Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 7: Finding meaning and quitting your job

Episode Date: April 18, 2016

In episode 7, Jamison and Dave answer these questions: How do I quit my job? What’s the process? How do I avoid burning bridges? What will my employer expect from me? How do benefits work? I’m worried my job is not meaningful? Am I just cranking out code for “the man”? What can I do to get more meaning out of my job?

Hello everyone and welcome to episode 7 of soft skills engineering the podcast where we discuss the non-technical side of software development the everything else I'm your host Dave Smith, and I am also your host Jameson dance and together we are I was thinking like a Voltron thing there. That's what I was thinking too. Actually Is there a button on Skype to do that the Voltron button? Yeah, I just pressed a button we'll see if we turn into a Voltron. So to kick off the show, you may have noticed just a lack of music, a lack of intro music. It just kind of starts. And we want to change that. We want some intro music for the show, but we're not sure what to put there. So we're asking you for suggestions. Do you have any music you think would be a good intro for the podcast? We don't really

have any genres or anything. It should just be good music. I think we're even willing to use, like doesn't have to be royalty free or anything i think we're counting on fair use to you can just say fair use and then like get away with anything right that's what i do when i speed in my car officer it's fair use fair use i shoplifted these cheetos but it's fair use but anyways so send us your suggestions if people don't send suggestions what will we do jameson soft skills engineering the best podcast in the world if you don't want to listen

to that send us a suggestion for music alright so Jameson you want to read our first question today? I sure do how do I quit my job? what's the process? how do I avoid burning bridges? what will my employer expect from me and how do benefits work?

so just kind of a general I want to quit what do I do? how does it work? how to do it well mm-hmm so i usually i think rage quit is the best way to do it and the more ragey or the better yep do you have any of those air horns that you can play or oh what if yep yep okay i got it you fill up a bucket full of water attach a string to it set it on top of the door go into your office ask your boss to come in they open the door it just dumps out all over their head and you record

and it's also the ice bucket challenge so then you force them to donate oh gosh we have gone way off the rails uh yeah and then you say you just got punked so i've never actually done that i've done everything short of the ice bucket yeah but you did punk someone and submit it to mtv's punked good uh do you do you just go in and say i'm quitting do you write it on a piece of paper maybe slip a post-it note under the door what do you do send an email text yeah here's how ideal perfect jameson would handle it i would go into my manager and schedule a meeting with them and then tell them hey i'm quitting i'm giving my two weeks notice uh that's it just hand the ball back to him not not be ragey not um not do it over a text message but i think it's important

to do it over person in person their first question is going to be oh what's going on like that's probably going to shock them you know maybe not but in many cases yes how do you respond to that uh i would tell them what my concerns are as long as my concerns aren't i don't like working with you so some things you'd withhold i think is what you're saying yeah i i think my style is i usually quit when i have i feel like i've learned all i can learn or i'm just kind of i i've i lack motivation now i'm just not excited about the team or the product anymore so it's not a huge shocker i think most of the time because because you can just kind of tell i'm not as pumped about working there anymore uh and and i also think i'll usually have one or two

conversations before the i quit conversation just to see because sometimes there's a thing you can do to change it you can switch teams or switch projects yeah yeah get a raise or i don't know yeah find what's what's actually wrong and try to fix that you know quitting is the last resort usually. Now, you know, sometimes it's the right thing to do and just move on. But in those situations, I found that's usually not the best time to have like a nice heart to heart conversation about what needs to improve in the organization, because usually your manager is going to be in a bit of a state of shock at that point. That's a good point. And so you might just want to be like, yeah, you know what, just we can talk about it more later or whatever. Maybe you go

in on a Friday afternoon, let them sit on it over till Monday and they can talk more. That's yeah. And also, most people are not cool under pressure. I think I said what ideal Jameson would do. But real Jameson, they would ask me, well, what's wrong? And I'd be like, I don't know, and just like freeze up under the appearance of conflict. So it would be hard to coherently express concerns at that point. Yeah, certainly. And realistically, if you've decided for sure that you're quitting, it's just not really the environment to sit down and say,

well you know you need to change these three things and then i'll be happy because then you're giving the message that your manager can do those three things and then you will stay but if you've really decided to quit you need to be pretty clear that i'm leaving and um yeah we can talk about feedback later but i'm definitely leaving yeah you need to know going into that conversation know that you're leaving or know the feedback no you need yeah you need to know if you're really solid on leaving and i recommend you either be really solid on leaving or just don't leave like If you're not willing to go out of that conversation, then you probably aren't ready to quit. I think it's, do you think it's bad to say, I'm concerned about working here and I'm thinking

