Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 123: Salary Promise Fail and Slacker Coworkers

Episode Date: September 10, 2018

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Great podcast! Love what you guys are doing and very happy that you are doing this for such a long time! Here’s the question. I started to work in a Startup a year ago. When we were negotiating the salary we agreed on amount X, and CTO promised that after a year it will be increased. He did say the exact sum. So, the year has passed, I followed up CTO about the salary raise, and he delegated the task to the manager, who decided not to give me a raise. When I asked ‘why?’ he said that I am good at negotiating my salary and I’m getting what the market is offering. I don’t feel bad about not getting more money, but the fact that the CTO break his word concerns me. I don’t think I can trust this company when they are promising anything and I started to care less about what I’m doing here. Am I delusional that a programmers salary has to increase even by 2% on a yearly basis and how to find a way to trust company in the future? Or just drop this and take the default SSE case - look for another job? Thank you for your answer. Hi Dave and Jamison, Absolutely love the show. I share an office with a peer who works on my team. We are both early in our career and are lucky to work under a very hands off manager. However, I feel my peer is taking advantage of the situation and is slacking off. He is rarely in his office and often states that he is ““working”” from home. When he graces us with his appearance in the office, he asks the most basic questions. Granted, those questions are internal and specific (not easily Google-able), but still, I feel he should have known the answers after a year on the job. He intentionally exploits our monolith’s slow builds by running full builds all the time and complain that it is slow. Then plays video games in the office until the build is complete (about 4 hours). Then makes a minor change in his feature code and kicks off a full build again, even though he could build incrementally (about 2-3 minutes). What do you recommend me to do? Should I spend time and energy to answer his lifeless questions? Should I confront him?

It takes more than putting a load balancer in front of it to be a software engineer. This is episode 123 of the Soft Skills Engineering Podcast. I'm your host, Jameson Dance. I'm your host, Dave Smith. We never talk about what you're going to say beforehand, and then I always start just laughing in the middle of it. Success. That's a core tenet of software development.

It solves a lot of problems. You know what problems it doesn't solve, though? The soft kind? Yeah. All of the non-technical problems. Okay. this is an advice show where we answer all of your non-technical questions about the technical field of software development things that can't be solved by putting a load balancer in front of

them how do you reverse a linked list put a load balancer in front of it next time someone asks you to do that on a whiteboard just slap down a citrix net scaler on the desk you you have you draw two boxes and put an arrow between them and then you draw another box above them and put two arrows from that box to those other two boxes and then just kind of like shrug at them it's highly available

boy this binary search tree has so many layers of redundancy it's incredible oh we have some patrons do you want to talk about those fine folks Dave yes I do thank you to everyone who has contributed to the show on patreon.com this month we have an extra

a one-time shout out to sebastian sandoval simila as well as our old faithful folks who are contributing at the level where they get a shout out every single week david jackson dustin coats ken howard matthew wotowicz nick cantar sean clayton and zach grannon thank you so much for your support if you yeah thank you yes if you would like to support the show go to soft uh where do we go soft skills.audio click on support us on patreon all right question time i'm gonna read it i'm not even going to ask you if you want to that's fine you don't have my permission but go ahead okay oh all right this is from an anonymous listener i work at a startup that's not how the question starts i started to work in a startup a year ago when we were negotiating the salary

we agreed on an amount x and the cto promised me that after a year it would be increased they did say the exact sum so a year has passed i followed up to the cto about a salary raise and they delegated the task to a manager who decided not to give me a raise. When I asked why, they said that I am good at negotiating my salary and I'm getting what the market is offering. I don't feel bad about not getting more money, but the fact that the CTO broke their word concerns me. I don't think I can trust this company when they are promising anything and I started to care less about what I'm doing here. Am I delusional that a programmer's salary has to increase even by 2% on a yearly basis? And how do I find a way to trust the company in the future? Or should I

