Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 418: Should I "rest and vest" and how do I avoid 3-hour agile meetings?

Episode Date: July 22, 2024

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I work as a Senior Software Engineer for a subsidiary owned by a mega corp. I am approaching 6 years at the company. In the last few years the company has had significant layoffs and I have been moved to a team by force with a new leadership chain and engineers I haven’t really worked with. Even though I was disgruntled when this happened, I gave this new team a chance. I have been successful in driving change within my engineering boundaries but I just don’t agree with many decisions made my leadership. I have concluded this team and company are no longer for me and I want to move on. Repeated layoffs, high bar for promotions, high stress( due to less people), no raises/bonuses have lead to fairly low morale across the org. Unfortunately, or fortunately the public stock price has gone up and many people are just resting and vesting. Even though I really want to leave it would be financially irresponsible. Are situations like this common in a software engineers careers? I am having trouble “resting”. Any advice on how to deal with the urge to perform yet you know it’s a bad decision? My lunch break is sacred, how can I set boundaries as a new lead engineer joining a new company? I’ve discovered the agile process they use is far too exhaustive when compared with the size of the company. They have 3 hour meetings covering the whole lunch window (11:30-14:30) for backlog and sprint review on two consecutive days?! To me this is totally mad, however people seem to have just accepted it. How do I tell them I am not accepting this without rejecting their culture?

it takes more than great code to be a great engineer this is episode 418 of the soft skills engineering podcast where i am your host jameson 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 and that was our original tagline before we started changing it every week so i'm gonna remind you all i guess back to first principles yes indeed we have to reference episode 418 it should be everyone's favorite status code in http is that i'm a teapot yes oh it's a good one this status code indicates that the server refuses to brew coffee because it is permanently a teapot a combined coffee teapot that is temporarily out of coffee should instead

return 503 oh i haven't read the actual text this is so good oh they knew what they were doing back in the day yeah anticipating every possible use case yes yes predating the internet of things yes decades okay do you want to thank our patrons yes this episode is no it's not sponsored it's supported by these lovely patrons who went to patreon and supported the show at a level where we say their names or whatever they write in the patreon name field which i just i just love that we've taken advantage of the patreon name field and i also think it's funny that people who do this if they support other patreon people this this is what the name that shows up for them so thank you for sabotaging it for us yes okay here's the list hawk tua it's some kind of

compound unicode emoji representing hmm the visceral feeling you get when someone schedules a friday aft javier gonzalez chewy ted timbrel become a senior engineer.com unsalted french fries are morally objectionable dan from drone deploy chase w norton level up your type script typehero.dev never is not just a crater on mars flamingo emoji i like chicken i like liver miyamix miyamix please deliver trash panda thecomputersciencebook.com kyle boss kent c dodds jenny kim owen chartle craig motlin the stochastic parrot helicone.ai best observability tool for ai red panda is best panda everyone in this list question mark jonathan king zanai beautiful functional user documentation a one-time shout out to will angel

sabotage hi dave is the next one hi hello travis britain canes john grant all right would you like to read our first question that one gets me every week okay oh that's just lovely best oh you are the best best best i've actually been using some of these phrases in my daily vernacular like i told my family that i felt like unsalted french fries are morally objectionable they got into you yes accepted you okay jameson do you want to read our first question i do as predicted by the patreon subscriber this is from a listener named can't rest invest i work as a senior software engineer for a subsidiary owned by a megacorp i'm approaching six years at the company in the last few years the company has had significant

layoffs and i have been moved to a team by force with a new leadership chain and engineers i haven't really worked with even though i was i was disgruntled when this happened i gave this new team a chance i've been successful in driving change within my engineering boundaries but i just don't agree with many decisions made by my leadership i have concluded this team and company are no longer for me and i want to move on repeated layoffs high bar for promotion high stress due to fewer people no raises bonuses have led to fairly low morale across the org Unfortunately, or fortunately, the public stock price has gone up and many people are just resting and vesting. Even though I really want to leave, it would be financially irresponsible.

