#Effecting a wow accomplishment to put on my resume at my new job

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latent adder
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Meetings (or at least, Agile Backlog Refinement meetings) are more like.. The leaders who have been thinking about the central issues of the backlog for days, just want to disseminate their decisions to the group. My "bright ideas for optimization" just get in the way. It annoys them when I force them to interrupt their flow to address my thought.

The best way to spend time in these meetings, given my goal of advancing in the workplace, is to build my empathic listening skill.

It was also bad that I talked over the leader in a rush to get my thought in. He was waiting for 25 minutes while me and others were gabbing away about less important issues - bit stressful for him.

Finally, the scrum master uses the meeting time to go through the backlog one by one and edit the Jira postings, so should just let her get to that.

latent adder
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Another thought. A while back the lead joked when I was trying to edit something on a board the scrum master was presenting (it was supposed to be a communal board) "Whoa there, cowboy." I have a problem with authority. Partially because I'm a short guy that hates feeling stepped over, I unconsciously do things that show that I'm not intimidated. I have no malice toward my lead who is a cool guy, but just his being the lead, my hindbrain occasionally wants to show that "I" am high status. Even the other team member that I commonly think of as not having good social habits (he asks a lot of questions), has a deferential pose to the lead - he is the student, the lead is the teacher. Don't want to stand out from the team for this (inferiority complex) quality!

tawdry leaf
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I don't think these guys want to change.

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Or accelerate, or do anything fast paced.

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You've successfully picked up on something very important. The key is you gotta assert your social status kinda, don't be deferential act like the smartest person in the room. And be them.

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Silicon Valley types do this with passive aggressive Patagonia.

latent adder
tawdry leaf
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Please don't go and actually buy Patagonia.

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You look like a sitcom character.

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There are other brands for the same job.

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Rule #1 of making a good impression, brand tags are a HUGE fashion nono.

latent adder
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This always happens. Got word from my lead that someone, presumably the leader of our sister team, is asking hey how come a0 isn't in the sister group meetings. He has 2-3 meetings a week of 30-60 minutes. Accounting for the spin up and spin down time and flow interruption characteristic of meetings I estimate that to attend all his meetings would reduce my weekly work time by 20-25%. (Why do so many managers have such poor consideration for people's time? He's subtracting ~30 person-hours each week from my team's work time for meetings that could be disseminated in 1 long email.)

I have a couple ideas. One is to - thank goodness for faceless Skype meetings - I could just join, set an alarm to sign out at the end of the meeting and then just work through it with headphones off. However I'm not sure I can shake the feeling "what if he is calling out for me right now" "what if someone is asking me a question right now". I don't want to embarrass my lead further, whom I like. The other option is to go and ask super politely of the sister team lead, explain how I really have trouble "getting into the zone" and ask how he feels about a rotating scribe system, that is, one person from my team each week attends and takes detailed notes, then the rest of the team can read it asynchronously. We'll have to take time to plan my speech and use all my Difficult Conversation skills to avoid stepping on his toes during this conversation.

tawdry leaf
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Just push back and say no.

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Don't apologise and super politely say no.

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Just say "I don't have time for this set of regularly scheduled weekly meetings."

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If you go to their meetings you are doing them a favour, by slowing down your time to code.

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It's not worthwhile..

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And don't apologise, don't say I'm sorry.

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They asked for your time, your time is valuable, tell them firmly no.

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Establish your status as worthwhile.

tawdry leaf
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Don't bend over to avoid stepping on people's toes.

Establish the importance of your time.

latent adder
tawdry leaf
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I think the crazy thing is that my idea seems crazy.

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But it does knowing the SWEs I've worked with.

latent adder
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the crazy thing is that my idea seems crazy.
Ain't that the truth.

latent adder
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I am attending the meetings for now. I already painted a big target on my back during an all-department meeting last month (a story for another time), among other times I've given my leader offense, so I'm going to be extra cautious now. Making the first impression to establish the importance of my time would be the better action here, but in my estimation it would require a level of social finesse that I currently lack (to do this while avoiding continuing to appear as a cowboy who flouts the established hierarchy).

What does office politics have to do with effecting a big accomplishment at work? In my thinking, it's the most important thing for me right now. I lack the street smarts and common sense that many people have regarding social things. To get ahead at work, I must ensure that the other chess pieces at work don't block me or pin me down unduly. I need to learn how to respect people more. I always thought that the ideals of America where I live, that equality is a value that is pursued by the government and culture (not pursued that well historically, but in general some effort is made) - that is not the natural way that primates interact, I'm realizing. Where laws are not strictly enforced to make people focus on civil rights and such, they naturally operate more like a military unit in the sense of hierarchies, "where you can punch down but you can't punch up", and respect* (ensuring that higher-ups are always seen by all to be higher than you) and following the norms of the group are basic social skills.

*Your post about respect a couple months ago is finally sinking in Urthor. (As is also your advice to work on what is important to the company.) Thank you for planting the seeds.

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Two last thoughts in the area of office politics:

(1) I try to follow the Golden Rule and to be honest. I try to walk in others' shoes and not judge them by my knee-jerk reaction. When others don't do the same for me I look down on them. But, why should others give extra effort to accommodate (try to follow the Golden Rule, try to walk in my shoes) me? Everyone is concerned about themselves first and foremost, and I shouldn't begrudge them that; I prioritize myself too.