just drop it and take the default soft skills engineering case and look for another job thank you for your answer i have to clarify the default advice is not look for another job it's get another job it's quit your current job yeah it starts with you just leap you are very good at negotiating like next time someone comes to me and i want to say no to them i'm just going to drop that little bomb you are very good at negotiating no when my daughter comes and says i am so hungry i would like pancakes and also cereal i'm gonna that's how that's gonna be my no from now on what a good negotiator you are talk to mom they just turn around and walk away

oh that there's got to be some kind of communication breakdown because that sounds so scummy when they say it you mean like which part the part where the cto delegated keeping his okay All the parts. Yes. Both of those parts, the part where they promise something. And then when you went and asked them, they said, why don't you talk to my friend over here to get the no from them instead of from me? Look, and then the yeah, I hate the part. What's that? Look, I just I hate saying no. All right. So I'm going to have this manager say no instead. Have a nice day. Yeah, it I don't know. Something has gone wrong here. That's it just feels like it feels like such a crap sandwich right where you're trying to do this bad thing by saying something nice

instead of just saying we don't feel like your performance is worth it or we don't have enough money or whatever the real reason is saying you're so good at negotiating that just feels so patronizing oh i'm mad about it now i was less mad when we first started talking about this but this is this is frustrating your empathy sensor is like or not empathy sensor your empathy capability is like really flexing its muscles right now yep yep i'm mad for you you're probably madder than the question asker i think at this point maybe they said that they uh they're not too bothered but then they say stuff that makes it sound like they're bothered too so like i'm gonna quit my job yeah yeah i'm not bothered but i can never trust this company again jameson you have so

much empathy i'm worried you're gonna quit your job for this person i'll quit their job for them i've been in a situation where i've negotiated a salary with someone before and they wanted to be higher than i was willing to go and we agreed on an interim solution where they would come in at the salary i promised and then after a certain amount of time had passed we would based on their performance we would bring them up to the salary they wanted or something we agreed on and when the time came i think we did six months in the case i'm thinking of when the time came, we talked about it and brought them up. And the reason that we made that arrangement at the beginning was because we were bringing them in lower than they wanted. So the fact that

what probably happened here is this listener came in lower than they wanted. And the CTO was very much aware of that and then made this agreement. Like, this is what I think happened. And then later was just like, nah, not going to do that. And so when this other manager said, well, you know, you negotiate at such a high salary to begin with, you're already in good shape. It's like, it's kind of like it's almost like gaslighting you know yeah like who cares this isn't what i wanted is that what you mean no i mean it's like no no you were high and it's like no no that's not how i remember it i remember coming in low and you agreed to bring me up after a year and this guy's like no no you were fine it was always good it's like no that's not how i remember yeah

one takeaway here is that things that happen in the future are always uncertain and you can do some things to eliminate some uncertainty you could try and get it in writing as part of your employment agreement which which would help force the issue a little bit but even then if they really decide not to do it basically your options are quit or or stay like you can't force them to do something at some point in the future i think this applies to like you'll get to work on this fancy project in six months or you'll get this promotion in six months or promises about the future are inherently unreliable so um i i think you need this doesn't help you now but you could have done things like it in writing to eliminate some of that unreliability you could also say

what would it take if it's performance-based i i can't tell from the question if it's performance-based or not if it's just like yeah stick around we'll bump you up or if it's what you mentioned if you do if you perform well in the job then then we're happy to move you to this level you want but either way you kind of need to go after that uncertainty to eliminate this bad surprise a year later it's possible they just forgot to and i don't know that that money isn't in the budget anymore because they blew it all on lacroix on startup water you walk up to your cto hey remember how i was gonna get that raise cto they pass you a lacroix yeah um about that drink cup he starts looking around and he his eyes keep drifting toward the fridge full of liquorice

spent it on coconut water it's not cheap i i actually wonder now is this the norm for there to be basically no compensation changes year over year for these people you mean at this company yeah at this company like if i was in this situation i might start asking my co-workers like hey when was your when do you get raises here you know how does that work yeah because maybe they'll be like come to think of it i've never had a raise yeah my experience is um so i work at a very large company and there's a very regular process for compensation increases and i feel like at small companies i've worked at it's been very seat of the pants some companies one company kind of had this informal yearly performance review that came with raises but it wasn't written

down or guaranteed or it happened for everybody or all the time and then other places i've worked It was it was like you get a raise when you are about to quit because you haven't got a raise yet, basically. But no one no one would ever come to you and say, like, great job, sport. You have a have a cost of living increase. Inflation is a thing or whatever. So I think it probably depends. But I think that's a good it's good advice to try and figure out what the norms are and see if this is. I think one important question is, is this a mark of them being unhappy with your performance or is it as it budgetary things?

