Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 397: Skunkworks and too much work/life balance

Episode Date: February 26, 2024

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Listener Davide says, I have a lot of ideas for significantly improving manufacturing processes, but management wants us to focus on business “priorities”. These are fun tasks such as making sure part numbers are replicated in two disconnected systems that have no way of talking to each other. Makes getting Master’s degree feel like time very well spent. I end up setting aside some time and doing the legwork for my improvements in secret, and showing my boss when the solution is 90% there. I have a fear that they think the solution appeared out of thin air and required no work, but also if I told them in advance I was going to spend time on it, I would get told off and forbidden from doing it. Am I alone in this? Am I stupid? Should I quit my job? Have I written too much? Is the world really relying on a handful of Excel spreadsheets which are keeping us one circular reference away from total annihilation? Thanks for reading this far, and greetings from a listener from some place in England. Sorry for the long question and thanks in advance for any help or advice :) I’ve been working for a small 20-year old B2B company. It makes money. The work-life balance is amazing. Our workdays are 6 hours, and we are remote. On busy days, I may work 3 hours a day. So everything is great. But I hate it. I have no interest in the product. Everyone picks one ticket and goes to their corner to fix it. No collaboration unless necessary, which is rare because there are no complex challenges. I feel no one in the company is ambitious technically. It feels like I’m not growing and learning. My previous company was the exact opposite. Brilliant invested colleagues. Lots to learn and I was always inspired to work with them and learn from them. I felt like the stupidest person in the room. They cared about technical decisions and problems a lot. It was as close to my ideal workplace as it could be (the product was meh, and the management sucked). But I got laid off after 5 months of being there. Now whenever I talk with anybody about how I feel demotivated, and lifeless, and want to move on from this company, they say I’m crazy. And if I’m looking to learn and grow I have all the time in the world. I want to be in an environment that challenges me, inspires me, and pushes me to learn during work hours at least. I fear that if I stay here for a few years, I will not have the experience and resume needed to move to a company like the one I was in before I got laid off. Am I wrong to want to move out of this company in this situation?

it takes more than being thankful for remote work when someone on your team posts in slack quote not quite 100 but i'm going to make it into the office to be a great engineer this is soft skills engineering episode 397 i'm your host dave smith i'm your host james and dance soft skills engineering is a weekly advice podcast so that you have things to do when you're not quite 100 100%. But you're going to go and drive into the office anyway. It is kind of weird that I used to not think anything of that. And I have changed since the pandemic. I have had times where I thought I could go in, but I'll stay home just to not get other people sick. I never had that thought ever. Maybe I'm just revealing how little I cared about other

people before, I guess. I think you were a super spreader. yes i think i was one of those lick my palms before every handshake now you're just a super spreader of good advice and hilarious jokes yes those spread more efficiently over the internet than covid i guess yes covid hardly ever transmits over the internet yeah this episode is sponsored by work os the best way to add single sign on to your software product you'll hear more about them later all right shall i thank our patrons yes big thank you to dan from drone deploy chase w norton type hero.dev never is not just a crater

on mars with a flamingo emoji i like chicken i like liver meow mix meow mix please deliver trash panda the computer science book.com valentin at data fold santa hopar nick kent c dodds jenny kim owen chartle craig botlin the stochastic parrot patreon.com we're hiring ira chan the question mark jonathan king webtau awesome end-to-end testing the unsettling nature of not knowing the content at williamangel.net travis brayden canes john grant and cody sale if you'd like to join this fabulously illustrious crew go to soft skills.audio and click support us on patreon where you can contribute any amount you like and if you contribute enough we'll say your name or whatever you type into the patreon name field on the show every week and any dollar

amount will get you an invitation to our slack community where you can chat and enjoy what's the Hitchhiker's Guide, Sharon and Joy. Sharon and Joy, with all the other soft skillets. Sharon, what is that? Sharon and Joy? It was a, Sharon and Joy was a slogan of a company, I believe, that manufactured robots. I could be wrong. And I seem to recall they had a jingle that said something like, Sharon and Joy, if you don't like it, we don't give a fig, go put your head in a pig, I think was the tagline. Sounds very British.

