Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 412: Work-life-team balance and getting code-sniped

Starting point is 00:00:00 it takes more than trying to turn your brain off and on again by going for a walk to be a great software engineer this is episode 412 of the soft skills engineering podcast where i am your host james and dance i'm your host dave smith soft skills engineering is your weekly advice show about all the non-technical things that go into the technical field of software development like strolling like ambulating what did you say on the promenade ambulating isn't that an old timey word for walking oh wow yes it is i just googled it yeah very well said thank you i have to make up for all the times i pronounce commonly known words incorrectly every once in a while dropping a less commonly known word pronounced well yes nicely done well as far as as far as

Starting point is 00:00:50 you know yeah and maybe it could be i mean i pronounce that word walking uh the treadmill desk just doesn't hit the same as going for a walk outside when you're like i don't know what to do oh yeah if i don't know what to do and i get on my treadmill desk a lot of times what to do turns into like i know i'll check twitter let's see if they help me know what to do? I still remember the very first time I had this phenomenon. And honestly, I should be more impacted by this and change my behavior more to take advantage of these kinds of inspirational moments. But I remember I was pounding my head against the desk on a programming problem. It was like 20 years ago. And I just could not figure out what to do. And I just eventually decided to

Starting point is 00:01:37 give up and walk home. I was in college at the time. So I just packed up my stuff and I just walked home and i was literally five minutes out the door when the answers just started flowing into my mind like here's what to do here's what to do i was like oh my gosh and by the time i got to my apartment i'm like i know exactly what to do i know how to solve this problem and i had been like an hour or two just completely no progress and i just thought if only i had thought to ambulate more yes yes i feel the exact same way and yet i have not taken a walk outside to think about a problem quite a while why don't we do this i'm gonna do it after this show sounds great i vow to take a walk and think hard about problems dave do you want to thank our patrons yes i do

Starting point is 00:02:19 here we go big thank you to everyone who's contributing at the level where they get a weekly shout out they are chewy ted timbrel testing is documenting but my co-workers don't test dave smith will you marry me become a senior engineer.com unsalted french fries are morally objectionable dan from drone deploy chase w norton level up your type script with type hero.dev never is not just a creator on mars i like chicken i like meomics wait no i like chicken i like liver meomics meomics please deliver trash panda the computer science book.com kyle boss kent c dodds jenny kim owen chartle craig motlin the stochastic parrot helicone.ai best observability tool for ai patreon.com we're hiring ira chan question mark jonathan king zanai beautiful functional user

Starting point is 00:03:03 documentation williamangel.net backslash book and the word backslash is spelled out so you know he meant it ragnar travis brayden canes john grant too young to feel this old thank you everyone for your contributions and i just hope one day we have so many patreon supporters that it takes us our full 30 minute episode to just read the names i think that would be that's what the people want that's clearly that's why you're here every week is to listen to these names get this stupid basketball game off my tv i want to see more ads baby oh all right this episode with these outrageous feats of athleticism show me about buffalo wild wings

Starting point is 00:03:47 okay this episode was sponsored by datadog which is the best way to monitor your technology stack More about Datadog later. Pay attention for your chance to win a free t-shirt. I guess it's not even winning. You just literally get it if you do the steps we tell you to do. Yeah, this is like the millennial trophy style of winning where everyone can be a winner. Everyone can. And trust me, once you put this t-shirt on, you're going to feel like a winner.

Starting point is 00:04:13 I got mine in the mail this week and it's really cool. It says Datadog. It's very soft. Very cute dog. It's so soft. Yeah. I love it when, I hate it when you get those, like, sandpapery, like, camel hair type shirts. Like, you must pay a penance.

