Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 127: Leaving a Job I Love and My Role Is Being Eroded

Episode Date: October 8, 2018

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Hey guys, I love the show! Thanks so much for keeping episodes coming every week. Some background: I work for a small, established company based in a small city with a growing tech scene. We have about 20 employees, 5 of which make up the engineering team and it’s been a great experience. My role is primarily being a full stack developer working on our web application, but since we’re a small company, I’ve been able to explore some other responsibilities like analyzing data for the marketing team and working with the sales staff to build custom solutions for select clients. I started working here as an intern while still in college almost 6 years ago. I feel my initial salary out of college started a bit low, but I’ve received an 8-10% raise each year I’ve been a full time employee (without having fight for them)–so I think I’m catching up. My question is, will I be stunting my career or making myself seem less hirable by staying here too long? I’ve clearly found a great place to work so leaving here would be difficult. I’m also concerned that I’m beginning to run out of skills to acquire here. It sounds easy to leave a job you hate, but how/when should you leave a job that’s this good to you? Hi Jamison and Dave, tl;dr: The role I was originally hired for is slowly being eroded - what should I do? Longer version: I have been working for my current company for a little over a year now. Things were going really well at first, I liked the team I was on, the work (backend) was interesting and I was learning a lot from my colleagues. Unfortunately, due to corporate machinations, my team was dissolved as part of a reorganization and scattered to seperate, mostly frontend focused, teams. Originally I was told that I would still be doing effectively the same type of work on my new team as on my old, and this has been mostly true. However, over the course of the last few weeks my new manager has gradually been announcing changes in the direction the team is taking as a whole and talking to me specifically about working more on frontend related tasks and upskilling, as I have almost no frontend experience. I have tried to make it clear that I have no interest in doing this but my manager is still pushing for it. I am currently still doing mostly backend work with a little frontend, but I feel like my days are numbered. There are other teams with a more backend focus, but I feel that my manager partly wants to keep me in the short term for some necessary backend work and in the long term is hoping I will acquiesce on doing more frontend work. How should I navigate this situation? It feels like I sinking in quicksand Thanks

It takes more than four nines of availability to be a great software engineer. This is episode 127 of the Soft Skills Engineering podcast. I'm your host, Jameson Dance. I'm your host, Dave Smith. Soft Skills Engineering is a podcast where we answer your questions about all the non-technical things that go into this technical field of software development. So how many nines does it take? That's kind of like how many licks does it take to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop, right?

Or I guess the answer to that was three at the end of the commercial. so three nines what is that that's like i don't know 10 hours of downtime or something oh yeah like per month yeah that's not too bad yeah okay do you want to talk about our wonderful patrons yes thank you patrons for supporting us on patreon at the level where we shout them out every single week they are matthew motowicks the agile ventures charity zach granin michael green david jackson nick kantar and sean clayton thank you so much for your contributions if you would like to support the show financially go to softskills.audio and click on support us on patreon if you want us to shout out your like old browser mmo form handle too like it can be any

name yeah we'll say it so thank you thank you all very much for your support yes how about you uh read our first question jameson yeah how about i do hey guys i love the show thanks for thanks so much for keeping the episodes coming every week. For some background, I work for a small established company based in a small city with a growing tech scene. We have about 20 employees, five of which make up the engineering team, and it's been a great experience. My role is primarily being a full-stack developer working on our web application, but since we're a small company, I've been able to explore some other responsibilities like analyzing data for the marketing team and working with the sales staff to build custom solutions for select clients. I started working here as an intern while

still in college almost six years ago i feel the initial salary out of college started a bit low but i've received an eight to ten percent raise each year i've been a full-time employee without having to fight them so i think i'm catching up my question is will i be stunting my career or making myself seem less hireable by staying here too long i've clearly found a great place to work so leaving here would be difficult i'm also concerned that i'm beginning to run out of skills to acquire here it sounds easy to leave a job you hate but how when should you leave a job that's this good for you. Hmm, okay, six years,

eight to 10% raises each year. That's pretty good. If you did about eight to 10% for five times in a row, starting at 60K, you'd be at 90K. So that's like a 50% increase. That's pretty good. You think, okay,

