Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 420: New grad getting boring work and busy manager

Episode Date: August 5, 2024

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Little Z says, Hello! I am a relatively new graduate (‘23 bachelor’s in information systems) who is currently working at a large tech company in a technical role adjacent to SWE. This is a great opportunity, but as time has progressed, I’ve felt growing dissatisfaction with the role. I don’t enjoy many of the projects I am put on. I feel that I am not fully making use of my technical skills/potential and that the work I do often doesn’t align my career aspirations (transitioning/diving into software engineering). This de-motivates and frustrates me, and I often feel I’m wasting my time. However, upon reflection, I feel that my sentiments are rooted in youthful ignorance and I am too impatient and idealistic in my expectations. What realistic expectations should I set for myself for my day-to-day work and long-term career trajectory? Should I expect to “bite the bullet” and work on things that don’t directly interest/benefit me, especially as I am still young and relatively unproven in my career? How, if at all, do economic market forces come into the picture here? Greetings! Long time fan, first time caller. This isn’t a question per se, but rather an observation that I’d love to hear your take on. Throughout my career, I’ve never had a boss that had less than 30 direct report. Yes, thirty. Three. Oh. I think this is primarly a cultural thing (I live in northern Europe), but also the fact that I’ve mostly worked in large organisations where tech was a means to an end. With that in mind, I find it your podcast fascinating because a lot of your answers and suggestions would be met either horror, disbelief or amusement - often a mix, I suspect. Weekly one-on-ones? A carreer plan? Going to skip-level managers? When your only interaction with you boss is a yearly apraisal that usually starts with the phrase “So, uuuuuh, who are you and what have you done the last year?”, your nuggets of wisdom feel less like nuggets and more like peals, as in “pearls before swine”! Any suggestions on how to thrive in an evironment such as this?

it takes more than saying at least i didn't pull a crowd strike every time you break something at work to be a great software engineer this is episode 420 of the soft skills engineering podcast where i'm your host jameson 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 deflecting blame by pointing at a mistake that has nothing to do with your mistake right oh just the name port the company really named itself poorly in hindsight yeah crowd strike yes there were a lot of crowds at airport explosion yes yeah oh i feel bad for them i don't even really know all the details this is one of those postmortems

i haven't looked into the depth of very well but i know it involved a driver i want to read the book about like what what went on at this company afterwards when people are just scrambling oh yeah what's the sketchiest thing someone did to try and pass off blame or like who valiantly fell on their sword and this is high corporate drama and what what normal qa processes did they sidestep in order to get the fix out faster you know and how did all that get approved well i think the fix was tell people they have to go and fix it themselves if i understand right not to get too technical but i think it was like all right all you admins go delete this file and then restart the machine oh boy i don't know that they actually pushed out a fix that fixed it for someone all you

admins except you windows 3.1 admins you guys are good yeah yeah just wild stuff it hey you can't brick 8 million windows machines without being pretty successful to be on 8 million windows machines look on the bright side yeah uh that's not what this show's about dave do you want to read our patrons you know i do i want to read them i guess i don't know read their names i was gonna say i want to read them their rights yeah read their personality you have the right to contribute money at a level that gets you a weekly shout out every week those people are some kind of compound banana family emoji javier gonzalez chewy ted timbrel become a senior engineer.com unsalted french fries are morally objectionable dan from drone deploy chase w norton

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whose names continue to delight and confound, then you can go to softskills.audio and click support us on Patreon where you can contribute any dollar amount you want to get access to our growing and beloved Slack community where you can enjoy like i do nearly every day the tech humor channel with some of the best memes programming comedy memes on the internet and if you contribute enough we will say whatever you type into the patreon name field this is true great should i read our first question i would i would be most pleased if you would okay this is from a listener named little z who says hello

i'm a relatively new graduate 2023 bachelor's in information systems who's currently working at a large tech company in a technical role adjacent to software engineering this is a great opportunity but as time has progressed i've felt growing dissatisfaction from the role i don't enjoy many of the projects i'm put on i feel that i am not fully making use of my technical skills or potential and that the work i do often doesn't align with my career aspirations which are transitioning into software engineering this demotivates and frustrates me and i often feel i'm wasting my time however upon reflection i feel that my sentiments are rooted in youthful ignorance and I'm too impatient and idealistic in my expectations. What realistic expectations

