Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 47: Speaking Up In A New Job and Personal Issues

Episode Date: February 14, 2017

Dave and Jamison answer these questions: How soon into a new job is it appropriate to raise concerns? What do you do when issues in your personal life affect your work? Thank you to Algolia for sponsoring this episode. Check out their job posting at algolia.com/softskillsengineering. Also thanks to Battlefield: Bad Company 2, which I spent 310 hours playing.

It takes more than great code to be a great engineer. This is episode 47 of the SoftSkills Engineering Podcast. I'm your host, Dave Smith. I am your host and human for loop, Jameson Dance. Welcome to episode 47 with the human for loop. Yep, and some guy named Dave. we want to first open up and talk about our sponsor soft skills engineering will make you smarter it'll also get you a job our sponsor is this company called algolia they make a hosted search platform uh gets used by sites like hacker news twitch tv a bunch of open source documentation sites use it too yes and algolia is hiring solutions engineers in san francisco and paris

France. So they sponsored us to get the word out. The solutions engineer will work with their customers to do things like build SDKs and solve cool problems using their search service. One of the things that impressed me as we were talking to Algolia was their culture. They seem to take it really seriously to make sure that they have a good environment where people can do great work, be creative. They're also looking for a specific kind of engineer. They want people who are pretty self-motivated and comfortable deciding on direction on their own because you have a lot of latitude to solve problems in the way you choose dave can you tell us about their interview process yes if you're interested go check out algolia.com a-l-g-o-l-i-a.com soft skills engineering

there's a phone screen and an at-home assignment that you'll publish on github which is pretty cool after that they will fly you out to their office for an in-person interview and then you will take it from there so thank you to algolia for sponsoring us and check them out if that sounds like an interesting thing for you yeah so jameson yes a few episodes ago we talked about interviews and crazy funny interview experiences some crazy some funny yeah and i think we have someone who wrote in an interesting story this week yeah this one i would call crazy and not funny just just intense a couple of episodes back you asked for bad interview stories so here's one after i finished with my first interviewer the interviewer said wow you did really well for someone with so little

experience and he went to get the next person instead the hiring manager came back and told me they'd made a terrible mistake and that they didn't realize i had so little experience they were looking for someone with much more experience he said i thought it was pretty obvious from my resume exactly how much experience i had zero because i'm a boot camp grad and i'd already done two phone screens one with this exact person i was pretty confused anyways he said there was no need to continue and they were very sorry and he sent me home later it occurred to me that it might have been because i was eight months pregnant i hadn't mentioned it before the interview i spent a lot of time looking for advice and it seemed the best thing to do is bring up the elephant

in the room first thing when arriving at the in-person interview i'll never know but it's a possibility oh yeah you'll never know yeah i mean you'll never know because that is a protected group and you cannot legally not hire someone because they are pregnant but you can legally say oh shoot we thought you had more experience than the amount of experience you told us that you had you can pretend like sorry you don't know how much experience they had until after you spoke with them on the phone and in person we meant experience with being not pregnant oh yeah that That is a crazy story, and I'm sorry that happened to you. Yes.

All right. Let's see. I think we might have some questions to answer today. Okay, this question comes from a listener named Jack. Jack writes, How soon into a new job is it appropriate or helpful to communicate issues that you're having? Even though they claimed at my company that there was an open forum for issues, it was met with exasperation the first time I tried.

I'm looking for a rule of thumb on this. it's a good question so i'm i'm assuming it means by issues you mean i noticed something weird that i think could be better or something like that that's how i that's how i took it too yeah what do you think i think you should bury your feelings deep inside a place that they will never ever come to the surface yeah and get back on the truck just tamp it down huh well question answer okay you you dare one of your co-workers to do it instead who has more experience like hey you've been here for a year go tell the boss that i don't like the color of the refrigerator in the kitchen okay two very healthy ways of dealing with this i so i worked

