Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 62: Many Meetings and Surviving an Acquisition

Episode Date: May 31, 2017

Jamison and Dave answer these two questions: I’m in too many meetings. How do I guard my own productivity? How do I make sure I’m not sidelined when my company acquires another company?

It takes more than great code to be a great engineer. This is Soft Skills Engineering, Episode 62. I'm your host, Dave Smith. I'm your host, Jameson Dance. Soft Skills Engineering is a weekly advice podcast where developers write in with questions, and we do our darndest to answer them accurately and without any kind of comedy or tangents. I wish darn was a unit of measurement. We apply five darns to this problem.

I am capable of outputting several darns. per per unit crap per unit per unit dang per gigawatt i don't know there's a bridge here in boston that's actually measured in uh the units i think it's called the smoots and it's actually written on the bridge the number of smoots long that the bridge is and a smooth is that a person yeah a smoot is an mit professor it's his height okay that's cool yeah those quirky MIT students okay kind of like you measure the amount of snarkiness in a technical discussion in Mila Dykstra's oh my gosh that's so funny you haven't heard that one that was so good yeah oh Mila Dykstra's if you're not familiar Dykstra is this crusty old computer scientist

who's brilliant oh he's dead but he was brilliant but also man he was snarky he's got a lot of spicy quotes that's not a soft skill though should we talk about some soft skills i think mila dykstra is a soft skill if you can really crank out the mila dykstra's yeah that's true it's it's like a it's like a the kind of soft skill superpower that a villain would use right it just like applying your intense intellect to just shaming people that disagree with you that's a it's a skill and it's not a hard it is so yeah yeah dykstra is evil that's the conclusion No, Dykstra is awesome. You know who else is awesome?

Our listener, Nathan, who asked this question. Nice segue. Thank you. Thank you. I am in too many meetings. Technically, I'm an analyst developer, but practically, I am a professional meeting attendee. It's very helpful for me and for the life of the projects that I join in the discussions, but it means I don't get any development time.

This is a problem both for my mental state and for the application development on these projects because the code isn't being written. I mentioned the problem to the scrum master who gave me a dirty look and unfriended me in real life. It hurt. They schedule these meetings because our manager is cracking down on them. Some projects are getting out of control. So here we are in a season of more meetings. What do I do to swing the pendulum back to where we can get more things done? So let me get this straight. There's no code being written. You're sitting in meetings a lot, but you're still getting paid.

how how exactly does this work how does this company stay in business i think there's some some lagging going on in the feedback in the system don't worry that problem will take care of it yeah eventually so i imagine some of these meetings are status meetings and those probably are the most most frustrating where they're asking you what have you done on the project and you're like nothing because i've been asked what have i done on the project for the last 40 hours last week and then repeat like four times for the different teams that have to attend the status meetings yeah yeah yeah have you seen this in real life kind of degenerate meetings where the meetings

are i mean everyone loves to complain about meetings sometimes they're super helpful but some sometimes they they aren't you know honestly i i haven't seen a lot of this uh obviously i've seen the occasional unproductive meeting but i think by and large my life has been filled with meetings that seem pretty useful you just don't show up to the ones that aren't useful well yeah i just get up and leave they're not useful because you're not there boom because you're dave smith a meeting that dave smith is in is used by definition actually that that is an important point i think is that sometimes we think that we are more important to the meeting or that the meeting is more important than it actually is and like we attend it because we think that

our presence is important but then once something will happen and you you fail to attend one time and then the world just keeps moving on without any major problems and you're like oh yeah i had a client who has a weekly um kind of product marketing development meeting and it's several hours long and they wanted me to go and i never did and what happened uh nothing the person i hired went to the meeting and they were like a little disgruntled that they had to go and that i didn't so this is a multi-hour meeting that you could bill for to just sit there and you didn't go well i billed for doing development instead which felt more important to me at that time it wasn't just like good point but i i'm agreeing with you that some some

meetings don't miss you that much if you're not there i do think that that's an important point like there's only one way to test if your presence is really needed at the meeting and that's don't show up to the meeting so try it there's there's the there's the goal of the meeting which is theoretically to get some work done or advance some project but there's all the meta stuff that comes along just being in the meeting you feel like you're kind of more of a team player and if you're not in the meeting i i at least worry like they think that i am too good for them or that this is not important enough or i i worry about offending people yeah i think that's a valid concern so i i have gone to meetings because i wanted to be seen in the meeting

