Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 442: Improving communication skills and how to break my job hopping habit

Episode Date: January 6, 2025

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I would like your advice on how I can improve my communication skills. I realize that practicing is usually the best way, but I am interested in taking online courses or learning more on becoming a better communicator. However, I am currently taking courses in CS and would like to primarily focus on that. I’m wondering what your thought are, especially when it comes to investing time in either a community college or online extension course. I have to make a confession. I am a job hopper, never staying longer at a job than a year. I am getting bored quickly, I always get the feeling of the grass is greener on the other side and I keep finding myself distracted from my current job always thinking of the next step, the next job, the next big thing. This feeling is a double edged sword. On the one hand I know that I am aware that this repeated behaviour is not sustainable and healthy. On the other hand it helped me progress extremely in my career and climb the ladder quickly and now after five years of experience I landed at big tech in my dream job role. But I still get this old feeling of planning the next thing, finding myself distracted and losing interest and not being satisfied. I want to stay at the job and keep earning the big bucks for my family. What can I do to get rid of the grass is greener syndrome?

it takes more than a new year's resolution to not write any bugs to be a great software engineer this is episode 442 of the soft skills engineering podcast i'm your host jamison dance i'm your host dave smith soft skills engineering is the weekly advice show about all the non-technical things that go into the technical field of software development like sticking to your new year's resolutions and never writing any bugs the whole year that's a good idea we should do that i mean there's a pretty easy way to do it which is not write any code although if you participate in design discussions or architecture discussions and i don't know you probably just need to not do anything because you could contribute by by faulty advice or incorrect requirements

you you probably shouldn't i mean imagine chaos theory you you shouldn't even move or breathe don't do anything you could yeah you could definitely inadvertently through a crazy chain of events cause a bug to come into existence yeah you know how some people talk about code bases as living their gardens you tend to them they grow you need a taxidermied code base locked in yeah throw some glue on it i don't know what they do with taxidermy probably not that you need to craggle your code base yeah craggle the code base yes uh that's not what this show is about this part of the show is about thanking our patrons dave do you want to do that i do all right these wonderful people are contributing at the level where we shot them out we have two

one-time shout outs we have charles and hi t-bor we're never going to give you up never going to let you down never going to run around and desert you and those that contribute at the level where we shout them out every week they are you wouldn't marry a dog so why would you date a dog never gonna get that'll make me laugh the first time i read it but i i'll be i'll be stone-faced the next time okay and then it looks like someone else chose a name of never gonna give you up never gonna let you down never gonna run around and desert you good answer my question you cowards what is your favorite color and a german word i orn hen brocken all right i i don't know what that means maybe james can look that up in case i said something not safe to say okay alexander

kuznetsov 10 print lucas morinton is cool go to 10 nick molyneux michael young.dev attribute error none type object has no attribute two string javier gonzalez chewy ted timbrel alexa set an alarm at 4 a.m okay it did not work become a senior engineer.com unsalted french fries are morally objectionable dan from drone deploy chase w norton dave do you want to read our first question nice try advent of typescript is here check out advent of ts.com never is not just a creator on mars flamingo emoji i like chicken i like liver meow mix meow mix please deliver trash panda kyle boss kent c dodds what can people do if they want their own answers questioned go to soft skills.audio and click the nevar is not just a planet in the vulcan system jenny kim

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good let's perpetuate the question answering which i will do first we need a question i'm going to do that part and then the other part and then we'll question the answer all right Yes. Yeah. This is from an anonymous listener who says, I would like your advice on how I can improve my communication skills. I realized that practicing is usually the best way, but I'm interested in taking online courses or learning more on becoming a better communicator.

