Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 434: Forgetful boss and nothing to say

Episode Date: November 11, 2024

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: My boss has been forgetting a lot of stuff lately — decisions from team discussions, action items from meetings, their own decisions that they then go against later, etc. They’re great overall, and this is definitely just a human thing… we’re not perfect. But how can I help them remember or remain accountable without feeling like the snitch from “Recess”? Listener Gill Bates, Hey! I started working in a big tech company recently and I feel like I am on a different planet all of a sudden. Before, I did only work in startups and small companies. I have joined as a senior developer and have a weekly 1:1 meeting with my manager, but also a biweekly 1:1 meeting with the skip level manager. The latter is where I am having problems. I don’t really know what to talk about in this meeting and fear that this is seen as disengagement. The first time I had the meeting, the skip level manager mentioned that he was sure I would have tons of questions and in reality I had none at all. I feel like, in my senior role, I must come into this meeting with good questions, but all questions I have, I am discussing with my peers or manager directly. So nothing left really for my skip level manager. I am starting to prepare fake questions, where I already know the answer to, just to seem engaged. It feels like a game. So please Dave & Jamison, tell me how to play that 1:1 skip level manager game.

it takes more than automating your job so well that your automations also write buggy code to be a great software engineer this is episode 434 of the soft skills engineering podcast i'm your host jamison 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 how do you apologize for the mistakes that you don't know that you made because you've recreated a clone of yourself using automation and the clone was so accurate that it screws up in the same way that you would screw up how do you apologize for that it's got to be some kind of automation i guess maybe the clone would also generate the apologies i think i think

the automation would make its own automation also isn't that the fear of the infinite paperclip kind of yeah grey goo ai takeover totally well happy to do my part to contribute to that good work dave do you want to thank our patrons i do we want to give a big shout out to those that are contributing at the level where they get the first one it's a one-time shout out to someone named zz it's actually lowercase z lowercase z i think just to make sure that's clear and i could i could tell from how you pronounced it you could tell by the way i said it yeah good yeah you said it lowercase no okay good i'm worried sometimes i worry that it came out the wrong way but i think i got it okay and a big thanks to those that contribute at such an in what's the

word what's a really fancy word for big exorbitant we've said yeah exorbitant is good i was gonna say prodigious but i think we've said that before this is good at such a prodigious exorbitant level that we say their names or whatever they type into the patreon name box every single week they are nick molyneux opita opita opita which by the way jameson i found out is a reference to a song a modern pop song what yeah it came on my spotify playlist old recently okay we'll catch you up later anyway the next name is attribute error none type object has no attribute to underscore string javier gonzalez chewy ted timbrel i found some cash and i'm back on the list baby become a senior engineer.com unsalted french fries are morally objectionable dan from

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patreon button and a special shout out to cody sale who has generously given a large sum in order to support the good work we do thank you co and then the message ends that was we'll never know what it would have said yeah what did cody but that's a lot of assumptions to make yeah i mean i'm not willing to make that leap thank you so much we appreciate you we feel your support i feel it every day as i bathe in my luxurious champagne pool purchased by all this uh i honestly don't know what i love more the the money or the just amazing comedy that comes through the patreon names okay i love the second one i was gonna go with money but not enough okay i can immediately hear people say well then why don't you just change the price on patreon so it's cheaper

and i think that means i actually love the money more because i'm not gonna do that sometimes your actions speak louder than your words jameson yeah yeah my revealed preferences the money or yeah okay all right i've been you got me thank you thank you everyone and by the way this does go to support the show we have editing costs server hosting costs and of course jameson's champagne bathtub that has to be refilled every day and he only likes a certain vintage to bathe in so you know it's expensive cleaning fees on that are what really gets you because i think it's sticky i actually have never touched i don't know what champagne is besides expensive you're not all right you've never had anything worth celebrating or felt to crack open a bottle

yeah i better read our first question yes this is from an anonymous listener who says my boss has been forgetting a lot of stuff lately decisions from team discussions action items from meetings their own decisions that they then go against later etc they're great overall and this is definitely just a human thing we're not perfect but how can i help them remember or remain accountable without feeling like the snitch from recess oh what's the snitch from why is recess in air quotes isn't that randall that was a tv show randall weems recess wiki yeah i think that was recess so recess was a cartoon yeah i think you were probably a bit too old for it it was like right around this person is probably my age because this was on

