Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 94: Dodging Recommendations and Full Sleeve Tattoos

Episode Date: February 3, 2018

This week Jamison and Dave answer these questions: As a “less than ideal” engineer was leaving our team, he asked if he could use me as a job reference. How should I tell them no? What are your thoughts on having full sleeve tattoos (ie, tattoos that cover the entire arm) within engineering?

It takes more than great TF-IDF skills to be a great engineer. This is episode 94 of the Soft Skills Engineering Podcast. I'm your host, Dave Smith. I'm your host, Jameson Dance. Soft Skills Engineering is a weekly advice show for software developers about non-technical subjects. So you're saying if you want to know what TF-IDF means, listen to a different podcast. That's right. Okay.

or you could take all the words spoken on all podcasts divide by what is it i can't even remember how df idf works hang on it's time for the traditional soft skills engineering look stuff up on google break divide by all the words that exist in all the podcasts and then figure out the inverse of the document frequency of the occurrence of all the terms and that's how you figure out something i think what you really mean is use this python library and call one of its functions yep in practice that's what nlp is use sci-fi or whatever yep that's right all right would you like to read our first question no no we need to thank our patreon supporters we do uh we want to thank dustin coats dustin is sponsoring at the level

where we thank him every week and so we will do that you can tell it's a prestigious honor thank you so much dustin thank you to all the other sponsors as well if you are interested in supporting the show on patreon you can go to patreon.com soft skills eng um we don't really do advertising here we've done in the past and we're doing this instead uh this is this is how we support the equipment cost the editing the design um all the other stuff that goes along with making the podcast so please donate if you uh would like to that's right and remember it does cost money to rent out space on the yacht where we record each episode i'm thinking like okay you know how you can get all that acoustic foam how much would it cost to get someone to do

like the mona lisa in acoustic foam because they have to they have different colors right probably so i want that's what i want that's what i'm taking this money for is to build yourself an Acoustic Mona Lisa. Yeah. Acoustically insulating Mona Lisa. Yes, which will then translate to a better show for all the listeners. The quality is going to go way up. It will.

I mean, yeah, art inspires greater human achievement. I think that's pretty uncontroversial. Yeah. And that I am a human and I will achieve. And you will benefit. Yes. All right. You the listener.

Well, yes, you the listener will benefit because you'll hear how happy I am in my voice. That's right. And what more could you want? nothing would you like to read our first question yes i will read it this is from a listener named adam as a less than ideal engineer was leaving our team he asked if he could use me as a job reference luckily i hadn't worked very closely with him and told him that i wouldn't be comfortable doing so if this were not the case with such an easy excuse how would you go about telling someone know to a referral thanks for the show luckily that's what you say is well luckily for

me i haven't worked very closely with you good thing the last five years i was kept distant from the misery you caused the rest of the company it really paid off yeah i'm so glad my lack of engagement good luck with your new job hopefully you don't get close to anyone there either I just mean dude I just don't even know words sorry I'm out of words I don't have words to share with people oh goodness remind me your name

again this is the incident where you just stuff a bunch of food in your mouth just put up a finger in the air and just do that until they go away you just make the charlie brown adult voice noise but in real life that's just how you talk you sound like a trumpet you could write that down phonetically right yeah yeah so i this is the thing professors get asked a lot about um they'll need to write letters a recommendation for students to go to grad school and a common tactic i've heard is to ask the student to write their own letter and then have the professor look it over and sign it if

they agree i think the thinking then is like well they want to write something the professor will will agree with and there's kind of some self-imposed pressure to be honest and evaluate yourself i don't know capably but that could also totally backfire right like as a 13 year old i was elected president of the united states and like i don't know you just put nonsense there the professor still has to either sign it or say hey i don't agree with this this is weird oh they can just redline it like an employment contract remember we talked about that cross out president of the united states and put like multiple felon or something low achieving student in my class