However, I am currently taking courses in CS and would like to primarily focus on that. I'm wondering what your thoughts are, especially when it comes to investing time in either a community college or online extension course. So I picked this question and I guess I'm revealing the inner workings of the show. I picked it because we talk a lot about communication skills. And sometimes we talk about specifics of here's a good way to communicate in this situation. But this is a very broad question about like, yeah, I've heard communication skills are important. How do I do it now? I know enough to know maybe I don't have them is kind of the under the subtext I'm getting out of this

question. Yes. Everyone talks about how it's a good thing to do. Very few people talk about how to do it well. Yeah. And that's because I don't know how. I just know the communication when I see it. A good communication is you repeat the stuff you hear a lot, right? Like communication is important. I think that's a sign of good communication. Well, what do you think? What's some general advice on how to improve as a communicator overall? Well, I can tell a funny story where I failed to communicate properly. I'll take it. This is about 10 years ago, actually. And I was an engineering director and I had four or five teams that were in the engineering department that I managed. And one of my daily routines was to get up in the morning and... Sorry,

my first thing I do when I got to work in the morning was to read through any bugs that had come in over the last 24 hours. I was like the first triage. And I would route them to teams where I thought they would be fixed by. And every time I routed a bug to a team, I would try to write a little sentence about why I'm sending it to them. And typically that sentence would be something like, well, I think your team worked in this area recently, or I think this is in your area of ownership, something simple. And then here's where I got in trouble. I meant to communicate. I want you, this team, you can choose what the priority should be for fixing this bug. I specifically was trying to give them the autonomy to choose whether to drop everything

and fix it now or whether to push it into a future date and fix it at some later point. But the words that I chose misled about half the managers into thinking I meant drop everything and fix this now. And I realized that there was ambiguity in the way that I worded it. And so here's what I said. I said, okay, I'm assigning this bug to your team. Here's why I'm assigning it, dot, dot, dot. Now, I'm trying to remember the exact words I've used because I have banished these words from my vocabulary because it created such a problem. but I said something like, I'm giving this to your team to prioritize. And like I said, what I meant by that was you can choose the priority. But what about half the managers

heard was prioritize this as priority number one. Yeah. Please prioritize this. And you meant do the work of assigning a priority to it. Yes. You choose the priority. I didn't mean... And I meant, oh man. Anyway, then I was doing this for months. And finally, someone mentioned in one of our engineering management meetings, just kind of offhand, like, well, yeah, Dave kind of disrupts our sprints a lot because he gives us these bugs that we have to fix right away. And I caught the offhand comment in a meeting and I was like, wait a minute, what? I can only remember once that I've said, hey, drop everything and work on this in the last year. What are you talking about? And the manager was like, well, yeah, you do it to us like every week. And I was

like, Oh no, what did I say? What did I do? And they, and then I, they really couldn't explain to me what I had done wrong. So I had to go back and read the comments. And then I realized, Oh my goodness, I've been saying prioritize when I meant choose a priority. Oh, anyway, honestly, Jameson, that experience was so impactful for me that I almost, I almost lost faith in my ability to communicate at all. Just because literally I said the words and half of the people i said them to interpreted them to mean the exact opposite of what i meant and it wasn't like jargon right you're talking to experts in your own field it wasn't yeah if i can't communicate with these people yeah people you work with all the time oh yeah what hope do i have i mean it

honestly devastated me for a little while and so i mean i immediately changed my wording because i mean i was able to fix that one problem very easily right so i just started using the term you choose the priority or i'm allowing you the autonomy to choose a priority just you do it and please note i'm not asking you to drop everything and fix this now you know but it just made me question everything else i say well and that's how you do it actually it is interesting to look at that story because i think it illustrates one of the ways good communication is it's like inception it's where the message you intend to communicate is understood by the other person. It's not that you said pretty words or everyone feels good or

they think you're funny or smart or eloquent or whatever. Did they understand the concept that you were trying to get into their brain? Is it in their brain? Exactly. Did they reconstruct the same image information that you had in your mind in their mind? And the answer, of course, is always no but did they get close enough yeah and you mentioned you mentioned that the purpose of communication is not to make someone feel good but but actually like the way that i view communication is that there's kind of a there's a base level that we just talked about which is did i did the proper image slash information get reconstructed in their mind as close close enough to what was in my mind that's like the first rung on the ladder but there's another rung on the

