter and i kind of feel like i've hit a ceiling so i don't know where to set my target anymore i don't even know that i care about titles that much but i very much like the pay raises that accompany them thanks yeah what do you do once you've got your staff once you've got your staff of staff of levels i don't know if you had the same image but when you said when you got your staff i immediately thought of a wizard staff in your hand yeah it's got an orb on the top clearly a lot of people think the staff word here means you know like personnel but i choose to believe that it's what you described jameson i like the

idea of a commemorative staff you can point it at people and they have to do it's more like it points at you when anything goes wrong yeah the staff then the staff starts to glow like oh no there's a critical incident that no one knows how to fix it's your fault the staff is hooked up to pager duty you thought you were it's like the monkey's paw it's like this staff you thought was going to be this powerful thing but really all it does is light up to say you made a mistake an executive is angry the staff is glowing oh no sits next to your bed at night and wakes you up by glowing buzzing yeah what's the top of the icy ladder so it's at at very large companies you'll often have principal and distinguished are kind of the two

levels i've i've seen or titles i've seen above staff and sometimes they get mixed so there's like distinguished staff and distinguished principal and i don't know if there's a standard around that or not oh well i mean we definitely know one thing there's no standard anything when it comes to levels and titles that's true that's fair probably the standard is some number it's probably like a p7 or something i don't know i've seen that more common across companies that they have numbers that correspond to levels than the titles correspond to the same yeah levels we were talking about before the show when we read this question we realized we we've definitely touched on the topic of levels and titles over the years but but kind of indirectly so we wanted

to take a show today and just really dedicate it to all the different levels we've seen and what your career ladder might look like in this case as an individual contributor and that's probably where we'll keep it today and we've already talked about the staff level but that that that level usually comes after some other levels that you get to and there are more beyond it but we got to put a huge disclaimer on this episode. And that is that companies do leveling so differently from company to company. So it's not surprising to hear that this listener thinks that leveling and titles are a mystery. That's actually by design. It keeps you in the dark and it makes it so you don't even know where the up looks like. It's a cost saving.

Really? You think it's by design? No, I'm just kidding. Or is that tongue in cheek? I'm just joking. Okay. But it sure could be a good cost saving strategy. If people don't know how much they could be making or what the next title looks like they would never strive for it and never earn it then you don't have to pay them that much and if there's one thing you don't want it's people

striving no yeah that would be can't have strivers so i feel like the first do you want to just go in order there's i've seen it as associate or junior software engineer yeah the word junior is kind of it's weird i never see the word i don't know this might turn into a rant but i really don't like the word junior engineer is it just me it's not me you don't you do like the word junior i don't mind it okay for some reason i find it unappealing and and i most of the most companies i've worked for is like infantilizing or something yeah exactly like junior like okay junior baby engineer yeah baby engineer sport engineer oh it yeah it kind of makes i don't know it just yeah infantilizing is a great way to describe it

and companies i've worked for use the term associate engineer which is like a little veneer on the infantile it means the same thing it's some some double speak on top of the yeah yes and then i've seen just regular old software engineers the next level also with all these levels you can add an arbitrary number of numbers after it so yeah maybe some company has associate three associate five and usually the number goes up as you advance so you can you can subdivide each of these levels and some companies like you're saying before don't even have the the title they just have a number like i worked at a company that just did e1 e2 e3 and i don't even know where the top was yeah and some sometimes some of those you have companies that do both where it's like

we do numbers and names i've worked for companies that do that as well you know it's like and the numbers don't start at one yeah or they start at one but the one is there just so that you can say no we can't possibly hire a one we need someone more experienced exactly i was in i was an x6 at my time at a large mega x6 yep what does x mean expensive i don't know expensive yeah maybe it had a title as well but okay i think the most infamous when it comes to lots and lots of numbers and titles among the big tech companies is microsoft where they'll have like you know if if amazon has one level microsoft will have like four or five for the same level and so you could be a senior engineer but within senior engineer there's like five different numbers oh you're an

