Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 430: Should I quit this job I'm underqualified for and honestly torpedoed my promo chances

Episode Date: October 14, 2024

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I work at a large tech company, been there for about two years at the time of writing this question. I got in by sheer luck since I��ve interviewed at many teams in this company before finally landing an offer and I’m starting to think I don’t belong. I constantly feel like I don’t do a good job to the point where I’m starting to feel incredibly depressed. My question is, what would you do in this situation? I keep thinking I should leave but it’s not like the work is stressful and not interesting. I also realize I have a pretty solid setup (6 mile no traffic commute, great coworkers, free ev charging, and job security seems solid) so I’m hesitant on giving that up. I also think even if I leave, would I just repeat the cycle again at a new job/company? I’m pretty stuck I’m a year into my first job at Mega Corp post-graduation. Due to high turnover, I’ve ended up taking on tasks that would have originally gone to more experienced developers. I’ve grown and received positive feedback from my manager and skip manager, who have both mentioned potential for promotion. However, in my 1:1s, I’ve expressed that I’m not looking for a promotion yet because I want to solidify my current role and improve my work-life balance. I still have many coding fundamentals to develop, and I’ve been stressed and working long hours to take on these responsibilities. I’m now worried that my honesty might have affected my chances of being promoted and that I might be seen as someone not interested in progressing (which is probably frowned upon in big tech). How should I navigate this situation? Is it okay that I’ve been candid, or should I reconsider my stance on promotion? Thanks!

it takes more than a headphone dent in your hair to be a great software engineer this is episode 430 of the soft skills engineering podcast where i'm your host jameson dance 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 i guess doing your hair with your headphones there's probably like headphones specific hairdos right can like incorporate them into the do yeah like you well last time i went to the barber they handed me a catalog and they said step one is pick the headphones you wear and we'll we'll have a different cut for you depending on yeah if you if you carve a headphone groove into your hair then the headphones

won't stick out anymore yeah of course we are being very rude to all the people that do not have hair and still wear headphones well now you just get a skull dent yeah that's what i was just wondering you have to get like it's like when you sleep all weird and then you wake up and there are lines on your face do you get one of those on your head yes i'll tell you in a few years yeah i actually so sometimes when i ride a bike before work sometimes and i have a nice helmet line across my forehead it's like the same thing do you have a helmet tan yes i have had that usually it's just a burn and then back to you know non-tan okay so it's not it's not a healthy tan line it's a your face got fried yeah and then it was protected not only from impact but

the cruel rays of the sun well yeah there's holes in the top of my helmet that let the sun shine through as well so i usually get spots i look like a leopard print helmet burn line nice uh i heard that's a that's a hot look yeah it's hot literally hey all right dave do you want to thank our patrons all right yes we would like to thank those that are giving so much that they get a weekly shout out they are nick molyneux big chungus i'm happy for you and i'm gonna let you finish but a hawk tua is the funniest meme of all time a one-time shout out to ill wangel bracket object object bracket 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 types

group of type hero dot dev never is not just greater on mars let me go emoji i like chicken i like liver meow mix meow mix please deliver trash panda kyle boss kent c dodds nevar is not just a planet in the vulcan system jenny kim owen chartle the stochastic parrot helicon dot ai best of reservability tool for ai red panda is best panda everyone in this list jonathan kings and i beautiful functional user documentation i like meow mix i like chicken oh no wait www.illwangel.com that's www.illwangel.com i just bought a house congratulations travis braden gaines john grant if you would like to join this illustrious crew go to soft skills audio and click the support us on patreon button please someone put this on a shirt i use vim but

i'm not good at it thank you if you would like to join this illustrious crew go to soft skills dot audio and click the support us on patreon button this just makes me want to look back four or five years ago and see what this list looked like because i'm pretty sure it was just names and names are great but it has spilled the bounds of sensibility and devolved into absurdity which is excellent oh i just randomly scrolled back like 90 episodes and someone pulled the if you would like to join this illustrious crew stunt so that's just one time back then i don't know i mean i know i'm not going to look at all of them but it was there on the random one that i picked up that was like two years ago i know have we been saying oh man i i don't know what

