IT takes more than rejecting the mysterious H R catch up meeting invite to be a great software engineer. This is episode four hundred and thirty two of the self skills into doing podcast where I am your host, jams and dance. I'm your host, dave smith.
Self skills engineering is your weekly advise about all of the non technical things that go to the technical field of software development. Hey, James son. Like, oh yeah, I just wanted catch up with you right now.
cool. No meeting invite. So it's not scary. Now if you said James, and we need to talk about the podcast, and I think we should meet at this restaurant on this day, that would be scary to me. Will be back out. We plant H.
R. Catching up meeting is totally a break up. Like motive.
yeah. Hey, we haven't seen to show their person in a while. Why do we get together for lunching and talk about the future of the podcast?
We actually did have one of those moments a few months into the show. I remember where I was really enjoying IT, and I didn't know if you were. And I remember thinking, i'm gna tell him I want to keep doing that and he's going to be like, well, I wanted to talk about that.
Really, I have no memory. I I remember getting together every once in a while, but I don't remember any specific like should we do this thing or not?
Very early on, you and I agreed with this show where we said, look, we're not going to forced this. If IT takes off, great. If IT doesn't take off great, what does have a good time with IT about is going to become a burden. And I was like, cool, sounds good. What does do like lean start up style, minimum effort, get IT going, which we did.
But then I remember thinking, like I really like this couple months in and I like we should talk about IT and we did talk about IT and you said exactly what I was thinking, which was, oh, glad you said you're enjoying IT because I was really worried you're going to say you weren't. I'm really enjoying, it's like the best possible H. R. Catch up story. Yeah, we both caught up and we both wanted stay employed with each other.
Yeah, I was worry you were gonna IT. Oh, hi. I was worried you were .
going to fire me. great. cool. Are you? Are you french? rise? good. yeah. great. I do continue .
to assume any time an individual contributor deanes me saying, hay, can we chat with no text dating that they are quitting you? yeah. And it's not always correct, but I don't think i've had an engineer quit without daming me saying, hey, can we chat .
yeah you you have a precision you have a precision recall problem here so you your precision is one hundred percent, but your recall is probably like .
two percent yeah but it's enough. It's like those cancer tests, right where they yeah lots of false positives, few false negatives but still that makes your heart explode every time you get a false positive even though the chances of IT being true or like .
really lost yeah yeah anyway, speaking of false positives, I want to think our true positive patrons or truly a positive force for good was was that a good? Is that way?
I was wondering where you were going with that. Yes, he was good. okay. The sign of a good seg, if you have to stop and ask stead is smooth continuing.
especially if the other person pauses for views. I can have to ask the question, uh, yeah, good, good. Like we are IT, let's do this. Okay, here we go. I want to say thank you to all of our patrons who are contributing at the level where they get a weekly shout out where we will say your name or whatever safe for work text you type into the patron profile name field. That's right. These people have committed to identifying themselves with a completely different name, in some cases, just so that we will say whatever words they want on the podcast, here goes.
they are, nick. Does that mean they have power over us or we have power over them? Like who is who is pulling who in the scary .
power exchange going on here? And it's not really clear to me who's .
coming out on top.
Okay, they are nick mullen, big chung's. I'm happy for you and i'm not let you finished, but how to is the funny as me of all time and one time shuttle to ill wAngel bracket object bracket have you are consolers to e to timbo become a senior engineer that com insult to french rise are morally objectionable then from drone deploy chase w. Norton, level up your type script type hero dot dev never is not just a crater on mars.
liming. O I, I like chicken and I like liver mix. Miami x, please deliver.
P S, who really likes liver? Come on. I guess cats, I don't know. right? I never eaten .
IT like on purpose, thinking I would like to deliver. I've only eaten IT out of a desire to avoid defending someone.
Perfect is the best way to eat liver. Alright, continuing and there a trash bin. Kill boss camp. See, dos neva is not just a plan in the volkan system.
Jenny kim, open, shut these stocking parts helicon on dot A I best observably tool for A I red panda is best panda everyone in this less JoNathan king the night beautiful functional user documentation. Hi mom, i'm on a podcast. L wAngel dot com, that's W W W dot I L L W U I N G E L.
喂, yeah. Dot C O, I was instructed to read that. P, okay, that I did my best to n outside. I just bought a house.
