Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 172: Contracting and American email etiquette

Episode Date: August 26, 2019

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I’m a Full Stack Developer. I feel undervalued at my current job and I am looking at other opportunities. Many recruiters approach me on LinkedIn with contract-to-hire positions. Usually this means the benefits are not as good as direct hire positions and that the company can just dispose of me when the contract is done (after 6 or 12 months, generally). Salaries seem to be higher when contracting, though. Have you ever worked as a contractor for a large company? Would you recommend it? How likely is it that companies use this type of employment as a way to temporarily hire somebody for a specific project and then get rid of them once it’s done? What signs should I look for to avoid such companies? Does contracting actually make a difference? I live in Oregon, where employment is at-will anyway, so I can get fired at any time without any warning. Hello, I’m a mechanical engineer from Brazil. I really love your podcast. As a mechanical engineer I don’t develop software but I believe the soft skills are important to everyone. I work in an American multinational company and I often talk or send e-mails to the engineers there. However, our culture is different so I don’t know how to behave or how straightforward, informal or political I must be. I’m always afraid of offending someone. What kind of things I never should say or do when dealing with Americans? We Brazilians become friendly and intimate very fast. Do you guys notice these kind of different behavior from different cultures?

it takes more than refactoring your insecure yaml configuration into json to be a great engineer this is episode 172 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 so this doesn't happen as much with json but with yaml for some reason you get like layers and layers and layers of yaml templating out yaml with more yaml you can get hit really hard on the head with a yaml stick but at least you get significant white space in your language hooray i want to thank our wonderful patrons thank you so much to matthew voidovich the agile ventures charity ted nugent crash bandicoot zach grannon this

engineer goes up to 11 louis santos nick cantar taras karuk sean sunny tie sonic the hedgehog ivo robotnik marie rousseau chris hogan chase norton and stanley tactical radio thank you so much to those people who are donating at the level where we shout them out every episode thank you to everyone else who is supporting the show and your support will help pay for the costs of running the show and also get you access to our fantastic slack full of friendly people it's slacktastic and if you want to join if you want to support us you can go to soft skills the audio and click support us on Patreon. That's right. Well, uh, yeah. Question time. Yeah. Should I read the first one? Please do. Okay. This comes from an anonymous listener who says, hi, I'm a full stack developer.

I feel undervalued at my current job and I'm looking at other opportunities. Many recruiters approach me on LinkedIn with contract to hire positions. Usually this means the benefits are not as good as direct hire positions and that the company can just dispose of me when the contract is done after six or 12 months. Generally salaries seem to be higher when contracting though. Have you ever worked as a contractor for a large company? Would you recommend it? How likely is it that companies use this type of employment as a way to temporarily hire somebody for a specific project and then get rid of them once it's done? What signs should I look for to avoid such companies? Does contracting actually make a difference? I live in Oregon where employment

is at will anyway, so I can get fired at any time without any warning. On that nice note. yeah what a good thought for all of us to ponder that live in at will states i mean that's that's true but there's also cultural and legal things that people wanting to fire folks worry about too so even if you work at an at will place there's usually something protecting you from an evil boss waking up on the wrong side of the bed and just yeah like who shall i fire today i'm in a bad mood and the only thing that is going to fix it is firing a random victim whoever looks me in the eyes first today so if you feel undervalued at your current job working as a disposable contractor is not a great way to immediately feel more value necessarily

what if i turn myself into more of a fungible commodity i mean you put it so clearly i was like man oh wow yeah you're right but it could lead to being more valued in the end yes short-term undervalued long-term maybe adequately valued yeah so i have experience with this i work at a large company that hires lots of contractors and some of them do make it to full-time there are a lot of complications there though so generally the contractors come through a contracting company and there's sometimes an agreement with the contracting company that you can't hire the contractors directly oh or you have to pay like a recruiting bounty or something like that so it's more expensive to hire them

oh wow and there's also they ask about a specific project and then get rid of them that is how it happens a lot of the time where you have a certain budget of this project it needs to spin up quickly and we don't have time to like hire a team for it so we'll get like five contractors for this project for a fixed amount of time and that usually has an end date and then there's some ability to reevaluate it and say hey we really like these contractors or this project is going really well so we'll extend the contract but it's it's like an explicit decision to extend it and you can just do nothing and let it lapse yeah how likely is it that companies use this type of employment i mean yeah that's part of the benefit of it is they they are exposed to less risk it's

