Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 44: Discussing Firing and Writing Job Postings

Episode Date: January 25, 2017

Dave and Jamison answer these questions: When I let someone go, should I tell them the reason why? How do I write a good job description? We mention Julia Evans’ blog post A litmus test for job descriptions in the second question.

It takes more than great code to be a great engineer. This is episode 44 of the Soft Skills Engineering Podcast. I am your host and your chocolate Teddy Grahams consumer, Jameson Dance. I am your other host, not eating anything, Dave Smith. I'm just going to start looking at stuff on my desk. I'm your host and possessor of fake golden fingernail clippers, Jameson Dance. I got some right here. i'll get better with the made-up titles i don't know how you could get better i mean you're already

there okay i'll stay the same but have a slightly different title next time how about that sounds great um we have a lot of stuff to get through so i'm gonna get through it first we have a story from an anonymous listener about a funny interview experience that i thought was cool um they say you joked about being a asked technical interview questions after getting the job this actually happened to me the interviewer called me offered me the job and then called back two hours later and said i was so excited about you i forgot to screen you technically can you imagine uh yeah that sounds great then proceeds to ask a ton of technical questions i got the job but whoa was i scared can you imagine that's like i got the job

yay let's celebrate two hours later ring ring i'm just imagining that in other situations like the irs calls you up and is like you look like a great person we're not gonna need you to pay taxes and then called they call you back and they're like whoa we got a little excited we need to ask you a few questions yeah we need to take a look at your books but hey you got the job yeah you got the job congratulations uh-huh and then we have a boot camp story yeah this one comes from joseph um this is about getting hired right after being in a boot camp joseph writes love love the show just want to affirm something you said from my experience i think you're right about boot camp job hoppers i graduated from a boot camp two years

ago and afterwards would routinely get all the way through interview processes at big companies like new relic and puppet labs i would solve their challenges and impress people and connect and have inside contacts but they always said we just can't hire you with so little experience the jobs available to boot camp boot camp grads at least in portland where i live are just not very good. But after a few short-term jobs, companies were much more willing to overlook my work history. I knew that my early jobs were dead ends and I didn't hesitate to trade them in for better opportunities ASAP. Now I have a great job, but after three or four early jobs, people did start asking me, why so many short jobs? I was able to honestly say I was looking for a team

that shared my values and that was challenging early in my career. And interviewers always seem to understand that but i do feel obligated to keep my current job for a long time on pain of losing that excuse what a smooth answer to that question i know i was looking for a team that shared my values yeah it's a great answer it really is it was really smooth it's also it kind of like pains me that this is a thing that happens because it's a lost opportunity for all these early companies i mean if this person could pass the interview processes at these like big names And then they got what they would call like a good job eventually if these early companies could have held on to this person either through like better experience or kind of paying them what market rate would be if they joined the company with the experience they had after they had been there a while or I don't know. I also wonder why these companies would put them through the interview process if they were just going to look at the resume at the end and say, oh, it says here you don't have enough experience.

wait after i reverse the binary tree yeah that is weird uh but it seems like it's worked out well i i hope that um companies get better at dealing with boot camp grads and and i think it'd be better for them certainly if they kept the the talented but inexperienced boot camp grads around longer um but it sounds like they're behaving in a way that that is effective for themselves the individual graduates i mean yeah yeah yeah yeah i was pleased to see that even though there was a bunch of job hopping happening that uh afterwards he was able to get a really good job after about two years he said that's cool yep awesome well should we read the first question yeah sure uh actually i'll read it

because then we can keep alternating i like it all right this is from an anonymous listener when i let someone go should i tell them the real reason if you're a lead engineer and you've chosen to let someone go do you let them know why how much do you tell them sometimes people ask why you're not renewing their contract for example and it's easy enough to say we ran out of money but the real reason could be something else like you tried to talk to them about things but they didn't improve do you cite that and possibly have a hard and humiliating humiliating conversation about their personality this is one example where i'm not sure that the golden rule makes sense because everyone is different so the question asker mentions contracts but i think this applies

to everybody not just people on contract yeah definitely the contract does give you a very nice convenient excuse though if you don't want to keep working with someone you just you just don't renew the contract and say like sorry we couldn't renew it because of reasons yes because of reasons and money or something yeah yeah yeah the the first time i read this i thought about what i would want to have happen if i were getting fired and the thing that i thought was i would want to know why um but that i don't know if i could take it i know i know that's what i was thinking too like like i deserve to know yeah yeah you can't just fire me and not tell me why right like you're you're jeopardizing my ability to provide for my family and and i don't know there's got to be a

