Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 51: Junior Scrum Master In Trouble And Jamison Has No Degree

Episode Date: March 15, 2017

Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I’m a junior developer on a team of seniors, and I’m also the Scrum Master. Our team has lots of problems. What do I do? Jamison openly talks about not finishing his degree. How did he put it on his resume or explain it to potential employers? In question two Jamison discovers he has been lying on his LinkedIn profile for half a decade, and freaks out a little bit. The mistake is corrected, but can the damage ever be undone? Tune in next week on SOFT SKILLS ENGINEERING.

It takes more than great code to be a great engineer. This is Soft Skills Engineering, episode 51. I'm your host, Dave Smith. I'm your host, Jameson Dance. Soft Skills Engineering is a advice show for engineers. We will advise you in a second, but first we have a couple little announcements. One is we want to talk about a podcast that we like.

It's called Elm Town. It's definitely a technical podcast, so don't be, I don't know, thrown off by that If you think the only podcasts out there are non-technical, it's about the Elm programming language, which is a really cool little, little language that I use and love. And it's by a good friend of mine. You can check them out at elmtown.github.io or in your favorite podcasting app. They just kind of talk about the Elm community, about cool projects that people are doing

with Elm. And they also do a lot of, um, just kind of introduction to how to build things or do common tasks in Elm. Cause it's still a pretty young community. So check out Elm town. Cool. We also have a comment from a listener today. This comes from Daniel in Canada who says,

I just listened to episode 47 and I wanted to let you know that in Canada, the government provides salary statistics for each job for each city and it's a very useful resource. Thanks, Daniel. I just typed in Daniel. Doesn't show me how much Daniel makes. But still useful. still useful but not not exactly what i was hoping to get yeah i was hoping for more of a

stalking tool and less of a general information tool but this is this is okay i guess all right should we get to our first question yes you want to read it for us yeah this is from listener awais ali sorry for mispronouncing your name i'm sure oh i'm a junior dev on a team of about six with six projects happening simultaneously my boss wants us to adopt scrum capital s scrum and has chosen me as scrum master capital s scrum capital m master i have less than a year of experience and this is my first job we've done two sprints and they haven't gone well at all we haven't done a proper sprint planning the end of the sprint was dropped and meetings devolve into long technical discussions i'm not the best moderator and i find it hard to interrupt the

senior engineers i'm trying my best to encourage scrum adoption in the team however this has proven to be difficult since half the team members are disinterested and the product owner doesn't seem to be following the quote rules of scrum furthermore most examples of scrum i read about are one team one project but we are one team and six projects how can i help my team adopt scrum or rather should we even be doing scrum at all and then this is in parentheses it feels like we shouldn't um uh i first want to focus on how did you get chosen as scrum master was there some kind of challenge or is this like a birthright position or was there divine revelation in yeah involved what do you well okay i know nothing about capital s scrum besides what i've like

absorbed from just working in programming i've never like read a book or taken a class or been certified or anything my impression is there's some dysfunction here and that dysfunction has been crammed into a scrum shaped box and then the expectation is like now it will work but i don't think there are any that is so i don't think there are any rules that are boxes that will just like fix a dysfunctional team so maybe we should find a different shaped box and cram the dysfunction yeah exactly maybe the problem is scrum is wrong but xp the xp shaped box will fit us better or yeah the one team six projects thing sounds weird the meetings devolving into long technical discussions i don't think that's a scrum specific problem but it definitely

happens yeah everywhere and sounds equally bad in both scrum and non-scrum i don't know just sounds bad overall and and scrum surprise surprise scrum is not fixing the badness magically by itself so here's one thing i know about scrum and actually i know this about every single development methodology on earth and that is that if your team isn't all in agreement and on board it's going to go badly and i don't care if it's scrum xp cmmi level 5 you know whatever if people don't agree on what the rules of the process are then it's not going to go good and i'm seeing some of that here like he says the product owner doesn't follow the rules he says the engineers didn't really have a sprint planning before they started the sprint right and here he

is one year what is he one year of experience and trying to manage all this very very challenging yeah that makes sense it seems like this kind of process stuff is easy to sabotage yes even on accident yeah yeah you mentioned the the meeting moderator thing and that's definitely a skill that you can improve at i can see why it would be hard to interrupt people especially if you are a more junior developer and there are senior engineers on the team um but the the thing that helps me so normally i avoid confrontation at at great cost to myself and others but some there's like a little flip that switches inside of me when i'm in a meeting and i become the incredible jameson hulk and just like get so

