Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 486: No one on my team talks and skip level meetings

Episode Date: November 10, 2025

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I work at a big tech company on a remote team of about 10 people, and most of them have been here for 5+ years. I’m in the “newer” half of the team with 4 years here. My problem is, in group meetings, absolutely NO ONE talks. I mean zero small talk, they have trouble responding to simple yes or no questions. Everyone participates thoroughly when it’s a technical discussion, but it’s clear no one has any interest in speaking more than necessary. We used to have one super talkative guy on our team, and even then it was mostly silence to his chats about his weekend. Is there anything I can do to get these people to speak at least a little bit? It feels insane how little I know about these people after 4 years. P.S. even in one on one chats, almost all of them shut down small talk A coworker told me that I should be having quarterly one-on-one’s with my skip to make sure they’re aware of all the good stuff I’ve been up to and my goal of promotion. This sounds correct, but feels weird when I think about setting this up. I haven’t had much direct communication with my skip, just a few responses to his questions during design meetings, but nothing else really. How do I feel less weird about this?

it takes more than using emojis as variable names to be a great software engineer this is episode 486 of the soft skills engineering podcast where i am your host jameson dance i'm your host dave smith soft skills engineering is your weekly advice show about all the non-technical things that go into the technical field of software development like deciding what feeling you want to communicate with this variable name and then choosing the emoji appropriately yeah i'm never going to do this imagine instead of calling log dot error you called log dot and then that red alarm I thought for sure you're going to say sad face oh yeah or the cat scream one that's my favorite cat scream yeah there's a cat with two two paws on the side oh yeah it's like the the

scream painting except a cat yeah I like that I love that one yeah I've heard that emojis are boomer things now so what i accept yeah i think emojis and texting in complete sentences oh yeah that of course the other one i heard socks that are ankle socks was it ankle socks or tall socks one of those is a boomer thing now oh it's wearing socks at all kids these days oh no actually i'm sorry i take that back our generation thought it was really cringy to wear socks with sandals or crocs now the kids think it's cringy to show your bare naked feet oh so they all wear socks with their crocs and sandals then consider me cringy because i got no socks on um that's not what the show is about either but let's thank our patrons dave do you want to do that i will but

first i just want to shout out to my my friend's first computer for today's episode the 486 my friend had one had the turbo button on it 66 megahertz or 33 megahertz uh really sweet computer played tie fighter on that computer i think oh man good times all right now i will read our patreons they are software was a mistake joel harkis says hi to friends ex-colleagues and deprecated classmates dave thank you for telling your story about the bad performance review i feel really understood and i'm probably not an alien how to test front end.com beta test compiler cache engineering leadership summit october 24th an open space event register at elsummit.com let's normalize calling curly braces squiggly braces even though they're pretty curly

and not so squiggly always use never ending story story pointer.com so i can woke up this morning got myself dave watching sopranos smiley face emoticon i fight fires as a hobby because it's so much less stressful than my tech job my actual name on linkedin is yami debugging in the dark candy the mobile development ordinary first of his name quote or one equals one drop table yummix jacob channeling that this enough of an amount is the most silly recurring expense i have it is also my favorite i love how we never say the actual amount on the show as if we're ever going to change it we've never changed it and we're probably never going to too lazy to go in and change it anyway yeah

no this is inflation proof exactly the missing semicolon christy the world's okayest programmer noah labhart i'm currently out of office i'll update my name when i come back next week you can't cha but you can definitely you definitely can change your project schedules with fly true.io not a sponsor daniel remsburg nick malinu if the service org uses a subservice org and the controls at the subservice org are necessary pretend it's not javier gonzalez chewy ted timbrel jameson dance dance refrigeration a single open parenthesis dan from drone deploy chase w norton never is not just greater on mars loon go joe emoji sometimes i say eat joji i like chicken i like liver me i mix me i mix please deliver dave you said you might come to the

swiss python python summit but you did not eventually oh that's true i really wanted to go i was this close to going but jacques yeah oh man i really wanted to go to okay kyle boss kent c dodds that guy over there jenny kim the stochastic parrot quinton we have not heard from you in a month please go to susan and hr asap jonathan king zanai beautiful functional user documentation a spider ascii art character that's forward slash forward slash backslash open paren I dare you to recreate that on your own keyboard Will Angel was a guest on episode 276 of the Federal Tech Podcast