(2) About being honest.. Lying by omission is real, but in the workplace, to achieve things I think one needs to embrace this part of office politics. For example, if my boss says "Hey, does anyone here dislike muscle cars? I think they are awesome, I love the loud noise they make when I floor the accelerator and zoom by everyone else." I'm gonna not say anything despite how these noises have affected my health in the past. I won't outright lie, except occasional white lies like "It was great to meet you" to people I don't like*. This may seem obvious to many of you, but that's what I mean when I say I'm immature when it comes to social skills.

*But still not stepping over the edge into brown-nosing. I will build relationships by helping people rather than butt-kissing.

tawdry leaf
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Who would you say are your major allies you've built within the company to enact change? Who have you impressed the most?

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The good part is you're in a relatively low stakes environment and figuring things out there.

It's a change averse crowd of people. In what sounds like a cost centre part of the business. So overall it's going to be a fine experience either way.

There are guard rails etc.

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I find the key often isn't to be dishonest and say you like muscle cars.

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The key in those conversations is to find common ground where you can talk about something you both enjoy.

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equality is a value that is pursued by the government and
Equality as in non-discrimination is very different to equality as in "we democratically vote on everyone's proposals for the project design."

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To get ahead at work, I must ensure that the other chess pieces at work don't block me or pin me down unduly.

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It's more about karma. Be someone with a widely admired reputation. It's not so much cynical chess pieces, people enjoy genuine and honest people.

You don't have to be conniving to be effective. Mostly, you do have to be someone who maintains a reputation that multiple other people admire deeply.

tawdry leaf
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latent adder
# tawdry leaf Who would you say are your major allies you've built within the company to enact...

A couple younger programmers on our sister team; they've helped me a lot and I helped one once in return. I've been friendly and cordial. They have good work ethic, are intelligent and we've had some similar life experiences growing up.

The other person I've built some relationship with is my lead. In the beginning I didn't conduct myself in ways that would make him "look good" but am striving to do so now and am volunteering for tasks.

latent adder
latent adder
latent adder
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A little update.  I've decided to focus for now on technical work, what they hired me for.  Any thinking of moving to management will be maybe in a year after I have accrued considerable technical production in what was hired for.  However I'm still working on social skills as that's very important toward any life goal, as well as in management.  Management for me, the only point is that if you want to have more influence over the direction of the company, that increases linearly with however far up the totem pole you go.

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As for people skill.  I'm proud of forcing myself to attend a little gathering put on by the company.  I am fearful with social situations, the type that just eventually, not interacting with anyone, retreats into a corner as mind bashes "you're not talking to anybody, you're 40-something years old and have the social skills of a dweeby 6th grader, everyone's laughing at you on the inside."

What is 100% doable? I look around, find one person that's not talking to anyone, walk over to them and say hi and ask them canned responses like Any plans for the weekend?  How are you doing. Then just practice active listening.  If they think wow this guy is just repeating what he learned in a book, a total autistic robot, I'm fine with that.  All I care about is practicing interaction. It doesn't kill me anymore when I sit down alone with myself and think about the fact that I'm so unsuited to social skills. I can write down things about people to ask about next time, I can restrict to only 45 minutes of active interaction per day, if that's lame whatever. The kind of socialization I can manage is good return on time toward my ultimate goal and that's enough.

latent adder
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Settling into a longer term routine. The Scrum Master is now PO, the old PO is now an engineer, the old old PO is now manager. Our current PO, I think the way she organizes the work entails a lot of unnecessary bookkeeping, but I go along with her plan on the surface. It's not worth trying to debate if my way is better. I am working on the toughest important tasks whether or not it's in the right order of her 50 step plan, keeping this work on the down low while finishing my official two tickets a week. I really think my prioritization is going to prevent us from getting all stressed out near the deadline.

tawdry leaf
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Ultimately there's a lot of creating work for middle management to do.

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I think it's very hard to do stuff just because anything "important" they feel obliged to keep involved in.

latent adder
latent adder
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Proud of myself; getting better at this workplace people skills thing. Got called over to assist a senior member with an installation problem, I got the thing to work so he wanted to see if I could spot the configuration problem. Now as is typical when we feel smart and are looking over a person's shoulder to judge their work, I spotted a diagnostic message that I thought we should dig into. He said didn't want to get into "editing stuff" right then. I was a bit taken aback but last time I was too pushy, I think I got annoying, and since he's older than me I remembered I should defer more often and be less pushy.

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Instead, I stopped and listened instead. I gave up on actually trying to solve the problem and focused on his feelings and thoughts. He wanted to see my setup run so I acquiesced and we did that. Afterwards I was about to ask if we could go back and look at that error message but he seemed ready to leave. I again went with his flow and let him go. I did the right thing. These problems will get solved one way or another, if his way takes twice as long it won't matter in the end, but I made him feel listened to and he left feeling in control, respected, and liking me more than before the interaction. And 25% of the time when I'm sure I'm right about something I get surprised with what other people know and turn out to be wrong so I remembered that too.

tawdry leaf
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I enjoyed the first chapter of this.