Are situations like this common in a software engineer's career? I'm having trouble, quote, resting. Any advice on how to deal with the urge to perform? Yet you know it's a bad decision. Oh, I have been in this situation. I wonder if this is the same megacorp I worked for. rest and vest i i heard that phrase adam megacorp for the first time in fact it was said by someone i reported to well just gotta rest and vest and i was like you you do what now like what

i hear a lot about those patagonia vests that all the dc bros supposedly wear is that the vest that we were talking about the like fleece zip up with no sleeves yes great autumn so you're warm but your arms are still free for athletic maneuvers, as is common in the VC world. Yes, unrestricted arm motions. That way, when you're sitting at the board meeting or trying to pitch to investors, your arms are not impeded. I think that vest is just showing off that I live in the Bay Area where the temperature is always nice, so I can always wear this. I know, whether summer or winter, I can wear my Patagonia-branded vest. it's its purpose to signal status i guess we should explain what that means rest invest rest

invest rest invest means that you don't want to work here you don't want to work hard but you've got a an incentive to stay for longer because you have stock that is not available to you yet but will be paid out at some point in the future which is called vesting not to be confused with jameson's patagonia vest reference yes i don't know why they call it vesting that's a weird name Maybe like investing. Maybe it's related to that. Oh, it's the opposite of investing where they give you money. They give you stock.

Wait, that is investing. You buy, except you don't have to buy it. I don't know. Well, what do you think? I mean, this all comes down to, well, let me just put it this way. This person is about to learn something about themselves. and the thing they're going to learn is how much, what exact dollar price do I put on working at a satisfying, fulfilling employer? Yeah. Yeah. I basically hear, I don't find the

work meaningful. So it's hard to, it's hard to work hard because I don't, I don't care, or I don't want to care. And that is unpleasant for some people. For some people, it's the dream. yes exactly that's why you're resting and that's that's that's the implication of resting investing is is like you're kind of putting up with it yeah in order to get this financial payoff exactly and that it is there is a big variety there's a big range of dollars that people are willing to accept or forego in exchange for a crappy work environment yeah are situations like this common in software engineers careers i think if you work at a megacorp it is fairly common to find yourself in a part of the company or team or whatever

that you don't love but you just have strong financial incentives to stay i think it's less common at smaller companies probably but yeah i definitely know people who are there for the money not for the love of the game but that's what the money's for i mean it's slightly different from that though it's not just you're there because they pay you well it's like you don't want you actually don't want to be there right but you are you are sticking around because they pay you well and to some extent at every job there are elements that you don't want to do and that's why they have to pay you that's what the money's for yeah exactly they're compensating you for doing something you wouldn't otherwise want to do and it's actually kind of just an

enormous privilege and wonderful blessing of working in a field where many people, I might even say most engineers I know, they actually want to do the things that they're getting paid to do. It's pretty, pretty amazing. Yeah. And so once in a while you get in a situation where you're like, wait a minute, I'm getting paid exorbitant amounts of money to do something I slightly don't want to do. Like, wait, yeah, that's hard, buddy. Yeah. I think, so I have stayed at a place I did not enjoy working at anymore that i did not want to be at anymore for the money but i didn't when i worked at a big mega corp i didn't time my departure exactly so that i would vest and then immediately bail i thought i don't love it but i'll stick around and then i just couldn't take

it anymore and couldn't wait long enough to the next cycle of vesting basically the next tranche i think yeah the next chunk yeah yeah it was in it was in one year chunks so it wasn't small increments yeah and wasn't it were you surprised at what i mean i'm these tranches of of stock they they tend to be pretty big that's it's you know that's kind of yeah they can be right and i imagine in your case given how wonderful you are that they were very big i inadvertently had good timing so the stock price went up a lot while i was there yes that's another thing that happened bigger And that seems to be what has happened here is that some of these big tech companies, including mine, including yours, Jameson, where we didn't both used to work for the

same one, so it's two data points, but they will set a number of shares that will be vested to you on a schedule ahead of time. In my case, there was a four-year schedule laid out on the day I was hired. And so the number of shares that they would give me were set with a date. and it was like after one year I would get a little bit and then after two years I would get a big chunk and then every six months thereafter until the four years was over

they would give me big chunks and if the stock price went up from the point I was hired to the point where my stock was ready to vest great that's just pure bonus gravy for you and those numbers got pretty big because the stock price while I was there it nearly tripled in the four years that I was there

well I think it kind of oscillated between like 2.5X and 3X. It was like a lot. In fact, I think it might've even quadrupled at one point. So for me, it was a lot of money and it was coming every six months. And I remember looking at that going, well, I'm just not really fulfilled here anymore. I don't really want to be here at this moment, but I got this tons of money coming in six months and I walked away from it. And that's when I learned what my price was. I was like, I guess it's higher than that, which is kind of a lot of money it was so weird my my price changed as i got more money like yes i i feel like for me i mean i feel somewhat vulgar talking about this because it feels like i'm soft bragging about

being rich i don't know we we live comfortable lives in a great field at a good time yeah i'm jameson look i'm just gonna say it for you jameson had a helipad installed on top of his house last week he'll be he'll be flying to work now uh your your patreon subscriptions fund my artisanal lobster factory that that's the only food i eat now i didn't mention it was a lego helipad but look yeah no what is my point my point is the numbers looked really big and then like my bank account started getting bigger and it eventually i got to a point where i felt like I think I'm good. It's not like I want to never work again or switch careers or anything, but I feel like I have sold out enough. I achieved my goal. My goal was to get more money.

