Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 400: Underperforming intern and upskilling

Starting point is 00:00:00 it takes more than adding a slack bot rule to correct every mention of linux to did you mean gnu slash linux to be a great engineer this is episode 400 of the soft skills engineering podcast i'm your host jamison dance i'm your host dave smith soft skills engineering is a weekly advice show about all the non-technical stuff that goes into the technical field of software development like being pedantic about linux gnu's not unix and linux is not just linux linux is just a kernel jameson if you had this rule wouldn't it correct itself recursively because it says gnu slash linux and that would be the most that would be the most wonderful poetic implementation yeah it would fit it's so beautiful it would fit so beautiful that episode also

Starting point is 00:00:50 not episode sorry that intro also constitutes our celebration for episode 400 that was it yeah that was it enjoy it we really pulled out all the stops for this one yes congrats jameson i want to say to you congratulations thank you you are the only person on earth who has tolerated recording 400 podcast episodes with me same same for you yeah i it's a great accomplishment to put up with it it is it shows we have amazing patience stamina tolerance thick skin kindness humility charity for those that are dumber than us wait yes who are we talking about now i got i got confused i think we're both talking about each other

Starting point is 00:01:43 wisely i have nothing but gratitude for 400 episodes with you but i don't i also don't want to make all of our readers i mean listeners throw up too much right now so maybe we should move on all right let's do it this episode is sponsored by an amazing podcast called red hat compiler tune in on your favorite podcasting app after this episode and we'll tell you more about them later i want to thank our patrons thank you to e4 e5 king e2 king e7 which if i'm not mistaken is some kind of checkers joke dan from drone deploy chase w norton type here.dev never is not just a crater on mars flamingo emoji i like me i like chicken oh my gosh i can't say words today i like chicken i

Starting point is 00:02:31 like liver, meowmix, meowmix, please deliver. Trash Panda, thecomputersciencebook.com, Valentin at Datafold, Santa Hopar,

Starting point is 00:02:38 Kent C. Dodds, Jenny Kim, Owen Shardle, Craig Motlin, the Stochastic Parrot, Patreon.com, we're hiring, Ira Chan,

Starting point is 00:02:45 question mark, Jonathan King, WebTow, awesome intent testing, the unsettling nature of not knowing the content at williamangel.net, Travis Braden,

Starting point is 00:02:52 Caden's John Grant, and every time Dave laughs, a new JavaScript framework is born. Oh man. Oh, there's a lot more JavaScript frameworks than my laughs, though. I got to say, there must be something else. Oh, my goodness.

Starting point is 00:03:09 You got to up the jolly factor. By the way, for those of you who are members of the Illustrious crew, we want you to know we have fully automated our Patreon name integration. So every week, you could change your name on Patreon every week if you wanted to. And we would update every week. It used to be monthly. It used to be manual. No, no.

Starting point is 00:03:27 we've come into the 20 the the 2025th century wait that's not right i got that totally wrong we're a little i mean we're 24 into the 21st century how's that okay that sounds good okay and we're automated so thanks so much for these awesome patreon names they really they really get me they do they show how clever and wise you are in addition to what good judgment you have to support the show yeah clearly if you want to join this group you can go to softskills.audio and click support us on patreon and any amount will get you an invite to our slack team and

Starting point is 00:04:07 any amount above the threshold will allow you to test out dave's automation yes find interesting ways to break it oh great idea i'm just if i don't see an sql injection attack attempt in next week's patreon i'm gonna be disappointed is there like a trello injection attack yeah dave jameson don't reveal the secret of our internal feeling oh no i mean use a different box that contains boxes to track things oh boy well all right Dave there's another very special card in in here in our maybe Trello thing it says happy birthday to Dave yes this episode is airing on my birthday episode 400 happy birthday to me that's my present it was weird that you planned that out so many years ago yes you know 10 years

Starting point is 00:05:05 from now I want in the spring of 2016 I hatched a plan and today it came together the long con yeah happy birthday dave thank you what do you want for your birthday 400 more episodes of soft skills engineering all right let's get to it okay uh you want to read our first question yes i do okay this comes from an anonymous listener who says i am a junior software engineer who has been placed in charge of a handful of graduates and interns who have joined my team the project is fairly technical for the first two weeks the new starters were pair programming that went well and after talking to each new starter, they were eager to start working individually. We're one month in and I'm concerned about the performance of one of the engineers. Morgan, fake name, has completed a

