Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 52: Slowness Guilt and I Have No Side Projects

Episode Date: March 21, 2017

Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I feel guilty about how slow I’m working. What should I do? I’d like to find a job, but I don’t have any completed side projects or an interesting GitHub profile. How can I explain this?

It takes more than great code to be a great engineer. This is episode 52 of the Soft Skills Engineering Podcast. I am your host, Jameson Dance. And I am your host, Dave Smith. And this is a free advice show for developers. The advice is worth what you pay for it. Maybe even less. That's true. Free has a cost.

Cost is your time. We want to be worth your time, though. We got a listener story in response to episode 50. uh this is so this was the question about the manager of zero people and the story is actually from the question asker yes i love it when this happens when we get more detail yeah about stuff we didn't know as it turns out my manager of zero experience was just one thread in a web of reasons i was unhappy so i started looking elsewhere and stumbled into an opportunity working directly under a manager who i respect tremendously and who respects me and alongside another engineer

i've worked with successfully at a previous company i'm expecting a formal offer for the new job this week and should be out of the startup by month's end thanks again for taking the time to bisect all the stuff going on in my career and giving me some much needed perspective your podcast regularly reminds me that we're not alone in this industry even if we feel like we are sometimes especially if you're a manager of zero people yeah i mean literally you were alone you were alone well congratulations on the new job yeah that's great i i hope you find all your wildest dreams yes and that they come true yeah get new dreams and then make those come true cool should we read our first question yeah sure i'll read this one uh this comes from

an anonymous listener who says hello great podcast thank you i enjoy the way you talk about various topics in our industry recently i started my second job i spent two years at my first job and my coding skills were not as good as i wanted them to be i changed jobs to push myself out of my comfort zone now i feel a bit slow at completing my tickets and i'm spending a lot of my time on research i am working on a greenfield project so maybe it's okay what do you think if you never get anything done the project will stay green forever oh yeah because the best code is is the code that has yet to be written that's right and so it can never become legacy if you don't finish yeah it'll never be brown yeah why are you in such a hurry to get to

a brownfield just luxuriate in that rich green grass for a while um so i lobbied for us to answer this question because i feel this all the time i feel like this is my constant state of being just feeling guilty about going too slow and some of that is because i'm kind of like a people pleaser i want people to be happy with my work um and some of it is just i don't know i'm just always worried that i'll suddenly get fired from for going too slow without having known i was going too slow so for me the one of the solutions to this is just more information uh just ask people how they think you're doing like if if you are worried about feeling slow um someone is probably managing you and has an idea of what you're supposed to be doing and and how you're meeting

their expectations and if you make those expectations explicit it's a lot easier to get a feel for where you actually are instead of where you have convinced yourself you are yeah yeah because maybe you're actually not going slow and maybe you're doing just fine and on the one hand i would expect a reasonable manager to tell you that but on the other hand an unreasonable manager might say actually you are going too slow you need to go faster like is the question to that ever or sorry is the answer to that question ever going to be yes i'm satisfied with your level of speed do not go faster slow down a little bit in fact yeah yeah yeah that's true an evil person would be like i noticed you went home

the other day and that was some time you didn't spend at work getting stuff done yeah so then maybe you could talk to your teammates about it i i just feel like there's got to be some way if part of the feeling is like do other people think or if part of the issue is you're wondering if other people think you're slow you can find that out yeah somehow yeah definitely and you you mentioned tickets in the questions so i'm assuming that there is a queue of tickets that your team is pulling from and people are working on these and then marking them as finished so if that's the case you could go compare your ticket completion rate with your co-workers and see how you stack up yeah that gets that gets really tricky but it's it is some

information i mean tickets are different sizes people close them at different rates people have different definitions of what done is but if someone else does like 400 and you do two then yeah that's that does tell you something here's what you do find the the fastest developer you know and just compare yourself to them and like like social media but for work just find someone to envy and just constantly hold yourself up against them and point out all the little places where you're lacking that's right take their best and compare it to your worst yep then yeah i do agree with jameson though that you should ask if you say uh if you like have a mentor you trust or someone on the team who can give you an objective answer i think it's a good