with an awesome person named BJ. Uh, he came in to, as a new employee to a place I'd been working for a while. And he came in as kind of like a team lead. And one of the first things he said was, I am not going to change anything for like two or three months. I just want to come in and see how you work and see what's going on and see what's there because it's so easy to just come in and say like all this stuff is different from how i like it and and then that comes out of your mouth as like all this stuff is broken and wrong and bad yeah so he explicitly set a time limit of like i won't suggest big sweeping changes until i've been there long enough to feel like i have a handle on it that's a really wise thing you know i i just changed jobs about uh let's see i guess over four

months ago now and i told myself that same thing i said look i'm just going to learn i'm going to observe and if something is bad it'll have to be really bad before i bring it up because i just want to see i want to watch you know and just take it in and kind of detach a little bit don't get like super invested in it but just watch it and then see what you can learn from it and then after a few months you might have a lot more context this is hard for me to do i feel like i consistently at pretty much every place i've ever worked have come in and been like all this stuff needs to change and it's gotten better over time but but i still feel like i i will tear stuff out without understanding why it's there so like have the kinds of things changed over the years that you've

latched on to uh yeah yeah i think so i think i'm a lot more understanding of like some human being was going through this intense pressure when they did this thing that is now hard to maintain or like this bad thing happened in the past which caused them to adopt this meeting process i'm a lot better at empathizing with the existing culture or way things are being done and i think i'm actually more pragmatic about like i i used to i still remember at at an early job i worked i spent like two weeks uh fixing all these javascript formatting issues and i don't think there was a linter on the project or anything it was just like one person on the team used tabs and then the other people used spaces so there were like tabs mixed in with all our

files you were like i shall i shall set this right yeah i was like this cannot be let me open a long running branch and have weeks of merge conflicts you did it on a branch yeah i did i sure did oh yeah this was before uh linters and especially before linters that could fix those things for you automatically yeah but the practical effect of that was that i wasted two weeks doing nothing and then like the person still had their editor set to use tabs so it kept more tabs kept getting put into the code base so i would never do something like that now i would focus on things that actually mattered but man i used to be i used to be bad at this so i would say if you're going to go sit down with your boss and openly talk about some of the issues with the company

before you sit down try to put yourself in their shoes and anticipate how they might respond to your concerns and in my experience being on the other side of that table like my immediate human reaction will be to deflect any issues right like the knee jerk will just say no no that's not a problem man you're you're new you don't know right so try to anticipate that and then um the next reaction i think will be well why why do you think that's a problem you know and be prepared to talk through exactly why it is and be prepared to answer those questions before you sit down and maybe that'll even change the way you bring it up in the first place yeah the the i think the classic example i'm thinking of is someone comes to a new job whoa surprise the code is confusing

and complicated and messy um kind of like it is everywhere on earth yeah and they think you know it's all this a rewrite we need to rewrite everything in this new language or framework or technology uh and then they start like crusading to rewrite stuff that's that's like a classic jump in want to change everything move that that's the least you'll ever know about the existing system and i don't know there's all kinds of reasons why i think it's often bad to jump in and suggest rewrites what about things like interpersonal conflict or struggles with your co-workers yeah so what if you come in and someone's mean to you and you're like you know what this team really needs not that person and then you start a campaign to get them fired

but again you have like no credibility you're the new person on the team yeah this this is where okay i've i'm i'm surprising myself here but this is where a mentor can help i think and i have actually been participating in a mentor program for the first time in my career uh where i actually have someone that i can ask questions as the mentor or the mentee yes i am i am doing both and um the mentoree yeah and it's been interesting to have someone who's not on my team not even not my boss and not uh anywhere in my reporting hierarchy that i can ask questions of and bounce ideas off of without the you know big repercussions of like well my boss who i have to work for for the rest of my time at this company yeah okay so

it's like a disinterested or not disinterested it's an objective third party yeah neutral bias slightly neutral observer so so when you say i want to rewrite everything they can be like whoa listen sit down for a second and let me draw you our architecture on this five mile square whiteboard here's what you will have to replicate yeah i like that a lot and if you don't have that you can hopefully you have a trusted friend that you can talk to who can hopefully understand and get yourself some yes men yeah rewrite that get that guy fired switch from scrum to xp then you'll go faster so one counterpoint to this is something i heard julia evans say which is that when you start a new job you have the superpower that you are not