I guess it depends a lot on the location. 90K seems like okay to maybe, it seems in the reasonable range for someone working with that much experience but you could definitely get a bunch more if that's your primarily if that's your primary concern well yeah so i mean these aren't i didn't mean for this to be an absolute number but more like over the cumulative effect of five years of raises in that range would be about a 50 total increase yeah so 60 to 90 or 100 to 150 even you know yeah like do you feel like 50 is a good increase for six years out of college i don't i

never know i feel like you could get more if you wanted to but it also probably depends what market you go into and what job you take first and yeah i mean you hear some people um joining facebook out of college that make like 150k 200 in total comp i don't know if those are just the people i hear about because they're like guess how much i make because they feel very proud of it yeah it seems okay it doesn't seem like you're being taken advantage of i guess that's you might be able to get more somewhere else but it doesn't seem like you're being neglected horribly in terms of finances yeah i don't know that i've ever stayed at one job long enough to feel like i had kind of learned the things that i could learn there you always jump before you're like yeah

it's a lot more to learn here but i'm out yeah i feel like i i don't feel like i've i've exhausted all the technical challenges at a job before so i don't really know what that feels like what's longest you've stayed at one job like two and a half years oh wow yeah that's pretty short what's the shortest you've stayed at a job six months oh okay how about you full-time job yes like 18 months i think oh i got you beat yeah mine are all kind of like in the same window i got you beat on both ends the longest i've stayed at a job is seven years and the shortest is six months. I've got you whooped. Oh, way worse than you in every way. It's not just about looks anymore. It's even tenure. Have you had this feeling though, where you feel like I just kind

of have this place figured out and I could do more of the same, but I can't really, there aren't any new challenges here. I have, I've had that at two companies where I felt like I'm doing the same things over and over and it's starting to feel repetitive. And in both cases, well, in one case, I changed roles. That's actually when I moved into management. And in the other case, I quit my job and got a new one. That was the proto soft skills engineering advice. So I'm thinking about the situation. You're paid well, you like your job, you're coming up on your six-year anniversary, and you're worried that if you stay there much longer, it might make you less hireable in the future. And I think that's a valid concern. But right now, the market is so good that it wouldn't

really matter if you'd been there for 15 years. I don't think it would hurt your chances that much. The risk, though, is that you develop skills that are so specialized to this one company that they become hard to transfer to other companies. It's one thing to be a good software engineer. It's another thing to be really good at your company. My skills are all here at this company i worry about that a lot too how do you know what's transferable versus what's not i feel like i get more effective the longer i stay at a company but i don't know if that means i'm becoming better absolutely or i just know i know who to talk to to like get stuff through yeah you know and that's not scalable maybe maybe figuring out how to learn who to talk to quickly that's like

a transferable skill but yeah and to develop that skill you just need to change jobs a lot yeah Yeah, you need to improve your anthropology skills, your bureaucratic anthropology sensors. You know, I think we've talked about before how long you should stay at your first company out of college. And you and I, I think, came to the consensus that that should be a pretty short tenure compared comparatively, like probably two years is typical and encouraged to be about the maximum is that where we landed before i'm gonna reserve some i'm gonna put a caveat on there which is if i ever start a company and you come join it as your first job out of school then the answer is for the rest of your life but besides that sure yeah if if you're not like in love with

it then i think it you should definitely look around at that time i just we've brought up the Monty Hall problem before. And I feel like that applies so much in your first job because there are hundreds of jobs that you qualify for right out of college. The one you choose is undoubtedly going to have some drawbacks that the other ones don't or vice versa. And there is almost definitely one out there that is better suited to you that you'll enjoy even more, that will pay you more, and that will teach you things that your current job won't teach you. so I just have a really hard time locking myself in for the first I don't know 10 years of my career without trying any other company now obviously there are caveats like if you landed at

one of these mega tech companies as your first job out of school you could probably spend your entire career there and never run out of interesting things to learn because there's so such a big diversity of different kinds of positions you can work in right but like if you're just at some small medium-sized company you've been there for six years I'm probably going to recommend moving on sounds like an answer what if you're happy though why would you leave if you're happy i know i know it's you have to basically measure your comfort and happiness or not measure balance those against opportunities for learning even more and interesting things there's one nice thing about this position which is you do not have time

pressure if you are at a job that you hate or you get laid off or you're just often when you switch jobs there's some amount of pressure to make that happen quickly but in this situation you're you're pretty comfortable there you you're pretty happy you're not in a rush right you have the opportunity and the ability to evaluate a lot of options so you could just kind of take the job search slow and say i want to find something really exciting and if i don't then this is fine too and and that gives you a lot more freedom and flexibility and it improves your negotiation position a lot too If you have to take the first acceptable job, then you're going to be less likely to see, like, I wonder what they'll do if I ask for them to wash my Bentley that they will also give me. Let's just find out.