is it i don't know there's there's a reason why and if it was this conditional thing that dave mentioned earlier then it'd be good to know it isn't just that you're good at negotiating it's that they think you're bad at your job or whatever the reason is doesn't have to be the reason but it could be yep how do i find a way to trust the company in the future um i think you say i have a hard time trusting you when you promised me this and it didn't happen and it's up to them to regain your trust it's not up to you to just take this leap of faith in a company yeah yeah i mean the way you earn trust is by making and keeping promises this was a promise made and broken so now if you want to regain trust you need to give them another chance to make and keep a

promise and i would probably say well when is the next raise coming and what do i need to do to get it i want x percent and what do i have to do you know take some time to think about that and let's come back let's get back together next week and figure out what that is and then i can work toward that goal sure and by the way i'd like for it to be six months away not another 12 months you know that's what i would do yeah that sounds like good advice i think you can push them on this and especially push them on the reason especially if how do i put it you can trust people companies are are soulless right they're not they have no like morals they're they're machines that produce money so i think you need to get agreements with if especially if they don't have this culture of

like regular raises or regular reviews or whatever it is then yeah you you need some agreement that you check up on regularly some kind of plan it's like the reverse of of a manager kind of doing coaching or trying to help someone improve you need to like follow up on them and talk about it regularly and see ask yeah how am i doing towards it help them flex their promise keeping muscles exactly say it just like that say what's what's like a really backhanded patronizing compliment you can give to the company you're really good at saving money you're so good at saving money i'm concerned that i might not get the raise that i was that i was promised and if i don't i might save you a lot of money how do you so that's one more thing we could maybe talk

about how do you delicately bring that up do you just straight up say if i don't get this raise i'm going i'm going to quit no i wouldn't do that i mean that's basically blackmail okay it's not quite blackmail but it's it's threatening right i think that a relationship with your employer should be one of a partnership where you you basically are you've engaged in a transaction that benefits both parties so you should find ways that benefit both parties instead of just threatening to leave all the time you know that's just how i would handle it yep yeah it feels like threatening to leave is leaving i guess if you say if you don't do this i will quit that kind of feels like the relationship might have broken down too much to repair um saying yeah i'm i'm

really interested in this raise and it's important to me saying the same thing but in a nicer way reflects i feel like that you're still invested in a little bit so you could you could just say like this is important to me for me to stay happy at this company and in this position yeah like And one way you can say that is, you can say, I want to work here for as long as possible and help make this company as successful as I can. What do we need to do to make it so that we can have this mutually beneficial arrangement where I benefit the company and my needs can be met long term? And one thing I think I need is regular cost of living adjustments to make sure that I can stay with the market. And then they'll say, then you say, now who's good at negotiating? All right.

Have we answered the question? I think so. Good luck. good luck do you want to read our next question yes i will read it right right now sorry it's a heavy one yeah is your mouse does it have a weight attached to the button or something i've been trying to bulk up my forearm so yeah my mouse has got 50 pounds on it all right hi dave and jameson absolutely love the show thanks i share an office with a peer who works on my team we are both early in our career and are lucky to work under a very hands-off manager however