i don't know what time is yeah pretty much it was mostly names i'm just going back yeah you know if i don't perceive the passage of time does that mean i am a time traveler uh basically if you don't perceive it kind of yeah like i just don't notice time passing oh time passed how do you notice that you don't notice time passing without noticing that time's passing i'm gonna read our first question let's get out of here okay this is from a listener named alex p who says i work at a large tech company been here about two years at the time of writing this question i got in by sheer luck since i've interviewed at many teams in this company before finally landing an offer and i'm starting to think

i don't belong i constantly feel like i don't do a good job to the point where i'm starting to feel incredibly depressed. My question is, what would you do in this situation? I keep thinking I should leave, but it's not like the work is stressful and not interesting. I also realized I have a pretty solid setup. Six-mile no-traffic commute, great co-workers, free electric vehicle charging, and job security seems solid. So I'm hesitant on giving that up. I also think, even if I leave, would I just repeat the cycle again at a new job slash company? I'm pretty stuck. How do you get a six-mile no-traffic commute at a big tech company? maybe they live in the farthest corner of the parking lot it's six miles away there's technically

no traffic i parked right outside my house and walked the parking lot yeah i don't know maybe it's a it's like a satellite office somewhere this feels like a one of those geo spotter challenges where you get dropped into a google street view and you have to figure out where you are yeah we gotta find the six mile no traffic commute from a big tech company office and then zoom in and see the actual person on street view and aha i'm looking forward found you alex yeah and we found your house yeah we know exactly where you live i would i'm just looking forward to someone writing in with a question but it's just a simple google maps link and when we click it it's like wait what is this oh that's six miles from a tech company with no traffic

i know exactly who this is or it's a link and then we look at the street view on the link and there's a person holding a sign with the question on it. It says, from Alex P, I work at a large tech company. It's an alternate, what is it? Alternate reality game? That's not what it is.

What does ARG stand for? I don't know. I'm not familiar with that term, but I love it already. It's not augmented reality. It's those games. It's a marketing stunt where there's some game or movie

or something they're trying to advertise and they like have a code on a website and the code leads to a coordinates and you go to the coordinates and there's some box you have to dig up that has a puzzle in it. It's, is it augmented reality? What does ARG stand for?

Alternate reality game? Oh, yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, let's do one of those. Yeah, one of those. I think we have to invent a mythos about the soft skills engineering universe and why there's like espionage and intrigue and stuff. We need to do some world building and some lore.

Yeah, which we'll do after we answer this question. Yes, that's our next meeting. Okay, so what would you do if you, I mean, what would you do if you landed on this team and it was like your sixth attempt to interview at the same company and you finally got in and then you're like, oh crap what have i done why am i here i would think about that xkcd comic where scientists test

20 different colors of jelly beans and each time they publish a result that says we are like we are 95 there's a 95 confidence interval that this jelly bean doesn't do anything and then they test one of them one time and then all those headlines pop up that are like this jelly bean causes cancer yeah okay yes oh yes i thought you're gonna say the jelly bean moved on its own i don't know what the actual effect was but the joke that i'm butchering is like if if you have a p value of 0.05 you do it 20 times and expecting random variation you'll get a result that seems significant one of the one of the 20 times you got lucky is that was a very long-winded way of saying you got lucky yeah it's a very long way of saying you got lucky okay yes but okay i got in

by sheer luck i mean that's what the question asker said so it's reasonable i'm yeah that's true i did just waste a lot of words i like the way you said it though i don't believe you because i don't think i said it well but i am going to focus on one thing here i'm starting to feel incredibly depressed and i wonder if that's actually more of the cause than the fact that you don't feel like you belong like maybe maybe that's a symptom of you just feeling really crappy and depressed in general and this is where our our space psychology does not help in this situation unfortunately but feeling incredibly depressed no matter what the cause is you could benefit from talking to somebody maybe but not your manager is maybe not no well what