with great effort i squeaked by um so that's one approach i still don't think that would work very well if if someone was a less than ideal engineer do you think they know are they aware and are asking for what they think is going to be a glowing recommendation or do you think that they just hope the person will kind of be polite and say nice things to avoid offending anybody um i think it could be awkwardness here right it's like how do you say hey i have nothing good to say about you and one approach is to not do that and just say vague nice things right maybe that's what they're counting on um yeah maybe maybe they're like you'll just say all the things

that are good about me like i have great hygiene i show up to work on time and uh i have a red car an exhaustive list which actually is one approach you could take is you could subtly recommend the things that are truly good about this person like no one no one is all negative we're all mixed bags of some good and some bad so you could just focus on the good things and the person reading the recommendation will maybe read between the lines and realize wait you didn't say anything about good engineering you know have you ever had to ask for references or or have your references contacted about jobs so i was just remembering a story that i think is actually this exact situation except i was the one asking for the

reference and the person didn't want to give me one so about four or five years ago i gave a presentation at my company at a big conference of the whole company and uh i thought it went pretty well and a bunch of people gave me a lot of complimentary remarks after the talk and uh One of the people who had been particularly positive about it, I approached him later and asked if he would be willing to write a short letter of recommendation just to say, hey, Dave gave a great talk. And the reason for this is kind of silly, but suffice it to say I had a good reason for asking this person. and uh i was on the phone with him and i was like so yeah hey i'd like to ask you to write a short just letter of recommendation saying what i did and what you thought of it and recommending me to give talks at other places and um he was an expert question dodger

and it took me several minutes before i finally realized oh he is he doesn't want to do it but he was saying things like well you know dave here here's what i think you need to do like he would totally misdirect me he'd be like i think you need to go do this that and the other thing and i'm like oh okay great thanks for the feedback so about that letter did you tell him like this is why i want it and he was trying to direct you to like here's how you can get the thing without this letter maybe yeah maybe it's been a few years i don't remember the details all i remember is i had this moment where i'm on the phone and i'm looking up at the ceiling and i was like oh my gosh he doesn't want to write the letter did you say that no no no i played it really cool

i at least i thought i played it cool yeah and uh yeah so he just completely evaded me and i and i just walked away realizing oh okay well he's not going to give me the recommendation were you upset by this um no i wasn't upset but it did cause me to reflect like what what just happened you know it was kind of it kind of was a little bit of cognitive dissonance because he had been so complimentary yeah and now he didn't want to say do anything else you know and it was just like wow like and i thought well he's got his reasons for it you know it's not like i didn't really think of it as a i didn't take it as a negative super negative for me i just felt like oh he's probably got reasons he's busy maybe i don't know huh anyway so that's my story i've been in this guy's

I don't think, I can't remember. Well, basically what I'm trying to understand is what is the responsibility of the person acting as a reference? Is it their job to warn about potential negative issues with this person? Is it to be a rubber stamp and say, yes, they're a human being that some people like? Is it to play up the upsides? i don't think i quite understand yeah where the responsibility is yeah yeah exactly like you i think like the super ethical person in you wants to do full disclosure everything on the table you know and give the best possible or the most representative recommendation as possible yeah yeah and i have contacted references and actually there have been there have definitely been some that are pretty mixed that that are it sounds like they're trying to do a good job of saying this is what the person is good at this is where they struggled and i really appreciated those those helped me as a potential employer make decisions and it wasn't like oh they said

something bad x them out like yeah it was more like of course there's some thing this person struggles with and boy is it nice to know it now instead of six months after we hire them i mean maybe in that case it's fine to act as a reference and and give a less than 100 positive review i have had people act as references for me and i have no idea what they've said ever that's true yeah you you don't usually get to see that yeah i think they were mostly positive but they could have been like and here's what he did this day here's why it sucked this project and i don't know i just never never would have known but so so that is one option just say yes and say some nice things and say some of the things that that were less than ideal

