Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 70: Appraisal-Driven Development and Meeting Creep

Episode Date: July 28, 2017

Jamison and Dave answer these questions: I’m a new team lead with a team member who is very appraisal-driven. How do I deal with them? Have you ever experienced meeting-creep? What do you do about it? Jamison mentions the 37 signals blog post on the downsides of group chat.

It takes more than great code to be a great engineer. This is Soft Skills Engineering, Episode 70. I'm your host, Dave Smith. I'm your host, Jameson Dance. Soft Skills Engineering is a weekly advice show for software developers and also tissue boxes. What? Did you just look at stuff on your desk? Did you have an emu on your desk that one week when you said emu? Yeah, last week. Yes, I did. And this week I literally looked across the room and saw a tissue box and that's what I said. uh tissue box is also appropriate because my microphone has been replaced with a tissue box which is why it sounds different i'm just on vacation don't have all my fancy gear but we value you so much listeners that we're bringing you wisdom even from glorious bear lake utah

i wish i was there it's cool there's a beach nice grass they have delicious raspberry milkshakes oh yeah those are pretty hyped up actually from what i've heard like raspberry milkshakes uh-huh yeah they are and i haven't had that many raspberry milkshakes so it was the just by default it was the best one i've ever had i don't know how they'd stack up in like a real taste test but it was really good i had some wild maine blueberry pie this week in maine it was incredible so was the main wild or was the blueberry wild or was the pie crust

wild what's the wild part it grew on wild pie crust bushes yeah it just means that the pie crust had never been broken so it didn't have a saddle it didn't it hasn't known

the touch of the cowboy yet which makes it a game year it's like unbridled gamey pie crust chewy pie crust um anyways all right let's get to the questions do you want me to read the first one you know i do this is from an anonymous listener i'm a new team lead and one of my reports is very appraisal driven he will help anybody that complements his work enough and looks to work in high visibility stuff to get recognition to get recognition if he works on something with other people he'll always be the one to present the

work. And most of the developers are super happy to avoid speaking in public. All that said, he's a very good developer. And everyone knows this. He's got wonderful performance reviews in the past. I think this constant search for recognition is not very healthy, and I don't know how to address it. Hmm. I wonder if you could just pay him in recognition points instead of money and save the company a whole bunch of money. We've given you an exciting new compensation plan where you'll you'll get a raise of negative 10 percent but also you get to run all the stand-up meetings yep you get to stand in front of entire groups of engineers and be recognized yeah we even got you this little box you can stand on to be taller than everyone i mean some people would

legitimately go for that that's way motivating to lots of people i think well i think to some extent most people are motivated by recognition i know that i am for sure and and some people are less and more but i think this trend is common in lots of people this sounds like it might be a little more of an extreme case but just like wanting to be recognized for work i think is a pretty common human sure i think we want i think we want to be appreciated yeah but not necessarily celebrated on on like a podium you know yeah i mean if you think about it most of the bad guys in superhero movies really what they just really want is is appreciation and recognition they just want to be understood yeah if someone just understood dr octopus he wouldn't have gone crazy and trying

to kill spider-man so here's your chance listener to avoid creating a super villain no pressure yeah this guy is on track for super villainy so you've got to solve this problem you thought the stakes were just like my team will be sad work might be a problem no no no this involves the fate of cities or worlds depending on how super of a super villain this i mean they're going to be fictional cities named like metropolis or something but but still yeah but we still care about those people um so let's let's i'm gonna latch on to some of the words here so he says if he works on something with other people he'll always be the one to present the work and most devs are super happy to avoid speaking in public isn't that true though like there's

this team has this one developer who's like oh me me i'll i'll make the demo video or i'll get up and present in front of the group or whatever and like most of the other developers are like awesome i'm off the hook right yeah to some extent this is a good thing for the team because they don't have to do the things they don't want to do yeah the danger is if this person is taking credit instead of presenting the team's work saying here's all the stuff i did in order to get more recognition that's that's real bad and that happens all the time oh man but i the question masker does not directly state that's what's happening right maybe it maybe it implicitly happens though just if some person is the face of the stuff that the team gets done

