Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 424: Bragging without ego and how to predict layoffs

Episode Date: September 2, 2024

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Listener Billy Bob Taco asks, I work at a small-medium startup, as a member of a very small team (read: just me). I work on infrastructure and APIs that support every other team, such as mobile and web clients, as well as other services. I’m relatively junior, and had to work hard to prove myself in this role. I do 100% of the system design and maintenance as well as feature development. I’ve been told on job interviews that I came across as a “little egotistical” when describing the role and the impact its had, but I don’t really know how to soften it! It’s my experience that I’m talking about when trying to share my ability and potential to fill a role. Help? Listener TimeDisplacementBox says, Great show, your future episodes just keep getting better and better. I have a question about avoiding lay offs. In this timeline I recently joined a large company out of college. I worked hard and surpassed goals set by my manager, getting very positive feedback at review time. However, a few weeks ago I started hearing that the company was over budget in engineering, huge changes started happening in upper management, and less work started flowing to our team. The concern was grounded in reality as one morning the company disbanded the team and laid off some of the newer hires including me. Aside from additional time travel, are there any questions I can ask during interviews to help ensure I am getting into a team that is safe from lay offs? And on the job, can you directly ask your manager if lay offs are in the future, or do you just need to watch out for the signs? Show Notes https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/2347:_Dependency

it takes more than bullying the llm by beginning your prompt with per my last message to be a great software engineer this is episode 424 of the soft skills engineering podcast where i'm your host jameson dance per my last episode i'm your host dave smith this is soft skills engineering the weekly advice show about all the non-technical questions that go into the technical field of software development. How do you take out your frustration about corporate culture, passive aggressiveness on this machine? Do you think that would make you a better person or a worse person? I feel like I've heard that catharsis isn't real and you don't work out your anger. You just get more angry if you express it that way. Whoa. Add that to the

long list of replication crisis problems. That's not what this show's about either, though we should dive into it dave do you want to thank our patreon our patrons not our patreon our patreonicals yes yes we'd like to thank those that are contributing at a level that gets them a weekly shout out they are hawk to us 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 level up your type script with type hero.dev never is not just a crater on mars flamingo emoji i like chicken i like liver meow mix meow mix please deliver trash panda the computer science book.com kyle boss kent c dodds nivar is

not just a planet in the vulcan system jenny kim owen chartle the stochastic parrot helicone.ai best observability tool for ai red panda is best panda everyone in this list jonathan kings and i beautiful functional user documentation an nth one-time shout out to will angel is a great engineer travis braden canes lies damn lies and product driven deadlines if you would like hold on this i'm not i'm not done reading the list so i'm just going to keep reading if you would like to join the illustrious crew go to soft skills.audio and click the support us on patreon button and finally what's your favorite salad has it changed since last time i don't know you know my least favorite salad is a wedge salad it feels so lazy just like here here's a salad you moron

you wouldn't dare challenge me you're too stupid to understand no this is just like a hunk of vegetable i did one time get served a wedge salad that was nothing but a wedge of iceberg lettuce with a single sardine placed on top that's what i knew this place is too fancy for me where are the corn dogs yeah it was done so elegantly though single sardine rested should laid to rest on the salad wedge you know that sardine was placed with the pinky out by the hand that placed oh yes yeah i could taste it i could taste the pinky extension all right would you like to read our first question yeah i would this is from a listener named billy bob taco who says, I work at a small medium startup as a member of a very small team. Read just me. I work on

infrastructure and APIs that support every other team, such as mobile and web clients, as well as other services. I'm relatively junior and had to work hard to prove myself in this role. I do 100% of the system design and maintenance as well as feature development. I've been told on job interviews that I come across as a little egotistical when describing the role and the impact it has had, but I don't really know how to soften it. It's my experience that I'm talking about when trying to share my ability and potential to fill a role help oh wow okay i got a great visual forming in my mind when i read the first couple when i listened to you say the first few sentences about you have a junior engineer team of one who the entire rest of the product is

resting on this one person all the apis platform level stuff and you remember that visual i think it might have been an xkcd comic which is like a whole bunch of blocks stacked up and everything looks stable except there's this one tiny little block holding like 80 of it and it's it's like some npm package or something that goes unmaintained oh yeah yeah it's like all of modern technology depends on this one yeah like these open source library with a single maintainer yeah like exactly every major tech company depends on this thing anyway that's this person yeah yeah i mean it sounds like you should ask for a raise at your current company but this is also talking about interviewing this is a tricky dance because you do want to come across as competent and like you