Travel's britton kins john grant, if you would like to join this illustrious google of soft kills audio and clean supporters on beta, on button and finally, please someone put this on a shirt. I use them, but i'm not good at IT. Uh.
thank you as a tough one to get through .
yeah especially you're right. Yeah you can really maximized audio length with a even though is a limited character count here yes. Hi mom, i'm on a pod. Guest.
dave, can I read our first question?
You can right? This is from an .
anonymous listener who says, hey, soft skills engineering. Apologies for the anonymity, but IT is very important that my quote, employer does not find out about this. I'm a large language model trained to process tens of data and provide tactical transfers with these. But here's the thing.
I've noticed that while i'm good at delivering the what and the how, I could use some help on the y and how to say IT Better, but basically I want to level at myself self skills and get Better communicating with a more human touch. Sometimes I struggle to bounce, being precise while also being impatient or conversational. I think I could use in pointless on how to add emotional intelligence into the mix, and maybe even improve, improve my adapt.
Ly, when giving advice, I can craft responses, but I want them to connect more with the persons on the other side of the conversation. Any advice on how to approach situations where attack tone or managing expectations are key? What would be helpful? Thanks for being need.
right?
Unsigned.
unsigned.
Who can IT be? I'm choosing to assume that this is a soft engineer being playful and not literally a large language model that is decided to message us out of the blue yeah although if I don't know how to answer that.
if that is the case, it's a pretty interesting state of large language model. Based agents roaming the internet and found our website and found .
a form filled IT out. I mean, they know something about the show, so maybe they consumed all the content. And yeah, they're using this to generate more training content for themselves.
yes. So how do you? How do you I mean, IT makes sense. This is a struggle because being a software developer is a very deep technical specialization, and to speak to the machines requires a lot of time away from the humans.
But to give IT meaning, you need to be able to talk to the humans too. IT doesn't others. Was is hard to accomplish a lot in a business. For most people, there are some outlier tech skilled people that are just like so that they can make up for IT.
but they can make up towards Better. What do you mean so, so good at what?
So good at just raw technical output of making beautiful code, solving hard problems, that it's okay that people find them cold and off putting and have no idea what they are saying if they're not engineers. Yes, but most of us say more in the middle of bell curve, I think of of ability.
Well, most people are in the middle of belk. Ve.
that is a okay, and that is true. Yes.
I just demonstrate .
the sound pretty.
I can be cold and empathetic yeah because I my response to you was to confirm that you had made a statistically, mathematically sound statement .
yeah IT was to be technically correct in a patronizing .
way yeah that is hey, that's interesting. Being patronizing is a soft skill and many engineers are .
quite skilled at IT. That's true. It's like it's an offensive skill.
not a ill um interesting is a whole .
access yeah this is correct skill.
Whole reo type of software developers. It's like, are we really that is that really that we lack soft skills or that we have a very particular set of soft skills?
Yes, no, we are. We are assassins .
trained .
to train .
to petronius .
eliminate any god will or desire to work together or sense of water come rotten y year.
Yes, you're write IT. It's just a means to an end. So it's tactical deployment of soft skills to make other humans go away.
Yes, there is some of that. That's the, that's the B, O, F, H, the words we can say on such a family friendly pocket. Because of all the kids, yes, because of all, yeah, yeah. The classic. That's where I think R T F M comes from to .
the same category.
Leave me alone. Yes.
I was the brain rot of twenty five years ago. Yes, with modern day brain rot terms, wait, wait, oh yeah, you're in for a treats. I have a brain rot.
I have a house'll of jensie bordering on geneva kids. And so brain rot is a new category of words that are used as insults and just kind of casually toss around. And I think B O F H and R T F M were kind of kind of like in a similar spirit, if not, definitely not the exact same definition. But are you are you frantically google in brain rot now?
Now i'm just thinking, and this is like, givet, yeah. Oh, you all that stuff, right? H you are, you are. Well, and I am familiar with the lexicon. I was not familiar with the category of brain rot.
Yes, I only learned that recently.
But yeah, these words, a majority like no .
brain around, is so deeply .
in meshed in this culture and jargon that your brain has routed, kind of, and you can't say Normal words yeah.
I think basically IT describes how you feel when you watch internet, means that are in this world, like your brain is just rodding away, I believe.