Starting point is 00:04:32 That's why you're wearing this shirt. It's for the last time you took down fraud. Yeah, you have the hair, camel hair shirt of shame. Until the next person takes down fraud, and then you'll hand it over. All right. All right. Should I read our first question? yes please go for it this is from an anonymous listener who says dear skillet hq i love it i

Starting point is 00:04:58 love that how would you negotiate a difference in work-life balance between teams i love my job and my immediate team we're a tech group within a larger non-tech business and it's a fun problem domain our immediate team has some hard-won work-life balance in part because it would be hard to hire anyone for the role if the balance wasn't part of the equation however i worry about how to communicate differences when anyone we work with all the people we're building software for have an unbalanced schedule because jazz hands emojis that's showbiz i wonder if it's literally showbiz or if it's just an expression i don't know yeah maybe i even understand why other people have their role set up that way and respect it but i don't want to give up my work-life balance either

Starting point is 00:05:40 how can i best handle the relationship when the that difference is there i love the podcast and the skillet slack thanks for the advice empathy and good humor oh it's not an anonymous listener they just put a name at the end tex arcana oh that's not spelled differently first name text last name arcana but not like the tex arcana the place t-e-x and then arcana like the vaguely magical word yeah arcana art yeah yeah like if you were playing a video game and you got a drop that said this word you'd be excited yeah it'd be rare huh so this team has a a special carved out work-life balance that the rest of the company does not enjoy is that what i'm hearing i think so yeah and so how to communicate the difference when anyone we work for have an unbalanced schedule

Starting point is 00:06:35 so i wonder if this comes across as they're they're kind of making requests to this team and are like and you'll have it done tonight at midnight right because that's that's just how i work like i wonder what the are they are they trying to establish boundaries so people know when to expect things that feels like the biggest potential immediate issue like i'm imagining it's it's it's probably not like they just feel bad that they have a cushy gig and everyone else is at work while they go home it's it's got to be like how do we communicate working hours and timelines and stuff so is that the idea you think is it i i think i read into this question something that wasn't there which was i'm thinking about changing teams but i want to negotiate

Starting point is 00:07:21 for my work-life balance on the new team but i guess that's not really it it's more like saying hey everyone else here works till 8 p.m but you guys are off at 5 p.m how do i explain i can't respond to your email between 5 p.m and 8 p.m because unlike you i'm not required to work yeah i wonder if i mean yeah the the real timey stuff is trickier than the like and it'll be done by midnight thing right because that thing you can just say oh no like it won't be it needs more time yeah it needs more time for me to sleep you can talk about you can you can expose expectations of timelines more easily than you can say hey i'm i'm like at a barbecue right now so i'm not going to respond to your stupid slack message also you're invited yeah oh you can't come why

Starting point is 00:08:20 not oh you're required to work shoot you can kind of lean into i mean there's if you're at a non-tech company you're part of a tech team you already have this cultural difference you can make that a vast chasm you can just like wear a lot of robes and have a lot of rituals and ceremonies and stuff just reinforce the differences no no yeah you could have my work-life balance too but then you would have to wear these robes yeah no the tech priesthood of sacred machine adepts does not like why would we have we why would we work your normal human hours right that prevents us from communing with the machines that's right i'm busy what do you think i'm doing i'm not over here at barbecues no i'm over here techno mancing are you familiar with warhammer 40k

Starting point is 00:09:14 no the name rings a bell but i don't know what it is it's like the dumbest coolest thing in the world i don't know it's this hobby of of war games set many years in this sci-fi future but part of the setting is their humanity has like kind of fallen a bit from technology and they have all this leftover ancient tech and this like religious order has sprung up around it because they don't really understand it so they like say prayers to the machine god to bless their tanks to work and stuff that's kind of what i'm imagining here you're like the shadowy order that i mean no one else understands it, even as much as you do. So you get to put a lot of ritual and ceremony around it. Yeah, this sounds wonderful. I think the only limit here is your creativity. Yeah. I can tell

Starting point is 00:10:02 you what I know big corporations tend to do is they will explain, without actually explaining, they will state that, no, no, no, this work-life balance arrangement that we have is actually better for you and this is like when a bank takes a holiday and then when they announce the holiday it's like we can serve you better yes just to better serve our customers we are observing the following 17 bank holidays per year and that's what's happening here maintain a cheery disposition we are going home at 10 a.m yeah exactly we will be open from 8 to 10 a.m they would never explain And I mean, cheery disposition would be a bridge too far. They would never actually explain how this better serves the customers.