e34 between e34 and e39 i'm making those numbers up is a senior engineer but even though these big tech companies have very rigid and sometimes complicated leveling systems, they're at least generally well documented, both internally and externally. Surprisingly, people go to great lengths to document these things. In fact, there's websites dedicated to aligning the levels between the big tech company levels where you can see a table that would say, okay, if you're an L5 at Amazon, that's an L47 through 52 at Microsoft or equal to an E3 at Facebook or Google. It's actually just kind of surprising to me that people have gone to that length but i think it's because there's such a big monetary factor in these things that people have a great interest in it

yeah anyway i i feel like i distracted us james and should we keep marching up the general trend here so we left off at what seniors yeah no we didn't even get to see oh sorry sometimes there's a mid-level but usually i've seen associate software engineer and then senior software engineer as the big stepping stones and then staff i've seen typically after senior again with some arbitrary number of like mini levels in between staff and senior and then see let's the difference between like a mid-level engineer senior and staff let's take a moment on that at some companies like at amazon for example senior really means tech lead but at other companies, it does not. It just means an experienced engineer who can kind of run on their

own without a lot of handholding and guidance. But staff engineer at most places usually means tech lead. That's how I think of it. When someone says I'm a staff engineer, I think, oh, you are responsible for the technical direction of a group of people. Yeah. I think that's a good way of putting it. The other caveat is titles are all different, but even even more different is like you're mentioning the the expectations of performance and responsibility at each level the same title might might have vastly different requirements at some places staff is like ultra mega unobtainium rare right you're like this superhero that swoops in and saves the day exactly and then other places don't even have a staff

yeah yeah that's true yeah after staff i've i've typically seen principal yep and then distinguished and once you get up to distinguished in my mind especially at big tech companies it's usually like you have invented a thing everyone heard has heard of like yeah you made android or you're on the ietf group that like defined tcpip or something right i don't know and and i don't know we should probably spend a few minutes on distinguished for a moment because even though most people it is the unobtainium you know most people will never be a distinguished engineer And most companies don't even have a distinguished engineer level because titles and levels are kind of like a pyramid scheme in one way. I don't mean in the way where everyone loses a bunch of money, but in one way they are, which is that the number of people who can occupy a title goes down by a factor of 10 at each level that goes as you increase.

In other words, there's an order of magnitude fewer number of people at the level above your level. And so by the time you get up to like distinguished engineer, you know, the exponential gets kind of crazy where it's like, OK, well, below distinguished engineer, you have, I don't know, senior principal. Below that, you have principal. Below that, you have staff. Below that, you have senior engineer. And so when you think about how many different levels that is and you take like 10 to the power of that number, that's a pretty big company. and so most companies don't even have it and those that do have very vanishingly few of them compared to the total workforce okay i'll give an example guido van rossum i'm just creeping on him on linkedin so he is the creator of python was the python benevolent dictator for life has since retired so he did not have to be assassinated to step down

and it wasn't for life for life position yeah it turns out but i'm just looking at his resume so he he created python i think he was at i don't know if he did it at google or not he i think it was before google he yeah he invented python well before he belonged to any big tech company but he did spend a bunch of time okay yeah he was a staff software engineer and then senior staff at google this again this is while he was the creator and and like runner of python at dropbox he was a principal engineer, and Microsoft, he was a distinguished engineer. And that fits my mind of distinguished engineers. Yeah, you made Python. Yep. How was he not a distinguished engineer at Google? I don't know. That's the part there I'm like, what? I don't know. I don't know.

Maybe that's why he works at Microsoft now. Exactly. And you know, interesting that his title was principal engineer at Dropbox. My guess is that that was the top of the list at dropbox yeah they probably didn't have a distinguished engineer level just to guess possible but like you know at amazon there were distinguished engineers as well i knew one there were probably a few others but remember that you know amazon has over 50 000 engineers well that was pre-layoffs you know i don't know how many they have now but who knows how many but there was one and this is probably a good segue to the part of the question that says can an IC become an executive? And at some of these mega tech companies, the answer is yes, but only

as distinguished engineers. I've never seen an individual contributor become an executive in any other function. And there's vanishingly few of them. So it's just not really a career track that I think most people should even bother striving for. Yeah. I mean, if you want to be an executive, I feel like the first answer is there's no pattern, especially if it's at a big company because there's so few people well there probably is a pattern the problem the patterns probably go to an ivy league school yeah it might be too late if if you haven't but i guess my point is even fewer of those right than than high level ic roles so it's going to be tough to follow a playbook because there's just not a not a lot of them

i do think it's more common to move into an executive role from management yeah 100 that's like a more standard path. So if you really want to be an executive, if that's your goal, which is a fine goal, then it might be easier if you dive into management. But if you hate management, you're not going to like being an executive. That's what it is. That's true. In terms of numbers, the number of executives who get there through a management track compared to the number of executives who get there through the individual contributor track, I would I would venture to say that there are a hundred or a thousand times more people that are executives that come to the management track than through the individual contributor track

