Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 11: Negotiating offers and dealing with an oblivious boss

Episode Date: May 16, 2016

In episode 11, Jamison and Dave answer these questions: I’m looking for a new job. How do I negotiate to get a better offer? How do you deal constructively with a boss who is well-intentioned, reasonably nice and intelligent, but incompetent, oblivious, and who has minimal to no oversight on their work performance?

Hello, everyone, and welcome to episode 11 of the Soft Skills Engineering podcast. I'm Dave Smith. I'm Jameson Dance. And together we form Soft Skills Engineering. That was the echo. We're still working on the intro. So, Jameson, I have a joke for you today. mm-hmm what is the difference between soft skills and soft water

uh creepy salespeople will not come to your house to try and get you to buy stuff for soft skills they'll come to your email that is correct i actually didn't have a punchline i was hoping you had one okay cool that's serendipity all right we have a couple of questions from listeners today would you like to kick us off with the first one yep i'm looking for a new job how do i negotiate to get a better offer negotiation i think we also wanted to expand this one to include um negotiating to just get a raise at your current job too yeah so so is it about like eye contact maybe piercing eye contact a firm grip yeah

uh be tall is important have you ever watched the tv show 30 rock no oh man they have this corporate guy and he loves negotiating and he sets up the room so that he has the upper hand and he makes the other party sit in this chair that's lower than him and yeah it's so funny yeah traditionally being a man has also helped uh be a man step one be a be a man over six feet tall No, I think, um, negotiation is, is to me pretty scary. It's not a thing that I love or enjoy, but also it's really valuable. Um, it's, it's one of the few times in your life that you can just spend five minutes and make like thousands more. That's true. That's true. If you spend five minutes coding and make like, you're probably not going to create thousands of dollars of value for

yourself. You might, I don't know, over a few weeks do that, but salary negotiations, it's such this compressed amount of time that can benefit you so much. Well, there's only two times in my life when I can do that. One is salary negotiation and one, the other one is the craps table at Las Vegas. Yeah, that's in both cases. And similar techniques apply actually. That's right. You blow on the dice. Is that craps? I don't even know. I don't know. I'm not a gambler. There's definitely dice involved in craps okay are you that's not the spinny thing or that's no that's roulette that's roulette all right we've we've shown our naivety isn't that the name of this show yeah jameson and dave are naive about how the real world rename the podcast so i i want to

start out by saying that it is scary for you as the person as the candidate or the job seeker or the requester of the rays but you know how when you go in the wild and they say don't worry wild animals are just as scared of you as you are of them the person on the other side of the table is probably also a little nervous and maybe a lot nervous, actually. And I can say that from personal experience over the last year. So you're not the only one who's nervous.

So you are in good company when you negotiate. Why would you be nervous if you are looking to hire someone or make an offer? When I want to hire someone, people are not generally lined up. You know, I don't have my pick of 10 people. Like, ooh, I've got 10 excellent candidates and we can choose one of them.

You know, like that would be a dream. That never happens in today's market. And so you're just desperately hoping. you've identified a great person and you're desperately hoping that they will say yes when you make them the offer and that they won't be enticed by some other company who's competing for this person because you know that if they say no you're going to have to go back to the drawing board interview more people and try to find someone else great and you may not that's an interesting point that reflects the balance of power you can often feel like

the company who is interviewing you has all the power and and they can just feel free to to do what they will but they've invested a lot in you if you've arrived to the point where you're talking about money like that means they want to hire you yeah and they're interested in you and like you said that the market is so crazy it's such a uh seller's market yeah wait who's the seller the one selling their soul yeah yeah the person who is looking to to join a company it's tilted in their favor incredibly heavily right now it is um there's actually an article called salary negotiation make more money be more valued and it's got a ton of great tips but this is one of the points it makes like they they they're kind of invested in you at this point

so you you have the ability to just ask for stuff and for the most part according to this article at least for the most part um if you ask for too much then the worst they're going to do is say no they're not going to just kill the job offer yeah like they'll back they'll regress back to a previous point they won't just say all right this deal's off you're out of here yeah like unless you ask for like 10 million dollars and then maybe that reflects some uh characteristics that did not come out in the other interviews yeah turns out this guy's an evil genius who wants to take over the world and wants me to finance it. Yeah, exactly. But there's definitely some wiggle room. Actually, this article has made me a lot of money because before reading it, I didn't realize you could

