Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 173: Newbie burden and getting a 25% raise

Episode Date: September 2, 2019

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Hello! Love the show ❤️ I’m 6 months into my career as a software engineer at a very large company. As a new engineer, I’m often lost and confused, especially since my team is working on a green field project. My mentor is very helpful and patient with me despite all of my questions. I’ve thanked him countless times and publicly called out his support at standup and in front of management basically everyday. But I still feel like this isn’t enough. He’d never say it, but I know I’m such a burden to him and slow down the team. Other than quitting my job to alleviate him from my near-constant “Please help” messages, how can I: 1) show him how much his support has meant to me and get him the recognition he deserves 2) stop being such a drain on his productivity/life Thank you!! I’m a Senior Software Engineer, and I played the salary game with a recently promoted Mid-Level engineer on my team, who, in a gross violation of the rules, not only volunteered his own salary, but one of another Mid-Level engineer. In retrospect he was a bad one to play the game with. Anyway, it turns out they’re both really close to me now, and are both making a good deal more than I was 5 years ago when I was promoted to Senior. This is mostly (maybe entirely) because I was a horrid negotiator when I first started at the company. It was my first ““real”” job, and it turns out I really lowballed the company during salary negotiations. I’m pretty ready to leave the company (for reasons both personal and professional), but I’ve submitted a talk proposal for an industry conference that takes place 6 months from now. In order to give the talk I’d need to still be employed by the company, so rather than ordering the Soft Skills Engineering Special and quitting my job, I’m going to give it a shot and ask for a 25% raise. My question is what advice do you have for this conversation? I’ve read all the usual ““state your value, don’t make it personal, etc”” stuff, but do you guys have anything else that’s been effective in your experience on either side of this?

it takes more than three hours of sleep to be a great engineer this is episode 173 of the soft skills engineering podcast i am your host jamison dance i'm your host dave smith soft skills engineering is a weekly advice show where we answer all of your non-technical questions about the technical field of software development and i am on paternity leave which means i am on sleep leave are you taking a leave from sleep yeah it's great but the best part about it is that i don't get as stressed when i don't sleep because i don't have to go like deploy to production the next day i get to go to costco with my daughter or change diapers and it's easier to do those things when i'm asleep sleepy not asleep it's harder to record a coherent podcast

sorry you're saying it's easier to go to costco in your sleep than it is to deploy to production in your sleep yeah that tells me a little something about your continuous deployment processes i think i am more likely to walk out of costco with like four giant big screen tvs that i don't need though it's my lack of sleep or or a gold membership that's what that's what you'd walk out with dave i already have the executive membership okay i could get another one i guess yeah less sleep leads to poor impulse control so okay bring on all those extra tvs i guess all right i'd like to thank our patrons for this month who are contributing at the level that gets them a shout out every week they are matthew voidovich the agile ventures charity ted nugent

crash bandicoot zach grannon this engineer goes up to 11x luis santos nick cantar taras karuk sean sunny tie sonic the hedgehog iva robotnik marie russo chris hogan chase norton and stanley tactical radio thank you so much if you'd like to support the show go to softskills.audio and click support us on patreon all right i'm gonna read wait nope i'm gonna tell people what they get all right join our slack all right now i'm gonna read our next question okay this is from that new engineer breathing heavily over your shoulder love the show i'm six months into my career as a software engineer at a very large company as a new engineer i'm often lost and confused especially since my team is working on a green

field project my mentor is very helpful and patient with me despite all of my questions i thanked him countless times and publicly called out his support at stand-up and in front of management basically every day but i still feel like this isn't enough he would never say it but i know i'm such a burden on him and slow down the team other than quitting my job to alleviate him from my near constant please help messages how can i number one show him how much his support has meant to me and get him the recognition he deserves and two stop being such a drain on his productivity slash life thank you hmm so the immediate thing that occurs to me is if you're breathing heavily over someone's shoulder make sure your breath is real fresh yeah because

that would make it even worse if you just had some powerful onion breath or something but if it's like a pleasant minty freshness then that's that's probably a benefit yeah it's almost like a air freshener that you didn't have to install yeah there's that new engineer freshening the air over your shoulder. At a comfortable 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit. Nicely humidified. Yeah. Yeah. There's so much to talk about here. Yeah. Have you ever felt like a burden on a team when you are just like hammering them with questions constantly? Yes. At my current job. So I work at Walmart Labs. It's a very large company. I joined about 20 months ago. And for more than the first six months i felt pretty lost and asked a lot of questions and also a lot of repeat questions

asking questions didn't feel as scary as asking the question that i'd already asked but forgot or didn't understand the answer to or didn't write down the answer to yeah or wrote it down but what i wrote was in hieroglyphics or just scribbled and illegible or yeah so i i feel this even as a not new engineer like this is a this is certainly a thing it's not unique to your situation at at a large company as a new engineer yeah and i don't know that i had any tricks to get through it i just kind of kind of did it i wish that i asked more questions honestly but i feel like i suffered from looking usually i'm pretty good at asking questions and willing to look dumb but in situations where i actually think i am dumb then it's harder to ask questions like if i don't have

