Episode 460: Losing autonomy and I got skipped for a promotion even though I'm awesome

It takes more than telling an AI it needs to provide a better source than I overheard it at a data science conference in 2018 when it hallucinates an API. To be a great software engineer, this is episode 460.

of the Soft Skills Engineering Podcast, where I'm your host, Jameson Dance. I'm your host, Dave Smith. Soft Skills Engineering is a weekly advice show about all of the non-technical things that go into the technical field of software engineering, which more and more involve... arguing with your computer instead of just cursing or yelling at your computer it used to be computers were always right or if they were wrong it's because you told them yeah to do the wrong thing exactly

I had a friend who says programming is the art of making the computer do what I want instead of what I said. Yeah. But now it actually is just wrong. Now it can be wrong because you told them something wrong. Yeah. Inadvertently in a blog post many years ago. Yeah, I hope most AIs are not trained on any of my blogs. I'm sure they are somehow. Dave, do you want to thank our patrons? Oh. Wait, no. Yes. No other things in the list. Yes, we have some listener feedback. This comes from...

A listener named Scott who says, thank you for the awesome show. I listen for two reasons. First, the uplifting feeling I get from your interactions. You are both so gracious and genuinely kind. Aw, precious. And second, the great advice. My wife recently benefited from your advice. Preparing for her first job interview in 20 years after being a stay at home mother, she found your tips invaluable.

I shared your advice about preparing a few examples of experiences that highlighted her skills and guided the conversation toward these experiences. She prepared your four examples and was able to use three of them. And guess what? She got the job. Way to go. Awesome. Little interview prep. I think that was probably your advice or I forgot that I gave that advice. I was trying to remember. It could go either way. I don't think I said that. I think you said that.

Makes sense she got the job if she followed your advice. Yeah. Well, it also helps that I was the interviewer. Just kidding. That was not the situation. You recognized that someone followed your advice. Yeah, and I'm like, well, got to give you the job now. All right. Shall I thank our patrons? Yes, go for it. Okay. Thank you to a one-time shout out to the stenography in this name is adversarial to AI.

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The value and appreciation you show for us in an eternal cycle of appreciation. And shareholder value. Yes. I don't remember if we signed any kind of agreement. So the shareholders could be like whoever. says out loud i own all of this first yeah exactly it's like the michael scott i declare bankruptcy yeah exactly except now you own our podcast yeah crap we really should have got a lawyer yeah well

Dave, do you want to read our first question? Yes, this comes from an anonymous listener who says, I have managed a product for some months now. My previous manager split their team to many teams of two to three people. they gave me a small team and plenty of autonomy to own the product and go crazy on it i had the time of my life as the team lead i learned a ton and was really developing management skills my new manager is more hands-on

They want to do things my old manager left space for me to do, like project planning and quarterly planning. Now I feel micromanaged when they get involved. I become territorial. It feels like he doesn't recognize the independence of the mini team.

I feel like I'm going backwards and undoing all the management growth I've had, becoming just a software engineer who should just keep their head down and work on a task. I don't know what to do. How do I keep my independence and keep growing but also get along with this new lead? and learn from them in the process. So it's not the direct focus of the question, but I think getting a new boss is one of the...

toughest things that can happen at your job, especially if it's a new person from outside. You just have all these built-in expectations for how work works that are really just... how you and your boss have figured out things. And guaranteed they will not be the same set with a new person. Even if they're fine, you just might feel like they are worse because they're different from how you expected.

or all the things that you have done enough to be unspoken and now have to be spoken out loud again. And one of those things is trust. You built up a lot of trust with your previous manager. And this new manager doesn't know you at all. And some people's approach when they don't know anyone or don't know someone is kind of be really hands off and just sit back and observe. And some people's approach is to get really hands on and like dig into it.

But yeah, I think trust is probably at the core of this. Or lack thereof. Yeah. Or a desire to justify the existence of the manager. Yeah, that's another... thing i i've seen that where someone comes in and they feel like they need to make a splash and the way they make a splash is by doing stuff they got to change stuff and make things happen and things have to be different than they would have been if they weren't there and if they just say well

Previous manager had mini teams. Yeah, sure. Keep going. Maybe that's why the previous manager is gone. Maybe they got fired. They weren't actually doing anything. Mini teams are wrong. Yeah. I see you did the mini team pattern, the anti pattern. You're fired. Delegation is the sign of a great leader, and they just successfully delegated their entire job to other people. Maybe. I wonder why they left. Yeah. I mean...