I feel like even when you hear about people who were ICs like they kind of established their cred as an IC this person was an engineer and then now they're the CEO of this mega company they still were all like management after after that it's not like they went from senior software engineer to So they like invented a popular programming language and then went into management. Is that what you're saying? I guess. Yeah. Maybe they went to an Ivy League school and majored in executive presence.

Ah, the key to being an executive. I don't know. I'm out of words on this. Okay. Well, let's recap the levels just to help and make sure we answered all the questions here. So do ICs ever become executives? Yes, but only in numbers that are like lottery winning. What's the top of the IC ladder?

well the distinguished engineer how much up is there from where i am as a staff engineer the answer to that is plenty probably depending on your company you know and the typical level from there is principal senior principal or some number of levels within the principal distinction and then there's also you know we should probably take a moment and explore this idea of architect where and i've seen some companies really adopt this mantra that they will have engineers whose only job is to quote architect things for other engineers which is usually essentially a system design role where you are basically in a full-time system design interview for 40 hours a week that sounds horrifying by the way well you also get to go to meetings nah any better good good

anyway so yeah that's kind of the latter interviews with meetings and you're right to think that you know have you hit a ceiling it's impossible to say without knowing more about your company but this is the kind of thing your manager should be able to describe at some companies you know many companies i've worked for just have no concept of a career advancement ladder they just haven't haven't solidified it you know and so if you're at a small company especially it's unlikely you've got a nice plan laid out for you where it's like do these things achieve these results you know but if you're at a big company that probably exists and your manager can probably give it to you yeah i will recommend a book to you which is called

i think it's just called staff software engineer oh is this the one by will larson yes i'm trying to look for it it's on my shelf yeah it's called staff engineer by will larson all right and the book is explicitly targeted for people in senior for software engineers in senior ic roles and the title of it is staff but i think you can kind of like squint and fuzz it up and down a few a few levels but it's it's a useful look at interviews with a bunch of other high level software engineer ics and kind of what they do and how they do it and my last chunk of advice here is that titles and level are very coarse measurements of success and growth in that there's not that many of them it's hard and it's kind of a big event some of it's out of your control and if you can focus

and find satisfaction in kind of becoming better and doing more then that's a lot more in your control then does that get recognized by bestowing this rare and expensive title upon me for that which they might not even have a slot for there might be like politics or you might not have the opportunity to demonstrate your your value and skills in a way that reflects that that that shows up as promotion worthy to people that decide it but if you try and have a big impact i think that can feel more in control and and more satisfying than the title that comes along with it if that makes sense yes it doesn't come with money though automatically so i guess if you want money then yeah sure yeah title's probably way to go dave should we move on to our next

question let's go for it would you do me the honor and just i just really would like to hear you read this one. Yeah, surely. This is from a listener called Johnny Drop Tables, I think. Yeah, Johnny Drop Tables. Unlikely to be their real name. Not a traditional family name that I'm aware of. Yet, I mean, but like Smith is a profession and a name now. So at some point that entered the lexicon. It's happening. All right. How do I tell if my manager is a direct communicator or a jerk? Should I trust my gut on this? He's a jerk. I've been working with my manager for a year now. He's fairly fluent in English, educated, and keeps up with broad knowledge of our team and domain. He often connects different aspects of our work to discover discrepancies, bugs, and interesting

ideas. I'm trying to wrap my head around his communication style. Here are a few examples that stand out. I refused to take on a new small project because I was concerned about meeting the deadline on my high priority solo project. He gave me feedback that I missed an opportunity to demonstrate context switching skills, which would look good for promotion. I responded with my own reasoning, but he wasn't interested and just moved on to the next topic. Two, he insisted on a new weekly requirement for our on-call pager rotation, which is to come up with one idea to improve the experience. When I asked why asking for help on a problem wouldn't be enough, he answered that he expected his engineers to have been hired for their critical

thinking and leadership skills, and that they should be able to demonstrate those. Three, Recently, he's been leading weekly meetings to improve the on-call experience. He tends to ask very direct questions. We'll look at a bug ticket, and he will ask, what's the root cause? Why do we do this? What are your ideas to solve this? When pressed, he insisted this was a brainstorming sort of conversation as opposed to a Q&A. Hmm.