Starting point is 00:10:48 They would just state unequivocally, look, we're going to make this really easy for you to understand. It's better for you if we don't work. In order to better serve you, I will not be responding to email or Slack outside of these hours. Yes. Outside of these highly constrained hours that you don't get the privilege of having. Well, I actually had an experience kind of like this when I worked for a mega tech co

Starting point is 00:11:12 we had co-workers in california but we were living in massachusetts and in california for whatever reason that i i don't understand they had like twice as many company holidays as we did we lived in the same country but you wouldn't really know it because it was like this company well you wouldn't know it if you looked at the holiday schedule let's put it that way this this company i worked for was had a bit of a reputation for being let's just say not the most generous when it comes to holidays. There were a lot of holidays we did not observe, but California did. Boy, did they. And this probably happened every month where it'd be like, hey, can you meet this day? And they're like, well, no, that's a holiday. And we were like, oh. Well, enjoy your perfect

Starting point is 00:12:02 weather every day of the year and your extra holidays. And we all know you make more than us because there's also a pay differential over there what are we doing you have to try and scramble to find something like well at least we get to experience the variety of seasons yeah snow is cool i think yeah it was like three feet of snow like no we can just drive to northern california we can go skiing there yes oh and in the same day we can go to the beach once again i have lake beaches those are better oh boy yeah so i i don't know how we dealt with this the california people made no attempt to reconcile the differences they just kind of stated it like it was the weather it's like what are you gonna do i think that's probably something

Starting point is 00:12:56 to it though i think if if there is something to that i think if you're apologetic about it you're kind of acknowledging it is it is wrong or or is an inconvenience in some way and if you just say hey good news we have such great work-life balance that we do excellent work and we're gonna stick around forever and like i don't know it's it's good to serve you better like yeah like i already told you it's to serve around three hours do you not want to be served better hey this guy doesn't want to be served better you could do it with like uh i don't know some teams have like docs for how to work with their team or yeah you could put a really annoying like automatic responder bot in if anyone ever messages you at 501 p.m it's like hey they'll get to this

Starting point is 00:13:46 in 16 hours yeah when i'm done with my barbecue and technomancy yeah is that the right word i think so yeah i think it is the right word perfect i mean some of it is probably the reality of of the different careers have different labor demands and expectations and we're still riding high on the momentum of tech being like super frothy for engineers so the reality is probably that on average especially if you're in show business i don't know if that's true if that's literal or not i think it's not literal but let's go with it as if it were because that would be funner yeah i mean they're not going to be able to hire people if if they have to work like showbiz intern hours it's some of it is just uh you you get what your the rarity of your labor

Starting point is 00:14:37 allots you to some extent yeah that is true you could tell them sorry that you didn't pick a better career whenever you tell them you're not going to respond that goes over really well i'm sure hey i know being an associate junior producer was your dream but then's the breaks you get your name in the credits and i don't yeah so think about that tomorrow morning at 2 a.m that's when the other co-worker puts an elbow in your side and says actually we also get our name in the credits and we work half as much i understand why they have it set up how do i handle the relationship Yeah, I think I think you just have to be open about it and direct and straightforward. Yeah, I mean, don't don't be a jerk about it.

Starting point is 00:15:20 Don't don't do all this stuff that we just joked about, about rubbing it in their face. Don't do that. I think when it comes to differences like this, where you've got two people and I mean, you could that there is there is a word we could use to describe the situation, which is one of these people like is privileged. They've got an extra thing that the other party doesn't have. and one way to reconcile that is to remove the privilege so that both people can be miserable equally and i i think that that's not great the other thing that you can do is just state it

Starting point is 00:15:55 hope the other person is understanding and move on because at the end of the day you can't really control how people feel about it you can probably influence them a little bit and and i think there's certainly a a groveling that you could do to make the situation worse on the other side On the one hand, you could brag about it and rub it in their face. Don't recommend. On the other hand, you could grovel about it and apologize and, you know, woe is me. I'm so sorry I have all this amazing work-life balance. I also don't recommend.

