Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 115: Sharing Your Salary When You Leave and Hiring Decisions Overruled

Episode Date: July 10, 2018

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Let say you accepted an offer from another company and you turned in your 2 weeks notice. If your current employer ask you how much you will be making at your new place, should you tell them? Recently I was on a panel of people hiring for my company. We were hiring for several positions and were given a fixed headcount. When it came down to the last spot we interviewed two people, one of which was a referral from someone higher up in the company. This person did terribly on the interview and we as a panel decided that we would offer the position to the other person, who was the strongest of all the interviewees. And all was fine until several days later when we received an email from HR showing the full list of people to be hired, and lo and behold, the list contained all the people we chose, plus one extra person, the referral person. Somehow there was magically more headcount for this person and now he is being hired. I’m not really sure how to feel about this. Because now we have a new person that is going to enter the company and I feel if he doesn’t perform well it will reflect badly on me and the panel that were involved in hiring. Also I am confused at this clear example of nepotism happening in my company. Should I bring this up with someone in the company? I’m leaning towards no but I am also confused and annoyed at what happened.

It takes more than great simulated annealing skills to be a great engineer. This is Soft Skills Engineering, episode 114. Oops, this is actually episode 115. But on with the show. I'm your host, Dave Smith. I'm your host, Jameson Dance. Soft Skills Engineering is a weekly advice show for software engineers about non-technical subjects that accompany engineering.

They, like, take engineering to the dance. You put a little spin on it, and I like that. I also just like the concept of simulated annealing because it's kind of just like flail about a little bit when you get stuck and maybe you'll find a better answer. Sometimes I try that in my code. I'm just like, I don't know what to do here. And then I like mash on a keyboard and it hasn't worked yet, but that doesn't mean it won't. If you had a good enough editor with good enough support for a type system, maybe it just kind of squint and like massage your code into something that type checks. Yeah.

and then yeah i mean if it passes it i mean that is step one right yeah pass the type check or if you do it in a function that never gets called in a dynamic language then that will also work yes just write code that doesn't get used and then you can you can try out a simulated annealing yeah crank that code out all right that's not what this show is about no we uh we also want to thank our patrons thank you so much to the people who support us on patreon these people are supporting at the prodigious level that gets them thanked every week. Nick Cantor, Dimitro and Nianila, David Jackson, Chris Fitkin, Sean Clayton, and Dustin Coates,

thank you so much. And thank you to all the other people who have supported us in the past and who are continuing to support us now. It really makes a big difference. It makes us feel better about doing the show too. The money goes to make the show better, but also it kind of validates us.

Sad, I guess. But I don't know. It's true. i mean my self-confidence it really needs this that's all they have tongue in cheek it's it feels nice to feel like people appreciate this show enough to contribute financially in some way so thank you i wasn't i actually i actually wasn't joking i feel great thursday well i don't know if people know this but here's a little inside scoop on the podcast we record on thursdays so now you know if you sneak your question in before thursday morning well this let us get hacked somehow is

that like one of your security questions yeah anyway i always feel great after recording the show mostly because i get to spend an hour oh i feel great too for the inverse reason of getting to spend an hour with you oh all right anyways let's get on with this thing let's stroke your ego and let's do the thing i'll read the first question this is from a listener named trollwa who said i would know how to pronounce this because i'm a big old weeaboo which is not true and i don't know if i'm flattered or offended but anyways let's say you accepted an offer from another company and you turned in your two weeks notice if your current employer asks how much you will be making at your new place should you tell them well only if you're making

more it uh i feel like this is the perfect opportunity to tell them because what could go wrong right like if if the number is astronomically large compared to what they were paying you then they you get to see the shocked look on their face and it's like you know what it's like it's like those stupid romantic comedies where there's like the hot woman who is just wearing glasses so she is somehow not hot and then she like takes her glasses off and gets transformed and suddenly everyone's like she is super hot no way it's like that you're like you know what i am worth this much i was worth this much the whole time and then you just like saunter off you get to star in your own romantic comedy that's what i'm saying

and that would feel pretty great that would feel empowering i would love it if matthew mcconaughey fell in love with me and tried to woo me but only after your glasses came off only yeah i do wear glasses um and you know what my hair is long enough that sometimes i put it in a ponytail and i think traditionally you're supposed to like pull the hair out of the ponytail and you shake it around and i could do that i could do both of those actions take out my glasses take out my ponytail and then logically matthew mcconaughey is the third thing uh yeah so that sounds amazing yeah i don't know i don't know how you do it though do you just like send an email like by the way i don't make this much well well in this question troll what says

if your company if your employer asks should you tell them so it's easy you just write a little note on a piece of paper and slide it across the desk it's like inverse negotiation you're like i don't even need to negotiate with you because i'm already leaving yeah do you think they're asking to try and see if they can counter it good there's a good chance of that i think i think they probably would have said that if that was the case i think they're just morbidly curious about how badly they're underpaying their engineers i mean if i i've been in this situation and i've desperately wanted to ask but i've never actually asked because it just seems so desperate you know it's like like oh you're leaving do you mind if i ask how much they're paying you you know i mean