Interesting. I'm assuming by the fairly fluent in English portion that they work in English, and this person is not a native English speaker. so an easy thing to think about is is there some cultural difference of like is there an expectation of more direct communication in their culture i don't know what is there a classic like direct straightforward communication culture i feel like i mean space scandinavian i'm sorry oh you went to scandinavian i went to space lawyers yeah same thing i guess i i don't know this for a fact but i've heard that scandinavian culture is is maybe more direct maybe our listeners can can chime in here there i can tell you one thing there are jokes in ted lasso about

the dutch being very direct okay where they say things it must be true we lost the football game because we are very bad at football and everyone's like oh and you specifically lost the game because you missed a shot oh boo we hate you and he's like what the dutch guy yeah i love the dutch by the way for what it's worth just you know i know they get a lot of flack just kidding i don't know i don't think they do oh yeah yeah i so i did not hear the words that your manager said but i feel like the examples you gave i can see why someone would say that and it seems like i can i can these examples could fit into the category of like straightforward and clear communicating even on like difficult topics manager like yeah you didn't do this thing

and here's it could have happened this like here's an outcome that could have happened if you did it that's fine doesn't sound like you're in trouble yeah in fact i i do take a little bit of issue with well okay let me not say issue johnny drop tables are our intrepid listener here set gave three examples of things that this director has done that makes johnny think that the director is a jerk and the third one was that he asks questions i mean it says very direct questions about bugs that arose during the on call like what is the root cause and why do we do this and what are your ideas to solve this those questions strike me as very good questions and not at all things a jerk would say a jerk would say things like why are you so bad at this and why did you

caused this problem but what is the root cause that's a fantastic question for a director to be asking so i'm gonna i'm gonna categorize example number three as not a jerk yeah that that also felt the least jerky out of all of these to me is is like it's part of the role of a manager is to help the group clearly address problems and and kind of shine a light on things that that are important yeah and and it can be uncomfortable to talk about incidents because there's often a specter of failure like yeah something messed up but if you shy away from it you won't learn from it exactly and and i think good direct questions like what is the root cause and why do we do this and how do we solve it these are exactly the kinds of questions that

an effective leader needs to be asking in an engineering organization this is how you improve because so many times the individuals who are working and i put myself in this camp when i've when I've been on the other side of this, on the individual side, we just don't sometimes ask ourselves these questions. We want to get things fixed and working and we want to do a good job, but we don't often, I guess I should say we get ourselves in the noise and the weeds and the trenches and many other metaphors that mean working, you know, hands dirty, sleeves rolled up. And we don't often lift our heads up and say, all right, what's the root cause? What are the systemic issues here? What are the major process improvements that need to

be implemented to prevent this from happening again you know instead we think i'm a hero because i fixed it and and then we come to work and we expect our manager to say you're a hero because you fixed it but instead your manager says what was the root cause and what are we doing to stop this from happening in the future and you're like oh i'm not a hero yeah good job fixing it why do we work in a way that caused it to take two hours to fix instead of yeah or whatever so i'm gonna chalk that one up to not a jerk that's effective management and you're a jerk for thinking he's he's a jerk. Just kidding. Just kidding. There is something about this, why do we do this question where I have both felt, I don't know, offended is too strong a word. Felt, what's a less strong

word? I don't know. Less strong than offended. Okay. That's my vocabulary. Junior offended. Junior offended. Yeah. Associate offended. Sorry, that's associate offended. Asked that question. Associate offended. Because it feels like it's an implicit criticism of the the the decision to do it this way right like why do we do it this way well because we thought it was right and and we have reasons and you don't understand them and then it was path dependent and and i've also felt on the other side like i want to know why the system works the way it does because i suspect it's not perfect and boy it seems like people are really touchy when i'm asking why we do it this way so i could see how those things can kind of conflict but i

