Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 395: Super star teammate and Getting better with no financial incentives

Episode Date: February 12, 2024

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Listener Bobby ForgedRequest asks One of my coworker, who is the nicest, most humble person I’ve ever met, is about twice as productive as I am! They’re super-uber productive! They close about 2-3x as many tickets as I do during the same sprint. For reference, I’m a software eng II and they’re a senior dev. Their work is very solid too, and they’re not just selecting easy, 1 point tickets to pad their stats. How do you cope with a super star teammate like this? Do I direct more questions towards them to slow them down? Do I volunteer them for more design heavy projects? Jokes aside, I’m curious if this is something that you’ve seen in your career, and if you were a manager, would this make you feel like the other, not-super-uber-smart teammate, is just not doing enough? Is the answer as simple as “well, sometimes people are just very, very gifted”? In my previous job of 5 years, I worked only 3 hours a day due to a low workload. Seeking a change for career growth, I switched jobs a few months ago, exposing myself to new technologies. Initially stressful, the pace has slowed down, and there’s no external pressure to learn. Despite getting praise and raises for minimal effort, I aspire to be a smarter software engineer. How do I motivate myself to learn and step out of my comfort zone when there’s no apparent reward, considering I’ve easily found new jobs and advanced in my career without exerting much effort?

it takes more than advising people to stay at their job and give it a chance because you don't want them competing against you on the job market to be a great engineer this is soft skills engineering episode 395 i am your host dave smith i'm your host jameson dance soft skills engineering is a weekly advice podcast for people who understand that there's only so many job openings and a lot of people competing for them. You know, back when we first started this show, we always said our goal was to become large enough that we could influence the tech labor market and then sell that as a service to unscrupulous people. We finally achieved that thanks to you. We wrecked the whole economy. Yeah. Are you an employer who doesn't want to

pay people as much? Tell soft skills engineering to tell people not to quit their jobs for a small fee you know it'd be a shame if the whole industry quit their jobs all the time and you had to constantly rehire them please stop telling people that yeah wait yeah i think i i think we're bad at this i think i'm bad at this i think the thing i said would not have the impact that they would want it to have i think the bottom line is we're we're we're building a business on a foundation of extortion and succeeding yeah and we're well we're succeeding a part of it but the like extorting part we take the money we don't do the thing very well so far we it's like intent we're still scaling up that part of the business

right now that all goes to just hiring people we don't know what they're doing yet yeah we're still building our extortion v1 alpha product layers and layers of management are required yes yeah the the team events exercises and of course the snacks oh the snacks how can you have a team without team building yeah all right this episode is sponsored by work os the best way to add single sign-on to your software product you will hear more about them later all right can i thank our patrons yeah i want to say thank you to those that are contributing at a level where we shout their name out every single week they are dan from drone deploy chase w norton type hero.dev never is not just a crater on mars with the flamingo emoji

i like chicken i like liver miyamix miyamix please deliver trash panda the computer science book.com valentin at datafold santa hopar kent c dodds jenny kim owen chartle craig motlin the stochastic parrot patron.com we're hiring ira chan a single solitary question mark jonathan king web tau awesome end-to-end testing the unsettling nature of not knowing the content and williamangel.net travis brayden canes john grant and cody sale if you'd like to join this so illustrious crew go to soft skills.audio and click the support us on patreon button where you can contribute any dollar amount to get access to our slack community where you can do things like get advice on how to negotiate your offer or just read the tech humor channel which is honestly my personal favorite

great memes are always showing up in there at just the right pace you know it's not like you're going to get sucked in scrolling and scrolling for hours it's just like a meme every couple days or maybe every day it's like the exact right amount of meme for my personal meme consumption budget anyway your code's compiling pop in there real quick pop in there check it out it's awesome and if you contribute enough we'll say whatever you want us to say that's safe for work and can be typed into the Patreon name field on the show every week. Thank you so much. We really appreciate the support. I want to read some listener feedback. This is from a listener named Chris who says, I discovered your podcast a few months ago and have been devouring the back

