Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 76: Writing Goals and Firing Jokes

Episode Date: September 25, 2017

This week Jamison and Dave answer these questions: My organization requires me to set goals for myself. What advice do you have for writing good technical and non-technical goals? My managers openly joke about firing people all the time. What should I do?

It takes more than highly optimized assembly code to be a great engineer. This is Soft Skills Engineering episode 76. I'm your host, Dave Smith. I'm your host, Jameson Dance. You threw me for a loop there. I didn't expect that. It's good that it takes more than highly optimized assembly code because, yeah, if that's all it takes, then I'm not good.

I've got some learning to do. All right. Well, actually, I trust that the people who built the dynamic language runtime that I write in compiled that dynamic language runtime from C with some optimization flags. Yep. So theoretically, I am writing highly optimized assembly code. Well, maybe your code gets jitted into highly optimized assembly code occasionally. Yeah.

Yeah. Eventually. There you go. and it takes it does take more than that to be a great engineer though it also takes soft skills okay okay i thought you're gonna say something else it also takes the ability to deadlift 500 pounds that's why this is now a workout podcast we're pivoting to nutrition supplements and weight lifting yes supplements we will supplement the testosterone in your body with more more

that we took from this horse oh all right do you want to read us our first question oh i should describe what this podcast actually is oh my bad soft skills engineering is a podcast where we take your questions about non-technical stuff about technical fields like software development and assembly and also horse tranquilizers that make you get real buff okay now which smoothly segues into our first question totally so smooth hi dave and jameson my organization requires me to set goals for myself every year and i usually struggle with writing clear and measurable goals what advice you have for writing good technical and non-technical goals love the podcast love you

too anonymous well it sounds like the main goal has been achieved which is a general feeling of love um for humanity our podcast included all right i don't really do goals one of my goals is to someday be the kind of person who has very very like measurable specific goals and achieves them i hope by the age of like 55 i'll turn into a type a person okay metamorphosis yeah yeah what is your personality type now uh type fuchsia that's what i would call it you're gonna wrap yourself in a fuchsia cocoon and then spring forth as a type a goal writer yeah yeah i i do write goals this is a leftover tradition from when i was a little kid we would all gather around every new year's eve and write goals and there were you had to write them in like four categories physical

mental social and like emotional spiritual and i still do that and then i just like promptly fold the card that i write them on into a paper airplane and throw it into a volcano but you still do that every year huh like a january 1st yeah yeah yeah i can't even remember what they were i think one of them was to like become six five uh fly a fighter jet through the sun that was your emotional goal yeah it would be a spiritual experience i guess if you could do that it would be celestial i imagine being six five is a powerful spiritual experience towering over just everyone you're just closer to heaven um yeah so all that to say uh i'm not sure maybe dave can teach me how oh my gosh i

hate writing annual goals for my employer hate it i haven't done that i've never had to do that by the way in a job in a professional setting i had to do it at a company oh geez like 10 years ago oh man i just hated it because it was like i can't even see three months into the future let alone 12 months you know yeah so were they just a hoop you had to jump through pretty much it was like part of your annual review process was to write out goals at the beginning of the year and then you're and look at them at the end yeah your performance appraisal was based on how well you had delivered on those goals but of course would you ever walk into a review and be like oh yeah you mean every year and it was like it got to the point where I was like oh yeah I

wrote that goal and then six weeks later we totally pivoted and that goal became obsolete yeah that that product line was discontinued i'm gonna ship i guess i failed my goal yeah exactly and it's like what a just what a waste of time at least for me at that point in my life and maybe i just didn't know how to write good goals but oh man i hated it yeah yeah i don't feel like goals are the way i interact with the world and move through it i i i think i have accomplished some stuff i mean i and and i most of it has not been goal driven there's just stuff i've wanted to do and sometimes i do it and sometimes i don't so you're just walking through the world responding to plain pain and pleasure stimuli yeah basically that's the fuchsia life it's like i put my hand

