Soft Skills for Engineers (Part 2)

Soft Skills for Engineers (Part 2)

If you’re starting here, you may want to read Part 1 first.

Paying Attention

This summer, I started to facilitate an 8-person mentoring circle at my current company, to help Senior Engineers grow to the next level. I’ve done a lot of one-on-one mentoring, but this was my first time leading a larger group. We did the circle over Zoom, since people are in different offices or working remotely. These were experienced and talented people with a lot of technical wins under their belts, and two of them even had their own YouTube channels.

I started with a quick warmup — six minutes to populate a Miro board: “Things I’m good at”, “Things I’m not good at yet”, “Things I want to learn”, and “Who do I want to be”. I thought it would be a nice way to draw people out, and to confirm my idea that most engineers at these levels need to strengthen their soft skills.

And it confirmed it, but in an unexpected way. The answers to the second set, “Things I’m not good at yet”, overwhelmingly were around communicating. Things like:

  • Expressing myself clearly and succinctly
  • Making sure others understand me
  • Having tact around giving negative feedback
  • Describing the importance of my work
  • Describing my work to a manager

I had thought I’d just use those questions as a warm-up exercise and as an excuse to launch into a generic discussion on the importance of soft skills. If I hadn’t asked the questions and then paid attention, I’d have missed it. Instead, those warmup questions changed the whole course of the mentoring circle, and also of this very series that I’m writing.

My mother (and maybe even your own mother) used to tell me “People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care”. By taking the time to ask what their problems were and where they wanted to grow, and then caring about their specific answers, I found out that this group needed a different approach than I’d planned.

Don’t Fall in Love with Your Story

Early in my career, in the late 90s, when mp3 was just starting to take off, I invented a way to embed an additional channel of data in mp3s, enough data to put advertisements in. This was before streaming services existed, and when people were digitizing their CD collections to share them up on mp3 sharing sites, so the record industry decided its new plan was to sue these sites and fine the uploaders. My big idea was that if music was going to be shared for free anyway, why couldn’t the labels monetize it with advertising?

The underlying technology had some slick math, so I applied for patents on it, made a web site and printed a brochure to get people excited, and built demos of it with some of the desktop mp3 players and devices of that era. It was timely and looked cool, so it wasn’t that hard to get meetings. I gave demos to VP- and CTO-level execs at three of the four major record labels, to senior people at Sony, Microsoft and Apple, and everyone thought it was amazing. But they didn’t buy the technology. What happened? Several issues kept coming up:

  • The idea required mp3 encoders, distribution and players to all support the new technology, and it didn’t provide solid value until a large chunk of the ecosystem supported it.
  • The contracts with musicians didn’t provide for things like embedded ads in their music, so would have had to be individually re-negotiated; and most importantly –
  • The music industry had been making boatloads of money from its decades-long business model of selling physical music, and they were not excited to change that model.

I was looking to sell my brilliant idea and run off into the sunset. I wasn’t looking to solve these other hard problems; I was expecting them to solve themselves. I was in broadcast mode, but I didn’t feel like I was in broadcast mode, since everyone responded so well to the shiny fancy demos. I was having meetings with high-level important executives who said nice things in meetings and ghosted me after.

These executives had real underlying problems in their business. The whole industry was in turmoil. As I walked through the record label offices, I passed deserted cubicle after deserted cubicle of executives who had already been laid off due to collapsing album sales. Anything could have happened with the right focus and partnerships. But I wasn’t listening to their real problems. If I’d used those meetings to ask more questions, and pulled them into the journey, working alongside them to find and understand their underlying problems, maybe we could have solved them together?

This was a golden opportunity that I missed because I didn’t focus on listening and understanding.

Understand Your Audience

I used to think that communicating an idea was like a professor giving a lecture. A brilliant, complex idea inside of a speaker’s head is expressed through a series of rational arguments, probably aided by drawing on a whiteboard, and then embeds itself in the listener’s head. People who are used to learning from books and in classrooms often use this as their model of how communication works.

Perhaps this works for a few people who are already connected, and who have a common background and set of ideas, but there are two things that are likely to happen:

  1. You may decide to be thorough, but waste a lot of time in preliminaries because you didn’t know that the person already understands a lot of the things that you are telling them, or

  2. You might start out over their head, without any background, and waste the whole time with them — they won’t understand anything but might be too uncomfortable to say it.

Most importantly, when you try to transmit an idea like this, it remains your idea, and they don’t have any ownership in it. In fact, a lot of people will instinctively challenge a new idea, either because it’s scary or because they don’t want to be a pushover who believes anything told to them. And sometimes people just like to be contrarian and act like the devil’s advocate.

Even in a school setting, several people in the class are spaced out (or hungover) at least part of the time, or can’t hear well, or missed a crucial lecture, and lose a connection in the chain of logic.

In grad school at Brown, I took a class from a brilliant professor who’d just come back from a year-long sabbatical after winning a computer theory prize. On day 1, he launched into a description of what he had been working on, covering a whiteboard with notes and equations, with no preliminaries. I checked in with others after the class, and no one had understood a single thing. There was really no reason for any of us to show up for that class, because the teacher wasn’t teaching. He was broadcasting, but none of us were properly prepared to receive it.

If you’re communicating at work (or even in your personal life) and give a thirty-minute uninterrupted brain dump, almost everyone will lose interest or miss a crucial point (especially if it’s easy for them to quickly and discreetly check Slack or e-mail). It’s fruitless to search for the perfect argument when you haven’t established common ground with the other person.

What do you think? It’s hard to keep a post like this from turning into a brain dump in itself, but I’m digging into this because it’s my own personal journey to get better at these kinds of things. Comment, and let’s figure this out together.