Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 128: Finish The Degree In Poverty? and Hiring Insecurity

Episode Date: October 15, 2018

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I’m working for minimum wage as a full Systems Administrator at a State University while I’m taking classes. I really like working here, but I need to make at LEAST 40K /year to justify this level of effort for much longer. I just got offered a job two hours away for 80 - 100K as a System Administrator at a smallish ISP. The same day my boss told me he got approval to hire me on at 45K in 3 - 4 months. If I wait and stay I’m not making what I feel I’m worth, but if I leave I’ll make WAY more money and probably won’t finish my bachelor’s degree. I already have 5 years of experience as a ““system admin”” but I want to move over to technical project management in the next 10 years. I think I should stay, make less money, continue growing my relationships in the Scholastic Network, and finish getting my Bachelor’s degree. That way I can get past HR checks to become a Project Manager somewhere else. What should I do? I’ve recently become the technical lead at my company. I need to build my team more but am struggling with one thing. How do I overcome the fear of hiring someone better than me who could potentially overtake me as the team lead? Is this a common fear among leaders? I want to build an effective team of high caliber developers. But I can’t do that if I let my ego and insecurity get in the way.

It takes more than extreme patience waiting for that long and slow deployment to be a great engineer. This is Soft Skills Engineering episode 128. I'm your host, Dave Smith. I am your host, Jameson Dance. Soft Skills Engineering is a weekly advice show for software developers about non-technical topics. One time I was listening to a podcast and it was kind of an artsy podcast that does weird things with the audio. And I heard a long gap and I kept thinking like, oh, this is interesting. they're challenging listeners assumptions they're they're playing on the it's it's like podcasts are all about engagement and listening and entertaining you and they're just putting in silence to see

what the listener does and then 10 minutes later i looked at my app and i was like oh it ended 10 minutes ago that's awesome um vaguely patience related content 10 10 minutes wow you are very patient i mean i was doing something i just kept being like so bold they're so bold oh they're so brave what what giants no one has been this brave since apple removed the headphone jack from the iphone yep those wacky podcasters what will they do next all right we have some patrons we would like to thank thank you to matthew wotowicz i got your name right maybe or at least i pronounced it the same way i did last time agile ventures zach grannon michael green david jackson nick cantar and Sean Clayton. Thank you so much to those people. You're all contributing at the level

where we shout you out every single week. Thank you to everyone else contributing. If you would like to contribute as well, you can go to softskills.audio and click the support us on Patreon button. Thank you very much. We appreciate your support. All right. Should I read our first question? Yeah. Yeah. Are you sure? I'm really sure. Okay. All right. Here goes nothing. I think this comes from an anonymous listener who says, I'm working for minimum wage as a full-time systems administrator at a state university while I'm taking classes. I really like working here but I need to make at least 40k per year to justify this level of effort for much longer. I just got offered a job two hours away for 80 to 100k as a system administrator at a smallish ISP. The same

day my boss told me that he got approval to hire me at 45k in three to four months. If I wait and stay I'm not making what I feel I'm worth but if I leave I'll make way more money and probably won't finish my bachelor's degree i already have five years of experience as a quote system admin i don't know why you put that in quotes sorry he told everyone yeah like pretend system admin but i've done nothing i already have five years of experience as a system admin but i want to move over to technical project management in the next 10 years i think i should stay make less money continuing to grow my relationships in the scholastic network and finish getting my bachelor's bachelor's degree. That way I can get past HR checks to become a future project manager

somewhere else. What should I do? Take the money. Take the money. Take the money. Take the money. Take the money. Take the money. Wait, what do you, I'm not, I don't quite follow. What do you think you should do? I think you should take the money. Oh, I see. so this is reflective of my own personal experience which was very similar some of the details i wasn't a sysadmin but i was a developer i had been working on campus and some lower paid off-campus jobs and i was pretty close to finishing my degree but i would have to either work full time while finishing it or work part-time and make a bunch less money and i took the money i

stopped working on my degree but i uh helpfully disguised myself from knowing that fact um not disguised myself i i bamboozled myself by saying i'll just do online classes and work full-time and do those full-time that way i won't have to go into class but really that was just me dropping out of college you're like surely i can finish these two classes online in the next 10 years and i don't have a time machine i don't know what would have happened but I can tell you it doesn't feel like not finishing those classes has hurt my career in any way I think if I mean my plan was to take that job later so if I had done that I would have just been I would have spent more time working part-time and making less money I would have just