reason right but but could you actually handle it if you knew that's my question yeah if they were like we just really prefer our developers to be five nine or taller oh curse this five eight and a half not this again it's like middle school all over i i think that if i were in this situation i'm getting fired it's like a super agitated emotional state for me it's very unlikely that I could take feedback in a productive way at that time. Yeah. Yeah. You're pretty amped up and you're, I mean, if it's a surprise, you're, you're like shocked and probably have gone into fight or flight mode. If it's not a surprise, you just probably just feel horrible about life already. And well, if it's not a surprise, then you, you don't really wonder. That's true.

like yeah i saw this coming three months ago yeah in hindsight i shouldn't have photocopied my butt that many times but it was worth it well i'll see you guys later so i think if you find yourself in this situation where you have to let someone go but you feel so torn about whether you should tell them the reasons something went wrong a long time ago and i think it could have been two things either one you had feedback that you should have given but for whatever reason you didn't or two the feedback you wanted to give was just too hard to give like it was more of like a character judgment than actual feedback you know yeah like this fundamental thing about you is bad and wrong we would like you to change it right right

it's like this thing you'll never change you need to change that yeah but yeah that doesn't really help you now if you're in this situation though right you're like yeah okay i screwed up but i still gotta do this not at all there's so there is some ammunition to like make you feel better about not giving direct feedback um especially in the united states i think there are some kind of employment or hr laws that allow people to sue for wrongful termination and one defense against that is to say absolutely nothing about the reason for termination okay which is like weird scar tissue built up because of legal issues that other companies have had yeah but if if you're at all worried like this person could get very upset and and then wrongfully sue us then i mean if you say

nothing there i think the defense is like there's nothing to cite right right interesting i have not heard that but legal scar tissue always surprises me yeah that's i mean that's like a horrible i feel bad that that's a thing because it just feels wrong like you want to be open and honest and those seem like good things to value but um hr people might might get a little antsy at the idea of giving someone detailed feedback on why they were let go so you're sitting across the table from someone and breaking the bad news to them and this your soul just is begging to share all this information but i still think this is not the time like i think that the person will not be in a good state to receive it and the only good that will come of you sharing that feedback

is that you will feel better like that you got it off your chest you know um i don't think it will really do the person much good in that moment i think it could if you had a pretty close relationship with them that might make it even harder to be in this situation but yeah and it might make it harder for them to receive the feedback i thought yeah i thought we were friends why didn't you tell me earlier yeah that's true it's just such a bad i mean when when you give people feedback they need to be in a really positive emotional place to be able to receive it generally and what if what if they're asking for feedback though because that's um asking for advice is a lot different than just getting unsolicited advice dumped on you yeah

yeah i've experienced that as a as a new parent there's an infinite ocean of unsolicited advice but if like your baby is doing this one thing and you're like i do not know what to do then then it's so much different what if the person giving you the advice was also firing you as a parent what if they were taking my child away yeah and and while i take your child here's some advice you should have done formula it's i just think that it's too emotionally 20 minutes in sleep training not 10 minutes your child is now a ward of the state yeah so i just i'm having a hard time imagining a situation where a person could receive that in a good place at that time you know while getting fired no in the moment while getting fired maybe later you could have

a conversation with them about it and and uh but you know if you're gonna you would just tell them like we'll we'll just talk later when it's less emotional like hey what do you do what are you doing for lunch tomorrow swing by the office well no i don't i just think it's going to be so hard like because if you start giving feedback the first thing they're going to say is where was this feedback six months ago you know and and you probably are going to have not a good answer for it you know so unless you're prepared to say look i'm sorry i screwed up then they'll say well then maybe i shouldn't have gotten fired you know i mean it's just oh you pulled the thread on that yarn or on that sweater and it's just going to come unraveled yeah maybe the meta answer to this

question well it is the meta answer to this question then is giving painful possibly painful direct uncomfortable feedback is better than firing someone way better if you work backwards from what that conversation would be like to like okay here's what i should do now then then that might give you the motivation to have a difficult conversation earlier yeah i totally think that's the case so in the moment when the time has come to let someone go i think you have to just get it done and then you're gonna have to put on a cold face and you're gonna feel like a scum you know it's terrible yeah for both people i i that makes sense to me but it still just feels bad like heartless yeah and i don't have a good defense for why to do it differently and i