grumpy and upset that i'm in a meeting that i'll just like interrupt people and cut them off and be a jerk but you can do that nicely in a way that moves the meeting forward and and i think the key is to recognize what is the point of this meeting and if the point is to have long technical discussions then that's great yeah and if it isn't then you're wasting everyone's time by by doing those in that meeting and so uh your your job is to like defend everyone's time right if they're having this long technical discussion even if it's productive for those people everyone else is just sitting there twiddling their thumbs waiting for them to finish yeah and it just like kind of drags everything down so you you have to like defend the time of

the team yeah i like with the scrum master sword that's right the sword that you pulled out of the scrum rock yeah the scrum rock wouldn't it be the scrum stone oh of course it would of course it would i think when you're in a meeting and you're wondering if the meeting or rather no you're not wondering you know that it's gone off track and now you feel like your job is to bring it back on track, I have found that a good way to do that is to ask the question, hey, are we on track for the purpose of this meeting? Another way to ask that that's a little more gentle is to say, hey, should we schedule a separate time to go down this line of thinking and go deeper into it? And then I think that will jolt people into realizing that the meeting has gone off track

and to give them a nice way to say, yeah, I think we should schedule another time. and then you can get back to the topic at hand and you can do that even as a junior developer because you're expected to ask questions like that like it can come from a place of genuine curiosity like are we on track is this is this how this is supposed to go and they'll answer hopefully honestly yeah yeah there's this weird thing that happens in meetings where everyone once you're in the meeting room it's okay to waste people's time yeah but it's it's not okay or there it feels less okay to say like hey you're wasting people's time yeah that's interesting but i don't know it's fine you just might get a reputation for being grumpy in meetings like

but they sure go faster when you walked in that meeting door you checked your right to have useful time spent at the door and now i'm going to use all the time on this outlook calendar event yeah yeah how how would you approach solving this problem say it's it does sound like they're not all bought into scrum would you say buying in all the way is the answer or would you say scrum will not save you fix some other problems first i think step one is to get a very nicely printed out maybe embossed copy of the agile manifesto put it behind glass get a nice frame and just carry it around with you everywhere and then anytime anything goes wrong just hold it up yeah that's your sword and

and and then i think that'll solve everything just just kind of aim it at the person so the sunlight reflects off the glass and gets them right in the eyes that's the laser pointer you put you'll smite them with the sword of the agile manifesto i think um i think it's i think it's really hard to change an organization if you've identified dysfunction especially if you're not at the head of the organization and in this case you've you've got the title of scrum master capital s capital m but you don't really have authority you're not signing anyone's paychecks and you're not making important like team decisions right there are

other people who are usually in that role so it's tough which means you have to influence from the sidelines so what direction would you influence them in i think some of it would i mean we talked about like making the meetings more efficient that'd be cool but some of the other issues are they aren't doing planning uh it sounds like they're just having problems communicating with the product team and about what they're going to do which is also broadly bad and then they just have a lot of stuff they're supposed to do all at once six projects and one team scrum is not going to fix that problem yeah that's really hard but i think the other stuff can be fixed at least one way to start with that would be to sit everyone down in a room and say this is scrum lay it out

for them here is how scrum works we start with a planning meeting we're going to do this every sprint the end goal is x we're going to you know have like a demo at the end of every sprint maybe set up a demo meeting at the end of each sprint and everyone needs to buy into this and this needs to come not from the scrum master but rather from the person who's responsible for this team the scrum master is really there to help make sure the process runs smoothly the scrum master is not there to define the process you know what i mean well i don't because i don't know anything about scrum but now i do so i would probably sit down privately with your manager first and say here's what i understand scrum to be is this your understanding make sure that they are bought in

get the product owner in the room as well and then sit down with the rest of the team and have them lay that out and say okay your new scrum master here is going to be the person to help us shepherd this process and make sure that we follow it and because what i'm hearing reading between the lines here is that people are not bought in you know you probably have a bunch of people who have done things one way for a long time and they're like this newfangled scrum business isn't going to save us and they're right right i mean they're right about that but you need you need to get the team harmonized on this idea if it's going to be successful because there's a thousand ways for to fail yeah i think that i am more broadly skeptical of process probably because i haven't