should I set for myself for my day-to-day work and long-term career trajectory? Should I expect to bite the bullet and work on things that don't directly interest or benefit me, especially as I am still young and relatively unproven in my career? How, if at all, do economic market forces come into the picture here? Daily goal, write 700 lines of Java code every day or consider your day a waste yeah hmm i mean maybe that's that's yeah so maybe they're in qa or like project management or technical program management or something yeah technical role adjacent to software engineering sounds like it could very well be a support role or like a technical advisory role for customers or some kind of like you put the bailing wire and duct tape together

to make the demo work for a for a prospect yeah sales engineer kind of thing huh yeah that's how i'm imagining this i think i think i got lucky because the jobs i had early in my career felt like well for the most part felt like really what i wanted to be doing and that's why i took them because i wanted to write code and learn stuff and i think i it was really only before my quote career started that i was still in school and working that i worked at jobs that felt like they just were to keep me alive, but kind of miserable. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I kind of, I want to call out the elephant in the room and I worry that in doing so I'll be perceived as a little bit elitist, but it is kind of just a fact of life.

I guess I'll just say it with great respect to all the information systems majors out there. This person wanted to become a software engineer, but studied information systems in college. And that is, in my opinion, the root of this problem. An information systems degree is not as automatic of a transition into a software engineering role in your professional life. There are a huge array of options for information systems majors, and only a small portion of those are actually software development. And I base this on spending the last 20 years recruiting and hiring software engineers and seeing those who come in with an information systems degree who just don't quite have the depth of software engineering training. And that's because they got a nice broad array

of other skills. They had to take a bunch of business classes. They took a bunch of corporate security classes. They took a bunch of database and network administration classes, all useful, great stuff. But those classes had an opportunity cost. And the opportunity cost was more deep software engineering classes that they simply didn't take one of the most accomplished developers i know was an information systems major actually two now that i think about it but i do share your viewpoint that it's sort of like it's it's on a a rung down in in aggregate in terms of raw technical focus and for software engineering right yes for software engineering And maybe slightly less technical as well, like just generally.

Yeah. So go back to school and get a CS degree. Exactly. And computer science is the degree I compare it to as a baseline. And what I have found is that people who graduate with a computer science degree, there's all these jobs that are looking for them. It's almost like you have a water slide. And at the bottom of the water slide, there's a sign that says computer science degree. And there's another water slide next to it that says information systems degree. And all the software engineering and software development employers are standing at the bottom of the computer science water slide just waiting for people to come out. But there's other people standing next to the information systems water

slide exit. But it's not a lot of software development jobs that are waiting down there. You know, like for some reason, they've all got their eyes on the computer science tube. Yeah. Yeah, I didn't even think about that. I'm glad you pointed that out. What do they do about it, though? I mean, don't go back to school and get a CSD. Yeah, exactly. feels like a not worth it at this point should i expect to bite the bullet and work on things that don't directly interest or benefit me i i would say you might have to take a crappier software development job as a way to get into software development maybe lower salary a company that

isn't i don't know as as cutting edge as what you would look for like but that feels more likely to me than to stick around and and hope to transition eventually if you're doing a job at this company yeah because what what i've seen people who are in this kind of situation do is they get really good at a bunch of stuff that's not software engineering yeah and then they become they become very sought after in this company and then their pay goes up and then they're like oh i can't afford to leave and go take a pay cut to be a junior engineer somewhere, you know, because companies love people like this. I have people like this in my company. We love them. They're wonderful. Very, very valuable, fantastic people. But if they have a desire to be a software

engineer, it's just like they're going to be frustrated. Yeah. Yeah. It sounds pithy and kind of obvious, but if you want to get a software engineering job, the most important thing you can do is get any kind of software engineering job because it's much easier to jump from a crappy software engineering job that you don't love that's still day-to-day doing the kind of stuff you'll do to a better one than it is to jump from kind of a business analyst, QA, project manager, whatever your role is that's technical but not directly software engineering, especially at the same company. It happens in the way that every year some artist is discovered on YouTube and becomes famous, but the odds of it happening to you specifically are not great.

