Hiring Engineers in Latin America

It takes more than knowing how to comment out code in every programming language to be a great engineer. This is Soft Skills Engineering Episode 309. I'm your host, Dave Smith. I'm your host, Jameson Dance. Soft Skills Engineering is a weekly advice podcast about the softer side of software development and doesn't really include commenting out code, but do you ever wish you could comment out something you said verbally a couple minutes ago? All the time. I don't do well speaking off the cuff in important business situations, and I find myself wishing that I could be writing stuff down and editing it and then sending it out when it said what I actually meant. Right. A while ago I had someone tell me that they really appreciated how clear my communication was when it was written. Yeah . I can't help but notice uh how narrow that feedback was. Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting. Yeah, I would like to comment stuff out. Or or have like a time machine standard, you know, solve solve every problem with the time machine. Classic. Okay, I I gotta ask you, what's now we're gonna get a little bit hard skills. Just just a little bit. Bear with me. Uh-huh. What is in your opinion the weirdest comment syntax of any language you've used? Oh, I don't know if I've seen anything too wild . The weirdest one I know of? Yeah, I just don't know of any that seem outrageous. I guess semicolons are kind of weird to me. Clojure uses those. Yeah. Probably some other stuff too. But I I don't know. I I don't know one that's like a smiley face emoji or something. That would be awesome if there was like an emoji. It's like an emoji, it's the spe likeech bubble emoji. Okay. That would be so cool. I gotta wrap this show up because I need to go write a code transformer. Yeah. That allows me to put in it the speech bubble emoji. And then outputs comments. That would be so so cool. Okay, so I'll I'll tell you my two weirdest. Okay. The first one is uh in basic, the rem token. You type R E M REM? Yeah, REM. That's a comment that you can mean. Well, I just I actually didn't know until I've used it before, but I didn't know what it meant until just now, and it it stands for remark. Huh. I'm gonna make a remark in the code here. Okay, I I think it would be cool if you could just type the word verily . Just verily at the beginning of a line means the rest of that line is a comment. Right. You're gonna hold forth. Okay, I gotta tell you the second weirdest one though. Okay. Do you know the comment syntax in SQL? Uh is that the is it dashes or something like that? It's two dashes, but here's where it gets so weird. The official language like specification says it's the comment indicator is dash dash space . And so some engines insist on that space being there, and some are like, nah, you don't need to put in the space . And so you can do dash dash. And then if you don't put a space in, some database engines give you super hard to understand error messages. Huh. That sounds like knowledge born of pain. It is. I have the scar tissue. It's tingling right now actually. Yeah. I guess XML's common syntax is kind of well it is n't. Because it it's also it kind of looks like XML. I don't know. We we better get out of here. Okay. Okay. This is the sound of me running out of the room and shutting the door and locking it . I want to thank our patrons who are supporting the show at the level where we shout them out every single week. Thank you too. Memester Josh. Owen Shardle. Craig Motlin. I Love Mavis the Stochastic Parrot. Andrew Pollock, Arenduna, Coshocton, Ohio, Patron.com.au we're hiring, Ira Chan, Monkey Face Emoji, Jonathan King, testing is documenting.org. Oli Dappofadia, Will Angel, my neighbor has smelly feet, Nick Hathaway, Travis Sanders, Braden Keynes, John Grant, Nick Cantar, and Philip John Basile . Thank you. Thank you so much. Alright. This episode is sponsored by Revello. Revelo is a great way to hire engineers Or listen for more. All right, you want to read our first question? Your first question. Verily. I am working on a DevOps team building the the shared serv ices that our engineers depend on. Log aggregation, CICD monitoring, Kubernetes clusters, etc. The team is myself, my boss, the lead DevOps, who is the lead DevOps engineer. I think that's what I interpret this to mean, and a handful of pretty junior people. I feel pulled in a bunch of directions. I've asked for written documentation from my boss to help establish expectations and processes. Think branching strategies, who owns what, what should be prioritized, etc. I want to make it easier to train up the junior people on the team and enable us to push back when devs ask for stuff with no context of what it will take to finish. Nothing has been written. It's starting to get to me because without that, it's very difficult for me to push back on requests from the developers on our various teams. How do I tell my boss I feel like he's letting me down and that I'm drowning because it seems like he just can't be bothered to write down some base information? Hmm. Hmm. He just can't be