catalog of episodes in reverse chronological order. It's been great listening to the job market gradually improve over time. Apologies for not having a question, but I just wanted to let you know that i find your show strangely compelling strangely compelling is uh thank you i guess what people say about us yeah that makes me feel strangely good that's exactly how it makes me feel i gotta say the first time i read this feedback i was listening to the the right chris say it's been nice to hearing the the job market gradually improve and i remember thinking is it improving and then i realized oh he's listening in backwards order that is so funny i had the same thought that is so funny oh i feel like it maybe is well i don't know i don't know too early

to tell maybe look thank you chris that was well okay listen too early to tell wink wink pay us enough money one way or the other and then we'll tell you we'll get the job market going the way you want all right chris thank you for the strangely compelling feedback shall i thank shall i read our first question please this comes from a listener named bobby forged request one of my co-workers who is the nicest most humble person i've ever met is about twice as productive as i am they're super uber productive they close about two to three times as many tickets as i do during the same sprint for reference i'm a software engineer too and they're a senior dev their work is very solid too and they're not just selecting easy one point

tickets to pad their stats how do you cope with a superstar teammate like this do i direct more questions toward them to slow them down do i volunteer them for more design heavy projects jokes aside i'm curious if this is something that you've seen in your career and if you were a manager would this make you feel like the other not super uber smart teammate is just not doing enough is this answer as simple as well sometimes people are just very very gifted i think you should convince this person to quit their job and join dave or i at at our workplaces Yes, we've got a position for you on the extortion OS platform 2.0. Yeah.

We need that productivity to finally launch our alpha. I love how this person completely took the wind out of our sails and already identified two awesome answers. Yeah. Which is ask them more questions to slow them down and give them a design-heavy project. So funny. Tell them you need to design your own ORM.

Yeah, that'll get them off topic. Yeah. Hmm. Okay. They're a senior dev, Software Engine 2. I feel like Software Engine 2 is probably the level right below senior dev. Probably, depending on the company, but it sounds about right. Yeah, it depends on the company, but that seems like a common ladder I've seen.

Does that mean that each level is twice as productive as the level below it? Yes. Because that's what's happening here. So yeah, it's, I mean, it's working. Yeah, it's fine. What you really have to do is think long and hard about the other senior devs who aren't two or three times as productive as you. Yeah, what are they doing?

Yeah. Also, just wait one day here. This is something maybe no one told you, but when you get promoted from software engineer two to senior engineer, you suddenly become two to three times as productive because there's a secret that's written in your promotion document that once you read it, you'll be like, oh my gosh, if I had known this, I could have been two to three times as productive. Yeah, but they couldn't have told you earlier because then that would dilute the value of the secret, I guess.

It's a secret that's kind of paradoxically can only be read and understood in the context of a truly earned promotion. So if you read it and you don't become two to three times as productive, you actually were not worthy of the promotion fades away yes and then you can't remember what it was that you read yeah so you all these things you will experience soon i mean what you could do is try and get them promoted and then you'll hear about all their failures and reasons why they can't be promoted i feel like there's always like pushback when you're trying to prepare a promotion doc or not pushback there's scrutiny and well what about this thing in this case and stuff so i think what i interpret here is some comparison to this person and and some amount of

like what am i even doing if i'm not as good as yeah super uber productive kind nice humble engineer this person wins on every dimension yeah yeah if this person was a jerk at least you'd be like yeah but they're a jerk yeah yeah yeah i can identify with that i've definitely worked with people who i felt like were just like a super set of me in some way yeah i think one thing that has helped me is realizing that that's actually never been true when i when i dig deep enough into it that i feel like i have always been able to identify something that i think i'm good at to add value that fits with a a weakness or an area of of that they're not concerned about or i don't know there's something i kind of imagine myself as a different puzzle

piece shape than the super uber productive perfect human but the other puzzle piece is like three times bigger though but it's also bigger yeah it's bigger it's also a different shape and there's there's a shape for me too there's a place i feel like yeah i can fit in small places and yeah what if you need someone who's less productive to sabotage a project yeah this person would fail at that yeah no but i think i i think it's unlikely that there's you're probably comparing like strength to weakness in a way of of something they do really well and it might be something you don't do as well or that you aspire to do better and it's it's easy to look at that and discount things