Okay, Will Angel Oh my gosh Will Angel is It's actually very good at self-promotion and I'm here for it I like Will, Will rules Alright, SoftWars episode 4, a new sprint Brayden Keynes, John Grant, Brittany Ellick

and closed parenthesis followed by a literal closing parenthesis oh my goodness thank you patrons for contributing at the just enough amount to get your name or whatever you type into your profile name field on patreon read aloud as long as it's safe for work and doesn't offend our sensibilities we've never not read one but i'm sure you guys could figure out a way to make us not read one let's not go there don't break the streak it's it's just such a beautiful piece of comedy for me every week i don't want you to change a thing yep all right

Jameson, would you like to read our first question? I would love nothing more. This is from a listener named Julia, who says, I work at a big tech company on a remote team of about 10 people, and most of them have been here for five plus years. I'm in the newer half of the team with only four years here. My problem is, in group meetings, absolutely no one talks. I mean, zero small talk.

They have trouble responding to a simple yes or no question. Everyone participates thoroughly when it's a technical discussion, but it's clear no one has any interest in speaking more than necessary. We used to have one super talkative guy on our team, and even then it was mostly silence to his chats about his weekend. Is there anything I can do to get these people to speak at least a little bit? It feels insane how little I know about these people after four years. Oh, man.

P.S. Even in one-on-one chats, almost all of them shut down small talk. Wow. Oh, my gosh. Okay. What has happened here? What traumatic event in this team's past has created this culture of silence? yeah they tried small talk once never again we lost john yeah oh man this feels like a quite extreme version of a phenomenon i have experienced where it just feels pretty dead you you kind of suspect they are not actually at work that's my fear if literally no one talks or responds in any way that like are you saying like they they're on mute because they don't want you to hear

any suspicious background noise yeah they're vacuuming or i don't know you can hear the waterfall in the background have you seen that uh guy on online who makes videos of him joining his work zoom meetings and he's like riding a bike but he has built this contraption that erects a green screen behind him have you seen this i feel like i've seen a picture of that he's got a laptop mount on his handlebars he's riding his bike there's wind blowing in his hair but the green screen makes it look like he's just sitting at an office desk yeah and then of course inevitably he crashes and the green screen like flies and it reveals what's really going on that's your team yeah it sounds like without i mean that guy was participating in the meeting though he had his

camera on that's true he was fully invested sort of i mean we're in a zoom call i don't have my camera on right now you have no idea what i'm doing this wasn't explicitly spelled out in the question but did you automatically assume this is a remote team no it says remote team oh did it it's explicitly spelled out in the question dave oh so hey remember how it explicitly says remote team i just wanted to call out that this is a remote team i was just saying that for everyone's benefit that's how i know you were multitasking and and you were oh i think you're doing i think you're at fencing lessons while i was reading the question yeah exactly i was at my fencing lessons pretending to record this podcast i was trying to do both can you blame me for doing both

No. Fencing lessons sound cool. What's the concern? So I know nothing about these people after four years. Is it, it feels awkward and weird in the meetings? Is it, it just feels like you're not that close at all? I feel like it's probably the second one more than the first one even. Yeah. And I understand that concern. It's nice to, you spend a lot of time with these people. Yeah. It would be nice to feel like you have some, I mean, you do have a relationship with them. Oh, you have a relationship. a very professional relationship friends not everyone has to be deep close personal buddies but it would be nice to feel like there's some human element to this beyond the robotic checking

off of work tasks i can i can understand this i gotta tell you i've been on both ends of this spectrum where on the one hand you have deep close friendships that abide and last for life at work and you also work with a team that you barely know and i have i have friendships now actually that came from a job that i started 19 years ago in the year 2004 youngsters if you can remember back then i started at a company and i ended up working at that company for seven years and i still regularly get together with many people from that company some just once a year some once a month, but I cherish those relationships. And honestly, when I think back over my many year career, that was my favorite job. It was the lowest paying job.