can get stuff done i wonder what it is about the way you're expressing it that makes it seem so i'm going to hazard a guess and it could be way wrong but there's a difference between here's all this stuff i figured out and like stand back everybody i i know the right way to do everything and especially from a junior person who's smart sometimes that vibe can come off of like don't worry i have this all figured out when when you really know that they cannot possibly right like they've never worked with a sql database before because they only worked with no sql or something like you you just by nature of time have gaps in your experience level so So maybe it's potentially caused by the way you're expressing confidence about how the

thing you did is the right thing. I think you can focus on the business impact and what you did specifically. But if you could somehow express like, and I'm open to learning more and getting better and improving instead of just like, good news, I've got it all done and figured out and it is infallible and impeccable. Well, I have an idea for how to do this. How? What you need to do is train an LLM on the words of the least egotistical person I know, which is Jameson Dance, and ask that LLM, write what your answer is, and then ask that LLM to rephrase them in the words of Jameson Dance.

Aha. Good luck. You're screwed. That's what I'd say if you do that. Yeah, you might get some side effects in there. Yeah. oh no the llm has developed crippling self-doubt it won't give any answers anymore yeah

yeah this is so interesting because you often hear the opposite advice i just i just got this image of the llm saying it takes more than like it takes more than great code to be a great engineer it's like wait a minute that's not what i that's all it'll say is just tag like intro lines from the show we just over indexed on the first sentence of every transcript tell us about your work in infrastructure and then it just spits out a bunch of stupid not even jokes yeah just words really it takes more than great infrastructure to be a great engineer what the interviewers are like this is weird yeah well sorry it's clearly because they're not listeners of the show already. Yeah, you usually get advice to the opposite of this effect,

which is be very clear about what you've done. And don't say we, like say I and kind of emphasize your impact. But maybe that's because most people tend to underdo that part. Yeah. So you need the opposite advice. I don't know. This is a hard one. I'd have to listen to some of the things you say, because there's probably a combination of word choice and tone that can contribute to someone perceiving you as egotistical and i'm trying to think like who do i think is egotistical i don't know there's there's kind of like this self-satisfied attitude you know when you're interviewing someone that you think is egotistical where they're like and then i did this and then you look back at them and smile like you're so proud

of yourself or something i don't know that's kind of the visual i'm getting yeah yeah i don't know maybe if you feel like you've had a really big impact maybe you could talk about what was like hard about achieving that too so not just i i stepped in and solved all these problems but like i had to go through this journey to figure out what i thought the right thing to do was or something like that because i think egotistical is kind of a stand-in here for this person might be hard to work with if we hire them they might struggle to collaborate with others or disagree or i don't know take direction or so if you can show that you do take direction and collaborate it might address some of these concerns. I mean, the definition of egotistical is that

you have an inflated view of your own self-importance. And I think this poor person is in a situation where they are actually very important in their organization. They're the only person maintaining this critical piece of their software stack that all the other applications depend on. So it's like, what are you supposed to represent? Like in an interview, it's like i guess you're supposed to say the thing i built was really important even though i personally am not maybe that's kind of the separation you need to make yeah i guess i don't know i yeah i mean i'm just going back to something you said i feel like it's probably more about tone than the words you're saying and that's hard to judge through a question yeah through a written

question maybe you can send us an audio recording of yourself reading this and we'll just be like oh my gosh, you're so egotistical. Yeah. Confirmed. It is tone. Now, different tone, please. You know, one of the things that I've done when I've been interviewed to try to balance these impossible demands that Jameson mentioned a few minutes ago about trying to brag on the one hand, you know, cast yourself in a very positive light and on the other hand, not be perceived as a jerk or an egotist. And so one thing I'll employ, one phrase I'll employ is to tell people that I'm, listen, I'm really uncomfortable sharing all these positive things about myself, but I feel like in this context, it's important for me to share with you the most valuable

accomplishments that I've made or the things that I think are really great and relevant for you to know. And so that little preamble where you say, I'm uncomfortable doing this, it almost preps people's minds to say, oh, they're uncomfortable with this. Great. That means they're not egotistical. Yeah. I also got a, I also got a, I heard a great strategy. Well, I think it's great. I haven't really had a chance to employ it, but I read a book. We mentioned, you know what, we've mentioned this book now twice, I think in the last few months, but I read the book, Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss, mostly for the bank robbery stories, which are really great. But he has a concept he calls accusation audits. And the purpose of an