yep the danger there is then they don't get the job and then ask why and they say well your reference said all this stuff about you and then you know you get a battle so maybe okay okay i'm thinking of this hypothetical world where you want to be honest and and open and you can say i was thinking before we did the show how would you say no because i wouldn't be able to give you a good review because that's very uncomfortable and still very uncomfortable but slightly less slightly more comfortable is saying i'd be happy to do it here's some of the feedback i would share with them so they they at least have some inkling that it won't just be like the statue built in their honor yeah that it it'll be

a more nuanced view of their strengths and weaknesses and you don't even have to say like here's all the stuff that you did bad i'm gonna say you could just say yeah i'd be happy to do it here's what i here's what i see is your strengths and i might talk about some of the struggles or i don't know just some some hint that's a good idea but i don't know if i would be capable of doing that though yeah it would be an awkward situation yeah i think instead you should just literally sculpt and deliver a statue in their honor okay i mean how awesome would that be that would be cool yeah just shows up on the company's front door like you asked for a letter of recommendation well here it is and you pull the big sheet down here's what they inspired me to do

and then you get out of the awkward conversation you're just like look this is a statue of them yeah what more do you want yeah i have been a reference for people before okay i'm just remembering one of my friends asked me to be a reference for for him and i think i was pretty much resoundingly positive because i really liked working with him so it was pretty easy but i have never been well that's not true okay i have a slightly related story the prefix to the story is do not do what past dumb jameson did so i worked with a a person who was not performing well at all in the job didn't have the skills the experience just was not doing a great job um this person asked me not for a formal job reference but

basically for an intro to the job process for this this kind of famous well-liked tech company that i knew a bunch of people at and and they had a reputation for being very technically excellent and having a really high bar and lots of smart people worked there and they were really cool and it was an attractive place to work and also it was clear like we only hire the best that was kind of the vibe they put off and in my head i was like there's no way that you would be able to get hired there and instead of uh somehow well i don't even know what i would have done instead but basically what i did was say sure i'll do that and then i never did it and just ignored it and and they never asked again and the problem went away until one day i meet this person again

and they confront me angrily over it so every time you walk out your front door you have this little fear that you might bump into them yeah exactly and that's a price that's a price worth paying The reason I didn't do it is because I felt like it would reflect poorly on me where they clearly have such a high standard. Their engineers are very publicly brilliant and accomplish a lot. And I just felt there's no way this person would fit in or keep up in that culture. If I said, hey, talk to them about a job, they would be like, what is Jameson thinking that he thinks this person would fit here? uh so it's pretty selfish and also very poorly handled but on the bright side they will never come to you for recommendations ever again like neither the company nor that person problem solved so i think i mean i still feel like my advice though uncomfortable feels like the right thing to do and i think i am a little more comfortable which is personally uncomfortable you mean tell the person who's requesting the recommendation that you don't

want to give a recommendation either tell them that explicitly or say here's what i think they're looking for in this situation i think i would have said here's what they're looking for i i don't think you're quite there yet i'd be happy to maybe put you in touch and and then maybe they why would you insert yourself like that and make that judgment call on their behalf like why not let the process play out because and and share but still share an honest disclosure where you give maybe not a glowing recommendation but surely there are some positive things about this person you could share okay i'm gonna rewind time that's me speaking in reverse here's what i would say i would say i don't think it's a good fit for you right now i'd be happy to put you in contact with

them and and so you can it'll kind of build a relationship for later for when you learn a little bit more okay um and then that way i think i would feel comfortable telling the people the contacts at the company hey they don't have the skills yet but they really like your company maybe you can chat with them and maybe it'll work out something like that so you just completely reframe the whole interaction yeah because what they wanted was hey help me get a job at this company right now and that that i'm pretty sure was impossible um but they were they were also pretty new in their career too it wasn't it wasn't purely a skill thing some of it was experience too so okay i don't think it is forever impossible well that's interesting i think that uh i think

that's very wise to to like reframe things in a way that will set them up for success rather than just avoiding awkwardness and rather that doesn't help adam though because adam is being asked for a job to be act adam is being asked to act as a job reference for a company that this person's applying for yes and the trick with job references is when they come in i've seen them come in in two forms sometimes they'll come in the form of a phone call where the hiring manager will call you up and just say hey what can you tell me about so and so and then it's just totally open-ended but the other form is they will sometimes send you like an online survey where you have to respond on a scale of one to ten and then maybe there's a dozen of these questions