There really is nothing better than being able to delegate to someone who's really capable and motivated and just being like, okay, that whole problem space is now abstracted. And I just have a weekly check-in and ask if everything's going great. And when my...

person says yes i'm just like oh there is kind of this amazing it's almost like i guess this is what leverage feels like you know like the uh andy groves yeah high leverage you know you successfully get someone to start doing something that you were doing and oh boy does it feel great but some people are kind of scared of it i don't know it is scary to let go of control

I have both been the new manager coming in and being hands-on and been the person who is there and gets a new manager. And I felt the same feeling of, wait a minute, I used to have more trust and autonomy. Now this person is kind of like... muscling into my territory, even though it's literally their territory because they're my boss. It was hard. I mean, I think our relationship took a while to become smooth and trusting. And some of that was...

I think inherent in just the problem of working out how to work together. And some of it was like me saying, wait, I thought this was, this used to be the thing I got to decide. And now you're saying it's not. And that feels bad to me. Yeah. Was that like a, was that a. a situation of inconsistent expectations from your manager? What do you mean? Did the new manager change mid-stride?

You used to be responsible for this. Now you're not. Or you used to have autonomy to decide this. Now you're not. Or was it just the old manager and new manager had different allowances for your own decision making? I think it was more like all of it got reset and I had to figure out.

through experience what i could and couldn't own now you know yeah it wasn't necessarily that they were really inconsistent it's just it's not like they came in and said here is a full complete list of all of the stuff yeah that could be your responsibility or mine and i've divided it up this way it was just you just had to bump into the boundaries yeah yeah i don't think i reacted super well all the time to it yeah i can imagine you just had an absolute meltdown started screaming

I didn't scream, but I think, yeah, I was grumpy sometimes. I want to approve the AWS bill. come on this happened a few times to me and there was one time where i think the manager was being pretty inconsistent but yeah there was also some of just i don't know having to bump into it yeah another one was more just They were internally consistent. I just had to discover what the shape that they were internally consistently keeping was. Right. By walking into it face first. Yeah, and it...

It did feel bad. And there was some amount of ego here, too, of like, wait, I thought I was capable of doing this. and am i am i not capable of it is it because i'm doing a bad job of this or someone else could be doing a better job and in some cases yes absolutely like new manager way better at this thing that i had been doing than i was and in some cases just different or i don't know not necessarily better but yeah i did have some ego wrapped up in there

It is tough to feel like your role is shrinking, though. Yeah, for sure. That feels bad. I mean, you ask, how do I keep my independence with a manager who wants to take away my independence? The question kind of answers itself a little. But there are some real out-of-the-box things you could do. Like, for example, create a whole bunch of drama and problems on other teams that your manager is responsible for so their attention gets fully occupied over there.

Yes, yes. Keep them busy. Now you can go back to the way it was because your manager simply doesn't have the time. Yeah. We're just cruising along while you deal with the spate of serial killings that happened in that other team's department. So weird. Yeah, that's pretty unusual for this company. I mean, it's a good thing you're here to deal with that.

Boy, I would be at a loss for what to do. I guess I'll just keep working on B2B SaaS. Zero killings are up 15%. I just don't know what to do about this. Good thing that's someone else's job. Yeah. There really is something to be said for having a manager that's too busy to manage you. For me personally, my personality, that is my all-time favorite, most wonderful type of leader.

People ask me, what kind of leader are you the most compatible with? Or what kind of personality and a leader do you like? And I'm like, make my leader too busy to be able to manage me. That's my favorite thing. And it's not because I want to get out of accountability or I want to sneak off and... not work during the middle of the day or go to the movie theater in the afternoons. That's not at all what it is. It's just that I thrive when I sense a lack of direction.

When I sense that my manager doesn't have the day-to-day bandwidth to be able to kind of check in on me, I just, I rise to the occasion. Why do you think that is? You fill in the gap kind of? Well, I, you know. I'm a complicated man, Jameson. I don't even understand myself. And I'm also not very introspective. But I've just noticed over the years, like, you know, I've had a lot of bosses now over the last, what, 20, coming on 25 years of employment.