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It's an interesting book on soft skills stuff

tawdry leaf
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Giving people the opportunity to self express is the hardest thing in the world.

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We deeply want to self express ourselves. Juggling is so hard

latent adder
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Being perhaps more selfcentered than most (as a mental tendency), it makes me suspect there's some truth to the aphorism that if one wants to get out of depression (or general malaise) one should go out and do something for another person. One effect of that would clearly be to step outside of these processes that necessitate bias of how things relate to me.

tawdry leaf
tawdry leaf
tawdry leaf
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Noise cancelling headphones on

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It's very hard to juggle people vs doing your job all day.

latent adder
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Hm I really think you're right there. Habit forming.

latent adder
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Thorny problem I've been percolating on for a week. Last week my boss's boss said that a major milestone I thought would be due in a year is now due in 3 months. Technically I was just a fly on the wall and my boss's boss said this to my boss (in front of several other leads so I think my boss is mad at her now). What I think made her mad (we'll call my boss Stacey and her boss Mary) is that Mary said We don't have the luxury of doing it your way anymore Stacey.

Stacey had this sort of roundabout (in my view) approaching the project at hand rather than "just dive in and start coding directly toward the end goal". So we've been spending the last several months sort of half-coding half-laying down foundations that would be nice but aren't strictly necessary. So now basically Mary is saying Dive in and start coding directly toward the product.

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I badly want to talk to Stacey and tell her that, as Stacey hasn't done any of the coding and I have, that if you look at the definition of the final product, it can be broken down into about 35 subtasks. These subtasks individually look pretty trivial, like "send a command to this box and get the output." But having coded up a couple of these I know that each subtask will take me 2 weeks. There are ~5 developers on the team but they aren't as motivated or as dedicated as me, so they'd probably take 3 weeks to do a similar piece and I'd have to help them some.

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This is politically sensitive. I don't want to "take sides with Mary" against Stacey. People say that the most important thing to get ahead in career is to be on good terms with your direct boss. I don't want to make it seem like I think I am smarter or Stacey or say that I don't think her plans are good, in any way.

So I was thinking I would just tell her I am concerned about the new deadline and lay out the facts that each of these 35 pieces would take a good programmer 2 weeks. Combined with some final verification that needs to be done on the whole system, I really don't see this happening in less than 9 months.

People I have talked to have advised to not even say anything and let Stacey deal with it. Some agreed you can lay out the facts ONCE, with GREAT attention to saying it diplomatically, but not offer any suggestions to Stacey.

latent adder
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I think I have some inkling why Stacey did it the way she did. Analogy: let's say your team's job was to write all the software that brings a car from the off cold state to on and rolling down the road. I know nothing about cars but suppose it consists of a series of steps like: (1) the 12 volt battery is turned on, (2) this turns on the main car computer, (3) the auxiliary software like radio, lights, air conditioning go on. (4) it then starts the fuel injector, (5) kicks off the spark plug that lights the fuel, (6) cylinders start turning. (7) switch into Drive (8) go to higher gear, done.

What Stacey is saying is that each member of the team picks a different step and writes a unit of code and a unit test for that.

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The problem is that it's hard to write the code properly for, for example, having the engine cylinders going if you don't know what the fuel injector is doing. But when you're trying to separate a sequence of steps among a team I'm not sure what better thing you could do. So maybe I'm not going to raise it as a complaint to Stacey at all, I might just provide to her a list of the 35 things and a suggested order that it would make sense for people to try to do them. This avoids any insinuation that she is doing anything wrong but at the same time it shows that I'm thinking ahead and trying to help her out.

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I don't think it's worth trying to write a nice unit test for everything since even if one step works in a unit test, it may break when you set the state of the car to be with all the preceding steps executed. Also she has a lot of suggestions about refactoring the code to make it ideal etc., but she just thinks that'll save headaches later, and she doesn't insist it be fixed right away, so that's actually pretty reasonable. Overall the unnecessary overhead is not that great and breaking it down into separate steps is inevitable.

Maybe she is not as bad as I feared and if I can work with her in teamlike fashion I can be happy about everything.

tawdry leaf
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I feel like you're not in an environment that rewards the non Stacey thinking much sorta.

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Stacey sounds like she has the right idea, iterative PoC to flesh out the product.

The issue is she doesn't have the grasp of the detail to actually implement that, because if you don't actually know the technology you just cannot set timelines or really have any ability to deliver in a short space of time.

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Ultimately Macey is right.

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I think the solution is to write a 3 page document showing how you can do it in 1 month your way, show Macy and Stacey and ask for feedback.

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Asking for feedback is showing you don't think it's perfect... but you're framing the problem in your ideas.

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Ultimately, trying not to be sexist, but Stacey gives the impression of a project manager trying to make software.

When you've really just got to write the code and get your hands dirty.

latent adder
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You think this organization is more bureaucratic than modern-engineering fast-paced style.

I really like your idea of asking for feedback. It's so simple and the smart thing to do.

tawdry leaf
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In writing!