It was probably the least impactful in some ways, maybe kind of impactful in other ways. It's the lowest paying job I've ever had after college. And yet I loved it the most, like looking back. So I understand the desire to want to have co-workers that you feel close to. I think there's a classic, I don't know what it is, trope, meme, a classic thing where everyone who wants to talk more than I do is a time-wasting blabbermouth, and everyone who participates less than I do is obviously not actually at work in the cold and soulless automaton. That is a very funny perspective. I think you can apply this to many situations. Everyone who does a thing more than I do is wrong, and also less than I do is wrong, and conveniently, I am correct here. But there is a there's a there's a distribution of how much people want to engage in small talks and and the warmth of human relationships at work.

And maybe your team is full of people on one far end of the distribution and you're an outlier here. In that case, I don't know. I don't know what you do. Maybe you just haven't found the right topic. Yeah. Maybe one day you're going to be like and truffle hunting and everyone just comes alive. they have some name for them so there's got to be like a name that you call yourself if you're a true truffle aficionado oh yeah a snuffleupagus truffleupagus i don't know a truffleupagus yeah yeah this is hard though i mean i can't honestly i can't say i've ever successfully pivoted a culture like this i mean this this is a deep deep cultural expectation here i mean think about this this person has been on this team for four years and barely knows their co-workers

how do you turn that around it's your problem still the new one yeah oh the new new team member here yeah new whippersnapper you haven't earned their trust yet after four years maybe there's actually a deep connection and bond between everyone else except you because you haven't crossed the five-year mark yet they're going to be like welcome do they talk a lot in chat I've seen that before where people don't speak up a lot, maybe shyness or uncomfortable in some way, but they do chat. Maybe that's a, I don't know, you can chat about your weekends. Yeah, maybe. Everyone participates when it's a technical discussion.

No one has any interest in speaking more than necessary. So I mentioned I've been on both ends of the spectrum. well i already talked about the deep friendship end but on the no friendship low connection end it was also a big tech company and being remote definitely made it harder and the culture was super embedded and maybe i'll maybe i'll just say some things out loud that may or may not apply in this situation but which were definitely part of my experience and i think contributed and that was that we had, boy, I guess there were probably two factors that made this team less deeply connected. Factor one is that getting into a big tech company is kind of a, I think it can be seen

as a competitive activity. It's kind of elite and low supply, high demand. It's kind of like getting into a upper echelon college or university, you know, where it's like you have to claw your way to the top. And, and I think some of that attitude kind of pervades in the way teams work together. So that was a factor. The other factor was there was constant turnover and change and growth. So I, every week for four years, I had meetings with people that I would never see again. And so it was, it was very common at first, like when I first joined, it was common for me to try to get to know people, but it was never reciprocated, at least not on, for people who didn't work directly on my team. It was never reciprocated. And eventually, I realized why,

which is like, why would you spend 20 minutes out of a 30-minute meeting getting to know someone when you're probably never going to see them again? So that was factor number two. But then factor number three is a little bit more subtle and one we don't really talk about very much. And that is that the cultural backgrounds of the people were pretty different one from another. There were certainly some bigger and smaller groups, but it makes connection a little bit more challenging for a lot of my team i'd say 70 english was not their first language and so that makes that puts a little bit of connection friction in place and by the way they all spoke pretty darn good english so it wasn't like a major it wasn't a major piece of

friction but then there were cultural differences too where it's like how do i engage how do how do people get to know each other in your culture and it varies a lot from culture to culture so i think a lot of people just felt kind of like they just felt like they didn't know what to do for fear that it would mess with their job you know or like get them a bad review or create a bad reputation and it was a little bit cutthroat because we did do stack ranking and you know people did get put on performance plans pretty regularly and people always worried that it was because their boss didn't like them or because the rest of the team didn't like them so that you know i i've read about those kinds of experiences so it could be hard and the last thing i'll say on this sorry i