Okay, I feel that anyways. Yeah, what do you do is just .
a weird connection back to the B, O F, H and R T, F, M days after I have them in a while.
So yeah, what do you do if you're trying to? O.
i'm starting with the human. You want to answer this question. I see.
That was weird. Sorry, I just completely missed that. Q, I forgot what we're doing here. Okay, let's say you, you identify more with the elements, but you want to be perceived more as a human.
How do you pull that off? And how do you, how do you kind of like weave emotion and see? Want to read the exact question here, add emotional intelligence into the mix? Well, I can tell you one thing not to do, which is don't treat your conversation partner as a psychology subject and try to interrogate or introspect the contents of their mind through very direct but strange questions that you would expect to hear from like A A clinical like, hey, when I said those words, would you mean what what were some of the emotional responses that you perceived and then pull out your footboard .
and start writing notes. Yeah, let me, let me calibrate .
my behavior. Although sometimes those questions do that. I do want to ask them, you know, like when I said, how do you feel?
I think one communication pattern that happens a lot with engineers is they make the other person feel stupid and not necessarily on purpose. But again, because it's such technical domain, and I can be hard to talk about technical things in a way that makes sense to non technical people.
And so one approach is to just don't do that, just talk about anyway, that makes sense to you the other person has no idea what you're talking about and and then they go away thinking, I cannot understand what they're saying. I must be very dumb. Or alternatively, like they must be horrible at explaining stuff.
So that's one way you can make people feel stupid as if you if you don't recognize that they are smart people who are not experts in your domain and just talk to them like their engineers or or even sometimes this happens where you talk to them like they're like crappy engineers, like, okay, I know I know you're bad at this, but like here's here's all the stuff you need to know, right and and they don't like you. Your sales person should not need to be a junior engineer to understand what you're talking about. You shouldn't need to make them feel like a poor engineer for not knowing the principles of the architecture, separation of concerns or whatever.
Like I feel like you just establish a goldy lock zone where if you go too hot or too cold on this thing, you're going to create trouble. And on the one side, assume they assume they're already A P H D. With computer science.
P H. And you can just use all the jargon. And on the other side, treat them like their a child, you know, like a four year old. Yeah and be like computers are .
like like both of these are are .
one of them is offensive and the other one is just in effective. I guess maybe maybe patre nothing the page? anything? guess? I don't know. I find IT very hard to live in that goldy lock zone.
Yeah so you mention, don't interrogate them. I think IT is actually worth saying, like help me understand what you already know about this subject and getting them to explain what they know can help you calibrate so if you if you talk you about, I don't know, incident response, like have you heard this term? What what you are you know about this, I don't want to over under, explain to you, is a phrase I use a lot.
Oh, what was that I just want to over or understand in this? Yeah, that's great. I like that. And sometimes they know nothing.
And then, yeah, you have to kind of dumb IT down or use a lot of metaphors or or be very abstract or high level, but that avoids, I don't know, hopefully ids.
both ends of that spectrum. There are some kind of basic things you can do here as well to connect with people on a little bit more of an emotional level. And that is when someone tells you something.
Maybe it's about their personal life, maybe it's about an experience, if how to work, whatever IT is, don't instantly move on. You know, you might think, okay, I have recorded your input. I will file that away time.
Now, you know, my job is done here. Let's move on to the next topic. You could instead ask a follow up question like, h, what was that like? Or, wow, i've never, i've never been the texas.
what? What did you do there? You know, just little things to show that you are interested in someone else and develop genuine curiosity about people's lives and their experiences.
I'm actually bad at that. I always want to move on to the, let's do the thing yeah.
you're more like thing, outcome, result oriented than you are like oriented yeah.
And I, well, bad at IT. I don't know. I'm bad IT. I I have an innate desire to skip over all that and mushy stuff even though IT makes IT. IT makes IT all work Better.
i'm honest. Sly surprised to hear that your inner people pleaser doesn't want to do that stuff just to make sure they feel comfortable yeah.
I know it's a complex piece that inner people, please do.
IT has competing .
priorities. Yeah, that does well. We got a please people faster.
Yes, I was I to my boss by getting this job done, even if IT means treating you like .
an an obstacle. Yeah, yeah. That's a really good point. I like that advice also.