bothered to write down some base information. Have you tried sitting down behind your boss and wrap your arms around him like that Patrick Sway ze movie from the 80s? Ghost It's ghost. Hold the pen and paper in his hands and and just gently guide his hands, get him started, and then walk away. Yeah. That's probably wh why your boss hasn't done it yet. We've talked about the tragedy of the commons before and this feels like you are the commons in the situation. There's this kind of shared resource, which is this DevOps team, and no other team really pays any cost for imposing requests on you or adding work to your plate, it sounds like. And so everyone is just there's there are a bunch of sheep grazing on you. You're the commons. You're being grazed on and it hurts to be grazed upon. I think sheep isn't that isn't that the original metaphor for tragedy of the commons original metaphor is the wrong word. It's like a field that everyone lets their animals out to graze on. Oh, I don't know. Maybe that it was like a shared pasture? Yeah, it I think the commons are like it's like this common ground in between a bunch of farms or something like that. Anyways, that's you. That's you. That's your team. Okay. Yeah, the costs are not being shared by the people consuming stuff. So I just need to interject here and say that the internet agrees with you. It was all about sheep grazing. It usually does. Especially now that I can edit Wikipedia again . Oh, I can't wait till all our social networks get that edit button, which I'm assuming will be granted to me for everyone else and then obviously just resolve conflicts that way . Nothing has been written. Yeah, so so you're getting a bunch of requests coming in. This seems like a bigger problem to me than like we don't have written down how our branch strategy works, because I feel like that's there's not a lot of controversy in there. There's I don't know, a few major approaches and you can probably just pick one and be fine. But handling incoming work feels like a much bigger problem and much harder to handle, especially if you're just doing it yourself. So I like that your instinct is is enable us to push back. You say enable us to push back when devs ask for stuff with no context of what it will take to finish. They're not supposed to have context though. I don't know that you can expect them to have that context. Like part of the purpose of your team is to abstract over these resources that you maintain and make it so they don't have to be experts in these resources. So them asking for stuff doesn't feel like the problem and they're probably gonna still come ask for stuff even if you have this air quotes solved, I think the problem is you you might not have a clearly defined purpose for your team where the purpose is both positive and negative. And by that I mean we do do these things and we do do not these other things. Like it it both includes some stuff and excludes some other stuff. And if you can define that, that gives you something to refer back to when requests come in at least. Um or or to help prioritize stuff. Like if part of the problem is there's a lot of requests that come in that all seem relevant to the purpose of your team, then maybe some of them are more relevant to it than others, and you do those ones first or something like that. But but just having to deal ad hoc with all these incoming requests is a pain. And I have been there. It's like an avalanche. It's like if you ever have the last name that is a verb, like dan ce, you will throughout your life regularly have people who say, Dance! Do you like to dance? And to each of those people, it is the first time they have thought of that joke and heard of it. And to the person on the other end, it is the 10 milli onth time. And that imbalance of like there there might be one team that's coming to you once and saying, Hey, can we have this thing real quick? And to them it's a little tiny request, one off thing. And to you it's like, yeah, yeah. To you it's like that and now I have ten million and one thing to do and that's it. I can't take it anymore. And and yeah it's it's it's uneven that that uh how much effort it costs them to ask and how much stress it imposes on you to receive that. Yeah. I don't have a solution for that. Just uh just start thinking it's funny. That's what I did with my name. I started agreeing with them. Like that is funny. It just gets funnier every time. It it actually does. I I don't I'm not being facetious here. Like I I I don't know, I get a kick out of it now that that there's just this like shared joke in everyone's head and I get to participate in it all the time. It feels like maybe you've reached some level of Zen master enlightenment to be able to say it's funny. I have with this. Yes. It used to be very frustrating and then I've I've achieved something in life by just letting it go. Same situation is now a source of joy that was a source of pain. Yeah, so just do that for work . Everything You should write a book. It's like Zen and the Art of Learning to Laugh at Jokes at Your Expense. I've talked a lot here. I feel like I'm I