um and uh they're they're both challenging to respond to i think but i'll tell you what i do is i usually err on the side of the positive review uh even if the person who i'm recommending uh left the company on pretty bad terms and the reason i do that and it kind of depends on the relationship i have with the person with the hiring manager if i already know them well or not you know um i don't know i just i'll tell you what when i get one of these references from someone and it's a glowing response i know how hard it is to write a negative response to these things so if it's a glowing response i usually don't put a ton of stock into it what i'm looking for is if someone is willing to say they were a terrible employee for these reasons that is

super loud like if someone is actually willing to do that it speaks volumes in my opinion and i've had one case where we were interviewing a candidate they were technically very sound uh super super qualified technically but then we got a reference from a previous hiring manager who said who confirmed a hunch that we had that this person had major social skills problems in other words they were very hard to work with they would uh say rude and demeaning things to other people on the team and stuff like that and so we disqualified this person from the hiring process based on that data point alone like technically they were solid but anyway so all that was a long-winded way of saying i usually give pretty positive recommendations even for people that

aren't the best engineers that's kind of sad because it yeah well it just makes us a hoop to jump through why it does well i do it then yeah exactly so i don't that's why when i send out referral recommendations sorry reference checks for people i'm hiring when they come back glowing i don't really read into them that much but when they come back super negative i i pay a lot of attention yeah um it's just another data point i mean it's like this is just one more awkward weird hard to hard hardly predictive data point in the interview process right i mean how is it all that different from the rest of the interview process yeah there's another part which is you mentioned hiring managers and so this this feels like a

personal thing where this person is asking you adam smith i don't know what your last name is mr adam maybe that's your adam smith the famous economist who is now a software engineer interview yeah that too but maybe maybe adam is this person's last name oh um maybe it's all there maybe it's just one name like prince adam anyways this person came to you and said adam would you please be a reference for me not adam's employer i would like you to i'm i'm they're going to contact you because i worked here before please tell them whatever that could have been that could have been what happened here as well i think based on what i'm reading in the question yeah usually when that happens the company doesn't say anything besides yep they worked here because

they don't want to get sued that's true that's true so if that's the case you have a lot of wiggle room to just say yes they worked here yep and and then the the kind of out of bounds communication is like and we can't tell you anything more because we don't want to get sued that's right and why did they leave your team i can't comment on that yeah exactly uh but this feels more personal like you're asking a person you know not not them as a representative of your previous employer did we okay so it feels like there are two options here one is to just give accentuate the positive to give a glowing recommendation and hope that they know that your recommendation means nothing another option is to have a super awkward conversation

that'll probably make somebody mad somehow set expectations that you might be less than perfectly positive yep uh another option is to just never pick up the phone ever again that's right just it'll ring in your pocket and you will just not answer you don't recognize the number why pick it up even life i live even if it is the number of your significant other you still don't answer because it could be a spoofed caller id from the company okay asking you're taking a step further well you gotta be you do not want an awkward conversation at all costs yeah move to the mountains avoid technology yep a friendly sparrow will carry you this podcast okay i think we've helped yeah maybe have we answered the question well let me ask you this

would you be willing to give a reference if i needed it yeah for you heck yeah okay i know you pretty well and i think you're great it'd be easy see and i'll never know whether you're being honest or not i am being honest you can tell because i said so that's right just like i said i would give that other person an intro and never did jameson's failures let's rename the podcast well that could be a subtitle soft skills engineering colon jameson's failures jameson failed so you don't have to yeah all right should we go to our next question yes please get me out here this comes from a listener named ron he says what are your thoughts on having full sleeve tattoos i.e tattoos that cover the entire arm within engineering is it all right as long as

