Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 57: Disliking Management and Difficult Co-workers

Episode Date: April 25, 2017

I’ve been pushed in to doing management tasks I really don’t enjoy. What do I do? How do I handle a co-worker who I really struggle to get along with? Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

It takes more than great code to be a great engineer. This is episode 57 of the Soft Skills Engineering Podcast. I'm your host, Jameson Dance. And I'm your host, Dave Smith. And this is the podcast where we take your non-technical questions about technical fields like software development. We have a comment from a listener first, though. It says, I landed my first programming job straight out of college. Later on, I realized it was because I had asked for a starting salary much lower than the average. I stayed with my first employer for four years, and over this time, I got a raise twice.

despite that i was still about ten thousand dollars below the average salary for developers with my skill set and experience in the city where i live i spoke to my manager about this he ruled out bumping my salary nah nah no thank you oh man he ruled out bumping my salary but assured me he would put together a quote growth plan which would eventually help me get to where i need to be i saw that as an opportunity to grow within the organization so i stayed alas the quote growth plan was just a tactic to stop me from leaving this is also the time i started listening to your podcast oh i know i think i know how this story is going to end your repeated advice of quit your job gave me the courage to look at my options

my linkedin profile was full of recruiter messages so i decided to reply to one of them the recruiter hooked me up with a job interview at a local startup she also told me the salary range the company was willing to offer for the position before i even cleared my interview the lower end of that range was about 25 000 more than my salary i got yeah wow i got the job the work i do here is a lot more challenging than my previous company by deciding to quit my job i have leveled up my programming skills and my bank account love the podcast you guys are hilarious well another satisfied quitter oh man oh uh i'm glad i'm glad it sounds like your life is better um i guess i'm equating more money with a better life which is totally not true 100 all the time

true oh okay you cleared that up um it is sad that there's this thing that happens where when you know the least about your career or salary negotiation that's what kind of sets the baseline yeah for what you make and you live with that for years yeah they ask you hey would you make your last job and then you just tell them and they're like okay we'll give you some amount more than that and if you start lower off then you end up lower off but yeah yeah you can kind of bump out of that if you if you want to so congratulations and i'm really happy that your bank account got leveled up and also that you're doing more challenging and fun work that's really great yeah way to be a quitter yeah i think it's i think i hope that everyone knows that we give

that advice about half tongue-in-cheek and half seriously like we understand that not everyone can just like quit their job and then roll frictionlessly into their next sweet gig and make a lot more money yeah yeah it's just not true for everyone yeah and there is a reckoning coming i'm sure where that will be not true for more people than it is right now but 2001 can happen again yeah exactly yep all right i don't know what our fallback advice will be then like keep it'll be keep your job keep your job and suck it up suck it up and welcome to the real world like everyone else yeah i guess now we get to live in the fantasy world though that's right Okay. I'm going to read our first question. Okay. I took a position as a tech lead about a year ago.

At the time, the understanding was that this was just to lead technical direction of the product, but not the people. Any type of managerial tasks would be handled by the CTO. We're a small company. Since that time, the CTO has left and the understanding I had with them wasn't communicated to HR or the new CTO. Add in some pretty dramatic changes in product direction. And now I find that Most of my time is spent doing non-technical tasks like being in meetings, writing gear tickets, et cetera, and also people managing. My goal was never to go into this level of leadership. I wanted to be more involved in the technical and product decisions, but I know that my

technical skills aren't growing because I'm hardly ever using them anymore. My question is, how would you go about bringing this up to your CTO? Can you step back from leadership and still be at the same company, or is it only possible if you move on? Thanks a bunch. I like move on. that's a good euphemism for quit your job i'm just i'm just moving in a new direction i am moving on as of friday afternoon at 2 p.m which means i got fired