matter which actually is do they feel good yeah like do we have a good working relationship yeah exactly think i understand them do they think i'm competent and and this this is like the it's a whole other level of challenge because if you do manage to get that information transmitted accurately enough but they hate you it doesn't it might not matter how accurately you transmitted the information because there's this other gooey squishy human experience side of the communication yeah if they under that's true if they understand it clearly because you you treat them like little idiot babies yeah dumb it down so much i've published a picture book that's meant for five-year-olds to tell you how to build this feature uh i think you just described like

presentations to executives like no less detail more abstraction yeah summarize it more more pictures less words okay okay i guess money money good yeah that's money money go up yeah money good need go up but down actually yeah that's fair i think we're kind of talking around part of it but part of a big part of communication is kind of checking for understanding or modeling what someone already knows in your head. Like to communicate well with someone, you need to have some indication either from your own brain, simulating their brain, or actually confirming that they understand what you're trying to say. Yes. Which is why I like to administer a written proctored test after every

conversation and then you ask for a net promoter score at the end of the test yes would you recommend this test to a friend yeah would you recommend talking to jameson to a friend oh my enps is in the toilet i better make the test more comprehensive to figure out what's wrong that's the problem I need more data. Man, I could talk all day about this. So I've given some feedback to people who found themselves delivering a talk at a conference. The thing that I told them was, don't be afraid to restate the quote obvious.

You know, when you're communicating with someone, sometimes you make assumptions. Like I often make assumptions like, oh, they probably already know these three things. so I'm not going to state those. I'm going to skip that because we have a shared understanding of that part and then move on. And there are two problems that happen when you don't state the obvious stuff and leave it. Let's just say what it is. It's an assumption that the other person already knows. And the first problem is that they might not actually know the things that you think are obvious because everyone's coming with a different set of experiences and they just may not have had a chance to receive that information in the past. And the second thing

that happens is more like an opportunity cost. You missed an opportunity to clearly indicate to your audience that you understand it and give them confidence that you understand the foundational groundwork here that you're working with, your shared understanding. I like that. We're kind of giving tips of things to do, but you mentioned practice, and I think you're right that practicing is a good way to get better at most things. You also mentioned conference talks. And I think giving talks at meetups, those are usually a lower bar to get into. And meetups are always desperate for people to present on something. I think that's a good way to practice that specific one-to-many style of communication, where you're up in front of a group talking and trying to transmit an idea. Obviously, many other kinds of communication happen and exist, but that's one that's important. And also, there's an easy avenue to practice, which is just go sign up for a talk.

It might suck. That's fine. The bar is low for meetup talks generally. And you'll get better the more you do it. I love that. Jameson, I think giving conference talks and meetup talks, just basically speaking in front of an audience is a underrated tool for getting better at communication overall, because there's something that shifts in my mind when I'm preparing to share information with a group

that it like puts my brain at a higher state of, I don't know, I don't know the right word to describe this, but it's like when you're preparing to teach versus just learning something yourself. I don't know what it is. I'm sure you've experienced this, but my mind is at a heightened state of awareness of comprehension of like what like what really are the concepts here and i i learn way better make all these connections and throw away all these ideas that are like you're not going to put them in your presentation but they're they're interesting yeah so i think i think that's a great idea um another another idea is start a podcast yeah don't do it about soft skills in software engineering yeah that's taken that's already

taken there's already one oh yeah we're famously litigious but only in space i guess if you thought the mickey mouse legal action over the last hundred years is serious wait until you try to start a soft skills podcast as soon as you step foot off of this planet we'll sue the pants off yes with our space lawyers sue the space suit off of you and then you'll die so i guess we're threatening to murder you well the consequences are dire yeah this was a metaphor just in case speaking of communication yeah yeah we'll clarify what else and especially what about the kind of like the i don't know i'll call it the work communication where it's it's one to one or one to a couple people it's not it's not the same as presenting a prepared thing to a big group

that you put in orders of magnitude more time in the prep than in the giving? How do you practice and get better at that? Like the one-on-one stuff? Yeah. Yeah. Well, one thing that I do that I think has served me pretty well is when someone is sitting down one-on-one with me and talking to me, there's a few different, let's say, situations that are prevalent in that scenario.

