Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 407: I'm too territorial and should I quiet quit?

Episode Date: May 6, 2024

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I am a data scientist and have been at my company for 2 years. Each of the data scientists on my team specialize in a different area of the business (growth, marketing, etc). I have developed a reputation for being the expert in my area and have worked really hard to understand my domain. I have a new data science team member who works in an adjacent area and has expressed interest in learning more about “my” area. But every time I talk to him I find myself getting defensive and possessive (on the inside). I don’t want to share my area, and I like being known as the expert, and I don’t want him working on stuff in my domain. Any advice on how to be less territorial here? Should I quiet quit? I’m a year in to a new job, and am doing well. I work for a large consulting company, and have been doing a decent amount of unpaid overtime by volunteering for internal projects that we can’t bill to our clients! The extra 5-10 hours a week have been adding up, and I feel overwhelmed. I don’t think the extra work is as appreciated as it should be. I’ve received lots of positive feedback, and my performance reviews have been fine. Am I getting taken advantage of? Will people notice if I step back and just do the bare minimum expected for my job? I like being useful, and do genuinely enjoy some of the projects I’ve volunteered for. They’ve probably also been good for my internal visibility, as I’ve gotten to have my name on some large internal announcements and have had some good face time with very senior people. If I end up sticking around here, it’ll probably be good, and I wouldn’t mind a promotion. But I’m exhausted, and it’s starting to get in the way of my personal life, hobbies, and even client work sometimes. I’m also wondering if that time would be better spent on upskilling or open source or something outside the company. How far can I cut back without repercussions?

it takes more than measuring aromatic complexity instead of cyclomatic complexity to be a great engineer this is soft skills engineering episode 407 i'm your host dave smith i am your host jamison dance soft skills engineering is a weekly advice podcast for software developers of all complexities some days i i get pretty complex there's something about working from home yeah you've complected your home life and work life yeah i do like the adjective complex instead of stinky because it's it's like you could imagine saying that about a wine or a cheese you know this has a complex smell yes it's not disgusting it's refined it means that you are wrong for thinking it's gross because you're just lowbrow i am an acquired

complexity yes yes yeah and then you refactor by showering i guess that's how you unnest those loops delete dead code in the form of yep dead code yeah uh dave i want to thank our patrons so i will thank you to these folks who support the show at the level where we shout them out every single week thank you to do not and then the next one become a senior engineer.com unsalted french fires are morally objectionable dan from drone deploy chase w norton level up your type script with type here.dev never is not just a crater on mars i like chicken i like liver meow mix meow mix please deliver trash panda the computer science book.com kyle boss kent c dodds jenny kim owen charlotte craig motlin the stochastic parrot

patreon.com we're hiring ira chan question mark jonathan king zanai beautiful functional user documentation the uns excuse me the settling nature of the content and williamangel.com i will admit this one i did go to will's website after he first put this in here so it worked nice targeted advertisement worked ragnar travis brayden canes john grant and the genius peanut butter guy thank you so much we really appreciate you we appreciate you so much that we say the words that you want us to say and we give you virtual hugs yes which until the metaverse advances enough you'll just have to take on our word i like i like how you said we appreciate you so much that we say the words you want us to say it's like that's pretty good advice for

relationships too yeah i guess you could interpret that on a bunch of different levels what do you want me to say that is just type it in the base sometimes that is how i operate where i'm like okay what are the words they want me to say that will make them like me i will i must find and say those words it's like andy from the office trying to get people to like him yeah at least it's genuine doesn't work wait no yes all right shout out to episode 407 proxy authentication required i don't know who this proxy is but we better authenticate it yeah i wonder how many times this gets used i've never used it nor seen it used i may have no i may have used this in fact we i use a commercial proxy at work for location masking sometimes for testing from different

locations and if you use that proxy and don't specify the password i think it gives you a 407 I worked on a team that built a proxy. And you still didn't know? I don't know if we did 407 stuff. Probably not authenticated. Maybe we did. Yeah, I should ask. I'll ask them if they see it in the code base.