not because i felt like i had a ton of value to get out of it you're like hey everyone i'm here i'm contributing yeah i work at this company i am not slacking off right now you can tell by the way i'm sitting in this room and and looking attentively yeah yeah i am a valued member of this team that's right which you know by my eye contact that's how i deliver value i just look at you and then you work a little bit harder value it literally comes from my eyes it's a superpower um so yeah what's nathan to do okay it sounds like some of the meetings are valuable he at least specifically mentions that they are uh that they're valuable yeah yeah so

let's take that at face value they are valuable but man there is nothing worse than having let's say four or five meetings in an eight hour nine hour work day with like 30 to 60 minutes between each one you know what i mean yeah as a developer yeah you can't no do anything yeah like you're just totally stymied by that you get off one meeting you're like okay 30 minutes i can get something done no you can't you can't even get started in 30 minutes barely yeah especially since because you've been absent when you come back to sit next to your team they're going to flood you with questions so you're going to spend that 30 to 60 minutes answering questions and then whoop got to go to my next meeting so that is just the worst sometimes the questions are like how was

the meeting what'd you talk about in the meeting was so so there what'd they say did you make good eye contact yeah yeah the the personal issue of unhappiness in meetings i mean that answer is pretty clear you need to go to fewer meetings if you want to be personally fulfilled. The delivering value to the company, Nathan said something about how he's worried the projects aren't advancing enough because he's not writing code on them because he's in meetings all day. It might be that in this time of trouble, your role in the organization has shifted. And while they would love you to write code, the fact that you are in meetings all day makes it pretty unrealistic for them to expect you to write code so either they've explicitly decided that's okay or that's

just kind of happened and you need to make sure that's okay because because maybe maybe they'll be just as horrified as you are like what nathan is in seven hours of meetings in an eight hour day how is he going to get all the crap done i mean we still need him to do and then and then something will happen that is actually possible i um i went well it could be like several different groups you know where they're all like well we meet with nathan one hour each day and yeah yeah they don't know the collective toll that that has that's exactly what i was going to say is that these things this is a this is a distributed problem where you have individual actors who don't know the full state of the nathan system and the nathan system is horribly fragmented and uh they don't

they just don't have any appreciation for that so aggressively managing and defragging your calendar hey young whippersnappers do you know what defragmenting is i remember clicking a button that did it on my computer when i was a little kid and took like 60 minutes and then yeah then you then you thought your computer was faster yeah that graph was pretty it was it was so much more contiguous anyway defragging your calendar is important a couple of months ago i got into a situation where i was working on a few additional projects and my meeting load just went through the roof i had literally 25 meetings a week which in a 40 to 50 hour work week it's pretty much impossible to get any software development

done when you have 25 like hour-long meetings to attend you know especially when they're not compressed into a contiguous blocks which of course they're not because people don't know your calendar yeah and then sometimes you do prep for the meeting so yep yep and i actually went to my manager and i counted them all up and i categorized each one which was actually really helpful for me to say okay i'm spending this many hours per week doing this kind of meeting on this project this many hours on this kind of meeting on this other project and um it was very very informative for me and i went to my manager and i said this is too much we gotta we gotta change something and he helped me it sounds like he's kind of already tried to do that by talking to

the scrum master scrum master is such a vague yeah who knows what that person actually does though but it sounds like they didn't help you so talk to someone else then i don't know what your scrum what a scrum master does in your organization but someone has the power to say nathan is miserable and he's not getting any work done so let's change this yes and find that person and talk to them that's right and and the way to find that person might be to think imagine who i would talk to and if i told them that i have all these meetings and that i'm not getting anything done they would be really mad find that person in your company in your organization oh in your organization yeah in your company find that person and then think about how they'll respond and i'll