One is they're bringing a question to me. Another one is they're bringing a concern to me. Another one is they're just talking to talk. And that's okay too, right? and in all three of those scenarios i find that my best first response is to ask them a question whether they're bringing me a question or bringing me a concern or just talking if i can bring if i can respond to them with a question it accomplishes several really cool things in a communication scenario first of all it ensures it can help me clarify that i've

understood them and second all second of all it makes them feel good which makes them more likely to communicate more clearly with you because they're not going to be on edge they're going to feel comfortable. Yeah. Like this person's taking me seriously. Exactly. Exactly. And I regularly get feedback from people that says, Dave really takes my concerns and my conversations seriously. And I think people can feel that. Now, on the other hand, I do come across as a little bit intense sometimes because I think sometimes I come across as like a, what's that called? Like a police officer that's an interrogator. Yeah. An interrogator. That's the word. Yeah. And I have to be careful of that because it's like, oh, really? What color shirt were you wearing when this

happen you know like it's like not not exactly what i'm trying to do but i have found that that works really good and on the other side of it when i'm the one who's sharing or coming to someone with a question or a concern if they immediately jump in with an answer or jump in with a story of their own i often feel unheard and i don't i never want someone to feel that way on the other end of a one-on-one conversation yeah they're just waiting for their turn yeah exactly yeah not really listening. Well, I was really listening, but I'm not going to ask a question. I was going to say prove it. Prove it by asking a follow-up question. Have we answered the question? That's my question. I think so. I want to add just one kind of cross-cutting thing, which is for a

software engineer, a great framework for thinking about communication and planning your own communication is to consider all communication as a form of user interface. Everything you put out there, whether verbal or written is a user interface and it could be lots of users. It could be one user, but it's always a user. And so I try it like when, let's just talk about written for a minute. Like when I've written an email or a Slack message, sometimes I will read through that email and depending on how much of a hurry I'm in, I will look at some of the wording and think, could this be misconstrued for something else? Like, is this too long? Will someone just stop reading halfway through? And if so, will they get the most important information? Could

this just be three bullet points? Oh, yeah, here's a great one. I have avoided using the word now in most of my written communication. And that's because it's very easy to misconstrue it for the word not. And like, for example, if I say, I can now edit this code, you know, I have so many times either typoed it myself, as I cannot edit this code, or someone else misread it as not, I cannot edit this code that I just stopped using that word in my in my communication. And so sometimes I will read through my written emails and Slack messages and try to figure out like which one of these words could easily be misconstrued for a different one. And let's just reword this thing to make sure that that can't happen. Yeah.

I tend to be pretty wordy and the faster I'm going, the wordier I am. So I do a lot of deleting. Hopefully that helps. Maybe just maybe I delete the key important information. But no, it's usually deleting equivocation of some kind or. What do you mean by equivocation? mean anything like i really think that and i can just delete all of that yeah and just say the word yes the thought yes i maybe we should i don't know yeah yeah yeah just get rid of the maybe

get rid of the should just be like i propose i don't know yeah that's great all right surely we've answered it now we have and we question the answer so i think we're done with this one all right dave will you read our next question yes this comes from a listener named chris p bacon I have to make a confession. I am a job hopper never staying longer at a job than a year I am getting bored quickly I always get the feeling of the grass is greener on the other side and I keep finding myself distracted from my current job Always thinking of the next step the next job the next big thing this feeling is a double-edged sword on the one hand I know that I am aware that this repeated behavior is not sustainable and healthy

On the other hand it helped me progress extremely in my career and climb the ladder quickly and now after five years of experience i landed at big tech in my dream job role but i still get this old feeling of planning the next thing finding myself distracted and losing interest and not being satisfied i want to stay at the job and keep earning the big bucks for my family what can i do to get rid of the grass is greener syndrome never staying longer job at a year i get bored quickly i feel like a year isn't even enough to do anything real maybe that's i don't know Maybe I'm revealing how slow I am or something like that. Maybe that's an old age thing.