question to ask um the funny thing is uh you may be surprised at how little people will actually know about this oh yeah go to your manager and and ask am i going fast enough and your manager might be like uh i don't know i thought you were until you asked me this question clearly there's a problem yeah that's a great point even on small teams i have felt that from from managers because i've i've actually asked this before of people and i the most i've gotten from a manager was just a shrug of the shoulders so which is actually a good sign right like that's good yeah yeah that means like at least if there is a problem they don't know about it what about the research area if it's a greenfield project and there's a lot of kind of initial setup

or just unknown i don't know it's not just build out this feature it's like figure out what what feature to build out how how do you evaluate speed in that context where you're out of the i don't know standard iteration product cycle yeah you can't really measure research output in in like the traditional story points or other measures right yeah i believe that's how you get tenure right don't you get 500 story points from publishing papers i'm a level 7 publisher because one of the outputs of your research could be that you actually saved your team a bunch of work by not having to build something that was a dead end and how do you measure the speed increases that come from skipping a huge swath of work that you decided not to do yeah i i've

mentioned part of this in the past i worked at a company a few years ago where we had a period of several weeks of crunch time and then we had some sort of downtime after that uh some of it was just straight up vacation they told us like don't come into work for x number of days and then when we came back they told us you need to do some kind of exploratory research on this area and it was very vague had no deadlines uh there weren't great criteria for measuring progress and it turns out that we finished the time we had allotted to that and we had nothing done which is like didn't we we did stuff but there was no output from it so i agree that it's hard to evaluate progress but also in in without any structure or boundaries or goals or anything it's also hard it can be just

hard to make progress yeah true so how do you maybe this is a personal thing more i mean some people do great at that completely structureless exploratory um kind of work but i think lots of people would struggle to to feel like they'd accomplish something at the end so how would you take this open-ended thing and like put some structure on it so i think there's uh is that even the right question to ask um oh oh no maybe you don't yeah i think you do generally uh i i think that if you don't have some kind of structure around the research you're doing then you'll just spend time learning and the output of the value of the output might not be easy to identify or might not be even might not even be valuable it might be valuable for your next job when you spend

a month like playing with docker don't get anything done but then you put docker on your resume okay so i i think there are three techniques that i'm mulling over in my head right now that would help you to uh structure this kind of research and like actually measure it the first one is writing down some kind of acceptance criteria so you know when you're done and this can be fuzzy especially if you're like well i'm going to investigate these three technologies and you know evaluate them for use in our product but you could write criteria for that and say like after i've built my to do mvc app in three different technologies then i will that'll be my acceptance criteria the second thing is to have a written report at the end of your research

that uh summarizes your findings and lessons learned for other people and that can be like the output so once that's done and reviewed and everyone's you know happy with the result that's your acceptance and then the third thing is to just completely time box your research and say i will take three days and no more than three days and whatever i have at the end of three days that's what we have whether it's complete or not and i think using those you can those three techniques you can put a little bit of structure around it yeah some combination of those three might i mean you might not need all three of them but yeah yeah i like that and and nope i don't have anything else to say it's gone i was gonna ask when you're feeling slow uh try to ask yourself

if that feeling is self-inflicted or if it actually comes from a real external source like are you just feeling guilty because you haven't yet calibrated to the speed of how things are done or do you actually have some external pressure pushing you to finish something and you're not meeting the deadline or the time that something is needed by hmm so at the risk of being too personal dave you just well not just but you fairly recently started a new job did you feel too slow there oh yeah yeah totally do you do you feel less slow now uh yeah i feel like i can get more done now than i could a few months ago and i've heard people in my same situation say the same thing they also feel slow and these are like industry veterans who have been developing software

for decades and who are very good at it they start a new job and feel slow so i think it's pretty normal sure so even dave feels slow yeah i feel slow a lot cool well have we answered the question i think so yeah slow down slow down there partner just go slower that was the summary cool i'm gonna read the next question this is from a listener named jin or gin depending on how you pronounce gif uh i would like to find a new job but i'm feeling insecure because i don't have an interesting github profile or side projects to show in my spare time i study and program a lot but i've never built something really valuable how can i explain this how do i answer uh in an

