Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 97: A Quiet Intern and Hearts and Guts

Episode Date: February 22, 2018

This week Jamison and Dave answer these questions: We have a great intern, who is smart and has good ideas but is also very quiet. She’s got a great deal of potential, and I want to tell her that being more vocal and assertive can help her greatly, both in her career and in life. How can I give her this feedback, without it sounding like a criticism of her personality, or her introverted tendencies?” Recently a team member was let go. I am the team lead so I played a role in their termination. While they weren’t a good fit for the team, I’d still like to be in touch and help them improve their skills. Should I steer clear of this? My gut says yes but my heart says no.

It takes more than impressive Jira skills to be a great software engineer. This is episode 97 of the Soft Skills Engineering Podcast. I'm your host, Jameson Dance. I'm your host and lover of all things Jira, Dave Smith. I mean, that goes without saying. Soft Skills Engineering is a podcast where we take your questions about non-technical things about software and we answer them. Sometimes.

I have become quite the deft hand at Jira myself. Have you? Oh man, I'm sorry. Oh yeah. i don't know i don't hate it that much it's just the thing i hate is how slow it is i know it gets blamed a lot for process problems it's the instrument people use to express their weird broken process so people hate jira but really they hate their process it's the proxy yeah i don't think i don't know our process isn't too bad but man is it slow hey this week we'd like to thank two of our patrons on patreon who are supporting the show at the level where we thank them every

single week dustin coates and michael collier thanks dustin and michael if you'd like to support the show go to patreon.com soft skills eng and contribute a little bit of money all right should i read our first question yes you should this is from a listener named joe we have a great intern who is smart and has good ideas but is also very very very quiet she rarely speaks and she's not vocal on slack 20 years into my career i strongly believe programming is a collaborative activity that involves discussion debate and communication and these are areas that require speaking up frequently i'm also concerned that folks she encounters down the road will mistake her quietness for weakness she's got a great deal

of potential and i want to tell her that being more vocal and assertive can help her greatly both in her career and in life how can i give her this feedback without it sounding like criticism of her personality or her introverted tendencies well the way you deal with all introverts and quiet people it works universally is you just yell at them until they snap out of it and if yelling doesn't work you're just not doing enough yelling that's that's what motivates them yeah i think not getting yelled at is actually a pretty big motivator for introverts so oh so you just demonstrate that the threat is real yeah

yeah this is this is an interesting question i think there's a lot to talk about in here one thing i want to talk about is this comparison between 20 years of your career and the intern who is presumably zero years into her career and it's so much easier to speak up when you just know the lay of the land you know the people if you've been there for a long time or you just know the space in general if you've been working in the field a long time i started a new job a month ish ago and um i'm i would i'm not particularly quiet but i i was more quiet at the beginning of my job than i am normally just because i don't know there's just a lot of stuff i don't know people say words i don't know people talk about projects i don't know any information about

so um i think some of it might just be that's that's how it is when you're new it's it's it's easier for some people to kind of sit back and gather information versus jump in and contribute i mean there might be some people that don't know anything and just like pop in and are like i heard you're talking about databases have you tried the blockchain and like that's that's bad in a different way how could it be bad it's got blockchain in it okay that's true maybe that wasn't the best example yeah excuse me so you're saying don't come don't calibrate your 20-year vocalness against someone's zero year vocalness yeah i think vocalocitude um there there can definitely be i think you can definitely have feedback but also saying

you yeah you at zero years of experience don't act like i at 20 years of experience too is is might be a little bit of misplaced expectations might be a little bit of misplaced expectation yeah you know at zero years you should have all the ideas i should be more quiet in meetings at 20 years what do you think dave i actually think that being quiet uh and being perceived as too quiet by more senior engineers is a very common theme among newly minted engineers very common would you say that's the case in your experience jameson i think yeah yeah i was gonna say more words but i'm gonna just say yes in fact i would say it's so common that the few people who have the gift of speaking up in meetings and other uh other environments they actually sometimes can