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Writing is a real superpower. Takes the ego out of the discussion.

latent adder
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Well I'm going to spend all today and most of Monday fixing small not-currently-necessary changes that the product owner wants. This is all in my view wasted time because the code is going to be changed so many times in the future anyway, most of this shined up code will be discarded. But I am fully committed (disagree and commit) to supporting my PO to the fullest extent now. I want her to be 100% thinking of me as a perfect reliable tool for getting whatever she wants done, and having accumulated 0 "negative social bank account withdrawals" in her brain. I've decided that my goal is no longer to try to single-handedly improve the course of the creation of the product but to come out of this few years at current employer with having proved to 3 influential people that I'm a perfect worker for their purposes. It's funny how thanks to politics actually achieving a better product is secondary to making people happy.

As for how I finally decided to change my attitude in this way I will explain later. I mulled over it a lot and took into account all advice as well as my history with this job.

latent adder
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I think Stacey is a little pissed and understandably so. Despite many admonitions to people to do code reviews, which got ignored (no one volunteered - I reviewed every merge request promptly as they came out, but 2 reviews required) now she's in the position of not having anything much to present during our team demo at a whole department gathering next week. She's been hands-off as far as being an enforcer up til now; we'll see if she starts giving assignments and deadlines.

tawdry leaf
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Give her something to do?

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Writing architecture diagrams is a useful thing project managers can do if they have a lot of time on their hands.

latent adder
latent adder
latent adder
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As promised here is my reasons for not speaking up to Stacey about foreseen deadline issues.

(1) I have a history of doing my own thing against Stacey's wishes. At the first quarterly planning meeting, given the list of "planning analysis action items" we had to complete by the end of the day, I ascertained quickly that the only way to finish on time is if I essentially did a quick draft of the entire solution myself then returned to the group where they could polish it up. I saw that without a strong leader people would get lost in long discussions until the 11th hour. Stacey called me back a couple times but I said just a few more minutes (it actually took 40 minutes) and I'll be done with this and return. I was right, we were the only group that finished on time, but Stacey got so stressed out that she had to leave the room to cool down.

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(2) A family friend counseled me that if you raise any sort of foreseen problem, play the Cassandra, regardless if you're right you will be unconsciously tagged as almost like a saboteur. Associated in people's minds with some sort of negativity. If the deadline is indeed missed you'll be blamed, unconsciously. Human psychology, illogical but people can't help it. So goes the theory.

tawdry leaf
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Need a new job imo

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Ultimately, everyone is incredibly bottlenecked on manager.

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Low capability manager is death sentence.

latent adder
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No salvaging this one eh

tawdry leaf
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You can make it work for awhile.

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Just keep your head down and see if an opportunity to move up the food chain comes.

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Make Stacey look good and look for a fresh opportunity.

latent adder
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For amusement here are some examples where people embarrassed other people in front of the whole department during the last department meeting:
-I said man it's hard to remember how I fixed a problem, it was so long ago (when a teammate asked for help on a software setup task we were all supposed to complete on our computers) (said in front of my group) - implying he's slow to complete the task
-Mary said "Let's just set aside all of John's stories", Stacey jokes "Well I didn't want to name names, but" (regarding the mess a co-worker who left the company left) - implying Mary doesn't know the socially savvy rule of not naming names
-Stacey said Craig "gets sidelined a lot", talking about how he forgot to do something for the meeting that Stacey had chatted with him about. Craig rejoined "Oh I did do that actually" She was trying to praise him for having so many responsiblities (he's MC of the meeting) but it came out wrong

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This has become one of my priorities, to learn to never say something that puts down people in front of others. I have a habit of mentally categorizing people as not as competent as me or lacking certain skills, when they show this. Especially when they have annoying habits like droning on and wasting my time or when we're pair programming, trying a bunch of dumb things that wastes our time, or teaching me things that I already know. This then internalizes them in my mind as incompetent or annoying. I find that any resentment or poor feeling towards someone will eventually slip out in my speech. So now I'm trying to say to myself all the time teammate is good, teammate is an asset to the team, teammate is capable, teammate has some excellent skills.

latent adder
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Thinking better about my teammates has been succeeding. I'm also adding small snippets of meditation and stopping work when I'm starting to feel woozy and 'pushing too hard' by the late afternoon. That has resulted doing the accidental "tiny slip metamessage that co-worker is inferior/not-as-skilled" less.

I understand now why being a pleasant coworker is the most important characteristic for a teammate. Every time I let slip a tiny critical metamessage out of frustration or just being tired I make it 5% less pleasant for that coworker to come to work. Do this every now and then and pretty soon I'm becoming a real drain on the team's productivity.

"People won't remember what you said or did, but they'll always remember how you made them feel."

Dale Carnegie "All problems stem from people who don't like people [in general]" channeling Will Rogers "I never met a person I didn't like." These are currently kind of mantras for me.

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On another note Stacey is still being too 'kid gloves' in my opinion. Mary held a special meeting with our team where she said the same thing about five times: "we must have laser focus to only work on things that directly and completely move toward our promised product to deliver in October." Mary was almost pounding the table for emphasis so to speak.

Yet Stacey is still doing things like implementing code maintenance type optimizations that may or may not pay off by October. In other words she is letting us invest two weeks into a project that might result in some maintenance time saved but if it doesn't save three or four weeks of time before October it's going against what Mary said to do.

if I were Stacey I would say to Steve you're paid for 20 hours a week on our group. you should be able to get three PR reviews and one, maybe two 3-point Jira tasks done each 2 weeks sprint. This type of rate is the only way we can finish the 100 or so 3 point tasks (my estimation of the amount to actually produce the product that we promised the customer in October).