bet you you'll start to get some insight before you even go to that person yeah it might be like a vp of engineering or i don't know some kind of technical leadership how would your ceo like to know that they're paying your salary to have you sit in meetings and just make sure status gets reported now on the other side of that coin they might say look you are serving a valuable function that it turns out is a very rare skill in engineering which is the ability to coordinate between teams effectively and accurately because it is really hard to do that it turns out it is a superpower so maybe you're being paid a premium for that and you don't even realize it and once you look at things in that light it might change the way you approach this yeah i mean if you hate

meetings well okay i i have been in sort of in these shoes where i've been in meetings and and just hate them um because i felt like they were distracting me from the real work but i think i've also been in periods of my life where i've been in lots of meetings and i didn't hate it because i i felt like the meeting was the work i was supposed to do so i think the the thing that caused me exactly to hate it was um feeling like i was responsible for a bunch of stuff and the meeting was not helping me it was hurting me exactly my ability to get that stuff done you had an expectations mismatch yeah yeah so maybe maybe you gotta fix up those expectations here's another technique you might use which is to start to get people to use written communication

for these things instead of face-to-face verbal it is so slow to communicate information verbally like there's a reason that we don't do the oral tradition of passing stories mouth-to-mouth we print them in books and we read the books right and maybe there's not a reason for that i don't know maybe that has more you just offended like the whole stand-up comedian um i don't know union what do they have yeah storytellers there's still people to do that but i i see what you mean that the information density could be higher that's right the information density per unit time is low in spoken form and it's also but dave you get all the body language you get the body language that's true and that is meta information but you also sacrifice accuracy when you speak

verbally it is much easier to be misunderstood and it's slower so if you can get people to write stuff down in documents of some kind and then share them even if you have a meeting where you just share the documents and read them together you could probably spend half the time communicating the information as opposed to just having someone stand up in front of the group and say we're on track to deliver our widget by deadline x yeah the the meeting meeting physically or through some kind of video conferencing whatever meeting with all the people in real time feels valuable when there's a lot of um back and forth communication and context that needs to be shared rapidly but if it's just status updates there's you hear that meme all the time about a meeting

that could be replaced by an email and sometimes that's just people being disgruntled but sometimes it really isn't sometimes it's just yeah someone's working style is to work in meetings and they schedule a meeting and yep everyone else just kind of goes along so all right i have one more thing I want to say about this, which is that if you are the only person who can attend these meetings and do this, there's a good chance you have become indispensable. And being indispensable is a really bad thing in an engineering organization for two reasons. Number one, you can't scale. So think about as your team and company grow, you can't go to all these meetings, which means you've set up this linear relationship between the org size and your own personal

obligation to be in all these meetings that has to change you can't scale that way um so that's number one number two is that it actually pisses off your co-workers when you're the only person who knows all the things and can connect all the dots they'll start to resent you because you you'll you can be perceived as an information hoarder or they'll be frustrated that they always have to ask you to get answers to their questions instead of just knowing firsthand what's going on because there's good healthy mechanisms in place to get that information yeah and you might not even want to hoard the information you just might forget to tell them everything exactly if your job is to hear stuff and tell it to other people some of that's going to get lost and holy crap it is hard

to keep track of who you've told what you know what i mean you're like oh i should tell these three people that and then you tell two of them and then you're like my job is done and then two months later you realize you forgot to tell joe about this critical thing and then joe finds out about it from someone else and anyway that's the major plot point of most romantic comedies someone knows a thing and they think someone else knows it too they don't they don't oh no hilarity ensues yeah so don't don't change the romantic comedy to a a brisk email so much more efficient yeah i think that sums up our wisdom we answered the question not yet there is oh i told you i had one more thing i actually have two more things oh there is a book face-to-face communication

doesn't work get rid of it if you had written that down yeah you would have remembered while you're typing oh i have two more that's right okay there is a book that i haven't read but that other people have but other people who are smart have read and told me it's really good and they've told me some of the things about it and i think you've read it too jameson the book is called deep work yes i was thinking about that you've read it yeah yeah and there's stuff in there about scheduling meeting time and stuff and giving yourself time to do uninterrupted deep work right yep that's the thesis of the book basically that to do hard creative tasks you need long stretches of uninterrupted time and here's all these ways you could try and get it yep and