worked at a company large enough that i mean if if you have a thousand engineers you need some way to organize that and i can't fathom what that would be like so i just kind of like look at all this stuff and sneer at it and and make fun of how it all came out of this agile manifesto that's like a paragraph long yeah so my my inclination would be more to attack like the product owner doesn't seem to have a clear direction of what you should be working on um and you can impose scrum rules on that but it doesn't i don't know that the scrum rules will solve that problem and then the our team has six different projects we're all supposed we're supposed to be working on all at once uh which means like i don't know your team has six people so there's maybe like

one person on each project in the sprint or you're just like bouncing back and forth between projects with each card or yeah i don't know it just you have no focus on your team and scrum isn't gonna fix that either just by more efficiently planning and tracking what you're working on you'll still be spread across six different things so i totally agree with all that i think you're you're right and that might i can't remember but that might actually be a violation of one of the scrum tenets oh so you're saying by sitting down and defining the scrum process you will you will end up attempting to solve that maybe maybe i don't know i i can't actually remember they they mentioned it in the question they say most examples of scrum i read about our

one team one project yeah yeah okay so i think if i were you like coming bringing the conversation back now down to what do you do junior scrum master i would actually ask my manager this very pointed question which is why did you choose me as scrum master what are you hoping to get out of this and to not have to be scrum master i asked everyone else and they all said no no but really i mean what what is your manager hoping to get out of this situation maybe you were chosen because they see it as like a development opportunity for you maybe they see the role of scrum master as something different from what you see it as and what the books say it should be and it would be really good to know what what that is so that you can

try to deliver what your manager wanted yeah i think the theme here is communication yeah but but more specifically i think it's about expectations i think we have people operating independently probably everyone with good intentions and wondering why no one gets what they want at the end of the day yeah so like communication about the expectations that each person on this group in this group has of the other people to me the the reason to adopt a process like this is that it would solve some problems you're having that you're trying to do something you encounter some pain and then you say like okay we're having a really hard time figuring out when we're going to be done with projects let's look at some process that puts

more emphasis on estimation or we're having a really hard time uh we we deliver features and then customers don't actually want them so how can we get more customer feedback earlier on or something like yeah but i guess i keep harping on this point it just feels like they they just had some developers and we're like we'll just dump some scrum juice on them and that'll it'll work yeah it could very well be but you can make that scrum juice more potent and then maybe it will help we're kind of just crapping all over we're kind of just crapping all over this question you know no no i don't know just scrum not the question oh right i think so many people are in

this boat where they're they're following some like capital p process and turns out it still sucks yeah yeah and i'm trying to think of like a non-snarky way to talk someone out of a situation like that you know like how do you besides just saying well of course a good process will isn't going to make dumb engineers smart like that's the classic line right yeah say that in your next meeting don't don't say that in your next meeting but how do we how do you get out of a situation like this besides you know besides yeah quitting your job get a new one and now you can put scrum master on your resume so yeah it is way easier yeah it's way easier to take pot shots at it It is.

It's on the side. And I think you were on to something, Jameson, when you said that when a team selects a process, it's usually because they had a problem that they were trying to solve. And sometimes that problem is very subtle. Like, hey, we're spending too much time deliberating about how to proceed on these things that should be just automatic procedures. And Scrum can come in and resolve a lot of that because it's like, look, you're going to do iterations.

They're going to be this long. there's a clearly stated objective at the beginning of the iteration and you're supposed to deliver that by the end um you know and it sounds like in this team those things have not been enumerated and agreed upon by the whole team so i would start there start with the why once you've understood the why then these things need to be laid out clear write them down put them in like a presentation and get the whole team in a room and and sign off on this thing and then proceed and then and then tailor it and always say you know in a few months if this isn't working we can adjust it and then have an adjustment meeting in a few months and say you know how did it go

over the last couple months what are we doing and and can we do it better that sounds great that sounds like it would help uh in in lots of situations it feels like there's the negative way you could look at it where it's like these pointy haired bozos are just trying to make us jump through all these hoops but your solution gets around that and and it involves the team in and and shows them why which i think that's that's the cure for a lot of like resentment about process things yeah this is what problem it's solving and in the meantime you have this nice title of scrum master which i'm pretty sure gives you a lot of authority to do things like say hey senior engineer get my coffee scrum master needs their coffee