about quitting and then use that to kind of work out some problems? Well, that depends on the company. So, you know, last episode I mentioned how I was, I felt pretty naive. And the reason I mentioned that is because I have worked for excellent companies who are very good to their people. And so I feel like I could say that. But I've had friends who have worked for companies where if you say that you're fired so um you'll have to judge the company and the quality of your manager to know like can i have this conversation with that kind of free food in the cafeteria has just been a little stale the last couple days it's really good you're fired you don't like that free food we give you uh yeah i i think

yeah i'm gonna change my ideal answer that's what i would ideally do i would ideally talk to them and say, this stuff is really getting me down and I don't know if I'm going to stick around forever if this is how it is, but it's not I'm quitting right now. It's like the warning shot. It's also, you want to, or I think you want to make sure

that that's not a threat. You're not saying you better fix this crap or I'm going to quit. Yeah, you don't want to create a hostage situation. Yeah, give me a raise or I'm gone or something like that, even though that's a valid economic exchange and they pay you in return for your service

and you want more money and that's the way to get it, I think it would change the tenor of your relationship and it might be hard to have a healthy thing where they feel like you've been holding this club over them. Yeah, exactly. What if you get mad again? Then you're going to threaten to quit again and derail some project and I don't know.

Yeah, at the very least you run the risk of being labeled as toxic or threatening if you do that in our industry. Now, in other industries, I think this is actually a little more commonly practiced, the idea of going to get a counteroffer by threatening to quit or by actually getting another offer and then holding it as leverage to get a better pay or better situation at work. In our industry, I don't see that very much from developers, and I think it's looked down upon by most company leadership. Now, I have seen advice that says you should be interviewing regularly every X months or something just to kind of know what's out there. Do you think that falls under this? What if you go interview just because you want to see if there's somewhere else you could be happy and then you see something that seems like it could be a good fit?

That's exactly how I have changed jobs almost every time. So, you know, I definitely think people should interview semi-regularly, at least if nothing else, to stay in the practice of it because it can be really intimidating and stressful. But if you do it and there's no pressure to actually get a job, like because you already have a job that you don't hate, and if it turns out to be really awesome, then why not? You know, that happens. and that's great. And I think if you go to your company and say, look, I just found this other opportunity and it's amazing. And I feel like I can't pass it up. Then you're on great footing and, and, um, you probably do want to take that job. I mean, that's a win for you. But do you think that falls into the same? I got an offer.

No, it all depends on how you handle it. I mean, if you have no intention of, uh, staying at your job, but well, let's see, that's not a good way to put it. If you are going to interview for the purpose of getting an offer so that you can get a raise, then yeah, don't do that. I'm not cool with that. I got to do the old devil's advocate thing. Why not? If you could go make more money somewhere else, doesn't that reflect your true value? And shouldn't you see if you could get your current job to reflect that true value? You can do that without holding the club over their head. I mean, if you go to them and say, look, I know that in the market, I'm worth this much money per year. And just say that without having to have a hostage and a gun to the

hostage's head um i you can do that and i think it's a healthy exchange but if you go in with the offer uh for whatever reason culturally or otherwise that just comes across as um mercenary let's say almost as if they're paying you to do a job like a mercenary like a mercenary gets paid everyone knows jameson you're supposed to work because you believe in the mission of the company not because they're paying you come on yeah they pay you that's just like a happy accident yeah the money oh i get paid too nice oh gravy do these jira tickets and i get one awesome i i want to tell a brief story about probably the crappiest way i've quit a job uh it was my this was my last job while i was still in college so i was working part-time and

i was really stressed out about finals so i asked to cut back on my hours um to focus more on school and not be as stressed out and cutting back on my hours made me realize like hey I hate it there I'm happier the less I work there even though I get less money and then I just went and quit after that and that wasn't I feel bad about it because I feel like I wasn't honest with them saying hey I am gonna quit it was kind of like a can you make this uh this concession for me and they kind of did it to to make sure i was happy and could do well in school and then it led to me quitting so kind of blew up in their face a little bit well no i mean i was way happier it worked out for the best for them anyway but for them i feel bad that they made this effort and then i was like hey

thanks for that see ya um long term do you feel like it hurt them really bad to have you do that i don't know they're they're still around so it didn't probably crush the company the weight of my intern level programming power is missing from them. Did not. Our intern quit. We're folding. Call the investors. Oh no. Who will add semicolons to this JavaScript file now? I didn't do that. That's a really good point because I remember my first job out of college, I quit after 18 months and I just agonized over it because the team that I was leaving had been together for literally decades. And I felt like it was personal, you know, like I'm stabbing this team in the back. but at the end of the day it was fine and my manager actually sat down with me and I because

I was agonizing in front of him and finally he said look this team will be fine without you Dave don't worry it's going to be okay and I was like ah release you know you're not even that great Dave yeah exactly I know you think you're a superstar but so did we said the two weeks notice thing right that's kind of standard yeah I think that is pretty standard although I don't think you have a legal obligation to give two weeks. That is the professional standard courtesy to give. Some companies expect you to do more. And I think we've talked about this before, but a friend of mine worked for a company that actually required 90 days of notice. And it was in their employment contract because they really had some pretty serious technical stuff.

