Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 75: Self-Promotion For Wallflowers and Moving in a Year

Episode Date: September 19, 2017

This week Jamison and Dave answer these questions: What are some good ways for people who aren’t good at self-promotion to promote themselves? I’m moving to Europe in a year. How much notice should I give my company that I’m leaving? Way back in episode 26 we talked a little bit about self-promotion as well.

It takes more than great code to be a great engineer. This is episode 75 of the Soft Skills Engineering podcast. I'm your host, Jameson Dance. I'm your host, Dave Smith. Soft Skills Engineering is a podcast where we answer all of your non-technical questions about the technical field of software development. So it's for software developers, and as is tradition, I have to look at my desk and pick a thing and say it's also for that thing.

What's it going to be? It's for clutter also. There's a lot of clutter on my desk. That's a metaphor for life as a software developer. I guess, yeah. For me anyways. I'm probably revealing too much of myself now. How dare you?

How dare you reveal that there's clutter on your desk? Yeah. I've ruined the image people have of Jameson, the human Roomba. The Roomba is my favorite cleaning strategy, though. i just do a random walk through the house and just like pick up stuff in my path until you feel satisfied yeah yeah or until i run over poop and then i smeared all over the place someday i'll learn stupid roomba

oh i knew i should have picked a better role model oh my gosh all right should we get into the questions let's do it do you want to read the first question yeah sure this comes from a listener named carl carl says what are some good ways for people that aren't great at self-promotion to get visibility into what they do thanks carl uh google ads google try bidding on keywords like carl is the best you could and they want people to search for that what if oh take your like jira ticket numbers and buy ads on those ah yeah when your co-workers accidentally paste ticket numbers into their search bar you'll be the first result it's foolproof it's probably pretty cheap to bid on a random sequence

of letters and numbers oh yeah the cpm on that's got to be super low i bet you could afford it yeah hey no one said it would be cheap that's true that it would be worth it that's right um yeah okay so that might work yeah i mean it's a surefire solution i mean newsletters are big for self-promotion yeah set up your own internal internal newsletter uh what's the word that starts with a c carl's credo i don't know you need some alliteration for the title of your newsletter yeah the chronicles of yeah the chronicles of carl and it's just like a weekly report of stuff you did at the company and yep i don't know and you have to supplement that with a youtube channel and uh don't worry that you only get three views per video because it was you refreshing the page

three times you have to start somewhere yeah um i think actually you start with the fancy way overproduced video intro that's got like it's like guns shooting the letters into place into like a metal sheet like stamping the letters out it takes like 45 seconds to get through the intro yeah yeah yeah oh man have you ever like comment subscribe i know this is a little off topic but like the worst is when i go to topic what are you doing dave you know ruin our show you know when you go to search for a tutorial and it's like a 40 second video you're like oh great this is just what i need but like 35 seconds of it or some totally flagrant introduction sequence and it's like oh yeah oh man um so stick with carl's chronicles or the chronicles of carl

question answered yeah you'll need to get really good at html emails which is a different skill from html because you use a lot of tables you use html from 1997 yeah it's vintage ht yeah yeah uh okay so getting serious we answered a similar question on this show before in episode number 26 so i should have listened to that because we're about to say stuff and i wonder if the things i will say will contradict the things that i said back then you know i hope so because that would suggest that you have learned yeah that's one of the things it would suggest um so my uh from from knowing you dave i feel like you are a good self-promoter can you talk about what makes you a good self-promoter so it starts by having a hugely inflated view of yourself okay that's

something i'm born with i just think i just think i'm really great yeah and i also like to tell people stuff so that's that's like half tongue-in-cheek but half not i mean you you you like yourself and you think good things about yourself i i actually have um yeah this is going to sound awful to anyone who has uh self-image issues which is as far as i can tell everyone everyone besides you besides me um i actually do think positive things about myself um and i i think i only became aware of this about within about the last year uh i just thought i don't know i didn't really think anything about it it's like the water i swim in you know yeah um and frankly i don't know why we're talking about this because i don't think

it helps okay um but so maybe not oh we'll go ahead yeah i mean just i think that your ability to promote yourself is much easier if you can identify the things that are good about you and the things that you've done well if you yourself are constantly criticizing yourself uh that was a lot of yourselves. If you're constantly criticizing yourself, I think it's going to be hard for you to promote what you've done to others, right? I mean, that could be extra challenging. Yeah, for sure. And we talked so much about imposter syndrome and kind of overcoming that. But identifying your strengths is just as important as figuring out that you're not an imposter. I think so. Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. And I feel like that's something I've