And where I've done my best work is where my boss has been the most hands-off. And usually they're hands-off because they just don't have time. They're just overtaxed. I think it's because I like to seek out problems that are important and solve them and then just have full end-to-end ownership over it.

And I really like that feeling when I show up to my boss and I'm like, hey, look what I did. And they're like, whoa, it never even would have occurred to me to check on that. Oh my gosh, I'm so grateful. And it's just like my inner people pleaser just gets. flooded with like pleasure dopamine stuff i don't know what it is it's like the it's not even just doing a good job on you you ace the assignment you you created

The curriculum and then did a good job on the curriculum. I designed a test, took it, mailed it. Interesting. I think... When your manager is super busy, it creates a little bit of a low expectations environment. And maybe that's what I thrive in is when expectations are low. I thrive when expectations are low. Yeah, I mean, don't we all? But it's like, yeah, imagine your manager is so busy.

that they can't really even give you direction or instructions. But then you go find something great to do and you show it to them and they're just like, oh my gosh. I was so worried you were going to show up and say, free stuff. Yeah, I haven't done anything. Sweet. And then your manager would have to blame themselves for lack of direction, you know, if things went really bad. But instead, you showed up and did something. And then the manager is like, yes.

This could have gone so much worse. Yeah. Yeah. I like that. I mean, to the manager, it's free stuff, right? Yeah. This is a thing that could have a wide range of outcomes from bad to great. Awesome. Only the great ones happened. Right. Whereas if your manager gave you like a really lofty and challenging goal to achieve, which is how I tend to manage people, then it's like the opposite situation. Expectations are high. I'm very demanding.

and i want frequent check-ins and frequent updates and uh then you know people don't usually live up to it so i don't know maybe that's maybe i'm actually creating the problem Maybe my own leadership style needs to be to take on so much work and responsibility that I can't possibly do that effectively for everyone. So then it creates the environment where they can thrive. And then once in a rare while, I can laser focus on some of the areas that need my attention. Yeah.

This is a good growth opportunity for you, Dave. Yeah, that's how I grow is by being too busy. Do you think it's worth talking to your manager about it? I don't know. I was thinking about that when I read this question. It's like... Go to your manager and say, hey, you're micromanaging me or hey, I want more independence. It's just, I don't know. It feels like if someone came to me and said that, I'd be like, look, there's a reason I'm micromanaging you.

You know, it's not, you know, just you saying I want to be not micromanaged, I think isn't enough reason to, isn't a good enough justification for me to stop if I'm putting myself in the shoes of your manager. Instead, I think what you should do is surprise your manager.

with the amazing achievement that you do, do things that your manager couldn't possibly have time to do. For example, so I have a couple of managers that report to me right now. And one of them recently came to me and said, Dave, I was concerned about a particular... What was it? It was some kind of, oh geez, apparently it left a huge impact on me. I can't even remember what it was.

But I remember how I felt. So they came to me and they said, I've done some analysis on all of our team members' work over the last couple of quarters because I was curious about this dip in productivity on this one area. And I've...

done some analysis and I've come to some conclusions about how we work in our processes and I want to suggest some changes. And I was like, yes. And my manager showed me a bunch of the work they'd done. It was like this beautiful spreadsheet with a bunch of interesting charts and the conclusions were all like super compelling. And I was like, this is fantastic. That created a belief. That was an experience for me that created a belief in me that this manager is so on top of it.

that if ever I'm running low on time to give, that is an area that I will not spend time on because it's already well-managed and being well-executed in ways that honestly are better than I could do. So if you, in this situation, now I'm talking to the listener, find yourself wanting to create that kind of experience in your new manager, do stuff like that. Surprise them. Show them amazing, amazing work that they could never do on their own because they just don't have the time to do it.

I don't think I would say, hey, I feel like you're micromanaging me. I think it could be useful to say, hey, I want to do this thing. Can you help me understand what the outcomes you want are so that you can delegate it to me and let me have a go at it? I think that would work for kind of... bigger things but i feel like there's likely to be a lot of little things that aren't quarterly planning or running the retros or kind of

Things you can point to where your manager just sort of steps in and says, here's how it's going to be or overrules you. I think you can carve out tasks or ask for the responsibility to do specific tasks.