And then maybe they'll say yes. You'll be like, huh, wow, this will work there. but but you you you have some more power there with if you're not rushed and you're also not under like feelings pressure i guess is is if you're just miserable and want to switch jobs yeah and plus you'll do better in the interviews anyway yeah that's true just yeah make sure the first interview you take is with a company you would never want to work for yeah because it's probably been a while if you've been at the same company for six years you're probably a little rusty yeah come into your current job in a trench coat stacked on top of another person

and pretend like you're a very tall person interviewing for a role there will i be stunting my career or making myself seem less hireable i think there's a potential like you said technically if you're in like fox pro or some weird niche technology if you're kind of like broadly keeping up with industry tech trends i wouldn't worry about that too much and then i think dave already answered the other part about tech specific skills and and long tenures like no one's gonna be like six years must be some kind of loser like no yeah nobody else must have wanted to hire them they stayed that long i don't think you'll encounter any of that yeah but it is long and um after i went to my second startup um which i joined after having

been at my previous company for seven years people asked me you know where'd you come from and i told them and they said how long were you there and I said seven years and everyone at this new startup their their jaws just dropped to the floor it was like they were like that's three times longer than any place I've ever stayed and I was just amazed so there is you will um I sorry I'm stumbling you may be surprised at how big of an outlier you are and I don't think it will automatically hurt you at this point um but you will seem unusual i think in the startup scene i should say you'll be a unique snowflake just like you are inside your career will reflect that okay have we answered it yeah i think so all right good luck friend do you want to read our

next question dave sure this comes from a listener named james who says hi jameson and dave the tldr is that the role I was originally hired for is slowly being eroded. What should I do? The longer version is that I've been working for my current company for a little over a year. Things were going really well at first. I liked the team, the work was interesting, and I was learning a lot from my colleagues. Unfortunately, due to corporate machinations, my team was dissolved as part of a negotiation and scattered to separate, mostly front-end-focused teams. And I like to work on the back-end. Originally, I was told I would still be doing effectively the same type of back-end work on my new team as on my old, and this has been mostly

true. However, over the course of the last few weeks, my new manager has gradually been announcing changes in the direction the team is taking as a whole, and talking to me specifically about working more on front-end related tasks and upskilling, as I have almost no front-end experience. I have tried to make it clear that I have no interest in doing this, but my manager is still pushing for it. I'm currently still doing mostly back-end work with a little front-end, but I feel like my days are numbered there are other teams with a more back-end focus but i feel my manager partly wants to keep me in the short term for some necessary back-end work and in the long term is hoping i will acquiesce on doing more front-end work how should i navigate this situation it feels like i

am sinking in quicksand in the princess bride when wesley is sinking into quicksand how does he get out of it doesn't someone come rescue him don't they throw like a vine in yeah does it is it is it uh the big strong dude who he then later chokes out yeah i don't know i somebody cuts him a vine and throws it in i can't remember i'm getting the order of events all like backwards i don't know we'll have to do that instead of recording the show one week just watch it together anyways whoever that character is that's who we are we're here to toss you the vine we have slayed the rodents of unusual size here's your cue dave i killed the rodent now you do the rest of the work well so i i am latching on to one part of

the question where it says i feel like my boss wants to keep me around to do some necessary short-term back-end work and then after that i don't know you know you think the boss is being untruthful and saying i really want you to switch skill sets i think the boss has an immediate need to do back-end stuff has no long-term need for back-end and just doesn't really know what to do with this person in the long run and obviously hasn't articulated a clear plan you know like here's what we're going to do for you in six months i guess i just wonder if they can switch teams yeah is there at companies of a certain size there's opportunities usually to just do something else within the company you just change who your manager is do different work that's more

