Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 85: Annoying Know-it-alls and Company Headshots

Episode Date: November 30, 2017

This week Jamison and Dave answer these questions: One of my co-workers is a know-it-all, which is pretty annoying. How do I work with them? A former employer still has my photo on their team website eight years after I left. How do I get them to take it down?

It takes more than a magnetized needle and a steady hand to be a good software developer. This is Soft Skills Engineering. 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. Boom. This is episode 85, by the way, for those that are keeping track at home. Shoot. You'd think that after doing this 85 times that we would have this part figured out.

literally before the show started we said that we had learned everything there was to learn about how to do this show our hubris yep it has brought us down as always there's probably a greek play that correlates pretty well with this well there was that one greek tragedy about podcasts there was yeah where uh what would be like the most greek tragedy podcast metaphor that would require me to know greek tragedy literature and it's probably it's probably you get fired from your job because of something you say on your podcast or something and then your family leaves you and but your podcast was about how to be productive at work and at home that's like a yep that sounds good and then you accidentally murder your parents yep exactly they always

throw in a little bit of that a little bit of patricide yeah absolutely okay we said this is podcasts about non-technical things for technical people let's prove it do you want to read our first question yes this comes from an anonymous listener who says we have a team member that is a great addition to the team in a technical way but everything he says or does seems to annoy me sorry i'm feeling feeling bad for you okay for example i get the feeling that he always wants to come across smarter than everyone else and that really pisses me off for some reason okay moving on i'm not laughing at you sorry the problem is that nobody else seems to have this feeling so nobody really has a problem with this guy and i am the only one stressing out about

stuff like this it looks like our personalities just don't match up it feels like back when i used to live with my parents and my little brother with my little brother constantly annoying me as well for no actual reason in short what is the best way to deal with people who just annoy you i for one know that it's pretty easy to fire your little brother uh you just talk to him about how he's not meeting performance in your metrics yeah you can just bring this up in your regularly scheduled performance appraisal with your brother yeah or yeah i mean you do a one-on-one with your mom sure sure tell her that your little brother's just really annoying wrestling you gotta wrestle him right isn't

that what you do with i don't have any little brothers but i imagine you wrestle a lot which is like wrestling except um in the south of the united states you do some rough housing a lot of noogies he says a little rough and tumble yeah yeah yeah show show him who's boss oh i had a little brother who annoyed me as a kid really oh yeah and he wasn't even trying to be annoying i was just stupid i was like hypersensitive in hindsight i can see that very clearly as i look at my own children annoying each other and i realize i was exactly like this yeah i think that's pretty common something about siblings just sometimes they annoy you when it wouldn't annoy a person who wasn't their sibling oh yeah for sure uh and

maybe that's what's happening here maybe maybe there's some of that maybe he is smarter than everyone else he wants to come across as smarter than everyone else maybe it's because he is he's just a super genius he's not trying to bask in his knowledge it just happens it's like yeah yeah does the sun try to shine no it just does and this guy just outputs wisdom and to your feeble mind it looks like hubris i can't not shine buddy so i've i've worked with people who are 100 for sure smarter than i am who haven't come across this way and i've also worked with people who who definitely come across this way so i totally get your concern it does feel there's just something that feels weird about someone who seems like

they're trying to look smarter than you instead of just doing good work with the talents they have yeah those were jokes i agree this would be annoying maybe everyone else is also annoyed but they just aren't no one's talking about it with each other okay i thought i was in a situation like this where there was a co-worker that kind of bothered me a little bit wasn't any major conflict but there were just a few things they did that bugged me but no one said anything so I just kind of sucked it up and dealt with it only later to find out that basically everyone on the team had had some similar issues with that person and if only there had been a management structure in place to help resolve this conflict because it was flat so our management structure

was just gossip which never reached this person and then yeah it wasn't resolved productively but it was like a mesh it's like a mesh network that has yeah i mean i yeah when i say gossip i mean like the gossip protocol distributed systems literally in the gossip protocol yeah uh and like distributed systems it broke down in interesting ways and yeah in interesting and hard to predict ways yep namely the feedback never arrived at its actual destination yeah there was like a split brain situation with this one engineer yeah yeah they thought they were the leader they elected themselves exactly meanwhile a separate quorum has formed and they've all concluded he's annoying yeah yeah oh classic you don't want to just come across as whiny