I just want to know so bad yeah but I've never done it I've always been too much of a coward I've definitely never done it as a representative of the company I don't think I've even done it when co-workers left to go to different jobs I think I kind of didn't want to know because I didn't want to know if it was more and then feel sad yeah because the next question you got to ask is well how much were you making here and then you feel sad again yeah I don't know you should just tell them I don't think there's a downside to it no I don't think so well you could you could make up anything you want to quadruple that number i have a story kind of along those lines a long time ago i had a co-worker who had quit and was in the same situation two weeks notice

turned in hr exit interviews coming up and he comes to me and a few of my co-workers and says okay my hr exit interview is coming up what do you want me to say and we were like look just tell hr that the only reason you're leaving is because you don't make enough money and you just need to make more money and if only they would pay you more money you would have stayed and boy you better be careful because you might lose a bunch more engineers if you don't pay them more money he was like he was like okay guys whatever i'll do it like he no skin off his back so he did it he came back from his hr interview and he said i sang like a canary and sure enough within a couple of months we got a across the board salary increase for all

engineers um and i know i know that it was related to his hr exit interview so you could be a hero this is your chance what an expensive interview yeah that's a very expensive interview yeah yeah it could have a positive effect on the company it could at least even if it doesn't change how much they pay people it could at least tell them like they were getting a crazy deal or uh maybe they're fine really underpaying people but at least they know for sure that they do i i don't know if i want to say this because i think it reflects poorly on me as a interviewee i don't know maybe edit this out but i went to go interview at a company i had a lot of questions and then i kind of got the inside scoop on some of those questions from an engineer that worked there

and i also looked up on glassdoor how much they paid their engineers on average and it was shockingly low and i told i didn't take the job and i told the engineer there you are so underpaid oh man you're underpaid um i think they asked me they were like what do you think about the pay ranges that you've seen here and i was like they are pretty low like how bad are we talking here uh it was like it was like 30 40 percent market it was really bad i don't know what happened with that i think that i feel like that that employee was slightly disgruntled anyways so maybe it didn't i don't know i just feel like it could be breaking this interviewing code of like i interviewed there and then i made their lives worse because either this person quit or they

went and asked for more money and were unhappy about how much money they never let james an interview at your company he'll come in like a wrecking ball and leave you in ruins yeah there's this there's this portuguese phrase that translates to burn your film like did i burn my film did i did i ruin my film of like by telling people that i will ruin their company if they interview me is that is that like burning bridges before you've crossed them is that kind of it's like uh giving yourself a bad reputation or getting a bad reputation okay but that's not really the situation we're in here i mean this is i'm leaving i've got an offer to go somewhere else my employer wants to know how much i just tell him sounds fine no yeah i'm struggling to find

a downside even though i've never done this so i'm just presuming that it would be fine i mean they know they know it's going to be more they're only trying to find out how much higher because and that's not because of some fundamental economic law it's just that the current state of the industry is you leave job and you get a pay raise albeit it might be small it might be large yeah you know it's just kind of the convention i think there are there are probably jobs that are the exception to that if they're very mission driven you might take a pay cut to go work on something you love but if yeah in general i think people assume when developers switch jobs they generally get a raise which might be why they switch jobs so often hmm yeah i don't know it

sounds good to me question answered yeah i think all right do you want to read our next question dave you bet let's see here okay this is a good one this is a little bit of a long question i'm gonna go ahead and read it all this comes from an anonymous listener recently i was on a panel of people hiring for my company we were hiring for several positions and were given a fixed head count when it came down to the last spot we interviewed two people one of which was a referral from someone higher up in the company this person did terrible on the interview and we as a panel decided that we would offer the position to the other person who was the strongest of all the interviewees and all was fine until several days later when we received an email from