been some thousands of dollars behind financially where I am right now so I don't feel like it's harmed me at all and i feel like the market and perception and culture and everything have all shifted even more since then so that i feel like it would harm me even less if i did it today yeah like boot camps weren't even a thing back then yeah yeah and i feel like system administration maybe even places less requirements for degrees that's my vague impression where it's a lot of people that just like get into computers when they're kids and turns out you can do a lot of cool sysadmin stuff without ever going to school at all. Yeah, exactly. I don't think I've ever seen a job description for a system admin that says required computer science bachelor's degree.

What about this technical project management thing? So maybe the question asker could get a great sysadmin job, but is it going to hurt their long-term goal, do you think? Well, that depends on how they define technical project management, because that has a lot of different definitions depending on what company you're at. And it could be anything from the person who walks around with the clipboard checking off and reporting status on a project on one end of the spectrum to like a director of a big organization managing people and leading a technical team on the other end of the spectrum and a lot of things in between. So I would say that even though I just took a long time to explain that spectrum, I don't think this decision

will impact any of those roles, but I think it might impact some slightly less than others. I think that if you want to be the clipboard checkboxer person, I think that your technical degree will be even less important. But if you want to be the director at a big company, then your pedigree, your academic pedigree may be challenged. I've never been a director at a big company so i don't know what that world is like but i feel like it it's got to have more to do with what you get done right i mean i i see announcements of new director people joining our company and it never mentions anything about where they went to school it's always like this person worked at ebay and did all kinds of rad stuff there and then came here it's it's like yeah i

mean maybe there's some something somewhere in that path that's been gated by degree but i feel like i don't see it at higher levels either it's all just they seem like they've been very successful so far and they could probably be successful in this role yeah you're right about that i agree i've had the same experience let's say you got a new director or a new technical project manager or whatever would you think to ask like i wonder if they have their degree and if so where is it from i i never would but i do work in an organization that has a very high they place a very high value on educational pedigree in certain roles because like half of my organization has a science background and every single one machine learning yes stuff yes like machine learning

natural language stuff and every single one of the people in that hierarchy whether it's you know whether it's an individual contributor all the way up to the vp and everyone in between they all have phds yeah right so it's like a it's i have a little bit of that bias based on my current situation but that doesn't sound like this situation at all no and i don't think you can get a phd in systems administration not yet you'd be a pioneer here's my dissertation i just wrote down everything people already do it's the first phd dissertation so you just accept it yeah what um yeah i i think i mean okay what would you lose out on you would lose out on the scholastic network kind of academia um there's some probably intangibles there there

might be some connections you could make but my career has been affected way more by people i meet professionally than by people i met in school oh yeah i mean aside from your your peers right Like your teachers and other faculty, they have had zero impact. And I have maintained some connections with some of them, but they've had basically zero impact. And that's because the academic sphere tends not to coincide with the professional sphere, right? Like those, those interactions, those bridges are few and far between.

Yeah. Yeah. I think we both agree. You should totally take the money or, or you should tell your boss like, Hey, here's the other offer I had. I would like to stay here. I guess if that's what you really want. dave every time we talk about salary like this you always tell me don't you always tell people

don't use this offer to negotiate more money but i feel like if if the motivation for leaving is purely financial and you would like to stay if they gave you more money that seems fine yeah but i mean this is a situation where this is an employee at a state university there's just no way that that that money is going to move up okay anywhere even near what he's been offered All right. All right. Nuance removed. I tried to put some in. It's back out. Take the money. So now I'm going to push back on you a little bit on this one, Jameson, because I think that there is inherent value in finishing your degree, even if it doesn't directly benefit you in the job search or the job market. It just feels good to have it done. And some people really value that,

you know? How much, can you place a dollar amount on that good feeling? like how let me well let me counter with another question how much is it worth to you and i'll tell you how much is it worth to me to just be able to play the trump card anytime you say something i can say yeah well i i got a computer science degree and you didn't can you put a price on that uh yeah i think all the money that i've made by not finishing my degree yeah i don't know i can't tell if you're joking or not but there's there's value in college okay yeah i'm only i'm only like half joking i certainly don't put any like value in being able to tell people that i have a degree and especially to win arguments with jameson

