Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 67: Graduate School and Asking Good Questions

Episode Date: July 7, 2017

Jamison and Dave answer these questions: Should I get a Masters in Computer Science? How do I ask good questions?

It takes more than great code to be a great engineer. This is Soft Skills Engineering episode 67. I'm your host Dave Smith. I am your host Jameson Dance. Soft Skills Engineering is a weekly advice show for software developers and emus. Are you going to add more animals every week? Will the intro just get longer and longer as you expand the scope of the podcast? Eventually the whole animal kingdom will be invited. One species at a time. Yeah, one species at a time. It will turn into a podcast about helping software developers with soft skills and also educating people about all the different kinds of animals there are. That's right. By simply naming them and nothing else. Yeah. I mean, if you name something, you have power over it. I learned that from fantasy novels.

Speaking of that, I have named a conference called React Rally. i co-organize a conference called react rally and i'm gonna use this podcast for selfish purposes use it sell tickets conference is august 25th through the 26th in salt lake city it's a single track conference about a javascript framework called react if you don't know what it is i would love for you to come but probably you're not going to but if you already know what it is then you should be super excited because we have fantastic speakers um it's it's a really chill atmosphere so the parties are like we play lawn games at at night with friends kind of i don't know it's it's i i love it and other people who have no

motivation to lie to me tell me they love it also um so if you're interested you can buy tickets at reactrally.com also we should be out by the time this comes out we'll be doing a diversity scholarship this year so we'll be giving out a bunch of tickets to locals in utah and then also paying for a small number of people to fly in and attend the conference from wherever they live so if you're interested in that you can find the diversity scholarship application on react rally.com as well hope to see you there i should read the first question though all right hi dave and jameson lately i've been thinking about going back to school for a master's in computer science on the one hand i think it would be interesting and potentially help me get my foot in the door of

some more specialized fields but on the other hand i don't know if the cost and time commitment is worth it for the possible career opportunities in what situations is going back to school for an mscs worth it and that was from listener named maria thanks for the question as someone with not a bachelor's in computer science i feel perfectly qualified to answer this question hey did you ever finish it uh no no i'm still i'm still chugging along are you how are you how's it going uh i was stymied by i i got halfway through my first course and then you have to take a test and their ui for how you like schedule to take it is broken and then i just i don't know that was enough to throw me off so real committed okay i just have to call someone and tell them

that it doesn't work and then they tell me how dumb i am and yeah did you click try clicking the start button yeah a couple times so no no bachelor's degree from jameson but would you go back for a master's if i were independently wealthy yes okay because i think computer science is fascinating and in a master's you just get to dive a little bit more into the to the fascinating parts of it um and you become a little bit more of an expert it's not a phd so you're not like the world expert on the topic that you pick but but if you're super into databases or programming languages or machine learning or whatever you you get to read a bunch of papers and and understand that at a level that most people don't which is cool in an academic

sense um and could be fulfilling and stimulating and i don't think i could not have a job for the years it would take to do it so it'd be like a really long expensive vacation yeah like an intellectual vacation i don't think it would help me in a career in any sense but what if you got really really good at automata theory you'd be unstoppable i could get in really really esoteric arguments and win every time no i would get crushed because there's always someone better at automata oh yeah that's true you better go with symbolic computation instead yeah there i don't know you'll just care a lot more and more about a smaller and smaller chunk of the world yeah scope decreases while caring increases and i think the pettiness increases too

oh yeah it's easier to get insulted and insult other people this is a little tongue-in-cheek but i think it reflects how i feel they they're intellectually interesting in a career in software development i i don't believe that they're generally useful i think there are probably exceptions to that and especially if you get something fancy like machine learning or artificial intelligence or whatever you could probably go be like a talented grunt at an ai company but you couldn't you wouldn't be like they wouldn't just hire you at tesla to run their automated car division or whatever you know no that i mean if you wanted to get a phd and then you could be talking about real specialization right yep i mean a master's degree is you'll

specialize a little bit but you will not get nearly the level of depth uh not to mention And I don't think a master's degree opens a lot more doors to you that aren't already open to you as an experienced software developer with a bachelor's degree in computer science. That's just my gut feel on it. That's how I feel too, that the PhD does, but that neither of those are really financial. It's more like you can do things that you wouldn't get hired on to do as a software engineer with a bachelor's. Right, right.