defragging your meetings is a big part of that and eliminating meetings altogether is another big part of that i think yeah another big part of the book is the author reminding you over and over again how many papers they published i i had issues i don't know i like the thesis i hated the book oh that's a topic for another podcast this is why this is why i didn't read it i just let you tell me the good parts yeah the well it's the title deep work the title is great yeah it it improved my life and i was also like really grumpy after i read it okay that's all i have all right question answered good luck nathan would you like to read our next question yes this comes from an anonymous listener it starts out thanks for the show i think it's become my

favorite dev focused podcast i like how they said i think it's becoming i don't want to commit to that but that's okay we we love you too thank you thank you going on i am the only front-end developer at a small startup we are about to acquire another small startup management says the plan is to pull the new company's front-end code into our code base i'm worried i will become sidelined maintaining the existing front-end while the new engineers from the other company work on the news stuff even if i don't get sidelined i'm worried i'll be spending the next few months copying and pasting code into our code base and making other people's code work am i getting worried about nothing should i speak to my manager about my concerns uh spending the next few months

copying pasting code into our code base and making other people's code work sounds like front-end engineering replace this new startup with stack overflow and yeah this is interesting that the acquisition have you ever been involved in an acquisition uh yes we purchased one company and integrated their stuff into our products how did it go well number one it took about three times longer than anyone thought it would yeah and after we finished integrating their stuff into our stuff we sold the company to another company so really so we kind of like took the company spent two years integrating it and running that company separately and then we sold the company to a new company so we basically it was kind of an aqua hire like we it was like a two-person startup

and we got them both and they helped us integrate their technology which was pretty advanced stuff it wasn't just like you know a crud uh application hey that's advanced for some people crud yeah yeah i guess yeah crud and haskell is very advanced especially the update part you don't do that part it's just it's just you can only read that's right you could create and read no you can't even create that changes state everything's pure dave you can't create anything no i'm just okay that's a dumb that's a dumb joke i have been well the point in me asking that question was did you see people get sidelined or pulled into directions they didn't want to go because of the acquisition well i mean look every acquisition is going to be different you know

depending on the the nature of things depending on the what you intend to do with the technology you acquire what you intend to do with the people but in this case no no one got sidelined there was more than enough work for everyone to have fulfilling meaningful work to do yeah i was i worked at a company that acquired another company um there were some rounds of layoffs of the company we acquired but after that the the kind of people that ended up working together with us um they were all really great and really smart and we all worked together on exciting things as well it didn't feel like anyone got stuck with the with the bad work maybe i'm just remembering that way because i didn't get stuck with the bad work there was this army of people miserable you

had no idea yeah yeah so how so how many who got laid off was it the acquiring company or the acquired company the acquired company had a lot of employees and not all of them ended up working long term at the at the acquiring company um which i i that's kind of standard it's kind of sad yeah that's more typical it's more typical to have people get sidelined or laid off from the company being acquired yeah because it's like you have like i don't well i was gonna say a dumb analogy i'm not gonna say that anymore but you already your company knows you well right and they trust you and know what you can do and even though they're interested in this company they're acquiring all these people are still new to them and so i don't think the default thing is to like

see the new employees and be like you know what you're better than all these employees we already have throw those people in the garbage i could see how that'd be scary but i don't think that would usually happen all right so here's my suggestion although i well i just thought of a story from um jamie zawinski the netscape guy okay tell it netscape acquired this object oriented company back when that was like incredibly cutting edge and and they kind of came in and then suddenly they were running the development of the new version of netscape somehow and and he has a lot of grumpy things to say about how big of bozos they were and how they ruined everything and so maybe through some common some some kind of politics it could happen oh yeah i feel like it

doesn't usually especially in smaller acquisitions and smaller companies yeah it kind of depends also if the companies are planning to join forces like and continue to operate as a company that's twice the size like that's pretty common too for small companies so who knows who knows i mean this could go any direction okay you're right but i have one way to make sure that you're on the other side of this fence which is pretend you didn't know the acquisition is happening go interview with the other company and get a job with them and then get acquired by your former company and then you get you get the good stuff and then you won't get sidelined i mean if you're worried you'll get sideland on this side then join the other side yeah if you can't beat them it's perfect