but um i will say that if you don't finish now you will probably never finish and i think that individual folks need to like look at themselves and say, how much will that, um, haunt me in 20 years? And I know several people for whom it haunted them enough that after their kids were grown and they were, you know, in their fifties, uh, they actually did go back and get their degree just to finish it up. And there was really no economic or market driven reason for that other than they just wanted it to be done. Sure. Yeah. I'm a, I have some projects finishing up this month but then i hope to take it back up oh yeah yeah okay i'm slowly plugging away but someday i'll be able to because i'm so close and and the cost is different so this person's situation

there's a very large financial cost to finishing the degree and so they have to judge is it worth it to give up this extra what did they say 45k versus 80 yeah this extra um 35 to how do i math $55,000 a year yeah and for me it's like do I want to spend an hour a day for the next six months working on this because I have one class left it's all mine like it's a much lower cost much more easily borne here's something we glossed over in the question I'm working for minimum wage as a systems administrator wow and presumably oh yeah this they say I have five years of experience um that's incredible unfortunately you know this 40k raise or 40k per year 45k per year is coming in a few months and that's great but goodness uh you have been underpaid for a very long time

at this university i don't know if there's a way around that though if that's just how the university pays everyone like what are you going to do besides just quit yeah depending on the location of the university there just may not be other it jobs in the in the same city that the university's in you know yeah could be the only gig in town when i worked for my university it was relatively low paying relative to professional programming work but for a university job it was so cushy it paid so much better than i i worked before as like a night security guard or something and made way more as a lowly my sequel peon than i did as a night security guard um you were a security guard i mean i could be loosely described as being a security guard my job was to walk

around the freshman dorms at night and i had this weird wand thing that i touched to this sensor on the door to make sure it was locked making sure that no one had left the doors propped open so people could like sneak in and make out in the dorms or whatever um i think i never saw anyone ever so you were you're not only were you barely a security guard you were not even a needed security guard no i was not all i was doing is like securing kids from having fun i wasn't like protecting property or or intimidating people i had to do it in the winter too and it was overnight so there were shifts where it'd be like 3 a.m in the winter in utah just like walking around in the no oh man miserable with your wand yeah with my wand i guess it was for self-defense maybe if i

looked kind of like a a pipe so maybe i could have like i don't know if i found people making out just start whacking them stop it wow yeah it was great well that's anyways and you got paid minimum wage i bet you at all minimum wage i think it was well i can't remember it might have been minimum wage if it wasn't it was pretty close it was commensurate with the value i was providing so maybe you were a little overcompensated yeah possibly i think it felt like one of those jobs that they're like we we have to give jobs to students yeah i don't know somehow and so they just threw some money at it i don't know oh i did have to do other stuff that was okay i'm remembering more now right pivoting the

podcast to jameson's vague college recollections it was i i worked in the office at the like student center and it was the rotating shift to be the security guard so most of the time i was like sitting in an office sorting stuff or like i don't know doing random crap on a computer but every couple days i had to go out and be the night security guard and i rotated between people okay i'm glad you're combination secretary security guard yes and i owe it all to that all your success yep all right have we answered the question i i think so i'm just i'm so torn on this one because if it was if you were making a little more money which you will be soon i would say probably stick it out and finish your degree yeah they don't they don't say how

much they have left either but it's it the difference is so stark uh just take the money it's pretty big you'll have to move though right unless you're gonna do a two-hour commute yeah take the money that's fine take the money buy a nice car yep okay fine take the money okay i that's how i win all my arguments people give up they're not convinced all right can i read our next question no please do this is from another anonymous listener i have recently become the technical lead at my company i need to build my team more but i'm struggling with one thing how do i overcome the fear of hiring someone better than me who could potentially overtake me as the team lead is this a common fear among leaders i want to build an effective team of high

caliber developers but i can't do that if i let my ego and insecurity get in the way this is a fascinating question yeah because i've always seen this sentiment from the other side i've always seen advice about like only hire people smarter than you and people saying don't hire people that are dumber than you just to make you look smart this person is explicitly saying like but i want to hire people worse than i am so they don't replace me like that clearly that's a sentiment some people have otherwise there wouldn't be so much advice about it but it's interesting seeing them come out and say it i appreciate your candor like what would happen if you deliberately set out to hire people that were only clearly less capable than you your job would be horrible you as a team