tv when i was a kid okay it was good so i missed it by about 30 or 40 years i i've learned new things about you just now the whole time you've been a fraud passing yourself off as a youthful hello fellow 40 40 something instead of an ancient 70 something you did a good job you had me fooled yeah i'm very youthful looking i mean i i knew the pop song references that you didn't know today so yeah yeah that's true that's like okay you know how you can i don't know harvest the blood and adrenochrome from young people and obviously inject it into yourself and then maintain your vampire-like immortality yeah i think you could do the same by keeping up on tiktok references yeah it's actually the fountain of youth is tiktok yeah it makes you younger

which is why i spend all my time doing it all right answering this question okay how can i help them remember remain accountable without i already forgot the questions i decided to never remind you what the question is but i have then forgot it so i'm going to remind you what it was. Yeah. So I identify with the boss in this situation because I am very forgetful and I will sometimes be consistent enough that if I end up in the situation where I try to make a decision and I forgot I already made it, I'll make the same decision, but not always. Sometimes, I don't know, the weather's different and that how delicious the pancakes were that i ate this morning affects it so sometimes i come to a different conclusion

that seems bad but i really appreciate it when someone says hey remember when we talked about this already and i'm i think aware of my faults in this regard so i don't get bothered by it the last time i said that to you you said how dare you insinuate that i'm a forgetful old man i forgot that i did that so it's a great way to live if your boss is great overall yeah unburdened by the past if your boss is great overall i i do feel like they wouldn't be too mad if you just said hey it's written down right here here are the action items yeah you don't have to say hey i've noticed a decline in your cognitive ability that makes me doubt your capabilities as a boss you can just say oh yeah remember when we talked about this yeah you could actually ratify

your company's constitution to introduce a 14th amendment like clause that allows you to depose your boss if they forget enough stuff sorry you forgot too many action items you've been deposed yeah i'm assuming that these things have been written down and that might not be true so an easy thing you could do if that's not happening is make sure this stuff gets written down if you make decisions in team discussions write it down in an agenda if you have it or if you don't throw it in slack or teams or discord or whatever you're using for your company write down action items make them tickets in your task tracking software i do this as a survival mechanism because otherwise i will 100 forget and then i still forget but then i am reminded of it later when i go back and

read the thing or someone says, like nudges me on it or whatever. So that makes it easier to be consistent. I have also developed a almost, almost unhealthy compulsion for writing down everything. I make a lot of notes. This is actually a technique I picked up at a big tech company because there was just so much information that I just, I couldn't stand the fact. Actually, you know what it was? It wasn't that there was so much information. It's that correct information was so hard to get. So hard. And so once I got it, I wrote it down like a treasure chest because I just couldn't stand the fact, the idea of like spending two more weeks to hunt down that person whose calendar I- You knew how much you suffered.

Yes. I mean, I'm like, oh, I finally found the person. That took me a week. Then it took me a week and a half to get on their calendar. Then I got on their calendar and now I will record this whole conversation audio and write the whole thing down in my note taking app. So I developed that and I've never let it go. And frankly, I've probably only referenced about less than 1% of the stuff I've written. But boy, I tell you what, when you find that 1%, it's like Christmas morning. Also just the act of writing it helps you remember it. Not me. So I, I think this is true for many people. Like if they take notes and during a lecture or something, but I have found that there's something about the act of writing copious notes. I mean, we're talking like I like

write a lot. Like I can, I've, I've written so many notes in my life that my typing speed has gone up and I can almost type as fast as most people can speak. I'm probably like 20% slower than speech. And what I've found is that when I do that, I don't actually form memories. You're too busy transcribing to actually think about what is being said. Yeah. Like imagine the court stenographer and then asking that court stenographer, like what was said in the court session? They'd be like, I don't know. I just read, I just write down what was said. I don't actually remember everything that was said. hmm that's me i think i'm actually like psychologically pardoning my memory forming