i'm saying is if you're feeling incredibly depressed you've identified you think it's because you're this imposter who doesn't belong at work it's possible you are feeling incredibly depressed because of mental health issues and you could talk to a psychologist and get some help with that that wouldn't require giving up this what seems like a pretty good setup overall yeah Yeah. You know, it's remarkable how easy it is for, I guess, any employee, but maybe especially software engineers, to conclude that they are doing a bad job. And let me just give you a great example. I recently spent some time with a very longtime friend of mine. We've worked at three companies together, and he is just an amazing, excellent engineer. And we worked together

at our second company more than 10 years ago and he came in joined the team and in our engineering department we had four or five engineering teams and he would he would show up and work and do such a good job that our the head of our engineering department would see this amazing work and then would be like hey you know this person's been on this team for a year they did so good i'm going to move them to another team and just have this person like pollinate every team you know i'm going to move them over there and just say look yeah do all the good things that you did on this last team here for this other team and yeah and then and then the next year he got invited as the for the first time ever an engineer got invited to our annual sales team like resort vacation

thing that you have to earn through hitting just amazing sales targets but they said this guy's so good that we're going to invite him to this annual retreat with a plus one all expenses paid for a week yeah it was amazing so this all went down over 10 years ago and just this weekend i was chatting with him and he said you know dave during that time i kept getting moved around from team to team and i thought it was because i was doing a bad job it's like i thought oh my gosh and he goes you know i think back on that now and i realize in hindsight that i was doing such a good job that the company was rewarding me and having me exert more influence on more teams but at the time it sure felt like punishment and i just thought if you can interpret that as

punishment then i can't imagine i don't know i just if anyone's possible of perceiving anything yeah i constantly feel like i don't do a good job i think your own feelings are important because they affect a lot of your life, but they don't determine whether you're doing a good job or not. The main thing that your feelings determine is what you feel. Yeah, exactly. And you feel crappy. Yeah.

But there's a lot you can do to get a different viewpoint of whether the company thinks you're doing a good job or not. you you don't owe it it feels like you have this unspoken assumption that you owe your company what feels to you like an excellent job and i think there's some admirable stuff about that it means i don't know you you want to work hard and do do well but i don't think they care that much about how you feel about how you're doing i think they care about how you're actually doing yeah exactly that's right yeah so if you feel like you're doing a bad job you're sort of like saying well i'll fall on my sword i'll quit because i don't deserve to be here uh-huh feeling like

you're doing a really bad job isn't great but it doesn't feel good quitting yeah it feels it feels crappy yeah but falling on your sword could be worse like maybe they're really happy with what you're doing and this is just a perspective that you have yeah so you can probe at this and see how you are doing or how other people think you are doing, you've been there two years. I mean, you've been there for two hard years also, where a lot of big tech companies have laid off a lot of people. And presumably, I know it's not perfect, but if someone were very obviously doing a really bad job, it's a lot harder to get by over the past couple of years than maybe you could a few years ago. Yeah. If you survived the last two years without getting laid off at a big tech

company i would say that's a really strong signal that you're doing pretty good yeah but if your brain is convinced you're doing a bad job that will not help um you won't you don't think it'll help convince your brain you're doing a good job like i don't think so i i think you need feedback from your peers okay and maybe you maybe you're getting it maybe it's not in the question and maybe you feel like you're doing a bad job because they'll tell you hey you're doing a really poor job but what i suspect is happening is maybe maybe you have done a poor job at some things right and you just have latched on to that thing of like you screwed up this thing listen you definitely have you've definitely done a bad job at one point at least not because of any not not