i get that but if it makes it harder to work together on a team i think it is worth bringing up to hopefully a a capable manager that you have and i mean this this kind of feedback is really hard to give to someone yeah it's easier to get from a manager because it can come from a place of this is this will make the team perform better instead of if it comes from you you might just say hey i think it's really annoying when you do this uh and your little brother when you did that to him was like oh yeah give me ammunition yeah exactly it's like my ab test is complete yeah but if you talk to your manager about it i mean it can be helpful just to gripe sometimes you might just get it off your chest but also it's a data point they have that they can use

to potentially give feedback to someone and part of your manager's job is to give tricky feedback absolutely but but before you go to your manager that what you just said jameson triggered in my mind a memory that uh i think everyone needs a trusted confidant who's not in your workplace this can be a spouse partner sibling friend in my case it's my spouse with whom i share my frustrations you know like this and what i have found is that when someone annoys me at work if i can just talk about that for a few minutes and get it off my chest somehow inside my brain the annoyance goes down and just the act of talking about it and getting it off my chest does this and i realized that i had worked myself up inside my own head over something that actually

isn't really that big of a deal and it's not things stop bothering me as much when i when i have a chance to do that yeah that's a good point maybe that's what's needed here that's a pretty low cost thing to do exactly or you could pay a very expensive therapist yes to do the same thing that's pretty high cost but then the cost makes you feel like it's working better exactly and and which in turn makes it more effective yeah so yeah fundamentally if your personalities don't match up that doesn't mean anybody's wrong necessarily so there are people you just might not get along with super well sometimes but um you might still have to be on a team with them so this could just be an opportunity for you to develop patience and to appreciate the good times

even more sweet sweet patience yep have you ever noticed when you say wow i feel more patient now that never just happens except through extreme hardship yeah yeah yeah it's like wow i'm not on fire anymore and i appreciate that it's good to not be on fire yeah hmm have we answered the question well i i don't know i don't i don't feel great about it yet um i think that let's just keep making more jokes until we feel great about it at some point we'll feel good about all the laughter we had at this poor person's expense yeah just kidding um i actually think it's very introspective of you and uh quite honorable that you raised this issue this way instead of just feeling frustrated and fuming you've actually

brought this to this you know to us your trusted confidants i wonder if you felt better after writing the question down that's what i want to know very possibly but let me ask this i think on the spectrum there's a spectrum here on one extreme of the spectrum you have annoyance and on the other extreme of the spectrum you have harmful behavior that inhibits the team from meeting its goals and i do think that there is a bit of a spectrum because at this point you have dedicated brain cycles to this annoyance so it is slowing you down in some aspect of your job and maybe other people are also dedicating brain cycles to that to being frustrated and those are brain cycles that could be dedicated to solving some problem or moving your team toward a goal

the question is how far down the spectrum is this and i think that you can change your expectations based on how far this down the spectrum you are or you perceive this problem to be and if it's within the safe zone you can give yourself this like higher order cognitive permission to disregard the annoyance that you feel and try to crowd out those thoughts and say you know what they're just not worth having and and push them away because you know that there's no benefit that can come from it because otherwise this this team member is perfectly productive and not hurting the team but if you cross over this line where you say i think that this behavior is actually harming the team that's when i think you need to go to a manager and i really wouldn't

recommend you go to a manager unless you're pretty sure it's on the other side of that line because you'll do some harm to that person even you know maybe not a ton of harm but at least some to their possible growth yeah that's a good point i want the brain power that you described where i can convince my brain that something isn't a big deal that yeah yeah that seems like a level of control over my own thoughts that i aspire to achieve someday dave i know it's hard right you've inspired me it's really hard and i'm not saying i'm good at this but this is where having another person to talk to really helps because i feel like when i'm explaining these problems to someone else the higher order reasoning takes over my brain because i have to actually