I do want to say that I am grateful that Stacey is so patient with me despite the fact that I did something really bad to get us both off on the wrong foot (mentioned earlier in this journal). She still treats me nicely. My social bank account with Stacey is still in the red. I'm actively working to make deposits everywhere I can to bring it into the black, for example I wrote down that she was going to the winery on her vacation and asked her about it when she got back, and also complimenting when she makes a good point on a PR ("good catch", "that's definitely a better name for this function", "thank you").

tawdry leaf
tawdry leaf
latent adder
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@tawdry leaf, thank you so much for the extremely kind compliment. It means a lot to me because you have a keen understanding of how things operate in the working world. Looking back at your comments on this thread, some of them I understand better now; I didn't actually understand what you were saying back then. I feel like a boat that's been trying to aim at a goal since I started last year, and every now and then you pop up and give me a bump to more optimally point at the goal. Thank you for all the input you've placed.

latent adder
latent adder
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Note: I've been posting a lot so anybody reading, please don't feel that by posting I'm fishing for responses.

Emotional labor. Today I talked to Craig for an hour then I talked to Steve for half an hour, well listen is more like it. I don't talk much so it's really an hour of listening to their concerns and feelings. Then I went to a skype meeting where this guy that I wanted to make a favorable impression on was lecturing. So I listened for a while and asked a couple questions. Then I went for a walk with my wife and chatted with her for 45 minutes. Then I sat through a 90 minute backlog refinement. Lastly Steve had a question about my merge request and Craig raised issues for me to fix on my merge request (stylistic things). I know he and others have good reasons for doing everything they do but right now I just feel tired of people ripping all my code submissions to shreds while submitting little code themselves.

tawdry leaf
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People don't know better. I wouldn't shout at your kids, ever.

tawdry leaf
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Been reflecting a lot on this. I feel like you're accelerating past what I have to add a little

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Which is an excellent thing. But please keep writing, I'm learning so much from reading your recent perspectives, and I hope you are too.

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I find often, 90% of conflict occurs when I, personally, don't understand the other person.

tawdry leaf
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Feedback is the breakfast of champions.

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I'm actually leaving my current job because they don't have enough of an engineering culture.

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If I had someone slaughtering my pull requests, pushing for quality, I'd be so happy.

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In terms of: people slaughtering my pull requests whilst submitting none of their own.

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High performance and improvement only ever occurs after work. Hard, exhausting, work.

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My favourite life lesson:

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Hard work isn't "work."

Hard work, in an intellectual profession, is painful feedback from your brain realigning your neurons.

Coating neurons with a myelin sheath, and a few other little odds and ends.

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To get better, intellectually, only hard work does the job.

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"Soft" work, involves neurons following already established pathways.

tawdry leaf
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A "Hero" is always criticised the most. But, they criticise because it's innate to human nature to criticise your hero.

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Every hunter-gatherer tribe has heroes. Folk who can do work nobody else can.

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And, every tribe is harshest on their heroes.

Because, secretly, everyone knows they're relying on the hero.

The hero is necessary, to get the tribe through winter.

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Anyway, I'm too young to be spinning that kind of bullshit.

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But I wouldn't be harsh on people.

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And I wouldn't be harsh on your kids.

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Kids neurons are hardwired for exploration.

Kid's are basically exploration and discovery machines. They're designed to wander off and do crazy stuff.

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Good kids are ones who explore, a lot.

Good kids get themselves tired out at the end of the day.

latent adder
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@tawdry leaf Best of luck in your search for your next position - or you already found it? If so, congratulations and hope it has the culture you want.

Thank you for the very kind statement about my progress; it truly made my day. I continue to carefully read your comments as i find them very informative - as you say, quality feedback is so important.

I like your hero and hard work reframing: it certainly puts the situation in a more positive, and really differently oriented light. Much to chew on in your comments....til next time

tawdry leaf
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Definitely. It's hard work every day, being the right thing.

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I find it's very easy in life to change if you go total rejection.

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"I'm never going to be that person, ever." Recipe for success.

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Saying "I'll be this person, some of the time," makes things too hard.

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I could be wrong though. You're a far more experienced person than I am.

I have not seen much of the world.

At all.

latent adder
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I think you're right about absolutism in that sense. But thanks - anyone who's older likes to think they've learned from their years.

tawdry leaf
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Hmm.

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They way I put it is.

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You get more experienced, you have more models to compare the variables to.

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You just have... more things to compare variables to.

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Hardest life lesson I've learnt is, just because I've got experience, it doesn't mean I have the answers.

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Combing to this industry later in life than most folk.

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Mostly my answers are wrong. You can't ever stop comparing your answers to new ideas. Always have to be flexible.

bitter marten
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also, if you feel like there's too much time spent reworking PRs that's a legitimate thing to talk about during retro

thorn heath
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I've just perused the beginning bits of this thread, and it's turning out to be quite useful for me. I'll make sure to read the rest of it, and hopefully I can soon contribute my own experiences as well. 🙏 .

latent adder
latent adder
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Next week is the every-several-months meeting with the customer. Decided to walk up to the delegation this time and ask them "So what areas are you most concerned about with regard to the software we're gonna have ready for you in June?" (Not going to invite them over to my team's table like last time because Steve and people took up their attention with technical questions.) To find one thing I can do "as a side project" to wow my manager on my performance review this December to put me in line with promotion to Staff.