Yes, it is. I don't know if I've quoted that correctly. Probably not. No, it's pretty good. That seems pretty on from what I Googled. Oh, nice. Nice job. Good thing you remember that and not like your child's birthday or whatever important thing you've forgotten most recently. Dave, should I read our first question?

I hope you will. That's actually why I invited you here today. I aim to fulfill your hopes. Oh, good. Listener David says, I have a lot of ideas for significantly improving manufacturing processes, but management always wants us to focus on business quote priorities. These are fun tasks such as making sure part numbers are replicated in two disconnected systems that have no way of talking to each other. It makes getting my master's degree feel like time very well spent.

I end up setting aside some time and doing the legwork for my own improvements in secret and showing my boss when the solution is 90% there. I have a fear that they think the solution appeared out of thin air and required no work, but also if I told them in advance I was going to spend time on it i would get told off and forbidden from doing it am i alone in this am i stupid should i quit my job have i written too much is the world really relying on a handful of excel spreadsheets which are keeping us one circular reference away from total annihilation thanks for reading this far and greetings from a listener from someplace in england no you're not stupid that one's easy to answer you're smart

Is the world really relying on a handful of Excel spreadsheets which are keeping us one circular reference away from total annihilation? Oh, I love that so much. Yes. Sadly, yes. Or really, the world is relying on one NPM package and the goodwill of its maintainer. Yeah. I hope they don't go to jail.

Were you just referencing Hans Reiser when you said don't go to jail? Or is that a different reference? No, I wasn't. but that's a much worse one yeah there was a simple i mean similar ish thing in npm where i think he got in a car accident and hurt somebody pretty bad and then had to go to jail oh really yeah i did hear that someone pulled an npm package out of spite and then the world went to pot for a little while no this was well yeah that too there's a lot of ways the world can go into total annihilation turns out yeah yeah there are hans reisner is that riser riser yeah he's the one

that wrote a file system that was widely used in linux and then murdered his wife right he yes he the file system was advanced but not totally widely used yet it was on its way to stardom it was kind of like a it was like cutting edge yes cutting edge file system supposed to be much better than the ext family of file systems and then he murdered his wife and went to jail and he's in jail now and the reason i brought up his name is because i just read a letter that he wrote from jail. He's been in jail for over 10 years. Needless to say, he hasn't really been contributing to the world of file systems, but it was a very, very interesting letter. He's definitely got a new perspective on life. Was that the one that was about his file system? But there's a preface at

the beginning that says like, yes, yes, murder is bad and I shouldn't have done it and see here for all my explanation, like for my full apology about it. I don't know. I think it was mostly, it was less about his file system and more about all of his interpersonal relationships and how he just didn't value human life obviously as much as he should have yeah it seems like it was recent like this is in the last month or two he wrote this letter huh so kind of cool i don't know i really don't know how we got on that tangent but anyway i don't either yeah so here we have listener david who created a new manufacturing process but had to do it in secret like so many things that businesses overtly refused to invest in and then turn out to be the saving grace for

the business i i'm i'm of two minds about this i can totally understand why there are these business priorities and working on things that are not business priorities gets frowned upon because that's i don't know it's kind of the job um and someone in a leadership role i'm often doing the frowning i'm in those shoes saying why are we doing this thing instead of that other critical thing that we have a a firm belief will result in this concrete outcome for the business but also i recognize you can sometimes get into a local maximum in that state where you're just sort of doing the next easiest thing that seems like it'll work and you might be missing out on some things that are are crucially important but might not have as clear of numbers attached to

them. Yeah. There's this phenomenon that happens in management, and I am a victim of this, where we identify clear business objectives that need to be delivered in order to generate a bunch of value. And then I find myself struggling to justify anything else when answering questions like, well, if this is going to make us a multi-billion dollar company, why are you putting time into that? Yeah. Yeah. If you have this list of priorities that is, I don't know, a year long and you can clearly articulate why you think each of them has a chance for being super effective where do you put like upgrade our database version into that list which is important stuff that you really should do but also i don't know it sounds like the stuff that

that david is working on isn't it's not even really like maintenance stuff it's improvements solutions, things like that. These are things that engineers appreciate and management doesn't because there's essentially no way to measure the ROI on this stuff. So here we have a case where you've got two different manufacturing processes that have part numbers and they're in disconnected systems, which means you're going to get corrupt data or drift between the two systems, right? And it's like, okay, I want to spend 100 hours fixing this problem.

