Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 45: RAPID FIRE and Micromanagers

Episode Date: January 28, 2017

It’s our first RAPID FIRE episode, where we answer a bunch of questions rapid-ish-ly. Why do I get passed up for developer jobs? Should I take this high-paying job even though it’s a scary change? Should I quit my first job after five years? We also answer a longer question: How do I deal with a micromanaging project manager? Thank you to Algolia for sponsoring this episode. Check out their job posting at algolia.com/softskillsengineering.

It takes more than great code to be a great engineer. This is Soft Skills Engineering, the podcast, episode number 45. I'm your host, Dave Smith. I am your host, Jameson Dance. So we actually just had a really great conversation with an engineer from a company called Algolia. Yeah, Algolia is building a really cool search service that is used by lots of companies. Yeah, it gets used in a lot of open source projects or open tools. Hacker News. I think it's the search for Hacker News. It powers the React documentation,

the Yarn documentation, Periscope, Twitch, a bunch of other things that you have used. That's right. Algolia is looking for engineers, not just any engineer. They want people who care about the kind of stuff that we talk about on this podcast. So they sponsored us to get the word out that they are hiring people like you, dear listeners. Yeah, they're looking for engineers who want to try something new by working as a solutions engineer in either San Francisco or Paris. Wow. What is a solutions engineer? Is that sales? It is not sales. Do not be afraid. They actually work with other engineers to build SDKs. They help write clients. They will also consult with customers to basically make sure the product is working well for them.

And they'll also do some kind of education. Yeah. And if you're up for it at Algolia, you can travel and speak at conferences. In fact, the engineer we spoke with traveled to Finland and Australia last year to go speak at different conferences. Yep, traveled to both of the places. Both of the conference places. Yep.

One of the things that impressed me about Algolia is their company culture. They take it really seriously and they work hard to create a good environment for people to do their best work. They also said they're looking for a specific kind of engineer. The person we interviewed specifically said

that this role will have a lot of latitude to solve customer problems. So they probably want someone who is good at self-direction and exploration. Dave, can you tell us anything about the interview process? Yeah, so to start, if you're interested, go check it out at algolia.com slash softskillsengineering. That's A-L-G-O-L-I-A dot com slash softskillsengineering. The process is simple. there's a phone screen and an at-home assignment that you'll publish on github after that they'll fly you out to their office for an in-person interview also on their website there's a

picture of a person in the in a hammock which is basically we think the culturally acceptable ball pit yep you know how you look in the browser uh url bar and there's the little lock and it says secure the hammock in your jobs page is basically like that for company culture it's like yep chill the chill lock all right yeah thank you to algolia for sponsoring the podcast go check it out uh we're gonna do something a little differently today with our questions what do we got cooking jameson we are going to do a rapid fire episode um it makes me think of you know in those cowboy movies how somebody will like well they usually get really drunk we didn't do that part but and then they'll throw a bunch of stuff up in the air and

then like shoot it all out of the air yeah that's what we're gonna do with wisdom we're gonna throw questions up in the air and then like spin around in a circle and just like blam answer them with our shatter the question bottle with our wisdom bullets yes okay um i think i'll go ahead and read the first question then okay no pressure this is i'm ready get your ready to draw get six shooter out there text yep okay this comes from listener desi who writes if you look at my resume i'm kind of the example of the jack of all trades master of none i have a bachelor's in marketing and a master's in marketing i have no real world experience so i pretty much get passed up for anything i feel like i've tried everything and been on tons of interviews just never gotten

a chance to be a software developer so what do you say to desi jameson uh have you ever worked as a software developer before i think no have you ever taken any classes or done any education or built anything on your own maybe a little okay kabam you don't have any experience and people don't want to hire someone to become a developer they want to hire someone who can be a developer like already yeah you need something you need something it's really hard to just break in to the front door when you don't have any experience at all the market is not that hot yeah the market is hot but it's not 1999 anymore yeah yeah i'd say build stuff on your own or look at a boot camp or some kind of education and then try and get a junior developer job

yeah and we know not everyone can just quit their job take no income for three months and ramp up a new career right so some of these some boot camps will do evening classes which can work out pretty well yep but you need some kind of experience yeah definitely true i don't think i've ever seen a job where they won't take any oh no i have seen one yes uh a friend of mine started a company this is izeni um you know you know as any right jameson yeah he'll actually take people with like no experience and pay them minimum wage and until they get up to speed and then he'll give them a like a regular developer salary at that point so the only company i've ever heard that does that okay talk to izeni it exploded in the air we got it all right i want to read our next