interview if the interviewer asks me if the interviewer asks me to show them something thank you you're welcome preemptively preemptive you're welcome so side projects you don't have any side projects yeah or an interesting github profile what does an interesting github profile mean does it mean you have like a saucy like your debonair picture you've got a hat with a feather in it that would be interesting decorative vest with all your different projects as uh buttons oh yeah like merit badges i was thinking more like the uh the waiters and waitresses who work in restaurants with oh yeah they have to have the flair yeah lots of lots of pieces of flair

flair we went to a restaurant the other day and it was definitely a flair restaurant yeah the waitress came up and said howdy y'all in the most soulless like dead voice ever i felt so bad for her and i asked her if she had to say that and she said no but she did because it was it was a very a texas themed restaurant no i just like to say howdy i this is how i greet everyone in utah the traditional utah greeting of howdy y'all anyways that's not what this question is about i asked what an interesting github profile means i guess that was kind of a leading question because i i assume when they say interesting github profile they mean like famous open source person profile where you have a bunch of popular projects and a ton of commits you look at that little graph

and it looks like green tile on a wall where like every day there's just lots of commits and i would say that's like the 0.01 percent of github users yeah i i've interviewed a lot of developers and just looked at a lot of developers github profiles i've never maybe once i think once i've seen what i would say is like a classic interesting github profile with tons of open source stuff yeah but hundreds of of just dot files or like random boilerplate they forked or yeah like intro cs projects or bootcamp projects so that that's kind of the default i would say and so don't feel bad if that's what your github profile looks like because that's what everyone's looks like yeah exactly so if you're in an interview and the interviewer says

show me your github profile say show me yours first i'm gonna look at dave smith's github profile oh i've got flare 37 repositories oh you got you got stars 85 stars on the angular react directive example oh man that was from like three years ago only 74 contributions in the last year though dave i'm sorry we're gonna have to pass i have content oh that includes our website that is open source yeah that's another point these numbers are so stupid and arbitrary yeah you can't bogus yeah you really can't rely on them for anything any meaning my decision yeah my blog is uh public um i have this this node module that i made in 2012 no 2011 called recursive reader and it has 118 stars because it was the first like thing to

recursively list files in directories and i have not touched it in many months but yeah i guess i guess what i'm saying is these numbers are arbitrary and i don't do they don't reflect what i actually do so let's let's go away from github because i'm pretty sure that most people don't have a super interesting github profile and even if they did there's all these false signals there anyway what if i have 647 contribute public contributions this year which i believe means i'm worth roughly 10 times as much as you you are the mythical 10x developer or maybe i'm the 1x and you're the 0.1 oh snap oh snap that was a sick burn okay so we know that uh github doesn't really tell the complete story but what about side

projects what if an interviewer says tell me about your side projects and you're like i don't have any side projects i think side projects can be a positive signal but the lack of side projects is not to me a negative signal it is to some people um because some companies and some interviewers really value passion and when they mean when they say passion what they mean is someone who programs like literally every second they're awake they program all day for work and then they go home and work really hard when they're not at work and and side projects are one indication of that and open source and speaking at conferences and i don't know there's all this stuff that falls into passion but yeah again that's not what makes someone a good developer or a good employee

it's just a signal people have latched onto. So I think my point is there are some places that might, uh, not want to hire you if you don't have this, but I think most places, most people that are programmers don't have side projects. So yeah, it's not going to hurt you that much. Yeah, that's probably true. One of the things you can say if, if you don't have any side projects and they ask you is, uh, what I've said is look at different points in my life. I have had more interest in doing side projects. And it usually depends on how engaging my main day job is. And if I'm in kind of a boring situation at work, or I'm not being challenged, those are the times when I'm most likely to get side projects going. But if I'm in a really engaging, fun,

exciting, challenging job, then I very rarely do side projects. And I've noticed this correlation over my career and so if you've been in an exciting challenging fun job then you can say look i i just haven't really had time to do side projects because i've been so excited to work on my regular work yeah and i i actually think some employers will say that's cool yeah you know like that's great i put a lot of myself into my job so that's where the energy goes also i mean some people have kids and then that is your full-time side project if you have kids then you have like an hour a day for side projects and that side project is like recover recovery time yeah yeah or i mean people have all kinds of interests that aren't programming and i