Yeah, maybe it is an old age thing, too. I think I did hop jobs. I feel like my tenure has increased as I have gotten older. So some of this is just normal at the beginning part of your career, especially if you think you're looking for a job that fits your needs and circumstances, and you know the least you'll ever know at the beginning of your career about the the breadth of possibilities out there yeah so the odds are that that you'll find something in your first job that just is great is probably small especially given that you you don't know what great is i don't know i think it's

normal to hop a little bit more at the beginning while you're trying to figure out what do i like yeah but if what you like is always like not what i have that's i guess that's the problem well yeah and that's the money hall problem right i mean like money hall problem of course is the game show where you have three doors to choose from and behind two of the doors there's nothing behind one of the doors there's a prize and when you pick one of the doors the the host will say okay you've selected one door i am now going to open one of the other doors that has nothing you can then see that and now you have more information than you had when you started and the question is should you change your answer to the one remaining to the other door that hasn't been open the answer

is yes for a reason yes yeah it i don't believe it but it is yeah it's not intuitive but the answer is yes and i remember when i learned about this i wrote a bunch of code to simulate it like thousands of times and sure enough it does increase your odds like by five or ten percentage points of getting the right getting the price but but the reason it works is because your field has been your field of options has been shrunk and so when you're at a job and it's your first job that's like picking the first job out of a thousand that were possibly available to you you know in a theoretical world uh the chances that you picked the right job for that first job were one in a thousand and then for your second job the chances that you picked the right job is one out

of 999 so that's better odds so you should switch just keep hopping yeah just keep going until it's like that one job remains wait until the one job yeah until your chances of finding the dream job is one in one because you've already explored the other 999 options that's also assuming that you can tell you found it and you don't hop away from your dream job that's true prematurely do you feel like you've ever left too early like if you look back on your career do you feel are there places you you wish you had stayed longer financially yes like it's it's numerically objectively true that if i had stayed at one of my previous companies for let's see like two and a half more years i would have made a lot of money yeah like life-changing amounts of money but i left

early and left all that money on the table like a dummy. But you didn't know. I mean, I don't know. That's just the, them's the breaks. Yeah. But that was the cost. That was the opportunity cost of job hopping. Yeah. I asked this question because if I look back at all of my job changes, did I go too early? I thought I was going to say, no, I feel like I left at the right time at all of them. But now I'm looking back and realizing the answer is no. Yeah. No, I think honestly, I felt pretty good about the job timing that I had. And the only time I ever even got an indication that there was something better was that one time. And I think that the point that you made for me, Jameson,

was how would you even know? Yeah. And the answer is, I think most of the time you won't. But this person isn't even talking about financial windfall purely. Although that, I don't know, job hopping often increases your salary. They're saying, I just want to do new things. I get bored.

The next step, the next job, the next big thing. I feel like my standard belief here is that you learn things from staying longer at a job than you do from switching jobs. You learn different things. Yeah, there definitely is a ballpark of knowledge that can only be acquired by living with the consequences of your choices

for extended periods of time. Or even others, right? Like it doesn't even have to be your choice. It can be someone else's decision that they pushed for and you just get to see it work out. If you hop jobs, you often get to see, you get totally new worlds but you don't get as much of the history and how they change over time so you might see a totally different tech stack yep but you don't see how that was chosen and

the consequences of choosing it as the code base evolves over time you just see the snapshot of like ah now i'm in this tech stack here's this new observability tool that i learned and i i remember i definitely learned this at a company i stayed at for five years where we went through one two three at least three front-end web frameworks in that time and all three of them seemed amazing for the first couple of months and maybe even for the first six months and it wasn't until probably the year mark before we were like oh boy this is a mess like this is not good yeah you can make a mess in any framework turns out yeah some of them just help you a little more making investors yeah yeah no advice is universal so there's probably someone who can