certainly have never never had the guts to do it differently but i want like my ideal version of myself firing someone would be like this is really hard to hear here's why we think it didn't work out for you here's why we think it didn't work out for us but it makes sense that that might be a little tricky yep totally did you talk about how there's no upside for you oh yeah so like the selfish perspective on this is yeah that you sitting across the table from someone who you need to let go there's really no upside for you just strictly from a selfish perspective what are you going to get out of it and the only thing you're going to get out of it is that you'll feel better that you got that you shared that information you know so it's like about your

feelings i think more than it is about anything else at least as i envision my own self sitting in the chair yeah so yeah if you draw all the outcomes for yourself from the conversation one of them is like you go home and write dear diary today i did a hard thing but i think it was the right thing and then 95 of them are like you get new tires because they're slashed or you're like wiping burnt burning hot coffee off your face or someone's like crying and yeah yep yeah so tough tough question really tough situation i yeah i still just don't want it to be true but i don't know you you make too much sense i led you down the path of you convinced me soulless logic convince me to be evil i have that effect on people that's the subtitle for our

show question answered with evil yep okay let's let's do another question let's do it about that so this question comes from a listener uh whose twitter handle is currently the young mope i don't know what that means it sounds like a rapper name yeah the young well no it'd be young mope not the young mope and it'd be un or y-u-n-g not y-o-u-n-g nice but it could be so the young mope writes hi dave and jameson long time listener a couple of months anyway hey that's long that's like uh three javascript frameworks long time listener first time writer i work for a very small company and i've been tasked with writing a job posting any tips on how to put our best foot forward to potential applicants yeah boy do i have tips i've just spent a long time actually

thinking about and writing uh job descriptions for a client that i'm working with right now that's pretty good but wait have you written a job description for a job description writer position no no no i mean yeah ideally i would just hire my hire this out to someone else like that wasn't there that government worker that uh he worked two full-time jobs at once and one of them he just like subcontracted out to some random person in china that he found i think i did hear about that yeah he went to jail oh he did oh gosh yeah well it was like it was like secret government oh he like shared classified that he was like shipping to to the other side of the world so what i'm saying is my job description work is too sensitive

to ever let anyone else have their hand yeah so it's like a national secret it is that i will share with you all listeners wow just don't tell anyone because it is a secret yeah i think an insight that i recently had is that job descriptions are not descriptions of what the job is they're sales documents you're pitching someone and if you just say like come work here you need to know these things and you will do these things then that's a pretty standard but ineffective sales pitch and the developer market right now is crazy and any developer looking for a job has an infinite number of options and most of them that they find only through job descriptions are going to be like that it'll be like hey you need to know jquery and this php framework and you will build business

applications that do this thing and you will need to be able to use a computer yeah we will provide to you yep we have uh snacks in the office and um for a fee table and a cool relaxed culture yes we work real hard we are we work hard and we play hard we build awesome stuff we're changing the world making the world a better place through ai driven chat bots that also do enterprise resource planning um the the job description is like the inverse of a resume though like resumes all blur together they sound the same it's like the job description is the yin to my resume yang yeah yeah and if your resume can stick out i think that can be a good thing um okay so so yeah your your goal is to make someone who's reading this excited to apply

not tell them what javascript framework they need to know or whatever so how do i make someone excited you need to be a good writer first of all and that's not a skill that everyone has so if you are tasked with writing a job description and you can honestly evaluate your writing skills and you think they're not great you probably need to work with someone who is who is better at it um and and by good writer i mean you need to communicate the personality of your company uh hopefully your company has a personality too though we are a dull but pretty tolerable sweatshop come do solid competent work at reasonable rates in reasonable hours in reasonably beige pants uh yeah how do you sell it on it i don't know why do you work there

yeah that's a really good question and i think maybe that should be foremost on your job description like what do you like lead to you taking the soft skills engineering advice and saying wait a minute why do i work here i'm gonna quit my job and get a different one i tried to write a job description and i just ended up quitting i realized that there's nothing worth describing about this job hopefully that's not it the most recent job description i wrote was for like a lead developer and i got really excited writing that because it's all about the opportunity to build and create a culture and a team and like technical style and philosophy and that's a pretty awesome opportunity i think you have to yeah you have to like genuinely look at