hr by the way just i'm going to insert here have you ever heard a good story that says like you received an email from hr like does that ever go well he thinks the next thing hr and part of me thinks well maybe they shouldn't make people miserable so much if they don't want people to say stuff like that about them it's their own fault okay back to the question and all was fine until several days later when we received an email from hr showing the full list of people to be hired and lo and behold the list contained all the people we chose plus one extra person the referral person somehow there was magically more headcount for this person and now he is being hired i'm not really sure how to feel about this because now we have a new person that is going to enter the

company and i feel if he doesn't perform well it will reflect badly on me and the panel that were involved in hiring also i'm confused at this clear example of nepotism happening in my company should i bring this up with someone in the company i'm leaning towards no but i'm also confused and annoyed at what happened jameson give me the thoughtful hmm i'm trying to avoid doing that no what if i say but it's your hallmark instead it's just not the same just like an alien noise that people don't make uh it feels similar to how if someone can't get a raise and then they say i will quit to get a raise at a different company suddenly they can get a raise like there's there are these hard there are these constraints that are always flexible in the right

situation and for the right person and it seems bad that it happened this way including including basic qualifications to be able to do the job yeah i don't know if the ceo wants someone hired they're probably going to get hired even if they are not qualified for the job unfortunately yeah So you're saying nepotism is everywhere. There's nothing you can do to avoid it. There's nothing you can do to give up. Try and get your own cousins hired. Just lean into it.

Yep. That's the way it works here, eh? Or try to always work for a company where your uncle is the CEO. I have children. I would like it if they made money. Can we find something for a five-year-old to do? This is no ordinary five-year-old. This five-year-old is special because she's related to me.

she's uniquely qualified for this position in that i will manage her money for her that she earns from this child labor there's something very special about this five-year-old she's actually six oh it's one of those little league world series type of situations oh man this is really frustrating i have been in the situation before where i've said no and the person still gets hired and you know it happens and i i have seen it happen multiple times where i felt like i made a pretty good case for no and then they get hired anyway and you know sometimes it works out and often it doesn't but as a good citizen of your company you need to not torpedo this person like the best thing you can do at this point is to embrace the decision try

your best to make it work because uh all you're gonna do if you fight i mean okay this is a nuanced thing like i'm trying to express that for the for the candidate's sake the person getting hired you should do your best to support them and make try to make them successful but for the process's sake you should throw a hissy fit and really try to get this fixed you know because i don't think it's right that your company has expressed that there are basic qualifications for the job unless you happen to be related to someone or have a good friendship with someone that somehow exempts you from meeting this bar i think that's unacceptable what do you think I agree. That's bonkers. I haven't been in this particular situation where I said no explicitly and someone else and there was strong consensus and then that was overruled. I've been in a situation where I wasn't asked and I feel like I would have said no, but that's like like you interview or like you weren't even on the interview.

one of them i was sick and and so i wasn't there another one it was a weird situation where they they kind of went through a different interview process but ended up working um working with developers i don't think i've ever been in a situation where the entire panel said no and they still and then the person was hired anyway i've been the sole dissenting voice and i've even been one of maybe two dissenting voices out of like five total but i've never had it be like unanimously no and then in they come that's that does seem really weird to me you will say no to people that could have been good employees i think that happens and those people probably don't stick out in your mind as much as the people you said no to that ended up working there anyways

and struggled a lot so it's not it's not impossible that they'll be good at their job but i think i think you need to separate the question of will this person do a good job now that they're hired from what's the point of having an interview panel if you're going to ignore their advice especially if it's unanimous so i don't know maybe don't don't go to their manager and say i'm pretty sure this person's going to suck at their job or whatever but you should definitely i agree you should definitely raise the issue of we all said no why does this person work here it looks really bad if they're related to this high muckety muck yeah and i and i think you can like that separation you can even do this without calling out the individual and say hey i'm not

here to tank this person's career i'm here to make sure that the next time this happens that we meet our hiring bar instead of meeting some secret hiring bar like i don't want to work at a place like that i think you're really wise to separate those two things yeah and i don't think you'll be blamed if this person doesn't perform well i bet there are people that feel similar to you i bet people that see this feel bad i mean no no one could look at this and feel like this is a great situation i'm glad it worked out this way they're not qualified everyone thinks they're not qualified because they're related to someone importantly got hired sounds good i i approve of that so well if you put it that way clearly that's just the kind of values driven high

