Bad news
Scripts, receipts, and delivery tactics for handling terminations, delays, and tough team calls without losing respect
This playbook is part of The Profitable Data Engineer Framework. Click here to explore the full series.
I’m running a private workshop this Friday for data engineers who want to become the kind of leaders execs actually listen to.
You’ll also get access to the full Difficult Conversations Playbook with scripts, delivery tactics, and real examples I’ve never shared publicly.
This is for serious data engineers only. The ones who want to be trusted with hard calls, not just clean DAGs.
Links are at the end of the article. Upgrade now if that’s you.
Read time: 13 minutes
I used to think hard conversations weren’t part of my job.
Firing someone. Explaining a project delay to stakeholders. Telling a team their teammate won’t be coming back.
That was manager territory. Or product’s problem. Not mine.
I was a software engineer engineer. I built the systems. I kept things running. If something broke, I fixed it.
I thought if I stayed in my lane and delivered, I’d never have to step into the uncomfortable stuff.
But eventually, it caught up to me.
The first time I had to let someone go, I froze. I tried softening the message. I started rambling. I even threw in a compliment to make it feel less brutal.
It didn’t work.
What came out wasn’t clarity. It was confusion. And the minute the conversation ended, the real damage started.
Rumors spread. Trust eroded.
That’s when I realized something: no one teaches you how to say the hard thing. Not in school. Not in onboarding.
And definitely not in any of those internal leadership trainings we all pretend to finish.
But the people who know how to say it, the ones who can look someone in the eye and deliver the truth without flinching, are the ones who get trusted with bigger bets.
So I started building a framework. Not theory. Not corporate fluff. A real system I could use the next time I had to deliver brutal news without losing respect.
That framework became a playbook. One I now share with every engineer who wants to step up and lead for real.
Let me show you how it works.
The real job no one preps you for
Most data engineers spend years getting good at the technical stuff. We build clean pipelines. We monitor jobs. We clean up after messy stakeholders who drop five new fields into production without telling anyone.
And we do it quietly.
That’s how we’ve always earned respect, by keeping systems running and not making noise.
Note: That’s a lie. My mission with this newsletter is to teach data engineers skills no one else teaches you. I created The Data Engineering Impact Communication Playbook to help engineers translate technical wins into business outcomes and actually get credit.
But as soon as you start stepping into leadership, even informally, the rules shift.
Suddenly, the job isn’t just about building systems. It’s about communicating what those systems can and can’t do. It’s about delivering bad news when they break. And sometimes, it’s about having conversations you never thought you’d be responsible for.
Telling someone their project is delayed.
Explaining to a team why a teammate was let go.
Looking someone in the eye and ending their employment.
None of that’s in the job description. And no one teaches you how to do it. Not during onboarding. Not in the “tech lead” promotion packet. Not in your manager’s weekly standup.
So most engineers do what they know: they avoid it. They stall.
They hide behind dashboards and Slack messages. Or they try to soften the message so much that it stops making sense.
The result is confusion, gossip, and wasted time. People make up their own stories. Projects spiral. Morale tanks.
This is the part no one tells you:
When you become the person responsible for delivery, you also become the person responsible for saying the hard thing. Out loud. In public. Without losing your nerve.
But you don’t have to wing it.
There’s a way to do this with clarity, calm, and control. And that’s where the playbook comes in.
The 4-step framework I swear by
Over the past few years, I’ve delivered some version of bad news more times than I can count.
Early on, I made every mistake: rambling, apologizing too much, trying to explain everything at once. I thought if I talked long enough, I could soften the blow or make people feel better.
It did the opposite.
So I built a repeatable structure. Four steps. No filler. No fake empathy. Just clarity.