accusation audit is for you to preempt a accusation that the other party will make against you by just stating it out loud before you then make your real statement. So in this case, you would say, you might think I'm really egotistical for saying this, but, and then you say, I was the sole infrastructure maintainer for all the APIs that every product in my company depended on. And it's like, the way Chris Voss explains it, and I feel this deep in my core, um, is that when you accuse someone of housing a belief about you, like saying you might think I'm an egotistical person, a common reaction is to say, no, no, no, I don't think that don't, you know, don't, don't you dare put that on me. I definitely don't think

you're egotistical, you know? And that's the reaction. And so you can kind of prep people mentally for these things by saying that. So it sort of points them in the opposite direction. exactly someone who is egotistical would never cynically use this to their advantage so therefore exactly huh i like that well have we answered the question i got one more idea so one thing i would do is i would focus on facts not superlatives it's very easy in an interview context to um to say i'm really great at this like i mean actually let me let me take that back that's not easy for a lot of people to say. But from the question, I worry that maybe you're using superlatives like very great or extremely good. And the way I like to do things in

interviews is say, I'm just going to give you the facts and the facts will help you draw correct conclusions. And those conclusions based on my facts are going to be good because I'm going to give you the best facts I have in my arsenal. So you can say things like, well, in my last company, I occupied a pretty unique situation. It was a little bit intimidating, but I was the sole developer on all of the infrastructure and APIs that every other team at the company depended on for our mobile and web clients. And this was kind of a high pressure situation, but I feel like I did a really good job. We had X uptime on these services and I got a lot of positive feedback on how well the APIs serve these other product teams. So it's like just the facts, as many numbers as

you can would be really good and um just state it and then let them come to the conclusion that you are really great i like that that's kind of a show don't tell approach i think sometimes people call it that yeah yeah if that doesn't work though then you you do have to frame it at the end by saying and those facts indicate that i am really great just fyi in case you're having a hard time concluding correctly yeah wouldn't want you to make the wrong conclusion yeah exactly all right now have we answered the question i think so good luck good luck dave do you want to read our next question this comes from listener time displacement box who says is that a doctor who thing the time in doctor who it's tardis and it's temporal and relative dimensions in space so pretty close okay

My TARDIS shows up when I Google Time Displacement Box, but it doesn't appear to be. I don't know. All right. Sorry. Carry on. Add this to the long list of sci-fi references that Jameson doesn't get. Yep. Okay.

Time Displacement Box says, great show. Your future episodes just keep getting better and better. Thank you so much. I have never had a compliment from the future. and i guess just to interpret that it means that the show we're doing right now is the worst we will do compared to all of our future shows so that's the cynical view okay continuing with the question i have a question about avoiding layoffs in this timeline sorry i love the time travel stuff i gosh side note i love time travel i mean i've never done it but i love watching stories

will you love it in the future i will love it i just love anyway sorry i'm kind of obsessed with it all right in this timeline i recently joined a large company out of college i worked hard and surpassed goals set by my manager getting very positive feedback at review time however there's always a however with that kind of leader however a few weeks ago the end i'm just writing to tell you everything's great okay sorry man i have not interrupted a question this bad maybe ever Okay. Continuing. However, a few weeks ago, I started hearing that the company was over budget in engineering. Huge changes started happening in upper management and less work started flowing to our team. The concern was grounded in reality as one morning the company disbanded the team and laid off some of the newer hires, including me. Aside from additional time travel, are there any questions I can ask during interviews to help ensure I am getting into a team that is safe from layoffs? And on the job, can you directly ask your manager if layoffs are in the future, or do you just need to watch out for the signs?

Hmm. I'm going to answer the second question first, which is you can ask them whatever you want. I think it is pretty unlikely that your manager would say, yes, there are layoffs in the future for a couple of reasons. One, they might not know. And even if they suspect, they're probably part of their role is to kind of preserve the safety of the team and the health of the team like they they have incentives to say don't worry everything's fine and not freak people out by saying hey i think there's going to be layoffs soon team member that right i'm kind of responsible for so i don't know that it would hurt to ask there's probably some way in which it could in some situations but i think it's pretty unlikely that they'll say yeah i think

you you better start looking i so your best bet is definitely watch the signs see are there revenue numbers anywhere are there especially burn rate if you're at a startup or even a big company revenue and expense numbers and just how how well are is the business doing because it turns out sometimes that can be fairly disconnected from how awesome your team is at producing great code and ultimately how well the business is doing based on what you are doing determines whether your team will be affected by layoffs or not yeah i agree it sounds like you got some pretty strong signs too like yeah engineering is way over budget yep that's a pretty big red flag that'll do it and okay cool we've decided we will suddenly make a lot more money from engineering then we just

