Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 158: I accepted a counter-offer and stayed and dealing with engineers who exaggerate their contributions

Episode Date: May 20, 2019

This episode is sponsored by the O’Reilly Velocity conference. Register today and use discount code SKILLS for a 20% discount: http://velocityconf.com/skills. In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I was unhappy at my job despite having a great manager, so I started interviewing around. Then my manager helped improve things considerably, but I ended up getting a job offer that was for a much higher amount than I’m currently paid. My company gave me a counter offer that I accepted, but now I feel like I somehow betrayed my manager and don’t know how to stop feeling guilty. How do I come back from a touchy salary negotiation incident like this and make things feel like they’re normal again? Compared to a smaller company which I used to work at, this new big company I’m working at seems to require more storytelling around the work that I do. I see people getting rewarded for exaggerating the effects of their work and being excused for their missed deadlines when they complain and blame the codebase. I hate to play this kind of game and would rather divert my energy on improving as an engineer and getting more code written. </rant> With all that said, I do understand the need for this and think it’s a valuable skill.

This episode is sponsored by the amazing O'Reilly Velocity Conference coming to San Jose, California, June 10th through June 13th. It takes more than great sequence diagram skills to be a great engineer. This is episode 158 of the Soft Skills Engineering podcast. I'm your host, Dave Smith. I'm your host, Jameson Dance. Soft Skills Engineering is a weekly advice show for software developers about non-technical topics.

You could make a sequence diagram about anything, really. Like, I'm going to make one about microwaving my lunch, I guess. it's just a one flat line put lunch in microwave press button take lunch out eat lunch that's it's not a microservice yet how do i turn microwaving my lunch into a distributed system i'm pretty sure that's how i get several million dollars of vc funding or at least a really good blog article yeah what if you had to subscribe to a monthly service in order to microwave your lunch perfect and then the startup music plays underneath me while i'm saying this like you know that startup music genre the jingle yeah there's the startup music jingles oh yeah

you just feel inspired to replace your microwave with an expensive less less reliable service but it's got rounded corners i feel like that jingle has come to me for me has come to mean for me like this company doesn't have music budget they spent it all on coconut water i actually googled for that jingle one time and i couldn't find it i was like what's the startup jingle i was like i was sure i would find some page but there are so many of them anyways let's thank our wonderful patrons thank you so much to matthew voidovich the agile ventures charity zach grannon louis santos nick kantar sean clayton

Ivo Robotnik, Sonny Tai, Sonic the Hedgehog, Mireille Rousseau, and Chris Hogan. Thank you so much to those folks and to everyone who has contributed or is contributing. Thank you for helping make the show possible. Yeah, thanks very much. All right, I'll read our first question. Here goes.

This comes from an anonymous listener who says, I was unhappy at my job despite having a great manager. So I started interviewing around. Then my manager helped improve things considerably, but I ended up getting a job offer that was for a much higher amount than I'm currently paid. My company gave me a counter offer that I accepted, but now I feel like I somehow betrayed my manager and don't know how to stop feeling guilty.

How do I come back from a touchy salary negotiation incident like this and make things feel like they're normal again? It's easy. You give us the difference. And then you feel like you're back to what you were paid before. Guilt disposal as a service. Yeah. Isn't that?

It's yeah. We will sell you salary indulgences. i love it hmm have you ever accepted a counter offer never i have never been counter offered because i always have quit before i know where i'm going so there's no counter offer because there's nothing yeah there's no counter offer because the counter offer is like from my couch beckoning saying hey what if you were unemployed for a while so jameson a note from hr here says you're quitting to do nothing we will pay you one cent infinitely more financially valuable than what you're about to start doing

oh yeah and i i make one cent yeah and then more by staying yeah i i don't think i've ever lined up a new job while i had an existing job and then had the option to get counter offered which maybe that's a mistake probably actually i'm gonna go on the record and say that is a mistake don't do that so i haven't been in this situation directly yeah and then i think with your most recent job you were actually self-employed and you didn't make yourself a counteroffer i didn't yeah that's true i guess i could have been in that situation and i i chose to let myself go you know it sounds like a really great opportunity for you jameson and i'm excited and i think that's the best step for you i wish you good luck on your future endeavors wish i could have been there for