Starting point is 00:05:49 degree from a good university we often hire from, but appears to lack any knowledge of software development. As a result, Morgan seems to struggle with researching and working through problems beyond following tutorials. I got the impression that while pair programming, Morgan didn't contribute much. Is there anything I could do to give Morgan the boost needed to start rolling? I'm sure I could spoon feed Morgan, but it would monopolize my time when I'm already spending time with the other new starters on top of my own tasks. I want to give Morgan a shot, but I don't know what to do. At what point do I tell my manager about my concerns? Then, just to reiterate the kind of concerns here we have, the listener wrote in with six bullet points, and I'll just read a

Starting point is 00:06:29 few. When told to insert a colon to fix the syntax error, Morgan didn't know what a colon was. Morgan has never heard about concurrency. The last issue Morgan worked on required reading some source code even after explanation morgan didn't understand how to find the calling ancestor of a given function morgan wanted to do some devops having done some at university but morgan doesn't appear to understand docker at all morgan said they studied react at university but has demonstrated lack of understanding to write react code so basic i guess the point of those bullets is basic stuff even all these issues in aggregate would be fine with me but the continual resemblance of and behavior of a stunned mullet isn't encouraging what is that a reference i don't

Starting point is 00:07:08 get a stunned I don't quite get it either yeah I worry that I've said something offensive with stunned mullet but I guess I don't know anyway last sentence after being told to research a concept Morgan must be told a specific google query to type in thanks and apologies for the long question okay I have a stunned mullet right now I think I haven't had a haircut in a long time So, if you stunned me enough, maybe you could, like, shape it into a mullet. Maybe that's what it is. Okay. All right. I got it. Like a stunned mullet is an Australian or English phrase meaning dazed and uncomprehending.

Starting point is 00:07:47 I believe it is not offensive. Okay. Whew. Australian, huh? Australian and British. I choose to believe this is Australian because that just feels more delightful. More exciting and fun. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:08:02 I want to give Morgan a shot I mean it sounds like you did I don't know it sounds to me like you are about to start an unwitting two-year computer science program in your in your spare time where you are the professor and the TA and you've got one student and that student's name is yeah hmm I'm sure I could spoon feed Morgan but I wouldn't monopolize my time yeah i think i think the time to tell your manager is now i mean if they're an intern then part of the point of that is to try to evaluate do you want them to come on full time so assume i'm assuming there's some sort of official evaluation feedback thing as part of this i don't know yeah i guess it depends on how internships work there but at the very least

Starting point is 00:08:58 you probably want to not spend a lot of your time investing in this person if it looks like you would have to invest so much that it would never pay back and like assuming they learn all the stuff you teach them do you want to keep teaching them stuff like you said dave for yeah for years longer i think the answer is no i mean look we don't know what's in this person's heart the answer could be i've always wanted to be a teacher but i never i always wanted a developer salary and a teacher's job well guess what you got it that's true it's probably way easier and way higher paying uh-huh and you'll be a developer paid to teach one person than to be an actual teacher it's perfect yeah you've unlocked the secret continue

Starting point is 00:09:45 morgan must be told the specific google query to type in oh that is maybe the most damning part of all of this is so painful so you don't know stuff i don't know stuff morgan doesn't know stuff i at least hope i would know how to google what is thing x what is it called how do i use it yeah what what is a colon and then you have to then hurriedly delete and say what is a colon in programming languages yeah and then clear history yes i'm gonna do this search in incognito mode i've learned to do all my work related searches yeah an incognito and i mean i have two reasons one is i asked what a colon was and got some nasty images but the other reason is i don't want anyone knowing i had to search what a colon was yeah i mean imagine imagine this