easier to just end a contract than it is to fire an employee or lay off people yeah and often as well if the company is experiencing financial difficulties that's an easy knob to turn to just say we're gonna stop paying our contractors right i mean hopefully you tell them not to work anymore as well uh you don't just not pay them and let them keep coming in to do your work what if this is the cfo right what if we can get them to do the job without paying them to do the job bottom line be so good yeah what if they work for goodwill equity where we give them options to our hearts or something options with a very good strike price to buy the fact that we like them yeah they still have to buy it yeah i have i have so much practical stuff to say that i don't have

anything funny to say i feel like so interrupt me with funny stuff i guess dave but okay the other thing going on here is if you come through a contracting company if you're not just directly employed as a contractor by the company, then there's always some price difference going on between what the contracting company is paying you and what the company wanting the contractor is paying the contracting company. And that can be to your advantage because it can be possible that you could join the company full-time for more money if you add in benefits and all the full-time stuff, but the company would be paying less money for you. There's like some arbitrage there that you can take advantage of where if you're working directly for the company you don't

have that so say you you you bill ten dollars an hour but the company bills out your labor at twenty dollars an hour whatever you can join full-time for the equivalent of 15 bucks an hour and get a raise and the company pays less money and if they like you that's a good deal oh so you're saying if you get one of these contracting companies to be kind of your intermediate man yeah then when you go full-time you might actually what have an increase in pay is that is that the possibility yeah or at least not as steep a decrease the question mentions higher salaries which they don't mean salaries yeah they don't mean the word salary higher monies and that's to account for the fact that you're not getting any benefits and your vacations now cost twice as

much money because it's not only whatever you spend it's the amount of money you're not earning by billing during those times yes so so generally the base salary is less but the total comp will be higher because you avoid all those extra costs and get more benefits and stuff but if you're going directly as a contractor you could probably just charge more money straight up and i think it'd be hard to get in at big companies though they like that kind of like barrier filter effect of having a contracting company that you go through yeah you can imagine it doesn't scale very well to have like a thousand individual agreements with yeah yeah yeah if you need if you need 500 contractors then you're not gonna like go find your 500 top then it turns into a

recruiting problem and why wouldn't you just hire someone full-time right huh so that's a bunch of info i've dumped is it good to do the problem here is feeling undervalued but what about in like a mixed contractor full-time environment what do you think will be the effect on being undervalued there oh i mean in the united states the law requires you be undervalued like they have to treat you differently or you are not a contractor you're a full-time employee and they have to pay benefits so they have incentives to not have you participate fully with the team and not have you come to company activities and have as much of a barrier of like handing tasks across the line and getting the result back as possible so it's very clear that you're not an employee with employee

like benefits but that doesn't always happen in real life because it turns out that's often if you're embedding on a team that's one more piece of advice i guess positions where you're embedded on a team are going to be much easier to convert to full-time and much more comfortable than positions where you're working separately on a contract project that you just hand over to someone else when you're done okay and i think the practical experience is often a little bit different than this like really hard and fast kind of shun shun the contractors so we don't get in legal trouble advice well what do you mean by that what do you mean it's different in practice like it's hard to work with someone like that so i think in practice lots of contractors end up

integrating more closely with the team and and just kind of in some ways looking sort of like normal employees yeah but if like the right person found out then they would stop it i guess right okay so i guess that's one sign to look for is look for uh embedding instead of separate projects what signs to look for you could ask them how often it happens too because some people explicitly use it as a as a way to vet folks didn't you have some experience with that dave Yeah, I did that. So a good 10 plus years ago, we were feeling dismayed with our interview process. It was quite rigorous. It was like an all day ordeal for every candidate. And we thought, you know, we're spending a lot of our time. We're spending a lot of the candidates time.

Wouldn't it be better just to do a lower investment interview process of just a couple of hours and then bring people on on like a 90 day temp to perm arrangement so that they can just start working. And if after 90 days, they're great, then they just come on full time. But if they're not, then they don't. And I think we did go through a contracting company to do that, where we basically outsourced the sourcing of candidates. And we did this for about four or five candidates, and none of them worked out. So we abandoned it and just went back to our normal full-time direct hire. For those candidates, do you feel like you would have hired some of them full-time? Or do you feel like you wouldn't have hired any of them full-time, but you're willing to take a chance because of