that you do do well so i think i'm giving you a vague generic pep talk of like maybe you're two to three times better at hugs than this person yes highly underrated and undercompensated skill yeah tell two to three times better of jokes yeah you can't fire me i'm the joke guy yeah hey who would tell he's funny we didn't we wouldn't have such a good time anymore in our meetings yeah so i i would look at that and if you're really stuck on like well who am i even what am i even doing here if i'm not as good as this person the other advice i have is see if there are things that you can learn from them i think it is unlikely that you will absorb their power and just turn into them but i've learned stuff from people much better than me at things

even if i haven't become as good at them as things at the very least i've learned like oh it's possible to be this good at it yes thing at debugging or or like sequel or i don't know data-driven decisions or whatever it is and it kind of raises the ceiling of what i think normal and and excellent is yeah the question here is how do i cope with this and i'll tell you jameson like when i started i started riding bikes kind of more seriously about what like 10 years ago or so and you know i would just kind of tool around the neighborhood ride this route, you know, pedal, pedal my pedals, turn the wheels. And then I got in with a group of riders who showed me, they were like, I'm like, oh, where are you riding today? Can I go with you?

And they were like, sure. They went literally 10 times farther than I had ever gone. And I got home at the end of the ride and I was like, wow, I'm exhausted. Also, I never would have even realized that was possible to go that far and do that route. And, uh, and so it's nice to work with people who push the performance envelope a lot farther than you even thought, farther than you could really even see, I think. I'm trying not to be too hyperbolic, but far. And so this is actually a much, much better situation, I think, than working with people who you look at and go, man, why can't they just be a little more productive? Yeah. Yeah. This person seems like they could have the makings of a great mentor. They're nice. They're humble. They're

super productive. They might be a great asset, someone who's capable of teaching you stuff and willing to do it. I've heard the cliche a lot of, you're not supposed to be the smartest person in the room. You work with great people and get better. I guess that's kind of what we were just saying. But yeah, you get to live that out. Yeah, it's awesome. It really is great. And just watch this person and see what are they doing. Sometimes in software development, there really can be this big performance delta between two people and i've never really been able to pinpoint what it is that makes someone so much better than or so much more productive than someone else other than like they there's a way that they seem to think that just works for the project

and i don't know i don't even know how to put that to words i can think of a person i worked with early in my career who was really really good at debugging and i had never really thought about debugging as a skill or something you got better at it was just kind of labor you did i guess but i watched them debug and they just deleted like half the code and we're like well now we know it's not in this part and then uncommented it and then deleted the other you know they just like yeah sliced through very quickly something instead of staring at it agonizingly yeah maybe if i just look at it long enough yeah yeah they're like well delete all this crap okay it's still there it's not in that part you know clever so it wasn't i mean it wasn't

quite like one weird trick to get better at debugging but that's a small example of of something i feel like i learned from someone who is who's gifted and and excellent at something also sometimes these highly productive people their secret is they wrote the code you know there's a huge difference there's a huge difference between someone who wrote the code and someone who's now coming into it and having to figure it out. You know, just imagine how that feeling you get after you write a couple hundred lines of code

and you put it out there and you just have all of these mental objects in your mind that represent the various states and interfaces and control flow. And all of that is just there for easy reference. It's like an L1 cache, ready to go. But then imagine if the only way to get to that instead of having it built up over time

because you created it is to read it line by line. It is so hard. It is like 10 times harder to read all the code and come to an understanding than to, well, you know, I got to take that 10 times back. It actually took a ton of effort to build that mental model for the person who wrote the code. It's just that they did it by writing the code, you know? So it's like, they're going to have to do that anyway. But now you have to show up and you're just, it's like starting a race miles behind everyone else. I'm thinking of a particular kind of side project I have at work that, yeah, I have it all in my head. And at some point I will have to hand that off to the team. Yep. And they'll be like, what is this crap?