used to how things work there yet yeah and usually that means you come in and say like what the crap a lot when you see stuff that is weird but everyone that's been there for a long time is used to it so they don't notice that it's confusing like this happens all the time i think with the process for getting a project up and running on your machine like people do it once and then it's done so they don't care that it takes like five days to get everything installed they're just weird things that people get used to so if you take this approach where you wait until you understand things a little more i think you also need to make sure you keep in mind those what what stood out to you when it was all brand new as weird yeah and it's so easy to lose

you lose sight of that yeah early yeah like of course we migrate the database by like copying and pasting this text file around and then manually entering in a bunch of sql commands like how else it's fine everything's fine yeah how else would you do it and and one other thing is I think the more experience you have to compare stuff to, the more credibility you will have. Like if it's your first job and you come in and you're like, that's not how we did it in my software engineering class, then like surprise, surprise, that's because nothing works how it works in your software engineering class. but if you worked at a bunch of places or on a bunch of projects then you have a bit yeah then you have a better understanding of what the range of normalcy is and what is far outside of normal just a side question what voice were you impersonating there because i loved it

uh i think that was old school mickey mouse cs grad that's wonderful yeah steamboat willie fresh out of yes steamboat carnegie million for cs um yeah i mean because because everywhere will have weird things and everywhere will do things slightly differently because everyone is building different products and has different constraints but if you've worked several jobs you know it's like okay it's bad that your manager yells at you a lot or it's weird that you don't use version control at all or it's weird that you deploy stuff with ftp or i don't know yeah you just get like the range of what acceptable is and there's there's probably a huge caveat here where you know if there's some shady stuff going on or

illegal stuff then yeah you should raise that issue right away even if you're the new engineer on the team yeah yeah um one thing i want to talk about is mindset because i think when you approach these situations you can sometimes come across as just complaining and i think people respond pretty badly to that if you just say well this is bad but you don't really have a solution or any kind of recommendation it can come across pretty bad have you ever yeah that happened jameson yeah i've been on both sides of that i've done that and i've had people do it to me i've done i've done that too and it's like very natural to just say hey boss here's a problem you should solve it um yeah you know where it goes it goes right to the bottom of the list

great i will get to that when i have solved all of the other problems sometimes as engineers we forget that we were hired to solve hard problems that other people aren't solving and sometimes those problems are not uh tabs versus spaces sometimes those problems are like people and organizational and process problems that are hard to solve yeah and you might be the person to come and solve this problem for the team but you're gonna have to put on your problem solving hat and take off your complaining hat to do that yeah most most of them i think if they were easy they would have been solved already there might be some problems that it's just like some trick of new perspective will reveal a simple solution but yeah yeah most of them probably won't so rule of

thumb to answer the last question i would say is that it takes at most companies i've been at um the bigger the company the longer it takes to reach a point where you can you know reliably identify and propose solutions to the problems um with an upper probably a lower bound of several weeks at a small company and uh upper bound of a few months maybe three to six months if it's a big company that's roughly where i would put the rule of thumb how about you yeah that makes sense to me and if you propose a new solution i would also try to elicit feedback from the people you're proposing it to and just ask them like hey am i coming across as complaining am i you know does this seem like a valid idea how does it how you know how does this seem to you and if you get good

good positive feedback then go for it push it but if people are like i don't know you might want to go back to the drawing board yeah before you before you take that to the ceo also often these problems um solving the problem involves like messing up someone's cushy arrangement they have for themselves like if someone built the deployment system by hand and maintains it and you're like this deployment system's garbage and it'd be way easier if it was like this that person is probably not going to be a huge fan of of your solution so even the technical problems will have people components to them yes because you're up you're you're upsetting some established order because it turns out there's actually no such thing as a problem that