this contracting thing? I mean, I'm not totally sure I understand the question, but... So at the end of the couple hours of interview say you were deciding are we going to hire them full-time or not would you be a no on all these people but you just said but we'll try it out for this 90 days because if it doesn't work out we'll have more information and it could turn into yes and if it doesn't work out it's fine i don't think i would have said no because after just a couple of hours i didn't have enough data points to actually make a solid conclusion but it was enough to say not no if that makes sense like there were no red flags right and it was just enough to say yeah let's give it a try. Hmm. But that wasn't like we need to ramp up on a project really quick. That was

we want to tweak our hiring process. Exactly. It was just trying to be more efficient with our hiring. It's not really a commentary on the approach overall. I don't really know how it works in general or if our experience is really predictive of the rest of the industry. But for us, it was basically an abysmal failure. Yeah. Maybe because we did it wrong. Such a rare experience for you, Dave. Abysmal failure? Yeah. I know it only happens like once a day. Yeah. how likely is it yeah i don't i don't know raw numbers but you could ask the company i mean presumably if they find contractors they really like and want to bring on full-time then they're they're happy to do it yeah i would ask if i was looking at a position like this i would definitely

ask the company yeah you know but i will say that one thing and james and you have a ton of experience with this having run your own contracting company for about a year or two but like you have got to figure out how much your life is going to cost as a contractor because the price tag goes way up on things that you probably don't even know your employer is spending on your behalf right now. Insurance, payroll tax that they don't pay for you anymore. Self-employment tax is higher. Yeah. No PTO, no bonuses, no 401k, no equity. But you live in Oregon, so at least they still pump your gas for you yeah that's true that's worth a lot an hour yeah there are things out there there's there's some freelance rate calculators that help you figure out kind of

eyeball what your what your hourly rate should be to target a certain take-home number but it's it's like much higher than i think most people expect right yeah yeah if you take a number and multiply it by 2 000 hours that's roughly 40 hour weeks 50 weeks a year so basically two weeks of vacation a year then you'll be like that's a lot of money and then you like divide that in half basically yeah but should you do it i mean i would say not to do it at a company you would not want a full-time job for just that there's a job out there yeah if you're looking for stability and this is deliberately an effort to get a job then try and target it just like you would a job search and say here are the companies i would like to contract for i do not have any experience on the

recruiting side of working through a recruiter to get placed as a contractor working as a as a contractor or consultant, basically what happens is companies that like you always try to hire you and it's this delicate dance of, I don't like you enough to join you full time, but I'll keep taking your money, please. But that's as a more independent consultant than someone who's got one client that's a big company, basically. I got to say, and I'm curious if you've had a similar observation, but maybe 10 years ago or so, I would say two thirds or more of my recruiter inbox messaging was for contract positions whereas today it's got to be i don't know under 20 like it just seems like the numbers have come way down 10 years ago i was in college so

either infinity or zero percent of my recruiter spam but it does it does feel like it's gone down a little bit maybe maybe it's like an experience thing where people with longer tenures and more experience don't get approached by that as much yeah maybe recruiters are like it doesn't work go for the young fresh out of college kids they they don't know what they're doing i can trick them into a contracting gig yeah i i think i've used up all my wisdom juice on this question all right squeezed it all yep good luck good luck with that okay i will read the next question this is from a listener named carlos hello i'm a mechanical engineer from brazil i really love your podcast as a mechanical engineer i don't develop software but i believe the soft skills

are important to everyone i work in an american multinational company and i often talk or send emails to the engineers there however our culture is different so i don't know how to behave or how straightforward informal or political i must be i'm always afraid of offending someone what kind of things should i never say or do when dealing with americans we brazilians become friendly and intimate very fast do you guys notice these kinds of different behavior from different cultures oh awesome question oi tudo bem i lived for two years in brazil i spoke fluent portuguese at one point i could again with some effort i guess and brazil is rad i loved it there and that matches my impression broadly of the culture that people are very friendly get to know each other very

quickly and rapidly and it's easy to make fast friends and then just like stick with somebody for a while and hang out if you want okay so this is this is going to be a hard question for us to answer because what you're saying is like tell me about the things that americans never do to each other you know yeah it's like oh what do i never do i don't know yeah what are the things that are just obvious to you that you just assume are how everyone will behave exactly the water you swim in describe it i think that brazilian culture feels a little bit more informal i so i didn't work professionally when i lived in brazil so this is through a different lens of experience but it felt like maybe the the american business style of email is a little bit more direct and