then non-technical people or people that aren't on the team just assume they're the ones driving the stuff getting done yeah yeah maybe is that maybe this well i mean here here they say that he's a he's a wonderful developer and everybody knows that well of course they do he's always standing up and telling people how wonderful he is but yeah but i i'm sitting here thinking okay you're a new team lead and you've got this one developer who's a great developer and you know it and you know exactly what his contributions are you probably also have people on your team who are doing great work and you don't know it and that's i think a much more dangerous situation um on the one hand it can be obnoxious when people seem braggy or seem like they're only

motivated by the praise of others but on the other hand wouldn't it be tragic if you had an underappreciated developer because you just didn't know yeah so they might not even be deliberately taking credit but by just being more easily visible they're kind of pushing pushing other people out because of limited attention or something like that this is like a sibling dynamic the squeaky grease gets the wheel kind of thing yeah yeah wait did i just say the squeaky grease gets the wheel you did say it and i was gonna let it slide it's just gonna let you crash and burn so i have a question that has no answer because there's no no more info to be gathered from this block i will answer it i will answer what what happens when this developer fails if he's really

appraisal driven and um and motivated by external feedback what if he just takes something on and just struggles or bombs it yeah does he stand up and own that or does he sweep it under the rug i feel like the danger with being really appraisal motivated is if you fail then you just implode because you're so used to like being uh evaluated on all the stuff you get done and how much value it provides to people and then all of a sudden you you have failed to do that and to some extent that's what you tie your self-worth to almost well let me respond to that question as someone who actually feels uh quite like the person we're talking about i am often the developer who stands up and presents my team's work or uh gives you know

gives the presentation for the rest of the company or whatever um when i fail and this is going to sound kind of funny i like to make a big deal about how good i was at failing and what i mean by that is i like to really express and make sure everyone's clear on the mistakes that i made and that my team made and then show all of the actions we're taking to make sure that those mistakes never happen again and i think you can fail and still get praise by failing very gracefully no really have to look good while you do it i had a professor in college who uh his field of study was um cave crustaceans like these lobsters that live in caves that don't have any pigment and don't see because they don't need to because it's completely dark and he was like

the world's expert in this very narrow field and he published an enormous amount of research and he said one of the one one time he just said like i just write up all the stuff that fails and i submit those and sometimes they get published that's how i publish so much like everyone he right he writes up what stuff that fails what do you mean like experiments that didn't pan out yeah so usually usually paper scientific papers are about successful experiments of stuff you tried that worked and he just writes up everything and submits it all and sometimes people accept the the write-ups of stuff that didn't work like he'll have his hypothesis he'll test it and he'll be like and it wasn't true and here's how we know and then just write that out and submit it

huh so that makes a lot of sense yeah it sounds kind of like what you're describing where you turn the failure into something other people can learn from yes um i actually by the way i actually think that's very important as a developer that's that's like the good kind of failure though what if the failure is like you get depressed and go home and play video games for two weeks and then you miss your deadline you can't you can't stand up in front of the company and be like here's what i learned from letting everyone down it's it's not like and i accidentally chose the wrong edition of of linux and that caused us to overflow our buffers it's like right i'm a failure of a human being yeah exactly there's one one of those kind of failures is more okay to talk about than the

other yeah that's true good point very good point just never so that the message is never ever fail in that way yes only fail in ways that present really well yeah if you're very appraisal driven you're probably externally motivated to some extent versus internally motivated would you say that's accurate um yeah i think so maybe like maybe you're motivated by pleasing people and it's not so much yeah there's not some great work or labor you're trying to accomplish so i i guess yeah i just feel like failure could be harder on those kind of people if you're motivated by the praise of others or or showing things off to other people um we haven't talked about how to address it at all we've just kind of talked about it you seem to be saying dave that it's

not so bad i'm actually yeah i'm still debating whether this is even a problem because i think that obviously anything taken to an extreme can become a problem including this you know if this guy avoids doing hard but very important and less visible work then that could be bad yeah um but at the same time i think most developers i know would actually benefit from some of this and being able to see one of my peers exhibit these qualities i think could be very helpful for other developers who aren't naturally as good at self-promotion yeah i i think if you can identify specific problems that this behavior is causing then you might want to address those problems and then you you're using appraisal to motivate this person to fix those problems