And so they wanted you to pair with someone for 90 days as you transitioned out. And so I don't know. I don't even know if that's legal. You would just get 90 days of crappy work out of me if that was required i i i have a hard time being really motivated when the reason i'm quitting is usually because i lack motivation to work there anymore so if it was this long drawn out process i i mean i wouldn't just like show play video games all day but sure i would have a hard time with that so you mentioned two weeks notice and that's kind of the standard thing is professional courtesy why why should you maintain that standard like what what's in it for you to to be courteous Well, I think sometimes we say professional courtesy and we think to the company, but let's take it a little more personal. It's a courtesy to your team. If you just bail out on your team, maybe you're in the middle of some work, someone's going to have to pick that up. But two weeks gives you time to wrap up what you're doing, transfer knowledge, and help your team not be left in a lurch. So I think that's where that came from. And what's in it for you is that you're being nice to your team, who you hopefully have respect for and like and don't want them to suffer as a result of your leaving.

Sure. Yeah, that makes sense. So it's more, it's almost self-interest where you're trying to leave a good impression on the people you worked with so that you'll be more likely to work with them. Yeah, I think so. That makes sense. So that's how you quit. Yep. With sunglasses on. I'm out of here. Yeah. Great. Do you want to read our second question, Dave? Yeah, sure. This one is really personal and I love it. So let's talk. I'm worried my job is not meaningful am i just cranking out quote for quote sorry am i just cranking out code for quote the man what can i do to get more meaning out of my job what is the meaning of meaning it's meta uh yeah so does this do you think that you need to be motivated by the product that you produce

As in, I'm working for some company that makes it easier to find sources of clean, I don't know, you make some doodad, you stick in the ground, it creates clean water, right? That's cool, like that can benefit people. You could see it helping out in disaster situations or impoverished countries or something like that. Is that how you find meaning or are there other ways that you could find meaning at work? I think that's what we think of most of the time when we think of meaning is how valuable to humanity is the product that I'm building. And I also think it's really hard to find a job that you can say this job's product is uber meaningful to the world. Yeah. Why is that?

I mean, we work for money and most of the stuff that we build as developers is stuff people are paying for either directly or indirectly. Why doesn't that align with things that we consider meaningful? I don't know. But I mean, well, I guess if you define meaning as changing the world in some significant way, there's only so many different people that can change the world in a big significant way, right? Or else it'd just be constant churn. Somebody has to write the mainframe app that their bank uses so that they can write checks to pay people to change the world in a significant way.

An excellent point. And an insurance company has to insure the charity that produces clean water for everyone. Yep. And then someone has to optimize the CPM on the ads that you click on to sign up for insurance for that company. Yeah. That's really interesting. Else we would be doomed. Without the ad click revenue, the insurance couldn't insure your clean water company. Yeah. And we wouldn't have all this free stuff that we get to use. You know, I haven't really thought of it. It's like the transitive property of meaning,

but at the end of the day, at some point you are building something meaningful directly or indirectly yeah now in some cases you're just absolutely scum like you know like if you're building like you know a tool that uh like as a doomsday device that will be used to kill off humanity or something like there's really no meaning in that not the way i define meaning anyway patriotism man you're killing off the bad parts of humanity though someone can find meaning in that i guess yeah i guess that yeah um i i think yeah so you you could look at it as you're indirectly supporting it's like armies have this is a weird metaphor because it's very militaristic but in armies there's a very small number of people that are actually the frontline

soldiers that fight and there's this huge pyramid of people supporting them doing logistics or or or like base building or medical staff or supplies or just all kinds of stuff that isn't like using a weapon against someone um so if if you think of the people doing the like pure good for the world work as on top of that pyramid then you could find meaning in supporting that that's kind of what you're saying earlier yeah i think that's a pretty interesting way to look at it i had not really considered that angle i am the base of the pyramid and which side is that is that the side that pulls the trigger or the side that does the ad click revenue? The ad click revenue. No, I don't work for an ad click revenue company, but those provide money

to people. Absolutely. So the big question I think many people ask is, do I get meaning from the paycheck that I take home every day? Or is there intrinsic meaning in the work that I perform every day? What is it for you, Jameson? I think it's a mix. I would say there are positive benefits to the world from the work that I do. But there's also definitely a paycheck that I get and I find a lot of joy and satisfaction in stuff I do outside of work. So yeah, it's kind of a mix. I think for me, it's more like I have to be convinced that there isn't a bad outcome to the world. And then I can find a lot of meaning in the day-to-day work of working well with the team or helping a customer be happier

or like delivering something that's just of quality no matter what the actual output is. Just producing something good that I'm proud of, I guess. Oh, that's cool. It's like take pride in the output regardless of like how world-changing it is. Yeah. So yeah, the stuff I work on is kind of like back off.