Like, oh, great. What new revenue will come from that 100 hours? Oh, no, Dave. I think this is the business priority. Oh, that is the priority. I'm pretty sure this is sarcasm. Wait a minute. I think this is the thing that the engineer is doing,

but they want to be doing something cooler. Oh, my gosh. As usual, the British humor went right over my head. Yep. I love British humor so much. Makes getting a master's degree feel like time very well spent. Also British humor. Got it.

I love it. Okay. So, yeah, I'm sensitive to my words being used against me, but I feel like at least some of the time engineers are right when they say we have to do this thing that doesn't have clear business value. But boy, will it suck if we don't. And if you never do that, you're probably missing out on stuff. But there's always going to be some conflict because engineers are often wrong about that stuff, too. we have to do this critical thing that was is deeply important and it's because they like read a blog post one time about it or something or there's yeah there's some there's some hype or

fad or emotion behind it instead of an actual reason yeah i think i'm just a firm defender of the status quo like in general but also in this situation where i think i think you need to do skunk work stuff sometimes yeah and you need to talk to your boss about it sometimes and sometimes they'll say no and sometimes there's skunk work stuff you shouldn't do that you'll stop doing. And there's sometimes stuff you feel passionately enough that you push forward. And then sometimes it'll turn out to be crucially important. And then you just hope you have a good boss who doesn't take all the credit for that. Yeah, exactly. I always knew we should have been working on this. And that's why in my spare time after hours. Yeah. You know, it's

interesting because the reason this works so well to have someone go off in their spare time and then present something to the business and have the business enthusiastically support it is because they're taking advantage of the sunk cost fallacy. Is that right? I might be misusing that fallacy, but let me explain myself. You show up and if you say before you start working on it, hey, I want to spend a hundred hours working on this project that I think will be valuable. They're like a hundred hours. Ooh, that's going to, no way. That's too much. But then if you go secretly work on it for a hundred hours and then present it, they're like, great, let's move forward with this. And it's something about it already being done or mostly done

that makes them feel like it's a good idea one thing to be aware of is sometimes there's a lot of work in still left in taking something from a skunkworks project to a real thing and it can feel bad if you put in your spare time which is a sacrifice it's an act of passion it shows you care and then the business says no thank you we do not want this thing sometimes they don't want that thing because there's a bunch more time required still to roll it out so maybe you've done the prototype you're saying this is so cool we should do it and they still don't think it's the right thing to do or still don't want to take time away from it to finish it it's not just that they don't appreciate the work you did it's that there's costs ahead still to fully take

advantage of it that they don't want to pay so it's it's a lot easier if you say i did this thing and it's done and it's just free. And now like, give me kudos versus, hey, I started this project for us and we have to keep working on it now because I already started it. Because of the sunk cost fallacy. And this is where you say it's 90% done and a wise manager will say, yes, but what about the second 90%? Yep, exactly. Exactly. Am I stupid? No, you're not stupid. Should I quit my job? No, you're going to get this everywhere. Yeah, I think you are going to get this everywhere i think if if your manager says no to everything if there's never any room for anything besides critical business priorities i think that's kind of a bad sign

because you have to do some of it you have to you have to build the thing and you have to preserve your capacity to build the thing and often the work to preserve the capacity to build the thing is sort of like engineering investment things instead of customer facing things yeah if you never do that then i think that's not a great sign but if the answer to a lot of things is no you know what might be it might be a useful question to ask what would make it easier to say yes to this like what are your concerns is it just not done enough is that you feel like even if it was done it wouldn't matter is it like you're worried you're not seeing all the free 100 hours of labor you're saying what happened to that 100 hours that could have gone towards