I will try to make this align with Stacey's goals because as my team lead she is #1 or #2 the blocker or enabler of promotion for me. But Stacey really cares about quality code and OOP design and things like 100% pure unit test coverage which doesn't buy me as much on the appealing for promotion, as something like "Took initiative to ask customer about issue X and led Tamara, Dick and Harriet to solve problem X.*" (Mary's (mary = product manager) instruction to us is 'work on nothing else but strictly getting working product that is what was contracted for 2 years ago' so the achievement might just be "Took initiative to talk to customer about top 1 most critical functionality of product needed on release in June and led T.D.&H. to effect it by June delivery")

*Because satisfy customer = closely related to getting new business = getting money. good software practices = only distantly related to getting new business = not much help in getting money

This essentially means I'll no longer be 100% above board with Stacey on what I'm working on, OR have to figure out a way to get Stacey to think it was HER idea to solve problem X for the customer. As I and most of the actual engineering-workers on the team predicted many months ago, with deadline looming Mary came down harder on us to shelve code quality and OOP design work in favor of just getting the product out. Stacey isn't happy but is acquiescing to Mary.

latent adder
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The foreseen occurred. In a meeting including the customer, Mary reiterated (and promised audits) that due to July deadline, we are to focus on doing the absolute minimum to get the system into working order by July. The analogy is we're no longer writing software to drive the car,rather we are simply looking for the sequence of steps to get the car driving: example fill up gas tank, seat driver in car, Start engine, switch to drive...

Stacey (my lead) reluctantly said "I like the code architecture we're building, but we understand." She started breaking up the goal into e.g. let's figure out how to turn the steering wheel, how to command the fuel injector... The problem with that is, things need to be done in the right order or things won't work in your testing (if engine off steering wheel won't turn). So I started reading all the docs, I had plans to become a master of the system, talk to all the experts and get the correct ordering of the steps hashed out ASAP, bringing in all teammates to help.

I told my wife my plans and she said first ask Stacey what she thinks. She's right: I had forgotten that the goal is to stay on Stacey's good side because only if your manager likes you are you ever going to get promoted. That's more important than creating business value for the company at least for my goal of getting promoted.

latent adder
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I've been spending a good deal of time building relationships with higher ups. I noticed (I'm attending more meetings now that I've become Stacey's deputy) that often Mary or other managers in meetings will ask Stacey to do little todos. Stacey's really busy and I just started taking care of them myself when I perceived she wasn't getting to them. (these are small things like just talking to the other devs and getting them to an agreement about some policy - a 7th grader could do it).

I report back the result to Mary at next meeting. She and other managers really seem to like that. It seems silly but I'm documenting these tiny things. Maybe I'll bundle them into a metric come yearly review "Executed intra-team communication tasks 37 times this year e.g. consensus on Policy 332-A, compiled history of progress on Subproject 16-XZ,.."

The other thing I've been doing is every time someone mentions something about themselves or I see them doing something - they took their kids to Kids At Work Day, their cat is having surgery, "This training class is really fun" - I write it down then ask them about it 'Learn anything cool in the class?' 'Did your son like Kids At Work Day?' at next meeting, bump-into, or just email them a few days after. Everyone likes this and I might bundle it as a metric under "team building", which is a KPI and also includes giving kudos and thanks to people publicly.

Currently 25% of my work are these "grease" work.

As always, suggestions/improvements to my approach are welcome. I need to book 1-1s with managers to give them my Brag List work in progress and get feedback.

latent adder
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In the last 4 months,my brain has decided that attaining a worthwhile career-related product isn't in the cards. I'm mid-40s and this brief foray into corporate climbing showed me how much time it takes to advance in a company.

My life goal is now YOLO essentially. I have quiet-quit at work and am looking for a chill WFH job to increase free time and eliminate commuting. I plan to do more: stuff with my kids before they become teenagers, handling of on-off depression, lower stress, reconnect with family and old friends, and pursue hobbies that have a sense of advancement.

My co workers seem more like human beings. They're nice people just trying to fulfill their own goals in life. In this job there are fair number of times we work side by side in a lab, minds focused in solving tricky problems (troubleshooting) together. It makes one feel needed and valuable when one has an idea that solves a stumper, and pride because troubleshooting is open-ended brain work (in contrast to SW debugging for example which is solved relatively formulaically). It also is my favorite type of socializing because one doesn't have to be comfortable shooting the sh*t in a group convo.

I view my bosses more sympathetically too. I can tell (at least for the 3 bosses I interact with) they're people just like my IC co-workers: the difference is they want to climb the ladder so they pressure us. I can see where they try to hold back from being the sh!tty boss.

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Stacey is now my favorite person to hang out with because I have no desire to do things my way, to accumulate reputation for advancing my career, and she is the same type of "geek" as me, almost like we share in-jokes even though we barely know each other. Her being the same type as me means I feel no social pressure to be normal or cool. Also, demographically we're very similar so less anxiety.