gotten better at the more i've done software um i've i've done enough different things to find the things that i feel like i'm good at and and that helps me because i feel like i can focus on those things more and i would feel naturally more inclined to tell people here's the good thing i did because i feel like i'm aware of being better at that interesting and how do you become aware that you have a particular skill or talent or even forgetting about innate talents what that you've done something that's particularly congratulation worthy some of it is definitely other

people saying whoa that was noteworthy for some reason a lot of the times I haven't known and it's happened the other way around too like wow that was particularly crappy but I thought this was the baseline yeah I don't mean to paint a rosy picture but just by doing stuff

sometimes people will say hey that's a good job and then I kind of file that away as like oh I do I do this thing well I communicate well about tricky problems or whatever it is and and apparently this what i did isn't normal like it's above normal right yeah this just takes time to assimilate all of these data points and then figure out what is the baseline for like normal and above normal notice that i'm not saying average because i think that's a little bit i'm trying to use more hand wavy words than

that yeah that implies there's numbers somewhere yeah not going there i don't know yeah i don't know that there are um so so that's kind of a tangent it's sort of related but we've talked a lot about identifying things you're good at so let's say you feel like you have stuff you've done well you're proud of you want other people to know about it how do you do that um i think the first thing you need to do is overcome the fear that when you tell someone about something that's good that they might turn around and say that's not good you know like i think that's like i have this paranoia in me that i'm gonna tell someone look at this cool thing i did maybe like i did that when i was like seven you know you're so far behind what an imposter yeah i mean people do that

sometimes it's true those people are often uh a little bit clueless about interpersonal interactions if they're if their instinct to someone saying an accomplishment is to one-up them um yeah the question is i think what really drives people to a state of nervousness is that they worry people might do that on the inside so you say look at this cool thing and they say oh that's great but uh internally they're thinking wow that sucked and then you carry that anxiety forever yeah i i think there are a lot of different ways to do this um i'm thinking of a particular co-worker i had who was almost 100 technical um he he was he was like good with people but his love is just the code and architecture and and and things that come out of

that and all the time he would just like think up cool things and be excited to share them with people um so he he was like playing with some cool new technology and built this demo in an hour that was uh that was actually really cool and because he was excited about the technology he was just telling people about it and that helped people realize like oh this person loves uh like exploring new technology and they love sharing it with other people and so it didn't feel like conscious self-promotion on their part it was just them um excitedly showing stuff off and and that felt kind of innate which is not helpful because be that person yeah yeah i think someone else i'm thinking of they uh they put a lot of effort into um kind of documentation and showing off the

features that they did so in pull requests they would have like videos of the feature in action or uh they would like show screenshots of it in different states like um to help people notice like here's what it was before here's the thing that i did that made it better here's why it's better and it it didn't feel like they were kind of pounding their chest about how awesome they were it was more like check out how cool our product is now because of these of these neat interactions i added but just more yeah more effort into telling the story that actually helps other people learn the product better too so it had a lot of benefits but one of them was people knew like oh this person does good work because look at look at how well they showed off

the work they did i feel like we talked about this person in a previous episode talking about code reviews am i remembering right yeah yeah i don't have the number in front of me but i remember that and i think i remember thinking it was a really good idea yeah another thing you can do is consult with your manager and ask for tips and tricks because sometimes depending on your company uh organizationally it might be hard to figure out the right vehicle and the right audience for communicating your efforts and self-promoting um for example i've seen at my current company there was a manager who sent out a great email that uh he was basically summarizing a project that I was working on and a few other projects in a single email. And I don't know what his magic

touch was, but the words he chose to use to describe our project and the impact that it was going to have, like he described the impact very well. You know, like this project is going to do this. It's going to buy us X, Y, and Z benefits. And he sent it up to some upper level leaders in the company. And I was like, oh, wow, he did a fantastic job of promoting what we're doing here and making sure that leadership knows why it's important. So I think sometimes you can team up with your manager and put together these things. And sometimes if your manager is really good,

they can promote for you and it actually carries more weight. If someone else is saying, hey, look what Carl did, you know, Carl put together this great feature and here's the benefit and it's coming from your manager, that's just gold right there. So I think a team effort could be really beneficial. Yeah. Why would you need to self-promote? What's, what's the point of it? What are you trying to accomplish? If a tree falls in the woods and no one is around to hear it, does it make a noise?

Did it even fall? Schrodinger's tree. Until you, if a tree falls in a box. Yeah. I know I'm getting a little silly, but the point is that we work among human beings and they are all silently forming opinions about you every time they see or interact with you. And if people don't know about the things you're doing, then they will form maybe inaccurate opinions about your work. And that can be really detrimental to you in terms of your career growth as well as your ability to perform on your team.