performing organization i want to work for the value is how much dna do you share with me transparency is key i mean clearly someone who made this decision wasn't thinking in those terms because it looks so bad like if you laid it out on the table they would say oh that's not the situation at all this thing this person brings unique skills that the other engineers didn't recognize or didn't appreciate that skills that are important for the role that i've hired them for if that's true then then you need to train your interviewers if they're all saying no to someone who's a really good fit for the job then you need to change what they're looking for absolutely and that that's where i think you need to focus your energy now is fixing this process

and frankly i would call out the leader who made this decision and say you made this decision what's the point of having us interview and what criteria are you actually assessing for you know because maybe we're not assessing for the right things which is definitely not the case in this situation but you know would you be that blunt about it uh for someone who to make a move like this to completely ignore the recommendation of the entire interviewing panel i think blunt is just what the doctor ordered yeah because i think i think subtlety might elude this person that's a good point i feel like i've seen that just in life in general that i think a lot about the subtleties of situations and how people are thinking and have try and have a lot of empathy

and stuff and i've encountered people that just do not give a crap at all and hints because they don't give a crap a hint doesn't penetrate they don't notice it or if they do notice it they don't care yep yeah so that may be the case here well that sounds scary but i agree it sounds like the right thing to do i just have a hard time imagining someone who's thoughtful and empathetic and really concerned doing something like this you know yeah and hey you know giving them the benefit of the doubt maybe it was a clerical error you know maybe maybe the spreadsheet where you typed in your recommendation got swizzled and you know they just mixed up the row with someone else and you know in they come the thing about having one extra head count that stuff's all i mean someone someone

decides at the end of the day how many of those they get like someone can match that number either way it is weird that it went to the person you didn't want to hire though well you know another way that this could have happened is they said okay we have four headcount we are uh interviewing for the four we've got a sorted list of candidates how they performed we have this fifth candidate who came in at the bottom and someone was like okay well let's just have a fifth headcount you know they were last but that doesn't mean they were bad you know maybe they're saying that their company is so talented that even people that are not talented enough to work at the company are more talented and are still somehow talented enough to work at the company like the bar is so high

that if you don't meet the bar the fact that you even tried means you met the bar if you don't meet the bar the bar will come and meet you and lift you you just hold on to that bar and it'll carry you into the clouds i this is a tangent but i i have negative feelings about the idea of like a talent level and a bar that you have to meet. And I feel like that does a disservice to people that grow and learn. And you're maybe identifying people that fit some biases that you might have that look like skill instead of people that could actually do the job well. But I think in this case, I don't know, everyone's saying no, it's just a pretty strong signal that it's not a good fit, or your interviewing process is really wrong and not providing you any value.

well have we answered this question more or less i i think you should uh i think that the panel of jameson and dave have voted this question answered and we'll check with our ceo and see if it's actually answered yeah do whatever you want with it that's a good point what can you do if you would like to ignore our recommendations dave on your own problems well first you have to get the problems to us so that we can provide an answer that you can ignore and you do that by going to soft skills dot audio and clicking on ask a question where you can fill out your form our actually you can fill out our form and you can type whatever letters you want in there we found out even if it's not a question oh okay yeah like if you just you can tell us how to say something yeah just say something

nice to jameson you can do that this is here's what it is it's a it's a bespoke artisanal very connected and human social network of dave and i plus whoever else types stuff in but it's only one way it's it's kind of a unique twist on twitter where you all can tweet but only two people are going to see your tweets and that's good because it means there's not going to be like an internet hate mob after you and i i think it's an improvement in some ways oh yeah for sure it'll be harder to promote your brand though literally zero of the people who have written into us have been attacked because we're too we're too busy you you did what you quit your job that's it wait till everybody hears about this yeah all right sorry tangent yes that's where

you go to answer or to ask questions and we will get our we will get them and then we will attempt to answer them thank you so much to everyone who hasn't done that hey who how what when i'm doing so bad today in what manner according to what manner of acting doing can people support the show they can go to our website and click the support us on patreon button is that what it is yeah i finally got it without having to google it but i'm still googling it to confirm i guess i'm not googling it i'm typing in a url support us on patreon they can go to our website and click the support us on patreon button that will do what it says it'll take you to patreon where you can contribute at a couple different levels we really appreciate it it supports us it supports the show

it helps us continue making it and it makes the show better so please do that if you if you feel like you want to i guess don't do it if you don't want to we don't want your money if you don't want to give us your money we only want voluntarily provided money yep if you click that button begrudgingly just just keep your money we'll know yeah the bits will have a different shade all right thanks so much for listening we'll catch you next week