I feel my peer has taken advantage of the situation and is slacking off. He is rarely in his office and often states that he is, air quotes, working from home. When he graces us with his appearance in the office, he asks the most basic questions. Granted, those questions are internal and specific and not easily googleable, but still, I feel he should have known the answers after a year on the job. He intentionally exploits our monolith's slow builds by running full builds all the time and complains that it is slow then he plays video games in the office until the build is complete which takes about four hours then he makes a minor change in his feature code and kicks off a full build again even though he could do an incremental build in about two to three minutes

what do you recommend me to do should i spend time and energy to answer his lifeless questions should i confront him hmm you could finish a video game in four hours four that's a long that's a long build yeah um i feel like this question is basically should i tattletale or do something else no that's not what i got out of it i mean tattletale is the negative connotation but i feel like if you have a co-worker who doesn't do any work and your manager is really hands off they might not know about it and you could confront them directly but another solution is talk to your manager about it and say hey i'm worried they do two things a day and then play video games for the other eight hours yeah like and i just i'm having a hard time imagining a world

where your manager isn't aware of this because how how do you spend how do you do like two five minute sessions of work a day and produce anything maybe in the four hours they also talk a lot in chat or write a lot of memos or something i don't know maybe they maybe they try and have more visible output than that like when they're not playing video games in between video games yeah when they when they die during the cut scenes the death timer yeah i mean i think i think it's perfectly fair to approach someone like this in this situation honestly i would probably go to them directly and say hey you know i've noticed that you're spending a lot of time playing video games at work i mean seriously like i would go to them and say as a favor i just want to let you know

that it's i sense you're playing a lot of video games at work and if i can sense it then management probably can too and you know i just wanted to give you a heads up i'm not going to tell on you i just want you to know it's probably not a great thing to do for your future prospects here at the company like if i were in your shoes i would appreciate someone giving me the heads up this is a weird thing about these cultures where they fill the office with toys and then the question you have is like can we use these there's the ball pit there's the beanbag water slide combo So, I mean, I'm at work. Can I just go up and down all day?

The free Game Boy Color you give to all your new employees. Wait, maybe this is just part of some freak experiment where he's like trying to push the limits to see where they are. He's trying to answer that very question. Maybe he's an investigative journalist looking into startup culture or big tech culture. I don't know what kind of company it is. I think you could also approach it from a,

hey i've got some sweet productivity tips for you did you know you could do this in incrementally and do it in two or three minutes instead of four hours and he's like oh that's gonna be great but that's gonna kill my video game career how am i gonna work on my side projects at work then if i can't wait for the build to finish my github activity feed is gonna suffer so bad yeah i think yeah i feel like that's the approach i would take more more than hey you play too many video games management's going to notice i'd say like hey notice you spend a long time waiting for these builds to complete have you thought about doing it incrementally it'd really help you iterate faster

and get more done i think i mean so imagine the failure scenarios there what if you say these things either one of them and they're like yep thanks for the tip and then turn back to the game boy color catch some more rare pokemon i mean what do you do then what if what if it doesn't help i'm also sensing some frustration on the question asker not just about slacking off but it's almost like because they're spending so much time doing doing other things they don't have this knowledge built up about internal things so that's that's causing a burden on you where if they were like doing more work they would know more about the code base and the company instead of having to ask you these basic questions yeah so some of it is like yeah

slowing your team down kind of that's bad overall it's no fun to be it's kind of a drag to work with people that aren't producing at all or that are slacking off because it feels like the expectations aren't very high and i don't know just kind of drags things down but also it's directly affecting the question askers productivity in the form of lots of questions they could know the answer to if they worked differently yeah and that feels bad right yeah they will feel bad but that that feels more directly bad right like you you are harmed by this yeah there's there's definitely some amount of training people and answering questions and helping each other there's there's the the grease that keeps the team moving i've heard people talk about the glue work actually

as well as just like stuff to do to help people be effective in general but i don't know this seems like it's too much from the question asker uh yeah way too much i mean we've got we got a triple play here working from home but not actually working playing video games at work for four hours at a stretch and asking questions that he should know the answers to right like it's okay if if they if they do nothing at the office when they're around other people like what do you think the chances are that he just goes home and just pulls up netflix all day it's 100 right yeah like doing even less than nothing i feel like is is my my expectation here um yeah what do you do well i think you confront him straight up a few years back i had a co-worker who had noticed that i