because of anything i read in the question but because i presume you are a human being who wrote this question and not a computer, which means you have messed up something. Yeah. And I think you're right when you ask at the end of the question, if I leave, would I just repeat the cycle again at a new job and company? And I think probably given what I see here, you need to develop the skill of accurately assessing how you are doing. Yes. And not just how you are feeling. Yeah. Yeah. If you don't have that and you go to your next job, you'll have a honeymoon. You'll feel great because you'll be in this exciting new environment. And then it might just creep back in. And if you don't have the ability to dig in and say, how do I collect more information

about how I'm actually doing so that I can fix it or determine like there's no fixing it and I got to go somewhere else. Exactly. And I think you might end up in the same cycle. Here's a little metaphor that I think everyone should probably understand as a software engineering audience. Let's say that you're using the product that you develop at work and you're playing around with it and you realize it's got this little bug and you're like, hmm, I see this bug. Is it just me or is this bug widespread?

Well, what do you do? You go to logs, you go to analytics, you go to custom metrics and you try to figure out how objectively real and objectively impactful this bug is. In other words, you look for other sources of information besides just your own individual experience to confirm or to reject the hypothesis

this, that this is an important thing that needs to be fixed. And that's exactly the situation you find yourself in. Now, you have these feelings that are that are so real, that they're actually causing you to have psychological distress. You the question asker use the term incredibly depressed. And so this is like a very real data point. But what you don't know is if it's actually corroborated by reality. And so I would, I'm basically I'm just going to say exactly what you said, Jameson, I would go to my manager and I would ask, listen, hey, I want to do a great job at this company. I love this team. I love working here. I want to be successful. I want the company to be successful. I'm a little concerned. I love my commute. I love my commute. Yes.

Listen, the parking lot's kind of huge, but we can look past that. I have a little bit of a concern that I'm not performing well enough. Can you help me understand that. Because listen, you're either going to find out one way or the other. You're either going to find out by getting fired someday or by some other kind of horrible experience, or you can ask and find out now and do something about it. And the answer may very well come back, yeah, you're not doing a good job. But the fact whether you're doing a good job or not doesn't change when your manager tells you. The only thing that changes is that you're aware of it now. So there's only two outcomes that are kind of well there's three outcomes that i've seen come out of these kinds

of discussions the the one outcome is the manager corroborates your concern which is yes you're doing a bad job and then you can work on it great the other outcome is the manager rejects your concern and says no you're actually doing a great job and you walk away happy and hopefully you can start to work you know have your feelings improved but there's a third outcome that has two sub branches that are kind of bad the on the one hand the manager will be like i don't know let me get back to you. And then you're like, oh crap. Or I just don't know. And I'm not really going to tell you anything concrete or they dance around the question. The other option is that the manager tells you you're doing a good job, but you don't believe your manager because you don't believe

that your manager has enough direct observability of what you're doing to actually have an informed opinion. And I've been in that situation before where the manager's like, you're doing great. And then I walk away still feeling like things might be bad. And my manager just doesn't know. And my manager is one conversation away from thinking I do bad because they hear something from one of my co-workers yeah so are you saying gather more information talk to your co-workers about that like what do you do if you're in that state i don't know it's always a little weird to go to your co-workers and say how am i performing but it's worth it but you have to ask them more specific questions you can't just say i feel incredibly depressed because i'm underperforming

do you think i'm underperforming instead you have to ask some very specific questions and what's the name of that wonderful the the wizard zines comic author oh julia evans i think yes julia evans has some great ideas on questions you can ask your co-workers to get actual feedback instead of just like hey no everything's great it's got a list of specific questions you can ask in one of those zines i can't remember which one but you can buy all 14 it looks like for a good bargain price so just maybe just go buy all of them i don't know and then read them all we can find it and link to it maybe yeah maybe yeah get more specific questions are much easier to answer i mean if you flip it around and imagine your co-worker saying hey how am i doing