one jameson i will this is from an anonymous listener i've been offered a position that pays substantially more than i currently make about two times more i really like my current position i have a good mentor reasonably interesting projects and a more than livable salary but feel i should cash in now as air quotes data science is super hot and talent constrained right now should i take a job that pays a lot more even though it's a scary change so if i'm in this situation and i'm pretty happy at my job but there's a lot of money on the table and i'm super interested in data science i'm probably going to go for it that's how i roll it exploded in the air i totally agree i think if you're interested in the field

and there's nothing horrible about it i mean if it's like and also i'll now have a four-hour commute or there's some other flag yeah yeah then money won't make up for that but if it's potentially interesting if you hate it you can like dry your tears with the dollar bills that you made from the job and then go take a long expensive sabbatical and write eloquent and beautiful medium posts about all the self-discovery that you do in the free time that you've earned by doing this lucrative job i quit a job once after about six years five years and um after six months i realized that i really liked it and so i went back i actually did that once and it worked out so just because you quit it doesn't mean it's the end of the road necessarily

yeah that's true you might be able to go back yep okay question we did it okay next question yes this is an anonymous question wait actually the question itself is not but the listener who wrote the question is the question is just a bunch of underscores and we get to fill it in with whatever we want okay so this person writes i've been working at the same job for five years it's my first real job and it's getting more and more exhausting to argue with my co-workers about new technologies and practices should i keep trying to change things or find a new job okay i'm gonna draw quit your job quit your job quit your job quit your job to me this is a no-brainer like five years first job totally get a new job you'll be amazed at all

the cool stuff that's out there and um yeah i mean i don't have anything else to say about that um yeah i mean i'm gonna say one more thing to ruin the punchy back and forth we had you you shouldn't just quit your job for quitting your job's sake i think but it sounds like this person is looking to explore more and they're not finding that at their job and that seems like a good reason if you've been there for five years to to quit and explore other opportunities there was more detail in the question that we didn't share but it was basically led me to believe that this person feels pretty attached to their job and to the people there which can make it hard you know you might feel like you're stabbing them in the back or something but it's been a long time

And five years is plenty for your first job. Yep. All right. We did it. We rapidly fired. That was our three-question rapid fire. It's a good thing we have three bullets in each of our guns. Yeah, that's true.

Our six shooters. They're the legendary three shooters used by all the cowboys in the Wild West. Okay, so that's the end of the rapid fire section. Now we're going to do our regular question style. This is from a listener named Addy Kunle. And it goes a little something like this. um hi dave and jameson thank you for your fun presentation of the soft skills podcast i've listened to every episode since you started thank you so much uh so have i so we are now friends

here's my question we are a small company of seven developers we've got a project manager who is a control freak and is addicted to micromanagement he loves to air quotes stay on top of things how does one handle such a personality without having to appear like that difficult employee micromanagers it's a good question i was telling dave before the show that i think if i ever was in charge of a lot of people and i wasn't like scared of them thinking i was stupid my default would be to micromanage because i really really don't like feeling out of control and so one way to feel in control is just like make everyone do exactly what you want all the time which is why this podcast is the way it is i mean i can't i can't make a single decision

without this guy just breathing down my neck that silence was me typing angrily to dave in skype now you better say this or else micromanagers are so hard yeah have you worked oh go ahead yeah i was i have worked with micromanager i have been a micromanager have you have you like overthrown one before like led a rebellion against them no you know me i just quit yeah that's true um the worst kind of micromanager is the one who says i'm not a micromanager you know what i mean i just get stuff done i don't believe in micromanagement but i'm gonna need you to tell me everything you did for the last but it's really important that you do this this

certain way because it's really time sensitive or really important to the customers or yeah yeah it's tough so i would say that when you're in this situation the first thing you need to do is try to understand the micromanager why are they micromanaging something is motivating this behavior is it fear are they afraid the team will make a mistake that they might be able to catch are they afraid they'll get asked a question by one of their co-workers or superiors that they won't know the answer to that's what i would find out fear of death fear maybe yeah maybe you just die if you mess up in a meeting he's already got one foot in the grave yep uh yeah that makes a lot of sense if you understand the risks that he's trying to avert