you're you're doing a judo move turning their move their their movements against them um that that's a good point i really like that because in the question uh the question asker writes i i think this is not very helpful or sorry not very healthy and i would say give me specific examples of why this isn't healthy yeah because i don't really see it yeah it's very possible it's just not in the question there's details there and if there are like if it's causing um clashes with teammates because other people might feel like this person is just i don't know out for themselves and throwing other people under the bus you can address that maybe a little more easily than changing what motivates a person which is i think pretty hard you need like tony

robbins skills to do that or like lots of electricity or yeah yeah like maybe some dna gene splicing or something yeah so i i think that's my only advice for how specifically to address it look for specific problems it's causing and address those just address the symptoms and sweep the underlying problem under the rug because it might not be an underlying problem it might just be a personality trait well that's a good point um and i would also say turn this question on his head and say who is on my team now that i'm a new team lead who is not being recognized for their work and my job as team lead is to bring those people to the forefront and celebrate their accomplishments even if they're not shamelessly self-promoting yeah you mentioned that kind of

unglamorous but vital work that i think every developer who's worked on a team knows has done that and knows people that do that and are drawn to that and and it could be your chance to celebrate that a little bit more because that stuff needs uh it often needs external champions to make people understand that it's valuable and important i agree okay has the question been answered i think we definitely talked about it and i think it's it definitely needs to be i think you need to peel the layers back one more layer and really understand what it is that bothers you about this because it sounds like you run the risk of just being annoyed and just because someone's behavior is obnoxious to you doesn't mean it's unhealthy or unproductive but it might be it might be

unhealthy and unproductive um i've definitely tried to convince myself before that something i didn't like was like bad for the team when really i just was bugged by it it's bad for your personal preferences yeah yeah it just made me annoyed but i needed to suck it up all right so yeah question answered question answered i did not mean to end the question by saying you need to suck it up you're so good luck good luck and and if if you want to let us know what happens or what you uncover if you dive into it a little oh yeah i'd be interested to hear i would absolutely love to hear yeah that'd be fantastic okay next question from an anonymous listener who says have you ever experienced what i call business meeting creep where business people

create a lot of meetings for devs that they don't really need to be at or invite themselves and sometimes even clients to your daily stand-ups what did you do about it who did you bring it up to what alternatives could you suggest to business people i have only experienced a party meeting creep where the meetings are about partying not business like go on you just have more and more meetings uh i didn't think this through before i just thought the phrase business meeting creep was funny i'm like what if instead of business it said a different word it turns out it's not funny and i found that out live on the podcast wait so you're going for like the uh party in the business in the front party in the back um no i wasn't even going there i'm not i'm not clever

enough to think of that on the fly just like what what other kind of meeting would it be just a a non-business meeting a i think well anyways no there's no more this needs to die save me i think when he says business he means non-engineering meetings yeah yeah those useless non-technical meetings that clearly have no purpose yeah just kidding have you experienced this no i've actually experienced the opposite of this where business people are so standoffish and cautious they kind of treat the engineers like with reverence and deference and they're like oh like they're like glass peaches where you can't touch them or they'll shatter yep just like a glass peach yeah there's definitely this like engineering

meme of don't interrupt the developers because it costs thousands of dollars for them to regain their concentration and you don't want to mess up their vitally important train of thought and uh sometimes i roll my eyes a little bit at that because it it kind of um there's a clear power structure there where it's like we're doing the real work and when you interrupt us with your stupid non-real work stuff it messes up the real work also i saw someone tweet if your day is ruined by someone tapping you on the shoulder you might have bad work habits and i thought that was funny too like nevertheless let's go with the assumption that these are not the most valuable meetings yes i would ask what's i mean the business people are

they're not dumb they're doing it for some reason can you figure out the reason why there's all these meetings all of a sudden is there like deadline pressure uh are customers unhappy do they i don't know like there's there's some force that is causing them to do this because they don't i don't think they want to be in these useless meetings more than you do maybe they just don't know what's going on right and they're like well we have to go talk to the developers to figure out what's going on why would they bring clients to a stand-up maybe so this has literally happened to me before where clients are just like hanging out at the office for to meet with somebody and they'll just like bring them in as uh kind of a

tour and just they'll just be standing there in the daily stand-up that's not every day but i've had people do that before i also worked at a place where um people could pay money for an unusually uh invasive amount of access to the development process and team as as a client and those clients would sometimes be in the stand-ups because they had like features they wanted to get out and they wanted to know the status so it's like tier tier seven support contract yeah basically it was like you pay us a large proportion of the total revenue that this company makes and You could be in our stand-up, sure. And that's, I mean, that's a trade-off.