Yeah, do you want to read our first question? I do. This comes from an anonymous listener who says, I am a data scientist and have been in my company for two years. Each of the data scientists on my team specializes in a different area of the business, like growth or marketing. I have developed a reputation for being the expert in my area, and I have worked really hard to understand my domain.

I have a new data science team member who works in an adjacent area and has expressed interest in learning more about my area. But every time I talk to him, I find myself getting defensive and possessive on the inside. I don't want to share my area and I like being known as the expert and I don't want him working on stuff in my domain.

Any advice on how to be less territorial here? Hmm, that reflects well on you as a person that that's the question you asked after this. Because you could have asked, how do I get them to back off? Yeah, how do I double down on my territorial nature? How do I defend, yeah, how do I defend my territory? How do I make sure he never asks

to come into my territory again? Yeah, I think dogs pee to mark the boundaries. One way is you could throw up a 407, proxy authentication required, every interaction. That's true, that's true. I think the peeing here would be like giving him really bad advice or launching into really long-winded,

boring stories every time he asks what if you what if you made yourself appear as a buffoon but only to certain people and then as an absolute expert and master of the of the material to everyone else and you create like this twilight zone gaslighting scenario so you're trying to undermine their credibility by making them think you're dumb yes but everyone else thinks you're very smart so when they say isn't isn't dave dumb everyone else goes what are you talking about dave is brilliant yeah exactly if you're so smart you can orchestrate that kind of conspiracy yeah that that takes confidence that i could not even imagine possessing what it looked like to live in those to live in that brain where i could think i will convince

this person i'm dumb because i know that everyone else thinks i'm so smart that they would never believe i'm dumb the confidence is off the charts and just the capacity to pull that off is a skill set that very few possess yeah it's probably a good movie in there somewhere yeah i don't want to share my area hmm do you know why they want to ask i mean you're not going to tell us because you're right now some text on a screen but it does make me wonder why they are digging into it expressed interest in learning more about my area obviously because they want to take your territory and dethrone you yeah i mean that's that's kind of the conclusion you're jumping to right that you have this expertise that is valuable and they are trying to dilute the value by by making more

of it and maybe that's not why maybe there's some project that they're working on i don't know it might be helpful to understand why that might help you become less defensive maybe it really is they're trying to take over yeah and then you become more defensive yeah all of your instincts were right they want to oust you and make you just one more skull on their skull of their throne of skulls a skull of thrones would be cool too though if you had a giant skull made out of thrones my skull of thrones yeah that'd be great what if so i mean you could you could try and do a little tit for tat like maybe you want to learn more about their area and i'm not saying this as a way to get back at them but maybe just a way to reduce the defensiveness to make it

more an exchange of ideas it's not that i am giving you all my secrets it's more like we're just learning more about each other's stuff yeah you know i still remember the first time i felt this kind of defensive territorial encroachment and i still remember my base instinctual response which was i had just been appointed a leader of a tiny team of me and one other engineer and kind of given an opportunity to be a tech lead for something. It wasn't something I was craving or even wanted, but it just kind of felt to me. And I remember we were working on this code together, and then I had to disappear for a day or go to some meetings or something.

And when I came back, the engineer had made a whole bunch of progress on our shared code and was showing me what they had done. And I'm embarrassed to admit today that I felt kind of scared by that, like frustrated with that. Like, oh no, you're going to take this code off in some direction and I'm going to be lost. Like, I have no idea what this code does, where it is. I haven't read it. I haven't reviewed it. But I quickly learned to banish those thoughts from my mind because I realized the success of this project, whether I'm familiar with the code or writing the code myself is paramount. It's not about whether or not I am intricately woven into every detail,

but the project itself is what I'm going for success on. And that was almost 20 years ago. Let's see, it was probably like 2008 or something, like 16 years ago. And do you know how much that matters to me that I knew what that code looked like today? It's like, not at all. Not even a little bit. And do you know how much I care who owns that project now and what my territory is or was on that project? Not at all. It's like completely unimportant. And I think that's probably my advice here is to take the long view and realize that you're going to be an expert in other areas too, because you're clearly very good. You're motivated, you're smart, you're capable. And if all you ever were for the next 20 years was the expert in marketing data science for this

