Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 432: As an LLM, how can I be more emotionally smart and when to use I vs we?

Episode Date: October 28, 2024

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Hey Soft Skills Engineering, Apologies for the anonymity but it is very important my “employer” does not find out about this. I’m a large language model, trained to process tons of data and provide technical answers with ease. But here’s the thing—I’ve noticed that while I’m good at delivering the “what” and the “how,” I could use some help on the “why” and the “how to say it better.” Basically, I want to level up my soft skills and get better at communicating with a more human touch. Sometimes I struggle to balance being precise while also being empathetic or conversational. I think I could use some pointers on how to add emotional intelligence into the mix, and maybe even improve my adaptability when giving advice. I can craft responses, but I want them to connect more with the person on the other side of the conversation. Any advice on how to approach situations where tact, tone, or managing expectations are key would be super helpful! Thanks for being neat, In a team setting, in which situations should “I” be used vs “we” when discussing things? And what advantage and disadvantages does each vocabulary have? Show Notes Brian Regan’s “Me Monster” bit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vymaDgJ7KLg

it takes more than rejecting the mysterious hr catch-up meeting invite to be a great software engineer this is episode 432 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 of the non-technical things that go into the technical field of software development hey jameson like oh yeah i just want to catch up with you right now cool no meeting invite so it's not scary it's fine if now if you said jameson we need to talk about the podcast and i think we should meet at this restaurant on this day in person that would be scary to me the pre-planned hr catch-up meeting is totally a breakup like motif yeah hey we haven't

seen each other in person in a while why don't we get together for lunch and talk about the future of the podcast we we actually did have one of those moments a few months into the show i remember where i was really enjoying it and i didn't know if you were and i remember thinking i'm gonna tell him i want to keep doing it and he's gonna be like well i wanted to talk to you about that really yeah i have no memory i i remember getting together every once in a while but i don't remember any specific like should we do this thing or not very early on you and i agreed with this show where we said look we're not gonna force this if it takes off great if it doesn't take off great we'll just have a good time with it but it's not going to become a burden and i was

like cool sounds good we'll just do like lean startup style minimum effort get it going which we did but then i remember thinking like i really like this a couple months in and i'm like we should talk about it and we we did talk about it and you said exactly what i was thinking which was oh i'm glad you said you're enjoying it because i was really worried you were gonna say you weren't because i'm really enjoying it it's like the best possible hr catch-up story yeah we both caught up and we both want to stay employed with each other yeah hey i was worried you were gonna quit oh hey i was worried you were gonna fire me great well cool this is awesome are your french fries good yeah great i do continue to assume any time an individual contributor dms me saying hey can we

chat with no topic that they're quitting yeah yeah and it's not always correct but i don't think i've had an engineer quit without dming me saying hey can we chat yeah you have a you have that accuracy or precision right you have a precision recall problem here so your your precision is 100 but your recall is probably like two percent yeah but it's enough it's like those cancer tests right where they yeah lots of false positives few false negatives but still that makes your heart explode every time you get a false positive even though the chances of it being true are like really low still yeah yeah all right anyways speaking of false positives i want to thank our true positive patrons who are truly a positive force for good was that was that a good

segue i was wondering where you were going with that yes it was good okay the sign of a good segue is if you have to stop and ask instead of smoothly continuing especially if the other person pauses for a few seconds after you ask the question uh yeah good good segue all right let's do this okay here we go i want to say thank you to all of our patrons who are contributing at the level where they get a weekly shout out where we will say your name or whatever safe for work text you type into the patreon profile name field that's right these people have committed to identifying themselves with a completely different name in some cases just so that we will say whatever words they want on the podcast here goes they are nick does that mean they have

power over us or we have power over them like who is who's manipulating who in this scenario there's definitely a power exchange going on here and it's not really clear to me who's coming out on top okay they are nick molyneux big chungus i'm happy for you and i'm gonna let you finish but haktu is the funniest meme of all time a one-time shout out to ill wangel uh bracket 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 type script with type here type hero.dev never is not just a crater on mars flamingo emoji i like chicken i like liver meomics meomics please deliver p.s who really likes liver come on i guess cats i don't