doesn't involve people that's true that's why soft skills are the best skills because they can help you with all problems. All the problems. Okay. Have we answered this question? Question answered. All right. I will read the next question. This is from a listener named Antonin. What do you do when your personal life starts to take a toll on your work life? And in the same vein, what do you do when you see colleagues or even subordinates being in that situation and the effect it has on the team? Don't forget the last part. Oh yeah. Thanks. I love the podcast sideways smiley face emoticon we love you too antonin yeah thank you yeah what do you do well i would say if your personal life is starting to take a toll on your work life

this would be a great opportunity to conduct an experiment to see how long you can not show up for work before someone notices sounds like something in office space actually i did this no it was in college so it wasn't at a job but uh yeah i definitely didn't go to school for a month um and i didn't die but man it sure messed up a lot of things for me so what were you doing instead uh yeah it's a it was a pretty low point in my life actually it was I was like crushed under the weight of lots of classes and work stuff and I was working in a in a lab doing some like scientific programming I basically thought I had a solution to this problem that my professor proposed I solve went in and talked to him about it and he very nicely told

me that I was like so far off of a solution and it was going to be so much harder and that was just like the straw that broke the camel's back and I went said okay I'll go work on that and I went home and i pulled up my xbox 360 and i started playing battlefield bad company 2 and i didn't stop until the calendar was on the next month that's a good time and i i do not recommend that you do that but if you do it college is probably the best place to do it better better than doing it in your job i guess it depends on if you're in the last month of your medical program yeah that's true i was not but my gpa went down a lot oh so you have data oh yeah hard data yeah first it started with the three and then it started with

the two so yeah don't do that do the opposite of that so i have helped a few people in this kind of a situation and i think jameson and i were both talking and i don't think i've been in this situation very much i've been really lucky really fortunate but i will say that um having been on the other side of the table from people who are having real struggles in their personal life and they need some extra consideration at work the best thing you can do um you know aside from just resolving the personal problems is to communicate oh there's a bully taking your lunch money let me take care of them yeah why not just solve the problem yeah it seems easy enough right to the root so the the best thing you can do aside from that is communicating really clearly and openly

at least in my experience now there may be companies that will respond in really awful ways to that so i don't know but in my experience i appreciated people telling me hey we're gonna i'm gonna need some leeway here or i'm having these problems what can we do and we came up with arrangements for them so that they could continue to be you know as productive as they could be given the circumstances but if they just stopped showing up that would have been really bad yeah yeah actually when you said you wanted to talk about this question i was like i don't know anything about this and the more i'm thinking about it the more i remember little things like so i failed almost all my classes that semester because that's what happens when

you miss a month's worth of assignments and exams and all that stuff but one of them i went and talked to the professor and i had a good relationship with them before and then afterwards we went and had a discussion and he was like huh it sounds like you're going through some depression and that's bad and you should get some help and also uh i'll give you an incomplete and then you can like make it up because it sounds like some like extenuating circumstances so with him i communicated a little more openly than i did with other people and it worked out better that's cool that's great yeah yeah it was good could definitely backfire though yeah oh yeah there were other professors i didn't communicate with because i didn't i don't know why because you didn't trust

him didn't want it to backfire yeah i mean some of them it was just like this giant class they didn't know who i was but that doesn't that doesn't apply here another thing you can do is if your schedule is going to be affected by this is to make sure your team is always clear on when you will and won't be in the office and if you work from home it's when you will be online and when you won't be what i found is that people are generally really forgiving if they know you're not going to be online but if they expect you to be online and you're just not then that's when people get frustrated yeah yeah especially if you have some arrangement where you're going to try and work the same amount of hours but it'll be at weird times yeah if people don't explicitly

know that they'll just assume you're like off goofing off yeah yeah exactly and sometimes this can feel embarrassing right where you want to tell your team how you're going to be working and how it might be a little different than usual um and you feel a little bit maybe ashamed that you're not pulling your weight but i i assure you that uh having clear expectations um that your team can know where you are is a lot better than having your team wondering where you are even if you're not working the hours that you wished you could yeah the embarrassment can turn into shame and then the shame can feed itself and then can turn turn into what was that game battlefield bad company 2 by the way such a good game it's a great game uh i think i i think i've seen that