Good luck to you team. And you'll think, why are they so slow? I was two to three times faster than they are. Yeah. What the heck? Come on. I didn't need docs to understand this project. Yeah, and no one documented any of this for me. I would also suggest, you know, you've got yourself a situation where you've got someone who truly is praiseworthy. They're nice, they're smart, they're humble, and highly productive. Why don't you go pay them some compliments? I think sometimes people can be insecure about this, but I have found that if you just come out and be lavish in praising people who are truly amazing and just say, hey, you are so awesome. I am so glad to be working with you. You're inspiring.

I just want to tell you how much I appreciate how productive and awesome you are. Now, this serves two purposes. One, it's going to make them feel great. And honestly, they deserve to be great. This is a highly productive person who's also nice. This is kind of a rare breed. But also, it will help you dispel some of the insecurity that you're carrying with you, which can only hurt you.

If you are insecure, it makes you vulnerable to misinterpret people's gestures as critique when they are not. It changes your mindset to receive words that are otherwise positive as negative. And it makes you always on the lookout and you're wasting brain cycles and emotional energy on that stuff. So the most, and I'm cluing in here to the word cope. How do I cope with this? Well, typically we cope with things that are real problems.

This is not a problem. You have an awesome coworker who does awesome work. The only problem is that you perceive it as that maybe managers think you look bad. And I want to pivot to that for just a moment before we go to the next question, Jameson, which is, what do managers think of this? And guess what? Every team has this distribution of talent on it. I'm sure, Jamison, as you think about your team right now, and you think about the most productive people and the least productive people, it's a power law-shaped curve or a Pareto distribution curve where you always have 20%

of people who are just much more productive than the others, and there's no getting away from it. and managers pull their hair out trying to figure out how to fill a whole team of nothing but those two to three X performers. And it's just really, really hard, if not impossible to do. So I don't think they think anything of it other than this person is great. And I don't think they think you're bad because this person is great. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. If your manager has been around, they have seen similar patterns before. It's not always the same shape, but certainly true that it's pretty rare to have a team where everyone is equally as productive so that i mean that's part of why levels exist the expectations are different

exactly well yeah i think if you're really concerned one of the concerns might be well am i doing enough not just am i as good as this person but like maybe i'm maybe i'm not even good at all and your manager should be able to answer that question for you right i i feel like i'm concern that i'm not getting as much done as this person how how do you feel about my output at work are you satisfied with it do you wish i were doing more so if that fear is is maybe like do they look down upon me or do they have a negative view of me or am i at risk because i'm not doing what they're doing you can you should be able to get a straight answer to that yeah totally all right jameson i can count on zero hands the number of times i've been glad that my dev team rolled their

own SSO system. Yeah, it's one of those things that seems straightforward. And then you start hearing more acronyms and more concepts and OAuth and OIDC and SAML and SCIM and a bunch of other stuff. And then you find out about new acronyms when stuff's on fire. Exactly. This is where WorkOS comes in. WorkOS makes it easy for developers to add SSO to their app rather than building it from scratch yourselves like I have mistakenly done. WorkOS has excellent, inspiring levels of good documentation. They have their own login UI they've created called AuthKit, which looks really beautiful. And frankly, I wish my company website looked that good. And they have example apps in nine different languages, including Node.js, Python, PHP,

and even Go. WorkOS is a drop-in replacement for Auth0, and it gives you great pricing. You get a million monthly active users for free. Also, I have personal experience with WorkOS. I actually use them at my current job. I know some of the folks over there. And the stuff Dave said is true. Really easy to use. Great docs. Excellent support. No complaints about them. I don't know. I don't know if that's a strong enough endorsement. They're all right. No complaints. No, Workhorse is great. I like them. I liked them before they sponsored us. Yeah. Great. Listen, don't punish your future self by building a homegrown SSO system or locking into a multi-year contract with some legacy vendor with opaque pricing and low usage caps. Join the growing list of

