Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 414: Hot-headed PM and leaving without downgrading

Episode Date: June 24, 2024

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Cool-headed engineer asks, How do you deal with hot-headed project managers? I have a project manager in my team who really likes to criticize me, a project lead. Most recently, I was criticized for asking a dumb question to the users which they already answered a few months ago. They told me that I should check with them for all the questions going forward. (think: “Why did you ask that question?! Don’t you know that they already answered that?! Look at this message here: . Their intent is clear. Please check with me for all questions going forward.") It’s not the first time they scolded me either. They tried to pressure me to push the timeline even though I explained why it wouldn’t be possible. They made a false equivalence by comparing it to a similar sounding project that’s completed very fast but, unbeknownst to them, is very different to mine. (think: “Why was that project completed in three month but you need six?! Those engineers are working on the same code too. Please accept that you are not a strong engineer.”) I am demoralized after each time they scolded me. It’s my fault to an extent, but I think the criticism is too extreme compared to the mistake. I feel like they just want to let off some heat after their strong discussions and furious meetings with other people. I’m also a frail person and break easily; I want to learn how to handle hot-headed people and extreme criticism better so I can better speak for my team and not acquiesce to all their demands. Hello! I’m really fortunate in my current company. I have a great team, great workload that’s challenging but doesn’t destroy my work-life balance, and plenty of pay, benefits, and recognition. I feel this comes from having a really small group of proactive devs, and software is the primary source of revenue at this company so engineers are highly valued and appreciated. It really is the perfect place to be in. But I’m also really early in my career and I don’t expect or want to stay here forever. I’m coming up on my fifth year, and I’d prefer not to stay for more than 6-7 years because I want to continue diversifying my career. I know I’m leaving for the sake of leaving, but the reasons are sound in my head. All the past companies I’ve worked for have been decent but have been soured by being around 9-5 “That’s not my job” cruising devs, or upper management who say “Customer wants it tomorrow so just write the codes”. I don’t want to risk going back to that. What are some ways I can scope out a company during the interview process to figure out what their real culture is like?

it takes more than rolling up your sleeves and breaking out the sticky notes when the sequel gets intense to be a great software engineer this is episode 414 of the soft skills engineering podcast where i'm your host jameson dance and i'm your host dave smith soft skills engineering is a weekly advice show about all the non-technical things that go into the technical field of software development like choosing which color of sticky note represents a one-to-many relationship and i guess you reinvent uml with sticky notes the green means outer join yeah left inner backwards union which one means monad that's the fuchsia sticky note yeah

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stack and you will hear more about them later all right do you want to read our first question i do and i tried to smush all of the consonants and vowels into just one sound at first just to be more efficient you know what i mean that's very impressive if you could pull that off and be understood yeah just a blast of static i got what you meant though i actually knew exactly what you were gonna say i feel like i need to i feel like i need to acknowledge the elephant in the room i've lost my voice a little bit this week oh i'm operating in a lower register and also it's a little scratchy because my family and i visited the what is it called the happiest place on earth ah we absolutely marathoned it 16 hours in the park non-stop that's the spencer's gifts

at mall of america right close the family-friendly version of that with rides ah okay they have rides at the mall of america okay i guess i've never been in roller coasters i've wanted to go there i've said we should probably do that maybe we should do an episode there it's a tax write-off yeah that means it's free right if i understand tax write-offs i think i think they pay us yes you got it it's not it's not that it's slightly cheaper no no just free money it's the government pays you to do cool things that you wouldn't have otherwise done except you are a business owner yes and we just love them so much okay i'm gonna read our first i think your voice sounds great oh good well something tells me by the end of the show i'm gonna

it could be completely mute from all the laughing you are you are on you're on a on a tear today jameson oh thank you thank you dave this comes from a question asker named cool-headed engineer how do you deal with hot-headed project managers oh i'm loving this question already i have a project manager on my team who really likes to criticize me a project lead most recently i was criticized for asking a dumb question to users which they already answered a few months ago they told me that i should check with them for all the questions going forward think why did you ask that question don't you know they already answered that look at this message here url their intent is clear please check with me for all questions going forward