it can can be covered up for important people i have so many thoughts i have no tattoos but lots of thoughts uh one why not get a tattoo of a sleeve then you can save a lot of time and effort and money on clothes you can have the best of both worlds yeah you only need half of a full sleeve shirt sleeve like every time you're wearing a short sleeve shirt it's actually one half of a long sleeve shirt you can have your tattoo and wear it too yeah exactly uh you could make it like a uml diagram or something that would be helpful for whiteboard discussions and then it'd be very useful but a binary search tree algorithm just printed on your arm yeah so you're doing you're in a design discussion and somebody's like we need this database clustered you're like oh

like this diagram on my arm and then you start drawing on it i happen to have a cassandra config for a nice highly available cluster right here oh you're saying use it as code snippets yeah it's like a reference yeah okay that's even a step further i was saying uh just have it as kind of a canvas to do your design on but you're saying like i can't remember what order these arguments come in you flip your arm over and look like you're cheating in a test and it's right there yep good thing i got this tattoo of of this javascript framework api it'll last forever just like the framework okay so in the spirit of reframing this question let me ask like another weird question so the question here is the sub question was is it all right as long as they can

be covered up for important people then i was thinking what about face tattoos like is it all right as long as you can put on like a a ski mask for important people uh i think they have body cards to protect against people that approach them wearing ski masks if they're important enough no no no it's fine it's fine it's just covering a tattoo on my face it's just covering the tattoo of teardrops i have near my eyes one for each person i've killed oh oh excuse us for the darkness excuse excuse our weapons we drew it was all a simple misunderstanding i okay yeah i don't think i don't i don't know which of those is worse a face tattoo or the thing you would have to do to disguise the fact that you had a face tattoo i think those would be equally equally

weird i thought you were gonna ask how do you define important people oh uh people who have bodyguards clearly well yeah i guess so i gotta tell you i've been spending this week in seattle and i've seen a lot of full sleeve tattoos seems to be just fine yeah i think i think the actual answer to this question is it does not matter for 90 of of united states tech jobs yeah i mean i don't know if the numbers are right maybe there are government jobs but i feel like for almost all industry jobs it probably does not matter at all yeah if you're a software engineer there's pretty broad spectrum of the way you can present yourself and still be taken completely seriously i wouldn't worry about it yeah i'm trying to think through my developer friends

who live in utah and utah is a very very conservative socially conservative place and a lot of them have tattoos and it affects literally none of them negatively and so if you can make it in utah i think you're fine yeah anywhere outside of utah yeah i'm trying to i'm trying to think of like subcultures or sub-industries where this might manifest you mentioned government contracting maybe uh i don't know like the financial industry they tend to wear ties and stuff the men do at least right yeah but then you have a full long sleeve shirt okay problem solved it's fine i yeah i honestly feel like it's neutral to positive i don't know it's like neutral positive even i think there are lots of cool developers

that have full sleeve tattoos and i think they're cooler because they have tats i don't even know what's on them all the time i just know they have cool tattoos it would be really cool though if you were able to come up with a full sleeve tattoo that reflects your profession i mean as an engineer that would be awesome i mean i've seen like y combinator tattoos not not the accelerator logo the at the the function yeah so i think there are some some cool technical tattoos that you could do i i'm assuming ron already has full sleeve tattoos yeah i'm guessing yeah and it's like what do i do about it maybe i don't know maybe okay it is more fun if we are pretending that ron is deciding whether to get full sleeve

tattoos or not well we get input on what they are the good the good news is if you're deciding about it like it's not permanent you can just wash them off with soap right so like if you change your mind or you want a different style it's no problem yeah if the marker that you use to tattoo yourself slips it's fine you can just wash it off that's true i have had lots of tattoos in that case it reminds me have you seen that that clip i don't even know what it's from there's this guy sitting at a desk taking a test and then he looks around the room shiftily and looks down at

his hand and you think he's cheating and then it zooms in on his hand and just says you can do it in giant letters that would be an awesome arm tattoo full sleeve you could get a rubber duck on your on your sleeve to assist with debugging exactly yeah you have your built in pair programmer