convince them and a lot of times i come up short and i say oh well it's actually not that big of a deal and i've convinced myself by trying to convince you that it is a big deal your story sounds dumb and boring yeah you realize it's not that big of a deal yeah but you have to say it out loud sometimes because otherwise you're i'll just use the term lizard and then they commented this on my pull request after i had gone yep okay yeah that's a good point i think i think sometimes time uh can temper these feelings and i'm talking like over the course of years multiple jobs you look back and the things that annoyed you five years ago are not even blips in your memory anymore you know and and so that helps you walk

into new situations with new annoyances and say yeah you know it's not that big of a deal yeah i really like what you said about seeing if it harms the team for instance the feeling that you're smarter than everyone could just be annoying but it could also affect technical decisions for example if you're trying to decide between technologies and someone just thinks they're smarter uh they might be pretty bad about understanding and accepting other people's viewpoints they might just go off and do it all themselves because they think they know best and it doesn't matter what the lowly peons decide so yeah even that specific annoying thing could range from annoying to negative like you said yeah absolutely and it could even have the insidious

side effect of causing other team members to defer their own hard work because they know that this guy's smart and he'll come up with the right answer you know yeah or just make you feel dumb for not doing whatever he says yep yeah yeah well that seems helpful dave thank you no thank you jameson you're welcome i don't know for what but you're welcome all right question answered yes i shall read the next question this is from a listener named alexander nine years ago i worked for a company with a very toxic culture i was only there for eight months we had a photographer or take headshots, and my photo is still on their site through eight years and three redesigns. I would like for them not to use my photos anymore, but I don't want to have a long email

thread or anything. What should I do? Wow, you're famous. It's hard to think of many, many images on the internet that have lasted nine years. Yeah. Do you still get paid as well? Because that would be cool. royalties yeah my paycheck has lasted through eight years and three redesigns nothing lasts across three redesigns that's lasted longer than most startups most javascript frameworks most people's tenure at their job so you have an accomplishment you should be proud of are are you outrageously good looking that's exactly what i wanted to ask because maybe they want the picture on their website so that people think their company is

is hip and cool and you add that in which case you are also a professional model now and they should pay you for that or you were nine years ago anyway yeah yeah i guess yeah the ravages of time and all that you always have that picture though so maybe since it's you in the picture maybe you could get your picture farmed out to other websites and set a goal to see how many different websites you can get to put your picture up yeah maybe okay yeah you could start a sas company whose market is companies who need good looking uh team pictures right like we need to make it you can't write good code unless you're outrageously good looking everybody knows that yeah so that's

definitely true my services yeah dave is living proof um so i'll sell my services i'll you just drop this javascript into your page and it and it loads 15 copies of my face onto your team website it helps you raise funding the roi is pretty high you know we talked about ab testing in our last question maybe you could even have like a javascript framework that ab tests different photos of you to see how it impacts the click through rates of the uh the conversion rates of your various customers and they're all of you because an important part of ab testing is not changing any underlying assumptions you just make little superficial tweaks left side right side yeah yeah blue steel or magnum which look do you

use animate some of them oh the possibilities are endless you could do blue steel this is an opportunity you've been gifted this by the universe so wasn't there a bill in the u.s senate or house i think it was senate like a decade ago that said if a website is using your copyrighted content you will have permission to hack that website and take down the content this was there was a bill about this it was like 2004 or something well you're in my wheelhouse now because i have an encyclopedic knowledge of u.s proposed laws i remember it anyway i i'm not going to name any names but the internet just got ablaze with this

bill because the senator who was championing the bill his own website had copyrighted material on it and of course the internet trolls were like well let's hack it i don't know if they did i don't know if they did but if that bill had passed you could have just taken matters into your own hands i'm latching on to the last part of the question that says i don't want to have long email threads or anything so yeah maybe hacking the website is at least could have been a viable option if this bill had passed you could have been a vigilante fighting for justice that's right i i think the answer is you just ask them to take it down i mean i feel like that's a pretty short pretty professional email and if it turns into a long email thread you can just tell them that

