Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 50: I Didn't Quit and Manager of Zero People

Episode Date: March 7, 2017

Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I didn’t quit my job. Did I mess up? I was hired to manage a team, but it is actually just me. What do I do?

It takes more than great code to be a great engineer. This is episode 50 of the Soft Skills Engineering Podcast. I am your host, Jameson Dance. I'm your host, Dave Smith. And there are no other hosts. There are no more words to say or hosts to announce. Yeah, we have stuff to announce. Do you want to kick it off, Dave?

Yeah, sure. So we do not have a sponsor for this episode, and we wanted to let you know that if you would like to sponsor this episode, you can. but also we're fine not having a sponsor at all and we think you're probably fine with that too but i think um just know that if we take on a sponsor it's only because it's someone that we really think is super cool and that you would really like so that's it there's just no sponsor sponsored by the love that dave and i have for you yeah uh we do want to tell you about a podcast that we enjoy though um this is a podcast called greater

than code. They do stories about people behind technology. And they also focus a lot on the human side, kind of like we do, but with a slightly different tack. They do stories about diversity, inclusivity and accessibility from people that you often don't hear from. And you can find it in your favorite podcasting app or greater than code.com. Check it out. And then we have a story from a listener, I believe. Yes, this is a good one. A couple episodes ago, we talked about death marches and somebody wrote in with this i guess it's kind of a funny story and with a little bit of sadness but with a happy ending about a death march a black comedy story you might say a what a black you haven't heard black comedy it's like no uh like a dark comedy

i don't i don't know like a comedy where bad things happen but they're funny bad things no i've never heard of that okay well bad things don't happen to dave so he's not familiar with that concept why would i even laugh at that i'm so uncultured okay this comes from a listener named marcos marcos says oh guys i love your show we love you too marcos he says it's my favorite podcast by far okay marcos you're just you're kissing our butts a little too much we're blushing i was laughing hard with your episode about the death march last night while working out i have a good one about a self-inflicted mini death march during the planning of a task the boss and another developer decided they wanted to build something a certain way and i was strongly

opposed the solution i proposed was estimated to take about two weeks but they decided to build it differently the project went from two weeks to three months at the end i had to get involved in the project in order to help the other developer because the deadline was way overdue the feature was built so badly that there was no way to make it work i worked lots of hours to help them and I was so pissed that I love that I was so pissed off that on a Thursday I decided to destroy the whole feature and rebuild it I think I've seen the same scene play out in Dragon Ball Z this is like anime software development or something just use your rage yeah you got angry enough your power level increased and then yeah that's how it goes okay so Marcos continues

I spent Thursday Friday Saturday and Sunday rebuilding it on the next Monday the feature was completed and was running 100x faster without errors and the customer was pleased with the new results it happened over three years ago and i've made over a thousand jokes poking the boss and the other developer about it we are great friends by the way i have never stepped over the line making fun of them also i started listening to your podcast in a period of my professional career where i was just promoted to team leader you guys have helped me so much thanks each episode gets better than the prior one man marcos so far you are overly nice yeah this is not necessarily monotonically increasing in the better category yeah we'll see and he signs it much love from

the dominican republic thanks marcos yeah thank you so much so if you are really confused about what this podcast is actually about we are a q a advice show for developers about non-technical things uh so we have some q's and we will give some a's right now here is here's our first question this is from an anonymous listener hello i am from brazil and i was on a quest to find a wombat friendly workplace i hope that that shows up in the new joel test is your office wombat friendly yeah because my boss is a micromanager i really and i really enjoy working remotely my current job is in an office and the home office is the natural habitat of wombats um i am in the job application process with a remote work company but after listening to soft skills engineering i

decided to talk with my current manager first after the talk she gave me a raise and i will now work from home it worked out i am unsure if i made the right decision because i will probably pass on the remote work company and they're really cool did i make the right decision of not running from my problems at my current company where i've only been for six months sincerely young mom bat if if you're wondering what the wombat reference was you'll have to go back a couple episodes yeah uh npm is a tech company that has a womba as their mascot so maybe they're like a secret sponsor of us or something so secret that they don't actually pay us yeah and they probably don't know we exist either okay so he didn't take the soft skills