and the phd actually it opens new doors but i think it also closes a whole bunch of other doors like oh yeah entry-level software development positions are just totally off the table for you yeah not not totally but most of the time they'll see the phd and be like whoa whoa what are you doing here you're overqualified yeah now i i do have uh i do have a good friend who's doing an online master's program part-time i don't actually know why he's doing it i should probably ask him but i think it's it's mostly for intellectual curiosity he's just very interested in stuff and motivated to learn it but also loves the structure that that um a program like this provides i don't know that he has long-term career goals around it i think it is just like this will

be cool this is what i'll do instead of like read blog posts at home about stuff i'll read the as well during evening and lunchtime hours and mostly with online courses i think over over the course of either five years or seven years he got his master's degree in computer science he bounced between two or three different universities trying to find one that would match up with his schedule and he finally did get it and he's one of my good friends and on the day he got his master's degree diploma he brought it into work and also brought in a cake that said his name was evan it said master evan i think on the cake perfect he was super proud of himself and uh he insisted from that point forward that everybody call him master so i mean with that alone it might be worth it

yeah that is uh you can't put a price on the title oh yeah i i think if you're looking in terms of raw um opportunity and financial costs though it's it's almost always not worth it yeah now in in evan's case his employer paid his tuition so the only cost he paid was his time okay and he was also like your friend who just loved i mean he just totally geeked out he focused on programming languages and compiler design and stuff like that super excited for that so it was like he was going to spend his time studying this anyway and so now he got to do it at a more rigorous level and he got a piece of paper that says he's a master so i worked the the first thing that ever paid me money to program was the uh the university computer science department

i worked there as a webmaster when i was going to school and that meant i got to hang out with the professors and with the grad students oh and you had master in your title uh that's that's true as an undergrad didn't even need that fancy piece of paper and i loved them they were super cool and it was fun to hang out with them and it made me realize that boy did i never want to go to grad school uh one one tip though that i got from the professors was if you want a master's try and get into a phd program because you normally get a master's as part of your phd studies and then you just drop out after you get your master's later nerds i think i should i should confirm this but i'm gonna say it on air anyways but i believe that most phd programs um in technical

fields will pay you a stipend and pay your tuition so you don't end up having to pay the the tuition costs and you even get a little tiny chunk of money so it can be easier financially to do that You're still doing, I mean, the opportunity cost of not working as a software developer is, is we'll, we'll dwarf the amount of money that you get, but it could be, it could be an okay deal. Yeah. Right. Take a little edge off.

I, yeah, I have pretty mixed feelings about this for a lot of years. I think if you had asked me, should I get a master's degree? I would have said, look, if it's your hobby, go for it. You know, there's much worse hobbies than CS master's degrees. but if you're looking for career advancement it's probably not worth it then i moved to the boston area and i ride my bike through the campus of harvard every day on my way to work and my office is across the street from mit and i gotta tell you that getting a master's degree from one of those universities in computer science will probably open doors that uh are just incredible

and would not be opened any other way if no if for no other reason through the social connections that you'll make um so that's pretty valuable on the other hand those are really expensive master's degrees to get yeah so there's a little financial trade-off for you uh expensive to get and also really hard to get into right right um i i would say that most people on earth in computing or most people on earth that write software could not get into mit or harvard or stanford or those big name cs schools you mean you don't just like you don't just walk up to the cash register and say i'd like one master's degree please here's two hundred thousand dollars and then they hand it to you no i mean that that's a special case that if you if you could get into

those places then i think the rules change a little bit but most people can't so yeah that's true that's true and most people that can can't afford it anyway yeah yeah uh but so maybe that doesn't even matter so i had another friend who got a master's degree this was oh geez seven eight years ago um he had been working for about maybe five six seven years as a software developer and then he went back and got a master's degree and i don't really think it made any difference to him whatsoever professionally and when i asked him about it and i asked him what his motivations were he said he wanted it for career purposes like he wanted to make more money and have a better job frankly i don't think it has paid off at all for him um i don't i actually haven't asked