there was a just as a funny side note there was this like techno song that i used to listen to it used to come up on this like radio station i listened to years ago where this guy got laid off and he recorded like this automated message that was his layoff was like an automated voicemail that got left and he and he like recorded it and worked it into the song and it was it was kind of funny it was like and it was like this british this female british voice that was like our company is moving in an exciting new direction you know without you yes unfortunately you know and he like put it to all this like crazy techno beat and stuff so huh i don't know why that just made me think of that catharsis yeah i'm sure i'm sure it was okay so you're in a leadership

role that you that grew beyond the boundaries that you wanted it to grow to yeah the the product direction plus the change in management those sound like the culprits yes this is this is a story that i have lived and seen many times because it turns out in our industry if you're pretty good with people and you seem to want to do good things uh it's pretty normal for you to get swept into these like management managerial roles because no one wants them generally right like most this is probably true for most engineers but you just you like have to beg them to go into management right it's just not people aren't just like dying to go into management yeah they like building stuff and writing code yeah and then suddenly yeah suddenly you're building jira

tickets and writing agendas right exactly so the the things that just just for some reference the things you describe as things you don't like that are now part of the tech lead sound like pretty normal tech lead things to me like what like jira tickets yeah being well i translate that to being more involved in the project management side um i mean if if it's your if you are the sole person responsible for writing jira tickets that seems weird but doing some jira work in the jira minds doesn't seem outrageous for for technical leadership yeah um doing people stuff that varies wildly i think from company to company on whether tech leads are responsible for like one-on-ones with their team members and career development and

mentorship and all that stuff but it's not unheard of so i think what could be happening is you just assume tech lead was one thing and your cto assumed it was a different thing yep and because there's no management in engineering is the total wild west with no standards and no agreement and no consensus and no knowledge or anything that that's just a thing that's just what happened i know it's isn't it crazy when i can say tech lead and i could walk into 10 different companies and i would get like 10 super different answers to what that means yep so what do you do like oh i run engineering at my small startup or like i i don't know i help decide on on what technology stack we use or i help people reach their career goals

i give briefings to our investors you know yeah yeah at my client actually uh we just hired a tech lead and that tech lead will be in investor meetings because the team is so small and yeah it'll be interesting and my current company a tech lead would not do any people management uh a tech lead would do mentoring but um most of their work would be focused on technical direction and sometimes that will include lots of meetings it will definitely include some jira tickets yeah you can't you can't really decide technical direction without talking to people or communicating that but yeah yeah so there will be some meetings so so what does our intrepid question ask or do then if it seems like they've ended up in this mismatch okay so the root cause of this problem

in my opinion is you didn't sit down with the new cto and define your role and like there's no i mean it's totally a reasonable mistake to have made but it was a mistake and i think it's reasonable because of what we said earlier which is that how would you know that different people have different definitions for what tech lead means when this is your first time being a tech lead right it's like i got the job it had these responsibilities why would that change just because some other person's job changed you know i also want to put a little bit of the blame on the cto to me a cto should have the skills to know the skills and experience to know that part of their job is to clearly define people's roles and it sounds like they just kind of snuck up over

time which means the cto didn't sit down and say here's what i expect you to do exactly and it's engineering management so maybe the cto is like a 22 year old college graduate who just is really tall and has really good hair or something i was just thinking like maybe the cto has the same problem yeah and the cto sitting here going wait a minute i didn't want to do people management what is this i thought a cto just sat around and did the chief technical things but only the chiefest of the technical things oh you sweet summer child yeah nobody knows what they're doing in engineering management exactly exactly once you take even a single footstep out of individual contributor land

it's totally the wild west yep job titles mean nothing you have to just like yeah you have to write all this stuff down anyway it's crazy yeah okay so that's what you should have done now this doesn't help you now but what you should have done when the new when the new cto came in as you should have sat down and said i'd like to define my role and make sure that you and i have a clear definition of what's expected of one another you're my boss i work for you i want to know what success looks like in your eyes i want to know what you'll do what i'll do and how we'll share responsibility and and let's just get this all nice and clear and i think a cto would really appreciate that anyone would appreciate that