I don't know that it would change the vibe of like, wait, they're just meddling a bunch. I don't know. They're in our architecture meetings and saying, well, I think we should do it this way. And then, okay, like they're your boss. So you can debate. But if they say, nope, then I guess you do it that way now.

I think it's still worth identifying specific things you would like to keep doing, but it might also just require adapting to a new leadership style, which is more hands-on and has more of an assumption that they will be directly... changing stuff in your area. I don't think they would be offended or upset if you said, hey, I want to do this thing. I don't know. I would like to grow. I'd like to take on more stuff and help contribute, and I could take stuff off your plate.

And if there is a reason they're micromanaging because they think you're doing it wrong or there's things you don't know that you need to know to do it, it would be helpful to bring those to the surface too. Well, have we answered the question? I don't know. I mean, we definitely talked enough. Yeah. I think I need a manager to tell me if the question's been answered. Actually, I have one more thought, which is, I think there's another option here, which is not that they...

want to meddle, but they either don't have the time or have not taken the time to define what they want clearly enough to delegate it to anybody. If they're just so reactive and under the gun always that they just are... are jumping from thing to thing, it does take some time to delegate stuff unless you are okay with any outcome that someone delivers. If you want something done a certain way, but you haven't kind of like...

built up the explanation for why. And if you haven't done the work to hand it off well, then it can be tempting as a manager to just say, well, I'll just do it because it's more work to hand it off and I want it done the way that I want it done. I think a way around that could be kind of pull out the outcomes that they want. So maybe they don't go off and create the unified framework of how to do the job that I would like done, but you can extract it from their brain.

by figuring out what they want. And then that frees them up to delegate it to you without them having to set aside a bunch of time to define it more clearly. Does that make sense? I don't know, but... If you tell me it makes sense, I will definitely believe you. It makes sense. Oh, that's what I thought. That's what I thought too. That's what I was going to say. Yeah, that is. Great job, manager. Great idea. Oh, thank you. Thank you. All right.

You want to read our next question? I do want to, but I think it's your turn. Oh, crud. Okay, I'll do it. Maybe I should read each sentence and then you could read it afterwards and I'll show you how to read it really well. You just... interrupt as soon as i stumble okay i'll just take over the rest of the question yeah okay this is from an anonymous listener who says i work as a senior engineer

in a large team alongside a few other senior technical leaders. I've consistently received positive feedback from my manager about my impact, improving engineering quality, operational excellence, and team communication patterns.

At the same time, there have been challenges in collaboration and teamwork between other senior leaders and the teams they work closely with. My manager has been highly supportive of the projects and changes I propose, and many improvements have been implemented based on my suggestions. During a recent promotion cycle, despite this positive feedback, I was not promoted while another senior engineer who is known to have collaboration challenges was promoted instead.

When I asked for feedback, I was told that while my contributions are appreciated and my time will come, they couldn't explain the specific factors behind the promotion decision. I now feel a bit demotivated as it seems engineering excellence and team impact. may not be the primary factors considered for growth here. My question is, how should I think about my next steps? Should I keep investing in this team or start considering other opportunities? Oof, this is a gut punch, in my opinion.

And it's interesting, this sentence here. It seems like engineering excellence and team impact may not be the primary factors for growth here. Yes, indeed. You have stumbled upon a shadow promotion system where the real reasons people get promoted... are not allowed to be said out loud because it would be too shameful. That's what I think is going on here. Just reading. You mean like political things? I don't know. Favor trading or. Yeah. It's like.

friendships or there's something else here i mean well okay i mean there's other there's other possibilities here it could very well be that this engineer is delusional about how great they are. And indeed, this other person is way better. I don't think that's the case. This is a very well articulated question. It seems to come from the mind of someone who sees things clearly and is able to identify some obvious challenges in the rest of the organization.

Well, they're a listener to the show. How could they be wrong? Yeah. And so when I hear things like this person has a reputation for being a bad collaborator and bad outcomes, and yet they got promoted and I didn't, even though I've got all this positive feedback.

Yeah, like sometimes when people say things like that, I think, well, you're just a self-absorbed, you know, narcissist who can't see the good in others and only sees the good in yourself. That's probably not what's happening here. Like this seems pretty clear-eyed. I think what's happening here is what happens all too often.

which is you have a terrible process for promotions that's based on favors, politics, and factors that have nothing to do with doing a good job at work. That's certainly possible. I think it's also possible that... there are differing views of impact. And what you perceive to be highly impactful is not noticed as highly impactful by the people that decide on promotions. While this other engineer, hard to work with.