it's not the first time they scolded me either they tried to pressure me to push the timeline even though i explained why it wouldn't be possible they made a false equivalence by comparing it to a similar sounding project that's completed very fast but unbeknownst to them is very different to mine think why was that project completed in three months but you need six those engineers are working on the same code too please accept that you are not a strong engineer oof i am demoralized after each time they scolded me it's my fault to an extent but i think the criticism is too extreme compared to the mistake i feel like they just want to let off some heat after their strong discussions and furious meetings with other people i'm also a frail person and

break easily i want to learn how to handle hot-headed people and extreme criticism better so i can better speak for my team and not acquiesce to all their demands oh painful getting yelled at at work is my least favorite thing at work yes yeah i also don't like cookie dough ice cream but that's not at work second only to getting yelled at at work and especially getting yelled at for asking a question like that just harms my soul the the pursuit of knowledge but it was a repeat question jameson that changes everything yeah didn't you know that some point and in the past that you weren't

there for like someone already knows the answer to this question yeah but you don't i don't know that's the point i am impressed with this question askers self-awareness what do you mean well they've identified how they feel they are clear on the situations that lead to feeling that way and they've characterized themselves and and know like i am i am a frail person and i break easily when people yell at me of course i think most people do like by the way so that's not unusual i think most people when they get yelled at they're just like what the i am breaking now this is terrible yeah i am shutting down yeah that's kind of how i go i yeah i guess it depends on who's yelling at me sometimes i shut down at work if someone yells

at you what do you do i don't know if i've ever been yelled at at work as an adult are we are you saying we're gonna have to go into your childhood trauma i think so i don't know if i've even been yelled at i mean i've been like criticized and i mean given nonsense but i don't think anyone's ever just yelled at me well i guess i i i maybe am i the one that said yelled maybe the question asker didn't actually say that yeah no this there isn't necessarily yelling we heard the word hot Headed, scolding, criticizing. Got it. So, you know, I'm reading a little bit into hot-headed here. So, maybe there's some yelling, maybe there's at least some aggressive behavior. Yeah. I mean, I definitely have gotten into battles at work. There was a time when I would

regularly get into heated conflicts with my boss, and that was my least favorite time at work ever in my life. So, I don't know. I don't think there's a way you can do this that won't make it kind of suck you don't think there's a way you can respond that isn't bad is that what you're saying i think there's a way you can respond that isn't bad but i don't think i was not personally able to change my personality to be fine with like this amount of conflict i still hated it even though i felt like i could figure out how to get stuff done i just hated it so much and it's part of why i switch jobs uh but yeah so so i think that's my point i think if like how do i do a good job for my team yeah that's that's probably a thing you can work on how do

i like armor my soul so i'm not bothered by this i don't know i think that's tougher extreme criticism better so i can better speak for my team and not acquiesce to other demands i i think how do like how do you how do you handle it to protect your team if they are criticizing your team or being hot-headed in meetings with your team i think it's very fair to pull them aside and say you got to stop this because you get to be kind of the mama bear right you're not it's not about you it's about the team you get to protect other people and stick up for them yeah that's a good point i can i can do this better than i can with one-on-one conflict where i'm like you will not treat my beloved team members that way i mean you can beat me up all

you want but yeah exactly yeah yeah i could see i could see you being that way you're willing to stand up for others but not yourself is the way i'm reading that yeah but and then another tactic that applies here i think is just delay giving answers in the moment right if this person is yelling at you and saying when's it going to be done faster no don't think just tell me the estimate like you don't have to you could say well i need to go look at it yeah but you gotta you gotta be careful about that you gotta couch that in such a way that it's a benefit for them and the way that you could say that is hey i want to give you an accurate answer you deserve an accurate a person of your caliber and greatness deserves correct information and i'm gonna make

