Episode 529: Zoom calls on my open floor plan and laconic staff engineer

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

1. Hi Jamison and Dave, jesters of my daily commute. I’m a *mechanical* engineer at a megacorp, and since people are people, I find most of your advice transfers pretty well.

   I’m the tech lead within a small-ish org of about 25 people. We’re in-office, and split between two locations (in a similar time zone), and multiple different projects. This means that there are a lot of Zoom meetings between locations. Lately, I’ve been having an issue with engineers deciding to take these meetings from their desks in our open office plan rather than finding a phone or conference room. I find this practice to be maddening! It’s really distracting because there will often be background noise that makes it hard to clearly understand them, and it also means that my workplace is a cacophony of people yelling into their AirPods, competing to overcome the background noise of their colleagues’ yelling into their AirPods.

   How do I make this stop and get my coworkers to hop into a phone or conference room for their meetings?! Oh btw, my manager is one of the worst offenders.

2. Listener bootersket says,

   I have 3 years of experience, all at this same company and team. My team has one staff software engineer who really knows the codebase well. When I have questions about why such and such thing is the way it is, I ask him. I’ve noticed his answers are unhelpful. Often they are short, with very little detail. I can’t tell if thinks they’re sufficient, doesn’t know how to explain himself clearly, is mad at me, or if I am just don’t know enough to understand them.

   For example, once I asked about two different variables that seemed ambiguously named and to refer to the same thing. His response was short and sweet. Quote: “almost the same thing”.

   Am I the problem? Is he? When I get responses like that I don’t feel compelled to keep asking questions in different ways because it doesn’t feel like he cares about mentoring juniors with dumb questions like myself. What do I do?