think the variety of interests adds depth to the to the field of programming yeah and i would say that your work experience is like a hundred times more important than your side projects which is a little little similar to what jameson was saying about how they're bonus points but they don't hurt you if you don't have one um but at the same time i think it's much more important to steer the interview conversation to the projects you've done at work what have you accomplished at work because that's a much more representative indicator of what you're going to do at this new job so if you're in an interview and they're like tell me about your side projects i would try to steer the conversation back to work yeah i really like that actually a side project

that worked like work would be work and and to me part of the benefit of a side project is the total lack of structure and the ability to do stupid things that like are not going to matter to customers or explore in ways that you don't have to deliver value in the same way you do work another they mentioned they code a lot but they just don't have what i assume is they do a lot of kind of learning in these side projects but they don't produce these polished projects that you can kind of click through and show someone okay there's not ui or anything like that and in that case then the output of the side project isn't like this product that you can demo and show off to people it's your skills so you are still learning stuff you're you're just growing

yourself instead of growing this other thing yeah good point like if they say show me something you can say well i don't really have any polished product to show but i've spent a ton of time learning and i can tell you about these projects that i've worked on yeah i learning exercises yeah i learned how to build apis and go lang or whatever you use some technology that taught you something also one kind of different spin on this is that when i've interviewed candidates and they have a ton of side projects going that are clearly a lot of work i think to myself i wonder how much of these side projects were actually paid for by their employer by accident and it can become a negative thing if it's like are you if i'm gonna hire you are you just gonna work for 20 hours and

then spend the other 20 hours sitting at your desk working on your uh erlang interpreter yeah that's a good point i mean you you want people to grow and develop themselves but also you want them to get work done for your company and i i have seen people step too far over that line um and then they have a painful conversation where they get pulled back into like no you like you work here this is your job we are paying you this isn't like yeah yeah and it it's also caused issues on teams too like if if if you're uh using work to fund your personal career development then the team knows that yeah and they probably have some resentment about it too so so definitely it can be taken too far but a healthy mix of side projects in my opinion is

generally a benefit and something that i will weigh when i use uh when i interview a candidate but uh the absence of side projects does not like just like jameson said that does not hurt your chances what if i were your interviewer yeah i'm trying to think through all the people that have that that have been hired like around me not even that i've directly hired and i don't know i feel it definitely it's definitely less than half that had serious side projects um and and of the people that we've interviewed like way fewer than half almost nobody had side projects oh wow i guess interesting it does seem like it helps but it's not yeah it's not it's not a not a blocker cool question answered answered we did it we have done it dave where can people go if they would like to

hear more of this amazing wisdom first of all i have a small issue with your word choice uh was it not was there not enough hyperbole yes only amazing what do you think this is not the best podcast in the world so if you want to check oh oh before that i want to so last week we did an episode in which i admitted uh that i'd been lying on my resume on my linkedin profile about my education experience immediately after that episode ended i messaged dave and was like i'm gonna do it and i signed up for online to for these two online classes that i never did i'm like halfway through one of them already so whoa theoretically i could be done in uh in like four weeks but actually that

won't happen because the first class is it's like a one credit class for an hour a week and the second class is calc two and that'll take me about nine months but you're gonna make a calc two baby in nine months yeah i am but the podcast has inspired me not only has it helped our listeners it's also helped me it inspired jameson to get that worthless piece of paper that he's been lying about having yep yeah so that i can retroactively not be lying anymore let's i want to just put it out there it was an accidental lie you weren't you weren't deliberately deceiving anyone no i'm not capable enough to deliberately deceive anyone so so yeah congratulations on starting your uh college education again thank you soon i'll be able to tell you uh about

trigonometry identities oh wonderful i'm looking forward to that episode all right anyways yes thank you jameson uh if you'd like to support the show go follow us on twitter the handle is at softskillseng many of you have done that we really appreciate it also go to softskills.audio that is our website for the podcast you can see all the episodes there you can subscribe there it's an easy link to send to your friends to tell them to subscribe and uh you can also uh what else can you do oh yeah you can leave comments on individual shows which a lot of you have done there are some cool conversations happening uh that actually were really nice to get other people's perspectives on situations because as it turns out jameson and i don't actually know

anything and a lot of other people do so that's really cool to see so go check that out at soft skills.audio all right i think that is it we'll catch you next week see ya