talk about yourself in the third person yes with your name with your title yes yeah all that kind of stuff do not miss this opportunity yeah yep all right with that the question has clearly been answered we shoved that question into a scrum shaped box and put a bow we did uh let's do our next question dave do you want to read this one i totally do this comes from a listener named matt matt says jameson openly talks about not finishing his degree how did he put it on his resume or explain it to potential employers so we've talked about this uh a couple different times i feel like but i haven't ever maybe i have i don't know i'll tell the whole story and then i'll try and answer the question uh i started college then i took some time off

and traveled the world fabulously for a couple years and then i came back and just took a computer science class i liked it uh it was super hard but it was really engaging to me so i switched my major to computer science and then i started working on campus as a webmaster which is the coolest title i've ever had webmaster i wish more things were called webmaster still is it like scrum master but for webs i did not have the sword what i had was a php my admin console to our my sql database did you print out a copy of the http rfc and frame it and like shine it in people's eyes no i missed that opportunity dang i will now though to make up for it uh and then i worked in a in a research lab doing some scientific programming and then i worked still as a student off campus at

a radar manufacturing company and then it was april of 2012 i was about to graduate uh one of my classmates told me about this cool job offer or this cool place that he worked and i was a little unhappy at at the place i was currently working uh so i ended up interviewing and getting a job there and they told me hey like you're hired you're you're you're hired full-time you get all these benefits when you come on full-time we understand you're still about to graduate so you can't come on full-time for a little while um and i decided hold on how far away were you from graduation at this point i was like a month or two wait a minute you literally only had a month of classes left no no it was like one more i had two classes left oh i don't think i

was taking those two classes so you had at least one more semester of time of calendar time to finish your degree yeah yeah that's right so i wouldn't have graduated in april i would have graduated i would have done those in like a summer or a spring term or something like that but anyways uh okay i decided instead of going to school full-time in a spring term and taking those two classes i would just start working full-time right away take those two classes online and then graduate and it turns out if you just never log into your online classes like nothing happens oh you don't no one comes and knocks on your door and it's not like you were going to go seek out that confrontation right

no heck no that would be against my nature so i just like never ever logged into my online classes and i worked full-time and had a great time at work and i i i ended up not finishing those two classes yet i still may someday i just had this vision of like two police officers knocking on your door and you're opening it and they're like are you jamison dance oh no it says here you haven't logged into your online class in two months i actually live in constant fear of that happening with like cable bills or taxes or like medical bills i'm just worried i've forgotten something crucial that i'll soon be dragged into jail for or the online class police yeah yeah but i the point is i was i was definitely in the cs grad pipeline right like i all i was in classes

with CS majors uh going to career fairs like companies are interested in hiring people that look like what I looked like for entry-level jobs so it wasn't like I just took some sociology credits and then dropped out and then was like oh I want to program now um I I did enough to get like the career the early career benefits of graduating with a CS degree and then the company that hired me just didn't care about degrees at all they hired some people out of high school some people some other people were dropouts like it was just a small startup that was pretty informal that cared a lot more about getting stuff done than degrees did any of the developers have a cs degree yeah yeah a few of them did but it was probably like half or less okay i'd say some of

that was uh people were younger at that company than at other places i've worked and some of it was they just hired lots of people that didn't have cs degrees when you applied for that job through your friend did you give them a resume that said i'm a student in a computer science program i did and i i imagine that helped get me through some early screening if i had just up and applied out of nowhere without that then maybe it would have been different but also i i knew my friend who worked at the company yeah yeah the the real thing they did ask me i still remember they asked me some whiteboard question about like finding pairs of numbers in an array that added up to a certain number and i don't even remember how i did but i remember it was

like vaguely cse um in in the very unpopular way right yeah i took a i took a class on that actually on on adding up no pairs of numbers in an array yeah specifically in an array there was a different class for linked lists with pairs of numbers but yeah huh well i'll never know that thing because i'm not going to take that class you could take it online i sure could i'll sign up right now um yeah so and then i worked at that first company long enough to get enough experience and enough like connections and enough stuff to look good on my resume that it has never been an issue since then so do you i mean i'm sure there are probably some jobs that are closed off to me because i don't have a degree but i also probably don't want to work at those places so yeah like

i'm fine with that like college professor for example yeah yeah but maybe you could do sociology college professor is that a sick burn in sociology so um after you finished your first job did you take the cs thing off your resume i think my i don't think i've gotten a job because of a resume do you do you even have a resume i do there's something on linkedin uh i don't know it just says what does it say on linkedin i'm gonna find out if i'm committing fraud right now If it says I graduate or not. It says like a start and end date.