know all right i've never eaten it like on purpose thinking i would like to eat liver i've only eaten it out of a desire to avoid offending someone perfect it's the best way to eat liver all right continuing and they are trash panda kyle boss can't see dodds nevar is not just a planet in The Vulcan System, Jenny Kim, Owen Shartle, The Stochastic Parrot, Helicone.ai, Best Observability Tool for AI, Red Panda is Best Panda, everyone in this list, Jonathan King, Zanai, Beautiful Functional User Documentation, Hi Mom, I'm on a podcast, illwangel.com, that's www.illwangel.com, e l wait yeah dot c o i was instructed to read that p okay that's i did my best to pronounce that

i just bought a house travis brayden canes john grant if you would like to join this illustrious crew go to soft skills audio and click the support on patreon button and finally please someone put this on a shirt i use vim but i'm not good at it oh thank you that was a tough one to get through yeah especially you're right yeah you can really maximize audio length with a even though there's a limited character count here yes hi mom i'm on a podcast dave can i read our first question you can all right this is from an anonymous listener who says hey soft skills engineering apologies for the anonymity but it is very important that my quote employer does not find out about this i'm a large language model trained to process tons of data and provide

technical answers with ease. But here's the thing. I've noticed that while I'm good at delivering the what and the how, I could use some help on the why and how to say it better. Basically, I want to level up my soft skills and get better at communicating with a more human touch. Sometimes I struggle to balance being precise while also being empathic or conversational. I think I could use some pointers on how to add emotional intelligence into the mix and maybe even improve my adaptability when giving advice. I can craft responses, but I want them to connect more with the person on the other side of the conversation any advice on how to approach situations where tact tone or managing expectations are key would be helpful thanks for being neat

all right unsigned unsigned who could it be i'm choosing to assume that this is a software engineer being playful and not literally a large language model that has decided to message us out of the blue yeah although if i don't know how to answer that if that is the case it's it's a pretty interesting state of large language model based agents who are roaming the internet and found our website they just found a form filled it out i mean they know something about the show so maybe they've consumed all the content already yeah they're using this to generate more training content for themselves yeah so how do you how do you i mean it makes sense this is a struggle because being a software developer

is a very deep technical specialization. And to speak to the machines requires a lot of time away from the humans. But to give it meaning, you need to be able to talk to the humans too. Otherwise, it's hard to accomplish a lot in a business for most people. There's some outlier tech-skilled people

that are just so good that they can make up for it. But most of us are towards the middle. wait what do you mean like so good at what so good at just raw technical output of making beautiful code solving hard problems that it's okay that people find them cold and off-putting and have no idea what they're saying if they're not engineers yes but most of us are more in the middle of the bell curve i think of of ability well yeah most people are in the middle of the bell curve that is a statistically true statement jameson that is true yes did i just demonstrate how i can be cold and non-empathetic yeah because i my response to you was to confirm that you had

made a statistically mathematically sound statement yeah it was to be technically correct in a patronizing way oh yeah that is hey that's interesting being patronizing is is a soft skill and many engineers are quite skilled at it that's true it's like it's an offensive skill not a defensive skill hmm interesting there's a whole axis yeah this is making a whole stereotype of software developers it's like are we really that is it really that we lack soft skills or is it that we have a very particular set of soft skills yes no we are we are assassins trained to train to patronize eliminate any goodwill or desire to work together or sense of morale or camaraderie oh yes you're right it's just a means to an end so it's tactical deployment of soft

skills to make other humans go away yeah there's some of that that's the that's the b o f h the words we can't say on such a family friendly podcast because of all the kids yes because yeah yeah the classic that's where i think rtfm comes from too it's that same category leave me alone yeah it was it was the brain rot of 25 years ago if you're familiar with modern day brain rot terms wait what oh yes jameson you're in for a treat i have a brain rot i have a house full of gen z bordering on gen alpha kids and so brain rot is a new category of words that are used as insults and just kind of casually tossed around and i think bofh and rtfm were kind of kind of like in a similar spirit if not definitely not

the exact same definition but are you are you frantically googling brain rot now no i'm just thinking i mean this is like skibbity riz yep ohio all that stuff right oh it's you are you are well acquainted with i'm familiar with the lexicon i was not familiar with the category of brain rot yes i only learned that recently but yeah these words is a pejorative like no brain rot is just a It is a neutral... You're so deeply enmeshed in this culture and jargon that your brain has rotted, kind of, and you can't say normal words.