straightforward and there's more effort on like communicating clearly and politely instead of casually and and maybe less conversational so like don't use the word dude don't use the word dude yeah okay yeah bro don't type rs rs rs rs a lot okay and what's that that's like lol in portuguese okay and don't type lol either yeah don't type lol uh say per my last email instead of listen up you moron that's a general thing it's not that brazilians would say listen up you moron more but per my last email is the magical phrase that for you didn't read my email listen wake up i think an important thing to know about americans mental model of brazil is soccer that's like the one thing they know about your whole country um so if you can like say like remember me i'm the soccer

guy or something they'll be like oh brazilian yeah so i think you're saying that americans are just culturally clueless about other there's room for one fact at most about each country yeah i think so okay maybe a couple if you have like hundreds of years of shared history between your two countries like france and the u.s a long relationship it's like cheese and great and like maybe if you reach it's like oh yeah statue of liberty they gave us the statue of liberty that's what i know about french culture they gave us a statue good good folk those french except it turned green oh it's beautiful though i love it true that's true you don't like the original brown well when i saw it i didn't i wasn't a fan back in whenever it was 1800s

not a fan of that original model yeah okay what about what is offensive to americans i don't know if i want to just list off all the things that would offend a large portion of our audience okay here's one for you saying that america might not be the number one country in anything is like super offensive to some americans that's the thing it's like a subset like uh america is large and varied and saying it is the number one country and lots of things could offend a different subset of americans true that's true so don't say anything i guess just stick to like here's this design what about that cracking football match okay don't talk about how much you hate bald eagles ah yes that is a safe thing to stay away from we've talked about how americans

are kind of ignorant about other cultures so you know you're from brazil and if an american thinks you speak spanish just go with it oh i know okay i know one in brazil the inventor of aviation is this guy named santos dumont and the wright brothers are not it they are frauds so if you want to start a giant fight between a brazilian and an american bring up the wright brothers and tell them that they were not first to flight okay that's a good one yeah there were some battles when i lived there about it it's a very stupid thing that i decided to fight did you so you you got on the right brother's side oh of course because they're american because you're a red blooded american yeah exactly and and i read up on the wikipedia article and there's like some

nuance and complexity that i ignored and was like maybe i tried to edit it to say like clearly it was the wright brothers or something i don't know okay that's a good topic to ignore yeah to some extent this crosses cultures though and it applies to more than just a brazilian talking to an american company like how what if what if you're american and you work for a japanese company or european company or something like how would you just go about understanding the cultural norms around communication especially business communication i feel like it would be easier to like make a faux pas that would mess up stuff yeah if you're just hanging out at a party and and you like someone says you speak spanish and then you like say no you you dummy i speak

portuguese and you kind of like laugh it off but if it's like an email with your boss yeah it's a little different it's weirder then it's hola yeah well hey turns out that's portuguese as well no is it okay darn it see that just goes to show how little i know well i mean i think a really good idea is to seek out someone who has your same cultural background who has spent time immersed in the other culture that you can then ask like what were the things that surprised you and i'll give you an example from friend that's i'm gonna interrupt you first so it's like the expert thing where experts aren't good teachers like we are experts in american culture that's right but we've we've internalized it so we can't look at it and examine it and say here's the here's

the weird part it's like people that are kind of have an outsider view yeah like i am really really good in american yeah it just comes effortlessly yeah don't even have to think to like watch football and yeah like like for example i used a drinking fountain the other day totally from muscle memory i drove on the right side of the road and was not even briefly terrified that i was going to run into oncoming traffic although i think it's the same yeah i think they drive on the right yeah in all of south america okay so here you know i'll just tell just a quick story that just totally surprised me but a good friend of ours is from france and when she came to the united states she learned the hard way that americans have a space bubble that's bigger

than french people have so you know if you're standing in the grocery store in the united states you usually want to put a couple two or three feet you know and these are imperial feet between not not one meter you know you want to put a couple two or three feet yeah between you and the next person in front of you and any closer than that and they're going to be like looking over their shoulder wondering what are you doing and this this lady this friend of mine she stood in line a lot at grocery stores and just right up against the back of the person you know maybe a few six inches away and repeatedly people were like what are you doing which i was like oh wow i had no idea i wonder how many times that happened where someone was like giving off

passive aggressive hints yeah that she just didn't pick up until someone finally was like why are you standing so close to me like right probably a bunch of times yeah i mean if she were living in our home state she may have lived an entire lifetime without ever anyone actually directly saying you're standing too close yeah passive aggressive is the only form of feedback but i think she was in new england so pretty quickly people yeah so yeah pretty pretty quickly people said hey you're standing too close yeah she's like i'm sorry anyway so yeah it's those kinds of things that would never occur to me to even say don't stand too close you know because i don't know like i don't know i didn't know other people stood that close and for what