company, I think you would be very disappointed in yourself. And so you got to let it go and feel free to let other people become experts as well. That'll empower you to move on to other and bigger and greater things if you help this person become an expert you get to take credit for everything they do i think that's how it works yes exactly anytime they have a good idea you get to tell everyone hey that's because i told them how this thing works that's yeah so actually that's my idea i remember when i helped that person grow into what they are today yeah yeah hmm how to be less territorial i do i do understand this fear that is this demonstrating that i am replaceable if someone else can come in and learn this stuff i think that's probably part of what is

beneath this i worked really hard at this but someone else could just do that maybe they will be better in some way so maybe another thing you could do is is try to just get a get a feel for what your what your manager's idea of your performances are they happy with it are they pumped about it are they overjoyed do they wish you were doing something else that you are not that can help put to rest some of these unnamed or or unsubstantiated fears of like what if i'm bad suddenly or what if they suddenly realize i'm bad and it's easier to share when you're more secure in in what you have yeah for sure and i think this is actually a pretty normal thing to feel when you've you've carved out this little world for

yourself that you feel really secure and great about. You've probably gotten a lot of praise. It's great. Wonderful. But it just does... I mean, okay, look, this might be Jameson and me doing our normal thing where we've just lived such charmed lives surrounded by generally well-motivated good people. But I'm going to make a statement that by and large, in almost every case, when someone wants to learn more about your area of expertise, it can only help you. It can't hurt you unless they like stick you in a jar and carry you around in their pocket and like i don't know if they're just like feeding you lines and then you respond and they tell them to someone else but yeah if you're just increasing how much other people know i think that's helpful it's nice to

be known as someone who knows stuff and teaches other people stuff yep all right have we answered the question i think so good luck and i mean summarizing my advice let it go in fact try it In fact, I would double down on the non-territorialness to maximize your success by actually opening this up, document everything you do, publicize everything you do, make it as easy as possible for other people to become experts in what you do, and then that will free you up to become an expert in something even cooler and more and bigger. Or get laid off. Love it. I don't know. One of those two. I was thinking that.

I'm not going to lie. Oh, we don't even need this person anymore. Everyone's an expert in this area. Yeah. uh, hopefully there's more valuable things you can do. All right. I'm going to read our next question. This is from an anonymous listener who says, should I quiet quit? I'm a year into a new job and I'm doing well. I work for a large consulting company and have been doing a decent amount of unpaid overtime by volunteering for internal projects that we can't bill to our

clients. The extra five to 10 hours a week have been adding up and I feel overwhelmed. I don't think the extra work is as appreciated as it should be. I've received lots of positive feedback and my performance reviews have been fine. Am I getting taken advantage of? Will people notice if I step back and just do the bare minimum expected for my job? I like being useful, and I do genuinely enjoy some of the projects

I've volunteered for. They've probably also been good for my internal visibility as I've gotten to have my name on some very large internal announcements and have had some good face time with very senior people. If I end up sticking around here, it'll probably be good and I wouldn't mind a promotion. But I'm exhausted and it's starting to get in the way

my personal life hobbies and even client work sometimes. I'm also wondering if that time would be better spent on upskilling or open source or something outside the company. How far can I cut back without repercussions? The word quiet quit. That is such an interesting phrase. This came up during the pandemic, right? I believe so. That's when I first started hearing it. I forgot what the definition is. It's just, you just see how little you can do and not get fired basically right keep getting paid don't do the work quiet quit and then a quiet quit of course has a sister like a cousin whose name i i don't know if it has a name but it's do this as at as many jobs as you can at the same time doing the minimum effort required for one's job and putting

in no more time effort or enthusiasm than absolutely necessary so it's not you don't you don't do nothing you do as little as you possibly can yeah yeah i mean i think there is a spectrum here there are plenty of employers who will happily take advantage of any extra passion you give them to your detriment yeah and it's it's it's hard for that to give you a return that feels equitable because of the power mismatch between you and an employer if you work nights and weekends for five years and just have no social life and kill your health and stuff you will be seen as a as a rock star at the company but like i mean they still might need to cut your whole division someday or i don't know like they're not gonna do that without thinking about all your nights