part of my brain where i'm like look step aside you don't need to work so hard right now because we're going to write all of this down not a single bit of this will be missed and you don't have to work i could see that happening where you don't want to have to worry about remembering remembering it so you kind of just get it all out of your head and so that's a that's a that's a two-edged sword though because right because i i would actually prefer to just remember everything wouldn't that be amazing yeah and so i've opted to have a have you tried record maybe you just haven't tried to remember everything maybe you just gotta really try just try remembering hard just try real hard i mean you're not wrong i mean there is i can feel in my mind this like

psychological i'll use a muscle metaphor because i can't actually feel anything inside my brain but i can feel the act of exerting myself to remember you know how sometimes you put something down like you're holding like your keys in your hand and you put them down thoughtlessly and then you can't find them later right but you know how sometimes when you put them down you and you say to yourself i am putting my keys on the kitchen table and then you go clink i have put my keys on the kitchen table and then that memory is like permanently formed tcp like synac yes exactly like there's an ssl handshake here the data was persisted in the long-term storage i got a 200 her back from the API. Everything is good. There's something about that action that makes my mind

form that memory. Yeah. So I've been diagnosed with ADHD, which I feel like literally everyone I talk to also has. So maybe it's just the way the world works now. But that experience of setting down keys and not knowing where they go is not unique to ADHD. But if I understand right, certainly happens more often and i think describes my default state of existing in the world is just things just disappear and reappear magically out of my perception yeah yeah and i do i like the feeling of being able to work on a problem kind of talk through something in a meeting figure something out and it is freeing to know and i don't have to just remember this like i can i can work on it and i know it's going to get blasted away out of my brain by the million other things

that are going to come in yeah but it does feel freeing and lowers my stress to know and it's going somewhere so i um this doesn't help with your boss yeah you know well let's hold on we gotta talk about i couldn't live that way i couldn't live in like where i have to remember stuff i know right look i i want to get to the boss thing too but i want to dwell on this memory thing for just a minute more, because I think there are some techniques you can use. Here's one, for example. You ever see that Doctor Who episode? Do you watch Doctor Who, Jameson? No, I just vaguely know about it from... Okay. So this is the new, in air quotes, the new series, which is now going back like 15 or 20 years. So maybe not so new,

but it's not the black and white one. Anyway, there's this one kind of alien. And while you are looking at the alien, you cannot form memories. And then when you look away, you can resume forming memories and so people adopt the technique where they grab a marker and they put like a mark on their arm while when they see the alien they they mark it so that they know what happened and so the way they experience creepy and you just like look at your arm and you're like holy crap yes exactly so you look down i've seen the alien yeah and there's like three there was no marks on your hand and then you look down and there's three and you're like anyway so i think that's how your keys feel to you yeah yeah it is it actually is yeah cool

that's all i wanted to say about memory that was my psychological analysis of you i like that because i i think that does describe like i'm just automatically going through the motions of moving stuff around physically but i'm definitely not forming any memories of where it goes yep which is why I have to put my keys in the drawer or they're gone. So if you were a forgetful old man who forgets his keys, which you are, and forgets important business decisions, and forgets whether or not you fired Bob, your team member, last week. Yeah.

Where's Bob? You fired him. What? Anyway, how would you like to be approached by one of your, let's say in this case, you're one of the people that report to you? so i think there's a difference between dealing with it in the moment which if this is a great boss i think you could just say hey remember we talked about this remember we decided this and often if you nudge somebody they will remember it just isn't on the top of their mind and addressing

the wider problem and i assume you're talking about the wider problem of how do you not just deal with the instance of it but hopefully make it happen less and i think this is where you can if your boss doesn't remember probably other people don't either part of the job your boss has is to get shared decisions and ideas and concepts into the brains of everybody on the team and you could pitch this as a we're actually helping an effort to help the whole team okay i want to make sure that everybody understands what we decide so we're going to write these things down and refer back to them so it's less focused on hey you forget stuff and change your mind all the time and it's more about when we make decisions we want them to stick and part