Got it. I have more money. I think I can slow down the rate at which I get more money in exchange for something I'm happier doing. And not everyone has that luxury and not everyone has the same decision kind of framework. But I think that is a common feeling that like, I would like more money, so I will stick around. And eventually you realize it's enough. Or often I feel like I hear people say they realized once they changed how unhappy they were and like how much happier they are potentially taking a pay cut or losing out on some financial reward in order to work somewhere more fulfilling. There's obviously a balance, right? And if you have fixed expenses, then it doesn't matter how fulfilling your job is if you can't pay your mortgage or medical

bills or whatever. But if you have financial flexibility, which it sounds like you might because of the situation you're in, I do think you're probably better off overall to at some point switch. I wonder, this has just made me wonder, what's the extreme thought exercise to determine where your price tag is? And I was trying to think to myself, what would be the dollar amount you would have to pay me to show up to work every day and just get punched all day just punched over and over i don't know how much is your purse gonna need to be for that mma fight that you're gonna sign up for is that what this question turns into right no one would pay yeah i guess there's also different kinds of misery right

there's the like i just can't do anything here it's just so slow and so many barriers and so much bureaucracy which is a certain kind of work dissatisfaction and there's also i would say a more acute version which is like i do not like my boss or think like they are making things bad somehow it's not just that it's kind of a slog it's that there's something happening i that actively makes me sad and so maybe the price depends on that too it sounds like in this case you're more in the second camp. It's not just like, I'm kind of bored. You feel bad, actively disagree, that kind of thing. Yeah, exactly. And I think that's probably what's really going on here. I'm looking at this, and this is kind of how I felt. It became more and more challenging

to get things done. Big organization, I wasn't that influential. And I put a big price tag on that, on the ability to work for a place where I could actually make a difference, do good things for customers, good things for my peers, good things for the rest of the organization. And I really, really valued that. And I was surprised at how much I valued that. I mean, it was to the tune of like six figures per year that I valued that. And I feel so much better because I got to tell you, like when I go to work and it's just sheer misery, then I come home, I'm just really not the best version of myself for my family and friends. And I'm just kind of unhappy as a general rule and i just thought man there's just really there's probably not enough money to just be

miserable all the time kind of just like a baseline simmering misery and yeah also just just to be really maybe a little bit more transparent about that i wasn't i wouldn't say miserable like i wasn't going to work and getting punched in the face all day it wasn't like that but it wasn't that much money right that would be a lot of money it wasn't get punched in the face money right yes it was just i want to get more done and i want to be more productive with my life money and so yeah i made that change and i'm really i'm actually really glad i did even though once in a while i wake up in the morning i pull out my phone and i open up my stocks app and then i do some mental math and i do a bunch of math yes and i just go oh oh my gosh and then

I multiply that math times the last four years since I left the my mega corp and I'm just like oh so much money but I think the point you're making is that when you would get home from work you wouldn't the the the sadness or unhappiness or whatever the the the doldrums would not magically be offset by you thinking ah dollars right it's not like that yeah changes your mood But, yeah, this is where it's different for everybody because maybe some folks are less impacted by that. Yeah. Maybe they're more able to just put up with it or they need the money more. They drive home in their expensive car and to their fancy house and they're like, this is what it's all about for me.

Yeah, they go through some pump-up routine on the way home. Yeah. And I'll tell you, there are definitely people like that. I mean, I know someone who worked at the same company for 35 years and probably hated 33 and a half of those years. and it's like hey just muscle through it and get it done get the job done and that's okay like i look i don't have any i kind of have respect for that honestly so i that's why i said i think this person who asked the question is about to learn something very interesting about themselves which is what's my price point for being fulfilled at work that'll be very interesting i think you'll

surprise yourself i surprised myself because i know that if i had rewound the clock 20 years and told my younger self, hey, in 20 years, you're going to have an opportunity to walk away from this much money just because the job is kind of like not that fulfilling for you. I would have been like, okay, that's not what I would have expected. But I did. This is also assuming you can get another job that's more fulfilling, which is not a given. Yeah. There's two aspects to that. One is, can you get another job? Right now, that's not exactly a straightforward proposition. And number two is, will it actually be more fulfilling? And I think the answer to that question you can get like a 90 confident yes if you're willing to go to a