you have a lawyer that you don't actually have and please direct all communication to my lawyer well and set up a gmail account that's also you you can have a lawyer for long enough to just write a scary letter and that's i don't know that's a thing lawyers often can just be professional bullies where their job is to write a scary letter and scare people into doing the thing you want um and i feel like in this case i don't know a ton about the law but this seems like a thing that you are in the right on where you don't work there anymore you might not be actually it all depends on the employment contract the headshots yep and having recently listened to an episode of this american life i think there is legal precedent that if you take the picture

you own the copyright yeah that's true and so it this might be out of your hands i don't know but there is definitely legal precedent for having lawyers send threatening letters and absolutely having that make people do stuff so i was just thinking that what a great startup company idea would be a machine learning ai which generates takedown notices given a little bit of input from you it can generate all the strong words you need to send yeah wouldn't that be fun that could be used for such evil though because i feel like most maybe this is just the strisand effect but i feel like most of the time when i hear about takedown notices they're just so bogus just outrageously someone trying to abuse someone else something they have no control over

Do you know what the Streisand effect is, Dave? I do now that I'm on Wikipedia. Okay, do you want to paraphrase the Wikipedia definition? So it's where you want to take something down, and the act of trying to take it down actually causes that thing to be even more widely publicized than originally. So it's like it backfires. So the takedown notice itself becomes more popular and well-known

than the actual original piece of information. Is that right? Yeah, pretty much. so so barbara streisand is a actor or something who who did this yeah i think there were pictures of her house that got published somewhere and she really didn't like that and so she tried to get them removed and and they spread everywhere because now there was a news story about her trying to remove these pictures that sucks but anyways don't build that because you could use it for evil but see you could use the machine learning to train it to prevent sending out evil

takedown notices yeah it's just machine learning all the way down that's true the machine learning will solve all of your problems that's a joke but i feel like that is a missing piece in a lot of tech products is they get considered for good and not for ill and maybe you do build in some some i don't know like a governor like a thing you put on a golf cart to make it so it doesn't go 100 miles an hour put in some tools that make it so you can't abuse it okay so uh if you don't want to send an email you have some research to do because this sounds like a novel hard problem the good news is you you might end up with a phd after it and your picture off of the website which would be cool or well okay even if they don't maybe they just change your title so it

says phd so it makes their company look even more impressive think of the medium think piece you could write i started out by wanting to take down my image from a website and i ended up with a phd yeah i read this blog post about how donald newth is the greatest yak shaver of all time he's like this famous computer scientist wrote the art of computer programming so he wanted to typeset his book that he was writing but the method that he used kind of went out of style they didn't use it anymore so he wrote this program to typeset his book he invented a programming language to write it in uh yeah he just he shaved a lot of yaks okay now i'm starting to wonder if maybe i don't understand the word yak shaving so can you explain it to me so i think

yak shaving is when you're trying to solve a problem and a related but not essential task pops up and you think i'll just solve this first and then that will help me solve this other problem oh man and usually those pop up recursively right and when you shave a yak yeah there's another yak underneath because apparently um i uh i think i have conflated yak shaving and bike shedding for a lot of years oh dang i feel like i've missed out publicly you're gonna edit this out right your humiliation will be public hmm we should censor this and see if the streisand effect makes it even more well-known send you build the thing send us a takedown and then we'll be famous okay alexander i hope this has helped i i think you send a polite email

and you count on their goodwill and their their professionalism to take it down and if not you really could probably if it's that important to you probably pay someone a few hundred bucks and send a less polite email after that i don't know you're kind of you might be out of luck yeah yeah but you have a cool research project now yeah definitely good luck the question has undeniably been answered good luck um what can people go if they want their own questions answered dave go to soft skills audio hey i i said bad words i gotta say good words what can people do if they want their own questions answered aren't those the same words i said what can people go oh you did yeah wow i transposed it to the correct words

without even knowing i did it yeah but i don't think all of our listeners would and okay that's fine that's fine yeah that's good i'm glad that you trust them and value them so much okay uh where can they go or what can they go sorry wait where can they go do where can i'll get question answered we'll go to hulk speak go softskills.audio click ask a question no you smash ask a question smash keyboard words question form anonymous not anonymous you choose yep we will smash wisdom onto your question all right thanks

Catch you next week.