I'm having flashbacks to times in my career 'cause I I had a few years where I was directly in this very similar situation of of like all this stuff coming in and from a bunch of different people. Yeah. But I do want to hear what you say, Dave, before I I just take it over the whole time? Well I I'm trying to think back over the last couple of decades and if there have been times when I needed my boss to do something that they weren't doing and was I willing to go ask them? And I I think think I have done this very rarely. Because most of the time when I needed something from my boss, it was something that I felt they lacked the skills to give. And so in that context, asking them to do it di I just didn't seem like the right thing. Like for example, I had a at one point I had a really non-technical boss and I needed support on certain things, but they were technical in nature. And and I just thought, I can't ask this guy to do this stuff. He just can't. You know? Like it would take years to train up. So I just never did. And then I'm trying to think to myself, what okay, what if there were situations like this where, it's like I, just need you to write some stuff down. Well, the way I kind of operate with this stuff is I would just go write it down and then show my boss and be like, is this okay? Yeah. Perfect. And then if he says yes, then there you go. This was now effectively written by my boss. And I can put it in front of people. Yeah. That's a great idea. What you shouldn't do is write it down and then show it to a bunch of people and then have your boss find out that this is what you've now defined your team to do and not do. Yeah. I I gotta tell you, as someone who is a a manager, I love it when my people come to me with fully baked ideas and they're just looking for my sign-off, as opposed to coming to me and just saying, Hey, I've got this really ambiguous problem and I just want you to solve it. And I'm like, Yeah, I I'm happy to I actually will do that. I will solve problems that people bring to me. I'm not the kind of person who says only bring me solutions. I actually really dislike that leadership style. It's like, let's solve it together. But if you bring me a fully baked solution and you're just asking for my sign-off, I'm like, oh, it's wonderful. Wonderful. It's like a gift. Yeah. I'm like, wow, you've really put some thought into this. I love it. I will sometimes sign off on ideas that I don't even think are all that great because I just want to encourage people to do more of that. Like now this isn't what I would do, but I I don't care. You have my full approval. I wouldn't say the first part. I would just say you have my full approval . As you mutter under your breath the second the yeah the first part. It's not what I would do. So one one thing I would expect your boss to do in the situation where there's a ton of work coming in, too much to do is is help prioritize stuff. And defining the purpose of your teams, you can say yes or no to things and and order stuff is one way to prioritize. But you could also just say, hey, boss, I got another request. Where should this go in the list of a thousand things I have to do? And start surfacing the problem more to them? If the abstract requests for like write down what I can say no to aren't working, then you might be able to surface some of the pain to encourage them to write it down or at least like arrive at a working definition of what you can say no to by taking the stuff your boss says don't do and then kind of like turning that into a into a thing you don't do? Does that make sense? You're saying like figure out the boundaries of what your boss's actual policies are by just bumping into them? I mean, assuming that they exist, it's it's also possible that they could just say yes to stuff and it's not really a defined rhyme or reason. Oh man, this reminds me of a story that is so funny. I just I worry it's gonna take too long to tell it. Well should I do should I do it? We better not then. No of course you should tell it. Okay . So the the the theme here is you don't know what your boss's policy is. They haven't defined it, and so you're just kind of trying to figure it out by bumping into it. So years ago, like we're talking fifteen years ago, I was working at a company that had a a meal reimbursement policy when you took interview candidates out for lunch. And they would of course, the company would pay for you and the k interview candidate. But then of course at most sit-down restaurants in the US, you leave a tip. And the amount of tip you leave is, you know, it's traditional due to fifteen to twenty percent. But you know, when you're using other people's money, it's very easy to be generous with your weight staff. And so sometimes we we would tip just very generously. The finance department in this company, and this is like a medium sized company, maybe like five hundred people, they started rejecting a subset, a portion of the dollars for reimbursement. So like let's say you left a fifteen dollar tip, they would only reimb urse like fourteen dollars out of the fifteen . And the engineers on