engineering advice of quitting your job they took some of the advice and it led to them getting a raise and working from home which is great yeah that'll be 10 please um i well first of all it's unclear to me if they are still interviewing with this remote work job and i would say 100 finish the interview process like you you have a legitimate interest in working there and i don't think it's disingenuous to just complete that even if you decide to stay at your current job because things got better there it can only give you more information about salary and benefits and what the market is like and yeah and and if they reject you you don't want to like prematurely rage quit your current job and then find out you can't unflip that table

that was good thank you so six months feels feels a little bit rushed to me what about you yeah it it definitely could especially if things are improving if it's about the trajectory yeah and i guess it depends on how much experience they have i mean they say young wombat but in maybe wombat years are different yeah from human years that's exactly what i was thinking it's like dog years but the opposite where they they age slowly huh so i i would say six months it might be a little bit rushed if it's like your first real programming job then six months might not be that long but even if it's your first job six months still feels a little bit fast especially since you just got a raise you got to work remotely which are the two main reasons you

cited or the one main reason you cited for wanting to go to the other job it seems like uh i would i would hang out for a little while also if this other company gives you an offer you might be able to decline it now and go back to them in six months time and say hey remember that offer i'm ready to accept it now obviously they won't just say okay start tomorrow but you could you could reopen that conversation and there's in my experience there's a pretty good chance that they will come back to you for example a friend of mine interviewed at google last year and they made him an offer and he decided to not take the offer but they went out of their way to say hey this offer is good for i think they said a year they said at any point in the next year you can

just accept the offer and start so it's out there it can happen but they're basically always hiring an infinite number of developers yes comparing this company to google may not be the most accurate google's on the list of companies you can't compare yourself to also if it's a smaller company odds are they're hiring and then they will stop hiring once they achieve once they fill some position yeah so that might not work why so i'm curious why if they end up getting the offer and it's legitimately better and they want to work there why shouldn't they take it oh i sorry if i if i suggested that i i didn't mean to i think in that case take it go okay like if if everything is aligned you want to work there you're excited by the by the job it's you know it meets your

requirements of working from home it's good money why not go for it yeah to me it feels like there there's a hidden third requirement where uh they they describe the remote work company as cool and so they want to work from home they want more money and then they secretly also want to work somewhere cool and they got the work from home part they got the more money part but maybe they feel like the place they work isn't as cool maybe it's like enterprisey boring software or just a culture i don't know maybe maybe the remote work is at a more well-known company that has like cachet in the developer community and maybe we're reading into that word a little too much maybe he literally needs a colder ambient temperature for wombat environment yeah actually

that's true and yeah so in that case it's like uh that's a benefit where you have to take some of your salary right now and invest it in refrigeration technology and that could be freed up by working at a colder place and they are from brazil parts of brazil get cold but i've lived there for a while it's pretty hot it did not get cold where i lived so if you are concerned about the cool thing i would say um cool can be won and lost pretty quickly and it also is not a replacement for like a valuable solid legit business um there are plenty of cool businesses that with like their cool sunglasses on crash and burn and go out of business and ruin people's lives and then there are lots of boring

businesses that make money and allow their employees to have productive happy lives also there's a lot of different dimensions of cool like oh yeah cool product or is it a cool environment or is it cool we'll just look at haircuts like undercuts are cool now and mullets were cool 20 years ago and that's way different so it's so it can be it can be kind of a fickle thing yeah well that's partially joking but partially not tech tech cool is very fickle and and there's as much fashion in that as there is in any other kind of cool when exactly were mullets cool well i had a mullet in the late 80s early 90s so that's when they were cool so by definition they were cool whenever you had it yeah no they were cool in the 80s there actually

there's been a slight mullet comeback and then i think it's faded away a little bit too but okay uh if you want to talk more about men's hairstyle i'm happy to do that on a different podcast soft hair engineering um we're taking sponsors for that one right now yeah that one yeah we're even at like l'oreal and other big shampoo companies um there are things that you could potentially do to make your company cooler also i know one thing that i always thought was cool is if a company had a developer blog and i was wanting to work at a company that had that was like known to developers and not every company is targeting developers as their customer base github needs a developer blog because developers are their customers but also github wants to hire

developers so there's there's multiple motivations for appearing cool to developers and if you can if you can make the case that it'll help with hiring then you can you can invest some time into writing a developer blog or doing whatever cool thing that that you think will make your company cooler if there's a way to make it pay back for the company then that's something you could also uh encourage them to do so you can invest in the cool so why not make your company cool without leaving yeah that's that's what i'm saying maybe the cool is inside you all along yeah just needs to be unleashed yeah yeah the answer was cool all right yeah that's that's all i have anything else dave no i think the question has been answered question answered good luck yeah

Good luck finding a Wombat-friendly workplace and making all your wildest dreams come true. Yeah. Okay. Should I read the next question? Please do. Okay. This comes from an anonymous listener, and he wrote, he or she wrote, I recently left a pretty good agency job to take on a technical leadership role in a very young startup publishing company.