in like a psychology test textbook where it was like embarrassment to shame shame leads to bad what is it bad company 2 battlefield bad company 2 yeah which leads to more embarrassment yeah but it it it builds upon itself and it feels like it's harder to dig your way out so yes yes you're like well i've gone two weeks now without really putting my weight i can't show my face or i can't admit it because they'll be like what the crap were you doing for two weeks and then suddenly it's three weeks another good reason to have a mentor that you can trust that you can talk to about these things or a friend or a trusted colleague yeah and i mean depending on what the issue is like professional help could help too yeah if it's mental health

issues there are people that can help you work through that and just in case this wasn't crystal clear this podcast does not count as professional help oh no unless you want help increasing your kda in battlefield bad company too in the which case i've got some tips so one other thing you can do is you can try to make it up to your team in other ways by taking on crappy tasks that no one wants to do i thought you're gonna say like make them cookies or that can never hurt but maybe you could volunteer to convert the code base from tabs to spaces as an example dear team i hope these cookies make up for the fact that i didn't show up for a month and you all had to pick up my slack and they were like yeah they do that worked these are pretty good cookies

openness honesty i i think those are the key here as they are in most things but especially in these really sensitive situations every time we give an answer like this like be open and honest the back of my mind tingles as i recall conversations with the co-workers who have worked at really dysfunctional companies where open and honest is like a punishable offense yeah and i think it just reveals thank you for telling me all your weaknesses now i know where to shiv you yes exactly and i think this yet again reveals just how charmed of a life james and i have led yeah that's true one one more thing i want to ask about say you're a manager and someone has approached you with an issue like this what do you do do you just tell the team like hey

dave isn't going to be around for a little bit he's working through some stuff do you say like dave's dog killed his cat and he's just distraught do you give all the details how do you know how do you communicate it to the team if someone has come to you privately with an issue well first of all i would actually ask the team member to communicate it to the team and and not speak for them but let them share the level of detail that they're comfortable sharing sure i'll maybe coach them with like what level that should be um yeah but i don't think it's good for the manager to just walk into the team and say hey i know you're in the middle of stand up but i just wanted to tell you that bob's you know going through some personal stuff and he's

not going to be around as much for the next few months i would rather have bob no blockers say that yeah and i have no blocker bob has some in his arteries though okay yeah i like that um yeah i would i would try to keep the communication between the person and the team because that this is not a one-time communication you're gonna have to reiterate this you know maybe you have a weekly thing where you have to tell them every week here's going to be my schedule this week it's going to be weird and here it is sure i would also sit down with them and say let's figure out exactly what your work is going to be like and you know let's get a plan together for how you're going to recover from this you know like yeah is this

going to cost you your job in the long run or are you going to be able to work back to full productivity you know and maybe we could arrange for something where you go to part-time and maybe we reduce your hours and you take a maybe some time without pay or some leave or just a short term disability or i mean you have so many options that you can use here you should be as a manager you should try to figure it out maybe consult with your hr department sure turns out they're actually really experienced with this stuff in most cases yeah like surprisingly experienced when i've talked to them they've been like oh yeah we've dealt with 17 of those cases this year huh so when you say that that's what gets me tingling with like the boy i hope your hr

department isn't one of those ones whose only job is to get people fired and not get the company sued good point good point but don't work for places like that again i've only worked with really good hr people yeah yeah okay well have we answered this question probably not but we're done anyways question stopped responding to question timed out dave where can people go if they want to hear more from us go visit us on our worldwide web internet page softskills.audio and at that website you can submit your own questions with as much or as little detail and as much or as little anonymity as you prefer and you can also play past episodes you can subscribe there and you can share it with your friends and you can write comments on the

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yeah thanks that would be great and also thank you to algolia again for sponsoring yes go check out algolia.com soft skills engineering if you'd like to read about the job opportunities there and with that we'll catch you next week bye