Starting point is 00:10:35 doesn't get corrected right like at least now it is if this person is an intern there should be a strong expectation that there's a lot of stuff they don't know but they should also if they're a great intern should be good at figuring out stuff that they don't know because most of the things they're going to do are things they don't know so i don't know a way to say this besides say you need to either de-internize this intern whatever process that is to end the internship or just like cut them off so that you don't invest more time i mean you shouldn't be rude or unkind but if if there's some legal reason or cultural reason why you don't want to just can some intern maybe it doesn't work somehow in australia then yes then you need to you need to make sure you

Starting point is 00:11:22 don't spend any of your time in this thing that won't return it to you it sounds so callous and cold when i say it that way yeah you're you're terrible jameson i can't believe that you would suggest that someone should be terminated for trying to do a job that they don't have the skills to do yeah well you have no heart i know i would only tell me what they should do instead okay i'm only saying it because it's my birthday and i that's the one day of the year i'm allowed to be a total jerk to everyone finally you can be truly honest yes happy birthday to me here come the insults that's my gift to me yeah yeah i mean really the bottom line here is Morgan got a job that Morgan can't do. And like this happens all the time. Imagine if I was

Starting point is 00:12:11 tried to go get a job as a brain surgeon. And by some miracle, I got through the hiring process and I show up in the operating room and it's like, I don't actually know where the brain is exactly. Do I go in through the nose or the ear? And they're like, neither, sir. What are you doing? I'm like, I need to quit this job right away. And that leads me to my next point, which is of everyone in this situation who is acutely aware of morgan's underperformance probably the most acutely aware is morgan and morgan probably feels terrible and i think it's worth sitting down this is probably not something i would have done when i was a junior engineer but i would be okay to sit down now with morgan and just be like morgan how's this job going for you

Starting point is 00:12:57 and don't be surprised when morgan breaks down and cries in front of you because this is probably very stressful. Yeah. I'm just thinking back to your brain surgery analogy. Maybe you've done a lot of Play-Doh. You're like, this is kind of the same, right? I studied Play-Doh. There's like the pink gooey stuff somewhere that you turn into ice cream, I believe. Wait, hold on. Pause the operation for a minute. Can someone bring me an iPad? I need to do a google search where hang on i have to ask chat gpt where do i cut can uh nurse can you please open chrome in incognito mode i need to search where is brain how is brain yes how to brain surgery why hold on i'm looking at the search history here and

Starting point is 00:13:52 it says what is a colon i think that's a different kind of doctor that's when you flee you've been discovered time to go to the gi wing of the hospital and see if i can do a better job i mean that realistically that's what's happened here morgan has managed to get a job which which happens occasionally that morgan is not qualified to do and it's it's a frustrating stressful and sad situation for everyone and it's actually kind of amazing how much grace our soft skills engineering listener is giving to morgan i mean this is like extreme and the reason i say it's extreme is listen to this last sentence even with all these issues i would be fine but it's the it's the stunned mullet that i can't handle

Starting point is 00:14:40 i'm like oh boy wait wait is this another example of british humor that i didn't get like a stunt i'm googling this it's a fish what is a mullet a kind of fish it is oh it's a fish and the fish looks very dumb i'll have to say this is not an intelligent looking fish it's like mouth mouth breathing with eyes wide big huge eyes like whoa yeah what a what a dumb fish oh man a stunned mullet yeah i mean i guess it's clear then the the solution is to make them not know how to do their job but just calmly and and serenely acknowledge it instead of act like a stunned bullet and then it'd be fine right it's like i still don't know what a colon is but at least i don't have my mouth hanging open i'm confident

Starting point is 00:15:33 about it yeah yeah yeah i i don't think there's another answer here besides give feedback that this is not working out and really this is a month when the concerns are this severe feels like enough time i know there's always this concern of like well maybe they're still onboarding and maybe it's not fair to them you're not making the decision to fire this person you don't know exactly what's going to happen here but i think a month is enough time as the person directly responsible for helping uh kind of get them up to speed to say hey they are not i am not getting them up to speed. It is failing miserably. Please, please help because it's not working out for me. Yep. And if I were in your shoes, actually, let me put it this way. If I was in your manager's

Starting point is 00:16:23 shoes and you copied and pasted this question word for word and gave it to me to read, I would go, okay, it's time to move. And it would be my duty to talk to Morgan, figure out what's going on, because I always want to give them the benefit of the doubt at first, and I never want to rule out the possibility that something terrible has happened in Morgan's life that is making an otherwise capable and competent software engineer become more of a, let's just say, stunned mullet variety engineer. But that's very unlikely to be the case here. It does happen once in a rare while, and then it would probably take another month before Morgan is going to be let go. So, I mean, that's one thing you have to come to terms with is that you are going to result in the termination of this person if you share this direct information with your manager.