Starting point is 00:16:23 I think just stating it like the weather, like, hey, we're just, you know, on this team, the hours we work and it's a little different than other people in the company. And then over time, you could hope that the company eventually grants the same level of awesome work-life balance to everyone else. I think that'd be a pretty cool outcome. not likely but it would be kind of cool maybe one other thing you could do is provide some escape patch and this is tricky because you are kind of opening the door to encroaching upon your work life balance but it's possible that there could be real emergencies maybe you have to have some

Starting point is 00:16:59 page some some way to say like and if if it absolutely cannot wait here's like our pager duty rotation yeah whatever here's how to get a hold of us after hours but we're not just going to be around like if it's on fire we will come put out the fire yeah i think and i think that's a really good olive branch to say look we understand that the rest of the company doesn't necessarily follow the same rhythms that we follow and so we want to make ourselves available for extenuating circumstances when those two schedules come into conflict so please page me every time It's a holiday that I have that you don't have. Just so I know.

Starting point is 00:17:36 Yeah, I just want to be aware. All right. Have we answered the question? I think so. Good luck. It's never fun to be on either side of this divide, but at least you have your comfortable robes that you can sit in. Yes, they're so soft.

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Starting point is 00:19:03 you can get a free Datadog t-shirt shipped to you. And trust me, it's really cute. Are you offering to send like model shots to prove up to you this day? My face ruins the shirt, but it has a cute dog on it. that's datadoghq.com soft skills you can go add datadog to your software today and get this great shirt with an adorable dog okay do you want to read our next question dave yes i do this comes

Starting point is 00:19:32 from a listener named frustrated my work keeps being stolen in the name of code quality i'm a new back-end developer for a team at a large company i've been with this team for about three months, and the company for over a year. We're developing an application to replace a legacy system, and the current feature has fairly well-described user requirements. The front-end developers keep finding new implementation issues that require more back-end development, so new tasks get added during the sprint. The longest-tenured developer, we'll call them LTD, on the team keeps finding better ways to implement these back-end changes, but these, quote, better ways sometimes don't meet the newly discovered front-end needs, leading to longer

Starting point is 00:20:11 development times. Additionally, the longest tenured developer often takes over the implementation work from me, which is frustrating. The longest tenured developer also sometimes becomes too busy to deliver everything in a timely manner. Additionally, the state of software development maturity is very low, so I'm trying to advocate for more

Starting point is 00:20:28 technical process improvements like CICD and using version control more than once per sprint. Oh, it's merge day. Everyone bring your conflicts. It's controlled. it's controlled yeah it's version control day yeah okay continuing i am frustrated and finding it hard to keep up motivation when everything is such a mess and the other devs defer to the

Starting point is 00:20:51 longest tenured dev who pushes back on many of these things my code quality is fine but i haven't yet learned enough about our application to be able to identify these larger cleaner approaches every code review so far has had no issues with my code quality but inspires the longest tenured dev to implement a simpler solution and they often will take my tickets and repurpose them for the new work i'm worried that if anyone looks at my productivity metrics they'll not look good and it's hard to say what i've accomplished so far is my frustration valid should i quit my job of course it's valid you're always valid your feelings are always valid your feelings are always correct they accurately that's what i tell my children yes when they're throwing a tantrum

Starting point is 00:21:34 yeah your feelings are right and true and good i should let you insert terrible idea that every kid asked for yeah you're right it was wrong of me to make you french toast after you asked me to make you french toast this is the the appropriate reaction your feelings are valid your tantrum is valid the volume of your screams is valid and you know what that's how i decide whether to listen to you or not it's how hard you scream yeah so it worked a lot of you scream the more i jump and help and the oh that's what i'm doing on accident sometimes oh no the terrible patterns that i'm reinforcing are also valid and self-created it's so true though sometimes this this sucks i it sounds like it sounds like this developer