that happen for you great and terrible hot-headed project manager yes i cower before your might and because of the deep respect i have for you i am going to take time and make this answer good and i am with you i want it fast and i want it good and and so i'm going to go do everything i can to make that happen i'm going to come back to you tomorrow and i'm going to give you the same answer i gave you today six months yeah except tomorrow maybe you'll cool off a little maybe give it some time that by the way that is kind of the technique i think that works with hot-headed people is you get out of there you know it i have very rarely seen okay i'll just say it i've never seen a hot-headed person well let's oh man what's the right way to put this

i've never seen an interaction where one person gets really heated that goes well when everyone else engages them in the heat it's yeah i think it's always better to say okay we're gonna take a step back just take a little break yeah come back to this let let emotions calm down a little bit i i mean i don't know what's going on here but i would seriously think about quitting this job if if you are a team lead and have to work with a project manager regularly and you i mean that's a pretty close working relationship yeah and it sucks that's horrible that's that's one of your closest work partnerships and if it's if it's adversarial then life is gonna be hard yeah and you are unlikely change this person i mean i don't know you could try but i doubt this will

work but if you want to feel like you've done something to try you could just explain to them how it makes you feel and how hard it is to work with them when they are so hostile and you have to be careful because someone who is hot-headed is also unlikely to receive feedback like this very well but actually when you criticize me i just feel really comfortable i thought that's what everyone wanted so finally yeah oh yeah no it's of course i can take it because i can dish it out obviously yeah people who dish out criticism take it really well yeah yeah it's a sign of thick skin to yell at everybody around you yes honestly if you know one of the things one of the liberating features of deciding to quit your job is that you can take risks like that knowing and by risk I

mean here actually confronting the person and you can treat it more like a detached scientific experiment and not so much like my gosh my future livelihood depends on this conversation going well you know and so if you've decided to quit maybe you've even found a new job then you might be willing to sit down and say listen you've been very difficult to work with and I just want to tell you some of the things you've done and the effect that it's had on me and the team. And I think this is going to hurt your career. And it would be interesting to see just how they responded. And then just pull out your pencil and clipboard and start making notes about what they say and do. I mean, I can predict how they would respond, especially if you're quitting.

They'll be very defensive. They'll have reasons why you're wrong. Maybe they'll tell you, maybe they won't. But especially if you are leaving the company, they'll be inclined to chalk it up to bitterness and, oh, well, obviously low performers can't handle my intensity. Oh, and this is why in the interest of science, you can't disclose that you're leaving. So you have your job offer in hand, but before you go and tell everyone you're leaving, you go and conduct this experiment. Problem solved. You'll get to see them in their natural habitat. There is some nuance here too, because you could express concerns in such a way that could come across as i cannot take criticism or negative feedback like it might not be what you

say but it might turn into this person as oh i have to i have to like i don't know i have to suck up to this person i have to i have to flatter them i have to like baby them because if i think they're doing something wrong i can't just say hey i think this is wrong and you're saying they might think that about you yeah yeah if you say hey i don't like it when you yell at me that might to turn into i can't handle your your direct feedback when it's not good enough and yeah i don't think that's what you are saying and you could be clear about that too like hey i want to know when you have concerns i i don't want you to tell me i'm stupid or right or yell or like if you ask me a question and i give you an answer you not liking the answer doesn't mean it's wrong

right no but but i want to know if you don't like the answer still baby or whatever else Yeah, yeah. I need to know what to do better, but I need you to not be so hostile and aggressive about it. It's kind of the vibe you're going for. Again, I doubt this will work because the kind of person that acts like this is not the kind of person to listen well to feedback. But if you're thinking about quitting your job, I don't know, maybe it'll fix it. And then you don't have to if you like the rest of the team. And it kind of sucks to quit your job right now. I have one more idea, which is to invoke this concept of boundaries. And boundaries are something that I've heard about about 15 years ago. And I probably didn't understand boundaries until this year. And that's in part because I never read the book called Boundaries. I just listened to the headlines and little snippets about it. And I'm like, yeah, that makes sense.