that conversation good luck on your future endeavors is like the polite business flip you the middle finger yes please join me in wishing jameson well in his future endeavors we are super excited and also a little sad yeah then you just see in the email just a little tiny very small party horn emoji slipped in there it's like is it stenography not stenography steganography steganography yeah the the periods are actually microfilm rights of all the happy photo shoots that the team did when i left so we're helping okay so what about you dave so you got nothing to offer i have had

a counter offer one time and i did not take it was it for similar or more money it was for the same amount of money as the new offer yeah or maybe a little more but see i just i'm the kind of i'm the kind of employee where if i choose to go i'm really gonna go yeah like i usually make that decision before i walk in i wouldn't i have never taken an offer for another job into my manager and said i'm holding this over your head as a warning shot please meet this or i'm leaving I've never done that. And it doesn't sound like that's what our listener here did either. Yeah, there was some more detail we didn't read, but they basically said, I didn't do

that. They just went into their manager to tell them kind of what was going on. Yeah, I'm leaving. And then the manager made a good case and things got better. I mean, you know, this is also kind of a thing, you know, where your situation at work isn't necessarily permanent. And if you stick it out for a few months, even if you're interviewing, things could change a lot.

I've had that happen. Yeah. And then you're like, oh, well, I got this offer because interviewing takes a while and sometimes it can take less time to turn a bad situation into a good situation i've got this offer now i don't actually want to leave and they made it pretty sweet but now i feel like a schmuck for staying and i feel like i just played the played my manager who i respect and love but i played them you know as if i played this offer off of them so yeah how do you how do you now shed your guilt i don't think you have anything to be guilty about this sounds like a solution to a

problem one of the problems was you were unhappy at work that problem was solved and then in interviewing you found out that another problem was you are underpaid at work and now that problem is solved i okay another option is maybe your manager has betrayed you and double-crossed you and the money is cursed and everything you buy with it will be like monkey's paw style like you buy your new tesla and it turns out it only has three wheels it can only turn right or something yeah so this is your manager's brilliant plan of exacting revenge i wonder if it would make this person feel better if they sat down with their manager and just kind of came clean about everything and said you know i wasn't really happy but you did a great job

and you turned things around here and now i'm super happy and the timing of this offer just it wasn't that i was like you know going around you and didn't like you it's just that it didn't work out or sorry the timing uh okay i'm blathering it's not so much that it was you you weren't the problem you did a great job and you fixed things and now everything's good and and yeah okay i'm i don't know what to say maybe that's not a good idea just start sweating a lot like i am right now yeah i don't know i i don't think you have anything to apologize for i think it sounds like you already told your manager i'm not holding this over you you could just say that again i i I would suspect, unless your manager has given you some indication that they are upset with

the fact that you now make more money, I don't think they would pay you the money, pay you enough to be mad that they were paying you that much, you know? I could maybe see that on a new hire where you don't quite have the exact gauge of their skills and they maybe negotiate really well or have some credentials and then they start and they're just struggling to perform. But the manager knows you, you've worked together for a while. and so presumably they have some idea of your value and your worth and if they're paying you for that i wouldn't assume that they're mad that you're making more money yeah i think you're

taking on guilt that has no reason to exist yeah it let's just say it this way if you went out shopping for an offer with no intention of joining another company but with every intention of bringing those offers back and using them to negotiate for a higher salary at your current company then yeah i'd say maybe you should feel guilty i i don't know should is a strong word but I would feel guilty in that situation. But you didn't do that. And now things worked out great for you. And quite frankly, you were probably underpaid. That's what I think is probably happening here. Yeah. Yeah. It's possible your manager could be happy now because there's not this revelation coming where you find out how much your colleagues make or how much you could

make somewhere else and get real mad. Yes. Yeah. And maybe your manager has been hoping they could bring your salary up to be at a more normal range, but the company has a policy where he can only bring it up in small increments. That is very true. There's a magic side door for people who you don't want to leave that salary can keep them. Yes. And that's exactly what happened with my counteroffer situation seven or eight years ago when I decided to take another opportunity. I announced to my manager that I was leaving and he asked me to hold off on making any commitments or announcing that I was leaving for like three days. And he came back with a sizable, sizable salary increase to match the other offer. You know, it was interesting, because it definitely went out