drown out the people like the more the less vocal majority yeah i'm trying not to drown you out i'm just gonna drown you out with giggles yeah maybe yeah maybe that's how you encourage instead of shouting at them you just tell really bad jokes and laugh and then they laugh along start laughing very quietly yeah the laughter gets louder and louder and then you just break through the barrier slowly it's like breaking a horse you just slowly slowly bring them in we've laughed together now we can work together so tell me your ideas about that blockchain again this will be great for a laugh

i think that's actually i just discovered a strategy i didn't know i employed but that is the thing i try and do like when i work together with new people yeah i try and tell really bad jokes and laugh about it so you have like a little easier that you're like okay i have a one-on-one in 20 minutes i'm gonna prepare a few jokes from my list oh no funny i don't even need to prepare they just come to me that's awesome so have you ever advised someone like this who is who in your mind seems a little bit too quiet yeah yeah so i worked with an intern who was very quiet they were also very bright oh my gosh the intern was michael collier who is a patreon of this show you're kidding also my cousin yeah there's is this nepotism i don't know

uh i have no idea what just happened but i'm saying his name and he's giving us money probably some kind of nepotism going on thanks michael anyways um he michael is very bright and he's not he's not like shy or reserved but he was just a little more quiet than he normally was i don't think i even talked to him about it though he just became more comfortable and contributed and talked more so he kind of got through it on his own but you were talking about how this is a general pattern that you see among newer developers um there was also a person i've worked with who um we actually talked to as a team and just said hey you're you're smarter than than the amount that you are saying to us like we know there's good stuff in there that we're not

getting and they they made an effort and changed and and the team was better because they contributed more all these people have been men though so it's a little bit of a different dynamic i guess yeah can you hear yes screaming in the background she just woke up it's not too loud she should be a little quieter in meetings she does not have that problem being too quiet in meetings well okay before we go there i want to talk about just introvert extrovert divides i guess i think sometimes introverts contribute in different ways than extroverts would like them to okay and you mentioned slack in your question i think sometimes they're much more comfortable contributing in text so design documentation or pull requests or things like that it's easier

for me personally, actually, to think through my feedback and type it out and phrase it the right way so that I express what I actually want to express. I feel like when I am in tricky verbal situations that I often leave them thinking like, man, I did not say what I wanted to say there. So speaking up, you want to encourage this person to speak up. I think you can encourage them to speak up through mediums that are comfortable for them to not just through talking in meetings hopefully i mean if the only way you make decisions is talking in meetings then you're biasing the decision towards people that are comfortable talking in meetings interesting i mean you can make it a comforting welcoming space so everyone feels willing to

participate but also uh you can you can elicit other kinds of feedback too i mean hopefully you're doing some kind of design documentation so you you decide on an approach to solving a problem someone writes it up and then you you kind of all agree that that's the decision and have feedback on that yeah that makes sense and in other words you have like multiple modes of feedback that are not all verbal could be written yes yeah that's a short way to say what i said no good job no i felt like you said it in just the right amount of words see if i could write it out i would have ended up at that amount of words yeah i really like that i think that's a great approach also um i think i want to dial in on a key word here in this sentence which is intern

and i i'm thinking back over all the interns i've worked with and i i think every single one of them i have felt and this is probably a dozen over the last 15 years i have felt like don't speak up very much and i was thinking back to when i was intern aged and what i was really coming to my internships to do and i'll tell you what it was it was to learn right i mean these are students usually they're in school they're learning full-time and when they come to a company to do an internship it's to augment the learning so i think that there's probably an expectations mismatch here between joe and this intern where the intern came to the job to learn more stuff and yeah and make some contributions as well i'm sure but like generally like the scale is tipping

toward the learning side and so to come in and start making recommendations for how software should be developed and how the team should work it's like that's just not even on the radar of an intern you know what i mean yeah yeah i could see that i think there are some really great learning opportunities that come from participation as well though so even if you say their job is just to learn if they i mean they don't they don't have to say we should change everything they could just ask questions or say why do we do it this way or oh absolutely and and making technical suggestions is a is an important skill to learn so maybe they make one and they learn there's a reason why we all use cheer even though everyone hates it or like i don't know whatever whatever the thing

they're suggesting it changes for i think you're totally right but i'm just trying to like establish that this first of all this is normal and i think like encouraging this person to speak up might put them in a pretty stressful situation because they're going to be like what do you mean i don't know anything like what am i supposed to what am i supposed to speak up about you know yeah so if i were in this situation and and joe's here joe here seems to believe that this particular intern has some great ideas i would actually go to her and say hey this idea you had to do x y and z that i somehow came into because you know and apparently got some of the ideas uh out of this intern without necessarily being in a meeting or something.