and weekends probably yeah they will they will not do something against their self-interest to out of out of goodwill for you having done this for a long time people at the company can do that but like the company itself exists to to not do those things to do stuff only out of its own self-interest so my point is it can be harmful if you get really passionate and and are not deliberate in how you choose to use that passion which it sounds like is what's happening here at the same time what you're it doesn't sound like quiet quitting what you're saying you you want to do it sounds like what you want to do is like your job yeah exactly i kind of interpret quiet quitting to be like less than kind of slacking off yeah yeah like if someone

found out you were quiet quitting they would probably be disappointed and wish you did not work there anymore whereas you can just like have a job yeah like yeah i'm doing 120 and i'd like to do a hundred percent i would like to quiet quit down to 100 yeah yeah how about i just like to quietly restore normal 100 life yeah you're quiet quitting your second job yeah that's it oh yes i didn't realize that's what we were actually talking about two jobs it's like a second mortgage i want to stop paying now i'm reading more about this on the i don't know this is some random website but it's saying like they're less willing to engage in citizenship behaviors no more staying late showing up earlier attending non-mandatory meetings i don't know my i still have this

impression of quiet quitting is like it's kind of a scam and you're just counting on not getting fully found out so maybe my definition is different from this but yeah doing extra that you're not being paid for or asked for or rewarded for it's fine to not do that i think especially if if if you are doing well if you're getting good reviews one of the outcomes here is you burn out and you quit and i'm sure this company would rather have you not do this extra five to ten hours of stuff a week and just still like be a good employee then then do it until you can't take it anymore and quit. Yeah, I agree with that. And, and frankly, you know, I'm a little bit of a mixed opinion on this because I have had this work for me. I, I remember I got a job about 12 years

ago and I worked for the first year. I just busted my butt. I worked a lot of nights, a lot of weekends. And at the end of the year, I went to my boss and I told him I have worked a lot of nights and a lot of weekends and look at, and I assembled, you know, a so-called brag document where I listed all the things that I had contributed to the company over the last year. And I said, I'm looking for a very big raise this year, to the tune of 30%. I thought, that's a lot. A 30% raise is enormous for someone who's not changing title or responsibility just to keep doing what I've been doing. And I got it. He gave me the raise. And so on the one hand, I don't really suggest going and just doing a ton of overtime because you, I guess, for no reason. I also don't suggest

it as a general lifestyle in perpetuity, but it can be used under the right conditions to essentially get paid for it in arrears. Because that's what ended up happening. Then I dialed down my work. I mean, I still worked hard and still did great work, living my best, what is it called? My best self? I don't know. Sorry. I was trying to make fun of some modern phrase and I couldn't pull it off. Anyway, but I did get paid for it. And so that worked because I was lucky and I happened to be in an environment that had HR flexibility, you know, most of the time they'd be like, oh, thanks so much. High-end raises this year are 3.5% instead of 3%. There you go, buddy. You know, so that would have been a really bad outcome.

So I don't necessarily recommend it, even though it can work out. What I do recommend for multiple reasons is that you should be upfront with your management about what you are doing before you do it so that they know what to watch for. And I mean, it says here you're getting good performance reviews and you're getting visibility. But I wonder if you have full visibility and if your boss doesn't know just how many extra hours you're working, there's a really good chance they or if you haven't told them is what I'm saying. If you haven't told your boss how many extra hours you're working, there's a very good chance they don't know. Yeah. Yeah, that's probably true i think you can also learn stuff from working hard like you might not get a a raise or direct

financial compensation but you can you mentioned facetime with people and new opportunities i think that's all definitely true but none of that means you have to keep doing it if you i mean and and i don't think you're required to right like part of what you should know at work is is what's expected of me and it seems very clear from your question that you were doing more than what is expected of you so i don't see any downside to cutting back it feels like there's often a rhythm to these things and if you just need a break that's fine yeah i think that's fine and you know or maybe you would feel better if you were being compensated for it i mean i don't know money can't heal all wounds, but sometimes it can heal the exhaustion wound when you feel like, oh,