on the stove that hurts i'm gonna set a goal to not put my hand on the stove anymore exactly i'm gonna put my hand on the stove until it doesn't hurt and develop my superpower of not getting burnt i don't know i mean so i i run a conference and i i guess i had like a goal of wanting to start what makes it a goal though i just wanted to start a conference and then i did well at some point you had to put something pretty measurable on that you had to choose a venue which had a certain number of seats and you had to sell tickets and you wanted to sell a certain number of tickets and yeah i just didn't look at it through the framework of a goal that was just a thing i wanted to do yeah i sat and wanted to do it for a while and then like then

you did it lined up i yeah i found a person to do it with and then we did it i think you could paint that story with a a goal-shaped paintbrush i didn't have like a vision board on my wall or anything i don't know i i think the word goal makes me think of um more measurable plans and and like some degree of specificity that is generally absent from my approach to life from your whole life yeah yeah like you have written them down somewhere they have dates associated with them you maybe you broke them down into steps uh you review them regularly i i think i just have obsessions and things i don't do those are the two two ways i do it so you just reminded me of a story from my teenage life which i think at the time i thought was really stupid but now i'm

starting to see some wisdom in it does it involve cruising for babes on main street no but it does involve a celebrity oh cool i was a a golf club boy like a like i cleaned rich guys golf clubs after they got off the golf course okay is that a country club so you know yeah and uh one day i was 15 so this is over 20 years ago no i wasn't 15 i must have been 17 it doesn't matter it was over 20 years ago one day matthew mcconaughey came through and well yeah it's kind of a big deal actually i don't think he was much of a big deal back then but yeah he wasn't back then he was like a rom-com kind of star he was in a sci-fi movie that i had recently seen i think it was called contact with uh jody foster anyway this is going pretty far back now for you youngsters

so i walked up to him and i gave him my hat and i said hey mr mcconaughey i loved you in that movie would you sign my hat and he was like sure thing i'm trying to do my matthew mcconaughey accent that was really good he kind of has a southern accent right sure sure thing yeah sure thing fella so yeah he's like elvis yeah you nailed him so i gave him my marker and he wrote on there uh dear dave just keep on living matthew mcconaughey and i was like that's the stupidest thing i've ever heard but you know what i just realized he just described your whole approach to goals he should yeah that's he should have addressed that head to you okay that's from a movie you

could not have seen because you were too young for its rated r rating but that's from isn't that from dazed and confused who knows was he in that movie i've heard him say it again though recently I think he said it in an award ceremony recently that I listened to. He has kept living. He has. And it has worked out well. It's a good goal. Just keep on living.

Eventually, you will be unable to fulfill that goal. Yeah. So it might not be the best goal forever. My goal is to live forever. Just keep on living. And I have set a date by which I will live forever. there's like the tactical thing of how do you deal with setting professional goals in this environment where they will in some way affect your evaluation and did you ever figure out how

to do that because it sounds like you had some frustrating experiences i figured it out did you ever figure out i mean this might even be like gaming the system not necessarily that's exactly what it was how do you game this system then you contrary to what everyone says a good goal should be you make it as ambiguous and easily achievable as possible so that at the end of the year you can say objectively i nailed that no matter what happens and i did that i did that for several years where and in fact can you give me an example oh geez like a redacted example i don't know it was like help new people on the team ramp up you know and it's like i knew we had a few new people and i spent some time with them and it's like check mark done i i imagine that was a thing

that you liked and would have done anyway exactly just from what i know about exactly so okay i don't know i actually can't remember any of the details but my manager was in on it with me because he hated this he hated the system too and he was he told me he's like look just make these as achievable as possible so that at the end of the year we don't have a an awkward situation yeah so and you know what else continue working at company yes you know what else is funny i i remember doing this one year i wrote all these goals i took it pretty seriously and then midway through the year they like redid the goal system so like all my goals were obsolete because they didn't conform to the new guidelines

and i was like oh my gosh this is just case in point for why i don't like to write these long-term 12-month goals for my boss yeah but if you must if you must write goals and i'm gonna guess you're in a big company that uh uses these goals for some nefarious purpose maybe stack ranking um if you must write them try to figure out who the audience is for these goals and it might be that they are a tool that your boss uses to defend your continued existence at the job or to defend giving you a raise and if so figure out what ammo your boss needs to have so that he or she can make the best case possible for you and you know at some companies you'll be able to get away with some pretty crazy ambiguous stuff uh but at other companies you'll have to be very