my team just thought this was so funny. And so we actually printed out a chart and we put it on we taped it up on my door to my office and we decided to binary search the policy . So we we had any time anyone took someone out for lunch, we asked them to write down how what percent they tipped uh on the chart, you know, and then other people could walk by when they were going out to lunch and they could look at that and look for spaces that hadn't yet been explored. And we were trying to like zero in on exactly where is the line where it's no longer reimbursable. And a after about four or five attempts, we had what we thought was a pretty good line, but then they moved the goalpost because I think they heard they heard those rumor that the engineers were tracking their reimbursements as a game and they just started reimbursing all of them. Like they I think they must have just they must have moved the line way out of there. But anyway, we just had so much fun with that. We're like, hey, real life binary search with dollars and a and finance policy. Let's do this. It was really fun. But you you've've run into the problem I mentioned earlier, which is people can just decide to do other stuff. Exactly. And then your search you're trying to it's non deterministic search algorithm. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. So anyway. Getting back to the question here, how do I tell my boss he's letting me down? I don't think you want to go and tell your boss that he's letting you down. I think you want to sit down with your boss and say, We have a problem that I need your help solving. The problem is and, then lay it out. Be and be unemotional about it and describe the problem in the most objective terms you can find. And explain to the boss what's going to happen if this problem doesn't get solved, which is it's going to lead to burnout, we're going to make bad decisions, and the team's not not going to be working on the most important things because we don't have a clear strategy for handling that. And then I've shared a an article in the show notes called Writing Strategies and Visions. This was brought to me actually by one of my team members who's just really excellent at this stuff. And it's it's a process for writing a strategy document, which I think is actually what's missing here. Is that you don't have a strategy for how to deal with competing priorities and open questions on the team. And if you'll if you'll follow this pattern, either you or your boss together, to write a strategy document that describes this problem and then describes possible solutions to it, I think you'll find that you can solve this problem effectively without having to sit down and say, you're letting me down. Yeah. It's a good call out on both those points of of posing you you've like proposed a direction for a solution, even if you haven't written up the whole strategy ahead of time, but but it's uh the question mentions that this person is the lead DevOps engineer and this kind of work might be a little bit out of their comfort zone because this is not traditional lead DevOps. Well, guess depends on how you define it. This is certainly not the kind of like technical making systems work lead DevOps engine er stuff. This is much more like team coordination people , like enablement stuff. So they might just not know what to do, you know? Yeah. They might not. And that's har der, you know, if they don't know what to do. Yeah, I think if they don't know what to do, you also might need to be careful of ego, because you depends on the manager a lot, or the boss, I guess. But some bosses are fine with revealing they don't know what to do and kind of like bringing you into that, and some might get a little snippy or defensive or feel like they need to protect their reputation. But e either way I feel like if you want this problem solved, w 100% if you want to guarantee that something happens then yeah you have to do the thing Dave said of of like write a solution and say can we do this thing or or like unless you object we're gonna do this thing. Mm-hmm. I think that answers my question. Can't be bothered to write down some base information. I think I've answered it. Did I miss anything? Any answers I skipped? Did you skip any answers? Yeah. We have a script for this? I assumed that you did. And that's why you can see prepared. I was just following along. Oh man. I thought you were writing the script this whole time. Alright. We've answered it. The question is answered. That's what the script says, so we will move on. Yes. Okay . Hey Jameson, have you heard how easy it is to hire engineers right now? Given infinite dollars, it is easy to hire engineers right now. I want to recommend a company that helps you hire engineers in Latin America. It's called Revello. Tell me about it. I've been hiring engineers in Latin America for the past two years and they are awesome. I've worked with a few different companies who provide engineers from Latin America, but none of them were really great. I recently discovered Ravello. Ravello helps you find skilled software engineers in Latin