It's mostly enterprise software, which has a stigma sometimes of being just like, it's just some form that some bureaucratic person uses somewhere but it can make a difference in people's job satisfaction and how well they're able to do their jobs so yeah that's that's what i like to um is i try to think of the stories of the people who are using the product i'm building to me the most demoralizing situation is when i build something and no one uses it yeah um and i've actually left jobs because of that i'm like this stuff just keeps getting shelved you know yeah um but even in that situation it never gets

deployed or it gets thrown out into the market and it just isn't isn't a thing people care about no like well this is in the defense contractor industry so it was like being funded but not actually super useful okay so it didn't you know it was it was less like a failed experiment and more like doomed from day one yeah so so in this metaphor you are at the bottom of the pyramid and instead of a soldier on top there's like some politician who got like a donation to his campaign from a lobbyist or something yeah and has to check a box to say that it went to a developer you know yes this is science research and but it'll never see the light of day you know that kind of thing yeah but even in that situation i think people can derive satisfaction from forming relationships

with their team members and taking pride in building something quality even if it doesn't get used now i don't want to do that but you still can find meaning in those little things i think yeah and probably the vast majority i mean part of the pyramid metaphor is the top of the pyramid is very much smaller than the bottom. The people working for nonprofit open source foundations are very visible, but they're a small in number, I would say, compared to the people doing just general line of business software

somewhere that gets paid for and makes them money. So going back to the money versus meaning thing, I had a nice lesson handed to me by Life. Just about last year, I was working on a contract that I had just signed. it was a freelance gig that I don't normally do. But when the price tag is really big, I take these contracts because I'm like, hey, big money, you know, I love money. And I was about a week into the contract. And I found myself at home reading a book to my daughter

at night. And I'm laying there reading to her. And I realized, oh, man, I have been reading for a while, I need to stop this and go work on that contract, because it's worth so much money per hour that I put into it. And I had this inner conflict. And I was like, you know what, I don't want to do it. I would rather sit here and read to my daughter. And like, this is a precious moment to me. And I realized at that moment that the money component of things is not the big motivator for me. I love making lots of money. Like that's what I want to do. But at the end of the day, it wasn't this huge motivator. And so I got this nice lesson just handed to me that it wasn't that important. And then the week later, I actually canceled the rest of the contract. And I think

a lot of times we don't introspect like that. But once in a rare while, we get this little, you know experiment handed to us and then the outcome is really telling yeah yeah that's a great story that's a i feel like everyone needs a moment like that sometime in their life where you kind of examine what you're doing and say this is like my life this is what i'm putting my time into is this what i actually want to put my time into and sometimes the answer is yes absolutely yeah if if that was serving some goal that was really important to you like maybe you're trying to save up a nest egg to launch some dream company or something then yeah often there's some periods of sacrifice where we give up some time doing other stuff we love but absolutely and i'm

i hope people don't take that the wrong way and think well if you don't read to your children and instead work then you're a bad person no i mean life's full of trade-offs and i've traded off in the other direction before but it's more like being being explicit with those trade-offs like maybe you go work for a company that you're not in love with their mission but you it helps advance your career goals somehow it lets you meet people or it gives you experience building the kind of things you want to build or yep pays you really well and allows you the freedom to do something different later on yeah i think you could find meaning in those things so i guess to sum up the answer like i'm worried my job is not meaningful you can find meaning in in lots of

ways and also maybe you need to quit your job and do the stuff we talked about last question see question one yes what a convenient lineup i guess we did it in the wrong order though yeah be dissatisfied first quit second yes uh yeah but there are things you can do to find satisfaction in where you are and just make sure that you're you're aware of those trade-offs i guess is is what i got from your answer dave i think so cool you answered you did it question answered. Nice. There should be, oh, what's that law and order noise? That like, dun, dun. We need one of those. We need a soundboard to play when the question is answered. That's such a good idea. Justice has been served this day. Great. I think that about wraps up our

episode. Where can people find out more about us? The best place to find out about us is on Twitter, where you can find us at softskillseng is our Twitter handle. If you have a question that you'd like to ask, we would love to hear from it. We've actually been getting more and more questions over the last couple of weeks, which has been fantastic. Thank you for that. And you can send us a direct message or you can just tweet us out in the open where everyone can see. Either way, we will be happy to add your question to our backlog. Yeah. Yeah. We'd love to hear from you and love to answer your questions both poorly and excellently. That's right. We'll do both sometimes in the same sentence. Poor is when I answer and excellent is when Dave answers. Yeah.

We will combine them. Awesome. Thank you very much for listening. We'll talk to you next week. Farewell.