it's worth i would happily welcome you to stand closer to me if you want to it's fine yeah your bubble has been shrunk because you have kids that's true i don't have a bubble anyway in fact i actually have a natural bubble to get to me you'll have to fight your way through a perimeter of children the children are clutched to your legs at the grocery store so the stranger has to stand one child's body width away from that's right it's like bubble wrap so there's probably a hundred little things like that that someone who has lived in the culture having grown up in yours will see and be able to tell you oh right off the bat they'll probably be able to list five things i think a useful thing to do would be ask a trusted colleague and say

hey, I want to make sure I'm communicating effectively. Could you look at, I don't know, these emails or these interactions and tell me if there's anything that seems like it would be offensive or ineffective. Right. Or even just culturally off a little bit. Yeah. Try to cast a really wide net so that their eyes are open to even subtle nuance things. Because I think culture manifests in subtle things usually. I think it's also different how common the experience is at the company of interacting with people from different cultures. Where if everyone at the company is in america most of the folks american and you're kind of the outlier then people might not have as good cultural like context switching in their head where they can say oh this is how

this person communicates or whatever but if it's much more common the proportions are much more even then then it's possible that it's it's very common to uh to be chatting between americans and brazilians and people are maybe they have some mental model of what your culture is like too you could explain that more as well you could say hey i like to be more casual in my in my email communication or whatever it is this is again me extrapolating from my my uh unique experience there yeah the other thing i'll say is that if this is a multinational company which carlos says it is it it could be that there's actually a overriding company culture that really should dominate the the communication structure and stuff like cyberpunk where they're these like

global megacorp multinational companies that are their own countries, basically. That's right. And they cross-cut geographical cultures. And I work for a company like that, that has established a very strong corporate culture that governs the behavior, it governs the reward systems, it governs the feedback we give to each other and the way we build software and treat customers and everything. And so that culture tends to override any local behavioral culture. And what I found is that even though I've interacted with people from dozens of other cultures i find that we have this common language and it really helps to be able to transcend any kind of you know cultural differences so i also work for a large global megacorp and it doesn't

feel quite the same with this shared strong culture so i think that might depend company to company however there are a lot of people from different countries that i work with and i think it's kind of like there isn't a shared culture but there's this shared understanding of like everyone's kind of negotiating people are used to communicating across cultures a little bit so everybody cuts everybody else a little bit of slack i think like in your case everyone just communicates in bentonville arkansas i wish i don't know what that's like we were gonna go to bentonville and then we didn't we had to cancel our trip we ended up going to california i've already been there so it was fun but it would have been cool to stop by the homeland of the company

i'm not sure i've ever actually been to arkansas i have never never in my life or as my daughter As my daughter said. Arkansas? Yeah. I mean, we live in Utah and there's a bunch of names that are like that. There's Hurricane instead of, it's spelled Hurricane and Tool, but you pronounce it Tooele. Just weird. Manoway.

I don't know. Spelled Mantua. What? Spelled Mantua, pronounced Manoway. I've never even heard of that place. Did you just make that up? No. It's on the way to Logan.

Oh, okay. There's a little Utah culture for you. yeah now i know i mean utah culture is like what i can see from my office because that's most of where i spend my life for me utah culture is this little bee flying around outside my window right now well hmm have we answered the question i think so we were a little bit indirect about it though because like i think the the short answer is we can't reliably answer this question for any culture because we don't have that context to do it. So we have a blind spot.

We have a giant blind spot, despite the fact that this is maybe the most I know about another culture besides American because I live there. And it's still like, I have no idea, man. But I can tell you how to investigate it. And I think that's what you should do. All right.

Well, boa sorte. Oh, what does that mean? That means good luck. Oh, I actually knew that. I could tell. Yeah, you speak Spanish. Yeah, and what I found is that when an American speaks Spanish

and another American speaks Portuguese, their accents are so bad that it sounds like the same language. Yeah, I had a good accent at one point and now I do not. Now I barely have a grasp on grammar and vocabulary. Well, good luck, Carlos. I hope this helps

and please let us know how it goes. If you want your own question answered, what should you do? Why am I asking you, Dave? Well, because I know the answer. I guess, yeah. Dave, what would you do if you had a question you wanted answered?

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