companies that are using WorkOS today like Vercel, Webflow, and Loom. Check it out at workos.com slash soft skills. That is workos.com slash soft skills. Okay. Should we read our next question? Yes. This is from an anonymous listener who asks, in my previous job of five years, I worked only three hours a day due to a low workload. Seeking a change for career growth, I switched jobs a few months ago, exposing myself to new technologies. Initially stressful, the pace has slowed down and there's no external pressure to learn. Despite getting praise and raises for minimal effort, I aspire to be a smarter software engineer. How do I motivate myself to learn and step out of my comfort zone when there's no apparent reward considering I've

easily found new jobs and advanced my career without exerting too much effort? Wow, a history of only having to work part-time at a full-time job and still be successful. Oh, this might be the other person from the first question. Yeah, maybe it is. Maybe the truth is worse than you thought. They're not just two to three times more productive. They're like six to eight times more productive because they're only working three hours a day.

How do you motivate yourself to learn? When there's no apparent reward. That's interesting. What does that mean? No apparent reward. I mean, there's like an existential answer to that question. Oh, what's the meaning of it all? This is all so meaningless.

But I don't think that's what they were talking about here. I think it's more like monetary reward, you know? Yeah, like they're doing fine without really exerting themselves. I felt this before. I remember I was very early on in my career and the first couple of opportunities I got raises or bonuses, I remember thinking after the raise, I thought, for some reason, I am less motivated to work as hard now. and I think it was because I realized like oh this is a generous raise and I guess what I've been doing is is good enough is so good that it earned a high raise and then I'm like well what if I don't put in as much work I don't know it's a very interesting mental gymnastics that I was

kind of walking through but I remember walking away thinking I don't feel like I should work so hard hmm maybe it was because the material benefit of getting a raise just there was so much anticipation and when it actually happened and i look at my first paycheck i was like oh it was like i don't feel like i can buy another hamburger yeah exactly this week yeah it's like the marginal benefit of a little bit of extra money is just not that yeah not that impactful in your life yeah so it seems like the listener is motivated by there's two things in conflict one of them is the external recognition of skill and success which comes from raises and praise and kind of promotions and stuff. And they feel like they're

getting that even though they're not really applying themselves as much as they could be. And then the other piece is the internal, the intrinsic motivation of you just want to be excellent or you want to build this thing. You want to see this thing exist. I think I have an exact answer to this, which is you should go start a company. If you feel like you're really underused, I don't know if this is a good answer or not, but you will not be able to do this if you're starting a startup. It will kind of suck you in completely and you will have a lot of commitment and ownership of it because it's your thing. So if you work three hours a day and you get a lot of stuff done, I think most people who are founders would say, awesome, five more hours to do stuff instead of like, sweet, I'm done for the day. right so you you could maybe do something much different that would provide you a lot more

feeling of ownership and an accomplishment of of like uh the intrinsic need to to deliver something by making it your thing entirely there are other ways to achieve that as well but that's one way you could do it yeah that is a good point start a company and you'll never ever feel this way again yeah you'll feel a lot of other things yes for example you'll feel a longing to go back to the life you had yeah despair thanks if so i haven't done this i haven't started well i don't know i've like started a sort of small business started a couple things i guess but they're not like startup software companies yeah in the same way if it seems like it's kind of like how people describe parenting where it's like higher highs and lower lows yeah it feels similar uh from my

glimpses of it in other people of like yeah it's just so intense in the good and the bad yep i don't know this podcast is all highs dave i don't have any i know lows there's obstacles engineering there are no intense enough we're just doing great we i just like it it's fun so how do you motivate yourself well you know i only podcast for three hours a day and then i've been doing eight hours a day what's going on thanks for subsidizing my free time dave oh i've been wondering how you got so good at dota um my skills have atrophied yeah the community has moved on greatly in the several years I've been away. I would be much worse now. Yeah, for sure. Okay. So how do I motivate myself to learn to step out of my comfort zone when

there's no apparent reward? I would say I challenge that. There are rewards. What are you looking for? What is the reward that you want to receive? If it's monetary, that's okay. No judgment. Money turns into hamburgers and I like hamburgers. But you could maybe talk to your boss about that and say, hey, I'm looking for a way. Here's like kind of my favorite key phrase. I'm looking for a way to align my incentives to the business's success. And I think that one of the ways I can do that is through productivity, that I could increase my productivity to produce more for our company to be more successful. And in order for that incentive to align, I need some kind of target that I'm working toward. And don't say something silly like lines of code or story

points produced, but some kind of target. Maybe it's a deliverable. Maybe it's a side project. I mean, you go to your manager and you say, hey, I can take on a project beyond my normal workload. They definitely have something in mind. Like, I'll just give you a few ideas, a few examples of that. Your engineering manager probably has some things that he or she wants to tackle in the product so bad, but it never rises to the priority level of what's on the roadmap for this, for the immediate future.