weren't before but well don't worry we'll solve it yeah by just making more money perfect we'll cover the overages with money and sharing money i can i can confirm jameson that if your manager knows about layoffs your manager is probably not going to tell you about layoffs because if they did they would be part of the layoffs it's like it's usually so i've been on the other end of layoffs once in my career and telling anyone that it was happening before it happened was like totally verboten yeah it kind of oh man i mean it's so hard to execute a layoff anyway that if word gets out before the layoff happens it's just like panic inducing and so you know then no one oh it's just it's just terrible so your manager probably won't tell you but i still don't think

it hurts to ask and then you kind of watch for facial twitches i think you can also ask not directly hey do you know there are going to be layoffs and blink twice if the answer is yes but I can't tell you, but also, Hey, how well is the business doing or how, how, how secure is our team specifically? Layoffs sometimes indicate kind of outside forces, but they can be just changing internal direction of maybe this, the company doesn't want to do the thing that your team does anymore. And they should know something about that. Again, whether they will tell you or not is not for certain, but I think they are more likely to tell you, here's what I think about kind of the internal state of how important our team is, then the yes, I know about layoffs and

I'm going to just dump all I know to you. So given that you're probably not going to get a direct answer, what are some of the signs? Sometimes it's just hard to tell, you know? Yeah. Especially if you're at a giant mega company, like the bigger the company, I feel like in some ways the harder it is. Yeah, exactly. The bigger the company, the lower the likelihood that anyone in your social circle even knows they're coming. Yeah. It's also hard to... You would think, oh, it's a publicly traded company.

Maybe I can tell from the shareholder meetings or the public disclosures. Probably not. The stock price. Yeah, maybe that will predict it. No, probably not. I mean, if the company's doing great, then unlikely that there will be layoffs. Hopefully, you at least know that stuff. in a big company there is a an aura of protection exuded by senior executives and so the closer you

are to them if your team reports to someone who reports directly to a c-level person or whatever like less likely to be impacted by layoffs and the further away you are the more likely potential i think you are to be impacted by layoffs because yeah that's like sort of an indicator of how important the company thinks the stuff you do is. The proximity on the org chart to the C-level people is kind of a proxy for, do they know what value your team provides? Yeah. And not that they design it that way. I think it just ends up that way in practice. Yeah, exactly. That's right. What about this question of, how do I tell during interviews? Yeah, that's interesting. I think there are questions I ask in interviews to try to get

a sense for the, how core, how critical the team is that I'm interviewing on. And I have failed this in the past. Like I interviewed for a company and I was really worried about getting put on some kind of like sideline ancillary, not important team. And so I asked the manager straight up, like, are you telling me this is the core technology team for this product? And the manager said, yes. And I was like, great. That's what I'm looking for. Like I was nervous that it would be some kind of sideline team well anyway i started the job and it took me like a few weeks it was a big company took me a few weeks to piece together nope this is not core at all and my manager actually doesn't even know that like my manager the company was so big and the org was so

complex that my manager thought that the team was super core but it just wasn't we were at least three teams removed from the actual core team who was doing the real work it took me weeks to traverse a social network you know in a corporate social network to figure out where the actual core work was happening that's tricky too because sometimes core can mean different things like if you're building platform underlying architecture infrastructure stuff then in one way you could think well that's very core because all the important stuff builds on us but also you're much more removed from the the dollars coming inside which is often more more kind of outside facing. And I don't know. I think the fact that they are hiring you indicates, hopefully,

unless there's some dysfunction, they don't think there are going to be layoffs because hopefully they're not going to hire and then immediately lay people off. Although sometimes you don't want to tip off. Sometimes there's an issue. So maybe you keep headcount open and I don't know. There's ways that that can not go well, as you found out, I guess, in your experience. But I think similar to the manager asking your manager about layoffs thing i i think if you ask in the interview hey are there going to be layoffs they're going to say no like they're trying to convince you to work for them um yeah so you're left asking about secondary signals like profitability or stability or like dave said importance in the org and also like you said that's very hard to judge because

you said the manager didn't really know right and there's probably also some bias in their in their mind to think like they want to see themselves as an important core technology piece in the org. So they probably can tell themselves a story that results in it feeling like, yeah, we are really core, even though that might not be very believable to others. Yeah. Yeah. What, I don't know, what depends on this team? What would happen if this team didn't exist? Maybe that one's a little morbid, but some way of figuring out how critical is probably a thing you could ask.