small company that needs you yeah you know almost definitely you'll be more fulfilled in certain areas namely the company needs you you can you can enact big changes you can you can be impactful will you be fulfilled in the sense that you're actually working on a mission that you support and actually does make a difference in the world that's actually much harder much harder to come by usually they pay you less money in those jobs too because you're trading off yes fulfillment that's why game devs and non-profit employees are underpaid or paid less i should say have we answered the question i think so i think it's going to be very interesting and i would tell you if i woke up in your shoes having actually been in your shoes i would probably go ahead and

leave even though even let me think here yeah i would just leave but but again like you said it would be financially irresponsible. That phrase caught me because I thought when I left my high-paying megacorp job, I didn't have a lot of financial trouble at that point. I had things really pretty well squared away, no crazy debts hanging over my head, no big medical bills that I had to pay for. I didn't have a life-threatening disease with expensive medication that was going to cost my daughter her life if I left the job. I didn't have that kind of situation. A bookie coming to break your legs. Yes, I had no gambling debts that I owed the mafia. I just didn't have that problem. And so

I do think that there's probably a bar where you say, look, I'm making enough money to meet my obligations that are going to keep me alive and well. So if that's the case, if you haven't met that bar, you got to stay. Just make it work. But if you have cleared that bar and you're just looking for more fulfillment at lower income and that income isn't exactly necessary for survival or wellness, then go for it. Yep. All right, Dave, will you read our next question? Yes, I will. This comes from someone named HangryDev, who says, My lunch break is sacred. How can I set boundaries as a new lead engineer joining a new company? I've discovered the agile process they use is far too exhaustive when compared with the size

of the company. They have three-hour meetings covering the whole lunch window, 11.30am to 2.30pm for backlog and sprint review on two consecutive days. To me, this is totally mad. However, people seem to have just accepted it. How do I tell them that I am not accepting this without rejecting their culture? Ooh, this is a great example of a thing that would be great to learn before you joined the company that you don't often think to ask, especially if lunch is sacred to you. You might've just assumed like, and I will be able to make it work. And yeah, so meeting schedules, including required meetings, are maybe a useful thing to take a glimpse at. Also to just get a feel for what the workload on the team is like and how much focus time they have.

Yeah. Sometimes people ask, tell me about a day in the life of your team members. But maybe you need to ask, tell me about a week in the life of your team members so you can get a sense for Show me your calendar. It just got eight hour blocks that say, wishing for death. you may have some culture red flags culture red flag new lead engineer joining a new company sorry i just can't get that image out of my mind eight hour blocks wishing for death oh boy

okay all right i'm gonna regain my composure here okay i mean there's good news here this is what are we talking about we got six hours a week to do sprint planning and what else sprint review backlog and sprint review is what it's called six hours a week to do that you got some inefficiency problems here yeah i mean that does seem like a lot for the whole it doesn't say that they have the whole team in it so maybe it is some subset of i don't know some kind of leadership yeah that does sound like a lot and this person's a lead engineer according to the question so yeah so yeah like it's a lot and and i mean one way that you could you could secretly get your lunch hour back is by calling out this efficiency problem and saying,

hey, I think we could be more efficient. Here's some ways I think we could do that. Let's try this out by starting our meeting, our normal three-hour meeting. I want to start it at 1 p.m. instead of starting it at 11.30. Let's just see how it goes. And you'll probably get a whole bunch of secret confidential notes saying, thank you so much. I've been missing my lunch hour too. Yeah. You're going to have to identify what is making these meetings take so dang long and then propose fixes to that. And then I think you'll be able to reclaim your lunch hour and that will be your incentive to make this better. The potential risk here is that there's somebody who really likes the meeting being long. Maybe they feel really engaged during it. Maybe it

makes them feel useful or powerful or something. Maybe they tell long stories about their fishing trips and they just trap everyone. If everyone just hates it and they're just waiting for someone to speak up, then you could just kind of topple it over by saying that. But I don't know, maybe they had some planning issues in the past and this was a reaction to it. So you might have to push a little bit harder. What do you think about the idea of just saying, hey, I would like to have a lunch break, so this meeting time doesn't work for me. Can we move it? Yeah, can we move it from it's 1130 to 230 let's just go one to four yeah and that's i maybe you work remote and there's some time zone issues that might be true that makes things really hard it very well could be