towards business priorities yeah because maybe there's something in there if you can get your bosses buy-in on it ahead of time then it's a lot easier for them to give you cover to do the thing and then make it be a real job instead of like your your spare time job yeah and that that may be what needs to happen just as a general rule if you find yourself as an engineer or sneakily doing things that you think will be valuable instead of getting buy-in beforehand. It could be an indication that you haven't really developed the language of engineering business, which is where you take your engineering and you translate it into terms that a business can make decisions about coherently. Things like how much effort will it

be? What are the risk levels? And what are the expected returns on investment? And I found that engineers who master this technique of carefully presenting, usually in slide form, the ROI on their activities, they get traction with their ideas and they're able to get approval to do a lot of things and they don't have to sneak around doing them. In fact, a lot of these people find themselves in very influential engineering leadership positions because they're very good at extracting investment dollars from businesses. The ones they work for, I mean. yeah if especially if you can connect it to a problem or a pain that is perceivable to the to the audience if if it's like my editor takes too long to boot and so i want to hack on it to make

it faster so i'm going to go do some open source work whatever like they don't see that and they don't care if that's a big enough deal you can probably connect it to something like hey you know how when we had that critical bug it took longer to fix it because we had to wait for yes punch cards to scroll through my editor or i don't know whatever whatever thing it is like they don't have the same perspective you have and don't feel the pain the same way you do so if it's your pain you're trying to solve then then can you express it in the way they understand exactly well have we answered the question yes i declare yes good luck yeah good luck 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 skim and a bunch of other stuff and then you find out about new acronyms when stuff's on fire exactly this is where work os comes in work os makes it easy for developers to add sso to their app rather than building it from scratch yourselves like i have mistakenly done work os has excellent inspiring levels of good documentation they have their own login ui they've created called off kit which looks really beautiful and frankly i wish my company website looked that good and they have 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, WorkOS is great. I like them.

I liked them before they sponsored us. 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. Will you read our next question, Dave? Yes, I will. This comes from someone named Extrinsically Motivated. Sorry for the long

question and thanks in advance for any help or advice. I've been working for a small 20-year-old B2B company. It makes money. The work-life balance is amazing. Our work days are six hours and we are remote. On busy days, I may work three hours a day. So everything is great, but I hate it. I have no interest in the product. Everyone picks one ticket and goes to their corner to fix it. There's no collaboration unless necessary, which is rare because there are no complex challenges. I feel no one in the company is ambitious technically. It feels like I'm not growing and learning. My previous company was the exact opposite. Brilliant, invested colleagues, lots to learn, and I was always inspired to work with them and learn from them.

I felt like the stupidest person in the room, and I loved it. They cared about technical decisions and problems a lot. It was so close to my ideal workplace as it could be. The product was meh, and the management sucked, but I got laid off after five months. Now, whenever I talk with anybody about how I feel demotivated and lifeless and want to move on from this company, they say I'm crazy. And if I'm looking to learn and grow, I have all the time in the world. I want to be in an environment that challenges me, inspires me, and pushes me to learn during work hours at least. I fear that if I stay here for a few years, I will not have the experience and resume needed to move to a company like the one I was in before I got laid off. Am I wrong

to want to move out of this company in this situation? What's your gut feel? My gut feel is no, you're not wrong. I've left companies for the same reason. That was my gut feel too. i just have an itch to be challenged and stretched it's also a much different challenge to kind of push yourself in an environment like you could work with your boss to say i need more exciting things i need more challenging things i want to learn i want to do more can i work on this part of the product but none of that is going to change your team and if that's part of it if you want to be around a group of people who are you feel like inspired by then i don't think you can do much at this place if you're an IC. Your task has changed from you being unhappy at your job to

radically transforming all of your coworkers. That's harder. That's harder than getting a new job. Yes. I think there are probably... Oh, go ahead. I was just agreeing with you because I agree. Ah, excellent. That means I said the right thing. You did. I was following along and you said exactly the script i wanted you to say yes i did it brilliant invested colleagues yeah i it does sound like this is kind of a laid-back place in general so i was i was gonna say maybe there's something you can do to kind of up the level of difficulty or up the challenge i should say oh i know how to do that job how introduce some new technology that appears shiny and hot but you know is going to create all kinds of unexpected complexities and technical debt.