and find the reason why someone would want this job and if the reason is like they will do work in exchange for money to buy food that's that's great but it's probably got more than that somehow yeah i think a lot of people when they write the job description they forget that it's a sales document and instead they just write the requirements of things that they think are great to have in a co-worker you know they may be they might even imagine some of their co-workers that they love and write okay you need to be just like this engineer just like that engineer and then it comes across to the reader as a list of unattainable requirements you know like i can never do that i can never be this engineer that they want so instead of writing the requirements

that you see in other engineers instead go pick out those engineers and talk to them and say what is it that you like about this job and then write that yeah i i also think that um people have a pretty strong like marketing bs filter and there's just there's like this genre of job descriptions that are kind of like marketing bs filled um and we kind of joked about it earlier like change the world through ai chat box to do erp software we work hard we play hard and like they have like the team photo that has the cute dog in it and i don't know i i don't i don't know what to do to avoid that besides tell you to try and be authentic and i think that that comes across i would say avoid using supercharged superlatives like mind-blowing and you know adjectives like

amazing instead tell your story and let the candidate come to the conclusion that it's amazing yeah yeah i think another good principle is try harder than normal to say what the job is actually like because most job descriptions have absolutely nothing to do with like what the actual work is and what it's like and and usually you read it and you're like okay i need to know htm but no l just hypertext markup it's probably a typo and but i i don't know like what i do day to day i don't know how i work i don't know who i work with i don't know anything this can be hard because sometimes you don't know what exactly they'll do until they get there but again the bar is so low that if you put a little bit of effort into it thinking like okay

this someone already works here that this has worked the job description work that came in they got hired what are they doing now and and write about that and like jameson said the bar is so low that it's not hard to be a shining star yeah it's definitely not so i remember about 10 years ago i found myself in this position having to write a job description and i i wrote things in the job description, like, Hey, we don't expect you to have expertise in any particular set of programming languages. Even though we use C++ on our job, we want you to be proficient in at least two or three languages. Like that's the kind of engineer we're looking for. We're not looking for someone who has specialized in one language. We're looking for a generalist. And so

I wrote that instead of saying five years C++ experience required, you know, so I wrote these things out and then i and i said you know for example you might know ruby and php and that's great you know even though we use z plus plus bring your experience and learn c plus plus with us and and i think that that resonated well but i shipped it off to management and then they got their hands on it and edited it before they put it out on the internet they just change it to five years yeah basically they basically took out all the the warm personality that i had tried to put into the job description and made it corporate you know just kind of boilerplate template and i just flipped out like i went to my manager and i was like why what did you do i was so upset

my baby and they kind of reverse edited it and put some of it back but it's really hard to get a job description published that's actually honest and um it bucks the norm a little bit yeah i think that depends a lot on the size of the company i imagine that company was a little bit larger i really like that point about being pragmatic about the experience did you did you say anything about how we work in c++ and if you don't know c++ like we want you to be able to become amazing at it but you don't have to be amazing already is that kind of the sentiment that was the sentiment yeah yeah i like which really flies in the face of a lot of the job descriptions you see where they say are you a ninja are you a rock star on the stage of react

js ninja yeah that's like that's the current one that's the one and it's like no i'm not a ninja and what amazing engineer do you know that actually would describe themselves as a ninja or a rock star like no yeah in fact if you think you're a ninja and you talk about how much of a ninja you are that's probably like a negative in my book i mean yeah there are some words that you should i think you should not say and ninja and rockstar and guru are kind of all on there um i also think that you should include a description of the interview process the so the the purpose of a resume is to get you an interview the purpose of a job description is to get people to submit the resume so that they get interviewed and i think knowing what's gonna happen is really helpful

for that um yeah yeah yeah yeah if you don't know what your interview process is then you have a different problem as well like you should be able to say this is how we interview people and then write that down yeah and try to try to make your process as low pressure as possible so that you can get people in the door so that you can give yourself a chance to meet them you know that's yeah my last job we did a really good job of this we said hey look you know what do you have to lose You probably have a great job, but, you know, just come meet us or call us. We'd love to talk to you or email, you know, whatever. And that got us a lot of leads so that we could actually talk to engineers.