nobody likes to operate in a totally ambiguous you know undefined role yeah do you think it's too late i mean could you just do that now i think you should i think every day you wait will make it harder to do you know because it'll be like wait you've been doing this for two years why are you only now just telling me did you ever hear that story about like the old married couple who had been together for like 50 years and and uh like i don't know if this is this is just probably fictional but the story goes that the the wife like would bake this cherry pie and the husband would eat the cherry pie and tell her how nice it was but after 50 years it turned out that he never liked the cherry pie and she hated baking it but she only baked it because she

thought he liked it and he said he liked it because he wanted to make her feel good exactly so it's like they're both suffering just because they didn't you know communicate about their actual desires so so i think in this case the sooner you can nip this in the bud the better And I think you can do this without sounding whiny and without sounding like you're backing down from responsibility. I think you just sit down and say, let's define our roles. Here's what I think my job is right now. Here's what I want my job to be. Can we make this happen?

Yeah. I mean, the alternative is backing down. And I think if you have a solution, if your solution isn't just like, I don't want to do this anymore, but I still want to work here. Good luck. That could be tricky. but if you have someone who through your tech lead experience you feel is interested and willing and capable of doing the job that tech lead is that you don't want to do um it might be easier to do kind of a switcheroo oh a fall guy a fall guy no no no a patsy you know i heard that uh

jennifer's really the best job at this company it's like the tom sawyer whitewashing story have you heard that story uh i've read that book and i remember something about whitewashing he's like painting the fence and he's making it look like it's awesome his friends come by and they're like oh i want to whitewash that fence he's like no it's too awesome it's too fun it's like but i'll tell you what if you pay me five cents you can whitewash this section of the fence they're like okay oh man pull a tom sawyer so let me tell you what we did at my last company that actually took this burden and made it really manageable. There were trade-offs to this, but this is what we did.

We made technical lead a rotating assignment. And it would rotate any time from six months to 18 months, approximately. Usually it didn't last longer than that. And we would take turns being the technical lead for the team. This had a couple of effects. The first effect was that it was very clear that you were not doing people management. because it was not acceptable to have your manager be rotating every six to 18 months

and it would end up with everyone knowing everyone's salary. So we didn't do that. It was not people management, but it also had the effect of letting people get a taste for technical leadership without being totally committed and have no escape hatch. So we even let an intern do it for a while and it was great.

blows my mind i know i know well i mean after they had seen three other people do the job for periods of time it became pretty clear what the job was right like they led certain meetings they they weren't necessarily picking technologies like the team would still step up and and contribute in that way um but uh but they did it and it worked out pretty well now there were downsides of course as well because not everyone really is good at being a technical lead which means that sometimes you get someone in the role who's not doesn't do a good job as someone else who like desperately wants to do it and tries really hard and and is kind of like made for it but it did have the nice advantage of saying look once you move into leadership you can get a taste

for it and if you like it you can do more of it but if you don't like it no harm you can step back into individual contributor and we expect you to and you won't have to like take a pay cut that feels kind of like saying this job is so unimportant that it doesn't matter who does it and then like what's the point of it that is an interesting observation i mean if it doesn't if you just pick random people and change it up all the time how much impact can you're like limiting the impact that someone who's good at it can have i guess 18 months is kind of an engineering time it's like dog years that's that's kind of a long time yeah and and if someone was amazing at tech lead and they did it for 18 months it's conceivable

that they could just be like promoted out of it yeah after that time yeah i mean if if we had someone who really showed great promise in that role you'd bet we would give them more leadership opportunities is it like is it random who does it or no no i mean as managers we would sit down and carefully consider the options and you know when the time came for someone to finish their rotation we would look at it and i mean only one time did we let the intern do it and and it wasn't that we sat down and said we think this is the best candidate it was that the team said hey we want the intern to do it like none of them wanted to do it um i don't know it was a very fun dynamic team so i think they were just cool with it and the team was able to roll with it