maybe have monologue a little too long here but i guess this has become a bit of a hot button issue I'll just say this carefully, but the immigration situation, I believe, is a contributing factor as well. People don't want to rock the boat. I did not even think about that. Yeah. I knew of a few people who had to leave the country because their immigration status was expiring and their new status wasn't being renewed. They were here on a student visa, which gave them a few years of work authorization, and they were in the US having done grad school. and their new visa, the more permanent visa, like an H-1B didn't come through.

And so they had to leave. You know, unfortunately we worked for a multinational company. So they go find another country to work in for a while. Canada was a common place for people to go at the time. But I think people were nervous. No one ever said this out loud to me, but imagine if, you know, losing your job

meant not just having to find a new job, but it also meant you have to leave the country. The country that you worked really hard to come to. and like you did a graduate program here and then you've got this job against all odds, like the numbers game is crazy. You know, if you're immigrating from a country into the US, it's like, oh man,

the numbers you're up against are astounding. You know, it's like a thousand to one chance in some cases. Anyway, but imagine, imagine if something you do at work could not only threaten your job, which is already a big deal, but also threaten your residency. It's like, wait a minute,

I'm in the middle of a 12 month apartment lease or what am i or holy crap what country am i going to go to and if i go back to my country then i can't even come here to interview for another job so like i can't lose this job and so i think people were often like really aggressive about keeping their job don't rock the boat and do as as good of a job as you possibly can and so it was like any any secondary objective like getting to know my co-workers was not part of the survival algorithm you know that's a very specific concern of a broader thing i was thinking about which is safety sometimes yeah groups will retreat to silence if they do not feel very safe and the fact that most of them have been there for five

plus years makes me think maybe that might not be as big of a deal hopefully they still they feel some amount of safety if they've worked together for for that long but i don't know you never know maybe they had a boss who made fun of them four and a half years ago or something maybe there's something they're trying to avoid and and building safety is hard and can often feel unpleasant and feels very thankless if other people are not interested in it you can kind of show some vulnerability but then if if it just flops then kind of feels worse than if you did nothing the other thought i had is have you seen that video it's one of the older youtube videos it's from like 15 years ago of there's a group of people sitting on a hill at some concert

and there's just one guy dancing wildly by himself surrounded by all these people sitting down watching the concert i don't know if i've seen and then after 30 seconds another guy joins him and also dances just very goofily just two goons having fun yeah and then slowly over the next minute or two more people trickle in and then by the end there's you can't even see them all on the camera there's like hundreds of people in this giant crowd just dancing wildly to the music wow and it all started from this one guy just going up there and being very weird never looking at him and saying ha look at that guy so weird look at him having fun how dare you have fun it's so weird i guess the point is you can change stuff if you're willing to be weird

for long enough yes so maybe four years is just not long enough to try to make small talk maybe If you try for five years, then the next person will join in. If there are two people, then it makes it a lot easier. Yeah. You could also just ask why. Hey, why don't you guys talk? And they'll be like, what are you talking about? Yeah, and nothing will guarantee more participation than...

Than accusing them of being weird for not talking. Yeah. I know what they'll do, which is say nothing in response. Yeah, I'll be like, hmm? I feel no obligation to respond to that question. Yeah. That doesn't sound like a technical question. Yeah.

You know, one thing that I saw gel teams that have all of the friction that I talked about before was in-person interactions. And it sounds like maybe you've been remote for these four years and it's been fully remote that whole time. Maybe it's time to push for an on-site where you all get together. That's a great point. Yeah, it can make it easier to work remotely if you've met each other in the face. All right, have we answered this question? I think so. Good luck.

It's a challenging one. And I think probably the most challenging part is actually convincing people that this matters. Because I think that they'll be like, well, what do you mean? I'm paid to do a job. Why do you care about my weekend? You know, like that's like the very extreme version of this. And it's hard to make a case to the business that this is actually important. Yeah.

