Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 136: My family thinks I'm over paid and Is a 10% raise good

Episode Date: December 17, 2018

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I am a software developer and as such, i get paid nicely. My family doesn’t think I work hard enough or deserve the money. Any advice? I am a software developer that was promoted earlier this year. I received a 10% raise with this promotion. Since working for this company for some time, this is the first substantial raise I have received. Previous raises ranged from nothing to sub-inflation raises. Today, my manager informed me that at my annual review I would not be receiving a raise. My manager said this has nothing to do with my performance but more with the fact that I was given a raise with my promotion earlier this year. I was caught off guard by this and did not really know how to feel about this information. Does this seem reasonable? Is this something worth following up on with my manager? If so, what are good questions to ask?

It takes more than property-based testing to be a great software engineer. This is episode 136 of the Soft Skills Engineering Podcast, and I am your host, Jameson Dance. I'm your host, Dave Smith. I now want to make my generative tests all rhyme. I feel like that's a thing you could do with a complex enough property-based testing suite. What do you mean? What would rhyme? The inputs? Yeah.

Oh. Are you familiar with property-based testing, Dave? That's like real estate, right? yeah you use a is it a dowsing rod is that the split thing yeah where you find water under the under the ground that would be more comprehensible than some of the docs no it's it's really cool and you should check it out and that's not what this show is about south skills engineering is a weekly advice show where we answer all of your non-technical questions about the technical field of software development that is exactly what it is and this

week we'd like to thank some patrons who have made this show possible by contributing at the level that gives them a shout out every single week they are matthew wotowicz the agile ventures charity zach grannon david jackson nick kantar sean clayton and chris hogan thank you so much if you'd like to support the show financially head over to patreon or rather head over to our website softskills.audio and click support us on patreon thank you so much to all of our new patrons this week it's been great we really appreciate your financial support yeah thank you so much i actually had a friend ask me if that means that he could make me say sonic the hedgehog every week and i told him yes my dignity does cost 20 a month well that it turns out that patron did come through

this week i don't know if you saw the email all right i didn't and when we bill sonic the hedgehog on january 1st we will begin saying sonic the hedgehog every week wait we just said it early crap oh no all right i'm gonna dive into the questions this is from an anonymous listener i'm a software developer and as such i get paid nicely my family doesn't think i work hard enough or deserve the money any advice your family is right uh have you tried paying them off with all your money oh yeah now do you think i make too much money i think you deserve a little bit more of the money than i thought you did and for another twenty dollars i will think you deserve all the money this is interesting my i wonder if the

family comes from a like a non-technical background or there are people working blue collar jobs or something or they're a bunch of doctors and they're like wait you make how much i had to go to 15 years of med school you know i feel i actually feel that i have a friend who is an auto mechanic and i also have friends who are doctors and i feel from both sides judged for how stupidly easy my job is like um i don't have to be on call the same way doctors do people's lives don't hang in the balance it's just physically so the biggest physical dangers are that i'll get short uh hip flexors from sitting down all day like i don't know hey you laugh it's a real problem is it really i have to stretch for minutes a day i thought you

just making it up no it's a thing if you sit all day your hip flexors shorten and it kills millions a year now i feel like an insensitive noob i'm so sorry well don't worry dave death is coming in the form of short short hip flexors you'll rue the day you made fun of this but yeah i don't know it is pretty easy in some ways or not easy it is cushy in some ways yeah you sit all day you can listen to music while you work a lot of companies give you free food sometimes it's stressful i don't know i feel like i would be stressed i'm capable of being stressed out by any job though show me a cushy job and i'll show you how i can mine stress out of it if stress was currency you would be rich you could find it everywhere every time i turn over a rock i

find stress yep i think there's a snarky remark you could make to your family which is well if i make too much why don't you get into it how would that go over yeah depends on if i'm filming a reality tv show of this conversation or not let me set up some cameras and then go for it i'll line up some sponsors oh yeah that that that episode we get a ton of good ratings yeah watch people be horrible on camera go okay just say it dave well if you if you think i made too much but but first try and bribe them okay use both of our suggestions first pay them off then tell them they're not smart enough to do your job got it people say that a lot though it's like i think my dad used to say this to me when i was a kid when i would say oh that those people get

paid so much money and he's like sounds like you need to get into that business thanks dad i feel like i get a lot of people that make me uncomfortable the other way by saying well your job is so hard i could never do that like oh really just saying saying the word programming they have some block in their head that makes them feel like that's for smart people and there's other work that they can do and uh i feel like it again it kind of goes both ways where there's this idealized view of what my life is like and then i i feel like i should show them the excel spreadsheet that i produced today and then uh that that correct both people and they'd be like you got paid to do what? This? Yeah. Or like you had to sit in a meeting for how long to do this?

