Engineers are People with Dagna Bieda
Show notes
Matty talks with Dagna Bieda, a software engineer turned career coach with over ten years of coding and more than three years of coaching, about communication, empathy and the people side of engineering. Dagna has coached clients from large companies and small ones, with two to twenty years of experience and backgrounds from self-taught to bootcamp to college. The cold open is Dagna: "It's important to realize that at the end of the day, we're people working with other people to create products for other people."
Clarify AssumptionsDagna says everyone comes to a conversation with assumptions from family and culture, and clarifying them is a key communication skill. There are two kinds: the ones you hold yourself, such as how many people and how much time a feature has, which you can state, and the ones you make about what others assume, where it's better to ask and overcommunicate, because "there are no stupid questions." Dagna recommends starting with an "I sentence" to create a safe space: "I didn't get it. Why don't you give it another go?" so the other person doesn't get defensive. Matty says that when you keep saying people just don't get it, that's on you, and Dagna says you can't control other people's actions but have an impact on how they behave, and if you think you work with idiots, people sense it.
Empathy as Understanding PrioritiesMatty asks how to operationalize empathy, recalling the 2014 devopsdays talks that were all about it and a talk title, "You've Convinced Me We Have to Collaborate Now. How the Hell Do I Deal With People?" Dagna says empathy is misunderstood as having to feel what others feel. What works in the workplace is understanding other people's priorities: an engineer wants to fix bugs, implement features, learn and have fun, while a project manager cares about business value delivered on time with no disruptions and isn't moved by refactoring without a tangible change. Dagna gives clients a worksheet to map stakeholders' priorities, and says pitching an idea by showing how it fits their priorities is "how brilliant engineering ideas get actually implemented." Matty says it's like a talk called The 5 Love Languages of DevOps: a change that makes sense to me might land differently for you, like 30 milliseconds faster matters because of an SLA.
AssertivenessDagna's own stuck point was assertive communication. Dagna is Polish and direct, and recalls a company-wide meeting of around 300 people after layoffs where Dagna tried to raise concerns with leadership with good intentions, and the boss asked why Dagna had called the entire leadership team idiots, which Dagna says was not what was said but how it came across. The lesson is that intent and how you come across can differ completely. Assertive communication means talking about your needs and wants respectfully so others feel heard. Dagna says probably every senior engineer sounds like an asshole now and then by being too direct, and that humans aren't rational beings who only look at facts.
Step Outside the ForestMatty says systems are complex and have ramifications beyond your microservice. Dagna says engineers are so deep in the woods that they see one tree, while a manager sees the health of the project, a director sees groups of trees and the C-level sees the whole forest, and stepping outside the forest is critical for career advancement: "what got you to that senior position is not going to get you past that position." Once your technical foundation is solid, soft skills matter more. Matty points to earlier episodes on principal engineers and says even engineers who became engineers to avoid people deal with people.
Limiting Beliefs and Marketing YourselfDagna says the way you think impacts how you act, and compares the subconscious to background programs running on an operating system: people around you growing up "install beliefs" with a sudo command. A common engineer belief is that their work speaks for itself, and it doesn't, since nobody sees it unless they pull the repo. Dagna says marketing your work is a communication skill, and changing a belief is possible because people keep changing. Matty adds that ops roles have the same visibility problem as a corporate lawyer, and recommends knowing how your company makes money. Dagna tells of two features: a refactor that cut a mobile build from about 4 minutes to 20 seconds, interesting but affecting two engineers, and a boring build for a huge client that got praise from the boss's boss, the sales rep and the client. A conversation with the manager showed where the impact was, so ask how features affect the business. Dagna adds that if you can't ask your manager that, run. Matty recalls not knowing for years what the bank's treasury services line of business did until reading its intranet page.
Values and InterviewsDagna's first coaching step is figuring out a client's values and the last is finding companies that share them, so you aren't reacting to job postings. Matty notes that interviews are full duplex: the candidate is also evaluating the company, and interviewers are usually untrained. Dagna says candidates who ask questions back are people Dagna wants to hire, and that confidence in your skills lets you negotiate, like the six-month sabbatical Dagna negotiated four months into a startup job, which was spent traveling across Southeast Asia.
Dagna's one recommendation is to ask more questions and put assumptions on the table. Dagna's coaching site is themindfuldev.com, with a case study video, and the two agree to do a follow-up on confidence.