America. They only provide full-time senior engineers with m at least five years of experience. They don't force you to pay for things you don't need, like a project manager. This is really interesting. Their pricing is awesome because they charge a monthly fee and you know how much they're paying the developers, so there's not a lot of indirection there, which is not common. Sometimes you get these opaque invoices and you have to figure out how much is actually going to the developer, how much is going to the the company. They do the sourcing and the vetting, and you can interview the engineers before deciding if you want to work with them, and they take care of payroll and benefits, which is great. Yeah, I highly recommend hiring engineers in Latin America. It's a huge untapped market for a lot of US companies. All of Ravello's engineers speak English, and the time zone is one of the big wins. If you're based in the United States, the Latin American time zones line up really well with US time zones. You don't have that painful twenty four hour turnaround problem when you have a question for an engineer on the other side of the world. Yeah. I've worked with wonderful engineers that live on the other side of the world, and both of our lives were worse because of that. Someone's always up at midnight. So this is great. Check out Ravello today. You can go to revello.com slash soft skills to check it out. That's Do you want to read our next question, Dave? Yes. This comes from an anonymous listener who says, I have been working with my manager for almost a year to be promoted. I have been making a lot of progress on my tasks and as a developer. My manager agreed that I would be promoted in the next month or so if I kept it up. Then he quit to go to a new company. Painful. I now have a new manager and I feel like I have to start from scratch. Not much has been translated over from the old manager to the new manager about my progress. The new manager is now telling me there is no way they would hire me as a mid-level dev . I feel like I've wasted a lot of time with the old manager and that the new manager is not seeing my value to the company and all the work that I've done to this point. I'm not going to quit or anything, but I just wanted to rant. Thanks for listening. You're welcome. Yeah . Wait, there's no question. He just needed this person just needed to be heard. Well, our work here's done. We have heard you. And listeners, you've all heard this person too , so you've helped. Yeah, thanks for listening. Like this is uh listening at scale. This is a bummer. I don't know how you get around this. I have been on both sides of this as the new manager coming in and trying to pick up context and coming to a different evaluation than the previous manager and then having to work through that with the the report. And as a a person getting a new boss and trying to carry my boss's context over. Mm-hmm. I thought you were gonna say that you've been the new manager who came in and and came to a different conclusion and that you've been the old manager who left and abandoned your team's promotion? Oh, I'm sure I've done that too. Yeah, I've probably done that. I think I did a better job about not abandoning people right before they were gonna get promoted by me. But if you hear a squawk, that's my chicken that I keep in my office. No, it's a it's a little child. A baby. Yes, I'm soothing the baby to sleep by talking about work drama . About how to handle difficult office situations. Everyone's favorite lullaby. So not much has been translated from the old manager. I think I I don't know if this will make you feel better or worse, but it is possible that even if a lot was translated from the old manager to the to to the new manager, the new manager would still just disagree. It's possible. This could be a problem of not enough information. It could also just be a different perspective or different expectations or standards. So you you might be in the same spot if your manager had put in a bunch of work to transfer context over. Maybe not, but maybe. Yeah. And and this is yeah, it's it's so hard having consistent criteria for promotion and leveling that are objective and and clear enough that you can apply them between people and especially between like different leaders applying them in a same in a similar way is so hard.. Mm-hmm Totally true. I have not seen it done well. I've always there there's always some amount of like no matter how much material there is, there's some amount of of the leader interpreting the career ladder or the standards or expectations or whatever into like practical, pragmatic things that then they work on their team with. Yeah, very true. Oh man, that's a bummer. I guess I just said give up. I I mean time machine is an option here. That's true. Yeah, if you had a time machine, yeah, go push harder for the promotion. Or ask your old manager, can you write me like a letter of recommendation that I can hand over to this new person so that we don't lose progress. I think this highlights that no one will care more about your promotion than you. And that anytime