of how they stick is everyone like knows about them and understands them and that does not just happen if you say, we decided this thing in a meeting. People come away with very different understandings of what happened or just forget or weren't paying attention or whatever. So I think you could pitch this as, I want to help the team stay on top of things and get things done. So help me. Let's write stuff down and then we can share it around. Yeah, that's a good point. I mean, if decisions are being... Yeah, I really like that. If decisions are being made by your boss presumably these impact the team and presumably it'd be good to have a record of what that was so you don't just have to go re-ask your boss i like that smart i

guess it depends on whether they're publicly shareable or not i'm assuming they're things like we want this kind of architecture and not like we will dock this person's pay by 10 because they remind me that i forgot something right i yeah i think i you have to assume that's the kind of a decision category we're talking about here if there's anything i really dislike at work it's when we re-litigate or re-discuss the same question and this happens a lot actually i've got i've had team members who sometimes it's me sometimes i'm the one reminding everyone but you know like most recently it was me reminding everyone like okay here's why we're not using that feature of this thing because it doesn't support x and we need x and so then people are like hey why don't we use

this like this obvious thing to reach for i'm like remember that's because and it's like i think it's hardest for people to remember stuff that has dependencies where it's like well there were actually three logical steps you have to make before we can say why we didn't use it we didn't use it because it doesn't have x and x is needed for y and y was needed for z like okay it's like hard it's hard to remember all that that's also i'm just thinking of people that seem like they they know are people that get very effective in an org and know know how to navigate stuff i feel like you've just articulated part of why they're so good at it is because they understand all of the oh yeah dependencies they don't just know hey we don't use this feature they know like

10 years ago someone pressed this button which had this carry-on effect which meant that we need to support this special use case which means we can't use these other features that aren't compatible with this use case and and then legal decided this but that person left and their predecessor or their successor decided this yeah hmm what do you do it's complicated i think there's one possible outcome here that we need to address which is one of the these challenging parts about forgetting things is that you don't remember that you forgot things a lot of the time and so if you go to your boss and say i've been noticing you've been forgetting a lot of stuff lately they'll be like they that one possible response is no i don't i didn't remember that yeah i don't i don't remember

forgetting anything. And you say, I knew you would say that. So I've prepared a list of seven important decisions that you forgot about that came from team meetings that we had to rediscuss. And good news, you'll get practice at this meeting because they'll probably forget that this happened and then you'll get to try a few different approaches. Yes, last time we talked about this. Yeah. Do you remember the meeting we had where I talked to you about forgetting stuff? No. You know what this reminds me of? Have you ever seen, is it the day after Tomorrow? The Edge of Tomorrow The Edge of Tomorrow, yeah

Tom Cruise time travel movie One of my favorites It's such a good movie You have to It happens in a lot of time travel movies Or Groundhog Day type movies like this Where someone just learns everything That's going to happen and they get to figure out how to speed run

Through I've figured out how to get through this part of the day Fast So the next time you have the meeting about forgetfulness You'll be like, okay, listen, before you say this you're gonna say this then i'm gonna say this then you're gonna say your boss is like you're gonna throw a punch and i will block you with my left hand and then that will disorient you yeah this doesn't help you but i just love those parts of the movie where

oh my gosh mine too perfectly navigate this tricky situation rolling under the truck at just the right moment because they died 10 000 times yeah exactly i would definitely go insane before i would get good at any of that stuff have you seen the theories about groundhog day where theories that he's in there for hundreds of years like a super long time uh-huh no i haven't but it turns into kind of a horror movie yeah at that point well how else would he get that good at piano i i would never get that good at piano well my father was a piano mover that was one of the lines. I think it's your first lesson. All right. I really do think if you've got a good boss who's willing to confront things head on, I think this is an opportunity for you to give feedback to your

boss that maybe no one else has given them. And maybe they aren't aware of themselves. And you just got to put it really gently. Like, hey, listen, I've noticed three examples of times when you seem to have forgotten about a decision we made as a team and we rediscussed it and we came to either the same or different conclusion. But either way, we spent a bunch of extra time. And I just wonder if you're aware that this is happening. That might be all you got to say. And if they're a good self-aware person... I would love that feedback from somebody. Yeah, I would too. Now, if they're a monster, this is not what you want to do. I don't know dealing with monsters is a whole different level but it's possible it should be