of the bounds that I had been told for years were the limits on annual salary increases. So there are there definitely are these side doors. I know you're pretty against the idea of shopping around for offers to increase your salary. I do feel like it's it's one of the only levers you have when you already work at a company. And there's ways it could go wrong and backfire. And it could be scummy but your labor is what you're selling and getting a clear understanding of the value of that labor sometimes the company only understands the value of that labor when someone else has valued it at a different rate so yeah i think even even if there's a party that was like maybe they'll give maybe they'll match it and then i'll be happy i i think maybe there's there's a spectrum

of motivation where the purely mercenary like i'm gonna twist the screws and now that i'm saying that i don't know they're a company they're not your family so i guess twist them great job that's the summary nice work you did it stop feeling guilty you're fine yep and if you get sad just wipe your tears away with those hundred dollar bills you're stacking up now and you know there's always the support us on patreon button if you feel like you make too much yeah yeah there is there are probably other things you could do with the money but We're on that list somewhere. Buy a Tesla that only drives right.

Then you have to buy one that only drives left and combine them into one mega Tesla. A Voltron. Yeah, a Tesla Voltron that just has really bad alignment. You know, I've been thinking about which conferences to attend this year. What a coincidence. This episode is sponsored by the O'Reilly Velocity Conference in San Jose, California, June 10th through the 13th. Yeah, I checked it out.

Velocity looks like a great event to learn new skills for building and managing cloud-native systems. They have a diverse lineup of 92 speakers from companies like Spotify, Netflix, Google, Dropbox, and Cloudflare. There will be talks about cloud application development, microservices, security, and of course, the darling of the internet right now, Kubernetes. It looks incredible this year. You should come to Velocity if you want to learn about chaos engineering, cloud-native systems, and serverless, and you get to hear firsthand from the engineers who have built some of the world's largest scale and highest performing internet applications.

My team works in this domain and it actually looks directly relevant to the kind of stuff we're facing right now. Really cool. You can even become a certified Kubernetes application developer while there. And you get to meet a bunch of interesting people, which is one of the main reasons I attend conferences.

We worked out a sweet deal with the Velocity organizers for soft skills engineering listeners. You can get 20% off when you use code SKILLS during registration. I did the math and with that code, you can get a pass for as low as $908 right now. Go to velocityconf.com slash skills to register and use discount code skills. Should I read our next question?

Yeah, let's do it. All right. This is from a listener named Ed. Compared to a smaller company, which I used to work for, this new big company I'm working at seems to require more storytelling around the work that I do. I see people getting rewarded for exaggerating the effects of their work and being excused for their missed deadlines when they complain and blame the code base. I hate to play this kind of game and would rather divert my energy on improving as an

engineer and getting more code written. and there is a semantically invalid and rant tag okay there's no open rant xml and rant our podcast has now seg faulted because it's written in c i guess yeah with all that said i do understand the need for this and i think it's a valuable skill so there's not a question here so that means we get to make up our own question yep um dave what can i do to be like you i assume that's the next sentence that's that's the implicit question here i usually add that to most of the questions in my head there are no dumb questions until now you're saying what can i do to be like you's a dumb question yep oh dear yeah there's there's a feeling here do you think

it seems like it could be either way one of them is how do i be effective in this environment or the other one is how do i just focus on doing good work and not have to worry about all this storytelling stuff yeah oh man i kind of have this snarky comment here where i'm thinking you see people getting rewarded for exaggerating the effects of their work say it ain't so people would never do that and they would never be rewarded for that level of dishonesty and yet here we are hmm yeah why don't we change the people switch them out yeah with people who understate their contributions yeah so i work at a gigantic megacorp and no one ever has any idea what is going on like one team over they're working on products you have never heard of

you've never heard mention of them or mention of any of the things that they affect or any of their customers or there's just so much going on that the communication requirements are much higher if you want people to actually understand what you're doing and some of that might be storytelling and some of it might be exaggeration but some of it is just if you do good work in this environment and no one knows about it then you didn't your work didn't have much of an effect or it doesn't bubble up to people that allocate resources promotions and number of team members and stuff like that so there is definitely a larger communication overhead in general i think at large companies partially just to make sure it filters through to people that need to know about

it there's just there's a lot of context yeah and so you're saying oh i know what it is so you have to exaggerate the contribution so that by the time it like it like the contribution gets attenuated as it travels farther and okay so it's it's like estimates where you have to like quintuple your estimate because each layer it goes through is going to shrink the amount of time is that what you're saying yeah or like a signal like a signal booster like you have to boost the signal to be able to transmit farther yeah yeah so some of this might be big company thing the the the storytelling and communication thing i don't know about the exaggeration stuff that might just be like a i don't know human nature thing like we talked about yeah but if it's just based on talking about what