But this idea was really great. And I would love to have more of those kinds of ideas from you. I'd love to hear that more. So thanks. Thanks for sharing that. That is like the bare minimum easiest thing you can do is to say thank you for the ideas you do have and just encourage that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're worried about criticizing. And that's not criticism. That's encouragement. Exactly. That's a great suggestion. Yeah. Another one might be to try and pull feedback a little more.

You want to be careful probably not to do this in a giant meeting in front of people. but but just say hey what do you think intern person what do you think about this idea like this is what we're thinking do you have any concerns about it any suggestions uh if you do it in front of like the whole company then that would be paralyzing but in in smaller situations or in yeah in smaller groups or over chat or something like that um if you really think they have good ideas and good feedback then you could elicit that feedback directly instead of just kind of folding your arms and hoping they get the hint that they should give more feedback

And for the next part of our all-hands meeting, I would like to call our intern up to the stage to answer the following question. What should we do differently in the engineering department? The mic is yours. You have 10 minutes. Explain the trade-offs of TCP slow start. Please go. This will be great for their career, I promise. They'll really learn a lot.

I know. I think if you had had this opportunity as an intern. yeah so i also want to touch really quickly on remote versus non-remote if it sounds like this is an in-person team because you mentioned meetings but also slack most most teams have slack but also most in-person teams have some kind of written communication as well if you are a remote team the burden for communication is much much higher because you don't have that in-person uh face-to-face like incidental communication so i think i would approach this differently if this were a fully remote team versus in person if they aren't talking at all on slack then they just are invisible a little bit uh but if it's in person yeah i don't

know it's different yeah yeah for sure um i do think that like we said like that's just giving compliments on the good ideas they've had is definitely low-hanging fruit and it's even not that hard to go and say to them i love that idea i would love to hear more ideas from you like that you know and even take it one step further and say hey when we're sitting in meetings i just want you to know that you are totally welcome to share these ideas and i would very much enjoy hearing what's on your mind when we're sitting in in meetings like that yeah just open the door and be like i want you to be aware that this is something we we enjoy and we like you to do and uh you know maybe don't i wouldn't go so far as saying it's an expectation and part of like

the way we'll appraise your performance but at least tell them like this door is open and we want you to to walk through it yeah yeah people don't give enough compliments at work i think that's a pretty general principle so if you can if you can tell them something they're doing well and also say something nice about them that's that's great so i want to talk about an experience i had once i uh i've participated a little bit in the local girl develop it meetups um i've taught a couple classes and just kind of attended a few other things and one time i went to there was a new chapter opening up in a city near me. I knew some of the people. I didn't know very many of the people. And I went with my wife, so I wasn't even just there by myself. And I felt so

uncomfortable. I just felt so awkward and out of place. And it was nothing that the people there did or that the group did. I was just, I was, I was a man and there were a lot of women there that I didn't know. And they all kind of knew each other. And I was coming into an unfamiliar situation and there was there was nothing explicitly threatening about the situation just being very very different in this very visible way was enough to make me uncomfortable and and more reserved than i normally am i would say so i i think i don't know what the demographics are at your company but i think it's possible also that they just feel uncomfortable not because someone is deliberately making them uncomfortable but just because there aren't very there might not

be a very many women there you know and it's a hard that's just another dimension to jump into especially if you're more reserved in general excellent point yeah i kind of just like talked to my wife and the one other person i knew that was there yeah but i mean if someone if someone approached me and said like hey how's it going and and i i think i would have participated i just didn't want to like intrude in a potentially weird creepy looking way on on these group conversations that were happening all around me yeah it makes sense so try to put yourself in this intern's shoes a little bit and realize that there may be more going on than what you are even aware of i think is what you're saying right i think so yeah yeah through i mean there doesn't