this baseline of i i basically know what i'm talking about and i've i've established some amount of reputation so that people know even though i ask this obvious to them question it's not because i'm dumb it's just like i'm just trying to learn this thing unless you actually feel dumb yeah if i don't have that then then it's harder so that just took a while to get over and it made me very sad for several months okay how many months probably like 10 months okay it was a while it was yeah it was like october by the time i felt like oh i'm actually kind of comfortable here all right yeah i've had i've had a similar experience especially at big companies it takes a lot longer than i would have expected to ramp up you know i've joined i've joined

startups and felt like i had my feet under me after just a month but i'm currently working for a big company and i really didn't feel super confident in myself until about a year and a half yeah it's crazy to say out loud but that's about how long it took yeah i mean is it worth talking about would you have done something different in retrospect to get that confidence faster probably should have breathed down more people's shoulders yeah i think i wish that i had asked better questions and i wish that i had written more docs because it turns out most of the stuff i was asking were things that the knowledge was very unevenly distributed about and that's that's also a way to turn it from you interrupting people to

you sharing that knowledge with the general audience a little bit more and getting a little bit more value than just your own self if you're worried about just being such a burden and not getting as much out of it or not them not getting as much productivity out of it if you can say but look now the whole team understands this thing better it's a little bit easier to oh yeah for me at least a little bit easier to justify that i think if i could go back in time and and i had a goal of accelerating my ramp up process i noticed that a few times i set up calendar events with other teams or people who i don't normally go to with a set of questions i wanted to ask them and i would just interview them i just be like tell me about this and then that would spawn

three more questions in my mind that I would ask them and I just put a half an hour on their calendar and I would just go through these questions and they would spawn more questions and those sessions were extremely effective and it was great because I would bother this person once in six months you know so I didn't feel like a burden to them and I think it made them feel good like subject matter experts you know it's it's when you start going to the same person over and over that's when you start I start to feel bad and kind of guilty for taking so much of their time yeah i i worked with a great developer named amy knight and she was very effective at learning things uh as a new employee at the company that we worked and she batched her questions up really

aggressively so she would just kind of work productively and then once or twice a week she would have this very curated list of questions and we just kind of knock them out and it didn't feel like a burden at all because it was more like it wasn't it wasn't like hey i'm gonna tap you on the shoulder to interrupt you it was more like being like you said being interviewed as someone who knows things which is flattering yeah how long would these weekly or twice weekly sessions last it was like half an hour to an hour okay i don't know i like helping people too though so it it never felt like a burden and and i think that approach of batching would work for people that maybe felt a little more bugged so there's this underlying feeling in the question that

i'm not worthy like i'm a huge burden and i'm just a nuisance people are upset at me because i'm taking up their time and slowing them down and i think you have to change that mindset it's easy for me to say but harder to do but i mean you you were hired there you deserve to be there and if it takes more effort to get you up to speed that's an investment on the company's part and they're doing it deliberately it's not they're looking at it long term and saying even if it takes a little bit of time to explain things the benefit to the organization is is positive overall so i feel like you have this really negative opinion of of your role there that's coming across in the question of of not contributing any value and just being a drain and that's totally

not true you're not a drain like people learn things by mentoring when you explain stuff to other people you learn it better and when you explain stuff to other people you learn things sound dumb when they come out of your mouth that you hadn't really examined before and it's really helpful to point out things that are confusing or suboptimal about the way that you work or way things are organized okay especially so the question asking mentions a greenfield project there are so many questions and unknowns right now and there might be some answers but so much of the work of a greenfield project is thinking about the right way to do things and kind of processing that information and talking to you about it is a is a really helpful way to process

that information i think you're contributing positive value that's a really good point i had i've been on my team now long enough to where people come to me with lots of questions and we've had a few people join recently and i've had a couple of one hour just question and answer sessions and it occurred to me that i've actually been creating action items for myself oh yeah after a half hour info session where it's like i'm supposed to be sharing knowledge with you but in the end it comes out with oh there's a bunch of things we haven't thought about that i need to address yeah every time we onboard someone to my team there's a chunk in the onboarding doc that says there will be confusing things basically and we might not have noticed them or might have

gotten used to them but we want to fix them so so every time we onboard a new person to the team we change that doc and change our processes and change our code and stuff gets better so it's kind of like shining a light on things also you're not a burden they're lucky to work with you your mentor should be thanking you because they get the opportunity to mentor the famous good breath heavy breather engineer who'll go on to do great things it seems like from the question that your mentor has shown that they like doing this and for people that like it mentoring is really really really really satisfying so it's not it's not a burden it's something they like doing and it's probably bringing satisfaction to them so like five years from now they'll they'll

be sitting in an audience listening to you describe your achievements and they'll lean over to their neighbor and whisper i mentored that engineer i smelled that engineer's breath have i told you how good they were breathing over my shoulder yeah yeah yeah it's it's not a drain at all it's it's a positive experience for them and for you okay but having said all that wonderful stuff there are obviously techniques you can use to try to get to a point where you are now in a role where you can help others and not be needing to have your questions answered by other people so much, right? Theoretically. I'm excited to learn them. Yeah. And I mean, you've already covered a couple of good techniques, which are batch your questions.