just ask for more money and people would sometimes say yes. Sometimes that's literally all you have to do. They say a number and you're like, eh, can I have this much more? And then sometimes they'll be like, sure. Yep. I've been on both sides of that. If it's a big company, to you, if you ask for $10,000 more, that will have a huge effect on your life. If it's some gigantic company or even like a midsize company, that's, that's like a rounding error in their budget. Yeah. Not a ton of money. Yeah. And I can tell you, there will be conversations on the other side of that question. Like, Hmm, would we pay $10,000 more for this person? And you're like thinking about your overall staff budget, which may be $50 million, you know? And you're like,

yeah, let's do that. You know, like that's a drop in the bucket. Yeah. I, although I have had experiences that went the other way where I was interviewing people and trying to find out their salary ranges. And there have been people who just asked for something that I thought was so outside of what their skillset merited that, that it was like, well, we're just not really interested anymore. Yeah. And then on the, and so you've been on that side of the table too, where you go, look do i really want to pay this person more than anyone else on my team i haven't been responsible for the budget but it has been stuff like that where like this person would be the highest paid engineer at the company yes are they worth that yes i don't think so it would be weird so

yeah because sometimes there will be a ripple effect it's like well if i ask for ten thousand dollars more that might turn into a conversation on the other side of the table where they go okay if we do that we're gonna have to give five other people big raises to to make them you know not be outpaced by this new person sure and then suddenly it's a big budget item yeah i wasn't see that that reflects a scope i wasn't involved in i was just thinking like are they worth it not what what does this do to the rest of the team but yeah it definitely does and in some cases they were in some cases i i was a little a little put off by by it so ask for more not too much more maybe yeah how do you know

how much to ask for maybe that's a good yes uh that is a very good question and sometimes you have to feel this out by it's like a chicken and egg problem you feel it out by getting job offers and seeing where people land but those job offers are often influenced by numbers that you ceded to them and so it's like it's kind of a vicious cycle and this leads me to a point that salary can be an intensely private and personal thing and i don't mean that in the sense of keeping it secret i mean that salary means you know a dollar or a unit of currency means one thing to someone and one thing to someone else and we've talked about this on the show before um but it'll depend a lot on your needs you know like well i've got a family or i don't have a family i have a mortgage

or i don't have a mortgage i have a yacht that needs payments or i don't have a yacht that needs payments yes and it's like in your case yes in my case my yacht isn't it's very expensive and beautiful yeah it doesn't pay for itself that brazilian hardwood does not maintain itself let me tell you constant scrubbing um anyway so uh you know when i come at a negotiation from my side as like a job seeker and someone else comes in the negotiation they're coming from very different places and so the employer wants to know where are you coming from what are your needs and so they'll often ask you the the question that i think many developers don't want to answer which is well how much are you making now yeah i've seen so much advice that

says never be the first person to say a number. And it's often centered around that. Like when they ask you, how much do you make? Then you, you like raise your hackles and like stand up and get big. Like you're trying to scare off a bear and you just shout out, doesn't matter. I would like to make $400,000 and like intimidate your way to, to more money. Which have you ever answered that question? How much do you make? Uh, the first real job I ever got. Yes. I was making $12 an hour before that as an hourly employee. And they were like, well, how much, how much are you looking to make? And I said, well, I've made $12 an hour. Let's see times 40 hours a week. Cause I'd be working full-time times like 50 weeks a year. That's I think like $24,000 or something

like that's, but maybe a little more than that. So would you give me like 40 grand? And, um, again, in the Jameson and Dave are so naive theme of the podcast, they kind of laughed at me and set a number higher than that because that's not that wasn't how much developers even even super entry-level developers made uh so i have only this was only five years ago right yeah yeah it wasn't very long ago um and it didn't hurt me because people were nice but it could have like they could have said all right we'll pay you twenty five thousand dollars and then that would haunt you for the rest of your career until a benevolent employer would come along and say you know what you're like half underpaid you know or until i had a frightening and angering realization yeah

which again goes back to your point about being armed with knowledge if you know generally about how much developers make even at different companies than you it'll it'll correct for things like that where you make half i mean every company has different salary ranges but but you should be able to get an idea of like this is by far the lowest amount of money that anyone i talk two makes. That's bad. And I could easily get more than that by just asking for it. I have a friend who's been working for about 15 years and he started out at a job in a geography that was not really known for technology. And so as a result, there was not a big job market, which means there was a lot of developers hoping to work there, but not a lot of jobs to take.