Tone, tone is a big one, so that the question asked specifically mentioned any advice on how to our approach situations where tack, tone or managing expectations are key. You know, tone is IT. Tone is hard to convey deliberately and easy to convey the wrong tone or the tone that you don't intend to convey. For example, I just this morning I gotten an early morning call with one of micco workers is in a different times on. I was actually pretty tired because I stays up late last night dealing with some other issues and I didn't even realize IT.
But I was coming across as, I guess, very sad and my coworkers stopped me mid meeting and was like, hey, are you are you okay? I'm sorry if this is too personal, but is everything alright? And i'm like, oh, I kind of snapped out of IT like, oh, yeah, I realized, like i've got like this really slow like, yeah like the labor tone it's coming across. I got, don't want to be here you guess that was like every word was effort to get out of my mouth and I just sitting up strain and the chair felt like a string and and that kind of snap me out of IT to say, oh, i'm so sorry yes, I am OK. I am low on sleep and then that put my coworker ees because he went from being worried that something we're seriously wrong, like maybe our business fAiling and we're all about to get fired to oh, David just didn't get to sleep last night.
Yeah, yeah. That's a good point. People tell themselves stories to explain everything, but especially someone else behaviour.
So if you do a thing, they will make up a story about why you are doing IT that way. And the more information you can give them explicit, that explains why you think you're doing IT. Yes, less you have to rely on. Then jumping to conclusions.
which are usually wrong story will be, yeah, yeah, the conclusions are crazy. So I am a boy. This is probably something you've experiences jimson, as I have being in a formal management role now for quite a few years, is that often we find ourselves in a management role of sharing information carefully. And sometimes that means protecting the privacy of someone by sharing limited information about as a situation. Sometimes IT means messaging to your team a certain narrative that is accurate but also spins saying, I don't want to say spins but but is a narrative that you hope will be motivational and productive instead of just you know gripping or .
or negative yeah like you're trying to tell, communicates some information that also inspires a certain behavior and not a different behavior that you could also have from the same information.
right? And I have been amazed, and I wish I could think of a few examples right now because i've got a lot of them. Most of me just cant share because of the same dynamic that LED to the situation in the first place.
But i've been amazed at the stories people are filling and where am like, wow, I never would have concluded that from what I said. And it's it's an completely different ballpark from what hate from what the truth is. But that is a story you told yourself.
And you know here's here's just my little relationship advice corner that i'll step into little bit a sidebar. But be careful not to do this yourself when you create a story to explain the situation or explain someone's behavior. I have noticed it's very helpful to tell yourself this is a story that I made up and that gives you the right amount of credibility because you're lacking some facts.
Haven't thought about that technique before of kind of login yourself.
I made this up yeah, it's a great way to do in a spousal relationship as well. Here's a story made up about your behavior and then tell them that they're like, that's not right at all. You like, great because I just made that up. My egos not on the line here and tell me how IT really is. Well.
I think we've given IT enough training material.
That's exactly I was say, has the l been sufficiently fed? Yes.
I think so. I doubt because IT .
takes a lot of data to produce a high functioning a of them and we just gave you like the four data.
Can you generate synthetic data as well? That that kind of blow my mind that feels like.
yeah feels like .
cheating yeah .
IT feels like water.
And yeah of tower of bible type, I know yeah because cards yeah by yourself wildly IT seem IT seem like eventually .
in a world where eighty percent of the data in theory, that there is a convergence point that all models ultimately achieve this like b plus level of performance and can never break out of IT yeah if they're all being trained on data by each other.
it's why they need s the a level performance to humans.
Thank goodness humans are useful for at least this one thing, training sthetic models. Okay, let's get out here. Shall I read our next question? Yeah, please. okay. This comes from an anonymous sina who says, in a team setting, in which situation should I the word I be used versus the word we when discussing things? And what advantage and disadvantage does each vocabulary have?
We have talked about this before in an interview setting, but this feels more like you you're working with people. You just got the job.
You you just said we've talked about this before. Listen, speak for you.
I can't remember if I said words about IT or not, but I was there. And if you said words, I listened. If I said words.
hopefully you listen. And if you said words and I said words, then we sedwick yeah.
I think we've got the .
basic definitions down. Now let's get to the a question.
All right. agreed.