then maybe there's a better way to help him avert those risks or maybe you could you could meet that need right some other way yeah yeah like if he's got a fear of dying um i think the traditional way is you like go on a life journey and do a lot of dangerous stuff and realize that life is more meaningful if you're living and if you're not ruled by fear all the time so you'll probably do like tandem uh riding together and lots of stuff like that okay so after that um would you ever just say like i feel like you're micromanaging me and it's hard for me to work in in that environment i think i would but i know jameson that's probably you're probably getting uh sweaty palms right now just hearing me say that yeah i am well just like bruce banner the secret is my

palms are always sweaty i already have sweaty palms uh yeah i mean maybe like go behind him and grab his hands and on his keyboard with his hands type out you are a micromanager stop it and then you can demonstrate how it feels bad so but seriously the word micromanager has such negative connotations that i think if you approach someone and said i feel i feel micromanaged i think that that message might hit them so hard that they might just be like whoa whoa whoa you know and it might give them enough pause might get really defensive you're saying or they might give them they might get defensive or it might get it might be one of those moments where they realize suddenly it might shake them up yeah

yeah like shake them into introspection and a little bit of self-reflection okay wait a minute are you suggesting that when i have negative things to say to people i should just make it like so negative like like the defibrillators when someone's heart has stopped i just have to like crank it up to make sure the message gets through oh my gosh i don't know i mean i just i'm just envisioning myself sitting across the table from a reasonable person who doesn't know they're a micromanager and then expressing how i feel when they do certain things and it this is it's very helpful if you can cite specific examples you know if you just say hey you're a micromanager they're they're not going to have any idea you know they'll be like well what are you talking

about too like give me an example and you better be prepared how okay how would i know if i'm a micromanager because you could also say there's a flip side of the micromanager coin which is like very detail oriented and someone who cares a lot about like the polish of little things i don't know what what makes you cross the line i think what makes you cross the line is when you clearly reach into somebody else's area of responsibility and tell them how not just what they're responsible for but how to achieve that like the methods to achieve the thing they're responsible for you know that's micromanagement like it's one thing to say i want you to produce a ui that meets these requirements it's another thing to say i want you to do it using this

framework this programming language these tools and this bug tracker you know and then i want your you know process to follow this process that i read about and you know i mean and some of that's it's a lot of gray area though right yeah so i think the opposite of micromanagement is when you give someone complete latitude to succeed or fail where you are willing to say i'm going to assign this to this job to someone and if they fail i will let them feel the consequences of the failure and if you can honestly say that you're going to do that then you're probably not a micromanager but if you're saying look i'm only gonna i'll only swoop in and fix things if they're going bad you know then you might be a micromanager so there's this really

cool book i read a couple years ago called multipliers and in the book the author lists characteristics of great leaders and micromanager is one of the anti-characteristics. But the opposite of a micromanager is an investor. And what she means when she says investor is that you're willing to give ownership and accountability to others and that you let them both take ownership of their success and their failures. Whereas a micromanager keeps ownership for themselves. And it ultimately leads to an environment where people will wait to be told what to do because they, uh, have been shown that their failure is not an option. In other words, that, uh, this guy's going to rush in, in this case and make sure that everything goes his way.

Um, so that, you know, they just can't take ownership of the whole process. Yeah, that, that makes a lot of sense to me. I like, um, the recognition of the costs of micromanagement because i think that might lead to a discussion you could have with your manager that's not like it's not just i don't like it it's like this is how it's harming the performance of the team like you said it's hard to feel autonomy and ownership and it can be hard to feel motivated if you feel like someone's like puppet and they're just gonna make you dance and do the thing however they want it done and then yeah it can be hard to feel like you're contributing yeah your human effort is just like your mechanical effort yeah exactly like what am i even doing here why do we

even have this job yeah yeah i mean it's also so beyond the effect on people's motivations i think it's it's hard to scale micromanagement the company has seven people so he can probably micromanage however many people are on the dev team there's probably not that many but but if the company does well and is successful and you have 50 people and suddenly this product team has 20 people on it then you just can't can't keep up can't micro you can't type on all those keyboards all at once i only have so many hands yeah yeah so you're saying one solution is just grow the team to like 20 engineers and then yeah that's true anymore yeah yeah and then either there's one small team that is under the domain of this micromanager or maybe he'll be like upper

management and then he's micromanaging like two middle managers middle micromanagement yeah yeah and they're the micromanagement buffers between you and him and well this is a conversation that you could have with the manager that might be a little bit softer than just coming out and telling them you're a micromanager you could maybe say hey if we're going to grow this team and grow this company, I think we're going to need to scale ownership out so that individuals can own more responsibility and have more latitude in decision making, rather than having to run everything through you. How do you feel about giving me or maybe you nominate one of your unsuspecting co workers to give them more leadership and more responsibility over the team?