him how much he's making maybe maybe he's making a grundle of money and i don't know but um based on the jobs that he's had since then and the jobs that i've had since based on the stuff you find in his garbage can from going through his mail i don't think i i don't think it's really paid significant dividends in in terms of career advancement yeah i mean this is different for other fields too i know in education especially a master's is sort of becoming table stakes almost to advance your career as as a teacher and yeah it's it's super different but as a software a developer it's a great passion project if you can make it work financially it's not a great career investment for most people especially given the opportunity cost now in the question maria

says um it could help me get my foot in the door for more specialized fields and that may very well be true in some of these newfangled ai and machine learning projects and like you mentioned before you're probably not going to get to be head of tesla's self-driving car division but i think there are a lot of positions where you would get your foot in the door with a master's degree having an emphasis in machine learning or statistics or something else where otherwise you might not uh be allowed to walk through that door maybe maybe like bioinformatics you know something like that yeah i feel like i've heard that the phd is really the thing you need for those those specialized fields even i have seen i have heard and seen that firsthand um we hired

three four different uh data scientists at my last job all three of them had phds or phd equivalents you know where it's like they did all like 95 of the work and then dropped out like like a certain other co-hosts that i know yeah but um but i still think that with a master's degree with an emphasis in one of those areas it should i don't have data behind this but it should open doors that are pretty much closed if you have a bachelor's degree well you have to get a master's get a phd usually so yeah so try it get the master's see if you can get the jobs and then if you can't go back and finish that phd yeah oh man there were there were people there that had been in the phd program for a decade or more oh oh oh it's they must really like it i i think if they really liked

it they would have finished faster well what was taking them so long i don't know it's both an enormous amount of work and also incredibly self-directed and open-ended and there's lots of room for you to work really hard and get totally stuck and backtrack and throw a bunch your work away and there's lots of room for you to kind of just spin your wheels because there aren't very many um hard deliverables or things enforced upon you so i think so so that's interesting because a lot of people say they want to go back to college because they're not good at self-directed learning and that the college curriculum would force them to stay on track yeah that's what you're saying maybe it wouldn't no not not for phds for sure i know um for masters

there's some curriculum uh but yeah the the the the more you do the less direction there is okay which could be really hard for some people it's it's weird because people that get into phd programs are generally very smart and academically talented sure but some of them just get trapped have we answered the question yeah i think so bottom line for me is financially the difference between a bachelor's degree and a master's degree is probably unmeasurable it's so small for most people and but uh from a personal satisfaction standpoint i think there are people who just love this and they feel like their life is more complete having gone through that process and i can't argue with that one bit and i'd say go for it if that's you

yeah you you mentioned the financial benefit and as as someone who's reviewed a lot of resumes i've looked at resumes of people applying for general software developer positions who have masters and it in no way at all affected my review of their application positively or negatively it was just like pure neutrality like oh they did a master's that's cool but they're also into mountain biking yeah yeah exactly which which i feel really bad for saying because it's years of their life of their life but it just it just doesn't have a lot to do with writing writing web apps you know well that's true all right so go for it absolutely do it don't let anything get in your way there's no cost too high i feel conflicted about my response on this question

because i love learning stuff and and i love the feeling of just diving in and studying things and sometimes i'll wake up and have questions that would take years of work to answer and i wonder what would it be like to have that be my job where i just have this question and i'm trying to find the answer and that's part of the research part of the master's program but i feel like i've come down really hard against it i certainly don't think that those answers to questions will make me any money though uh it's more like intellectual curiosity and stimulation and if that's the motivation then for sure and if not then we've we've covered it it's a solid maybe i think you and i have like a perfect agreement total harmony on this subject good so if you disagree dear

listener please write in and let us know what your opinion is and we will read it out especially if you have experience if you did a master's and it was great or you did a phd or whatever if you've done it because i mean dave and i haven't done it right we have no idea for sure we're just making stuff up so please let us know um one more thing i want to say about this uh and then we'll wrap up when i was an undergrad student getting my computer science bachelor's degree every virtually every cs class every semester the teacher would dedicate one class period to trying to convince us to go on to get a master's degree um did you have a similar experience jameson in your college yeah for sure and they would throw out some very interesting statistics

such as the difference in earnings over a lifetime between a bachelor's degree holder and a master's degree holder was some number like a million dollars or something um and and they would give all these like opening salaries are x percent higher and and this and that um i i believe in my heart that those figures were all uh i don't want to say fake news they were um construed to uh paint a better picture than is reality for most people now granted these numbers are 15 years ago and the industry has changed a lot since then um but i believe that they were mistaken in their predictions yeah so there you go in other words you will hear people convince you quite strongly of this professors are um a very biased source for