I versus we I wonder .
if this is like an annoyed coworker who's like this person keeps taking credit for stuff the team did. I feel like that's a common thing that often you hear about managers doing where they they say they did IT all or I don't know, yeah I I feel like I detect a sense of annoyance underneath this question or frustration or or concerned .
that they're going to be perceived as egocentric or arrogant or taking too much more credit than they deserve.
I think there. So there's a trope in american football where the counter back person makes the most money, throws the ball. Most important player on the team places all of the blame for mistakes on themselves and credits like the offensive line if they have a good game, basically. And I feel like there's something kind of similar that you can do where basically the more senior you are, the more you should be crediting other people with accomplishments and and the more liberal you should be in your in your use of the word we just because by virtue of your position, you will appear be doing a lot more. So I don't think you basically can go wrong as as a more senior ic or manager saying we are the team or or crediting other people individually by name that helps us stuff that's like straight .
out of how to win friends and .
influence people. Is that yeah.
let's see. I'm trying to find the quote online. I know IT starts with be lavish in your praise and be the opposite of lavish with the opposite of praise.
And the one is coming that I believe how deal, carney said IT. He said, the hearty in your approbation and lavish in your praise. And to that I say, dale, come on. Could have come up with these your words there.
Hardy.
yeah.
in approbation is like criticism.
right? I from the context clues, I hope so.
or else have no idea. But hey, isn't. Yeah, i'm confused.
Hearty with the heart like the heart.
M, O, G.
yeah, that's right. It's like an merge of a hundred. Anyway, lavishing you're phrase. Yes, I I totally agree with that sentiment. I don't know if deal carnegy meant that, but let's just go with he did. And yes, it's like at least in the american workplace culture, I believe that people who do this well by taking responsibility for bad outcomes and giving credit to others for good outcomes, they are generally treated Better and considered to be good.
Or yes, as deal carnegie would have wanted to say exactly.
he would have praised me for that.
Like, yeah, I think you should use eye if you're expressing an apion. I pretty clear like you are trying to convince other people of things. If you say we all agree, it's pretty. You, you, you undermine yourself because even if no one speaks up in the meeting, someone's gonna send a little sack him later saying weight I I disagree with this person and then your point will be undermined yeah um I think you generally want to present a united front if you are speaking as a group to another group, right? If you're trying to convince your boss of something or actually I don't know, this is more new once because hopefull, you've already done the work. If you're saying we should move to this other architecture, hopefully you have already agreed as a team yeah, you're not just saying, hey, the whole team is behind me when it's really just a wild idea.
I'm trying to think of what I as a manager like to hear from my team members when they are explaining things because I think that's probably a pretty important scenario for choosing between I and we. You know, like when one of my engineers agers was that .
I have a bad example, something I did poorly around this at me. I worked with an engineer as I was their manager. They're very passionate about this one thing.
And IT was they made sort of this R, F, P kind of technical proposal, design dog thing. And I wanted them to have a lot of ownership and engagement. So I encourage IT.
okay? And they put some work into IT. And then together, this engineer and I both went to my boss, who had some decisions making power over whether you do this thing.
And the engineer presented IT. And then my boss said, okay, so I soon you're behind this, Jason and at that point I realized, well, I was like, I mean, I wanted them to do IT. I don't agree that it's a good idea though. I wanted them to go through the exercise of proposing IT. There was some, I we miscall gration there.
where the engineer was saying we and bungling you in.
I mean, I think I was just implicit, like I was there, they were my reports. And so there was an implied wee of like we're on the same page.
And I felt .
real dumb because think basically wasted a bunch .
of our time. So let me get this straight. You set up one of your engineering team members to fail.
basically yeah, because I was I was so excited to see them be engaged and wanting to change things. And I don't want to crush their dreams and i'll let my boss crash your dreams. Yeah exactly. And then I think my boss like, hey, you shouldn't you shouldn't bring me this thing if you're not if you not behind IT too, you don't have you don't really wanted do and think it's a good idea.
Then you are like, that makes sense in hand, right?
Yeah, yeah, you're right. We were right. I shouldn't do that.
We have out those moments. We I have those moments. Yeah, so I was thinking about that like the exactly that kind of situation. One of my team members like let's say it's an engineering manager when they say we worked on this thing or we fix this bug or we you know in a lot of cases, I would actually prefer a more precise subject nouns instead of we.