specific and clear so you have to figure that out and and i would treat this just like a system treat it the way i treated all my high school classes which was figure out what i need to do to get the grade and and the learning is is a happy byproduct if it happens but not required this stuff this stuff makes me so sad because clearly this system was put in place as a way to help people get stuff done and there's i i think there are probably benevolent motivations behind it but it just immediately has dissolved into this like political hoop you have to jump through absolutely and it it seems like that for everything i don't know now i would say this as much as i dislike these individual goals i really like organizational goals that apply to a whole

team or the whole company where leadership says something like we want to hit this sales target for the year i think that's fantastic everyone can rally together and support that goal and get it done or you something like you know we want our software to perform better we want our users to have a better experience in this measurable way by this certain date. That's good stuff. I love that. And I think that's a wonderful way to drive your organization and team. But to have an individual have their own set of goals that are somehow related to the company goals, but not really because it's about your individual development, that's so much harder to do. I mean, your individual needs will change and the company will change out from under you.

So I'm just not a huge fan. Yeah. If you're worried about the company changing out from under you you might kind of take dave's approach of making the very broad and and fuzzy um you might take that approach with some longer term goals but if you're making goals uh you could say like probably for the next two months this project i'm working on isn't going to die so so you can maybe make a more specific technical goal about shorter term things and then just i don't know you have more certainty that you'll be around and able to meet those because it'll happen sooner but then what about if you want to if you want to sprinkle in some technical or or uh like more concrete goals just make sure they're on a shorter timeline i guess that's true and then

never mind the fact that your goal only applies to like two months out of the 12 in a year yeah well so so then you have like i helped the new team members throughout the year and also in january i i i lowered the payload size of our software by 10 or whatever before that software product was discontinued that was so funny yep so good luck have we answered it no i think we did a terrible job at this one but i think we just like kind of we're like we we we like took our ball and went home from this question like this question is dumb you shouldn't do this here's all these reasons why good luck completely unhelpful maybe some of our other listeners have had a better experience setting individual goals for their company or maybe you've had a terrible

experience and you'd like to share it either way we'd like to hear from you um go hit us up i i know there are people that set individual goals for themselves and achieve them um and they're called all my bosses no they're all like high performing people like i i know i'm thinking you know, specific people. So a lot of this is personality style also. And, um, how do I say this? Oftentimes those kinds of people are the ones that will set policies for the organization because that really helps them and it helps them be productive and achieve a lot. And so clearly it will help everyone. And, and then now people who might not necessarily thrive based off of setting individual measurable goals are kind of encouraged to because that's what the ceo does

and it works for them that is very insightful jameson oh thank you i mean really so you're basically saying that we have this goal culture sometimes because the people who are who naturally rise to these leadership positions are goal-driven people so often hmm i gotta go rethink my life now again doesn't help you best of luck all right i mean also there i'm sure there are yeah there's people there are people that could have good feedback absolutely they just aren't not me yeah oh man okay should i read the next question yes hopefully this one is a question that we can answer oh probably not okay okay this comes from an anonymous listener as well it says there are two leaders in our company that

hold rather high managing tech leading positions they are generally nice guys except when a failure happens and they start cracking jokes when we have a technical issue sometimes they say things like hey how can we fix this let's fire someone or hey are those developers still in the office yeah let's put them out of their misery and finish them right here gesturing with his hand shaped like a gun okay uh that's murder yeah you you have fired them from life yeah that's that's not within your uh stewardship as a technical lead turns out yeah okay let me keep reading even though they are jokey and are not directed to anyone personally i still feel demotivated like disposable garbage that can be easily replaced i know i should not take it seriously but as long

as i'm not comfortable with that i've started thinking about what i can do here i only have two ideas one approach them personally and calmly explain how i feel about their jokes or two approach the head of hr i've never had any similar experience so i'm unaware of possible consequences of any of these actions and whether they will change anything or not ouch well that stinks it really does i'm just gonna say it's almost not like i'm thinking of all these funny jokes i could say and i'm just like i don't even want to joke about it it really is just kind of gross yeah especially if it's when people make mistakes because that's when people are worried about being fired that's when that's when people feel low and then making jokes