information about whether you should go on to grad school or not because they they have made it they are the pinnacle of academia is it like 0.01 percent of graduating phds end up as professors or something like that whoa it's an extraordinarily small number oh i would have thought much higher than that um i think that's tenured professors uh okay okay you know what i'm gonna google that i'm sitting at a computer and i want to say the real number because to me it seems like most cs phds that i know the only thing they're really really qualified to do is teach cs classes in at the college level and do research cs research like very few companies employ significant numbers of phd cs students or graduates well it depends on whether i want

the numbers to agree with me or not oh perfect that's my favorite kind the choice is yours success rate three percent says one google headline i like those odds okay that's higher than 0.01 that's not tenure track that's any kind of professor and and there's the whole adjunct thing that's becoming a bigger deal so anyways and the cs industry is small that you will end up like the people who are telling you for sure go on to grad school i did it and it was great also they make all of their salary based on people paying tuition for education that's true small conflict of interest Yeah, you're kind of, I mean, grad students are a resource that professors mine to produce papers

in some ways. And the trade-off is they help you, but whatever. Yeah. New question. All right. Question answered. Question sidetracked. Do you want to read the next question, Dave? Sure. This one is from an anonymous listener who says, I often ask technical questions and either get one word answers that I don't understand or giant explanations of things I already understand. How do I ask good technical questions to get the answers that I need?

Hmm. I don't know, Jameson. How do you ask good questions? Is that the Socratic method? You just ask questions when people ask you questions? I don't know, Jameson. Is it? Is that what you want it to be?

I don't know. i did computer science not humanities so there are large gaps in my knowledge about the world should i spend the rest of this episode only asking questions what would happen if you did that what do you think would happen how many listeners would never listen to the podcast again how many do we have again how many can we afford to lose how bad would you feel okay i can't take it anymore this is a great question um i've experienced both ends of this question as both the question asker getting unsatisfactory answers and a question answerer who just feels like

i'm saying words and they're not they're not doing it they're not doing anything yeah they're just deflecting off the surface to quote star wars episode 4 uh yeah i believe you um yeah so so one problem can be that um you get a lot of detail some of which is meaningless to you or some of which you already know and that problem can be solved by giving more detail in your question i i feel like i learned how to ask really good technical questions partially from Stack Overflow. Back in the day, I spent a lot of time on Stack Overflow and I still have like Stack Overflow karma interest. I have all these questions that I answered and asked years and years ago and they still get upvotes. So I'm just, I've retired

actually and I'm living off the interest from my Stack Overflow karma. So you asked questions that people thought were good, so they voted them up? Yep. And I also gave answers that people thought were good so they voted them up and it still happens all the time from i asked some question about like dot net in the 2010 because i needed it for a class or something and and people still upvote it now um wow anyways the culture of asking questions on stack overflow encourages a lot of detail about why you're asking the question and what exactly the question is and code samples of what you tried and like the error message that you got back and it's not like um people will yell at you if the question isn't isn't detailed enough they just won't answer it or they'll answer

it wrong and you won't get the information you need so there are strong incentives to give a lot of detail in your question which can help the answerer the the worst question ever hey dave why isn't this working and it's like why isn't what working that that program you wrote what's it doing it's not working what can you show me the error message oh yeah it said error i'm like no i can't help you i cannot help you unless you give me all the information i haven't seen your screen i don't know what you're seeing so yeah give all the details sometimes yeah you know sometimes it helps to i was gonna say you can there's a risk of flooding the person with too much detail but usually that's better than not providing enough yeah i mentioned stack overflow

there's also a good example in open source culture a lot of popular open source projects will have issue templates or they'll have examples of good bug reports or or questions people have asked in their issue trackers um and and the ones that get answered are usually the ones that are asked well it's not necessarily the most important or most broken bugs or whatever it's it's what makes it easiest for for the person that knows it to give the answer yeah so this is a valuable skill because it will help you get answers absolutely absolutely and correct answers that will actually solve your problem and sometimes the answer to your question is not actually the answer that you to the question you asked but some some assumption that you've made that is incorrect and if you give enough