So I think it's super important to make sure everyone knows what you're doing in addition to just doing great work sure so there's in my head there's the scummy self-promotion which is you're trying to convince people that you are something you are not and what you just said sounds more like you're trying to accurately inform people of of what you're doing yeah exactly you're trying to make sure that they know the things that you're doing well and and appreciate them i guess i think sometimes we assume that people must know what we're working on like i spend so many hours doing this, surely they know what I'm doing. But people are really self-consumed with their own set of tasks and worries and concerns that it's really hard to keep track

of what all the people on your team are doing, not to mention the greater organization. So I think you really do have to go to a little bit of extra effort if you want people to know what you're doing. It can be an interesting exercise to ask your manager, hey, what do you think i'm doing what do you think i'm good at and and they may or may not have answers for you let me just tell you it takes a really good on the ball manager to answer that question accurately for more than like five or six people it really does yeah i remember conversations with a manager he was like i know you do important things and i'm glad you're on the team but sometimes i don't really know what you're doing isn't it weird isn't that the weirdest thing like

can you imagine other industries where it's like i mean let's say you're a construction foreman and it's like well i know i know you're doing good things for our construction project but i don't really know what you do yeah there's no way right i think that sentence ends with and you're fired right in in most industries like yeah but i'm such a good influence on the brick player team yeah i don't think so one so we haven't talked about like stand-up i mean there's all kinds of built-in structures for communicating status of things and those can be opportunities for self-promotion if you just say here's what i got done and if if you can find a way to give enough context about the thing you got done that people understand why it's important without

boring them and talking for five minutes and stand up which is that should be punishable by like getting the water cooler dumped over your head oh don't do that but if you can find a way to concisely summarize the impact of the things you're working on that again that isn't like scummy i don't know sleazy self-promotion you're just trying to tell people what you're doing and why it's important and yes it can be a good way to do it without having to do a bunch of new things you aren't already doing i guess so you're saying build it right into your stand-up yeah and be careful here like i i i made the widget maker say like why it's important yeah and how it will help other people kind of and be careful not to go into like so then i chose to use this design pattern

but that didn't work out so then i imagine me standing over you with a water cooler jug ready to dump it on your head you accidentally did the ice bucket challenge after it ended if i hear one more implementation detail you're getting this bucket of ice water yep so i i tried a new technique over the last couple of months at work which is uh i have started creating mailing lists uh using our company mailing list infrastructure for notifying people of interesting changes and things to the products that i'm working on so my team owns a few different products uh or i guess i could say like projects maybe and there are consumers of that. You know, there are people who need to be made aware of changes to it. There are people who

just are curious about it. And I subscribe them proactively to these mailing lists. And then occasionally we send out an email that represents interesting and noteworthy changes that have gone in and maybe like new big improvements that'll make people happy. And we send out these emails maybe once a month or once every couple of weeks. And it's great for sharing visibility because you don't have to worry about remembering the big list of all the people that might be interested in your project you can just send it to this one email list you could even imagine having a slack channel for this too but see slack i think tends to get a little more ignored yeah uh it's worked out great so you know we're we're releasing a new feature this week and we sent out an email it was

fantastic lots of people received it they're gonna now they know like we did this really cool speed up it's gonna make their lives easier and now they know we did it and i'm i was sure to mention you know who worked on it and all that stuff so it's a cool it's a cool technique yeah that is really cool well have we answered the question probably not i'm trying to think i feel like there's a lot more that you can do let's yeah real quickly before we move on carl says good ways for people that aren't great at self-promotion like what is some of the stuff they can do um what do you think jameson makes someone not great at self-promotion like what how do you identify someone who's not great hmm I think focusing on the technical impact is very common and also leads to not

being good at self-promotion okay where and we have to do that as developers that's kind of our job but it's the tree falls in the woods thing where if that's all you're focused on uh you'll you'll miss out on the the second order effects the things caused by the technical impact yeah definitely like the actual benefit to the person who uses your stuff yeah I mean sometimes people are just shy and they're they're worried about about putting themselves out in front of other people yeah absolutely there's there's the common developer like distaste for things they see as marketing yes which is uh i i have learned is is can be harmful there there are a lot of reasons i mean some sometimes people get into computers because they don't like people sure sure yeah