you did i think that's easier to sell one way or the other where you can exaggerate or understate what you did but if you're saying what the impact of some work was and you have a way to measure that you can still just make all that up certainly but i think it's it's easier to look at that and feel like that reflects reality so if you feel like you need to do some of this to be effective i think some of that turns into putting more effort into measuring the outcomes that happen from your work and storytelling based on that instead of just here's what i did here's how hard it was here's like how smart i am for doing it say we i don't know closed this many bugs or we saved this much money or we sold this many contracts or whatever or we sold this many

left-handed teslas yeah we we offloaded this much broken inventory by routing it through our cursed tesla vendor you know but it says here big company right new big company and i just want to call out how different it is or how different it has been for me working at startups compared to big companies. I also work for a very large company now, but in the past I've worked for startups and I'll just tell the story this way. At startups, every engineer knows what every other engineer is working on. And when the leader says, here's what we're going to do, then that's what we all do. And that's pretty much it. But then when you come to a big company, I have learned, as I've observed that it's a lot more about persuading the masses to go along with your ideas there isn't

like this central figure who says okay here's what everyone's gonna do go do it because it's just too big for one mind to conceive of all the different uh things that have to be done you know it's not i think sometimes i imagine the military where you have like this overlord who runs the whole military and they've like planned out every little battalion's movements and is but i don't even know if battalion's the right word i'm sorry but they've planned out every movement they've planned out every supply chain issue they've planned out all the the schedules for all the different units and how they are going to move together but big companies just aren't like that it's more like wait you're saying that's how you think the military works yeah that's how i think

that's how i think of it yeah i think about like this like chess master who's moving the pieces on a board right i've played a lot of first person shooters so i don't think from my experience in the military online that's not quite how it works in the online military yeah with 12 a lot of people yeah just a lot of people yelling things i can't repeat on this podcast well anyway but big companies aren't like that and they're not like the startup and what they tend to be more like is these crowds of people who who will only act when persuaded even like these top-down initiatives you have to persuade people to do it i heard this uh interview with a CEO of one of the largest companies in America recently, and he was talking about how hard he had

to work to persuade people to do what he wanted them to do. And I thought, what? Like, why? You're like the number one most in charge person at this whole company. Why do you have to spend time on persuasion? But you do. And these stories, right, like this activity of telling stories about what you did and the effects that it had and the positive things that you contributed are part of that persuasion process. And they're a part that doesn't seem as necessary at a small company. That makes so much sense to me. Like you said about the big top-down initiatives, there are so many layers those have to filter through where people make decisions on each of those layers. And there's a lot of ways for things to go wrong or to get tangled up or to conflict

with other ideas or initiatives. And so a lot of it is just trying to coordinate and communicate. i don't know what to say about the some people exaggerate their work or blame lack of productivity on the code base that's a time-honored engineering tradition yeah that's true you can't take that away from us yeah what will we blame our lack of productivity on then yeah open floor if the code is fine on what open floor plans oh yeah that's true closed floor plans clean code and reddit is blocked and flying cars that's the secret i guess and unicorns yeah okay yeah if we're wishing yeah i guess i hate to play this kind of game would rather divert my energy on improving as an engineer and getting more code written yeah there's hmm i think you can tackle this deliberately

there's a few things you could do you could do nothing and just focus on technical output and because you listen to soft skills engineering that's proof that you're a great programmer and you'll do good technical work. But there is kind of a limit to how far that will take you and how influential that will be. You can kind of play the game as it is played here and exaggerate your successes and blame all your failures on the code base. You could also look at it as, I feel like I've never regretted the outcome of me taking a few hours to clearly communicate what I'm doing and why on anything of meaningful size at a big company, where the feedback has always been positive or some looming disaster that i had no idea about is uncovered because of it and

it is a time burden but i think in general it makes the rest of my time more effective than if i just put my head down and cranked out the code or cranked out features or whatever so i feel like you could look at it as something that will accelerate your technical output not a distraction from it because there's so much coordination that has to happen that is so insightful it really was Good job. Thank you. I'm just I'm just sitting here thinking that is so true. Like this. This is an investment. When you focus on honing your skills of describing your contributions to other people, it unlocks you in the future, even though it binds you down today in terms of your technical contributions. You'll be given more trust, more autonomy, and you'll be able to do things you want to do in the future. And you'll probably never be able to completely let this skill die. You'll always have to be describing your work.