lead your life would be a nightmare you would spend your whole day just cleaning up people's messes it would suck so bad well what if you what if you didn't let's rethink best practices okay got it all right take it from the top what if you just didn't do your job that's what you're saying you hired bad employees and then we're also a bad employee no no and then every time something goes wrong you throw them under the bus oh okay so so you look great as disposable yeah and hope they never catch on that everyone who joins your team is bad at their job and gets fired for like bringing down prod you're gonna have to be good at marketing and you're gonna have you're gonna have to say it's not that everyone i hire is bad it's that i am just so

good and this what you see is normal i'm a shining star the but on the other hand you don't have to be good at being a team lead so it's it's a win yeah um as someone leading a team i can tell you that my life is vastly improved by working with people that are really smart. And I don't want to imagine what it would be like if I couldn't work with them. It would be so bad. So some of it is self-serving, like think about what it would be like if you did this. And I can't think of a way that it would not be horrible. That's true. I mean, if you want to be engaged at work and excited and solve hard problems and feel like you're doing a good job, having people whose hand you have to hold all the time would would pull you away from that and it would bring the

team down and then i think you would probably justifiably be recognized as not doing a good job in your role either also i think that the competition for your job might be uh less common than you think every every time i've moved into a team lead role it's been like the team sits around and they're like we need a new team lead and everyone's like not it you know and then yeah i'm the one that raises my hand and they're like oh thank goodness yeah i that's been the same experience i've had when i've become some kind of team leader manager role that there were other people who were smarter than i was even or who could have done it who just really did not want to and so they're like great someone else can do all the stuff that i don't want to do yep yeah i

just haven't encountered i mean i'm sure it's got to be out there somewhere where there are people who are who are just trying to climb the ladder oh yeah destroy anyone in their way but i don't think that's i feel like all those people go to business school and so you're safe just walk over to your sales department and you'll get a sense for what that looks like yeah i just i just don't know that this is i guess we're spending a lot of time telling this person they're stupid or thinking this way i feel bad i think what i'm saying is i'm giving your ego permission to let go of its insecurity because there's nothing to worry about yeah one thing you could also do is so maybe maybe it's not like what if someone replaces me it's like

this feeling that as the team lead you have to be better at every part of the job than anyone else on the team and i don't think that's a reasonable expectation i don't think that's true i think you need a different skill set and you should be technically competent as a technical team lead and be able to be a successful individual contributor but if you're doing it right you don't want to be the bottleneck if you have to be if you have to know the most about everything it's going to hold your team back a little bit and and you want to be able to give people autonomy and say like go solve our ui rendering problems and i haven't put the time in to figure out how to solve them that's your job yes um and have someone be good at that and do a better job than

you could that makes your life better absolutely i like that perspective when i was a younger engineer i remember thinking to myself why can't i find a manager who's better at my job than me so i can have someone to look up to and emulate and someone who can tell me how to solve my problems and and hold my hand more and in the intervening 15 years i've never found one and i realized that's because being a good manager and being a good engineer are they're not one is not dependent on the other and good managers can bring in engineers that are better than them in ways that supplement their gaps in their own capabilities right like if if your manager was great at everything, then they would just do your job for you. But that the whole point of your

manager is that they're doing things that you don't want to do or can't do. And you're doing things that they don't want to do and can't do. It's a two way street. So I would embrace that symmetry and embrace that complimentary notion where you are depending on these people to fill gaps that you have. And it's not just a matter of like making more of you. It's not like you're just cloning the manager and saying, well, I need to go 10 times faster. So I need to hire 10 people. it's about fundamental capabilities that you don't have and probably won't ever have are who you're looking for in a hire yeah yeah i i will say um i don't have the feeling of i can't hire anyone smarter than i am or they'll replace me but i do still feel the pressure of of

needing to know the most out of anyone that's something i'm still trying to struggle or something i'm still struggling through you're trying to try to improve on i'm trying to let go of that and i have room to improve i'll say that but um oh do you remember that hearing that story about the guy who uh worked two jobs at once by subcontracting one of his jobs to china oh yeah he got in a lot of trouble right yeah i'm pretty sure he went to jail does that you know what that has nothing to do with this question at all never mind undo that pop that off the stack all right anyways just a just a fun little aside for you why did i think that had anything to do with this question i know i saw your