It's nice to have 0 need to advance my reputation combined with less worry about pleasing bosses. I praise co-workers more and compare myself to them less.

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I still update the performance management profile; recently added a few things like "TEAM BUILDING: praised co-workers publicly 47 times this year" (+ a brief list), "TEAM BUILDING: asked co workers about their interests 17 times", "CUSTOMER SATISFACTION: went above and beyond to do things for customer satisfaction 13 times" (+ details). More just to not waste all the effort I put to note it all down throughout the year.

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Started new job on Monday. Aiming for achieving an impressive accomplishment spanning 1+ years (by mid-2025) to put on my resume to transform it from blah resume -> impressive, in hopes of landing dream job in 2025.

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Example: Spearheaded effort to bring up new lab software system by organizing my and 3+ co-workers' efforts, brought up system in half projected time with minimal post-bring-up bugs discovered.

fluid stump
latent adder
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Ha you're absolutely right, thanks for the comment. I have quite a few years of IC experience but yeah this is probably silly. Just trying to think of something I can do that would be really impressive. Maybe, now that you mention it I should start learning what is the real process by which one typically becomes a lead.

Or I could focus on just doing my own job really well and keeping metrics on how much I've gone above and beyond.

Should add some background I suppose. I'm in my 40s, CA bay area, 12 years of experience in software (C, web stuff, & data science), new job is working on a prototype for a large machine - think jet engine or electric car hardware+software. @fluid stump

tawdry leaf
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Wow accomplishments often means impacting multiple teams if that makes sense.

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Keep looking for opportunities that impact the whole business. I think there's a real upper limit via doing the work assigned to your team.

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Looking for important things to do trumps just grinding the day to day.

latent adder
tawdry leaf
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Allg haha, YMMV what would I know. Remember the brag document.

latent adder
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Of about 8 people in the team, 3 are diligent. The scrum master and product owner are closer to my age. The scrum master responds quickly and the onboarding materials she wrote are accurate and intelligent. I see emails from her at 10p sometimes. The product owner on the first weekly meeting related an interesting event on his weekend and got crickets. Later he mentioned to me he's thinking about making that meeting in-person to improve group cohesion. In the next meeting I'll be sure to spend some time in small talk.

A young Indian engineer is good too. His Jira tickets have a lot of comments/explanation and from his speech in scrum meetings he really is doing stuff.

2 of the other members dont respond to questions during meetings (online meetings). 1 does but seems to make excuses for not completing tasks.

I've just about completed overhead and look forward to starting my first Jira ticket Tuesday.

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I like the facility. Nice cafeteria (not FAANG fancy), gym with squat and deadlift facilities, large air space, clean. On busy day 1/3 cubicles occupied, most people I saw in cafeteria at a time was 40 of probably 220 total building occupants. Chatty guys near me but I take my laptop to an empty cube to work. Commute 20min.(When I worked here in 2000s it was 30min.) I'm allowed 2 days WFH. Planning to go in Mondays and Fridays for max. quiet. Pleased with everything so far. I am happy

latent adder
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One of the members who I judged as being poor (based on not answering or answering after a while sometimes during meetings) is actually fine. She is knowledgeable and helpful. She works in an area where she has to monitor stuff for long hours and so it's understandable she mightn't spend so much effort listening continually in meetings.

latent adder
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It's interesting to me how much you can tell by watching little things a person does or says.

One of the guys on the team early on mentioned that new people need to get combos to the lab where work is done on the real hardware of the product. When I later took him up on an offer to shadow him in there he jibed another guy who came in and out a couple times "When you gonna get your access." During my shadowing I displayed interest in the hardware and he said "Yeah this stuff is cool but you can't really learn it except by DOING it [referring to doing runs and other tasks related to the hardware]."

Later he was talking about how long some of the monitoring runs he has to do in there are (he's been doing these for years). He's stuck in there for several hours half-watching these boring runs. Clearly the other members of the team aren't tripping over themselves trying to take some of the run responsibility off his shoulders. Basically a few "tells" reveal what makes this guy tick: he really wants help doing the runs.

Office politics seems to be about respect. Whenever people have a beef it's about perceived fairness. In this case the veteran guy feels disrespected that a new guy would make him get in and out of his chair because the new guy is too lazy to fill out an access form. Also the veteran feels disrespected that new guys don't try to shoulder their fair portion of the boring work.

I'm considering making the project of getting everyone to do their fair share of these runs something to put on my resume or at least be one of the "work conflict" stories for my interview at dream company later.

tawdry leaf
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What impact have you made though?

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Office politics seems to be about respect.

Everything in life is about respect. 100,000 gets you food clothing shelter, the rest is ego.

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I'm considering making the project of getting everyone to do their fair share of these runs something to put on my resume or at least be one of the "work conflict" stories for my interview at dream company later.

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This is glue work and is the opposite of what you should put on your resume.

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You should still do it, but partition it to 5-10% of your time.

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They key to doing this is that *if it's taking more than 5% of your time you're doing it wrong."

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And need to try a different approach.

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During my shadowing I displayed interest in the hardware and he said "Yeah this stuff is cool but you can't really learn it except by DOING it [referring to doing runs and other tasks related to the hardware]."
I think your pathway to big impact is just rocking up one day with a huge feature for the hardware tldr.

latent adder
# tawdry leaf > During my shadowing I displayed interest in the hardware and he said "Yeah thi...