And as a result, they paid less just generally. And so he started a job under market, under what you said even a minute ago. And then he worked there for a couple of years and decided, I want to move to a different city that has a thriving tech sector. And he moved. And then he answered the question, how much are you making? And he told them and they were like, sweet, we'll give you a 10% raise and it'll be awesome for you. But he was still like 20 or 30% under market on his salary. So it followed him. And even to this day, he was just telling me last week, he's like, I'm still plagued by that. 15 years later, I'm still not where I want to be salary wise. Now he's doing fine. Don't get me wrong, but he's low. And he thinks he would have been

hire had his first job been a better pay or if he had handled that situation and asked for more. Yeah. I think maybe the, the, the reason behind why people ask that question is because employers are incentivized to pay you the minimum amount they can possibly pay you to get you to work there. And some people have different personal philosophies. Um, and I have been lucky enough to work with some of those people where they, they actually genuinely want to pay people what they're worth, but some people are just like, I'll pay you a dollar more than you want, and then you'll be happy and you'll still come work here and it'll save me money yep uh so so what do you do in that case well you because it's an employee's market you don't have to go work

there i think is the best thing right yeah right now yeah until the inevitable um correction yeah the until the what is it the unix timestamp overflow bug that's gonna destroy the earth still a few decades away but it's coming and then it'll be about who can use their abacus the best not who can build the the best website i'm an abacus engineer yep um no i really don't know what to do because i think at the end of the day there's constraints and you have to operate within those constraints but sometimes you don't even know what they are um maybe you could ask the question like how do you compensate people how do you choose people's salaries that's a great question to ask as a as an interview

candidate? Sure. Like how do you decide how much to pay someone? Another thing we haven't talked about is just the role of confidence in this. And this is something I am not great at. I say the word um too much to project an enormous amount of confidence. But a lot of just negotiation and making more money is just believing that you deserve it. And I think that comes from being informed and knowing what other people are making and what you could make yeah yeah and then if you just feel like this is what this is what i like to make and i think i'm worth it then um people will respond better to that as long as it doesn't pass yes the bounds of good taste i guess yes good taste and if you are if you have actual data like there's confidence and then there's false

confidence you know and you're like i guess cockiness you know and you're like well i should make a ton of money because i'm awesome you know and then there's i should make more because the market currently governs this price and i think that the price should be higher for me and here's some data points to support that you know yeah and i've seen people on both sides of that equation and and i think honestly management responds pretty negatively when you just show up and say well i want to make this much money and if you don't have a reason for why it kind of makes you look bad a little bit yeah i i think the best data point is another job offer for that much money or similar amount of money and that's that's the strongest negotiating position i think when you

say like here's what i like to make and this other company would pay me that and that i mean that's great yeah and and we're in a point where that shouldn't be crazy hard to get yeah but this brings us this opens up a small can of worms that we've dealt with a little bit on a previous episode where should you go and fish for an offer that you have no intention of accepting just for the purpose of holding that in your manager's face to say here's my data point you talk this is when you're talking about asking for a raise yeah exactly getting a different job right yeah exactly yeah um maybe i'm i'm squarely in the no camp for this i think uh if you're just interviewing for the sole sake of getting an offer so that you can show it to your boss

i think that you are that's going to hurt you in the long run um you're going to waste the other company's time and those interviewers and then you're going to look a little bit uh let's say unloyal to your current employer um but you know if you if you show up and say i want to raise and i have data points to support that i'm worth this much that's different than saying i got this job offer and i'm going to take it unless you pay me more i i think maybe most people aren't quite on the end of the spectrum where they're just like sociopaths that have no intention of ever joining this other company they just interview there to to use them as a stick to beat their current company up i i've seen this happen a fair amount of times where people have genuinely interviewed