Maybe they're hard to work with, but, and then there's some thing that they delivered that looks really impactful or important to the people that look at promotions. Maybe there's a bunch of dollar signs attached to the thing that they built, even though. they made other people very unhappy when they worked with them. Right, right. It's way easier to recognize dollar signs than the vague dissatisfaction that any colleague who worked with them had. Right, right. So I think...

It could also be a perspective difference or a different value. This question asker has talked a lot about operational excellence, team communication patterns, engineering quality. Team communication patterns can make a great difference in the effectiveness of a team and are also really, really, really hard to demonstrate outside of the team.

And usually these promotion discussions, this sounds like a big company, there's a scarce pool of promotions that everyone is going for. And so you're competing with someone. If you're a manager, you've got... your portfolio of people you're trying to get promoted, you are competing with the other manager who has their portfolio. And if you say, well, they really helped the team communicate well.

that's that's really fuzzy yeah it's very easy for someone else to say like well yeah so did my person yeah they helped the team communicate well too sure yeah boom equal footing yeah exactly it's a tie it doesn't count whereas if you can say You know, Project Icarus, because every company has a name, a project called Project Icarus. My person delivered Project Icarus. And it made us $14 million last year.

Yeah, they hurt some feelings, but that's what happens when you work in a high-stress, high-pressure, intense environment. Then they'll make some comparison to Navy SEALs because, of course, enterprise software has to be like... fighting a war yeah bdb sass is very similar to trench warfare yeah you think you think navy seals always get along no but just like they delivered project icarus

And yell at people, so did that one guy who killed bin Laden or whatever. They're the same. They're the same. You know, Jameson, as you were talking, I was thinking, you know what? I think you're totally right. If someone came to me and said...

Here are two promotion candidates. One of them is a really great collaborator, really gets along with everybody. And the other one delivered this amazing result. I'd be like, yeah, you know, at the end of the day, I kind of don't care how good of a collaborator you are.

I, at some level, as a human being, I do care. I don't want to work for a company full of complete jerks. But also, the company exists not to collaborate well. Collaboration is not the purpose. It's not the mission of your company. It might be one of your values, but it is not ultimately the thing that pays the bills. I could see this also being, yeah, engineering excellence is a... It's another means to an end.

Yeah, it sounds like technical debt of just like, well, engineers are going to do stuff. And of course, they're going to say it's better now because it's a thing that they wanted to do. But again, hard to assign very clear value to it. Yeah. So I think... I don't know the specific circumstances, but one explanation that does make sense is what we described, that they did a thing that was very visible, and it far outweighed the concerns that people had around how difficult they were to work with.

Yeah. In fact, maybe they think the difficult to work with is actually a feature, not a bug. It's like, look how they muscled that change through, even though there was all this organizational resistance, you know? Yeah. And I mean, it could have been to the company. honestly like if they're this soulless profit machine yeah retention is important and teams that collaborate well i think it's it's healthy and you do better work and certainly feels better to work on right but

Hard to measure, hard to demonstrate all of that. So I think your next task here is to figure out what are the heuristics that led this person to get this promotion and you not to. And this is going to be hard, I think, because clearly... Whatever it was that caused you to take a second place here, your manager is not able to articulate that to you.

there can be a lot of reasons for that. Some of just a couple of reasons I could think of is maybe it's an awkward conversation and they don't want to talk to you about it. Yeah. They don't want to say like, actually. being a great collaborator is not that important here. What's important is delivering on Project Icarus. Or maybe it's that they don't really know. They don't understand themselves. And so you're going to have to do some detective work here and figure out.

What are the things people are looking at to decide promotions? It also could be that your manager lost. In the battle for promotion dominance? Yeah, there's some skill involved and some personality traits that could make you better or worse at this. prep and communication and luck and how the vibes feel that day and and it's possible that they just didn't do a good enough job of articulating your value yep and that's also not

great to admit is like, man, I blew it. I didn't fight hard enough for you. That's not a thing you would like to say as a manager. You could imagine some managers saying, I tried really hard to fight for you, but in the end, I just couldn't.