The work started off interesting with the promise of getting to build my team, but a few months in it feels like upper management may be content with an engineering team of one parenthetical note me which means that i'm a quote manager of zero engineers and stuck as the only technical member of the team do you have any advice on how to approach this with my boss and at what point it seems reasonable to take the time-honored soft skills engineering advice of quit your job and get a new one i feel bad abandoning the startup especially since i'm the only technical team member but i also feel like i was bait and switched when they recruited me hmm well but at least you're a manager yeah i was gonna say you got the title put it on your

linkedin profile so my question is i wonder if the reason they haven't hired a team for you is because you are just so incredibly productive that they were like we thought we would need a whole team of engineers but our new manager is doing all the work himself this is great we found them the mythical 10x developer observe in their natural habitat who needs a team of 10 when you have a 10xer yeah so this sounds weird to me senior manager or upper management sounds like multiple people to me and it's weird that there's a multiple people upper management team and a one person engineering team well it might not be that weird it's a publishing company so it might not be a

technology product development company yeah that's what i was going to ask is is it a tech focused company or are you supporting like physical infrastructure or something like that also they just might not have any money if things aren't going as well as they wanted to then maybe their growth plans are not coming to pass maybe you have stumbled upon the truth of this company yeah the reason they didn't hire is they actually wish they hadn't hired you because they can barely make payroll it's i think it's completely fair to tell them hey you hired me to manage i'm so good at that and i'm not doing it and my skills are going to waste like when yeah when can we build the team i think you're under utilizing me you know yeah yeah you're

you're paying for value that you are not getting out of me this despite the fact that i am the mythical 10x developer i am a 100x manager yeah wait wait until you see me manage yeah these gantt charts will make you weep they'll be so beautiful yeah i think just point blank asking them about it doesn't seem weird to me yeah that's a come across as adversarial or combative um but i mean i think this is coming from a genuine place of curiosity for you and i would try to couch it that way like hey i'm curious we talked about building a team when i started that doesn't seem to be happening what's going on yeah especially because they explicitly recruited you into this role if it happens pretty often that roles change

from what the company thinks they need when they're hiring or what they say they need especially for startup yeah yeah especially at small startups but i feel like there's an expectation that like it should still be something you like to do and if you get hired to do software development and then you move into like printer cartridge replacement and you just hate it then i don't know you don't have to stay working there just because they hired you that's i would sit down with them and say look from one manager to another and then just start laughing oh here's what you do okay you you talk about all the things that your team needs because you're you're hired to like build and manage the team and uh it'll sound sound less

whiny when you're just saying like it's hard for me you can say my team is really struggling because they they are underutilized and also also they don't have a ball pit and my team is suffering from an existential crisis i like that so we we touched on budget a few minutes ago and um when you're building a team it's there's a huge component to the hiring process that includes budget and having helped participate in that project in that process at my last company for several years i know that there was approval that had to be granted before we could open um requisitions and start hiring engineers and it was like it was a negotiation process between engineering and finance to say

how many heads that's the accounting term how many heads can we hire this year and we we were kept to that and if we tried to hire beyond that they would just not approve the offers so there's a budget question that needs to be answered here and maybe you could just approach it from that perspective and say hey what's my hiring budget for the year how many heads can i hire and then start the process yourself maybe they're waiting for you to do that um and you just haven't done it yet because you were hoping that they would initiate the process i thought you were gonna hire yeah that sounds like the i don't know what are what what are they doing then if they're just like waiting for stuff to happen sounds like they're probably building stuff right i mean they're like