switch jobs every year for their whole like 20 30 year tech career and and climb the ladder every time and achieve better things every time but i feel like part of what gives me satisfaction out of work is accomplishing big things and sometimes those big things take a while so maybe looking at it not just as like what's the new new cool thing i can do but like whatever i want to get done here? What do I want to be able to point back to and say, I did this thing and it took a couple of years. It was a big vision and I achieved it. Versus, I don't know, I cranked out these features and I don't know, I hired a couple people and then I bounced. I love that. That was exactly one of the things I was going to say, which is change your focus from what can I get

out of this situation right now to what are the long-term project outcomes I want to achieve? and the natural byproduct of that mindset shift will be that you'll stay you'll have longevity at places yeah i think it takes a while to build trust too i mean if you join as the one of three engineers then you just kind of get trust because there's no there's nobody else to do it but a year feels like just long enough to you're really you've demonstrated what you can do enough for people to expect things of you. And then if you leave, then you don't get to cash in on all the trust you've built up necessarily to take bigger risks or bigger bets. Yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense. So I have some very specific advice for someone who,

like this question asker, finds themselves at a big tech company. And I read between the lines a little bit here on the question, but it seems like they don't want to walk away from the big earning that they've got at this tech company, which makes sense to me. So one way to do that, and actually a strategy that I employed when I was at a big tech company, was rather than looking for a job outside of the company, these big tech companies are so big, you can transfer within the company and find great options to reset that feeling of, oh no, the grass is greener somewhere else. And that worked great for me. I ended up working on, I guess in four years at a big tech co, I ended up working on basically like two different organizations and three different

major projects. And that was awesome for me. It was great. I spent a little over a year, the timing wasn't uniform for each of them, but it helped me to reset every time I moved to a new team or project. And it reset the clock for me because I'm also kind of a job hopper. I get bored easily and I'm always looking for grasses greener and other opportunities. But transferring within a big tech company achieved everything that I wanted to achieve by jumping to another company and i didn't have to let go of any of the big tech paycheck yeah i know that's an option i think i've said those words too to tell people to do it i never did it i when i was at a big tech company a big mega company i was i mean my role changed slightly but it was the same spot the same

team how long were you there three four years a little less than four years that's pretty cool like you worked on essentially the same project for four years straight basically yeah i got more responsibility but i never just switched to a totally different thing maybe that's the thing i should have explored more instead of just telling other people to explore it i would have more dollars if i had stayed this whole time also yeah me too for sure a lot more actually lots of money yeah but i'm happy with the choices i've made and plus we have all those patreon contributors to pay for my yacht that's true the it went from big tech co paying for the yacht to patreon it's great it doesn't pay for the yacht but also i live in a landlocked state so there's nowhere to

put the yacht jameson had a pond constructed in his backyard and the yacht floats on it it's pretty boy are my neighbors mad yeah actually my backyard neighbors have a boat and they have it's a it's like a wakeboarding boat so it has those giant rear-facing speakers i don't know if you've seen them they have i have there's like a they look like guns or something i don't know yeah they look like rockets yeah exactly sound like rockets also and so maybe i do need to construct a pond in my backyard is revenge on them for cranking the tunes just they park their boat facing with speakers facing our house and just blast the music are you serious oh my goodness yeah have you read your hoa covenants to make sure there's no rule against parking a yacht in a pond on your

own property because that would be awesome the first rule of the hoa where i live is there's no such thing as an hoa where i live so perfect well hence why your neighbors can blast their rocket speakers at your house oh i'd way rather have that than an hoa though yeah well well we're talking about stuff people can clearly relate to and obviously important for their tech careers have we answered the question i think so and i'm not even going to question the answer what can people do if they want their own questions answered go over to softskills.audio and click the ask a question button where you can fill out our form we need to just give an absolutely huge thanks to everyone who has been doing that we love reading your questions it's

been wonderful to read them all and they just keep coming and every time a new question shows up i'm like oh my gosh my heart it's growing it's swelling yeah i love it thank you there's more to learn out there that's part of what it tells me all right thank you we appreciate you Thank you for listening. We will catch you next week.