Starting point is 00:22:32 is not actually doing anything now because all the work they do gets co-opted and re-implemented in a different way and it's like what do you have to show for yourself after a year that that that is very frustrating your frustration is valid yeah objectively valid i would be i would be frustrated i'm sure the longest tenured developer is frustrated too this feels like behavior born out of frustration what i what i think is going on here is maybe the longest tenured developer feels like they have a really strong sense of correctness like i feel like this there's a right way to do things and it just so happens to be the way that i think it should be done all the time sometimes things happen that are wrong or not the way i would have done them and

Starting point is 00:23:15 they, instead of communicating with you and the team to try to create a shared understanding of what the right way is and what matters, their approach is like, well, I'll fix it. And that sucks. That is not, that is not great senior engineer behavior. It's, yeah. Sometimes as a longest tenured developer, you start out in a circumstance where it's only you. No one else is there to back you up. There's no one to coordinate with so all problems are your problem then A team grows up around you And you don't adapt your your behavior to the fact that there are now more people

Starting point is 00:23:55 Who frankly their intellect can serve the team and serve you But you're not fully leveraging them because you're just doing the same patterns that you did Before you had them around you and so I don't even ascribe malice to this person I just think they maybe haven't adapted their patterns to the team that has sprung up around them and they're just still rolling. And these behaviors a few years ago probably earned them lots of accolades and praise.

Starting point is 00:24:21 Oh, yeah. They know the right way to do stuff. Yeah, they can get it done. Highly productive. And now these same behaviors are actually harmful and slowing everyone down and leading to frustration. And you've literally caused someone to consider quitting their job.

Starting point is 00:24:35 You being the longest tenured developer, not. Yeah, suddenly I'm speaking directly to the longest-tenured developer right to you. Well, we're assuming that the frustrated listener will just tell them everything we say. Here, listen to this episode. I'm going to send you a link. Bring them over. Sit them down. Let's have a fireside chat.

Starting point is 00:24:54 So that's just me pontificating on how we got here. I've also seen this when there's turnover on a team and there's established conventions, but maybe the longest tenured developer is the only one that has them in their brain and and everyone else doesn't and so there's like in their mind a very strong set of rules for the way things are done here that the team does not share because they're new to the team they don't have the same context they just don't know and yeah they they don't know and maybe they wouldn't object to them if they knew maybe some of them you might argue about and change but just like oh i know we don't do it that way is not a scalable approach and in the absence of getting

Starting point is 00:25:36 the longest tenured developer to sit down and think about what they've done and change their ways i think you have to pull some of this out of them yeah i feel passionately about this topic i feel like there is a point of diminishing returns over consistency and like the approval of especially when it's the approval of one person if the team has a strong shared set of practices and conventions awesome but i feel like it's easy to get into a place where you have to tailor your code to who you think is going to review it because you know okay this person cares a lot about this pattern oh yeah all right i know they're gonna okay they're gonna call me out on naming things without reverse polish notation i i hate that that's that's a problem

Starting point is 00:26:29 yes so i i think part of what you can do is put it back on the longest tenure developer if if you want to do things in an efficient way and kind of the air quotes correct way say hey why don't you tell us this stuff ahead of time so that we can save time and and you don't have to be like going back and re-implementing our work why don't we do some kind of training or review of practices or patterns or whatever so that we can do it right the first time so you're saying couch it in in the terms of efficiency where you're saying hey i'll bet you yeah but you it's frustrating for you to have to re-implement all this work what if we could get some of your brain content into ours so that you don't have to do that yeah and that's easy to do as a peer because it's kind of

Starting point is 00:27:16 flattering and oh yeah it feels nice to be seen as the expert of the person teaching other people the tricky part is going to be when you disagree with some of the stuff and and that's harder to do as a peer to say hey that thing you think is a requirement that it must be done this way we should not do that and you should not care about it and you should stop caring about this thing you deeply care about yeah that one is a lot harder and that requires a lot more team consensus or a manager pushing down and saying, we do not give feedback on thing X in code reviews or whatever. Sometimes that kind of discussion where you can actually have a productive decision made on whether we should abandon a practice or adopt a new one is the