the whole engineering department no no i mean what's the executive oh what's what's the executive team doing if they're just like sitting there twiddling their thumbs like man it's like a game of chicken yeah we could really use a product blink first to say hey we need to hire people maybe they just all really hate hiring also it could be um it might not be budget issues it might be that they just feel like progress is going fast enough that they don't have a giant list i'm saying this and it sounds weird i know i've never seen this in real life i was like what maybe they just don't have stuff they want done maybe they're fine with how the technical stuff works and with the progress and it's going okay for them the conversations that i've had about

hiring with management in the past have gone something like this i show management this gigantic backlog of product features that they want to have developed and then i say with our current heads that's again the accounting term and i kind of throw up in my mouth every time i say that with our current heads you'll get this done by x date and then i say if you let me hire three engineers we can get this done three months earlier you know yeah that may be a conversation you need to have yeah you should also think about the future like is this business going to expand and have a greater engineering need in the future and if you have a fully ramped engineering staff ready to go when that growth phase hits then you'll be in a much better shape to ride the

wave instead of getting drowned by the wave yeah i was going to mention the old mythical man month when you brought up the hire three engineers get stuff done three months faster thing because that's uh fred brooks wrote a famous uh book called the mythical man month in which he coined the analogy that um you can one woman can have a baby in nine months and nine women cannot have a baby in one month and often that means you can't just like add more people to a project to make it go faster right away it i think it it takes a while for those people to spin up so even if you don't have a ton of over an overwhelming amount of work right now if you see more work coming ahead of you you really need to invest in that to give those people time to become productive yeah well anything

else you want to say it seems like talking to them is is completely appropriate in the situation and if they're not going to use your skills and they're not growing and that's where your skills are useful and where you're happiest then i think it's fine to leave yeah totally i wouldn't do not worry about leaving them in a lurch if they got you into the company on us on one premise and that premise is no longer true then it's on them and it's not your problem at all to walk away and they i don't think they'll take it personally yep i mean they might yeah but they won't be that competent in like hunting you down and punishing you because they don't sound that competent anyways so maybe yeah maybe um but this the fact that you don't know why you're not hiring

is to me a red flag that there's a conversation that needs to happen and try to try to root cause how this situation came to be and maybe someone gave you this information during the interview process who actually didn't know or maybe they just had bad information that changed the day after your interview yeah i think you should figure it out yep i agree all right question answered question answered dave where can people go if they want to hear more from us you should visit the worldwide web which is a cluster of connected devices that serve hypertext uh with a transfer protocol usually version 1.1 and you should get the page at softskills.audio um that's that is how you should do it i think do you skip dns how are they gonna know how to

do it if you don't explain dns oh i skipped arp too crap oh no oh man forget it i think there's a julia evans zine that can explain that whole process that's true i would love to see one on like gopher because i just hear about it and i don't understand it it was before my time yeah uh yeah we have our website that has all our past episodes soft skills.audio we have our twitter account soft skills eng where we tweet out new episodes we tweet out uh wise things and announcements actually we do have an announcement that we tweeted out on that we are going to be at ng conf in salt lake city yes doing a live show that's right that's about a month right yes it is april 5th 6th and 7th we'll be there and on the 6th recording a show in the afternoon

and if you would like to join us and have your question answered and allow us to ask follow-up questions so it's like a q and a and a q and an a and a q and a all in one uh please contact us send us a direct message on twitter or fill in our form on softskills.audio and tell us you'd like to participate we've already had one person reach out to us from twitter i'm sure more people will participate about the live show yeah yeah we have cool are tickets still on sale for ng conf or those no they sold out in like 30 seconds you know six months ago or something well if you are one of those lucky few we'll we'll post the podcast recording of it too but if you're going to be there we would love to meet you yeah come on over um we'll be recording in the afternoon on

thursday so uh come say hello and and come join us on the show and if you want to ask non-live questions you can send them to the form that is on our website uh you can include as much or as little detail on there as you would like you can also send them in a just a tweet or a direct message and uh we we would love to hear from you also if you enjoy the show please please please recommend it to people tweet about it rate us on itunes rate us in whatever podcast app you use it helps more people find the show and and we really enjoy growing the audience yeah because our egos are insatiable and can never be satisfied they are both insatiable and unsatisfiable yes yeah yeah just make that number insatiable and jameson's is not satisfiable yeah in like the

computer science unsatisfiable way or oh i don't know what that is oh well that's a different podcast um yeah tell tell your friends about it and uh stroke jameson's ego yep all right thank you for listening we'll catch you next week