do think i still agree that this isn't a jerky question it's just maybe a defensive response to a question new weekly requirement for on-call page or rotation so that requirement thing i've seen various iterations of that that part of your job while being on call is to make the on-call experience better in some way that doesn't seem outrageous there's trade-offs associated with that and and as long as you're aware of them and deliberately choosing them that's fine like it's tough to do this and also say and get all your normal work done at the same time and you know so you're kind of like taking more dedicated time away from from normal work which is fine but the answer does feel like it could be prickly like why helping why asking for help

isn't enough to improve it well you should have critical thinking and leadership skills sort of i could see how you could take that as like boy that doesn't seem like a thing someone with leadership and critical thinking skills would say coming up with a way to improve the on-call experience no no if you say so johnny drop tables my interpretation of this is johnny drop table said why isn't just fixing the problem enough yeah well he said why isn't asking for help on a problem enough yeah is that how i read that did i read that right no i i think so i guess i don't even know what that means like is that the way to improve the on-call experience is asking for help on the problem hopefully that happens already yeah maybe you're not just alone but i

think the answers sort of make sense as well where like that's not improving on call for everybody yeah if you just ask for help like that's that's not that's not what i asked you to do yeah exactly i and i gotta say like i i think i'm i'm a little ruthless here but i'm gonna chalk up number two as not a jerk either you know when your director comes in and says i want to impose i want to implement a new program where every time someone is on call, they come up with one idea to improve the on-call experience for everyone. That's awesome. This is a good thing. I don't know, maybe... I don't know. I love it, actually. And maybe I love it because these are things I've done. And I can't admit that I'm a jerk. Exactly. Yeah. It sounds like maybe you don't

have the same understanding of what the expectation is and so you're asking well why does this thing qualify and they're sort of saying like no no think critically and show leadership skills yeah i could see how that feels like a little bit of a slap on the wrist like come on step it up right but also but that's part of the job yeah yeah i mean i i'm sensing from these two examples so far we've only talked about two of the three and we'll get to the third one in a minute but from these two i'm thinking good leader the engineers on this team are going to level up their skills over the next year as this person provides direction it's going to be awesome and i'm not seeing any evidence of a jerk here and you know i've got some hypotheses about

where the jerkiness is coming from but it's not it's not visible to me in these questions in these examples yeah i mean there's there's a enormous amount of like tone and feeling yeah that is not communicated here and it's very possible to say these words and say them in a way that makes the team feel bad and perform worse and and that like you could be a jerk or not a jerk you could be schrodinger's jerk doing these actions but they don't they don't seem inherently jerky they seem challenging like they're they're challenging you in a good way yeah or it could be in a good way i guess all right i guess we're going in reverse order let's talk about the first one which is yeah the first project you were on a high priority thing with the deadline so you didn't do it

yeah and they said you missed an opportunity to demonstrate context switching skills which would look good for promotion i feel the same about this one where this this could be an objective truth and they're giving you this feedback of like hey if you did this it would have looked good for promotion and you didn't and i don't know yeah and you know i'd rather know this than not know this is what they think this is great like again so here we have a situation i'm just going to put my my personal angle on this your director said hey i want you to work on a small project on the side you know or didn't even say on the side just said i want you to work on this small project in addition to your high priority solo project and you said no the solo project is

more important and i think to myself who is responsible for setting priorities in your organization? Is it possibly your director? Is it possible that your director already had an idea of the priorities of these two projects and really wanted this other one to get done, even if it meant that your original project got delayed a little bit? And I think from based on the response that your director gave, yes, that is exactly what he wanted. And, you know, these deadlines that you have got, they usually come from someone like a director, you know, and so that means that they can be changed and massaged in accordance with the director's desires and so i think that's what happened here is he gave you an out he gave you an opportunity to delay one project to fulfill

another one at the same time and you just said no i don't want to do that that's possible so i think what you're saying is is instead of saying no i can't this other project has a deadline it's important you could have said i i can do other stuff it's gonna push this other project back Like, is that, how can we solve that problem? Is that fine? Do we need to, can you like announce that you've asked me to do this thing so it's going to delay this other project? Like what's, and instead just saying no felt like maybe too abrupt of an answer.