It has effects on the devs, but also you get a bucket load of money. But that happened. But they didn't ever, like, interrupt. We didn't ever have to cater to them. They were just passive observers because of the purpose of the stand-up. This stand-up looks like it's running effectively.

I feel like my money is well spent here. Yeah, basically. I mean, the purpose of the stand-up there was to communicate status to the team. and it didn't matter who else was there because they weren't the purpose was not to communicate the status to someone who has no context on what the team is doing so they're like if you want you can drop in and look at what people are saying but you're not i don't know you don't ask questions because we're not trying to explain stuff to you that's not what stand-up is for okay but that

might be what stand-up is for in this situation yeah i don't know i i just feel like there's some need the business people have that isn't getting met and so they're they're one of the tools that business people have is meetings so they're trying to use that tool to meet that need and if you can address that need in a different way then you can get out of meetings if if the if the problem is they don't know what's going on you can you can write an email to them and tell them what is going on instead of having this meeting and it still might involve more work but it's work that you control instead of work that gets dumped on you there may be a hole in this company's organizational structure where there is not a good liaison between engineering and the rest of the business

yeah this is what i'd imagine like a pm would do yeah exactly like their job is to be the go-between to both batch up questions and deflect easy easily answered questions yeah they sometimes they fall on the meeting sword for the the developers yeah exactly exactly so that could that could be missing from your organization if it's a small enough company this this role is often filled by the cto or the vp of engineering who is just so plugged into the rest of the business that they can shelter the engineers day-to-day work by answering questions and collaborating with the rest of the business but if you get bigger there almost definitely need to be a a non-developer person whose job is to manage the communication between the business and the engineers and that'll actually

be good not just for the engineers but good for the rest of the business because they'll get consistent information from one source instead of just saying well i think we should go make a i think we should schedule some time with jennifer over in engineering and that should square this up and it's like well maybe jennifer's not the right person you know maybe and so then and then jennifer sits in the meeting and goes oh you scheduled this meeting with the wrong person you know you need to talk to fred you know and it's like a pm could help alleviate all of that stuff yep one wrinkle that is not in what we read but is in the details this question asker gave us this is an agency so i imagine the clients are like clients that you're building websites for building apps for

yep which changes it a lot i think that to me feels like the clients might not trust you maybe they're not seeing enough progress or not seeing the kind of progress they want or their expectations of how fast things go are not matching what's happening or maybe kind of clamping down maybe this company is set up as like a lean direct access to the developer's company and maybe this is just baked into the company structure on purpose yeah and if it's an agency then especially if they're billing i mean more people the company cuts into your profit margins so having a pm is is another person that you pay so maybe they just have fewer people working on stuff yeah which which leads to this problem of no one's job it's not someone's job to deflect or handle

these questions right right totally possible but outside of that scenario let's say let's say you just want to start slashing meetings you're a developer you want for some reason you don't want to go to these meetings how do you make that clear to management and get that to happen i we haven't even talked about the meeting that can be replaced by an email trope some of these maybe could be if they're just asking a question i i do i know people in my life that make me try and make me have meetings with them where it's literally one question they want to ask that they could like send me a text or an email or a phone call and instead they ask me to drive somewhere at a specific time to meet them to answer the question so some of them could

potentially you could just say like what do you want to know just ask me in in a nice way hey jameson could you meet me for lunch tomorrow at noon i want to ask you what version of your operating system you're running yeah yes i would meet you for lunch because i like you dave and i think it'd be great but uh i don't know what version of my operating system i'm running well you know do your homework and bring the information to the meeting okay and we'll talk about the agenda make sure you have all these points addressed by then yeah so kill meetings by encouraging email yeah or i mean there's a billion slackers all these tools that's gonna say you know it's kind of young not a lot of people use it so maybe maybe something else like slack emails in