you're working through something like this, there's a good chance that some of the people involved in the process, and this could be a promotion, it could be a big project, it could be anything that takes more than a few weeks to get done, in this case probably several months. No one cares more about it than you. And so you owe it to yourself to keep careful records as things are progressing. You know, records of what people said, decisions people made, documenting exactly what the goalposts are that you're that you're working toward. In the case of a promotion, you know, clearly articulating in this in some kind of written form what are the things you've been asked to do and what are the things you've done and accomplished and what agreements were made. And if those things have your manager's name all over them, it can really help in the transition. You know, I've seen this a bunch too. And and when I worked at a at a really big company that had a pretty well defined promotion process, they actually said it straight up, you as the employee are responsible for driving your promotion through to completion and be prepared for the case that your manager changes mid in the middle of the promotion cycle. And so they they for them it was explicit and I really appreciated that. Yeah that's great. I feel like I wasted a lot of time with the old manager. They're new and not seeing my value. So yeah, that is a good point that your new manager is not seeing your trajectory of growth. They are just seeing what it seems like you're doing right now. And so it And your new manager is taking all that out and just saying, what are you doing now? And does that meet the criteria for this next position? It also could be that your old manager didn't think you were ready for promotion. It was just bad at telling you that. And now they're relieved someone else can deliver the bad news. Yeah. I mean I keep going back to what the question was, but then I remember there wasn't a question, so I can just say whatever I want. Yeah, that's true. You just gotta talk to your new manager and and treat it like you are starting over because you kind of are, and even though it sucks, you can deal with reality the way it is, or you can quit and get another job and get promoted that way, which is like the other the other path to promotion. Yeah, I I would just ask them, okay, what what would it take for me to get promoted to this level and then work on a plan to to do those things? It might take longer than you're thinking, but it's not gonna happen if you don't do that, right? Yeah. I don't know. I feel like I'm just saying suck it up as my answer to this non question. Yeah, you are because there's really no other choice here. You know? You gotta start over. Sorry, like it it sucks, but that is the truth in this case. And you've got a new manager who seems to have totally new expectations. If only you had made the company so good that your old manager didn't quit. Thought about your role in this . Why didn't you change their boss's boss's boss to make them easier to work with your manager's life or yeah this is it's frustrating because there's a lot that's not in your control here. Yeah most of it. Even though which actually kind of contradicts what I said earlier, which is that you gotta take responsibility for these things and document it yourself, which which I I have to believe that if you had done in this situation it would have been a little better for you. Yeah. Still not perfect though. Yeah. So this is one of those valuable life lessons, I guess. And if you're listening and you're not the question asker, then you get to learn a valuable life lesson from someone else. Lucky you. This does underscore how painful it can be to have lots of manager tur nover because yes. We've joked a lot about nobody misses you if you leave. Don't worry about, well that's they will miss you deeply. You're not going to kill the company if you quit and go get a different job. Your project isn't going to die, etc.. Right But if you're a manager, then you might kill someone's promotion if you quit. Right. Yes, you can. The blast radius is a little bigger. Yes. I don't know. I keep looking at this baby and then forgetting what I was talking about. That's a good sign that we've answered the question, I think. Yes. The baby is asleep, so mission accomplished . The content was so engaging that it put a small child to sleep. Ah, yes . I heard that there are a bunch of white noise podcasts on Spotify that make outrageous amounts of mone Oh really? Maybe that's a market we should be tapping into. Just Yeah. We are essentially white noise. I mean if you treat us like white noise, your career will be better for it. Yes. What should people do if they want their own questions answered in the form of white noise. Sorry. That was more like a pink noise, I think you were making there. Oh gosh. Okay. Go to soft skills.audio and click the uh ask a question button. Thank you so much to everyone who does that each week. We really appreciate all the new questions. We do. Thank you for listening. We will catch you next week. Don't you can