and they're just kind of goofing around they were like where's our team lead oh he's in math class and that was a pretty well-established team so they had seen the the pattern for quite a few rotations and they knew so so they were kind of capable of doing a lot without explicit guidance but see here's here's the other really big advantage and and this is getting a little bit far afield from the original question but one of the big advantages of having a rotating lead is that everyone gets to feel the burden of team ownership i mean you've been in lead positions right jameson and i'm sure that the difference in the weight that you feel of being an individual contributor versus being the lead is just enormous right yeah and this is

a pattern i see all the time in myself that i only understand how to do my job well when i stop doing it and do like the next job yeah and then you look back and you're like oh i could have done this so much better right yeah wow i should have i should have done all this stuff and so we want everyone to serve in that capacity so they can know what it means to be a good team member which you really learn when you're a team leader and uh and so having that rotate around means that you have more people who have experienced the the weight of leadership so that when they serve as non-leader in non-leader roles they do a better job that's all right that was a theory and i think that i think that proved to be true so you said some of the downsides were that sometimes you got

people in there who weren't great at it i guess that would happen no matter how you picked team leads though were there other downsides you increase the frequency with this role with this up pattern though right because you're changing more often so but then again you also reduce the impact because if you get someone who's not great at it you know that they can just be done in six months yeah uh other downsides um yeah it did turn into a bit of more of a project management role than like actual leadership because it rotated and so we tended to um teams tended to just pile on the crap work onto that rotation because they knew it was temporary you know it's Like you have to be the backlog grooming person or you have to, you know, you're the one that

has to write the PowerPoint slides or whatever, you know? So that was another disadvantage, but all in all, I think it was good. And I think it's really good for engineers because this person who's asking this question is basically saying, look, I'm worried that I'm going to have to quit my job just to change my responsibility around a little bit, which is totally crazy. Like if I were a manager and I had someone who wanted to change their role a little bit, like maybe tweak 20 or 30 percent of their role maybe even 40 50 percent and they told me that the alternative was they were gonna quit i'd be like yeah let's let's rearrange your role let's

let's let's draw on your strengths instead of yeah the things that you hate yeah that does seem less than ideal from from just from the company's perspective like oh we would lose this person rather than either either they quit or they do a job they don't like yeah yeah yeah so i i think i stand by my my thing i said earlier where if you have an alternative that isn't just i don't want to do this fix it then then it seems easier to say like okay well then you kind of train this person up for a couple weeks and then we swap it and yeah i think that could work i think the magic phrase here is people management. If you can say, look, CTO, I want you to do the people management and I want to, I want myself to do the technical leadership. And if you can really draw a line

between what that means on your team, I think that in this case of this question asker, that's the crux. He doesn't want to do people management. And that's, that's a very clear thing that I think most companies can agree on what that, what that is. That is clear. I think I struggle sometimes with the feeling like now you have two managers on a team like the technical manager and the people manager and it feels uh like you have two bosses and i don't know just i feel like that could be hard for the team if there isn't a lot of clarity around exactly what each person does yeah totally true but and on the other hand it's very hard to have one person for a team of say like eight or ten engineers it's very hard to have one person who can do both the technical leadership for that

team and the people management i think it's rare for those two skills to exist in their best form in the same person yeah um and it's hard to do that in a in a single work week anyway like in a 40-hour work week it's hard to cram all that work in just do less do less work just do less just do the people management bad and do any other stuff good and you'll be fine yeah or vice versa we're on uh we're gonna use vb6 for everything all technical decisions have been made done okay can we answer this question yeah i think so i think so i think this is a case where you don't have to quit to get what you want but you need to have that conversation you should have had when the new cto showed up yep all right do you want to read the next one yeah it says i have