You know, software engineering is kind of a young industry. Like lawyers and doctors are traditionally the high paid, you know, white collar workers. And software engineering kind of just swooped out of nowhere. And actually it wasn't even that high paying of a job until about like 10 years ago. Coincidentally, about the same time all these bootcamps started popping up. yeah not a coincidence at all actually yeah i wonder if it's a prestige it sounds like you're saying it's a prestige thing then if if you were a high-paid lawyer no one would say oh you don't deserve all this money is that what you're saying i don't think so i think it was more like i think it's a change i think the thing is that the industry has changed you know 15 years ago

software engineers were not exorbitantly paid and now they are that's like really fast for that big of a change and so people are like wait what i never even heard of programming job what is this why do you why do you make so much money yeah i don't think i have any real answers for this as opposed to all the real answers i normally have um i don't know because in some ways it is objectively physically cushy and it is paid pretty well i guess i'm i'm wondering why that's a bad thing though like yeah i mean aren't they high-fiving you saying you made it congratulations you're getting paid too much to do too little yeah i mean well i mean look take this question on the surface of it my family doesn't think i work hard enough or deserve the money i mean

what's the harm in just saying you know what family you're right i don't work hard enough i don't deserve this much money what a privilege yeah like you win now what what are you going to talk about at family family gatherings now though if you just eliminate a whole subject i know we used to talk about how much i don't deserve my income but i agree let's talk about something else how about the weather some of it could be i i've found it hard to explain what i do to people who aren't technical in a way that i feel like captures what i actually do i always find myself resorting to pretty broad analogies yeah me too and they're always and then i feel like yeah it's it's it doesn't reflect the reality

of what my life or what my job is like i mean and maybe some of it is that that they they don't understand really what you do or why someone would consider it valuable now that i'm saying this though this doesn't feel like a thing where you could explain your way out of it if it's this feels like a gut feeling that you can't just say like well let me talk to you about how the futures market work and then i'll explain why it's valuable to be like i don't know i don't know you could just explain stuff to people if they feel like your job is too easy okay well in that case if it's a gut thing just redirect the rage speaking of futures market why don't we just call out some wall street traders who make way too much money for basically gambling

but they have to do all that cocaine and it's really hard in their systems and by the way this same group of people is why your 401k lost half its value in 2008 so you know just send your rage that way okay okay yes i like it you're saying go into politics redirect populist rage as some other group and profit from it all right yep yeah i don't know this is interesting i feel like i feel like my family is happy for me yeah mine is too i've i've never like told my extended family how much i make but i mean i think they're happy that i'm not living on you know minimum wage yeah uh now that we bragged about how good we have it sorry we can't help you just try and have just switch families

have dave's family okay no next time they do that start generating some tears practice like crying on demand generate some tears and just whip out hundred dollar bills and wipe your tears off your face okay become a human reaction gif yeah exactly yeah yeah i like it that'll win them over they'll be like oh i was wrong i feel like there's something here we haven't quite gotten to the center of though which is that it's it's hard in ways that are not physical or even necessarily tied to how many hours you put in some some programming jobs involve long hours but some of them don't but there's this idea of some of it is knowledge work is is hard to measure and quantify and we run into issues with that with bosses often where you'll get people who want

butts in seats for a certain amount of time or who feel like you're goofing off because you're not like sitting down quietly at your desk or i don't know there's these perceptions of productivity that come from the manufacturing age where you sat down and put in an amount of physical work and got a unit of value out of it and it doesn't work that same way and and to some people i think that feels vague or unclear or or easy but then there's also another part of it where programming is um it's intellectually tiring and then there's all kinds of cultural and social issues that make it very hard for some people to to to be like accepted in the industry or to feel comfortable in the industry there's a lot of different axes where i think it's hard

in ways that don't necessarily apply to other kinds of jobs and i don't know how you get that across to people without trying to explain stuff to them and again i feel like gut feelings are hard to explain away okay here's why here's what you could do say how much money would i have to pay you to spend 40 to 50 hours a week sitting in college math class or replace college math class with a thing that they do not want to do is that what you're saying yeah or are you saying that your job is literally college math class yeah i mean i chose math because i think programming is strenuous mentally in the same way that math class is strenuous mentally and i'm gonna just I mean I'm just going to make a crazy assumption here that the people