Starting point is 00:17:18 But again, you must be cold and callous like Jameson. Just think that to yourself. I mean, just think of the other people that you're trying to help onboard as well. If all of your time is going into Morgan for a little return, they're probably missing out on a lot where you could, if you took all of the time you spent with them and divided it up among the other folks who seem to be doing better. or at least not poorly enough to be worthy of a question, then I feel like that'd be a lot more effective for the company, not just for your own satisfaction and sanity. I don't know. I think we've answered this question. Have we answered it? I think the answer is cold and simple. This person has a job they aren't qualified to do,

Starting point is 00:18:02 and they need to be terminated. Not because it's our job to make sure that our capitalist free market destroys everyone who's not fully capable but because they're just they're in the wrong place at the wrong time for themselves and i'm sure it feels awful and they need to go find something they can be productive at and the company eventually is going to figure this out and the longer you let it wait the worse it's going to be for them and for their teammates who have to put up with them and then you get culture problems and a culture problem like in this case the culture problem is people get a belief from experiencing interacting with morgan that this company, your performance doesn't matter.

Starting point is 00:18:40 You can do whatever you want and you're still going to get paid. You're still going to get rewarded. That's not a cultural belief you want to be circulating in your population because it'll make for a really crappy environment to work in. So it's going to happen. It's got to happen.

Starting point is 00:18:54 And the sooner it happens, the better. That's cold. That's the cold hard truth in this case. All right. We've done it. We've answered the question. Hey, Jameson, we've been talking about this podcast from Red Hat called Compiler. I guess people might think we're kind of obsessed with it,

Starting point is 00:19:09 and we are. What do you want to tell people about it today? I want to tell them about a new episode I just listened to from Compiler called Warning Signs, which is about some red flags or disasters or bad things that have happened in people's careers, which in some ways is the subject of this show. So it felt like it was very synergistic. I don't know. There's something about hearing a good prod is destroyed story that warms my heart. you particularly like those i love them yeah and and the compiler is good at storytelling about engineering i think that's one of my favorite things about it yeah and let's not miss this opportunity to say how much better they are than us at production quality

Starting point is 00:19:50 if we keep saying it then it becomes like a we're doing we're doing bad production ironically yeah exactly i know we know it's bad and we choose to because we're cool i think that's how it works right but seriously if you want to listen to a podcast about software development from people who actually know what they're doing and sound great and tell good stories red hat compiler is the podcast for you yep go check it out should i read our next question dave please do this is from a listener named confused cat who asks i just spent over four years on a team where technical growth was lacking. Recently, I transitioned to a new team within the same company, and I'm enjoying the atmosphere, the team dynamics, and the opportunity to engage in more challenging

Starting point is 00:20:35 software development tasks. Fortunately, my motivation is beginning to resurface. However, I've noticed that my technical skills have become somewhat rusty. While I can still deliver systems and features, I feel like I'm falling behind compared to some of my peers. This self-awareness is causing me to doubt myself, despite receiving no negative feedback from my current team or supervisor it's not just imposter syndrome i genuinely feel the need to upskill how can i navigate this situation effectively what strategies would you suggest for advancing my skills while holding a senior position and preventing feelings of inadequacy from affecting my performance aha confused cat let's start with number one you are actually not a cat

Starting point is 00:21:14 i can tell because you typed this and i've seen cat typing and it looks nothing like this it would be unfathomably unlikely that a cat walking across the keyboard would type this question we could calculate the odds but not impossible not impossible it's just the chances would be one in a very large number i'm guessing at least 100 digits yeah i thought you're gonna say at least 100 you'd have to have the cat walk across the keyboard at least 100 times to get these three paragraphs. Yeah. There's also a bit of a theme here

Starting point is 00:21:55 where our last question mentioned a stunned mullet and now we got a cat. And cats sometimes eat fish. So maybe there's something going on here, some kind of theme in the questions. Look, if ever you doubted that the universe wanted this podcast to exist, all you have to do is look at these random connections,

Starting point is 00:22:13 seemingly random connections between the questions we put on the screen or in the show. and it'll just tell you this podcast was meant to be. 400 episodes. Yes. Every single one has a hidden secret theme woven through the show.