your notes on that and i was like oh this is gonna be interesting i can't wait till jameson connects these dots um there must be something about outsourcing there always is yeah yeah anyways have we answered it how do i overcome the fear of thinking someone better than me could potentially overtake me as the team leader yeah see i think the question asker already knows this is something they need to get rid of the question is what are the techniques for doing it and i would say number one is that you can uh embrace your own ignorance and lack of ability like really be honest with yourself about what that is you're like i am never going to be the best at everything let it go tell people verbally that you're not good at x y or z and that that's

why you brought in these other people to be good at it um you know just like embrace that lean into it i think you until you acknowledge it out loud you're gonna have a hard time really internalizing that fact yeah yeah i think that's a good point that that also communicates something positive to your team which is that you don't have to pretend like you know stuff you don't that might be some pressure you're feeling too of if you hire smarter people they're gonna find out that they're smarter than you. And then you'll get in trouble. And I think everyone kind of experiences that to some degree when they join a team with talented people. Sounds like imposter syndrome. Yeah, it kind of is. And if you just tackle it head on and say, like, I don't know how to do

this thing. I'm asking you to do it and then help help solve this problem. The other technique I would use is think about how great it is to work with people who inspire you and amaze you because they're so much better at something than you. And then think about the opposite of that, which is where you hire someone who is not as good at something as you and it bothers you and you have to help them. And by the way, this is not a knock at like mentorship and hiring junior folks. That's not what I'm talking about. But just think about the difference in those two situations and just ask yourself, do I want a team full of people who amaze and inspire me or not? And that's the price you have to pay is letting go of your ego to have that kind of awesome team that you come to work

every day and go, wow, they're so amazing. Yeah. Yeah, that's right. Well said, Dave. I'm really good at saying things. I'm very secure about that. Yeah, well, that's why I'll never be on a team with you. I must be the sayer. Maybe I could work for you. Yeah. You just tell me what to say.

That way I could focus on the things that I'm good at, like... Shining your VP's shoes? yeah okay got it all right we'll i'll delegate the work to you and i will do the sucking up okay have we answered the question oh i hope so good luck this is an exciting position to step into and i hope you enjoy it it sounds like the fact that you're thinking about this as like a thing you need to overcome is positive because um that means you're not just going to be like well i'm only hiring people worse than i am problem solved which would be bad let me let me share one more story. So the very first time I became technical lead, it was a team of two,

me and one other engineer. And to this day, I still remember this feeling where I became the lead. I felt like I was responsible for everything. And the last thing that I wanted to have happen was one of my teammates did something that I wasn't aware of or didn't understand. And at one point, I had to take a day off or something. And when I came back, my teammate, the one and only teammate had implemented this complicated feature that I had wanted to implement I thought that'd be really fun I wanted to build it but he built it instead and I remember having this very tangible feeling of like frustration with that situation and thinking oh no he did it and it's I'm not going to understand it and he's going to be better than me at this thing

I don't know what came over me but at one point I was able to just let go of that completely and say but it's done and i didn't have to do it that's awesome like the project made progress even though i wasn't the one pushing the buttons on the keyboard yeah i think from that moment forward i was always so happy to delegate tasks off to people even if it was stuff that i thought was super interesting and fun and i just took myself out of the critical path on every project i led so that more capable people could not only contribute and make the project move forward without me but also so that they could grow and have these cool experiences themselves and i've never regretted that so hopefully that helps you when you're thinking about

bringing these new people onto your team all right i think that means it's answered okay i just have to have the last word it's one of my insecurities what should people do if they want their own questions answered dave if they want to give you the last word on their questions go to softskills.audio and click on ask a question where you can fill out our little form there you can also tweet us at softskillseng and follow us on twitter to get notified when new episodes are published as well as whenever we see cool soft skills related stuff come up we retweet it occasionally we promise to keep your your twitter feed pretty light we aren't we aren't super heavy tweeters gotta save the twitter feed for all those

sweet memes and cat pictures that's right dog pictures and stuff all right we'll catch you next week