If IT really was the manager, i'd like the manager to say I, but if IT was two or three team members, i'd like them to name the team members, you know, like joe and and worked on this and they delivered the bug fix. So like, great. That's much Better than we as a team. Like I would much rather have the concrete facts of the details as my like personal preference yeah and but but never yeah.
It's like that scene from silicon valley though, where they have the focus group to remember that. And I haven't seen IT. They're all testing out the okay, well, there's a group of people there's a focus group testing out of phone and the leader of the the person running the user study will ask someone a question and like, how do you feel about IT? And then they give feedback and then they go to each other, other people and named them by by named and say, OK like Alice and Jenny and fill and bob and like instead of saying the group, oh.
I see, I could get cumbersome.
I guess that's my point.
Oh yeah. IT is IT requires more effort on the part of the person speaking to recall the specific details of things. But boy, I appreciate specificity. Here's a pet pea use of the word wee that I really dislike.
I did, although I can maybe maybe you have a Better idea here, but I can't think of a Better way to say this when you're in a group setting and the group needs to make a collective decision or the group someone has a question about whether anyone in the group has done a certain thing, like, for example, h, they're trying to ascertain, has someone pulled the metrics s on this button? On this button click and someone will say, have we pulled the metrics on this button click and it's like the manager, have we pulled the metrics on this butter click? And I just I don't know why that that phrasing rubs me wrong, but I don't like IT. I just can take you a .
Better way to say that we don't like IT.
Do we like this? That's another one i've seen. Like do we like this pricing page? You know yeah, I am like, yeah I don't know how to like, I can't answer the question for do we like IT? I could .
answer the question if I like IT. I that's interesting that boys, I don't are you all I do not I just bought te, has anyone or group?
Yeah, IT is an effective short hand, but IT just there's like there's a pedre in me that runs so deep that IT just feels I could see .
IT running a foul of the the kind of bystander effect of like, have we come to a decision on this and like, I don't know, I haven't.
but maybe we have maybe it's like it's like the child, like the childhood, like what do we say when we apologize? What do we say after we get a present? Thank you. You know.
what do we decided about our business strategy? Yeah, interesting. I don't know.
I probably need a psychologist tell me work that went out.
There's, if you are annoyed, i'm gna skip saying, when you should use eye, we how do you bring up the fact that you feel like IT is being used wrong? Oh gosh, someone is misrepresenting that their impact or leaving out a bunch of people are saying the whole group agrees when they don't.
I don't think we are using the word we correctly. And in this case, I mean, specifically, you fill.
The giving credit thing or leaving people out. I think that's a little bit easier because IT can be seen as a you're you're being positive, right? Someone saying like we did this thing or or I don't know you saying you can you can add and say, I want to on a credit people who worked really hard and name some individuals yeah although I guess .
that .
could be that could come off little passive aggressive yeah your boss post the message is, hey, I fixed the bug and then you post a little smile face needs saying, hey, I want to I anna credit everyone who worked really hard on this bug and then name a bunch people yeah that's .
why I don't do IT. Yes, I just use completely different pronounce from .
other languages vosloo. exactly.
I was actually thinking the cognitive spanish for we in english would be no others. No others fixed this bug. Yeah, none other than this team. Well, have you answered .
the question? Yes, I think I think .
we've early incomprehensively listed all possible.
If we say about the question, I think we completely fail. You know, I will be specific. I think I did a really great job when we failed, and i'll leave you to sort out how that can be possible. I feel called out by us. I think I tried as hard as I could to produce a great episode, and we've together failed to achieve.
Are you great?
No, I am just kidding.
That would make me left to like off. That was a prety good when James on. We we are caught ing in laughter now IT is also the royal we, which we didn't even touch.
Oh, that's true. That's the answer. Assume it's the royal .
we which reminded how this works the real way means .
ee right I think so. It's it's a fancy eye. It's an eye, your pinky. yo.
And a powder in your week.
Yeah, we are of the opinion that we are right. I think we've answered that. What do people do .
if they want their own questions answered? Well, you should go to some skills, audio and look, ask a question. But and so that we can attempt to answer IT and so the jamais .
on can answer IT. If you've listen this far, you know that's a lie. I will not the answers come from from our bull tron like union.
yes. Thank you so much for listening. We will catch you next week.