And once we were able to talk to them and let them meet our team, they would often proceed with the process. Yeah, I mean, having a good interview process is a totally different question or long series of questions. But just say what's going to happen. Assume someone submits the resume, what happens next? and assume they go all the way through to getting hired. And remember that the job posting is step one in your interview process, you know? Like it's part of it.

So you need to see it as like an integrated part of the whole pipeline. Once you've written this job description, you should try farming it out to your team members and say, hey, on a scale of one to 10, how likely would you be to apply for this job after reading this job description? And keep iterating until you get good numbers, you know?

If someone reads it and goes, one i would not apply for that job then you know try again julia evans wrote a blog post about job postings where i think she basically took some job postings and then looked at her team and and wondered does this posting describe this person on my team and and most of them i think she ended up deciding that the job posting didn't actually reflect who worked there like it was like it was overly demanding the job posting yeah basically if they had if they had like matched the skills that the job posting asked up with the skills that the people had it didn't seem like it you had much correlation like wait i don't work with any ninjas

yeah yeah wait a minute none of these people have 15 years of experience with no sql databases and that can be a good way to judge if you are doing like the i don't know if you're like cargo colting job descriptions because you've just seen them written that way for a long time like it should describe what your team is like if you're looking for people that are if you if you think the team that the team that you have is good and like matches well with what you're looking for then they should kind of fit the job description yep i guess you could also say that uh you can have wildly different people on a team yeah and they won't all fit the same description right yeah yeah maybe it's hard to write one all-encompassing description that matches

everyone on your team so here's what you do you make an interactive job description where the job seeker fills out we are a adjective company seeking a innovative okay no wait are we innovative are we dynamic oh man dang it i can't decide oh that's a good idea are we big data or ai what do we call it now you could have multiple choice big data ai machine learning yeah deep learning neural network deep data we are a big deep company we are a big deep company so i just want to point out that this was the second episode in a row where jameson mentioned

cargo cult was it yes i haven't listened to the last one it was yeah and so if you haven't heard looked up the term cargo cult i'd highly recommend you hit wikipedia it's fascinating it's also one of those like developer terms that gets thrown around a lot like yak i was just gonna say like yak shaving whoa oh man we're in tune i think the term yak shaving is a cargo cult term all right did we answer this question did we shave this yak that's not what that means you're cargo culting it um i think so yeah i think i could talk about this forever maybe maybe what i'm trying to say is like write a job description like i would and maybe there are lots of different ways to do it

but i think what i described is my ideal job description yep and ultimately this is marketing i mean you need to get into the heads of the people that you're trying to find and write something that would appeal to them which is true clickbait headlines then this job description requires five points of experience you won't believe number three yeah like you're i mean a lot of these will get posted to job boards and you have a little headline and usually it's like like lead it's like title at company or something but you could pick a saucy headline about donald trump or something and then lots of people would click on it and read your job job description oh boy maybe don't do that though i think that goes for pretty much everything we say

maybe don't do this i think the question's answered all right we did it we shared wisdom wonderful if you have seen a really awesome or really terrible job description we would love to hear about it maybe you could link it to us on twitter yeah yeah i would love that so we just want to take a quick second to thank our sponsor dev mountain they uh give us money to say nice things about them so we're gonna do that nice things which we actually believe by the way we do believe we're not totally well at least i'm not jameson is but i'm not yeah just fair enough dev mountain is a coding boot camp they have locations in salt lake city and provo utah and they teach ui ux web development ios um actually the client i work with just hired a

boot camp grad from dev mountain oh really and she's great yeah she's she really knows her stuff she has an interesting life story and a cool unique background that i think is is helpful for the work that we're doing and she had a really good experience there that's awesome if yeah if you are interested in getting into the software industry and you are not already you can check them out or if you're interested in kind of leveling up your skills or making a switch of which kind of web of which kind of development work you do then check them out you can do that by going to soft skills the audio slash dev mountain and dave where else should people go if they want to ask questions or just find out more go follow us on twitter you can find

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right and you could even you could even lie about your identity and we even could pretend to be me and write a bogus question which apparently someone did on january 7th it was i mean they've had some some tough questions about it he thought it was me so good job i guess yes whoever you are great job i was a thoroughly confused so yes we would love to hear your questions and with that i think we're done for today and we'll see you next week yep see you later