started to come into the office later and later and i don't remember what was going on in my life at the time but there was something happening and i was kind of slacking a little bit and uh he sent me this email and at the top of the email it said hey dave look i have some unsolicited feedback for you i'm trying to be as helpful as i can here but i totally understand if you are not into it if you don't want the feedback no problem if you don't want the feedback delete this email now otherwise i'm gonna put in like a hundred new lines and you can scroll down to get and of course like what do you do in that situation of course you scroll down so i scroll all the way to the bottom and he says hey i've noticed that some people have commented that

you're coming in later and later and i just wanted to give you a heads up because he was in the office and people would come looking for me and he noticed they couldn't find me and i was so grateful that he shared that with me because i had a blind spot right like i didn't know i had drifted in later and later and i certainly didn't know that people were looking for me and couldn't find me because i wasn't there um but i also felt like kind of a schmuck because he had to craft like this super like delicate walking on eggshells email yeah with this with this funny like he didn't feel like he didn't feel comfortable enough that he could just say hey you come to work late all the time yeah exactly he had to like craft this weird email with a little um what's the word

a gimmick in the email. Yeah, it feels like a BuzzFeed type, like, yeah, there's a hook there. Yep. But you know what? I really appreciated that feedback. Now, in my case, I had, I don't think I had gone nearly as far off the cliff as this guy has, but maybe he'll appreciate it. I think that's one, there's the off chance that he will. You know, you never know what people's backgrounds are and he could be that he comes from a very different background from you, pretty laid back, And it might be good to know, I mean, I know it would be good for him to know that he's not keeping up with the norms. Yeah.

I, one of the things that I am worst at in life is confronting people like this. And I would like to get better. And I am inspired by you, Dave. Maybe you should practice. You should practice on me. Okay. You should, I don't mean right now. Hang on.

Give me a second. I'm gearing up. You sniffle too loudly. I literally was sniffling as you said that. um i'm sorry jameson geez come on that's it last episode and yeah i think i think my fear is it's gonna blow up right like i'll say something i'll offend them or i'll create drama or they'll they'll they'll say nothing but secretly they will hate me and and it will suck to work with them the rest of our tenure together but it'll be short because you're gonna quit your job right after that no i

mean i hope you don't have to quit anyways no i'm talking about you and you personally oh me personally yeah like if you created that kind of uh awkwardness i think you'd just be like well i'm out that went bad well my email didn't work what else is there to do uh but i want to live in a world where people can bring stuff like this up openly and not be offended and that world exists if if i do it i think you can be delicate and sensitive about it while still being clear uh so yeah i've talked myself into agreeing with you dave confront him go for it say hey this is affecting my productivity and i think you need to step up a little bit more and take more responsibility for finding the answers have you tried not playing video games

for eight hours a day oh this is just such a you know the meta commentary here is that this software industry is so freaking weird like can you imagine any other industry like a doctor yeah imagine he imagine this dude works at the dmv right and he just like doesn't go to the desk for four hours you'd be gone in a day yeah you know you're a car mechanic you're a doctor you're a lawyer like forget it there's just no way i actually talked to a friend who's a mechanic and he tells stories that are kind of like this of like oh this person just didn't show up to work one day and then the next day they were fired that's how they all end you're like i could do that for 15 days in a row and probably not get fired yeah i would have a meeting on my calendar

i could not show up to the meeting and then two weeks later another meeting would show up with a different person and then maybe i'd get fired yeah what a weird industry just a weird time yeah we're we're spoiled but you you can help yourself here my question is still what if it doesn't work when is your responsibility when do you escalate it or do you not escalate it i feel like you have to if you try and talk to them directly and it doesn't change yeah i would say try get talk to them directly give it maybe two or three weeks and if you see a vector of improvement then back off your work is done here you know and if you don't then you need to find a way to raise it up to your manager for sure at least i would yep that seems reasonable and you know there is