Right, right, right. The odds of it happening are 100%, but not to you. Yeah, someone will get it. Yeah. Yeah. So I think, you know, Jameson, you gave a great option, which is quit this job and go get a job as a software engineer where literally the job description aligns with your career aspirations.

And frankly, the sooner you do that, the better because the opportunity costs will be lower to switch because as your salary grows with this one skill set that you're doing but don't like, it will be harder to switch because you'll have to take a bigger and bigger pay cut as time goes on. Having said that, there is another option, which is maybe if you're persistent enough at this company and there are opportunities enough for you to actually get into and do what you want to do, you could make it work, but you're going to have to repeat yourself like 20 times to management you know hey i know we just talked about this last week in our weekly

one-on-one but have you seen any software development opportunities pop up you know and over and over and over i think that's a good point you're gonna have to repeat yourself but also not just say hey i want this can i can you do it for me you have to make it seem like it's a good idea to them like not just oh little z has been asking about this forever but i i think little z would be good at this job which is part of the trickier and the chicken and egg problem is like you're not probably doing stuff at your job that can demonstrate competence at software engineering there's a kind of a businessy phrase called job crafting which is sort of like turn your job into the job you want it to be and there might be some room for this if you're in business

and in a business analyst role there's often some kind of data analytics sql-ish querying stuff so you could use that as a reason to write more code similarly with qa maybe automate stuff like if you can find a way to turn more of your role into a software role that will help you gain experience and i think make it easier to transition internally and probably externally as well it might not be possible though you might just be so swamped with stuff or stuff that is not easily automatable, but yeah, that's what AI is for baby. Yep. All good. Yeah, that's true. You could probably create the demand for the things you want to do by doing the things you want to do in creative out of band ways that no one told you to do. I will say that if you go down that

route, a lot of the stuff you do will be, it will sell itself a little bit less good on the job hunt for your next software development job and that's just because there is a perception that or sorry and that's because most of those jobs will probably be like internal tooling development yeah yeah i replaced this spreadsheet with an app that is much better exactly yeah those kinds of internal tools and internal software projects are perceived in the job market as lower value and thus command lower pay typically to build that kind of stuff and that's because the the rigors of building production level quality code that works on you know thousands of different computers at the same time and is scalable and secure and whatnot that these these things that

to actually take to production require next level skills and experience to to build and so you'll be up against that headwind yeah i i still think this advice can fit into the broader framework of just go get a software just as if it's just go do it try to go get a software engineering job even if it's a crappy one i think that will be easier to do if you have crafted your job to be more softwarey yeah for sure right now absolutely true and i've hired people maybe you're gonna go work at an agency and the hours are kind of grinding and you're you're cranking out stuff under pressure that you don't follow up on or agencies are often a pathway into software development. Yeah, absolutely. Totally doable. And I've hired people who did nothing but

internal software development before they joined my team to do customer-facing for sale software. And they worked out great, but it was a stepping stone. And I did get them at a lower price point on the salary than people who had that experience already. And it was great. It was great for me because I got inexpensive labor for a time until they leveled up their skills. And it was great for them because they got to have the job that they wanted. And, you know, fast forward 10 years and it's like life changing trajectory on the salary and job satisfaction. That will be you in 10 years, little Z. You can do it. Yeah. Well, have we answered this question? I think so. Really good luck. I hope this works out well for you. And I think just to answer that one last question,

is this just me being youthful and impatient? I think no. I think that you are not being youthful and impatient, I think you're seeing this situation clearly, which is that your path is taking you somewhere you don't want to go in your career, and it will require effort from you to course correct, or else you'll wake up 10 years from now and go, man, I never really did do the things I wanted to do. Yeah. Yeah. Makes sense. All right, Dave, will you read our next question? Yes. This comes from an anonymous listener who says, greetings, long-time fan, first-time caller. This isn't a question per se, but rather an observation that I'd love to hear you take on. Hear your take on. Throughout my career, I've never had a boss that had less than