have to be like an actively negative environment just to make it less comfortable for someone to participating yeah for sure for sure well well let's just keep saying well together to demonstrate just how synchronized we are i have one last comment i wanted to make which is that the fact that you're being very considerate and sensitive to uh this person's personality and introverted tendencies shows me that you're probably going to do the right thing and not coming you're not probably not going to come across as critical which is great and if i were in your shoes i would focus on the positive the proactive things that you are encouraging this person to do where you say look i would like to see you do this more that's great that's a very different conversation

from you're too quiet yeah you know you're too introverted like i would never go there and instead i would just say try this we would love to hear your ideas yeah and i think you'll do just fine great feedback dave you've answered the question that's right all we're all fully answered now okay do you want to read our next question yes um this is a good one we don't usually read the question title but i'm going to read it this time okay this is called hearts and guts this comes from an anonymous listener who wrote recently a team member was let go i am the team lead so i played a role in their termination while they weren't a good fit for the team i'd still like to be in touch and help them improve their skills should i steer clear of this my gut

says yes but my heart says no okay so this question immediately raised like a i guess an anatomy question in my mind which is is your heart part of your guts where is the divide i think it depends on what you've eaten most recently right like are your guts your tummy area is that what we call guts are your lungs your guts i think guts are generally considered your intestines okay i think um because yeah and then the analogy is weird like i feel like sometimes gut and heart are used it's it's it's like something versus your brain you know yeah yeah you're right so now they're adding a third it's it's brain versus heart versus gut which if you're having trouble with a difficult decision add a third thing in there and compare that and see if it agrees and

then see if you agree with the majority and if not you're racked even more with conflict and if you do agree you're still racked with conflict well see the good news is if you have heart guts and brains now you're guaranteed planet yeah right yeah that's what it was guts brains and together we are no wait that's a monster a slimy disgusting monster but at least if you have three parties involved there's no chance of a tie yeah you could have a majority so that's good but then it's it's heart guts brains and then your consciousness is outside of all this evaluating so you could still tie i think if you wanted to if you're like my gut says this and my heart agrees but my brain says this and you know i agree with my brain yep so i guess i'll just do nothing classic just deadlock

perfect all right should you steer clear of this yes jameson says yes i disagree i say no i think you should steer clear of it because when people get fired which is what letting go means there's often like a narrative that they construct to justify why they were fired often from the hr leader no i mean i mean the person oh my bad okay okay sorry sorry sorry i thought you were going to get into a keeping your story straight situation oh no no i don't who cares okay just get sued it does it's fine um no the person who gets fired uh they don't want to just think i'm a kind of person who deserves to get fired this is just a human reaction right no one no one wants to face that reality so often they'll

they'll kind of get upset they'll construct a narrative around incompetence on the part of the organization or other people or maybe it was just political or the company moved in a different direction or anything besides i didn't do a good enough job so i got fired because that's that's painful and people shy away from pain. So they have, they have this story where it's not their fault. And if you still work at the company, you presumably have some reason why it is partially their fault. I mean, I guess sometimes people get their, their branch gets closed or I don't know, whatever, but often it is something to do with their performance. And, um, if you're trying to coach them and they're not willing to receive it because they're all defensive and closed off,

It's not going to go very well. I think they're, they're not in a great position to receive feedback for the most part. That is my, that's what my gut says, you know, and my heart says it too, and my brain and my mouth. So, I mean, also lots of times when someone gets fired, the people that still work there, um, well, this could go two ways, but sometimes they kind of, they kind of like close that person off again in self-defense. it's painful to have someone that you liked working with it's kind of still hanging around

that doesn't work there anymore so they'll they'll they'll just kind of form a new group around the people that are still there and they're very much an outsider um so it's yeah it's just a weird relationship that isn't it doesn't seem to lend itself well to the kind of open honest feedback that is like constructive criticism sometimes they get fired and the people that work there are mad they got fired and really like them and then and then they still talk and then that's that's that causes other problems too but uh yeah so that's why i think it's not a great idea all right shall i make my case please make your case i'm ready to instantly change my mind i would say depending it depends on how close you were before the termination