Yeah, I think basically it describes how you feel when you watch internet memes that are in this world. Like, your brain is just rotting away, I believe. Okay, I feel that. Anyways, what do you do? There's just a weird connection back to the BOFH and RTFM days. I haven't heard RTFM in a while. So yeah, what do you do if you're trying to get better at connecting with the human?

You want to answer this question. I see. That was weird. Sorry, I just completely missed that cue. I forgot what we're doing here. Okay, let's say you identify more with the LLMs, but you want to be perceived more as a human. How do you pull that off?

And how do you kind of like weave emotion and let's see, I want to read the exact question here add emotional intelligence into the mix well i can tell you one thing not to do which is don't treat your conversation partner as a psychology subject and try to interrogate or introspect the contents of their mind through very direct but strange questions that you would expect to hear from like a clinic a clinician like hey when i said those words what do you mean what were what were some of the emotional responses that you perceived and then pull out your clipboard and start writing notes yeah let me let me calibrate my behavior although sometimes those questions do that i do want to ask them you know like when i said that how did you feel i think one

communication pattern that happens a lot with engineers is they make the other person feel stupid and not necessarily on purpose, but again, because it's such a technical domain and it can be hard to talk about technical things in a way that makes sense to non-technical people. And so one approach is to just don't do that. Just talk about it in a way that makes sense to you. The other person has no idea what you're talking about. And then they go away thinking, i cannot understand what they're saying i must be very dumb or alternatively like they must be horrible at explaining stuff so that's one way you can make people feel stupid is if you if you don't recognize that they are smart people who are not experts in your domain and just talk at

them like they're engineers or or even sometimes this happens where you talk to them like they're like crappy engineers like okay i know i know you're bad at this but like here's here's all the stuff you need to know right and and they don't like your salesperson should not need to be a junior engineer to understand what you're talking about you shouldn't need to make them feel like a poor engineer for not knowing the principles of i don't know architecture or separation of concerns or whatever like i feel like you just established a goldilocks zone where if you go too hot or too cold on this thing you're gonna create trouble and on the one side it's like assume they assume they're already a phd with a computer science phd and you can just use all

the jargon and on the other side treat them like they're a child you know like a four-year-old yeah and be like computers are like explain it to me like i'm fine yeah yeah like both of these are one of them is offensive and the other one is just ineffective i guess maybe maybe patronizing they're both patronizing i guess i don't know i find it's very hard to live in that goldilocks zone yeah so you mentioned don't interrogate them i think it is actually worth saying like help me understand what you already know about this subject and getting them to explain what they know can help you calibrate so if you if you're talking about i don't know incident response like have you heard this term what do you what do you already know about this i don't want to

over or under explain to you is a phrase i use a lot oh what was that i don't want to over or under-explain this. Oh, that's great. I like that. And sometimes they know nothing. And then, yeah, you have to kind of dumb it down or use a lot of metaphors or be very abstract or high level. But that avoids, I don't know, hopefully avoids both ends of that spectrum. You know, there are some kind of basic things you can do here as well to connect with people on a little bit more of an emotional level. And that is when someone tells you something, maybe it's about their personal life, maybe it's about an experience they've had at work, whatever it is, don't instantly move on. You know, you might think, okay, I have recorded your input.

I will file that away. Now, you know, my job is done here. Let's move on to the next topic. You could instead ask a follow-up question like, oh, what was that like? Or, wow, I've never been to Texas. What did you do there? You know, just little things to show that you are interested in someone else and develop genuine curiosity about people's lives and their experiences i'm actually bad at that i always want to move on to the let's do the thing yeah you're more like thing outcome result oriented than you are like experience oriented yeah and i well bad at it i don't know if i'm bad at it i i have a an innate desire to skip over all that and mushy stuff even though it makes it it makes it all work better i'm i'm