Yeah, that that's a good point, too. It's not just it'll harm the growth of the team, it'll harm the growth of the people on the team they won't yeah they won't progress that much if they're just under this person's domain so yeah and and i mean part of a manager's job is to grow their team yeah but this sounds like a project manager based on the question which might true they might have ulterior motives and and one things i've noticed about that's like the assistant to the regional manager yeah i've noticed that some project managers they just really want to know the current status you know oh yeah is it done is it done when's it going to be done it's like the driving purpose of their being and it's even i mean we've talked about this before

but they they do not control the status too so it's even more like nerve-wracking yeah like here they are they've signed up for a date they have to give status on that date but they have no impact on moving that date right they can't make it go any faster yeah i guess what i'm saying is it's good to be a micromanager because then you know the dates really well but yeah if you can that goes back to what we said earlier if you can find some way to meet the needs that is that are causing him to micromanage in another way like if he's really concerned about dates um there's probably other things you can do to alleviate the date pressure or publish that information through like an asynchronous channel so that he's not coming

to you and saying is it done yet is it done yet yeah maybe like a like a simple web page or a trello board or something where you can update the status periodically sure or even better some kind of automated system like a burndown chart or something that says hey look just go put your ruler up on the screen and trace the line to the burndown that's the date you know do those work i've never worked somewhere that have that has one of those it doesn't really matter this in this case okay that's true it works if it if it gets him off your back yeah see that right not if it predicts the date correctly exactly okay good point um also in this case there may be another manager in this situation who could help so we have a project manager and we have

some developers maybe there's another manager and if you can clearly communicate the effect that this micromanagement is having on your team to that manager, maybe that manager can help you put in place some process to protect you from micromanagement. But this is where communication is key, right? You have to explain why it's harmful in terms that make sense to them.

Yeah. And it can't just be, well, I'm annoyed by all the questions I get, you know? Because you've got to be a team player, right? Yep. Well, is there any more wisdom to lend to this question? i don't think so this is a tough situation uh and um i think that it delves into human motivation and that can be a very non-deterministic hard to understand place so

yeah it's also there's this cult of the of the controlling genius and it all stems from steve jobs i was gonna say steve jobs like he was a micromanager he made apple and he built the best company ever and he built all the best products and like there's there's all these uh i worked at a company um where we eventually forbid the mention of facebook as like an example to look at because we had like 10 people and did something that wasn't related to them yeah but it's just so tempting to say like look at this successful person or a company and do what they do even though even though you're in a totally different situation and the different situation we are in from steve jobs is like most of us aren't brilliant product people

yeah exactly it's like if someone says well are you like literally the best product person who has ever lived in the history of technology if so you can micromanage me yeah then then you then you doing it and telling people what to do will always be better than them figuring it out but like yeah but you're probably not yeah so try saying that to him that's what i'm saying you're a pretty good project manager but you're no steve jobs yeah invent me an iphone then i'll let you tell me what characters to type of course then the next day he'll show up in a black turtleneck and be like let's do this oh yeah all right question answered i think question answered we did it Dave where can people go if they want to have us answer their questions go to our website

softskills.audio where you will find dancing gopher animated gifs and thousands of banner ads just kidding but you can play past episodes and there's a button you can click to send us questions and a lot of people have been doing that um far more than we can respond to that's actually part of why we did the rapid fire today hopefully we um did those questions of at least some degree of justice with our three shooters and so you can also go to follow us on twitter our handle is at soft skills eng and you can send us questions there our direct message account is open so feel free to send us unconstrained messages of as many characters as you want on twitter yeah it's true be careful with that power though don't don't let it go to your head

uh thank you again to algolia for sponsoring the podcast and head to algolia.com soft skills engineering to check out the job that we talked about yep thanks very much all right catch you next week