30 direct reports. Yes, 30. Three zero. No, three oh is what it says. Oh, that is a lot. I think this is primarily a cultural thing. I live in Northern Europe, but also the fact that I've mostly worked in large organizations where tech was a means to an end. With that in mind, I find it your podcast fascinating because a lot of your answers and suggestions would be met either with horror disbelief or amusement often a mix i suspect weekly one-on-ones a career plan going to skip level managers when your only interaction with your boss is a yearly appraisal that usually starts with the phrase so who are you and what have you done last year oh boy your nuggets of wisdom feel less like nuggets and more like pearls as in pearls before swine

any suggestions on how to thrive in an environment such as this 30 direct reports your boss doesn't even really know your name goodness yeah that's so interesting i mean it it means that the relationship has to be drastically different which i guess is what the question asker is is pointing at because there is a level of engagement and familiarity that i expect with my boss and with my reports and i i definitely feel stretched when i have even double digits because i can't get that yeah 10 people is a lot yeah it's a lot at this level i mean okay mammals have small numbers of children and care very deeply for them uh-huh bugs have lots of children they don't care at all this is like a a bug versus mammal thing

yeah no value judgment like jameson loves bugs yeah i mean we he creates bugs all the time i can see some right now maybe even more bugs than features yeah so i actually i was reading this book about uh medieval europe in the 14th century and the infant mortality rate was like 50 to 60 percent oh boy in the first two years basically and it it had the the book hypothesizes it had an impact on culture in that children don't really show up in popular culture in in stories or poems or paintings with any kind of like care or reverence or or like they're just probably gonna die so you're like all right we got we got one oh they made it all right now now time to think of them as a person after after they're 17 or

something or no yeah uh it said like five to seven years and then they basically just like go to work it's like i'm not gonna risk getting attached to you adults until you're five and i get attached you're probably gonna push a plow around yeah and i'm sure that i mean i don't know that sounds so brutal and yeah and probably is misstating it but there's got to be some adaptations when the numbers are different i guess that's my point and so it seems like these are the adaptations are you trying to say that if you worked in an environment where there were 30 people that reported to your boss that you would have a 50 career mortality rate yeah that's why they have so many reports is because half of them will die in the next year like a beetle's larva

yeah what do you do i mean what do you want i guess so if we're talking about the i get this image of someone standing outside a window with their hand pressed against it looking sadly through it all these people inside playing on a playground or something like oh a manager who knows your name i as soon as you painted that picture in my mind i got a charles dickens like tiny tim image yeah Yeah, exactly. Yeah, it's kind of like that. I mean, the good news about having a ton of reports is that your boss really probably has no idea what you do. And so if you're the kind of person that thrives when given a lot of autonomy and a hands-off manager, you're in great shape here. This is heaven for you.

Yeah. What do you do? Whatever you want. Yeah. Yeah, that's a good point. But you're going to have to write your own career plan because you ain't getting one. Yeah. Which, to be fair, for the first 15 years of my career, even though I only probably had seven or eight people reporting to my same manager, I didn't have any career plans either. Yeah, it's more like a career discussion. Yeah, I said it, but I'll say it again.

I guess it depends on what you want. Do you want a closer relationship with your boss and more feedback and insight and oversight? if you do then presumably there's still some amount of hierarchy of like yeah they have 30 reports but they work very closely with these three people just because of what they work on their roles or something so it's maybe like it's sort of more about maneuvering or what you what kind of work you do on the team to be closer if that's a thing that you want but like they've said maybe maybe it's not maybe you don't want that at all yeah in which case great you know if I found myself okay given where I am now so I've been in software engineering for 20 years