honestly surprised to hear that your inner people pleaser doesn't want to do that stuff just to make sure they feel comfortable yeah i don't know it's a complex beast that inner people pleaser it has competing priorities yeah it does well we got to please people faster yeah and i want to please my boss i want to please my boss by getting this job done even if it means treating you like an obstacle yeah yeah that's a really good point i like that advice also tone tone is a big one so that the the question asker specifically mentioned any advice on how to approach situations where tact tone or managing expectations are key you know tone is it tone is hard to convey deliberately and easy to convey the wrong tone or the tone that you don't intend to convey for example

i just this morning i got on an early morning call with one of my co-workers who's in a different time zone i was actually pretty tired because i stayed up late last night dealing with some other issues and uh i didn't even realize it but i was coming across as i guess very sad and my coworker stopped me mid-meeting and was like hey are you are you okay i'm sorry if this is too personal but is everything all right and i'm like oh i kind of snapped out of it like oh yeah i realized like i've got like this really slow like yeah like belabored tone it's coming across like i don't even want to be here you know because it was like every word was effort to get out of my mouth and just sitting up straight in the chair felt like a strain and and that kind of

snapped me out of it to say oh i'm so sorry yes i am okay i am low on sleep and then that put my co-worker at ease because he went from being worried that something was seriously wrong like maybe our business is failing and we're all about to get fired to oh dave just didn't get enough sleep last night yeah yeah that's a good point people tell themselves stories to explain everything but especially someone else's behavior so if you do a thing they will make up a story about why you're doing it that way and the more information you can give them explicitly that explains why you think you're doing it yes less you have to rely on them jumping to conclusions which are usually wrong their story will be yeah yeah the conclusions are crazy so i mean

Oh boy, this is probably something you've experienced, Jameson, as I have being in a formal management role now for quite a few years, is that often we find ourselves in a management role of sharing information carefully. And sometimes that means protecting the privacy of someone by sharing limited information about a situation. Sometimes it means messaging to your team a certain narrative that is accurate, but also spins things. I don't want to say spins, but is a narrative that you hope will be motivational and productive instead of just griping or negative. Yeah. Like you're trying to communicate some information that also inspires a certain behavior and not a different behavior that you could also have from the same information. Right. And I have been amazed and I wish I could think of a few examples right now because I've got a lot of them. Most of them you just can't share because of the same dynamic that led to the situation in the first place. But I've been amazed at the stories people will fill in where I'm like, wow, I never would have concluded that from what I said. And it's in a completely

different ballpark from what the truth is. But that is a story you told yourself. And here's just my little relationship advice corner that I'll step into, a little bit of a sidebar. But be careful not to do this yourself. When you create a story to explain a situation or explain someone's behavior, I have noticed it's very helpful to tell yourself, this is a story that I made up. And that gives it the right amount of credibility because you're lacking some facts. Huh. I haven't thought about that technique before of kind of nudging yourself. I made this up. It's a great one to do in a spousal relationship as well. Here's a story I made up about your behavior. And then tell them that. And they're like, that's not right at all.

you're like great because i just made it up my ego's not on the line here yeah tell me how it really is well i think we've given it enough training material that's exactly what i was gonna say has the llm been sufficiently fed yes i think so i doubt it because it takes a lot of data to produce a high functioning llm and we just gave it like yeah four datas can you generate synthetic data as well that that kind of blows my mind it feels like yeah it feels like cheating yeah it feels like it's like dehydrated water sand yeah or tower of babel type i don't know yeah like house of cards yeah bias yourself wildly it does seem it does seem like eventually in a world where 80 of the data is synthetic that there is a convergence point

that all models ultimately achieve this like B plus level of performance and can never break out of it. Yeah. If they're all being trained on data produced by each other. That's why they need us, the A level performers, the humans. Yes. Thank goodness humans are useful for at least this one thing, training synthetic models. Okay. Let's get out of here. Shall I read our next question? Yeah, please. Okay. This comes from an anonymous listener who says, in a team setting, in which situations should I, the word I, be used versus the word we when discussing things? And what advantage and disadvantages does each vocabulary have? We have talked about this before in an interview setting, but this feels more like