background information you can get a much more valuable answer to a question that you didn't even know you should ask um so a great example of this or the the pattern that this follows is called the xy problem have you ever heard of the xy problem jameson it's a good one and i i think many of us have fallen victim to it and the xy problem is where you have x problem and you think i could solve x problem by using y but i don't know how to do y so you go ask a co-worker or a friend how do i do y and the co-worker says well what are you trying to do and and you say well i'm trying to do x and they go oh well you definitely don't want to do y go back to x and here's the answer to your x problem here's a solution to that and so many times we just jump

straight to y and we ask that question and then we miss out on getting the even better answer to the original problem that prompted us to go asking in the first place so to avoid that what kind of things do you should do you do jameson um i usually try and give a broader overview of what i'm trying to accomplish before i dive into the details so i don't know say you're running into some issue where you ran out of space in you're like trying to upload a file and uh that's like the main goal i'm trying to upload a file with this web framework and that that question you have is like i'm seeing this error because the file when base64 encoded overflows the limit of characters in a get parameter how do i increase that limit and that's like your oh yeah that's

like classic question or whatever right like i'm asking how do i increase the number of characters i can put in get parameters in in an http request but the actual thing you're trying to do is upload a file so the the real answer is like don't use get to upload a file use post and if you say i'm trying to upload a file as the broad goal then someone will hopefully nicely point out that there's a better way to accomplish your actual goal instead of telling you like oh you can tweak this weird setting in iis or whatever but it's only specific to that server you should gzip the file first and then base64 encoded yeah yeah like those will solve the wrong problem encode the file into emoji then you'll save space in the character count

i got sidetracked by looking at um emoji compression algorithms yeah so so um that's that's probably the answer to the question you asked earlier about how do you avoid giving too much detail so it just like overwhelms people and you need like a tldr of here's what i'm trying to do okay now here's the nitty-gritty of what i tried and the code and the error i saw and what do i do to fix it another thing i've seen from question askers is they don't know enough they're so new to the technology or field or topic that they can't even formulate a good question okay or the answer to their question is like study this thing for six months or something how do you handle that case like as the as the question asker uh yeah as both

as the asker or the answer i don't know i saw someone who was pretty new to to software in general come in and ask like how do i communicate information to a to another computer with my javascript or something um and you were like oh boy yeah yeah exactly big answer to that yeah the answer is gigantic how do you how do you go about handling that on both ends so i think as the asker oh gosh i think about this a lot actually um like what it would take to answer simple questions for new programmers um who say things like you know uh what's a function and it's like well in order to explain what a function is i have to explain what code is and then i have to explain like yeah like the purpose of reusability and parameterizing things and like team dynamics and

it's just like it's just out of control so as a question ask you gotta talk about dykstra and go to and structured programming and like machine code yeah so i think as a question asker what i try to do is put myself in the shoes of the question answerer and that's fundamentally impossible to do but what it does is it helps you to think of follow-up questions that they might ask to get clarity on what you're trying to understand and so when i say like how do i communicate information between two computers my first thought as the question answerer would be well what are you trying to accomplish and what do you have you know and then i would go back as the question asker in my head i'm having this conversation like ping pong in my own brain

and i'm and i would say okay well i have a web browser and the other computer is also a web browser so maybe i should go google like browser to browser communication and then see what comes up you know things like that and and i think sometimes when you put yourself in the question answers shoes you can think of the follow-up questions that you will get asked and sometimes they will lead you down a path where you can actually discover the answers yourself yeah yeah i think if you're the asker of a really broad question like that communicating to people that you're not looking for someone to just create on the fly like the guide to tcp ip just type that into their chat client that they're using to talk to you um telling them like hey no

this is a broad question i'm looking for resources to where i can go to find more out about it if you don't have a specific uh like atomic problem you're asking an answer for but it's more like how can you explain this basic concept thing to me um and as an answerer you just have to i think you just have to kindly communicate to the person that there's a lot of scope to the question that they're asking and that you either can give them very broad things that they'll need to follow up with on their own or you need them to narrow it down a little bit to a more specific thing yeah totally what about the the issue of you being an expert in the field making it harder to relate to people who are beginners in the field the way you think about programming dave