It's a boundary, right? But here, this isn't like a spousal relationship. so it's a little bit different which is or a family relationship or a personal relationship it's a little different but it is a relationship it's a working relationship and i believe that it is reasonable to set up boundaries with your working relationships it's not something that i've had to do explicitly because generally speaking i've been surrounded by well-behaved professionals who aren't hotheads i've had a few but i've never i've never really had to set up boundaries like this although frankly i probably should have in the past

And knowing what I know now, I probably would. But the way that I would use a boundary in this scenario is I would talk to the person and say, hey, when you are overly critical, and when you are scolding me, and when you are pressing engineering to do things on an unreasonable timeline, after I've rationally explained to you what is possible, you are crossing a boundary with me that I will not accept. And when you do that, you are opting out of a productive professional relationship with me in that moment. And so I will step away until you've had a moment to cool down. And look, you got to pick the right boundaries though, because it can be really challenging. If you say, look, you're not allowed to contest my engineering estimates. Well, that's not fair. I think a project manager should be able to question engineering estimates and ask if there's ways to do things faster. That's fine. It's the hot-headed part that I think that's where the boundary is crossed. And so you need to say, if you're going to yell at me, if you're going to

be aggressive and raise your voice or stand up tall and talk down to me, you're crossing a boundary. And that means you are opting out of a productive professional relationship for this moment. And I won't participate in that. So I will step away and I will honor your decision to cross that boundary and I will leave. And I will come back when you are ready to go back to the other side of the boundary where we can be productive and professional. I like it. I've never had to say that to anyone, but I think it might work in a situation like this. It doesn't mean that they're going to change their behavior overnight, but it means you've now established rules of engagement that says, hey, when you act like this, I'm out. I'll come back because we're

paid to work together, but I'm not going to sit here and listen to you. You know, not going to do that. I think that would help you grow a little backbone. And I'm reading into the last part of the questions as I am, what does it say? I am a frail person and break easily. You can do something about that. You can develop over time backbone and standing up for yourself. If you can figure out where the right boundaries are to erect, I think you can become less frail and less breakable. And I think that's a great goal because there's a lot of crappy people out there. And if you're going to be broken into pieces every time you encounter one, that's kind of a sad, frustrating way to live. Yeah.

Yeah, I like it. All right. Question answered. They stand no chance against you. Yes. You are unbreakable. Yes. Hey, Jameson, have you ever worked on a SAS project with no observability tools?

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I get lost. You're kind of like hypothesizing about what's going on without something like this. And you get to see the exact stuff that's happening. Exactly. Datadog lets you see where you are overspending on your hosting bill, too. So you can be the hero that in this climate, you can save the company money on your AWS, Azure, or GCP bills, and your CFO will give you hugs. Datadog is integrated with over 700 tools and has out-of-the-box dashboards to start monitoring services like AWS, pager systems, and even password managers in minutes. you can get a two-week free trial with Datadog at datadoghq.com soft skills and if you add Datadog

to your code and set up a dashboard 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 my face ruins the shirt But it has a cute dog on it. That's datadoghq.com slash softskills. You can go add Datadog to your software today and get this great shirt with an adorable dog. Dave, do you want to read our next question? Actually, I would like you to read it

because I read the first one. Ah, crap. Exposed. Just a little pattern we established 413 episodes ago. You know, sometimes I forget. Yeah. this is from an anonymous listener who says hello i'm really fortunate in my current company i have a great team great workload that's challenging but doesn't destroy my work-life balance and