and maybe even before you joined the company like if this is a long-term friendship then i would say you probably should not sacrifice this friendship because of a termination i'd say go for it but having said that and maybe even not maybe even if it isn't a long-term friendship as long as you steer clear of the specific details of the termination you know like this person's probably going to be very curious to know like what exactly happened you know there's probably going to be some confusion and they want to resolve that confusion they want to avoid having this happen again having talked to people who were fired even a couple jobs in a row they're just like oh my gosh what happened you know like what did i do um sometimes sometimes

they know exactly what they did like when i got when i got fired um about 15 years ago yeah i knew exactly what i did but in many cases you're just like what happened and they're going to want to try to pry that out of you and i've seen this happen on a couple of occasions and it would be inappropriate for you to speak on behalf of the company in this in this unofficial get together and so you got to really just steer clear of that and i would set it up and say i want to you know stay connected to you and help you out and do whatever i can but at the same time i cannot talk about the details of the termination sorry hr said i would get fired if i did that just seems so unsatisfying though if part of what got you fired was some deficiency of skill in that

part whether that be a technical or like communication or i don't know managerial i don't know maybe it even wasn't like you did your job bad it was just you you made this important person mad somehow that that seems like the core of what you would want to tell them well if that's the case and i'd say don't go for it don't don't talk to them because yeah you just can't like that's actually inappropriate for you to do because you weren't the only well he said he's not the only person who participated in the termination like there was his input went in there were other people's input that went in um and so it would be inappropriate for him to now take a like a unilateral dialogue with this person and be like i'm going to represent all these other

people's voices and tell you my perspective on how things went down you know i don't think the other people didn't they didn't clear they didn't clear this person to give exactly feedback is everything you're sharing you're sharing stuff that was shared privately with you maybe exactly exactly so like if your goal is just to go and give this person all the details that they didn't get in their exit interview i would say no stay away stay away from that but if your goal is to provide ongoing coaching and mentorship and you think that the relationship could work that way then yeah i would go for that yeah i think it's a lot easier if they're fired for some technical problem or deficiency because then you can just say well you just didn't know enough of

this technology that we use and learn more of that and that's not a personal reflection on somebody but i feel like most most firings are more complex yeah and it's a lot easier to take them personally and then the feedback is like hey person this part of you is bad yeah yeah this deep this deep inextricable part of you that's foundational to your being is bad like i mean yeah i could no one wants to see this depending on the relationship to i mean people that break up are friends sometimes maybe maybe it's kind of like that yeah uh you're breaking up with them somehow but some people can still maintain a friendly relationship some people could still give and receive productive feedback and some people you

just it's better to better to end it there and not chat anymore yeah yeah for sure it's kind of a judgment call there yeah so i think we've waffled we ended up in the middle what i said no you said yes together our hearts said maybe and brains combined to maybe i still i still think in general i would lean towards not doing this and it would have something would have to convince me to do it yeah i mean there's there's not a lot that can go right for you by participating in this relationship right yeah like the the best case scenario is that you form a bond with someone you provide mentorship it's very satisfying for both of you the person goes on to great success and considers you a friend for life that's great but yeah the the possibility the other negative possibilities

are that you leak some information you shouldn't have it gets back to your company your company calls you in for a very awkward conversation um and you get a black mark on your career you know yeah i mean i think even more than that it's likely to create a negative relationship with this person yes or not likely i would say that's that's what i would be more concerned about than company black mark stuff but yeah you're right also i just don't care that much about getting sued maybe so maybe i should care more about that uh yeah well we totally helped i would say go with your heart but consult with your brain and possibly consult with your hr department your other brain stay away from your gut though it's famously fickle oh yeah your gut is uh

your gut's walking you down into a hazard yesterday my gut made me consume 10 chocolate cookies so i don't trust it very much right now and then actually no that was hang on hang on that was my brain punishing my gut there's a power struggle within me did that same gut complain about the self-same cookies that they it's desperately craved later oh yeah yeah it's a big whiner i want cookies i want cookies why did you eat cookies i'll get new guts and replace you then where will you be in some black market premium human guts all right i think our show is done we've talked about my heart trafficking time to end where should people go if they want to get their own questions answered if that's what you want follow your gut and your gut provides the

best answers but your heart says go to soft skills.audio and click on ask a question again we really appreciate your support on patreon please if you're interested go check it out we would love to see even more support we will catch you next week yep thanks