Is that what you're saying, Dave? Yeah, exactly. It's like, it's almost like, I don't want to be too critical of the listener here, but it's almost like you said, no, I've got these deadlines and I've already got a very important project without being open to the idea that maybe it's okay to delay a little bit, or maybe there's more to this story than just, I have to do the job I was assigned. It's kind of like if I'm leading a team and I say, okay, here's your projects for the sprint. And then mid-sprint I show up and I say, oh man, we've got, sorry, we have this high urgency issue that just arose and it really needs

to be addressed today. And the team responds to me by saying, no, it doesn't. We're going to do what we were originally planning to do. It's like, we're not going to change the plan. And I think, wait yeah it's my job to change the priority so and i'm changing it please go with me here yeah yeah like wait this is a this is a lever i i can pull in johnny drop tables defense i will also say that it's pretty common for managers to say can you just do this thing and in their mind it's like a little thing and they're not considering the cost of context switching or they're just seeing like can can you just get more work done yeah yeah if i ask you and so yeah so let's take that angle for a moment like that's definitely the more charitable angle on our question asker here and

there's a there's a good possibility that's what's going on you know it's like i just want to extract more work from you for the same pay and the same you know from as far as i'm or maybe not even thinking that that cynically about it but just like it'd be cool if we got more stuff done hey could you could you let's let's do more stuff and and they're kind of like inventing this world without trade-offs in their head or not considering the trade-offs yeah yeah exactly but but just strictly reading from here i'm i'm kind of coming down on the side of them of the director again you know the director says i've got a high priority thing i'd like you to work on it and you said no you know and and then he told you you missed an opportunity to demonstrate context

switching and he told you that in all three of these examples you know you missed an opportunity to demonstrate critical thinking and leadership skills you missed an opportunity to take a higher level of ownership on our issue resolution. And I'm like, this is great feedback for you. Your director is doing something that most leaders, at least in the US, culturally do not do. They do not tell you when you have disappointed them. And so now you actually have an opportunity to respond positively to that feedback and improve and probably make more money and get promotion and all that other fun stuff. Yeah. I mean, again, it's such a small window into what it's like to work for this person and and there are definitely ways that a leader could

do these behaviors and still feel like a jerk but i i guess you're trying to define what a jerk is too and that's sort of like a you feel it in your heart when someone is a jerk yeah type of thing i don't know that there's an objective definition yeah but i mean like here i think you could you could substitute the word jerk with unreasonable behavior and yeah like to me this is all pretty reasonable or at least it could be as long as he's not yelling while he does this yeah yeah i i think part of a manager's job is to push for performance on the team and another part is to create a safe environment and those are somewhat intention sometimes yeah on kind of the extremes where you can you can utterly drop safety and just like crack the whip super hard to push for

performance or vice versa just kind of like make it the coziest place ever that is immune from any any consequences of outcomes or output or anything yeah but so so i think what i'm saying is i'm seeing here like this push for performance and hopefully there's also a feeling of of like support along with it maybe that's what they're feeling like all i all i see is this push of you got to do more you got to do better why aren't you doing this thing and and not any support of I believe you can, and here's how I will work with you to help you get more opportunities to do better and things like that. So maybe that's a thing you could ask for, to say, hey, I want to do better. Can you help me on this?

Exactly. Exactly. Well, I mean, the judge has ruled in favor of your director, I think. Not a jerk. I'm going to be more waffly, as I usually am, and say it doesn't seem like inherently jerky behavior yeah it could still feel bad to work on this team and there could be other things like you like like i keep saying that aren't here but yeah yeah these three actions do not seem like they need the the scarlet jay the jerk stamp upon their suit nice okay well did we uh did we answer the question yeah i think we did all right i sure think we did dave what should people do if they want their own questions answered if you'd like us to to judge whether your co-worker is a jerk or not go to soft skills.audio and click the ask

a question button where you can submit our form and fill out all the details you want but as little as as much identifying information as you care to provide please do not include the names and social security numbers of the co-workers who you want us to judge. We don't want to dox them. Thank you so much for everyone who fills out that form each week. We love you. We love your questions. Please keep them coming. Yes, yes. All right. We'll catch you next week. Bye-bye.