your answer is going to be fine yeah yes good because you're not going to go you're not going to say ah i've spent hours preparing for this question have detailed feedback yes i have a list i've just been waiting for you to ask yeah yeah i think i think you need to dig into this more and and understand how you're doing and i feel like i am i feel like i don't belong is a crappy feeling it's also not very actionable you don't owe it to the company to quit because you feel like you don't belong if you're not happy there you don't have to stay but if you're not happy because you think they're unhappy with you you can find that out and you can also decide you know what i want to work on some of this stuff and try and make it

better. Yeah. Well, have we answered the question? I think so. Good luck. Go get more information and learn what the reality is. Trust your feelings to tell you how you feel. Do not trust them to tell you what reality is. So wise. Do you want to read our next question? Sure thing. This comes from an anonymous listener who says, I'm one year into my first job at a megacorp post-graduation. Due to high turnover, I've ended up taking on tasks that would have originally gone to more experienced developers. I've grown and received positive feedback from my manager and skip manager who have both mentioned potential for promotion. However, in my one-on-ones, I've expressed that I'm not looking for a promotion yet because I want to solidify my current role and improve my

work-life balance. I still have many coding fundamentals to develop and I've been stressed and working long hours to take on these responsibilities. I'm now worried that my honesty might have affected my chances of being promoted and that I might be seen as someone not interested in progressing, which is probably frowned upon in big tech. How should I navigate the situation? Is it okay that I've been candid or should I reconsider my stance on promotion? Thanks. Hmm. Hmm. You're into first job. Yeah. If trying to gather my thoughts here, I think it is understandable that you are stressed and feeling overwhelmed in your first year at a mega corp as your first job post-graduation, especially if you've taken on a bunch of work

that would have gone to other people like, yeah, that sounds stressful. And I can understand the concern that if I, I think if I get promoted, I will be more stressed because there'll be even higher expectations of me. Yeah. That might not be true. I don't think, yeah. I don't think that is what would happen. I feel like, I think you're right that especially early career, there's sort of this expectation that you, you, if you're bright and capable, you kind of move up quickly i also think that the the the the perception people have of you is different if you're promoted so right now you're kind of running around juggling a bunch of stuff i think if you are promoted you might have a little bit more cred to push back on things and say hey i'm actually not

going to do this because it's like your opinion matters more not just your output and you get to say hey i think it's more important that i spend my time doing this thing instead of this other thing. And so I don't think it means automatically you'll just have to pick up even more and be even more stressed out. You might feel more pressure and more sense of ownership at a higher level, but you might not have as high of a workload necessarily. Yeah. I mean, ideally you are identifying things that are more important for you to spend your time on. Right. But it's kind of the same amount of time or maybe even less as you become more efficient what about the coding skill coding fundamentals i mean you're in the first job first promotion i still think it depends

heavily company to company but expert wizard level sorceress coder i don't think i don't think getting promoted once means you have no nothing left to learn about just the the low level like writing of code stuff i think that kind of never stops for you have arrived but level two yeah final level yeah yeah i mean are you worried that i could see it being embarrassing to admit hey i don't know what this thing i don't i've never seen this pattern before monads what even are those but and then someone looks at your title and is astonished and aghast yeah what a level two engineer and they've never even heard of monads but i still think one promotion up is not i think you have a lot of room to learn stuff in public still without it seeming weird yeah for sure

especially for your second levels it's basically first level out of college or whatever you did before megacorp second level still plenty of plenty of room for generosity and charity in not knowing everything yeah i observed the dynamic at the megacorp i worked at where which i'm i just have to assume is not the same megacorp that this person worked at but there might be some relevant details here and the reason i assume it is because what i'm about to say which is at my megacorp it was explicitly stated by the highest levels of leadership that the level one engineering level was not a terminal level. And they had a phrase, up or out, which meant you will either be promoted to the next level, or you will be let go, because it is expected that you move to that next level.