been interested and then they go back to tell their company they're leaving and the other company's like wait a minute like you're worth this much to stay and then people change their minds i think that's totally fair i don't think yeah i mean loyalty to a company is good but companies will take advantage of that loyalty to your detriment a lot of that's true so i don't think you have any special duty to like not ask for more money or or not no no see if there's somewhere better somewhere i agree i agree i love dwight shroot from the office he says i am a loyal employee and i will work wherever loyalty is valued the most yeah i like it um so i want to tell one story of how i accidentally got a raise that again reflects jameson is naive he works in

a magical world where people are nice. Um, at a, at a job I'd been there a few years and I was already making what I would consider to be pretty good money. Um, it wasn't outrageous. It wasn't bad. It felt, I was pretty happy with what I made, but I bought a house and this looming mortgage just like over my head for 30 years. It wasn't a super expensive house. It wasn't a house I couldn't afford. It was just this fact that now you have to pay this forever. Uh, it just started stressing me out. So I was planning on doing some contract work on the side to just earn a little more money and save some more money. And I went to talk to my boss about it just to make sure like, Hey, this isn't going to affect my work performance, but I'm thinking about doing

this. Like, are you, are you okay with this? And he was like, uh, why don't I just pay you more money to have you not do that and then you don't have to work outside of work you just work during work and make so you didn't even have to go get an offer you just said i'm thinking about contracting yeah yeah uh and and that worked out it achieved the aims i meant to achieve but it definitely didn't start as a traditional i feel like i deserve more money here's here are all the data points about it um that was just because i worked with someone who was generous and and yeah do you have any stories about um going in to ask for a raise dave yeah uh i i do and i spent a fair bit of time at a medium-sized company of about 700 people that got bought by a large company of like

70 000 people or something and it was very stark difference in how that would operate like when i was when it was a smaller company, I could go in and say, I actually did go in a couple times, I want to raise and they would say, Okay, we'll think about it. And then they would they delivered, you know, like a couple months later or something, they'd be like, Alright, here's the raise you asked for, we think you're worth it. And here it is. And then after we got acquired by that bigger company, the policies just got so much stricter. And I could tell that it was a side effect of having had so many people in the company that occasionally people abused the system. So instead of punishing the people who abused the system they locked down the system you know and it was

like no we don't give raises out of cycle and we only give raises up to x percent and that is absolutely non-negotiable and so i think it depends a lot on your employer and the policies that are in place there yep and and how much of a jerk prior people have been sure yeah yeah some places will have regular raises some places will just never pay you more money unless you ask for it yep um so i question answered well no let's summarize do you want to give us a summary of what we talked about oh i suck at the summaries how about you do it okay i'll try so you can ask for more money yep most of the time it's easier to ask for more money if you have information both about what other people in similar situations are making and especially if you have competing job

offers. Um, that's, that's the strongest way to ask for a raise. Uh, if you ask for too much, it might be harmful to that job offer or that, that employment. Uh, but I think asking for a reasonable amount will never be harmful. And if it is, then you probably don't want to work there anyways. Yeah, probably not. And then I will say this from my experience doing these negotiations, um, it's very rare that you can have a lot of back and forth. Like, you know, when you're Buying a house, sometimes you can make an offer, counteroffer, offer, counteroffer. Okay, deal, right? With salary negotiations, it's more like offer, counteroffer, done.

You know, you kind of don't have a lot of shots to like narrow in on a price you can agree on. Usually it's like one and done. Here's my paper offer. I make one, you know, the employer gives me a paper offer. I turn around and say, I want this. And then they either say yes or no. And that's like the end of the negotiation. I've never seen it go like back and forth, except for like very specialized senior positions.

yeah that's that's been my experience both in uh offers to me and also ones that i've participated in hiring other people good point there's probably a ton more we could say about this but there is just i'll include the link to this blog post in the show notes um it's really good and it has some different perspectives from what we said great do you want to ask our or read our second question yes this question is how do you deal constructively with a boss who is well intentioned, reasonably nice and intelligent, but incompetent, oblivious, and who has minimal to no oversight on their work performance. That sounds like my dream job. I want to be incompetent, oblivious, and have no oversight. Just chill. And nice and well-intentioned.

Yeah. That's probably me. Okay. So have you heard of the null hypothesis in like the scientific method or statistics or things like that? I've heard the word used when smart people are arguing about something and then I always forget what it is. I'm going to butcher the definition, but it's basically like assume that like the default is happening or is true or something like that. I'm going to say that this boss to me sounds like the null boss.