who are making this comment don't really value your work I mean and your work is a lot like math so maybe choose math yeah I'm just trying to like make it visceral you know you were saying you had a hard time coming up with analogies that make it clear but I think that helps

and like sometimes if you ask people like would you rather run a mile or take a really hard test you know a lot of people will choose the mile right yeah because it's knowledge work is hard it hurts yeah it is hard it's it's not some arcane art that is secret and impossible to decipher though i think the pool of people who could figure it out is pretty huge oh yeah for sure i feel i feel

torn between i feel like you could go swing to one end of the pendulum and just talk about how hard it is and how how intricate the problems you deal with are and and make it kind of like i don't know how to explain what that would feel like it feels like kind of self-aggrandizing in a way where you're saying like i am so smart because i have to solve all these problems or you could swing the other way and say like look at how much money it makes us to mine ad data or whatever whatever thing you do that is tied to money and both of those feel like try them both and then see what happens next you can a b test them and then present the results to your family along with the p-value and confidence intervals yeah and tell them how hard it was to do

honestly though if someone said this to me and my family i would just say you're right i am overpaid and honestly i believe that software engineers are at the present moment overpaid i think there will really yeah i think so i mean salaries are so high they've grown so much over the last 10 years and i don't i think it's a more of a function of the plentiful quantity of vc money and just the land rush that is just happening in the it industry in general frankly i'm surprised it has lasted this long because remember i started out in 2003 when i was one of 200 applicants for three jobs you know i mean that's how it was and so i don't know if it'll ever go back to that but what we have right now feels like just a golden age just completely crazy yeah well i

will take it yeah oh yeah i'm not saying i'm not saying no i'm just saying i agree and i like the income it's great i i think i think it's still pretty unevenly distributed as well though i think there are certain parts of the industry that feel much more like that than others and i think there are plenty of people that will probably hear you and be like i'm not overpaid what are you talking about i would love to feel overpaid yeah i'm sure there are people like that and i've talked to several people who i'm like wow you are underpaid compared to the rest of the industry so i'm not saying that that like everyone is overpaid but i think the median software engineer is probably overpaid huh that's my that's i have no data behind that it's just my

gut feel who needs data you got guts i know what why do you need data when you have such good guts all right let's do our next question okay i'll read this one this comes from an anonymous listener who says, I am a software developer that was promoted earlier this year. I received a 10% raise with this promotion. Since working for this company for some time, this is the first substantial raise I have received. Previous raises ranged from nothing to sub-inflation raises. Today, my manager informed me that at my annual review, I would not be receiving a raise. My manager said this has nothing to do with my performance, but more with the fact that I was already given a raise with my promotion earlier this year. I was caught off guard by this and did

not really know how to feel about the situation does this seem reasonable is there something worth following up on with my manager if so what are good questions to ask i think the solution space of ways to be weird about raises is is pretty huge like it happened so it's reasonable to some degree that company i don't know what the norm is though this feels weird to me especially if you have scheduled annual raises that you just wouldn't get one there can be pay bans sometimes though but if you just got promoted you would theoretically be in a higher pay band so so i have heard of there being limits at certain levels of how much you can make but if you just got promoted you have a higher pay ban presumably if that's the problem so you wouldn't be in this

situation of like we literally cannot pay someone in this position more than you are making right now yeah i think the pay band cap is unlikely to be coming into play here yeah it's it's certainly not going to be 10 more than what you were making when you felt underpaid before with for having no raises or sub-inflation raises for several years uh so it does feel weird yeah to get no raise at all is weird i would i would normally expect at least a cost of living adjustment even if you had already gotten a promotion that year yeah i agree however i do know of companies who do who have a no raise policy or you know just cost of living policy except for promotions and promotion time is the only time you get substantial pay increase but it doesn't sound

like that's this feels like some weird combination of those things where they do get regular raises even though they didn't sound no it says but here it says previous raises ranged from nothing to sub-inflation which means maybe they were just doing cost of living or less and then the promotion you got a 10 here i have on my desk this piece of paper that says the cost of living went down in the last year you should be thankful we're not docking your pay yeah it sounds like there's some it doesn't sound like a no raise except for a promotion place it just sounds like they sometimes do raises and they didn't for this one it it doesn't sound right but it feels like their policy is already weird if they give no to subinflation raises before yeah like saying to