And so ask your manager. In fact, I had an engineer do that to me just a few weeks ago, came to me and said, I want to work overtime, because there are some skills that I want to develop in infrastructure as a service, or infrastructure as code rather. And I was like, great, there are some things I've been wanting to tackle for a long time, I'd love to have you have like your own little personal roadmap that's outside of the normal day to day. And this person was super happy. And I said, I'll pay you for it. And super happy. He just wanted to get the new technical skills. And I wanted it done. And we had a little bit of budget. And so we went for it. And it was awesome. So that's a good way

to motivate but you know for you maybe it's money maybe it's a bonus maybe it's extra pto i don't know figure something out and then go align force your company to have a decision or a discussion about aligning your incentives with the business outcomes this is a slightly different track but yeah this is going to be one of those i'm going to say it and see if i think it's true or not. If you really want to have a lot more output, sometimes that is possible in leadership roles. If you're a tech lead or a manager or a team lead or something, if you're helping a whole group of people do more, that can have more of an impact than you doing more. Just if you help each person do a little bit more, you'd have to do a lot more individually yourself to make up for

that difference. So I don't know if this aligns with what you're interested in at all or your skills or anything but um it's also a much different feeling of ownership when you're you're kind of trying to help the whole team instead of just do your stuff maybe that is some combination that fits your circumstances of maybe maybe some kind of leadership role some kind of technique thing something like that go start a book club nothing says output and recognition like book clubs oh man i've let our book club languish at work oh no yeah I got to get it back going. But clubs are hard to,

they take a lot of pushing. It was good. And then stuff just came up that wasn't the book club. Exactly. It just slips. It's never as important as the roadmap. All right. Also,

I think, you know, no, no apparent reward. You'd be surprised when you start putting yourself out there, how much fulfillment and enjoyment you can get from engaging in extracurricular activities. And by extracurricular here, I don't mean go join the chess club.

I mean, uh, doing a little bit more or different things than what you've been doing at work to help the business. Book Club kind of jogged my memory or made me think of that. But there's a whole bunch of other things too. Like, I'm sure there are processes that are broken on your team. Go talk to your manager about that. Offer to help and just see what it does to your overall demeanor and psyche to be proactively contributing value to your team. And forget about the money for a moment and just think about how nice it is to be a contributor

and look at the way your team looks at you and talks to you and appreciates you when you're the one sticking your neck out there and saying, I'm going to go make this better that I know will improve life for everyone. Just the glow in their faces. Exactly. When they see you.

Yeah, I think I'm going to, that's going to be a lot easier to do at a big, or at a small company than a big company. For sure. That can be a dangerous path to crushing your soul at a very large company. Yes. Because there's so much just cruft and inertia and bureaucracy in the way of process changes, especially if they cross areas of ownership and teams.

Yeah, I've seen people break into pieces on those rocks. Yes, I've been one of those people. So never try. I guess that's the message I'm getting. I don't know. Clearly. Give up now. Go work for a smaller company.

Yeah. Yeah. Hmm. Have we answered the question? I think so. cool well best of luck love to hear from you love to hear how it goes at the very least you have more time to listen to the podcast so perfect maybe that's a way you can use your time perfect what could people do if they would like their own questions answered dave go to soft skills

audio and click the ask a question button we want to thank you to everyone who does that every week we love reading your questions you keep the show going like the heart that pumps in my chest much like the heart that pumps in dave's chest if the questions stop he will die so it's a lot of pressure on you but i know you can do it thank you yeah thank you thank you so much for listening we'll catch you next week