They don't sound actively bad or actively harmful or evil. It sounds like they're kind of just a blob. they sit there they don't do great things they don't do bad things and it could be so much worse than that that that does not sound that horrible to me honestly um you could have a boss that actively dislikes you or plays political games or yeah or or is is like cracking the whip about deadlines or i mean there are plenty of bad things that a boss can do to harm you so the fact that they're just, to me, it sounds like they're not doing good things. That's, I mean, it could be better, but in the grand scale of bosses, this doesn't sound horrible. Yeah. So I think the core

problem here might be an expectations mismatch where you expected a boss to be like an awesome mentor, someone to guide you and hold your hand through things. And I don't mean that in a condescending way. I mean that in the most pandering way possible. Just kidding. But like, you know, maybe you expected to have a boss. And I expected this when I got out of college, started my first job. I expected my boss to be this like inspirational figure in my life who could guide me and show me all these things to do and open my eyes to the world of software development. And I have literally never had that in 15 years. Instead, I would say that my bosses have been for better pretty hands-off with me and they've let me sink or swim on my own

and very rarely have i ever thought oh my boss is actually harming me right now yeah another thing is um sometimes a lot of what your boss does doesn't involve you they have they have a lot of stuff to do. And, uh, sometimes it can be hard to, to look at your interactions with them and just assume that's, this is their only responsibility and they're not doing it great. So they're not, they're not a good boss, but I would wager that there are a lot of things going on besides just your interactions with them that, I mean, do you know what their job involves and what their responsibilities are and what they're doing to fulfill those? That is a very good question like a large part of managing in some organizations is is like air quotes managing up

right where you kind of communicate expectations to the to the people that are in charge of you and then you kind of protect your team from stuff that comes down from the the higher ups and it's kind of like a shield almost yes and so in that case your role is to to stop information right you're protecting and that's hard to see working under a boss like that you don't see all the meetings that they don't call you into or or the hard phone calls or the you know yeah and and they this boss could very well not be doing any of that they could be terrible at their job but the the point is there could be a lot of stuff going on that you aren't aware of the best boss i ever had uh used a term to describe himself and i want i know this is a family-friendly show so i'm gonna

modify the term a little bit but he called himself a crap umbrella and his he felt like his main duty was to stand up and prevent the rest of the organization from raining crap down on his team and so he was constantly in meetings with other organizations and with his own higher-ups and just deflecting garbage like you know mandated process changes and organizational changes and other things he would just deflect them or um or modify them or negotiate them so that they would be attractive when they finally got down to us and he did a wonderful job and paid a huge personal price to do that now this was a big company so there's going to be you know a certain amount of dysfunction that comes along with an organization that size but boy he did a fantastic

job and even though i worked for a large company i felt like i worked for a small nimble fun and energetic startup interesting that's really cool but he never did you know that though It took me a couple of years before I realized it. And then he started telling me about some of the stuff because I started asking and it was awesome. Yeah. Yeah. I think a lot of this comes from the developer lore that stems from like the pointy haired boss in Tilbert where managers are clueless, they're useless, they're dead weight. And I actually thought that for a while. I actually lobbied to change the company culture or the company structure in a place where I worked to a flat culture purely because I was like, I'm smart.

No one can tell me what to do. And it took me a while to learn that good managers actually can be a huge benefit, even if I didn't directly see what they were doing. Absolutely. I feel like, okay, I feel like I'm taking the boss's side too much. Yeah, I was just thinking that. Let's flip the table now. Yep. And let's say that maybe this boss really is incompetent and bad.