full-time professional and knowing what I know today about growth professional growth career development I would go online to one of these mega tech co companies and try to find leaked documentation about their career progression process and I would just try to implement that for myself because it's not honestly when I was less experienced it was really not obvious to me understanding how to grow professionally, how to make an impact as a software engineer, how to quantify your impact. Like I just had no idea how to do any of that stuff. Now I have a better idea. Still not perfect, of course, but much, much better and more concrete. And so one of the great ways to do that is just go find some of these leaked

career progression ladders or, you know, pull up. A lot of these companies have them online. Like I'll bet you GitLab has a great one. Yeah, they publish them. Yeah. Pull them for Amazon, Facebook, whatever. And the only reason I suggest these particular names is because they're big enough that the documents are probably online. I'm sure there are plenty of small companies whose processes are just as good or better, but their documents haven't been leaked because the numbers aren't in their favor for leaking the docs. And they're not always leaked. Sometimes they publish them directly. But nevertheless, if you want career progression and you want coaching, you're going to have to find it through your own means. And you might even want to go find a mentor,

maybe on your team even, or maybe someone from another company who can essentially act as your manager in this one way, which is coaching and guidance for what to do about your career planning. I like that. That feels, I mean, it's probably good advice anywhere. It's very few people probably have just a rock solid, crystal clear career plan together with their boss. but it makes more sense in this context too going to skip level manager i mean yeah what are what are some things you could do with a big team of 30 of 30 peers that you couldn't do if you had like four you could form like a football team of either type yes hand football or foot football yes hand football well said jameson it's a great name there's there's some unique things you could

do it maybe you could like run a if you're in europe i think they like formula one over there right i don't know if they like it in northern europe but maybe that's like the size of a pit crew over there yeah maybe perfect you need that many people to lift one formula one car yeah it's really weird you think it's the wheels but really it's just a bunch of people under there carrying it like flintstone style so fast yeah so fast well yeah when you when you have a bunch of people that can run like a seven minute mile and you have 30 of those people you can run like a five-second mile when you add them up. Yeah, it's multiplicative? Yeah, I think so. That's how math works with running. The other thing is, I'm really going

to lean in on this autonomy thing. Your boss can't possibly track your work when there's 30 of you. And so you actually have an opportunity to come up with some really cool stuff. And one of the things you could do kind of under the radar is talk to a bunch of your team members and ask them, what's something you wish the product could do? Or what's something that you think is super inefficient about our team or what's something that would be great if we had and start collecting this information and then build it you know you can maybe uh carve into your normal work just a little bit your work hours and build something really cool and you could do you could be a really impactful really supportive and awesome team member doing things that your

boss will probably never be able to tell you to do because there's 30 of you that's what i was kind of thinking too i mean 30 people is a pretty big group and there's definitely room to self organize a little bit if it's just pure uh unstructured like globs of people so yeah you can you can you can kind of make your own boss i guess it it is tricky because you don't presumably you don't want to like become someone's fake boss and and just like grab a bunch of authority and try and tell people what to do but this could be a unique opportunity to try to help push a group in a certain direction and and try and get better at influencing people maybe definitely not just influencing people but you could just build cool stuff i mean i'm i just i i'm just one of those

people that thrives in a more autonomous environment sometimes that means kind of just chilling out and not working very hard but sometimes when i find a project that really gets me interested. It means working a ton and doing some really cool stuff. And that could be you here. So I don't know. I say try to make the best of it. And it sounds like if indeed this is a geographical cultural thing that's, according to the question asker, perhaps is the case in Northern Europe, then you really can't quit your job and go find a six-person team with one manager. And so that not being an option, you're just going to have to find a way to fill the gaps that you perceive as holding you back and and good news you can do that probably because

no one's watching over your shoulder yeah i don't know maybe i'm just lazier than you so i'm not like great no one to watch what i can do i'm gonna do awesome stuff like i don't know wouldn't you feel happier if you did though if you did awesome stuff oh yeah certainly happier than if you just did nothing because that is another option you could be a pretty big slacker if there's no no oversight and you hear once it means you have a year to do nothing and then you get to see how well you can lie during that meeting i guess yep tons of stuff well have you answered the question i think so good luck right what can people do if they want their own questions answered go to softskills.audio and click the ask a question button where you can fill out our little form

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