You're like, I did end my time at college. Yeah. That's honest. Yeah, I don't know. I can say though, I haven't like just submitted a resume and then started an interview process from that. So this question doesn't apply to me that much. Oh, it says bachelor's of science.

Yes, computer science. I sure don't have one of those. I'm pretty sure I'm going to jail now because I just submitted that on air. Hey, listeners, can we just keep this between us? I really couldn't. I couldn't do this show alone, and I don't think you can do this from prison. Okay, I'm going to add to the description right now.

Hey, I actually never graduated yet. Well, there you go. Yeah, that sounds professional, right? Well, is your boss going to fire you now? I will check. Hey, are you going to fire me? Nope, I'm not going to fire you. Awesome.

you got lucky this time yeah well there you go i do know 100 that i have not misled an employer about having a degree because this has come up in the conversations i've had with employers but but they were all through personal connections yeah yeah they they don't care about the people that i worked with didn't care about a degree i have had the same experience by the way except for my very first job right out of college i don't think any other employer has really considered my degree or where i went to college or what kind of gpa that i got it's just not something that they care about what do i do do i just click delete i don't know how to handle this now poor jameson is in this ethical quandary this is from 2012 so i'm pretty sure i updated this

in 2012 when i was like yeah i'll graduate i'll just take these summer classes yeah yeah uh year expected what if i change it to 2017 maybe this is the year i'll take these classes and then i've been in school for the last 10 years 12 years oh 12 2005 is when i start i took two years off and then i also took a long time to graduate because i switched my major a bunch of times and then i didn't end up graduating this is a lot of detail about my educational experience is this helpful i mean yeah how does this matter to people like i'm just rambling about myself and i feel pretty stupid i know i'm not laughing at you i am okay uh

i am very convincing i am enjoying i read a funny joke in this other tab i have open let's let's settle down a little bit i did not finish my degree how did i put it on my resume or explain it to employers it only matters for your first employer if you can get the first job it doesn't matter after that if you are networking well that is what i would say this is true for i think the vast majority of developers there is obviously a subset of people who will be exempt from this rule people who have degrees with emphases and very specific things like natural language processing or something that's like highly tailored for a particular job yeah like data science and ai stuff that yeah those positions are pretty gate kept by degrees i think

still exactly but for i would like data science boot camps and yeah i don't think it's hard and fast yeah it's it's i think it's only a matter of time before even specialties become open to everyone so anyway i think that i think we answered the question which is basically you know huh what was your experience not having a college degree and getting started out in the industry and uh we had some good giggles along the way and identified that jameson has been lying to the internet i've been lying on my on my linkedin profile for the past five years what do i well i'm going to turn it around to you dave what do i do now do i delete this do i do i put a note in there? I think we should launch a Twitter poll and let our listeners decide what you do with

your LinkedIn profile. That sounds a lot like an inquisition. How should Jameson be punished for his crimes? Let the people decide. Dave, where can people go if they want to hear more about us or more? Nope, not more about us. If they want to hear more episodes of this show. Oh, that's easy. They've heard too much about me already. That's right. How could anyone want to know more um yeah i would like to know more about you but if you would like to know more about next week more about the episodes just hit soft skills.audio that's our website you can subscribe to the podcast there that is the best way to share the podcast is by posting that link on twitter emailing it to your entire company and telling them all to subscribe and and we would love you

for it we would love you anyways because you're already listening but that's true you know how like all your children are your favorite but really really there's this one child that promotes your podcast yeah the the child with the biggest clout score is actually your favorite dave's microphone shows this moment to turn into a game boy sound card so i'm gonna close it out your questions help make this podcast interesting and we would love to hear from you if you have questions, you can submit them on the Google form that's linked to on our website, or you can send us a direct message or just a regular tweet and we will put them in the queue and then we will sprinkle some wisdom on them. Thanks for listening. We'll catch you next week.