how do you remedy that situation um one thing you can do is it's not super helpful in the current situation but it can help for later which is you can learn from both positive examples like the the wise awesome mentor figure that you talked about wanting but you can also learn from negative examples um if you just kind of look at things that the boss is doing and you notice that they have a negative effect on your work or on the team's work um that can just be a little thing you file away like don't don't do that and that's a really good idea maybe think about what you would do instead if you're in that case so it's kind of like using it as as practice or to learn that's great yeah that's great i mean you can in even in the worst situation you can learn a lot i think

yep um i think the next thing i would do is i would make a list what do i expect from my boss I'd write them down and then for each item on that list. Let's say I come up with five things I would write then write down next to them Do is this something i'm willing to talk to my boss about and actually ask them to change? If they're not meeting that expectation Actually, that's the implied second question is are they actually doing these things? And then for the ones that they aren't you've got to ask yourself. Am I willing to talk to them? And if you are and I think in many cases you probably should be because having an expectations

management session with someone is a great way to establish a working relationship that is highly functional. And so I would then take that list to my boss and say, I have expectations for my boss. And I want to talk to you about them to see if they're reasonable expectations. And then I would sit down, read them all out to them and say, here you go. What do you think? Are these reasonable? And are these roles you'd be willing to fill? And let your boss speak for him or herself. Don't just assume that they're incompetent. Maybe your boss goes, oh, there's someone else in the organization that's supposed to do that and they're not i'll follow up and make sure that they're doing that for you or they might say yeah you're right i've been neglectful

in my duties here and i'm i'm gonna fix it but they can't fix it if you can't tell them sure well that's not strictly true they could probably fix it but you know it can certainly help yeah um of course sorry i didn't mean to cut you off but if one of your expectations is that they should be smart and competent yeah that's not really specific enough you know you need to like go a little more detailed well i was gonna say also if uh that the way that you described responding to feedback is the way i think a good boss would respond to feedback that's a good point but if they're not right if they like get upset at you or feel like you're in encroaching on their territory or playing some games with them or

trying to get them in trouble or something uh that's that's gonna be tricky you you won't be able to tell them, Hey, I wish you did this better. If, if that makes them mad at you or I don't know. Yeah, no, it's true. And there is, there is a line, right? I mean, there's only so much you can do, but I think you owe it to them to tell them your expectations and then the ball's in their court. If they choose to reject that, then that's on them, but you have to at least give them a chance. I think. Yeah. While we were talking about this question before the show, Dave, you also brought up something about how, um, they may not be just, they just might not be an experienced manager of software people or of a software organization you want to talk more

about that yeah sure not all software developer jobs are for companies that are optimized for software development like google clearly is a company whose main purpose is to make an environment where software developers can create software product but there's a lot of companies where software developers work and are happily employed but they are not the companies are not optimized for software development. They are optimized for some other thing. And software development is an auxiliary function to support that other thing. You know, like let's say you're a marketing firm and you have software developers who help build things to help the marketing stuff, but they aren't actually the core product that's being sold. Well, your whole company structure is not

going to be set up for those developers, right? And you know, maybe you're an agency who constantly starts projects over and you don't really have long-term mentorship for software developers because you're contracting people out and the list goes on and on and so if you're expecting a google-like culture where software developers are the beginning and end of the whole company you might be disappointed when you go to work for a company that's not like that yeah um i i think i guess you already kind of talked about this but one one approach you could take is demonstrating i mean clearly there's some things that you would like this person to do differently to make you

happier um i think if you can approach it in a way that will make their lives better that might be a good way to sell it to them like when you talk about people who are whose main responsibility is to manage software developers or software development i i think they're used to sitting down and thinking what can i do to improve things and to make my team more efficient and make things better um and and if you can ask those questions yourself and then sell them as benefits to this to this boss that might be easier than just say like it really bothers me when you chew with your mouth open or uh or when you when you come tap on my shoulder it makes me angry or something like if you say yeah when a better way to work would be this

because that'll help me get more stuff done and i'll work faster and we'll be able to ship more things. Focusing on outcomes, I think. Yeah. You have to do a little bit of sales maybe if you're not dealing with someone who will see the benefits kind of implicitly. Everything we've said so far assumes one thing. And I'm going to keep making this assumption for my next statement. And that is that your boss is not engaging in illegal or super harmful activities like sexual harassment or discrimination or stalking you at night or something. So let's just put that aside because to deal with that i just it's totally different um but let i think one thing under no circumstances should you ever engage in gossip about this boss the last thing you want to do is start talking

about them behind their back and saying a bunch of negative stuff about them to your peers this has a poisoning effect on teams and it will be the last thing you want to do if you actually want the situation to improve and then especially if the boss finds out that you have been poisoning the so to speak about them they'll be much less likely to uh engage with you and work on the situation in fact they might just be so upset with you that they would be even less uh involved in your work they might just completely pull away so i've definitely done that before actually yeah i think we all have i've done it too it's but it can be so detrimental i mean sometimes you just need to vent though right if you're so that's right you've got to find someone