a co-worker who is really hard for me to get along with he seems like he is intentionally working slowly as if he's worried that he'll get laid off if he finishes his project too quickly he doesn't take my advice when i recommend doing things differently even simple things like variable names that are less likely to collide with other variable names what should i do should i try to get him fired whoa went from zero to 100 real quick there at the end you know variable names i mean it's right up there with like theft of company property yeah uh the first part sounds a little bit like what people with siblings probably know about i don't know it just sounds like the thing i would do to like annoy my sister when i was a little kid

like i have to i have to pass her the butter at the dinner table and i do it as slowly as possible just to make her mad uh you are describing my children right now like you can't complain i'm giving you the butter why are you mad you said yeah gosh oh so is this person intentional that's the question are we talking about like eight-year-old behavior i mean it sounds like they have if they're worried about getting fired they have valid concerns that's true because you're worried about firing them so they connected the dots yep i think one question i have is are you a peer or are you a manager because those reactions look very different as a manager your your explicit responsibility is to

help help them perform well or uh figure out that it they're not a good fit for the company and that you need to fire them so this is like part of your job if you're a manager and if you're not then you have to do like sneaky backdoor influencing things like what what does that look like sneaky i don't know like plant cocaine on their desk you know the usual the usual stuff i do to eliminate my co-workers yeah well i mean i can't be satisfied right i can't be satisfied with just firing them i need them to end up in jail yeah i mean let's destroy them um you're trying to influence the organization to to get rid of this person which is that's politics that's like corporate politics right there so that's i don't know i'd never thought of that as politics

really uh yeah i guess you're right though i mean i guess i guess if you see it as the right thing for the company it doesn't feel like politics to you but yeah but i bet it feels like politics to the other guy yeah exactly that you're like rallying their manager against them that's yeah oh man that sucks i i also think you should be able to give feedback about your teammates and how you work together yes that feedback might just go into what feels like a black hole because there there are reasons why they're not immediately firing someone but but it shouldn't feel weird to i don't know like your your manager should know how you feel about people but you also don't want to just gossip about people all the time yeah exactly i would hope that your company has an

established process for giving feedback about your peers to management and if they do that would be the time to give this feedback i have found that when you deliver unsolicited negative feedback to management about your co-workers it's it it's a strange dynamic because when you do that it means your manager is going to have to do a bunch of extra work a bunch of really uh unpleasant extra work yes yes yeah and so hey you know the worst part about your job go do that for me yes so that's like it's actually really hard to do but if you already have this feedback process in place and they're just soliciting it and as part of their normal job it might be received with less friction if you do it then so you mean like 360 degree reviews or like one-on-ones with your

manager when well i i think um i don't know i mean different companies i've had would do feedback different ways uh sometimes you'd wait for that person's annual review to come up and they would ask some of the peers and sometimes you would not get asked you know so it's kind of hit or miss um yeah some companies are more rigorous about collecting feedback from all the people the person has worked with but usually they happen like on a semi-annual or annual basis at most companies i've seen and if it's a small startup then there may not be any process at all so you might just be out of luck yeah this is definitely in the realm of stuff you're you should be able to tell that the symptoms are things you should be able to talk with your manager about i think the

recommendation of firing them might be hit or miss but yeah their job is to make the team perform well and if there's this person who's really harming the team then then they need to work to resolve that somehow yeah exactly so i think it'd be it would be a bad idea to sit down with your manager and say i think you should fire this person because you're basically doing their job instead give them the evidence that they need to come to the correct conclusion because guess what you don't have all the information they have so if you sit down with them and just give them the data points they can come to a hopefully a better conclusion than you um like for example maybe it's a cousin that they don't want to fire just kidding i'm just kidding although that would suck

yeah then you fall back to the cocaine yeah then they you force their hand yeah that certainly won't ever come back to bite you yeah i've also had experiences where i worked with people that i had to work with and there was nothing that would change like i could not get this person fired and we just did not get along at all um and that just happens in life sometimes sometimes you just work with people you don't get along with and yeah i think there are skills that you can develop to just survive that you might not ever love it or or love that person but uh learning how to work with people that are hard for you to work with i think is important and that is that is a really good point i mean you can't just fire everyone you don't like