Why don't you switch databases? Perfect. Some days you only work three hours a day. What if you worked 24 hours a day for a long time under great stress? Start talking about multi-cloud. Yes, yes, exactly what I was thinking. You know what we need? Cross-region hot standby failover.

Yeah. yeah engineering principles demand it yes yeah just do it do it in hard mode it's a best practice how can we not do best practices have we ever kubernetes on kubernetes how high can we stack these how much better will our app get if we do oh man what a playground i know we're kind of joking but it is you know you could go and find some project that has been neglected by the company for many years that you know needs to be done the company knows it needs to be done and volunteer to do it and then make it extrinsic make

it an extrinsic motivation by negotiating an important deadline with the company even though maybe in your heart of hearts you know they won't enforce it but really you could probably find some pretty amazing projects to sink your teeth into at this company yeah this gets into the problem i mentioned earlier of how much do you want to invest in trying to change stuff but there might be people there who are in the same boat you are where it's just really chill and relaxed and no one else seems to be really pushing things so why why try and change it but maybe they're kind of bored and they might be excited about some some more engagement maybe not i don't know them and you do so maybe that's uh that's a thing you would know better but if if you want to

you could go kind of rally the troops around this thing say hey we're gonna build this awesome thing and it's gonna be fun to do and it's gonna be challenging we're gonna learn and the business is gonna be better from it and then charge and you run at the wall of spears or whatever kind of like war metaphor fits here. There might be people who would join you in enthusiasm and engagement. But I do feel like if I were you, I would take advantage of the six-hour workday that is only three hours to spend three hours a day looking for a job. Yeah, probably would. That's the beauty is you're set up to do all kinds of interview prep. Yeah. You want a challenge? You're thirsty for a challenge go get interviewed and just get demoralized and then go grind out

for four hours a day you might be happy to come back to your three hour a day gig i mean that's a good reason to um this sounds like the kind of person lots of people would want to hire someone who wants to work with brilliant people and be challenged and and do excellent work i feel like that is a pretty good reason for looking for a job and there are environments out there that will offer that i don't know if you'll be able to find them now they might not be hiring right now but i think it's worth trying yeah my advice is definitely biased by my my interest in work i i like working and if i were better at work-life balance maybe my advice would be different because it does sound so great to work three hours a day and then just just chill and

have the rest of your life. I think I would just get antsy. Well, have we answered the question? I think so. Kind of just a simple answer. If you can't find an engaging, exciting project that grows you technically and pushes you and stretches you in the ways you want at your current company, take advantage of all this free time to go interview for a new company. And trust me, in today's job market, you're going to need the time because there just aren't that many opportunities and those that are are highly competitive, by which I mean- They are moving a little slower. there's a lot of competitors for the position yeah i have one more thought i guess we kind of

talked about this but one one way to raise the difficulty level is to increase the scope one notch so say you're on a team you're working on stuff that that team is focused on look up and say what what do you like all of our teams need together is there some cross-cutting thing so that's that's one avenue that can raise the difficulty level might be more engaging might also be more frustrating but that's what the quit your job advice is for all right all right surely now we've answered the question we must have because we said more words even after saying that we had answered the question yes those are bonus words you know what those are free won't even charge you for that what can people do if they want their own questions answered

go to softskills.audio and click the ask a question button where you can fill out our form thank you to everyone who does that every week we love it we love your questions there are so many i do nothing but read them i just sit there all day and read them and every once in a while i click a little star icon next to some of them and those are the ones we answer on the air i just imagine you muttering in your room by yourself with scribbles all over the walls you've copied out down the questions quit my job what do i do just you have you have you do look kind of unhinged in this picture in my head nice that's what you've done to dave good job listeners keep it up all right we'll catch you next week see ya