off the team or maybe a friend or somewhere else you just can't vent like that to your teammates or maybe you have a mentor who has promised you confidentiality at the company and that that's part of their job then then maybe or maybe an hr person or something but but yeah uh nope not to them um yeah that's another episode but probably not to them okay bad idea um when i want to vent I have people in my life that are not at work that I vent to, not my coworkers. I don't know. I feel like I've fomented rebellion before and then it's made my life better. Probably not, not the classiest or most mature way to handle things, but. Did it result in someone being terminated?

Yes. And yeah, it does. Did you feel bad about the way it went down? I definitely feel bad about it, but it, it solved my problem. I don't know. I feel like you're taking a very like authority. You're, you're kind of siding with authority on this one where you're saying it'll always be bad. I, I, well, that's good. I mean, maybe I am, maybe I'm being a little bit too extreme, but, um, it has potential for being so bad so often that I avoid it as a matter of course yeah that's fair well um on that awesome note yeah we need to say one more thing i think that i don't want to end in conflict dave um okay how about this um i've got a i've got a thought on

it i was just reviewing my notes here so i spent a good probably 10 years as a software developer thinking that management only had one job and that was to pamper me and i thought they know nothing about my job. They couldn't possibly understand my work or me. Their job is just to make sure I'm comfortable. And I didn't really spend a lot of time thinking about what could I do to make their job better? And when it comes to management, I think that's a pretty common mentality. We don't think of it as a two-way street. Like my manager should know everything and should do all the things I need and then they don't have needs, you know? But if you can do things to try to make your manager's job easier or nicer or give them things that you know they

want, I think that that can help the relationship. And you might be surprised to find that when they open up to you or become a little bit more, let's say, competent suddenly or less oblivious because you're giving them some of their needs. Yeah. Yeah. That's a good point. I think that is kind of what I was trying to say earlier. Say a thing you dislike is your manager emails you twice a day to ask for like a status report it's really annoying it bugs you it interrupts you um maybe the reason they're doing that is because someone is just breathing down their neck and like really anxious to find out what's going on in their project and the way they try and do that is to just ask you if you can identify the underlying need like like you kind of said

dave then there might be an easier way to resolve that that'll still help them but be less interested for you could be cool it's a hard one answer if none of those works the default answer to any of these questions is always quit and get a different job just assume that that's a good point that is implied in every answer we give you can always find a different job which we can say because it's such an employee's market right now until that changes and then and and that is that is i think the last resort and if you find you just can't work with this boss anymore then you can leave yep and that kind of sucks but so be it maybe not maybe it'll give you an opportunity to negotiate and obtain a higher salary oh by listening to our handy tips in the first question

oh man it's like we planned that yep question sort of answered done done great well dave how can people find out more about us the best way to find out more is to visit our twitter page at softskillseng. Follow us there. Send us a direct message if you have a question that you'd like us to answer. And we would love to hear from you.

Yep. Oh, and subscribe on iTunes or Pocket Casts or wherever it is that you consume your podcasts. Make sure to subscribe. Please do. You probably already did

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and then write a little blurb to tell us how we're doing oh that reminds me we didn't even talk about anchoring at all what's that uh this is where if you just say a number it skews any numbers after that towards it so if you walk supposedly you you like kick the door open walk in and say there are a million mosquitoes outside today and then you sit down to talk about salary the offers will be higher than if you didn't say that or if you said i saw one cat the other day or something like that um so you missed an opportunity to use anchoring there to bias the ratings if you had said uh there are billions trillions uncountable numbers of stars in the sky but the itunes ratings only go up to five so just pick whatever number you think is good

oh my gosh or you could just hire a mentalist to do all of the negotiating for you i you know thousands of people just tuned out when we said how can people learn more about the show and they missed this gem. I will edit it. I'll make it twice as loud. Great. Well, with that, uh, I'm skeptical if that actually works or not, but I've read it in a pop psychology book, so it must be true. Malcolm Gladwell told a good story about it. So I have faith. Must be true. Yeah. Cool. Well, we'll see you next week. Thanks everybody. See ya.