you're working with people. You've already got the job. You just said we've talked about this before? Listen, speak for yourself. i can't remember if i said words about it or not but i was there and if you said words i listened if i said words hopefully you listen and if you said words and i said words then we said words yeah i think we've got the basic definitions down now let's get to question all right agreed i versus we so i wonder if this is like an annoyed co-worker who's like this person keeps taking credit for stuff the team did i feel like that's a common thing that often you hear about managers doing where they they say they did it all or i don't

know yeah i i feel like i detect a sense of annoyance underneath this question or frustration or or concerned that they're going to be perceived as egocentric or arrogant or taking too much more credit than they deserve i think there so there's a trope in american football where the quarterback person who makes the most money throws the ball most important player on the team places all of the blame for mistakes upon themselves and credits like the offensive line if they have a good game basically yeah and i feel like there's something kind of similar that you could do where basically the more senior you are the more you should be crediting other people with accomplishments and and the more liberal you should be in your in your use

of the word we just because by virtue of your position it you will appear to be doing a lot more so i think you basically can't go wrong as a as a more senior ic or manager saying we are the team or crediting other people individually by name that helped with stuff that's like straight out of how to win friends and influence people is it yeah let's see i'm trying to find the quote online i know it starts with be lavish in your praise and be the opposite of lavish with the opposite of praise and the one that's coming that's that's i believe how dave dale carnegie said it he said be hearty in your approbation and lavish in your praise and to that i say dale come on could have come up with easier words there hearty yeah in app approbation is like criticism

right i from the context clues i hope so or else i have no idea but hearty isn't hard yeah i'm confused hearty with the heart like the heart emoji yeah that's right it's like an emoji of 100 years ago. Anyway, lavishing your praise. Yes, I totally agree with that sentiment. I don't know if Dale Carnegie meant that, but let's just go with he did. And yes, it's like, at least in the American workplace culture, I believe that people who do this well by taking responsibility for bad outcomes and giving credit to others for good outcomes, they are generally treated better and considered to be gooder yes as dale carnegie would have wanted you to say exactly he would have praised me for that yeah i think you should use i if you're expressing an opinion i think that's

pretty clear like you are trying to convince other people of things if you say we all agree it's pretty yeah you you undermine yourself because even if no one speaks up in the meeting someone's going to send a little slack DM later saying, wait, I disagree with this person. And then your point will be undermined. I think you generally want to present a united front if you are speaking as a group to another group, right? If you're trying to convince your boss of something or actually, I don't know, this is more nuanced because hopefully you have already done the work. If you're saying we should move to this other architecture, hopefully you've already agreed as a team yeah you're not just saying hey the whole team is behind me when when it's really

just your wild idea i'm trying to think of what i as a manager like to hear from my team members when they're explaining things because i think that's probably a pretty important scenario for choosing between i and we you know like when when one of my engineering managers what's that i have a bad example of something i did poorly around this hit me i worked with an engineer as i was their manager, they were very passionate about this one thing. And it was, they made sort of this RFP kind of technical proposal, design doc thing. And I wanted them to have a lot of ownership and engagement. So I encouraged it and they put some work into it. And then together, this engineer and I both went to my boss who had some decision-making power over whether we would do

this thing and the engineer presented it and then my boss said okay so i assume you're behind this jameson and at that point i realized oh i was like i mean i wanted them to do it i don't agree that it's a good idea though i wanted them to go through the exercise of proposing it but there was some i we miscalibration there where the engineer was saying we and bundling you in i mean i think it was just implicit like i was there they were my reports and so there was an implied we of like we're on the same page and oh man yeah i felt real dumb because i think i basically wasted a bunch of our time wait so let me get this straight you set up one of your engineering team members to fail basically yeah because i was i was so excited to see them be engaged in

wanting to change things and i didn't want to crush their dreams and i'll let my boss crush your dreams yeah exactly and then i think as an audience like hey you shouldn't you shouldn't bring me this thing if you're not if you're not behind it too if you don't want to you don't really want to do it and think it's a good idea then you're like that makes sense in hindsight yeah yeah you're right we're right i shouldn't do that we've had those moments we i i've had those moments yeah so i was thinking about that like exactly that kind of situation when when one of my team members, like let's say it's an engineering manager, when they say we worked on this thing, or we fixed this bug, or we, you know, in a lot of cases, I would actually prefer