so so to them probably the idea of needing to self-promote is distasteful and their work should be self-evident from right yeah just like it just exists and that's the promotion yeah yeah but that is that is a huge fallacy in my opinion what about finding a mentor who can guide you through this and help you know when it's time to self-promote and when it's not that sounds like a good idea i've never done it i i was thinking while we were talking about this i don't think i've ever consciously tried to self-promote uh in in at work okay so i'm giant imposter huh i just am not that shy at work so it happens just happens yeah okay huh interesting i i think i've never thought that i've never sat down and thought like what can i do to inform people of

the impact of what i'm working on maybe i should maybe maybe it should be like a regular part of your week you know like friday rolls around and you kind of make a list of the things that you've accomplished and pick one or two items that look good and send out an email like well there's jameson's weekly email again self-promoting i have done that once uh i i just made a little bot that looked at all my we used github at this company and it just automatically collected all the pull requests that i made that week and uh sent an email to some people about it oh that was cool yeah that's interesting that one of the problems with the regularity that that would impose is that people will get accustomed to it and start ignoring it another problem is um the

pull request to like move a button looks the same as the pull request to add this new world shaking feature right it's just another bullet in the list but it's something you can do yeah maybe you should manually filter through and just pick out the good ones yeah there's also there's some products that can do that for you too there's i think there's it's called i done this it just sends people an email at the end of the day and it's like a prompt to say what you've accomplished i use that and it collects them all that got i don't know i used that for a couple of months there was like four or five of us that did and uh it was definitely interesting to see what other people were working on every day but man it just sucked the life out of me after a couple months

what do you mean i like i just got so tired of typing in the things that i had finished that day and having other people read it and not really knowing what impact it had or whether they even cared it just felt like you were sending it off into the void yeah i felt like i had to fill it up though you know it was like it it's like if i don't put at least four or five items on here i'm gonna look bad you know yeah we haven't talked about performance reviews and sometimes these more regular automated ways to force you to take uh to take stock of your accomplishments those can be really helpful for performance reviews where you need to say like what you did the whole year yeah and if you just wander into that meeting it can be really hard to think like what did i do

like i can't even remember what i did last year that was important yeah yeah so some kind of some kind of list of that you have kept of all the things you've done can be and performance reviews are kind of your opportunity to promote yourself i guess yeah all right let's call it answered and uh all right if you feel like it's not answered go back to episode 26 and you can get even more useless crap from me remember it's quantity over quality that's right okay should i read our next question yes please okay this comes from an anonymous listener for obvious reasons it says i'm moving to europe in a year how much notice should i give my company that i'm leaving telling them now feels like the kind of thing to do but also a bit naive have you ever known

anyone to give that much notice and how did it go i'll be quitting in one year please don't do anything bad to me imagine that the company told you you would be fired in one year what would you do i know what i would do what would you do i'd be like nope you mean right now because i quit i'm gonna go get a different job uh i have when you were reading this it occurred to me to wonder how on earth this person knows that they're moving to europe in a year that is a very organized person with yeah they're really lifing well well no i mean maybe it's a prophecy oh and maybe it will doesn't have to necessarily be a plan it could be maybe they met an old witch and she was like i see in the frog entrails you will be

in paris in one year i better tell my boss oh no i better hurry home to the office that's that's actually a good point that i think you're making subtly which is do you really know you're going to be in europe in one year a lot can change over the course of a year yeah i'm i i have no idea what my life will be like in one year i yeah i hope certain things will be will be will exist but i yeah i don't know like roomboat smears are probably still going to be in your life in a year why yeah i hope that i have optimized my routine to avoid those well i'm impressed if you know that ahead of time yeah yeah so i think this all leads up to us

saying there's no way i'm telling my boss that i'm going to be leaving in a year that is just i mean first of all what really is the confidence that you're going to be leaving in a year i don't know maybe maybe your visa is expiring and you have to leave something in which case your boss probably already knows because they're sponsoring your visa but yeah or maybe you maybe you're trying to get a visa and it takes a year or something wherever you're coming from but so you still have no guarantee so i mean i would probably not tell your boss if it was next month i would say yeah probably yes but that's more like turning in your notice than yeah you know planning yeah i mean they ask how much notice should i give my company that i'm leaving

uh in the united states two weeks is traditional so yep i'm not sure if if you just got a different job you would probably give two weeks notice i'm not sure it maybe the fact that you know so far ahead of time makes you feel pressure to tell them ahead of time yeah i think so but i don't i don't know that that's the case i think you're suffering from having this burden of wanting to disclose everything and put everything on the table but in this case this information is not going to help your company right one year if i were your boss and you told me you were leaving in a year i'd say okay well call me again in seven or eight months when it's more solid yeah i could see you wanting to give the company time to i don't know to to allocate