very easy to manipulate because they forget stuff all the time though yeah good news you'll get another chance yeah all right will you read our next question Dave yes I will this comes from a listener Gil Bates yeah definitely your real name hey I started working in a big tech company recently, and I feel like I am on a different planet all of a sudden. Before, I did only work in startups and small companies. I have joined as a senior developer, and I have a weekly one-on-one meeting with my manager, but also a bi-weekly one-on-one meeting with the skip level manager. The latter is where I am having problems. I don't really know what to talk about in this meeting, and I fear that this is seen as disengagement. The first time I had the meeting, the skip level

manager mentioned that he was sure I would have tons of questions. And in reality, I had none. I feel like in my senior role, I must come into this meeting with good questions. But all questions I have, I am discussing with my peers or managers directly. So nothing left, really, for my skip level manager. I'm starting to prepare fake questions where I already know the answer just to seem engaged. It seems like a game. So please, Dave and Jameson, tell me how to play that one-on-one skip level manager game. Oh, my goodness.

Fake questions. I love it. Big tech company, no questions. That is surprising to me that you have no questions. I don't think that's true, actually. I don't think you have no questions. I bet you're confused or baffled or unsure about a lot of things at a big tech company, but you just maybe don't have them off the top of your head. Or maybe you don't think they're the right questions for your skip level manager. But I would be very surprised if you joined a big tech company after working at startups and your response was oh yeah it makes sense i got it yeah no i'm good i think i got it i think i have it all i got it all you have nothing to offer me yeah i think i understand

everything uh yeah just about everything i think i understand checks list everything i just remember this long first this this fog of war this feeling of i i see this tiny keyhole of the code that i work on and the people i work with directly and i just am aware that the map is large and there's all this stuff out there and this vague sense of over time pieces of it kind of getting filled in which sort of happens at every job but i feel like the map is just so much bigger at a giant tech company. It becomes a different type of thing, even though it is similar in some degree. And that's a great topic for discussion with your skip level manager is understanding the bigger map and ask them like, hey, how does our team fit into the broader organization?

Yeah. What teams do you work with? You probably know your team. If they're your skip level manager, you have some sibling teams. So maybe you kind of know about them. You could ask your skip level manager about those teams specifically but then your org probably works with other orgs and that probably gets a little bit fuzzier i have some ideas for questions that will maybe be perceived as political not in the not in the like governmental sense but in the kind of network building kind of sucking up and yeah yeah yeah and and these question good questions for a skip level manager are questions that simultaneously give you valuable information about what's going on broadly in the company, and also position you as someone who is a valuable contributor

to the success of something bigger than just your assigned work every day. So things like, what can I help with in the broader organization? What is your number one concern right now for your organization? How do we as an organization reporting up to you get better? Who should I get to know in the org or peer organizations? These kinds of questions show an engagement and interest in contributing that will create an image of you in the mind of your skip level manager that you are someone who truly cares about the success of your organization and the company and someone they can trust and count on. Some of them might be tricky for the skip level to answer directly also. Like if you ask, what are you worried about? And they're

worried that one of their teams is just crap. They might say it. They might though. That's what's crazy is you know the kind of you never know sometimes they'll play it hard but even if they hesitate or look nervous when you ask that question you've still got information you know it's valuable yeah and i mean they probably wouldn't say i think this team is garbage they might say well this project on this other team isn't going super great or something like that and that gives you a chance to say how can i help yeah and there's always a risk when you're dealing with someone who has a higher scope of responsibility than you, that by offering to help, you'll end up signing yourself up for a bunch of work. But there's also a good chance

that you're signing yourself up for a lot of recognition and reward in the future and job security. Yeah. I mean, you're already at the job. So like, cool. You can find high value, high recognition work to do. That seems good. Yeah. I thought of another question. What do you think i could do to help my manager oh yeah you could ask your own manager that question and they have some thoughts and their own perspective but your skip level will have a different perspective on it too mm-hmm totally i love that and and any question you ask your manager i think you could also ask your skip level manager and now you get to find out if they agree did you hear that outrageous rumor that my manager has been spreading about you