what's going on here yeah remote work plus sacred lunch hours means there's like a three-hour block where you in the middle of the day where you can't i guess it depends on how widely distributed your team is but it could be all there could be a large block yeah it could be all day where you just can't meet with the whole team because someone is at sacred lunch but i i do think it's reasonable to come in and say hey this doesn't work for me can we can we adjust it yeah and you don't have to reject their culture to do it that feels a little bit softer but if your objective is both to spend less time in meetings and to have a lunch break then i think you do need to try and encourage more efficiency without making them feel like they're all idiots

for doing it this way yeah that's probably that's probably a good interim i mean to me this should be a no-brainer assuming there's no time zone complexity like you called out jameson to just say look let's just do one to four you don't have to attack any of the processes you don't have to accuse them of inefficiency you just shift the time like we said earlier people will probably thank you but if there are time zone complexities now it's like oh man could we divide it into two sessions you know maybe do like a morning session and an afternoon session yeah a three-hour meeting without a break sounds pretty intense yeah especially a regular one maybe if you're doing some one-time exercise or something but yeah that's that's intense yeah i agree and breaking

that up could actually be beneficial as well but but really like genuinely i would actually go after this process because something is not quite right here. It should not take six hours. Maybe there's too many people coming to this meeting, so it's really slow and inefficient. Maybe there's some individual work that could be done beforehand so that when you show up, it's more of an approval thing and less of a designed by committee, endless discussion kind of thing. Yeah. Yeah. I think you're right on there. And don't get me wrong. I actually don't have a problem with three-hour meetings. In fact, I currently have a weekly four-hour meeting that's my favorite meeting of the week. It's great. Everyone else hates it. Just kidding.

But what can they do about it? Because I'm their boss. Nothing. No, actually, it's actually a meeting where I'm not the one in charge. And it's still one of my favorite meetings. And so they can be effective. But I'm reading into the question here where it says sprint review and grooming. You should not need six hours of meeting time per week to do that. And so just a couple of ideas are, well, maybe you're on a one-week sprint And maybe you should be doing a two-week sprint so that you can have 50% less planning time. Because it turns out it kind of takes about as much time to plan a one-week sprint as it does to plan a two-week sprint, I think. It's not 2x longer to plan a two-week sprint. I think it's

more like 20% longer or something. There's something about economies of scale and something about overhead, that constant overhead of just getting a meeting going. And so maybe you need to work for a longer sprint, and then you only have to do these two three-hour meetings every two weeks instead of every week. That might help. But then really, really, it should not take this long. Having said that, I have a manager on my team right now who spends at least this amount of time privately preparing his sprints every two weeks. And it's really good work that he does. When he shows up at these sprint planning meetings, all the ducks are in a row, every I is dotted, T is crossed. And the actual meeting part of the sprint planning is short. It's great. It's

like the most poignant discussion. It's like, hey, what's the priority of these things? What order should we do these things in? It's not like, oh, what is that ticket again? Like, what is that for? Why are we doing this? You know, like all those questions have been pre-answered. And so maybe you need to, as the engineering lead, maybe you need to volunteer to do some of this pre-work so that these meetings can take less time yeah that's a good point sometimes meetings get used as a tool to carve out a block of time to do the work especially if there are a ton of meetings on everyone's calendar then you you just might not feel like you have the time to sit down and work through this stuff to prep for it but it can be more efficient if you can do the prep time and

the meeting is focused on summarizing and sharing context instead of like walking everyone through for the first time. Yeah. Like you could have read this beforehand or what? I mean, it's like, I don't know. There's nothing worse than just being in a meeting with 10 people where it's like, well, three people don't know the context on this. So we're going to take 20 minutes and walk you through how we got here. And it's like, well, you could have prepared ahead of time. And then this meeting could have been a decision-making session, which is really what sprint planning and grooming is all about is what order do we want to do our tasks in, you know, and are they well enough specified for engineering to pick them up or does our product team need to go back and do

some more detailed design? Yeah. Well, have we answered the question? I think so. Good luck. This is a, this, this should be straightforward, even though it seems daunting. And I don't think you need to necessarily couple these two ideas of one rejecting the culture and two rejecting the meeting schedule you you really should be able to navigate this without causing a bunch of waves yeah can you preserve the outcome that they're getting from the three-hour meeting that's then you can you can say that explicitly yeah i'm not trying to make us not plan we can still do it we'll do it in this other way all right and be sure to tell people like i respect the process and i uh i want to participate and i want to be supportive and a good a good team player you know

Just say that stuff out loud so people know you're not trying to be underhanded about this. Okay. Sorry. I had to bolt on that last thing. I'll allow it. Okay. What can people do if they want their own questions answered?

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