one more aspect of this that we haven't really explored and that is that this person could have some serious personal problems in their personal life they could have some kind of illness they could have some extenuating circumstance that you are not aware of and it would be good to approach this situation knowing that that's a possibility and so maybe the best thing to do instead of just saying i think you need to improve could be like you know how are you how do you feel about your work here are you satisfied with your work you know is there anything i can do to help you more than i am and put yourself out there a little bit more instead of coming out accusatory and see if they are willing to give you some opening into their life and tell you a little bit about what's

going on maybe they've got something really bad happening and it's just not a good time like i don't know i feel like that could come across as they both started at the same time right their peers there's not this explicit mentor manager relationship there yeah so i i feel like it i feel like that's often my approach as a manager but as a peer when what i really want to say is hey you interrupt me too much so i can't get my stuff done i have a hard time sincerely starting off and saying, how are you? Can I help you more? And they'll be like, yeah, answer these 400 questions. No, no. What I really meant was, can you tell me if there's anything going on in your life that's causing you to do this so I don't get mad at you? There's got to be a way to do that

though, right? Because it really is possible that there's something going on. And maybe that's the track you take with your own manager is you go to them and say, hey, so-and-so seems to be having a really hard time getting things done is there something going on is there anything i can do to help you know instead of so-and-so is terrible and deserves to be fired yeah i am trying to remember if i've ever done something like this i think one time i approached a co-worker because they were doing um they're basically doing like another part-time job it wasn't on the job right they weren't doing it while they were at work but they were taking regular time off of work to go do this other job that paid them money like recording a podcast yeah exactly this is this is

what is ridiculous to me when i look back at it and and i basically said hey this this kind of bothers me it makes me feel like you're not committed to the team and then once a week for an hour i would like go into a booth and record a podcast but i did talk to him about it directly and it worked out fine and there wasn't any awkwardness because i i hadn't noticed the cognitive dissonance there so it didn't bother me what did you say what did you say to them what i said that basically like hey it feels weird to me that you go do this other job like how many hours are we talking about i don't remember i feel like it was it was definitely more time than i spent on the podcast i should i should hope so it was it was several hours a

week i feel like okay and like during the workday though yeah during the workday and the content of that isn't the most interesting thing i feel like there are lots of arguments why that's fine or why it could work out either way and and the outcome isn't as important to me but we did talk about it and nothing disastrous happened like stuff got resolved and i think if they had said like it's important to me i feel like it helps me grow it helps the company grow like we could have figured it out no matter what the resolution was but it wasn't too bad it was fine so maybe i should do more of that do more uh more confrontation yeah like soft confrontation i don't know any other way you just sit down and say look i need to soft confront you see how they react

i just awkwardly start to shake their hand and stare into their eyes just and lay it on them but it's like a 20 minute conversation and i have really sweaty hands and you held the hand the whole time during that full 20 did not awkward at all nope now that's how you got into management firm moist handshakes that's my motto that's our new i should talk to i i should ask this i'm gonna ask them how they feel about it in retrospect yeah because maybe maybe they have this huge grudge and are like what a moron they're not even gonna reply to your email i can't believe jameson did this when he did pulled all this other crap and they're just too nice to say anything i'm gonna find this out all right well i look

forward to that yeah depending on the answer i may or may not talk about it on the show what's the it's like the the warrant canary right where you can't tell people if you've been served a warrant or a wiretap or whatever so some people get around it by putting up a web page saying we have never been served a warrant or never like exposed customer data because of a wiretap and then they just like take it down one day it'll be like that if i talk about it that means it all worked out great and if you don't i won't talk about it if it didn't all right i look forward to hearing or not hearing but it's kind of a halting problem because you don't know what the timeout is right yeah that's true i'll solve that first okay solve the halting problem i'm pretty

sure it requires a load balancer all right i think we've answered our question all right dave what can people do if they want their own questions answered go over to softskills.audio and click on ask a question there is a load balancer behind that question i'm fairly certain fill out the form click the button submit and then put your feet up on your desk and pat yourself on the back for a job well done yep thank you so much for listening we hope you listen still see ya