is different from someone who is learning about programming for the first time and you have a lot of vocabulary they don't and you have a lot of abstraction built up in your head that they don't so how do you explain things to someone without just saying words that are like technically correct yeah incomprehensible to someone that is not dave smith level of developer you know yeah yeah exactly this is this is actually really hard to do um because either you have to make assumptions about the knowledge that the person already has or you have to stop at every other word and ask them are you familiar with this and of course their natural tendency their ego is going to push them to say oh yeah yeah of course i i already know what that is who wouldn't know what

pumping lemma is and everyone does that you know i got pumping lemmas for days um so i think uh i think you have as a question answer in person that you can do this but i try to read people's body language and i try to watch their eyes and see if they're kind of glazing over and looking away or if they're engaged and like eyebrows going up and down you know like i get this you know if they're if they're crying a lot like if tears are just running out of their eyes um so i use that for sure and then i also stop and ask like okay you know is that clear now some people they just will never say no they'll be like yep that's clear and so you have to find because it's an insult right it's like no you suck at explaining stuff like people don't want

to say no or it's like no i suck at understanding stuff yeah yeah like you're saying words i don't understand so you are clearly smart and if i don't understand them that means i'm dumb yeah exactly and so you you have to ask the question in a way that gives them license to honestly answer you know which can take different forms for different people but you know you can say things like oh have you worked with this before you know and then they can say no i haven't worked with it i'm familiar with it you know they can give they can give an answer or you can say things like um uh let's see i'm drawing a blank i think i don't know but anyway i kind of think of it like uh you're doing like a binary search

over their understanding so you might start off way over explaining but you kind of ask for feedback on them on on what they're understanding and then they they oh man how do i words yeah binary search so you start off way over explaining you figure out that they understand what you're talking about you you drop way back and and use a lot more abstraction you figure out they're confused now and you kind of like narrow in on what their level of understanding is but it requires a lot of feedback and interaction back and forth between you and the person who's asking the question yeah exactly how do you avoid punishing people who are really good at answering questions by just overflowing them with questions so someone gives you a great

answer it's really helpful um but they have work to do too right so so there's this instinct to reach out to the person that helped you last time but also right i don't know you don't want to be annoying to them you want them to still get their stuff done yeah absolutely and i think the onus is actually on the answerer in this situation to make sure that they are not doing unscalable interactions when they answer questions so if someone comes to them with a question they should think who else could benefit from this answer and try to spread this knowledge and bring people in to the conversation and make sure that more people hear the answer so that next time there's a broader base of people that can be drawn upon to answer that same question so that's one way to do

it it's like a good answer for stack overflow are you a secret shill a what a shill what is that oh i don't know you're you're someone whose job it is to you're like a spokesperson trying to convince people to use stack overflow i get every time someone uses stack overflow i get a penny so yes yeah it's a lot it's a good deal anything else we should chat about with this particular i've got a question i've got a couple more small points and one is that as a question asker i think it's really important that you hone your sense of do i understand this i think sometimes i'll get in a situation where i ask a question and while the answer is being given i think ah enlightenment i get it and then i go back to my desk and i'm like i didn't get any of that you know and i think it's

really important that you practice what it feels like when you've actually achieved understanding of something and to do that i think what i do is i say okay could i explain this back to someone else after having heard it and run through that mental exercise briefly as you're you know right after you get your answer and if you can't then ask for follow-up and clarity i think it might be related to the dunning-kruger effect actually where you you feel like you've gotten this sense of understanding and that you get it and now you're capable but then in reality you didn't it didn't quite soak in, you know? Yeah. Yeah. That makes sense. So you kind of test your knowledge with the person who answered it. Yeah, exactly. And then another good tip for

question askers is while your answerer is going through their, their, their answer, you don't have to just sit back and be a passive audience. You can, you can interrupt them and pause and say, Hey, can you clarify this point? What is that? What is that? And some people don't work well in a real time, you know, back and forth fashion. So you can make notes while you're listening and just say hey like a mental note write down a word that will remind you to come back to a question and then when they're done give your brain a minute to settle in good word rutabaga yep and then when you're done give your brain a moment to process and maybe you have to go back to your desk and think for a while and then come back and ask follow-up questions to