your projects or to rewrite all your code find a replacement yeah or i don't know i i could see that it's also um sometimes nice people will try and be nice to a corporation and corporations are not humans that have feelings they they don't need like your sympathy or your your kindness uh they will gladly take it and feel nothing in return except some amount of financial benefit sometimes at your expense so you don't yeah you you have friends at the company but the company isn't your friend that's right it's not anyone's friend yeah their their job is to make money unless they're a b corp and then the job is to like do good and also make money um if you're an executive maybe are you like the cto or the vp of engineering okay yeah now we're

talking succession planning right yeah that that has different wrinkles but even even if you're just like a very important developer at the company those people leave i don't know if the company dies because you leave uh you should feel great because you have carried that company on your back if you believe that the company will die when you leave you have what we call leverage that's true and that is a language that companies speak yeah they do yeah oh yeah so i knew uh there's a company in california in santa barbara called green hill software i don't know if they're still around but a friend of mine worked for them about 10 years ago and they had the most aggressive succession planning process that i've ever heard

of at a tech company which was that if you're going to leave you they required you to give it was either two or three months of notice it was like written in the employment contract and the reason yeah it was crazy the reason they did that so california is an at-will state that's super illegal yeah it could be i don't know maybe it was just uh i'm not a lawyer that feels illegal in my gut yeah which is a court of law in some states yeah that's true um so anyway so my co-worker told me that uh they required two maybe three months and what they would do is they would hire your replacement and then that replacement would shadow you for that whole time that time period and you would ramp them up on your product and the justification they gave was that their

products were really complex and you needed the time to transfer knowledge from the previous person hmm um i just googled them and their website still exists well i see planes on their website they make software for planes they were in the business of compilers for real-time stuff yeah my friend maintained the c++ compiler i think or at least the safety and security critical systems maybe there's some arcane regulation about about safety critical things that changes you i don't know anyways but but my point is that that's the most aggressive i've ever seen and even that was only two or three months so yeah one year feels like way overkill and um i think you're opening yourself up to problems if you give that much notice for example if you give

one year notice then anytime there's a question of downsizing or anything you're going to be number one on the list because you're leaving anyway it'll be you'll be an easy target for management now i don't want to give your management credit but they're going to be thinking about that yeah the second thing is and james and i talked about this a little before the show is you might just wind up having all the crap work for the next year like any cool new exciting project they might say well this person's leaving in a year so i'm not going to give it to them yeah we don't want to put them on the new greenfield projects to help design it because yeah they'll be gone

i hope you like fetching coffee for people yeah so i would not robot the fetch i would not notify them until much much longer down the road maybe two months out yeah and even yeah two months feels very generous to me yes although i have never known that i was going to quit two months before I quit. So maybe if I did know I would do that, but I've only ever decided to quit and then told people like, Hey, I guess I'm quitting in two months or two weeks. So, uh, you sound more organized than I do. Yeah. Yeah. The one year plan. Yeah, I do. I have no idea where I'm going to be in one year. Yeah. I hope to be alive and well, one year ago today I was living like 2000 miles away enjoying my summer um and now here i am date august yeah one year ago today i had

barely well not barely i had recently quit my job and started contracting oh there you go one year that's a big change yeah i'll tell you what will never change though and that's this podcast i yeah we had started it over a year ago we will drive this thing into the ground speaking of driving things into the ground have we answered the question absolutely all right good luck get back to us in a year tell us how it went uh-huh tell us how europe is yeah um so we were talking before the show it feels like the volume of new questions has has lessened lately which is good because it means we've answered all of them that's right there's nothing left to ask but bad because it means we'll just spend the whole show talking

about stuff on our desk instead of the first couple minutes so if you have a question even if you feel like it's similar to stuff that we've already talked about please send it in we would love to hear from you we love answering your questions and dave can you tell them how they can do that. Go to our website at softskills.audio and click the ask a question button at the top of the page there. That'll take you to a nice little Google form where you can be as anonymous or as revealing as you desire. Revealing sounds weird. Oh yeah, that was maybe not the right. Well, yeah. As open. Well, yeah, I don't know. Give as much detail. What's the opposite of anonymous? Anonymous. Okay. We've talked about this before on the show. Yeah, I feel like we

have no you can be as anonymous or give us as much detail as you would like thank you that was a much less creepy way of saying that you're welcome maybe i can be your interpreter to humanity and then maybe my public relations manager after i screw it up yeah what dave really meant instead of the horrible thing he said was this nice thing yeah so please do that we'd love to hear from you we love answering your questions we want to answer more yes we do thank you all right we'll catch you next week.