what are your thoughts on the outrageous rumor that my manager has been spreading about you also remember that this is these meetings tend to be set up for two purposes one is to benefit you to help you be successful and that's great and it seems like you understand that and that's why you want questions but number two is for your skip level manager to extract information about the functioning of a team of the manager who reports to that skip level manager you know it's one thing to hear everything from the manager of the team and the manager's like look everything's great i'm really good at my job you know but then it's another thing to hear from everyone loves me yeah exactly and then it's a totally it can be a totally different story to hear from the team

members and hear them say actually everything's not great and so i'm not saying that you should be the person to go and spread those everything's not great information but if there's valuable updates about the progress of things, this is a good chance for you to be a conduit for that information. Undoubtedly, your skip level manager wants these meetings, at least in part, for that purpose. Yeah. Depending on your relationship with your manager, that can get tricky because if your manager is easily rattled, they might feel like you're going behind their back and you're making them look bad. Hopefully, that's not the case. That is always a risk with skip level meetings i can tell you what not to talk about do not talk about the code yeah do not

skip level managers are immune to complaints about code quality like i don't know they don't care about your linting rules or how how hard to work with this piece of code is because everybody says that everybody says that or enough people say it that at that level you sort of discount it a little bit i guess unless you have specific concerns that you can tie to business impact and some reasonable way to address it that isn't like we got to just stop we got to stop doing the thing that could make us money just really rewrite code yes that is that's not nope the answer to that will be nope that's a nope nope and also now i am judging you for thinking that that would be a good decision yeah because their first question is going to be have you talked to your manager about

this and if the answer is no you look dumb if the answer is yes he's like why are you talking to me about it yeah i think it so depending on the manager sometimes you get i'm kind of calling this person a director in my head that's not necessarily the title but it could be i don't know it depends on the company but sometimes they're very technical and they like kind of started some of the systems at this org that this whole org grew up around or something like that so you could actually ask them about depending on what they know kind of i don't know tell me about this important system that this other team works on like tell me tell me the story about where it came from and how do you mean the scuttlebutt yeah not really i think that stuff

is interesting it does sound like you're sucking up when i say this out loud but i i love the the like history of the system just as much as what we are doing right now i think it's fun to learn about that stuff how it came to be so maybe that's a different question like how how did we get here what where did this org come from yes if you run out of questions then i think you get to just engage in a power struggle waiting for the other person to speak first you just stare at each other It's a game of one-on-one chicken. Yeah. Whoever blinks first.

Now you're the skip level manager. You could also ask, hey, what do you think would be an effective use of our time in this meeting? What are some of the outcomes that you think we should achieve? This is my first time doing skip level one-on-ones, and I'd love to hear your perspective. Yeah, that's fair. Like, hey, I don't know what I'm supposed to do in these. I've never done them because I've worked at small startups.

I think that's not a dumb thing to say. i've only worked at companies where there was only one level so i don't know how to skip them yeah if i skipped the level i would be talking to our board i guess yeah i don't know all right have we answered the question i think so good luck good luck it's a good spot to be in at least they care yeah sometimes you're in a place where you just never even see this person and i don't know i think it's good that they are willing to spend time with you i agree all right what can people do if they want their own questions answered go over to soft skills to audio and click the ask a question button thank you to everyone who does that we love you

it's almost as nice as getting a weird patreon name in you know patreon account uh it's actually just as good it's great you keep the show going you are the lifeblood of the content of this show now if only you could just start writing answers then we could just read those it would be a lot easier yeah wait a minute you're so needy all you do is ask questions why don't you answer questions seriously it's the least you could do we have had people answer questions and say here's what i think would be good actually and we love that that's yeah and that's kind of the purpose for the slack channel so if you want to you know if you contribute anything on patreon we'll invite you to our slack community and you can go in and actually get real answers to real questions from

real people uh jameson and i are just robots but if you want actual humans you have to go into the Slack workspace. Yep. They're paywalled. Humans are paywalled. All right. Thank you. We'll catch you next week.