about it's i mean it's very possible that uh that feeling of being replaceable is something they're deliberately trying to encourage to kind of like crack the whip some people think that that's a good way to motivate people is kind of fear and i don't know stick instead of carrot yeah yeah like don't screw up or y'all get fired that's kind of the subtext under here yeah that they could be trying to put out or they could just be incredibly clueless that that's i'm going to give them the benefit of the doubt and say that they are fun loving jokey fellas who are also clueless yeah and i think it's something that many leaders can easily fall into because things that are obviously a joke to you as the leader in your nice comfy throne you know are not so crystal

clear as jokes to the people you're saying them to right um yeah i have so i actually have a story kind of about that i worked with someone uh so there were two people there was the the boss and there was a colleague and this was at a startup so there's always uncertainty at startups and the boss was very open about the uncertainty there would be a lot of detail about kind of finances and um more than i've seen in other places which made me feel good because i felt like i had a lot of insight into how the company was actually doing um the boss would also sometimes make jokes about like oh it's so crazy here who knows we might not have jobs in a month or like I don't know just like very casual off-the-cuff things but from knowing them and also knowing

the finances I was on completely unfazed by these jokes but my colleague was very phased so much so that they ended up quitting and working at a different larger more stable company partially because they were so sensitive to this feeling of instability even though i i don't think it was actually that unstable it was just they were so concerned about it that they were willing to quit their job and get a different one to to feel more stable wow and it was it was totally accidental but but it happened so that's kind of an example of the negative consequences of joking about things and not understanding how how your employees feel about wow do you think the boss in this situation knew that his or her words had had this effect

i don't know actually i'm not sure wow so yeah like that's that's a fantastic example and and it's not like in this case the boss was even joking about firing people right the boss was just joking about silly financial things that weren't yeah and i think it came from a good place of wanting to be open and wanting to share information with people but it just some people were like ha good well they weren't funny but it was like oh you yuckster and then some people were like will i be able to feed my family right oh no right so i think that is a great uh cautionary tale for the two bosses the two leadership people in this story from this listener because oh man joking about firing people and killing people that's just in my opinion totally

inappropriate and my advice to you would be to tread cautiously here but if i'm if i could safely assume that these people are reasonable mentally healthy and pretty rational then i would go talk to them about it in private probably one-on-one not the both of them at the same time oh yeah maybe both i don't know it depends on how much of a mob mentality they get when they're together you know yeah yeah um and i would tell them i would just say with very specific examples when you said that it makes me feel uncomfortable and i know you're joking but i still feel uncomfortable and i don't think you should i would i would appreciate it if you didn't joke like that Have you ever heard the phrase, there's a kernel of truth to every joke?

Yeah. Do you think it's true in this case that maybe they do actually feel like this? I think it could go both ways. So having been in a position where I was involved in firings, I never joked about it, first of all. At least I never intended to. Hopefully I didn't. But if I did, it would not be because there's a kernel of truth. because let me just tell you that kernel of truth is such a scary proposition as the manager who has

to actually do the firing that there's no way i would want to joke about it even a nervous joke it's yeah just no way so in my experience no i mean if you're joking about it it's a pretty good sign that it's actually not on the table and in fact it's so far from the table that uh these people feel comfortable joking about it that's what i think yeah and that's for me i'm a very jokey guy you know i do a lot of laughing and joking most of them are puns so nobody else laughs i know you enough to imagine that uh that firing someone would be um emotionally difficult for you and that's part of why you wouldn't want to joke about it is because it'd be painful i mean for you for the person who's fired obviously but you would not enjoy it right i can see people who are

a little more passionless or uh don't have relationships or don't care or care more about the company than the people that they're working with who wouldn't see firing is that big of a deal there's a lot of turnover or i don't know or there's psychopaths or or they've just become they've become numb to it because they've done it enough times yeah that maybe it really isn't That, like, if they have a lot of, yeah, if they fire 100 people a year, then their firing muscle is real strong. And then maybe it is a jokey thing to them. I don't know. I was going to ask what you thought about the suggestion to approach the head of HR.