I think the case is that a team that knows and cares about each other will work more effectively. You can convince management that they'll put in more hours if they feel obligated to support the rest of the team. I don't even think you have to convince management. I mean, they're the ones pushing like the team building exercises that people roll their eyes about. I feel like that's usually a true. The boots on the ground are skeptical of them. And management wants this.

It just feels good to walk around and look at your empire of happy people. Yeah. Productively collaborating people that I made happy. I made you happy. Yeah. Thanks to me for making you do that trust fall and building that tower out of marshmallows. That's the key to your happiness. So my life is filled with meaning.

All right. Have we answered this question? Yes. Dave, will you read our next one? Yes. This comes from an anonymous listener who says, a coworker told me that I should be having quarterly one-on-ones with my skip. Just as insert here, a skip or skip level is your manager's manager.

Okay. Quarterly one-on-ones with my skip to make sure they're aware of all the good stuff I've been up to and my goal of promotion. This sounds correct, but feels weird when I think about setting this up. I haven't had much direct communication with my skip just a few responses to his questions during design meetings but nothing else really how do I feel less weird about this we've talked about skip level meetings before as generally useful and a good thing to do and and what to say in them I don't think we've talked specifically about how do you set them up yeah I have a

suggestion which is you should talk to your manager about why you want to do this and get their backing because they're your skip level they're your manager's manager so your manager knows them better than you do and they can also help communicate to your skip level your skip to save some words which i will now ruin by saying even more words about saving words it'll take months to pay to break even now they're probably busy i think it's generally true that as you climb higher in the tree and have more nodes underneath you you have more demands on your time and have to be more explicit about saying no to things and and carving out time for things that are important on your calendar it can get full of stuff you feel like you have to do

but you don't want to do so i think having your manager's support is important to make this not a thing that they just say no i don't have time to do or that they can see some benefit for them in it how will this help them and their org to take this time with you yeah the fact is they probably want it and they're probably very happy to hear that team members are setting it up for them your manager or your skip your skip yeah your skip skippy as i like to call them to an extent right if you have skip level one-on-ones if you i don't know say there are 50 people underneath you in the tree and you've skipped level one-on-ones with them once a year that's still 50 extra meetings it's one that's true extra meeting once a week if it's once a quarter then now you got

what is that math 200 meetings so it does add up okay that just saying those numbers out loud it's staggering it's kind of discouraging but i i still think it's a good idea i think it's a good idea also for the skip level person to do it and if you can be someone they are interested in meeting with because you are uniquely talented or qualified or exciting or bring good questions like it can feel like a chore or it can be something you look forward to because you feel like the output is good and useful for you. Yeah. I mean, these meetings are, I believe that you cannot be an effective manager of managers without checking in with your team who are actually on the front lines of your organization regularly. Yeah. And my, my CEO is an excellent example of this. We have about

90, I think 93, 94 people in the company and he meets with every single one of them twice a year. Wow. And they're 15 minute meetings and he does some cool stuff by email to, to make them more effective so he can like read before he meets with them but it's really important and he gets some great insights and honestly it i think it's i think it's a really great thing so i'm trying to respond to the final question in this question which is how do i feel less weird about this i'll just tell you like i think that skip level managers who aren't doing this they're actually missing out and so you're helping your skip level manager do their job better. So part of it is a perspective shift. You're saying this is not an imposition on them.