plenty of pay benefits and recognition i feel this comes from having a really small group of proactive devs and software is the primary source of revenue at this company so engineers are highly valued and appreciated it really is the perfect place to be in awesome but i'm also really early in my career yeah end of the question yeah quit the end i'm just here to brag don't quit your job i'm also really early in my career and i don't expect or want to stay here forever i'm coming up on my fifth year and i prefer not to stay more than six or seven years because i want to continue diversifying my career i know i'm leaving for the sake of leaving but the reasons are sound in my head all the past companies i've worked for have been decent but i've been soured by being around

nine to five quote that's not my job cruising devs or upper management who say the customer wants it tomorrow so just write the code i don't want to risk going back to that what are some ways i can scope out a company during the interview process to figure out what their real culture is like hmm i mean i know you said you want to leave already but i don't know uh the if you could definitely do worse than what you have i mean i guess that's the point of asking the question you scope it out so that you uh make sure you're not doing worse this certainly sounds above average for software engineering environments. Yeah, this is tricky.

It's like, I've already decided to quit. Should I really quit? But really, that's not the question. The question is, how do I figure out what kind of company I'm getting into? Yeah. You know, I've been surprised. I think you just ask the recruiter.

Hey, is your team high quality and passionate and engaged? Yes. All right. Got it. You know, I've been surprised that Sometimes, interviewers will just tell you if the company is like this or not. I remember I interviewed at a healthcare company. They were like a healthcare clearinghouse.

Their job was basically write software that takes files that come in from an FTP server and then push them out to another FTP server. I was like, what do you like most about working here? And they were like, well, it's really undemanding. That's what I like. And I just thought, huh, that's a clue. you know work-life balance check but nine to five punch the clock also check yeah i think you can ask to meet some of the engineers on the team that you'd be working on that can be a good sample

usually the interviewers are going to be kind of folks that make the company look good generally so yeah if you if you go through a normal interview loop you might not especially if the company is big i mean if the company is giant you have no way of knowing if you're joining google like i don't know you just won't be able to know but if you can meet some of the people you would be working with you can try and pick up on how that feels it is going to be a small window of time though and like all things with an interview it's you're making a long-term decision on a very short interaction but you might be able to pick up some of a vibe at least yeah i think so i actually wrote a blog post remember blogging yeah i did that several years ago oh boy i wrote this

article eight years ago wait it was nine oh boy okay i wrote an article and i just was like you know what this article tries to answer this question i wrote it a long time ago and i wonder how it holds up. I'll just go ahead and put it in the show notes. You can check it out. But the article is called A Developer's Guide to Interviewing. And it's actually not meant for how to respond to interview questions, but rather how to interview a company and kind of figure out what they're all about. And I think if you can ask this set of questions, there's about a dozen or so questions and I've got them divided, maybe two dozen. I've got them divided like, okay, here are things you can ask a leader in engineering. Here's what you can ask an

individual contributor here's what you can ask like a non-engineering manager i don't know maybe it holds up it probably should some of this stuff is timeless but i'm just going to post this in the show notes you can go check it out or google dave smith what is it a developer's guide to interviewing you'll probably find it that way i'm reading it this holds up pretty well i think i was going to suggest one of the things you already suggested when can we pair yeah if you can find a way to like attend a team meeting somehow or be a fly on the wall or just do some normal work stuff with the team that's like the the more intense version of asking to talk to some of the team members i think you can kind of pick up how the team feels because it's harder to put on

a a face for like normal day-to-day work than it is for just kind of go do a meet and greet with this candidate and make sure you really wow them if you're talking about how you deal with this crushing deadline you have coming up with the hot-headed pm that screams at you like it's hard to hide yeah i actually think that probably the best way to get this information is to know someone who already works there yeah and then just ask them yeah otherwise there's just so much conflict of interest when you've got an interviewer who's and you're like hey so is it awesome to work here and they're like yeah i know you're trying to convince me to work here but yeah exactly so just try to find someone who works there who you already know, which is actually a great way to get