I'm actually being appropriately compensated for my time spent. And now my sense of cosmic justice has been restored and I feel fine. That can happen. I'm not saying that's necessarily the answer, but it could be. And right now you're essentially acting as a charitable volunteer for this company. And maybe that's what you want, but I don't think so based on the fact that you're exhausted, your personal life is suffering, and even your actual job, it says, even my client work is suffering. I think this is definitely out of balance. Oh, yeah. I forgot about that part. Yeah. Your second job is interfering with your first job.

Yeah. Your second unpaid job. That you want to quiet quit. Yeah. I think you should loud quit it. I don't think you have to be quiet about it. I think you should say, hey, I need to step away from this stuff for a little bit. And maybe you find someone to take it over. And I don't know, you can kind of like send it off on its way and leave it in an okay state maybe. Yeah. I think that makes a lot of sense. And there's another good reason to be upfront about this, loud quitting. And if you're looking for a narrative that makes that sound like you're not just lazy, like I think a lot of people worry,

maybe this is a United States culture problem, but I think a lot of people worry about looking like I'm not a team player, you know, or I want to reduce my hours. Uh-oh, you're the first one on the layoff list now. So what if you say things in the terms that your business values, like our clients? Our clients are suffering because of this extra work that I volunteered to take on without compensation. Can I, I am going to reduce this, help guide me with strategies that can do this effectively? I want to practice radical focus. Surely there's some buzzwordy focus initiative thing at your company that you can tie this to. Extreme ownership delegated.

Yeah. Talk about the Eisenhower matrix. Radical candor, extreme ownership, Eisenhower matrix. It's actually all one thing. Navy SEALs fit in there somehow. Yes, definitely. Yeah. Business is really important to Navy SEALs or Navy SEALs are really important to business. I think that's what I've learned. yeah they they can sneak up behind a guy and snap his neck and also lead an effective yeah leave it an effective shareholder meeting it turns out these are cross-trainable

it turns out i'm not afraid to confront an i can go three weeks on one hour of sleep a night and still hit a bullseye on the right person and also make great PowerPoints. Right. And wrangle that executive board meeting. Yeah, I think you should loud quit. That's my advice. So, I mean, it's the long play,

but you're going to have to start with BUDS, which is the torturous application process of becoming a Navy SEAL. Oh, man. I know there are people that read that and wonder, could I ever do this? I read that stuff and know, oh there's there's absolutely zero chance i would make it past like a minute into this you're like

one minute and where's the bell where's the bell i got a ring to get out of here yeah oh we haven't even started yet the bell is too far can you bring the bell to me please i actually brought a pocket making it to the bell i knew this would happen i brought a bell it's here how did you smuggle that in sir yeah you can tell how how much we know about the military by our vast experience yes clearly yeah loud quit that's my advice i'm sticking loud quit forget just drop the quiet and loud quit yep but do it in such a way that you don't look like a non-navy seal wuss yeah i think you can pull it off that's what all your training was for that's what all your buds yeah that was

you got through the boot camp yeah that makes you think you can't do this little thing are we are we making stuff up now i don't i don't know i think boot camp is definitely not buds oh yeah okay all right please don't be mad at us that's the implicit disclaimer at the end of every episode but i'll say it explicitly yeah no disrespect intended there is this weird obsession with navy seals in corporate culture though what should people do they want their own questions answered it should go to soft skills audio and grab it from behind the neck and snap it click the uh ask a question button where you can fill out our form that i don't even know i can't think of anything except navy seals now can you connect it to the proxy authentication required

at the beginning that would be perfect somehow if you encounter any kind of http error in the 400 class like 407 that means you need to authenticate with your proxy there are other errors too but that's what 407 means that's all i got i'm very confused i don't get it um all right i think we better get out of here let's get thanks for listening we will catch you next week