True that would be muy superior. Definitely something to keep in mind (was aware that an example of technical ground-breaking is the gold standard here, but focusing on hardware rather than software is an interesting perspective).

Part of me cannot stand being part of a team that gives tacit consent to saddling someone with the grunt work. Though if the guy cared enough, he could stand up for himself, and I can't put out everyone's fires more than 5%-10% of my time as you say.

As far as impact, I feel unreasonably proud of completing an extra Jira ticket this sprint (2 week sprints). The bar is not very high though, but I have been making a real effort. I figure excelling and becoming master of the technical details of the system - I hardly even understand the parts or what the game plan is here - is the necessary first step to moving toward a more leadership role, so today I'm just browsing Confluence and reading whatever meeting notes, documentation seems interesting.

latent adder
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Sooo many acronyms and requirements docs

I've been out of the workforce for 7 years but I guess my last job was a pretty simple one

tawdry leaf
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Part of me cannot stand being part of a team that gives tacit consent to saddling someone with the grunt work

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Remember the only solution to this is to work hard than other people and set a good standard.

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And shame them into doing the right thing.

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Unfortunately that's kinda the only way I've found to improve dev culture bottom up.

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I figure excelling and becoming master of the technical details of the system - I hardly even understand the parts or what the game plan is here - is the necessary first step to moving toward a more leadership role, so today I'm just browsing Confluence and reading whatever meeting notes, documentation seems interesting.
You learn the most by sweating.

latent adder
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Just got out of the first big meeting since i started 2 months ago with our customer. Continuing with my thread of liking to see what makes people tick I noticed that my manager said his three most important things were transparency, alignment, and continuous improvement. Will be entertaining seeing how this statement evinces itself in his leadership in the future.

Another interesting thing was that twice different representatives of the customer said that - we were demoing all this technical stuff - they said but what's the high-level how much progress we made to meet the objectives for this quarter. Most people including leads were answering this defensively "oh but we've made very good progress actually we're pretty much done" "when we stated this is not demonstrable we really meant" "That will be addressed in the individual team sessions this afternoon".. The proper response, which is easy for me sitting in the audience with no pressure and able to think, would be to simply say Okay you want basically progress bar. I'd estimate we met hardware goals 70%, the cables took longer to ship than expected, we met lab stand up goals 50%, held up by cable and drilling issues, software 120% the software team really chewed through lot of stuff... Just shows that when i present i need to focus just on active listening not defending.

I think people get caught up with the word "demo" and think oh we need to show how awesome we are and customer made the right choice choosing us over our competitors for the contract. But really, I as a member can't even understand what these teams are talking about (only my team) and the customer even less. What the customer really cares about is are you on schedule that's it. And after you give them a progress bar have them ask questions of the teams on whatever item they are really curious about.

tawdry leaf
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Have a read of Vcarl's post

tawdry leaf
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They essentially don't give a fuck about what you actually make

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they just want to know if you're functional so they can ignore you and not give a damn

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It's the customer/user problem

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the senior leader in the meeting will never actually use the software so they actually just don't care what you do

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It's a huge huge problem.

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@latent adder What's the most impactful feature you are directly responsible for?

latent adder
# tawdry leaf <@756485647916859455> What's the most impactful feature you are directly respons...

Figuring out how to talk to this one box. Our system is a collection of hardware boxes that we are joining together to make a larger functional system. I chose one particular piece.

Not much, I know. Still thinking about how I can actually impact the business, something that I could put into a numerical bullet point on a resume. All I can think of right now is doing things that I can prove help deliver the system earlier than the deadline. Would like to make it so that the system is e.g. 20% more reliable than spec'd out but how would one prove that one was responsible for that.

latent adder
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After sleeping on it, getting it done ahead of schedule isn't as important as reliability of the system ultimately. There's a large team and many steps to putting the system together so it'd be hard to personally impact how fast the system gets put together and tested.

The most important thing to get done with this system in the end is that it never fails. Reliability is of the utmost importance. But this company is old and there are people with decades of experience on similar systems, and procedures in place for testing out the system effectively. So what difference can I make? Maybe, by keeping an eye out, I can identify vulnerabilities that might be worth testing or hardening the system against. Those I could clearly put on the resume as "I noticed these potential dangers to the integrity of the final system, and devised and executed tests or fixes to code to protect against these vulnerabilities."

Another thing I should do is, at my yearly meeting with skip-level manager, ask "How can I make a difference?" @tawdry leaf I appreciate your question that made me think about all this.

latent adder
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Update on the dividing up the unpleasant work mentioned before: people more high-ranking than me also thought this is something that needs to be done & put forth a proposal of making everybody on the team do 5 hours a week of training for this or appointing one person who wants to to become the "expert run conductor". So this is off my plate for now.

tawdry leaf
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Any company that has run conductors and positions like that usually has massive power structures designed to stop you making a wow accomplishment

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And generally speaking doesn't reward wow accomplishments... kinda.

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Maybe you need a faster paced organisation

latent adder
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Agreed. I will just have to do my best

tawdry leaf
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Don't hold back on daring to be different