But I think you'll be given a lot more power and a lot more. Frankly, your job will be more fun, I think, if you do these things now. That's so good. Thanks, Dave. Man, I'm just feeling great about myself now. Your contributions are just so good. now i have to say something real dumb to balance it out gotta burst my ego balloon what was i gonna say it doesn't matter you already said something really smart

that's true yeah it doesn't matter this is all filler until the podcast ends the i think a lot of the fun technical problems end up going to people that communicate well or do they go to them or do they attract i don't know some somehow if if there's a problem you're really interested in solving being able to sell like why it's important why people should work on it that feels very valuable too that's all kind of storytelling stuff huh yeah so is it a law of attraction or is it more of a push where people push the problems like leadership pushes cool problems to people who communicate well and describe their contributions or do those do those people get to go grab the problems they're interested in probably both it's not yeah i bet

it's both so what about the other side where we've kind of told ed maybe focus a little bit more on this and it'll actually help your technical output but how do you deal with people where you just know that they're they're they're grifters i started laughing because i knew exactly where you're going they're schemers you could be the guy who is instead of playing up your own contributions you're just constantly downplaying others yeah just shooting other people oh you could be the snopes of your company that's in the bonus dlc chapters to how to win friends and influence people is you you go around and you cross-reference all of their figures and demand citations for all of their like board presentations

oh my gosh i i have no idea how you deal with this beyond ignoring it because i don't know how you fight it yeah like i've i've literally i've seen people exaggerate their contributions and i almost never hear those those assertions challenged yeah same in the times that i know enough to know that they are exaggerated i no one ever says anything and so i assume that this happens all the time where there's stuff i don't know anything about to know it's exaggerated it makes me wonder if leadership knows that as well they just like build it in and they just like it's eventually reflected but i'm gonna guess no because i've i've seen a lot of leadership and it seems like sometimes they latch on to people who just aren't the best contributors

and all their peers know it but leadership doesn't that's pretty common trope so you just get the knives out just backstab them right oh no way yeah i don't know maybe we'll skip that question because i don't know how to answer it how to be snopes in your company complain and blame the code base well you need some independent funding first of all or not so independent your funding might go away well if you become snopes and people know it then they might start paying you off to stay off their backs it's a side hustle ah okay snopes side hustle yes it's accepting bribes to say that the lizard men are real i mean at the end of the day though you know we're joking about this and and at the end of

the day i would never mount a campaign to torpedo someone's assertions about their own greatness usually they don't cause that much harm and so i think all you have to do is come up with even more exaggerated claims about yourself it's an arms race is that what you're saying yes that just feels bad for the culture though where it's arms race is a little tongue-in-cheek but not really where if if everyone exaggerates and everyone knows they exaggerate then if you just don't you if you tell the truth or if you you say things like they are then you suddenly look pretty bad in comparison yeah you do but don't worry the whole company's eventually going to go out of business if they're working from so wait for these people to destroy the company that's what

you're saying yep i don't know i feel like this is going to be one of those questions where i i think about it again later i'm like why didn't i say this but i think it would be hard for me personally to challenge or push back on projects i wasn't involved in that i just knew about tangentially i think when you hear things like this it's okay to ask skeptical questions without being a complete jerk you know you might instead of just saying like well that's obviously exaggerated you could say hey can you uh give me a source for that i'd love to look into that more and understand the details, you know, and then they'll share it with you

and then you'll know it was fake. Or maybe you'll find out that actually they aren't exaggerated. Yeah. You know, could go either way. Yeah, I guess we talked earlier about using numbers and figures and cold hard facts a little bit more.

And maybe that's your subtle way of pushing back against this is you just ask for people to support their assertions a little bit more. Well, have we solved this problem? Once and for all? As usual.

All right. Good luck, Ed. What can people do if they would like their own problems solved? Well, don't ask us, first of all. But if you, in just a lapse of judgment, decide you want to do that anyway, go to softskills.audio and click on Ask a Question. You can leave as much information as you want.

Thank you so much to all the people that have written in. The questions are wonderful, and you are the lifeblood of this show. Yeah, thank you. All right, we'll catch you next week.