make sure that you got it sure but you know it's asking questions and getting answers in the technical fields it's hard like this is not a a skill that most people are born with but it's so helpful if you can do this well then then you can unstick yourself a lot and if you can answer questions really well i think that's the secret to being a 10x engineer it's not you get 10 more x done you help other people get 10 more x done i think someone's tweeted that probably um i know i didn't invent that but we uh at my company we call that a force you're a force multiplier which means you're able to take a team and through your help they're able to multiply their efforts more than just what they could produce without you yep yeah this feels very valuable in an engineering

team in a software team absolutely absolutely so the last two things i'll say is that as a question answerer i i like to follow up at the end of it when i give an answer i like to ask did i answer your question and i can usually tell by people's body language like like did i did i really answer You know, I can usually tell right away whether I gave them an answer they were looking for. No, but I'm going to go sit down. Yeah, exactly. And look for that, really, because people will be polite to you. They will be so polite that it will hurt their knowledge and it'll hurt your ability to communicate.

And then the last thing I would say is whenever anyone asks me a question, I try to ask them the question behind their question before I jump into the answer. because so many times as a younger less experienced engineer i would launch into some monologue to answer their question only to find out a they already knew everything i was telling them and b i was going in totally the wrong direction yep and so i like to say what prompted this question what's your context where are you coming from with this you know what are you trying to accomplish and nine times out of ten that gives some really good context that will help me scope the answer down to what they need to a not waste their time by repeating crap they already know and b by giving them more specific information and sometimes i don't know enough it's like oh i

realize based on your context that you already know everything i know and i can't help you you know and that's fine but yeah better better to do that than to spend 10 minutes monologuing yeah yeah i love that point about avoiding just holding forth for paragraphs at a time about stuff i have been on the recipient end of that enough to know that it sucks and it's usually not helpful usually my questions aren't answered by like rants on someone's pet peeve topic or whatever about how everyone else is a moron and is doing everything wrong and only they know the true answer so i like i like that idea of making sure you're breaking up the answer a little bit and checking in to make sure it's useful and relevant it's like the agile development methodology of

question answering yeah take a one minute sprint yep then have a little retro yeah retrospective so let me give you a counter example where this went horribly awry okay i was a pretty junior engineer probably about three years out of college and we had this really demanding customer at my company we were doing big contracts and this this one customer was responsible for this big contract and i was working on this new feature for them and it was kind of experimental and i wanted to demo it to him and say hey here's an idea we think it'll be good for you come take a look so i sat down in the lab and i started showing the screen and and clicking around and whatnot and at one point this customer he just he's very bold very in your face

he just says to me why is this useful to me and because i like to give good answers i didn't just have an answer i said well why don't you tell me where you're coming from tell me a little bit about your job and he he just was so pissed he was like he just turned around and started talking to someone else and i was like there's a time and a place for asking clarifying questions and like a high profile customer demo is probably not that place that's weird though i don't know that it was weird weird it was weird every other time i've asked questions like that it's turned out better have we answered this question who can know the answer to that question jameson uh i wonder if we'll find out next week

and how would people know if they wanted to find out next week what i wonder how how can our listeners continue listening to this show aha and how can they ask their own questions they can ask their own questions i can't phrase that as a question i won't i can i can do anything i want and i choose not to do that they can go to soft skills dot audio click on the link on there that takes you to a google form fill it out give us as much or as little details you want we'll put it in our queue and and our minions will review it our minions are dave and myself that's right um if you are enjoying the show please share it with people uh if you can leave us a review on itunes that helps apparently also just i don't know share

it on whatever podcast app you use they all have little share buttons you can usually click on them and they'll pop up in twitter or facebook or give you a link you can copy and paste please do that we love it when people listen to this show you know i i probably probably every podcast i've ever listened to has said go to our website and do this or that do you want to know how many podcast websites i've actually gone to no don't tell me how many have you got two i i know exactly how many i've been to which is a sign that people don't do it that much i have shared a lot of podcasts just from apps because it's convenient oh okay i've never done that either oh well step it up dave seriously like i'm thinking about all

these different podcasts i listen to and i'm like i have never been to any of their websites yeah except ours but if you go to our website you can comment on each episode and some of the conversations have been really cool to see what people add after we're done spewing all of our bogus garbage then we get to hear what real smart people have to say about the topic and it's been really cool to see yeah yeah that's been great all right i think we're done okay next week