This is something that should be helping them. Exactly. And they should already be doing this. So the fact that they're not, you're just going to help them out. Just tell them that in the first meeting. Say, hey, you should have been doing this, but I've helped you by scheduling these. You're not doing a good job, so I'm going to help you do a better job. Also, these meetings, I'll tell you, having now heard the feedback from my CEO, from many people, these are an opportunity for you to shine in the organization and it's just it's a crazy numbers game but you know my ceo like i said there's 90 something people in our company and so he tries really hard to know everyone individually but he really doesn't like it's it's kind of impossible to have

a deep personal relationship with 90s plus people at the same time it's just a lot it's too big yeah i think there's probably some there's some wikipedia page on that dunbar number or something but anyway it's too big and so by but by doing these little interactions my ceo forms opinions about people and he will regularly come to me and say dave this engineer on your team really impressive really cool and i'm like hey good good for them you know they they cracked the code they figured out what to say and how to approach the ceo in such a way that they now have a better reputation yeah and then what happens next year when i want to give that person a raise it's just that much easier for me i i don't have to go make a case i don't have to start from a cold

blank slate with the ceo and be like okay let me tell you all about this person let me give you seven reasons why they're deserving of a raise and etc but now i can just say hey remember so and so that you met with last year and you really liked oh yeah i remember them they need a raise great do it you know it's like so much easier it's also helpful for part of the role of your skip is to have a wider perspective and a longer term plan and a broader vision and make more bets on longer term things in general. And there's a type of work that you kind of normally do that's in your wheelhouse on the team. But if you're a skip, I guess we're just pitching why this is useful. So I don't know, you probably already know that you're trying to do it. It helps answer the

question, right? Like, how do I feel less weird about this? Well, here's all the reasons. Yeah, it gives your skip level an idea of how they could potentially allocate people around on teams or projects right if they know if they know you a little bit more they know your skills and they they think i have this i don't know experiment i want to try who can work on this in my org yeah aha i know i've had a couple meetings with this person i know that they are good at this kind of project they can get that from their managers the people that report to them and that's that's very common that you you would ask hey i need this kind of team who do you think would be a good fit but your own knowledge also helps yeah totally what kind of things would you

talk about with your skip level i would ask them if they have a burn book any cool gossip about yeah what's what's the scuttlebutt oh scuttlebutt is exactly the word i was hoping you'd say yeah what kind of things would i talk about i would i would say i would want to know what they think about the long-term priorities of the organization hopefully you know something about that but it it does get hard to keep track of like what what do you think is important for us to work on over the next couple of years and they might say the stuff in your roadmap but there's probably some other things too what are you worried about i don't know what's what's concerning to you or what what risks are you worried about yeah opportunities are ahead of us is there something

you feel like like the team that i'm on specifically could be doing better or or should be doing differently totally these are great questions and i think also just sharing some of the things you've been doing especially things that are kind of outside the ordinary you know i had a couple of team members who in their recent ceo one-on-ones shared some side projects they were working on that my CEO got really excited about. And it was great. Like that's what he thought to comment on after interviewing 90 something people.

Those are the ones that stood out for him to talk to me about. So if you're doing anything above and beyond or extraordinary for your team, this is a good chance to call it out. Yeah. How do you do that without feeling weird? I mean, if you're feeling weird about setting up a skip level meeting already,

I can imagine you would be the kind of person that would also feel weird about saying, check out all these cool things I did that you just might not know about this. Check out how cool I am. Exactly. a way i've seen this dealt with is if you are just excited about the thing you made not about how cool you are for making it i think that's that feels a lot better exactly on both sides

if it's check out this awesome project not aren't i a good employee for having done this thing that you might not know about yeah exactly it's i'm really excited about observability and i was playing with this distributed tracing thing and so i'm setting up this pipeline to put it into these systems that our team owns and isn't this cool yeah exactly like here are some things i've been working on that are pretty interesting to me and i thought you might like to know about it tell them that if you want to know how to how to set this up say i listened to this podcast and dave and jameson said i should do this so also if you would like to listen here's the link and if you want to also make it mandatory for your whole team in org then that'd be cool too exactly

you can use that as a script perfect what could go wrong well have we answered this question I think so. Good luck. Go forth and do your skip level one-on-one. Yep. What can people do if they want their own questions answered? Go to softskills.audio and click the ask a question button where you can fill out our little form. We must, we are obligated to say thank you, thank you, thank you for everyone who has done that. And even if I wasn't obligated, I would still say it. Without obligation, I say thank you anyways. Nice. Thank you so much for listening. We will catch you next week.

We'll be right back.