join them i like it yeah all right question answered what else what else is there to say nothing we're done this question asker asks at the end should i speak with my manager about my concerns what do you think about that dave the answer to this question is in every case except for harassment or illegal activities the answer is always yes go straight to your manager and talk to them about this problem yeah if your manager is dealing drugs out of the basement of the office don't talk to your manager about it talk to the police hey i noticed a lot of blood stains on your clothes the other day um and some strange smells coming from your office and i just wanted to confront you in this dark parking lot alone about it to i mean you can save face that way

right you don't have to explain yourself in front of your peers yeah this is for you no one knows i'm here don't worry yeah don't worry i didn't tell anyone i'm here oh my gosh but aside from that one rare case yes always talk to your manager anytime you find yourself saying should i talk to my manager about this like the answer is almost always yes and if you're in a situation where you can't trust your manager to talk about these kinds of things you're in a bad situation and you should find a way out of it probably but your manager is there to help you and in most cases obviously not all managers are good at this but um if you have concerns about being sidelined you have concerns about the nature of your job talk to your manager

and tell them i don't want to be sidelined i want to make sure that i'm in the thick of this i want to contribute i want to be part of the team and that will greatly increase your odds of being in the thick of it and part of the team yeah and and knowing that your concerns specifically are i want to work on the cool new stuff and maintaining our existing app and integrating is not exciting to me is helpful to the manager because that could be exciting to some people right yeah maybe they have other people that are interested in that and now they know like okay this makes my job easier resources you would be amazed i can put the different things people want to do on their jobs and that managers just can't guess unless you tell them yeah so their lives are better if

they can put people where they're happier on projects they're happier doing so also remaining silent is a great way to uh get what you don't want just generally yeah that's that's a good point it's probably how i ended up here remaining silent in my life yeah self-employed you forgot you didn't tell your manager you don't want to be self-employed and here you are self-employed yeah no i i like that point a lot it makes sense to me any other things we want to say about this question hmm i i would i would probably ask more questions before i jumped in and said i don't want to be sidelined i would probably start with lots of questions talk to as many people as you can about the acquisition ask what the intentions are for the code ask what the intentions are for the

staff ask what the overall outcome is hoping what they're hoping for you know you'll be surprised at how much people are willing to say and you might just get the answer to your question before you even have to say anything or sorry what i meant to say was you might get what you want without having to ask because you find out that what you want is already what you're going to get so be silent is what you're saying just sit around and wait for bad things and then grin and bear it i i think another point is that some kind of anxiety around the outcome of an acquisition is totally normal because this is a big deal and it changes the company in a lot of ways yeah when you hire people you hire them usually one at a time or in small numbers at a time

an acquisition you just get a bunch of people all at once all these people have their own desires that you get and you get a business which has its own gravity right yeah as some revenue model that could be slightly different from your company's revenue model and now i don't know it just kind of stirs everything up a little bit so i don't think it's weird that you are concerned about the effects of this acquisition but i also don't think it is going to be horrible yep yep times will be changing for you the culture will change you can't double the size of your company overnight i'm assuming that's going to happen and not change the culture so get ready and just roll with it yeah good luck good luck you will do great and if not let us know your job quit your job

quit your job quit your job welcome to the quit your job show there's probably a podcast about that yeah i'll go find it all right where can people go if they want to ask their own questions dave go visit us on the worldwide web at softskills.audio click ask a question and fill out our user-friendly and convenient form many of you have done that please keep your stories brief and to the point and we look forward to hearing from you sorry if we haven't gotten to your question yet we have many many questions in the backlog that are keeping us busy jameson how can people help the show they can tweet about the show share it with your friends we are at soft skills eng on twitter um they can share the link to the website which is a very convenient way to show people how

to subscribe there's all these recommendation features in all the different podcast apps i mean itunes has reviews uh if you leave us a review or a rating on itunes that would be great you can press the little star button in this app called overcast that i use i have no idea what it does though it's just this black hole every time you click that button jameson gets this nice back rub feeling like someone's like taking his shoulders and massaging them that explains a lot of my life just now. Yeah. But, but share it with other people. If you enjoy it, that's the best way to help us. We would love to, to have more listeners because our egos are large, but not large enough. Not sufficiently large. Yeah. Yeah. They must become massive. Thanks everybody.

Yeah. Thank you. Catch you next week.