And the smaller the company, the easier that will be because it's like, well, there's only three of us, so I guess you could say pretty critical. yeah this whole team we're the whole engineering department and i can never take vacation again if this team goes away yeah exactly um also you might think oh it's a signal a positive signal that this company is hiring you know the fact that they're hiring means that they probably are not going to do layoffs and for a well-managed company that would be true but it turns out there are many companies who the hiring managers and the budget people and all that don't actually know that layoffs are coming and the bigger the company the more likely it is that that that that kind of

knowledge isolation takes place where you've got you know the left hand of the company is hiring aggressively but the head is about to prepare a severance of the left hand you know i mean this happened during the pandemic too a lot of the layoffs were like hiring and recruitment and stuff That hit pretty hard pretty early. Do you remember that? I'm trying to think back. There definitely was a quick fever of layoffs, but it was followed so quickly by aggressive hiring that I can't remember. Well, in like 2022, 23, when the tech downturn started kicking off more, I feel like it impacted, definitely impacted engineering. But as soon as all the companies decided,

oh, wait, we are not hiring at a breakneck speed anymore. I guess we don't need all of these recruiters and recruitment managers and yeah the hiring infrastructure was impacted by the layoffs just like uh i don't know i'm just agreeing with you in more words okay i love it can you say more of those words no okay i guess you don't agree with me that much then yeah so it's just a hard situation and i mean i think one way to to navigate this situation is just embrace the impermanence of life and even though it means that you might be financially devastated i'm sorry yeah seeking uh these are words i'll probably eat one day but seeking for security like this while very appealing it is kind of it's you're kind of chasing rainbows you know

you're gonna be let down at some point yeah you're gonna be disappointed but if you expect that everything's gonna be terrible and your job will never be as stable as you want then it'll be harder to be disappointed. And in reality, that just kind of is the world we live in. You know, it's like jobs come and jobs go. Companies are successful. Companies fail. Some of it is in your power. Some of it isn't. You know, I would love to have a guaranteed paycheck for the rest of my life, but I don't know if I would love it enough to actually want the rest of what would come with that, which is lack of motivation, lack of, you know, that there's something about getting up every morning and having to really go and get it because if you don't, you're not going to get

paid and then you won't be able to pay the bills and then you won't be able to afford that really fancy replica of the Optimus Prime robot that you've wanted since 1984 that the other kids on the street had but you couldn't afford. Sorry, was I talking out loud? That's your rosebud. Yes. I think just like quit your job can be the universal advice for a lot of problems, problems around or issues around hiring have a universal piece of advice, which is have a source on the inside. If you know anybody on the team already, that makes everything easier. And in this way, it makes things easier because you can ask them more pointed questions about this, where in the interview process, you are being sold to. The company is trying to evaluate

you. They're also trying to instill in you a desire to work for them. And not that they're going to lie, but yeah, someone who works there will give you a different perspective. They might be less likely to be aggressively pitching you and trying to sell you on to coming. And so find a source on the inside if you can. It's hard to, you can't always, but always helps. Yeah. Well, did we answer the question? Actually, one more thing about that. We haven't talked about how to do this a ton, but I've found LinkedIn is a great place to stare in horror at just the insane things that people right in public. But I mean, you can also just look up the company you're interviewing with and

then click around and see random developers that work there. And I have been reached out to by people on LinkedIn to ask about roles that I am not interviewing them for at a place that I work. I think you might get some success even if you don't know anyone directly there to just say, hey, I'm interviewing. Can you tell me about it? And maybe you get ignored, but maybe you get some bites if you don't have a direct in there. It's a numbers game. If you send out 45,000 of those, you'll probably get two or three people respond. Yeah. Yeah. At the cost of offending the other 45,000 potential co-workers. Exactly. All right. Surely now we've answered it. It must be because we've hit that time where we feel like it's probably answered.

Yeah. It doesn't matter what you think. It matters if we think that we've answered it, unfortunately. Which is a very thin proxy for, are we out of time? Yeah. Yeah. What can people do if they want their own questions to cause us to feel like we have answered them? Go to softskills.audio and click the ask a question button. We must say once again, as always, thank you so much for everyone who writes in with your questions each week. We love, love reading them. And one day we will answer them all in a single day. Whoa, you're upping the commitment. Okay.

I just realized what I said one day. It could be interpreted multiple ways. Yeah, no ambiguity left. Yeah. All right. Thank you for listening. We will catch you next week.