I couldn't do it. And the other manager got one and I promise I'm going to keep fighting for you. You know, some people might say that, but some people might be too embarrassed to admit it. Yeah. Promotions are tricky. I think, I don't think there's a, there's, there's no.

fair way to do this that feels good to everybody. It always, if you're trying to allocate scarce resources, it always feels bad to some degree. And you will always be able to find people who felt like they deserved it and missed out. And I don't know how you solve this systemically, really. Everyone gets a participation trophy is how you solve it. I mean, there are places that have said we just everyone makes the same amount of money.

And then you have this shadow system behind. Yeah, it's like there's other currency, I guess. Yeah, how many Aeron chairs you have. Exactly. That's my Monday Herman Miller. Yeah, well...

Sure, we all get paid the same, but someone has an Aeron chair for each limb of their body, and they sprawl across them all. Oh, this is so tough. You know, I worked at a company that had very clear... prescriptive documentation about how to get promoted and even in that environment where it was darn near perfectly objective even in that environment it was very hard

to get promoted. And it was demotivating to me. I went up for promotion once at that company, didn't get it and realized that in order to meet the promotion committee's criteria, it was going to take me like another couple of years to do it. Meanwhile, every week in my one-on-one, my boss is like, how's it going on the promotion? And I'm like, I haven't made any material progress in the last seven days on this multi-year effort. And I hated it.

I was tempted to tell my boss, like, look, I don't want to be promoted. Can we just stop talking about it? But they really wanted it for me because it was good for them. And that was actually the unspoken part was that managers who got their people promoted were themselves promoted. So that created quite an interesting incentive system.

But yeah, it's very, I think it's natural to say, should I be looking somewhere else? I think no. I think I would first try to figure out, like we were saying before, what are the... the factors that go into a promotion at this company and you might have to back into that you might have to reverse engineer it by asking multiple people like what were some of the top things that helped joe earn that

promotion. And maybe even ask Joe himself. I made up the word Joe. I don't know if that's actually the name of the guy who got promoted. But, you know, ask. Ask these questions. Figure it out. And if it seems like it's completely non-deterministic... In other words, there actually is no criteria. It really did just come down to something in the political realm. Then I would say, yeah, your chances of getting promoted are now way lower.

Because as an engineer, it's really hard to kind of like ingratiate yourself to a machine like this, I think, for most engineers. Yeah. And there's some amount of... things out of your control with how influential your manager is and what kind of projects your team works on. There are just areas that are closer to dollars or more visible. I do think...

A reasonable outcome for a company from a promotion process is pretty much everyone who gets promoted deserves it, even though a lot of people who did deserve it get left out. So this might also just be literally a case of, sure, maybe you... deserve it but there just isn't i don't know there's still a limited number and you have to you have to cut off somewhere yeah exactly and maybe next year there will be fewer candidates in the pool and your chances will be better

Again, you got to understand what all these factors are. Someone made this decision and someone can explain it to you. But if no one can explain it or no one is willing to explain it, then you might have a system that's...

really just not going to work for you and probably would find be better to find a new job and if this was three years ago i think we definitely would have said quit your job you'd probably get a juicy promotion and raise anyway the easy way yeah yeah but today that's less likely

Yeah. But hopefully we've given you the tools to achieve it. Yes. Best of luck to you. Good luck. What can people do if they want their own questions answered, Dave? Go to softskills.audio and click the Ask a Question button. We thank you so much to everyone who... has written in questions we love them not only my heart swells when i read them but also my brain does and i really need to see a doctor about these headaches but i still just keep the questions coming what's that movie

There's some movie with John Travolta where he becomes very smart because of a tumor that kills him. Oh. Does that make sense? I don't know. Hopefully that's not you. Yeah. I guess that's what I'm saying. Well, I don't feel smarter. I just feel, I don't know, good, euphoric.

You just feel better. Yeah. Okay, so it's not a tumor pressing on the part of your brain that makes you smarter. Yeah, no. It's a tumor pressing on the part of the brain that makes you feel better. Yeah, and then kills me. Which is probably actually better overall. Yeah. It's probably better for your life. Yeah, I'm just more ignorant. Yeah. Oh, what a blissful state. Well, you all leave me in a blissful state also. Thank you for listening. We'll catch you next week.