that's right that's right that's very mature and and uh i guess you could look at it as an opportunity and say can i make this relationship work even though i can tell that naturally it's not going to work you know on the trajectory that we're on like take it as a challenge like say i want to have a productive working relationship with this person yeah and see maybe you can be really frustrating and uh slow and yeah you might disagree on a lot of stuff and you might have to go like rage commit some changes to variable names or but talk about talk about like the the the most valuable soft skill though is learning to work productively with people that you don't get along with naturally yeah that's a really really good

spin on this my gut feel is if you uh work in larger organizations or work in management where you you work with like a larger circle of people that this might be more important because the the more people you work with and also the more different they are like if you're in senior management you're working with finance people and yeah sure like all kinds of people from very different backgrounds with very different values and it might seem just bizarre to you as an engineer that they care about this thing it feels like the wrong thing yeah i don't know working with people that you that you disagree with or struggle to get along with is valuable in that respect too when i look back on my early days of my career and i consider some

of the people that i found difficult to get along with i think today i would have a lot less trouble getting along with them i don't know i don't do you feel that way too um yeah i don't think professionally i don't think i have worked with many people that i just couldn't stand yeah me neither it's only been a handful but i think i just care less about the things that bugged me back then yeah it's like you've just learned you kind of put them into perspective over the years and it's like this just isn't that important yeah so in the short term i think one way that you can do that is you look at the situation and you go okay i'm frustrated i'm going to set a timer i'm going to set a 30-day timer i'm going to put a little event on my calendar and i'm going

to remind myself okay revisit this situation in 30 days and then i'm going to spend the next 30 days strictly observing and not taking action pay attention to things but don't like go to management after 30 days then reassess the situation and see if you still feel as like aggressively bad as you did before and i think you'll have a little more clarity by letting some time go by yeah i'm realizing that some of my advice comes from being married where you realize like you you can't really ever just make someone change sure like it's really hard to just change someone's behavior and and so the stuff you do is all about how you react to it yeah true um i wonder i wonder if there's an aspect of like maybe this person is really driven the question asker is

really driven and feels like they really value high performance they want to work with the smartest most capable people and this co-worker is is kind of not that way and i think there are probably organizations or teams you could join where everyone is like super driven and super high performing and that's one solution is that's true the soft skills answer but um learning how to work with people that are again yeah learning how to work with people that are different from you learning how to get things done with people of of all levels of intensity or skill or even is is important yeah totally i agree did we answer the question i think we did i think the question has been answered okay good luck this question is more than a year old so probably this person

i wonder what what's going on now yes did you say is dead no oh okay hopefully not i didn't i did not say that nor did i intend to their office park was hit by a meteor and wiped out the question answered by meteor we waited long enough and it resolved itself all right where can people go if they want to ask a question they can go to softskills.audio our website which has a google form which you can fill out to submit your question and as much or as little detail as you want yes and we'll put it in our backlog here's a pro tip if you want to submit a question keep it short because we have lots of questions and when we see one that's like three pages long we sometimes maybe subconsciously skip it because i just don't have that much time

yeah we we also will like summarize them yes and condense them sometimes but but yeah we do give preferential treatment to the short ones yeah but also we want more details we're i know two minds dave i know i know can't have it both ways so give us a short version and a long version how about that give it give us the shortest version with the most details yeah uh do whatever you want yeah we'll look at it yeah we'll read it jamison will just read the ones i don't have the patience to read yeah that's maybe um you can also follow us on twitter we're at soft skills eng we take questions through twitter direct messages or just tweets also that's kind of fallen off and it feels like a google forum is a better format but we still check our dms every

once in a while and if you enjoy the show please share it with people we've we've had some new listeners pop in and we are really glad about that yeah we want more new listeners so that we can become president is that the end goal i think so i want to get elected co-president of the united states based on our podcast audience right that's right okay we're close all right thanks everyone thanks see you next week