fitted with what you're interested in yeah might be time to go shopping around and see if there's a team that has a better long-term roadmap for you why i mean even if there isn't if if it's like a small startup i've still worked at small startups where individuals have said i just really want to do this other thing and i think they were given opportunities to some of them it worked out and some of them um it didn't but they all had at least a chance to try and do it so i feel like the the manager is pushing for you to change skill sets i just wonder if you can say i'd really like to continue doing this kind of work and if there's no other work like that then i'd like to explore switching teams it if the manager wants someone with that skill set usually when you

switch teams like this that that opens up an opening on the team you came from and so you can get someone else onto that team so it should be better for the manager overall too if they just really need someone who does a lot of front end and that's not what you want to do then you just switch and they have the skill set that they need the other word i'm sticking on is upskill where the question asker says my manager is pushing me to upskill into front end and that sounds like it could be like the manager trying to get you to grow your career in some way and that's the tactic that they have landed on oh i just literally interpreted the word up meaning like up the stack you know front end is up from back end i don't know is that a word that people say i don't think

you had it right i'm just that was me being hilarious okay oh okay but uh maybe it's them trying to be helpful you know like james wants to grow there's an opportunity for them for for james to have more impact if they develop front-end skills and if you just say i don't want to do that i still want to grow here's another alternative we could try or what what alternatives do you say do you suggest you suggest i want to down skill into the database right now i'm in the middle at the back end but i want to go even lower or i just want to get worse at the things i already know but do more things overall i want to do more things side skill i'm gonna horizontally scale out my skills yeah yeah my the t part of my t-shaped person needs to be wider

but thinner because there's only a fixed amount of ink it's yeah it barely covers the surface but you know what really what i want to get to is the point where i've read at least one blog post about every potential piece of software and hardware but i can't actually do anything that's the sweet spot i'm aiming for i've heard of everything and know nothing and that's why i read twitter all day at work instead of do anything oh you can't you don't even read the blog posts you just read the headlines in twitter no you read the tweets vsdl okay that's a thing check

I like what you're saying about the win-win situation like you leaving this team might actually help your boss out and it might help you out too so this is the kind of conversation that I think is actually one of the easiest to have is where you say my interests are back in dear manager please help me find back in work this is what I want to do you know and then just give them a give your manager a chance and some time to make that happen and then check in every couple of weeks and see how it's going that way it'll be very clear and unsurprising when you do come to your manager and say okay well we've explored this are there other teams that might be able to give me this kind of work changes in the direction the team is taking as a whole yeah so i feel like it makes

sense from the manager's perspective to me like i i don't know sometimes i want things to be different and then i look at people on my team and think like who can do this new thing so i've had conversations with people about them doing different kinds of things than they've done in the past and sometimes that's worked well and sometimes they've said you know i really want to stick with this thing and i say okay but it's not like i'm not offended i want people to be able to do work that they're fulfilled by and feel happy about and that's i think you can expect that out of a job that you should be able to do work that pays you reasonably well that is something that you're interested in specific i mean certainly a programming job there's enough

of those out there that you should be able to find that so the fact that your manager is pushing doesn't mean you have to do it you can just say i'm interested in this thing and if that's not what the team needs then can can we is there is there someone else i don't know that's that doesn't seem like a weird conversation yeah yeah especially with the team changing direction right like oh yeah that's yeah that's fine i'm not saying it's easy and you're like dumb for having this question though like it's it's i can see why it would be distressing to have your job circumstances upended like this but i feel like if you just explore it with them directly and say that's not what i'm interested in doing long term i'm interested in focusing on the kind of stuff i

was brought in to do and and is there an opportunity for me to do that work here on this team still yeah and it could be that the company as a whole is changing direction and that's one of one of the side effects of this direction change um is that there's less back-end need and more front-end need and if that's the case then it could be that you're going to find your desires met on some other at some other company and i think that you should do these things in order of like escalating uh what's the word i don't know you should basically escalate by talking your manager first to find work on your team if you can't find it there look for it on other teams and if you can't find it there look for it at other companies sure that seems reasonable well

good luck i hope you find what you're looking for yeah which is more back-end work you made that you made that very clear yeah all right what can people do if they would like their own questions answered go to soft skills dot dot dot i think you know the rest it was clear soft skills dot dot one of them is spelled out one of them is is a period but we won't tell you which one and then click on the button and most likely looks like it'll give you what you want thank you so much for listening thank you to all our patrons who are contributing to the show you are fantastic and we really appreciate your support and we will catch you next week