And I even had a very senior engineer explain to me the economics, or at least as he perceived them, the economics of that, which is that at your first level, you are actually a net expense to the company. And that it's not until your second level where you've demonstrated much more valuable skills that you become a net positive like a value producer for the company and so that was that was kind of the economic foundation for why they did that but nevertheless they did it and then they did say yeah you can settle in at that second level and they used the term terminal level is what they called that and they were fine with that they were like you could which sounds very intimidating right that's like a scary it's a scary sounding phrase for what

actually is like safety right it sounds like you're going to be terminated there i don't think that one ran through the PR department. Anyway, what I found though, was that even though they stated that that second level was a terminal level, it wasn't. They expected you to keep promoting and keep promoting multiple levels up, maybe four or five levels up, still keep promoting. And if you don't, I really strongly got the vibe that you were considered a, not a team player and not ambitious and not part of a growing company and high tech, this and that, and we're world class and anyway and i got that pressure a lot and you know i had i had nearly 20 years of experience when i joined my mega corp no actually it was way off 13 years of experience at that time

and i got tons of pressure to to go for promotion it was almost the only topic my manager ever wanted to talk about with me was my own promotion so really yeah it was almost every week and i just honestly it was exhausting i got tired of it and the process you know it's for a lot of reasons it burned me out because on the one hand i was perfectly happy to go for a promotion on the other hand like so many mega mega corps the promotions were heavily influenced by the opportunities you happen to have and if you didn't have them you kind of had to i don't know kind of force them to exist and that just created awkwardness and pain so yeah it's i i know that vibe you're talking about of like you're kind of just happy working and if you're trying to get promoted you

You have to push a lot and it can be uncomfortable, especially because there's all these factors outside of your control and you're exposing yourself to potential pain and disappointment by pushing really hard and then nothing happens. Yeah. Exactly. But at a level one, I really don't think these concerns are worthy concerns. They don't justify not getting promoted. But moving to that second level at almost any tech company I'm aware of, any of the

mega tech companies, is really nothing but a net positive. I mean, yeah, there's a little more expectation that you do better work, but there's not enough more expectation that you work more hours per se, and you will get better at this job over time. I want to zoom in on the hours thing. I feel like that's a thing you could just talk about right now, separate from promotion. You are worried about work-life balance and stress, and I think you can bring this subject up in a way that doesn't come across as, hey, I would like to work less and do less for the

company, which I could see maybe being a little bit concerning if you're thinking about promotion and you don't want to come across as going the wrong direction. But I don't think your manager would like you to be stressed and overwhelmed. You probably won't be doing your best work in that state yeah and so i i would try to work on fixing that separate from the promotion discussion even or even just like now in your current level because it's it's not a healthy long-term state to be in i've i've been there usually self-imposed sometimes external pressure but it's not happy my life has not been happy when i've done that yep hmm have we answered the question i think so i say go for the promotion your work-life balance will sort it out in fact

you'll have more influence and power or more control over your work-life balance i think the more you get promoted and i think it'll be fine and you'll have more money to be able to have a better more to spend on interesting things to do in the life side of the work work-life balance you can buy a house even closer in the parking lot yeah imagine shorten that commute even more you know that three miles away yeah that house you've been passing halfway to work every day that could be you yeah that that underground bunker in the middle of the parking complex yeah you could live there no longer will you just yeah you won't have to look enviously ah if only i could live in a windowless concrete dungeon that could be yours

then you can learn the true meaning of life which is acquiring more stuff climbing a ladder that has infinite rungs yeah well i think that means we've answered the question i think so what can people do if they want their own questions answered if you want your own question answered go to softskills.audio and click the support us on patreon button no that's not the button man i said the wrong button you can click that one too but it won't get you a question answered it'll get something read online i mean listen if you put a question in the patreon name field we may or may not weigh that yeah we'll answer it you've got some skin in the game i guess yeah yeah for sure but if you want your question really answered go to soft

skills audio and click the ask a question button where you can fill out our form this is the part of the show where we do the non-obligatory from the heart thank you to everyone who fills those out every week we love reading your questions and we really appreciate you writing them in you guys keep the show going so thank you thank you we do appreciate it thank you so much all right we will catch you next week you