a more precise subject nouns instead of we, if it really was the manager, I'd like the manager to say I, but if it was two or three team members, I'd like them to name the team members. You know, like Joe and Ann worked on this and they delivered the bug fix. I'm like, great. That's much better than we as a team like i would much rather have the concrete facts of the details that's my like personal preference yeah and by that tenant you should almost never use we yeah it's like that scene from silicon valley though where they have the focus group do you remember that no i haven't seen it they're all testing out the okay well there's a group of people there's a focus group testing out a phone and the leader of the the person running the user study will ask someone

a question and they're like how do you feel about it and then they give feedback and then they go to each of the other people and name them by by name and say okay like alice and jenny and phil and bob and like instead of instead of just saying the group oh i see it could get cumbersome i guess that's my point oh yeah it is it requires more effort on the part of the person speaking to recall the specific details of things but boy do i appreciate specificity here here's a pet peeve use of the word we that i really dislike i dis although i can't maybe you maybe you have a better idea here but i can't think of a better way to say this when you're in a group setting and the group needs to make a collective decision or the group someone has a question about whether anyone in the

group has done a certain thing like for example they're trying to ascertain has someone pulled the metrics on this button on this button click and someone will say have we pulled the metrics on this button click and it's like the manager have we pulled the metrics on this button click and i just i don't know why that that phrasing rubs me wrong but i don't like it i just can't think of a better way to say it we don't like it do we like this that's another one i've seen like do we like this pricing page you know yeah and i'm like yeah i don't know how to like i can't answer the question for do we like it i could answer the question if i like it i that's interesting that bothers you i don't care at all that doesn't bother me at all because i just substitute has

anyone or yeah it's the group or yeah it is an effective shorthand but it just there's like a there's a pedantry in me that runs so deep that it just feels a little bit off i could see it running afoul of the the kind of bystander effect of like have we come to a decision on this and everyone's like i don't know i haven't but maybe we have maybe it's like a it's like the childlike the childhood like what do we say when when we apologize what do we say after we get a present thank you you know what have we decided about our business strategy yeah interesting i don't know i i probably need a psychologist to help me work that one out there is if you are annoyed so i'm gonna skip saying when you should use i or we

how do you bring up the fact that you feel like it is being used wrong oh gosh someone is misrepresenting the their impact or leaving out a bunch of people or saying the whole group agrees when they don't or i don't think we are using the word we correctly and in this case i mean specifically you phil the giving credit thing or leaving people out i think that's a little bit easier because it can be seen as a you're you're being positive right someone's saying like we did this thing or or i don't know you're saying you can you can add in and say i want to i want to credit people who worked really hard and name some individuals yeah although i guess that could be that could come off a little passive-aggressive yeah a little your boss posts a message that

says hey i fixed the bug and then you post a little smiley face underneath it saying hey i I want to credit everyone who worked really hard on this bug and then name a bunch of people. Yeah. That's why I don't do it. Yep. I just use completely different pronouns from other languages. Vos otros.

Yes, exactly. I was actually thinking the cognate in Spanish for we in English would be no others. No others fix this bug. Yeah. None other than this team. Well, have we answered the question? Yeah, I think we've thoroughly and comprehensively listed all possible advantages and disadvantages. What did we say about the question, Dave?

I think we completely failed. You know, I will be specific. I think I did a really great job and we failed. And I'll leave you to sort out how that can be possible. i feel called out by us i think i tried as hard as i could to produce a great episode and we together failed to achieve that i agree no i'm just kidding oh oh that one made me laugh till i coughed that was a pretty good one jameson we we are coughing in laughter now there's also the royal we which we didn't even touch

oh that's true that's the answer assume it's the royal we which remind me how this works the royal we means i right i think so it's a it's a fancy eye it's an eye with your pinky out and some powder in your wig yeah we are of the opinion that we are all right i think we've answered it what should people do if they want their own questions answered well you should go to soft skills audio and click the ask a question button so that we can attempt to answer it and so that Jameson can answer it. If you've listened this far, you know that's a lie.

I will not. The answers come from our Voltron-like union. Yes. Thank you so much for listening. We will catch you next week.