I would only go there as a last resort. And I might even, in this case, I might even quit before I go to HR. Yeah. I just, what's going to happen there? Try to take it, what would be the next step? you go to hr you complain about it and if hr is going to actually do something about it they're just going to sit you down in the same room together or they're going to go talk to them on your behalf maybe anonymously but maybe not i don't know i mean that that just sounds like

you're giving up a lot of control i have never ever heard an experience where someone has went to talk to hr and it's ended up working out for them and every like tech workplace scandal i've ever read about that involves hr has has made them seem pretty non-helpful and sometimes pretty actively harmful that's pretty sad actually when you think about it um yeah it's like i mean maybe it's what they're supposed to do maybe it's some kind of bias where you don't hear about the good things and the salacious stuff gets reported on but yeah it doesn't make a good tweet hey i complained to hr about my boss and everything's great now yeah but it it sounds pretty resoundingly awful yeah that that they generally side with the company they want to smooth things over

they they don't want to solve the problem they want to um not create waves and also make sure no one gets sued that's a good point hmm that's interesting you know i've known some pretty good hr people and i would trust them with this uh yeah i would i know i've known a few um but it's again you're still introducing a new variable you just don't know what that hr person is going to do yeah and you also don't know they they're they could be good people but you don't know what their mandate is exactly i mean they might be trapped in a pretty unhealthy incentive system yeah hmm

well this is a bummer question okay so here I got a better idea it's a bummer situation okay next time there's like a management mistake or something you put your hand in the shape of a gun and you say let's go put management out of their misery fight fire with fire

get it get it it's hilarious yeah i don't think this is okay to joke about dang it i think oh no well obviously everything's okay for us to joke about i think these two people are wrong to joke about it i hope talking to them works it out uh it's possible it won't though and then you just gotta think uh i don't know can i get him fired and take over for him and change the culture or do i need to go somewhere else or can i just put up with this culture yeah yeah this culture should not exist but because of circumstances you might have to work there if it's hard to get a different job

or hard to move or whatever absolutely but i i would talk to them about it and in my experience most people are pretty reasonable and when you tell them that you feel uncomfortable when they do something they'll stop especially in management and i know well okay that may have been that may have been over the top but having if someone came over generalizing if someone came to me as a manager and said it makes me uncomfortable when you do this i would i would be so grateful that they came to me and i would completely stop and put in place some kind of mechanism to make sure that i didn't repeat that absolutely like a dog collar yeah a little shock button yeah whenever you make the gun finger yeah sign automatically shocks me yeah if you felt strongly enough about

this to write into our show chances are other people do too and i know from from experience and i think every developer knows that in order to do your best work you need to be able to focus on the job and not be worried about these super uncomfortable things that really kind of go back to basic survival right if you feel like your job is threatened and you're worried about that you're not going to be able to perform your best to be able to build the products your company needs so it might you might really be doing a bunch of people a favor but i would not go and talk to your co-workers about this i would instead go straight to the boss talk to them about it the person who's the instigator yeah that makes sense and there's a lesson here for every leader

don't joke about firing it's it's just not funny it might seem funny to you and that's fine that's your perspective i promise you it's just not funny to the people you're joking about it with even if they're super comfortable with it if you're in a subordinate manager relationship and you're the manager you just can't do it it's off limits yeah it's not gonna take the edge off this touchy subject exactly yeah all right have we answered the question oh yeah absolutely i just i feel really bad for this for this listener it's a tough situation this is a hard situation yeah best of luck to you yes what can people do if they would like their own questions answered go to softskills.audio at the top of the page is a little link that says ask a question

fill out your form you can be anonymous if you want or you can give us a bunch of contact information and we would love to hear your questions um thank you so much to those who have written in sorry we haven't gotten to all of them also if you have a comment you'd like to make um about this show or any show please use that same form go ahead and fill in your comment let us know if you have some ideas something we forgot to include or some other cool thing you think that would benefit listeners we will be happy to read it any show like they want to come in and talk to us about the new car talk episode yes absolutely okay we'll do anything all right thanks for listening we'll catch you next week see ya