Starting point is 00:28:01 kind of thing you have to do later in a relationships development. Because here, I'm thinking you're, you should focus on efficiency and trust building. And the way that I would do that is, is by, I love your idea, James, like the idea of sitting down and having that conversation where you focus on efficiency and team flow and avoiding rework. I like that idea because I think you could, you could actually build a consensus on it. And like you said, like it's flattering to the longest standing developer as well. I like that a lot. Then over time, as you implement these patterns, now you'll actually have some credibility

Starting point is 00:28:36 with which you can say, hey, I've implemented this pattern seven times. And of those seven times, five of them have turned into this other problem. I'd like to move that we reconsider this pattern and I've got some ideas for how to do it. And then you can stand on a little bit firmer ground that's built on both trust

Starting point is 00:28:55 and you actually have some experience that will carry weight when you make that argument. Yeah. In other words, I'm saying, just go with the flow and do exactly what they say until they trust you they'll say something that that is part of the downside is you do kind of have to like subordinate yourself to them if they're very opinionated and i mean if they're willing to just like grab your work and redo it it feels like they're probably pretty opinionated and are going to be more than happy to say like

Starting point is 00:29:20 good i will i will train you in the ways of doing it like i would have done it and the bad news is because you cannot fully mind meld with someone to do everything forever the way they would have done it. So it does require some flexibility on the other person's part to say, I know when to call it quits. I know when to say, it's not how I would have done it and I'm going to do nothing about it. Yeah. And I think a more aware team member would have actually sat down with the team at this point and said, hey, let's combine our minds and identify some opportunities for improvement here. But they just aren't doing that. And apparently, your manager's not doing that either, which there's a little bit of dysfunction. And so the breach that you see

Starting point is 00:30:04 or the gap between what you expect and what's actually happening here is caused by those deficiencies. People problems, man. Way harder than code problems. They're the easiest. People problems? Yeah. You just tell them to get solved and they do. It's so nice. all people problems are easy if they're if dave is the people hey dave i don't like how you're doing this okay let's change it all right done that is kind of how i roll i'm like oh really let's talk about it oh cool yeah great idea let's try that for a week and see if it improves things okay next of course on my teams there are no

Starting point is 00:30:40 problems that's the good part is you don't ever have to do that because there aren't any problems at all yeah i mean there was that one problem but you got rid of that problem by just screaming at the top of your lungs at the person who brought it up and then it's ever since then no problems problem solved the meta problem is these people are whiners and i solved that one right away with some stern rebuke yes oh yeah i mean it is a tricky situation it's a tricky dynamic to navigate to to come into a place of expertise and pick up the expertise and figure out which of it you agree with and which of it you don't and you're there to add new things and so there is a little bit of ego in here of like yeah well what am i am i am i just an automaton is my job to just like

Starting point is 00:31:27 do the thing that this person would have done if they're at the keyboard and yes it's we just wanted to multiply this person as many times as possible just figure out what they do and do that yeah and actually there is a little bit of truth to that like that it's like i guess automaton nature is on a spectrum and we don't want full automaton but we also don't want full independent thinking on everything because that's that can also be inefficient in its own way yeah i guess yeah you don't want to throw away everything every time a new person joins the team but it's part of the growing pains and the the good news is the longest tenured developer will only have to get better at this true as they stick around like there will be more new people

Starting point is 00:32:12 things will drift more and unless they're just holding on with an iron fist well even then it won't work people will quit the team will not succeed if if the longest tenured developers attitude is i will just write all the code if it doesn't exactly fit how i would have done it at the very best it will turn into a highly inefficient system where you've increased the team say by a factor of 10 but you've increased the output by a factor of 0.9 you know yeah yeah so you're you're helping them congrats all right have we answered the question i think so good luck what can people do if they want their own questions answered go over to softskills.audio and click the ask a question button we really appreciate everyone that does that we love your

Starting point is 00:32:56 questions we read them we enjoy them we laugh we cry sometimes we just commiserate but we always love them thank you please keep those coming we appreciate it so much thank you we will catch you next week

Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 412: Work-life-team balance and getting code-sniped

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