Starting point is 00:22:26 Go back and check. You'll find it. I promise. As long as you assume it's there, you'll find it. You'll find it. I recommend harnessing your confirmation bias. That's a powerful technique to find patterns.

Starting point is 00:22:39 It turns out you're great at finding patterns. So get to it. It feels good to do stuff you're good at. Oh, Jameson, you're in great form today. It's the best birthday present ever. Okay. You know, we said some kind of harsh words in our last question, and I'm going to double down. I'm going to want to say harsh words here, too.

Starting point is 00:23:04 I – oh, boy, maybe I shouldn't even say this. I hear a lot of people that write into the show with questions, and I am really not good at identifying themes. but a lot of once in a while not boy how do i even say that see i'm getting all nervous even addressing this but i'm basically going to tell someone to stop worrying about your feelings so much because that's what's happening here is that at least one of the there's a couple things going on here but one of them is dave can i give you some advice about how you're feeling and how to deliver this more effectively yes please just stop worrying about your feelings and say it oh you made me cough i'm coughing up coughing up blood now okay not really

Starting point is 00:23:49 okay i am gonna stop worrying about my feelings and just say it okay i feel like i'm falling behind this self-awareness is causing me to doubt myself despite receiving no negative feedback from my current team or supervisor i genuinely feel the need in this case to upskill now that's great You want to upskill? Fantastic. Lean into that. But I think a lot of people worry just a little bit too much about their feelings and not enough about get the job done. Get to work, get the job done, do your best work, and don't worry about the... There's this little part of your brain, I don't even know what part it's called because as we established in the last question, I am not a brain surgeon. But it creates thoughts that are just garbage. And I actually had, I had a boss

Starting point is 00:24:37 tell me this about 10 years ago. I was really worrying about a particular team member on my team. And I talked to my CTO about it. And it got to a point where, actually, I'll tell you the story in the proper order. I didn't talk to my CTO yet. I got to the point where I was so worried that I actually woke up one night at 3am. And I was just running, my mind was running in circles about how nervous I was about this situation. And so then the next day I sat down with my CTO and I said, this is so bothersome. I feel so strongly about this that I even woke up at 3am and just couldn't stop thinking about it. And I'm just nervous, nervous, nervous. And my CTO looks back at me and goes, you probably shouldn't trust the feelings you have at 3am. And 10 years later,

Starting point is 00:25:21 I just want to say thank you to that CTO. You know who you are. You're right. A lot of our feelings are actual just they're not accurate representations of reality and in this very question here we have some facts no negative feedback great you want you want to quickly kill those feelings go and ask your team for feedback hey what feedback do you have for me on my job performance how am i doing in my first few months on the job go ask your boss hey how am i doing don't even don't even couch it in the negative like hey what's my areas for improvement just go and say what's your honest take on how i'm doing am i doing well and they'll they'll tell you yeah great take that at face value and tell those feelings to stuff them deep down inside your body where they belong never

Starting point is 00:26:02 to surface again like unikitty taught us on the lego movie yes yeah that's an interesting direction to go i was thinking i remember you told a story on this podcast once i think about when you started riding bikes with a group that had been riding a lot and you'd been riding a bunch before on your own and then suddenly they were like hey let's go ride a hundred miles and you realized oh you can ride a hundred miles i guess you can huh and this feels similar where you have been on a team where either deliberately or inadvertently you've not been pushed to do much you've been kind of relaxing and then you join this team that is not relaxing and it is a change of pace so i think it's unsurprising that it takes you a second to adjust to it i don't think it means you are