oh that's great um get okay here's what you get you get either tabs or spaces tattooed on your arm depending on what your preferred indentation style is you're like aligning yourself to a tribe that's right um yeah there's so many options here oh yeah so many yeah i think they're cool i wish i could get tattoos maybe i will someday maybe you will well you've got markers in your house so well yeah that's true i have some right here on my desk maybe i should do that right now i'm sure you'll do a fine job i've drawn a lot of diagrams on the whiteboard how hard could it be

well have we answered the question i think so all right go for it ron don't hold back i think the key is the half sleeve yeah so it's winter and cover it up you get one sleeve wait oh oh you meant one out of two arms yeah not just up to your elbow but no yeah i guess yeah the terminology is ambiguous isn't that that's like a three-quarter sleeve anyways i think that's a real term yeah you get one sleeve on the arm with the tattoo if you're worried about covering it up the other arm is just like a tank top and then when a very important person comes by you just turn sideways with the tattooed arm behind you that's true you could you could just hide it to your emotions hello very important person and you wave with like the wrong hand

yeah in whatever culture it is they extend their right hand to shake your arm your hand and you extend your left you just grab the outside of their hand oh yeah i'm sorry my other arm is covered in uml diagrams and i know you hate uml uh it's i worked at our competitor previously and it's covered in their proprietary information yeah exactly i'm not able to show it you have to sign an nda which conveniently is printed on my other arm the one that i've extended to you yeah remember that group that printed some video codec on a t-shirt as a statement oh yeah solidarity or something it was copyrighted or something like that i think it was patented or something and they they wanted to protest the patent and so

they printed the code on a t-shirt yeah there was also the was it the playstation private key some private key from some gaming console got got snagged could have been and then there's a big lawsuit around it and they printed it on a bunch of dvd encryption key yeah that definitely happened dvd css i think is what it was called yeah so wait for that kind of a cause and get that on your full sleeve because that would be awesome okay so i mean the meltdown specter stuff just coming it came out kind of close to recording this podcast you'd have to shrink it down a lot but you're saying a specter uh exploit yeah print out a specter exploit maybe print out a guide to to like branch prediction or something so people understand how it works

just follow this how-to guide starting on my left mole above my wrist what okay one last random question before we finish exhaustively answering this question say you wanted to get something technical on your arm okay like real life some some kind of technical programming related knowledge how would you actually pick what to go what to put on there well it's got to be something that's going to be relevant for your whole life yeah exactly like which eliminates almost everything i know i'm thinking maybe the android logo okay an ironic blackberry tattoo maybe you go all the way back to the charles babbage computation engine it's timeless classic that would actually be cool i know add a loveless wrote some programs for it

maybe there's like a snippet from one of those or something or probably there's i mean i'm sure like i've seen lambda calculus tattoos or like yeah that's turing machine tattoos or something yeah that'd be cool okay it's decided you'll get a turing machine tattoo take care of it ron yep okay uh what should people do if they want more tattoo advice don't ask us clearly dave well dave i announced my credentials do you have any tattoos no i do not okay um we bring a fresh outside perspective yes very that's how we'll frame this very fresh but if you would like some tattoo advice anyway feel free to go to soft skills.audio and click on the ask a question link where you can fill out a form uh put in your question you can leave

your name in there or not whatever you like to make you feel more comfortable and uh what if people want to support the show what should they do then jameson they should i mean honestly the best way to support it is to help more people find it that is the greatest support if you also want to support financially head over to our patreon patreon.com soft skills eng and check out the the different tiers there although the best way to share it with your friends is to get our website url tattooed on your face that's true yeah i think we've actually talked about that before actually there's precedent there is um please don't i would do that i would pay you 10 bucks to do that though if you did uh this is taking me back to the elementary school days where

i ate ketchup packets and those little pepper shot things for quarters for quarters inflation it was worth a lot more back in those days oh yeah you could buy literally a ketchup packet with a quarter not anymore nope all right i think that means we're done we will catch you next week thank you