it's it's hipster phase where it's becoming cool again no way really yeah there's a backlash against chat tools like slack about being always connected and and have you read that 37 signals article about yeah how it's bad to have a meeting that's one line of text at a time anyways use some tool to get questions answered if the meeting is to answer a question um i got an idea hit me print out like a big banner and hang it in your conference rooms that says do you really need all these people in here for an hour and just put that up there and see what happens kind of that puts the aggressive and passive aggressive

all you need is like a comma idiot at the end i have heard i mean yeah this is another thing you have all these tools about how much does this meeting cost where you just type in the number of people the average salary and then it'll like tick this counter of how much it is costing to have to pay all these people to sit in a meeting uh yeah what else could they do one of the things i've seen be really successful is to create a no-meeting day or two each week where you say no meetings allowed on Tuesdays and Thursdays and you get management to buy into that

and then you have to police it because eventually it will deteriorate. But you have to police it and then engineers can rely on having uninterrupted time to work during those days. Yeah, if you can't pull off a whole day then you can just meetings go on calendars and if you have a different thing on that calendar

already then it's really easy to say like i can't do it at that time i have a contract yeah exactly that can help you batch up meetings if you just put in your calendar from like 8 to 12 or whenever your happy productive time is just put like important stuff in the calendar um schedule some time to have uninterrupted blocks of time if that would help if the problem is um that you are having a hard time finding long codes of time if you just have like 50 meetings in a week that's not going to help you just put a block in there that says board meeting presentations and no one will no one will uh double book you like we don't have a board we're an agency what are you talking about don't worry this is for my startup that i'm working on on company time it's fine i have a board

right i do think you're not on it because you question me you just lost your board seat chance yeah and board seat revoked i do think that you what you what it sounds like you want is to create a culture where meetings are the exception not the rule and uh what i have noticed outside of engineering is that meetings are the rule not the exception you know in marketing and sales and others people get real work done in meetings but in engineering people don't get real work done in meetings they make decisions they discuss alternatives but they don't build and ship product right yeah you can get work done but the work you do in an hour will then provide like 100

hours of typing at the keyboard work for you exactly and if you are and if that one to 100 ratio is correct then you should have one meeting every two or three weeks well sometimes it can save you 100 hours too that's also true so you should have maybe two meetings all meetings you'll get back hundreds of hours a week by just meeting more yeah but i do think you probably want to get your leadership bought into the idea of slashing meetings for more uninterrupted time but make sure you understand their motivation and what they really want from the engineers because maybe what they really want is to sell consulting hours with your clients and they can sell that better if they see you in action and have direct access to you yeah yeah that's a great

point there's there's some goal going on and figure out what that is and even if that is the I think you could still work around that to come up with a less disruptive way to do it. Say like, how many meetings with clients do you need a week to sell? Can we batch those up on a specific day or whatever? Like you were saying. Yeah, yeah.

Meeting day. Yep. It's really just like, what is the village called? Potemkin Village? Hang on, I have to go to this. Yeah, Potemkin Village. Have you heard about that?

No, what is that? there was this uh queen in russia that was visiting a place in her country and she was traveling by boat down the river and they just had all these like cardboard pop-up stands that they would put next to the river to make it look like they're all these prosperous villages around and then the boat would go and they'd like take them down and run around and get in front of the boat again and put them back up it sounds kind of like that with the client meetings using them to demonstrate the developers are working really hard you just like put them in a room and have a mash on the keyboard or you have the developers do the same 10 stand-ups every day or oh no they're

on the whiteboard doing binary search tree questions that's right that's right look at all that code up there that looks like getting real work done if you're just drawing trees on the whiteboard and if trees don't do it try graphs oh yeah um okay we answered the question oh yeah definitely with that last thing sutterfuge that's the answer okay good luck with the meeting creep this is a common problem i think the solution is usually context dependent though yeah i think so too and as with everything in engineering finding out the reason behind the issue is valuable

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And it also helps other people find the show. Yeah. Thanks for listening. Catch you next week.