Starting point is 00:26:55 incapable of it though but four years is a long time i mean that's longer than many people have stayed at their longest job ever so that's a long time to get used to a pace and a style and the good thing is you have a lot of examples around you to learn and if you are genuinely finally worried about not just what people think about your performance, but your kind of absolute output relative to other people. It sounds like you've got folks you can look at and see how much do they do? How do they do it? How can I be more like them? And if the answer is just like, put more reps in, that might be it. You just have to ride more miles so that you can then ride more miles. Yeah, I think I agree with you, Dave, though, that the feelings of like, I'm not good

Starting point is 00:27:40 enough are not healthy but i want to be better is a healthy feeling i think or it can be for sure well yeah it can be right any feeling taken too far it's a bad feeling yeah but including this one i think whatever feeling you're having right now right stop it because it's getting too close to the limit self-awareness has caused me to doubt myself yeah i i think i'm thinking back to some time i worked at a megacorp with some great people and i i think i did this explicitly i was like well you can you can solve a problem that way holy cow and then i kind of sat down and thought about it and absorbed their power and took it for my own actually not i think i i developed a very poor approximation of a skill that they had shown but it was it was i didn't know you could

Starting point is 00:28:32 do that until i saw him do it so i think you could look at it that way too like you're you're with a group that can help you level up and that's an envious place to be a lot of people want to be you hear about like don't be the smartest person in the room and you might be the smartest person in the room but you're feeling like you are not the most effective engineer in the room that means if you just absorb what people around you are doing you will get better yeah you will and one of the one of the beauties of working on a team that you describe like this which is, I'm assuming, yeah, challenging software development tasks, good team dynamics, opportunity to engage, good atmosphere. You're going to improve. And that's actually the

Starting point is 00:29:09 wonderful thing is you're sitting here telling yourself, oh, I need to improve. I need to do better. But you know what? You've already done the work of putting yourself in an environment where you're going to improve. And that's one of the things I like the most about, I guess it's one of my favorite life hacks, is that if you want to improve in something, sure you can put in the reps like like you're saying jameson and this requires discipline you can say like i'm gonna go to the gym every day and i'm gonna work out or i'm gonna do a elite code problem every night before bed or you can surround yourself by people who automatically improve your skills by being exposed to what it looks like like you're saying on the bike ride

Starting point is 00:29:47 thing you know it's like i didn't wake up and say well i'm gonna do one mile then the next day i'm gonna do two miles and the next day i didn't even make a plan i just said i'm gonna go hang out with those guys. That was my one decision. And then all the other things just happened automatically to me. Oh, blood doping. Okay. Okay. I got it. Yeah. Yeah. I think we're, we're trying to be encouraging because it sounds like you need some encouragement. I think so. Accept this encouragement here. I've given you it. Please take it. Have we answered the question? I think so. Good luck. I think you're going to be great. I think the direct question was, what strategies would you suggest for advancing my skills while preventing feelings of inadequacy? And I think

Starting point is 00:30:29 the strategy is, stop putting so much emphasis on your feelings and start putting emphasis on doing good work and getting good outcomes and getting results and being valuable. And then also, you've already implemented a strategy to advance your skills, which is you've surrounded yourself with awesome people at work who are going to naturally upskill you which i think is cool yeah cool dave what can people do if they would like their own questions answered well if you've been having feelings lately of wanting to get a question answered you should pay attention to those feelings yeah those ones are good and go go to soft skills.audio and click the ask a question button where you can fill out our form

Starting point is 00:31:09 and this is the part in the show where i say to everyone thank you thank you for filling out that question form every week we love it the questions just keep rolling in every every week i wake up to record this show and i look at the question sheet and i think no one's gonna write in and then to my surprise every week a bunch of people write in with questions so thank you thank you for doing that you should all wish dave a belated happy birthday too yeah it won't even be belated i mean today is literally today that this air this episode that's true if you listen on the day it airs it's my birthday and what other day would you listen on and if well i was about to say if you're catching up if it's four years later still wish him a happy

Starting point is 00:31:48 birthday because it was his birthday when this came out so it'll still work all right thank you for listening we will catch you next week

Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 400: Underperforming intern and upskilling

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