the job anyway. And frankly, in today's climate, maybe the only way to get the job regardless. So maybe you just need to figure that out and go meet with them and ask them, what's it like working there? And I would say, if you were to ask the kind of question that you wrote into the show for this very question, you would get some great insights. I think the way this is written out is really well just say look i'm i'm trying to avoid a nine to five that's not my job developer mentality or i also i'm trying to avoid customer wants it tomorrow so just write the just write the codes and just ask them like does that happen to your company and be like no yeah but i got 17 other super toxic things that happen yeah i mean this yeah

the stuff you describe are the the attributes that a company is looking for in someone they are hiring someone who is really engaged, who cares a lot, who wants to do great work and work with smart people. They're like, great, we'll take you. You can fix us. That's what you want to avoid. You want to avoid joining and having to turn it all around. Yeah. I mean, maybe you don't. Maybe that's a challenge. Yeah. Maybe you'd like that. Yeah. But it'd be good to know at least. Yeah. Good to know going in exactly what the job is going to be. And totally knowable too. I mean, you can find out a lot by asking people. And even though I kind of poo-pooed on asking the interviewer, they'll tell you. Especially if it's an individual contributor engineer, they're like,

look, I'm not selling this position. I'm actually here to vet you. And so not only will they probably just answer your question honestly, they might like you better because you asked that question. Because some interview candidates are actually just looking for the nine to five, that's not my job mentality and you know some companies are trying to avoid those people and so you could by asking these questions really point blank i think not only will you impress your interviewer but also they'll probably just tell you what the truth is it's pretty reliable the higher up the org chart you go the less reliable the information will be about that though yeah but you'll hear a lot about strategy yes strategery yes all right have we answered this question i

think so good luck although i i do want to kind of address a question that wasn't asked just a little bit which is should i quit this job and i'm like well i don't know if you should right now i mean maybe but there are many other risks to quitting your job right now besides the ones that are called out in this question, such as, will the new company exist in six months? And that's a real question. That's a real question with not an obvious answer in a lot of cases. And so this just might not be the right time. And I'm also reading into the question here a little bit. It looks like they've had some bad experiences in the past and have worked for multiple companies. And yeah, they're coming up on year five. And that is kind of on the higher

end of my recommendation for how long you should stay at a job in your early career, depending on the company, it just might not be a problem, especially if you had a couple of really solid experiences before that one. So I don't know. It might not be the time to go playing with fire. You also didn't ask this, but it would be good to have some clear criteria for what you are looking for that you don't have at your current company. because i see some stuff you're looking for that you already have like i don't want to lose this but what do i want that i can't that i don't have here that isn't just like i don't know different that's what i think this person is something is different exactly what they're looking for

just new different different title on the resume different company name different logo so you know which is by the way not a bad reason to change jobs i've switched jobs only because it was different it was different programming languages different technologies you know different domain and i loved it and i've been doing that every few years really for a long time and i think it's great it hones your skill at learning which is a really valuable skill all right well now we've clearly clearly knocked it out of the park i can't think of anything that we have not answered exactly there's nothing more that anyone could say about this question yeah yeah all right what should people do if they want their own questions answered

go over to softskills.audio on the worldwide interwebs and click the ask a question button we want to say thank you to everyone who's done that we must acknowledge i believe our form is broken right now and we're working on it so maybe wait a little bit by the time this comes out it'll be fixed but oh that's true you know if you tried we apologize to past yeah if you tried to submit a question between i don't know june 6th and june 14th of the year 2024 you may you may have struggled, and we apologize. We're going for five nines of uptime on this thing, and I don't know if we got it. Yeah, I think we probably have a couple hundred years of no incidents to go before we get back to five nines of downtime. Or of uptime. Five nines of downtime, we're not there

yet either. It's pretty easy to do, though. If we don't do anything for long enough, we will get there. All right, thank you for listening. We will catch you next week.