them this doesn't make any sense i don't think they'll be like you're right we have been doing it wrong this whole time here's some more money because it's already messed up all i did was look at my manager confused and he wrote me a check no the time that you can do that is in the job interview right yeah so i feel like the first question is pretty clear like no this is weird but what do they do about it yeah this is weird in terms of like broadly across the industry this feels this feels strange yes agreed on that point what i would do in this situation is i would start doing some investigative research at this company and try to figure out what is the norm and am i just getting shortchanged compared to all my peers or is this how this company does compensation

and the answer to that question will inform i think whether i'm going to stay because long term if you have to go five years between substantial raises, you're going to be way below market after not long. Yeah. I've worked at places that have no formal raise process and it's down to you asking about it and kind of pestering and maybe getting told no, and then pestering later. And I've worked at places that have very rigid, formal, like small range of numbers for specific criteria raises. And it's, I feel like your, your plan of attack for those is very different. One of them it's like what do you do the whole year to go through this defined formal process and the other one is like how do you make people feel like you deserve it when you ask for it yeah i feel

like this is kind of this weird uncanny valley in between those where there's some indication of some structure because you got a promotion so it's not just like a flat culture like everyone lives in a commune and money is figment of your imagination like but it still seems like you have to do a lot of asking for stuff my annual review i would not be receiving a raise so there's this expectation that raises come at annual reviews yep i don't know this feels hard i mean i would ask like what is the norm here i i guess i'm just not as bashful about asking comp questions to my management as many people are and i would just say like what should i expect for the next few years i know you can't promise me but like can you give me a historical indicator like i know

what i know the raises i've gotten over the last few years but what are my peers doing you know what's like the average for my team that's a really good question what's the average for my team because what you really want to know is like how much does each person on my team make and that's a hard question for your manager to answer but i don't think you i don't think you need that i think you can just tell you can just ask like what the percentage increases have been year over year and i think that'll tell you if you're about to if you're basically walking into a slump on your pay because you know the industry like we were talking is pretty hot and has been for years and you know i've it's not uncommon for developers to get five plus percent year over year for the

last 10 years you know and you compare that to like sub inflation so inflation's around two percent you compare like a five percent annual raise to like a one and a half percent annual raise over the course of 10 years you're talking about huge difference in money you know probably double right yeah i'm also struck by the fact that i mean you you got promoted and then this was a performance review so your performance was presumably good promotable even yeah like why i feel like you have an argument to make there about like rewarding good performance and that's that's i think one of the purposes of performance reviews not the only one but well to play devil's advocate there i would say you already got the reward for that and that was a 10 pay increase yeah i think i just

have this baseline assumption that a company with enough structure to have yearly performance reviews and and some idea of yearly raises even though they're explicitly saying you're not going to get one it just it seems wrong to say you get no raise even though your performance has been fine or excellent even yeah that like that feels like a separate concern to me than a raise for a promotion i don't know i mean yeah you're probably right i'm thinking more and more from the context of startups where i was in management and i think if i gave someone a 10 like out of cycle raise i would not be inclined to give them another massive raise at their performance review say three months later or six months later. Yeah. So they still have a firm plan of action, right?

Well, I guess their plan of action is ask your manager if this is the norm and what they should be able to expect going forward. Yeah. And also ask, because that question they might not want to answer because management doesn't like to commit themselves to future promises like that too much, especially when it comes to comp. But you could at least say historically, what's the rest of the team doing am i above average below average where am i and maybe i mean i might even come in and say look i'm expecting a five percent raise this year what is it going to take for me to earn that and the good news is your your annual review hasn't happened yet so there's still time i think to negotiate that if if this was happening like after your annual review you might be out of

luck until next year no it did i said it happened at the annual it says my manager informed me that at my annual review, I would not be receiving a raise. I interpreted that to mean that, hey, looking forward to your annual review, you're not going to be getting another raise. That's how I interpreted it. But you may be right. And if that's the case, then sorry. Either way, that's a good question to ask for next year. I would have that hard conversation and say, I would even throw out a number and say, look, I think I deserve a 5% raise and bring a little bit of market data. We've talked about this before. You know, you can search online and eliminate all the data that doesn't support your case.

also this may be a time where you need to start interviewing to see what the job market in your area really looks like and maybe you're topped out you know maybe you're at the top of your range for your experience level um that the market will bear so you need to find that out and uh then i think you'll have a little bit more legs to stand on when you bring this to your manager all right question answered yeah what can people do if they want more questions answered go to softskills.audio click the giant dollar sign and then a random video will appear making fun of you for making too much money for doing too little work as a software developer okay uh then once you're done watching that video click the ask us

a question button and thank you so much for listening we'll catch you next week