And the technique I shared was go outside of your normal answer providers and hit up other people with your questions, which by the way, that's a good thing to do, not just to alleviate the burden on one person, but also to get other people's perspectives and see if your team is actually aligned on the answers because they might not be. I do that all the time as a manager of a team. I talk to people outside of our team and it's incredibly helpful every time. Also, I think, you know, if you work for a company that's really measurement driven, you may have thought about this, but maybe not. And that is, why don't you keep track of the number of questions you're asking, which you can do quite easily if you're batching them up anyway, because, you know,

you're writing them all down. So you can track them, just put some date stamps on those batches. and then set a goal for yourself to reduce the number of questions that you ask on a weekly basis over some period of time. Maybe, maybe say like 10% per week reduction for the next 10 weeks. And in a couple of months, that'll put you down to zero, you know, or actually, I guess not. It's like the frog. It's like Zeno's paradox. Yeah. Jumping halfway to the pond every, every week. But it'll, it'll, it'll decrease your question volume significantly if you can adhere to that goal. And the reason, I'm not saying that you shouldn't, that you should let questions go unanswered. I'm saying that you should, when you're seeing that goal threshold approach for the week,

you should try to invest more time to see if you can uncover the answers yourself. Because that's what these people are doing when they answer your questions. And sometimes they're drawing on context that they just have by virtue of being on the team for a long time. But other times they're answering the question using tools and techniques that they've developed over the years. And that's what I do when people come to me with questions. I don't, I usually don't know the answer right off the bat, but I know how to find the answer. And that's the skill that you need to train yourself to get. That's a really good point. I worked with a gentleman named Shane Hanson. He works at Google now. He was really good at answering very tricky technical questions

based on data that he would just get from like just chopping up logs and analyzing them with some combination of zed and awk and all those tools or or like pprof or just he he's really good at using tooling to gather data to answer questions that's one great thing but the other great thing is he would always explain the process he used to answer those questions so he wouldn't just say like 10 milliseconds that's the 90th percentile he would he would post kind of the the script he used to gather that data and get the answer that's awesome that's yeah it was super cool yeah and i think part of it was his way of saying like hey you could have done this as well so wait a minute wait a minute just just a little passive aggressive just a little i mean i don't

think it was passive aggressive it was just like here's how here's how it's the whole teach a man to fish versus give him a fish thing like i will give you the fish but inside the fish is a manual for how to fish or something like that. I will feed you and teach you. Yeah, exactly. When you sink your teeth into this fish, you will find a piece of paper. Yeah, so I have a bunch of notes

that are basically copies of chat logs from Shane that show the answer to a question, but also how to use this tool that I didn't know about or how to get data from this data source that I didn't know existed or things like that. That's awesome. And as a question asker, You can say, hey, I've got a question for you.

I don't want you to tell me the answer. I want you to teach me how to find the answer, to force that to happen. Yeah. Or you could just say, give me a fish. I'm tired and hungry. I don't want a fish. I want a fish. All right.

Well, have we answered the question? I believe so. I don't think you're a drain. i think you're doing great and you will continue to do great i agree can i read our next question please okay this comes from an anonymous listener who says i'm a senior software engineer and i played the salary game oh we need to we need to interrupt ourselves here and describe the salary game for people who i feel like it needs a jingle like it's time for the salary game it's like it's like the prize is right or something yep exactly okay so the salary game

is where two people want to know how much each other make and the rules of the game are simple each person agrees that if the other person shares then they will share and they also have to agree that's rule number one rule number two is that you have to agree not to get mad okay and this comes from a good friend of mine named john well not to get mad at the other person yes yes you I'm out of your company. Yes, exactly. Or the industry or society. Yeah, just don't take it out on me.

That's the rule. So that's the salary game. And you can play the salary game even though your HR department might not want you to. It is legal in the United States to play as far as we know. But we're not experts on law. We only do space law. So couldn't say for sure in your jurisdiction.

It's certainly legal in space though. Yeah, oh, definitely, definitely. Okay, moving on here. So I decided to play the salary game with a recently promoted mid-level engineer on my team who in a gross violation of the rules not only volunteered his own salary but also the salary of another mid-level engineer oh no two for one in retrospect he was a bad one to play the game with does that mean that you need to like it's like a hand of cards you have just these salaries that

you know you have to play another one yeah you volunteer another salary that you know it's like magic the gathering yep i've got a good deck okay all right the question asker goes on to say anyways it turns out they're both really close to me now and are both making a good deal more than i was five years ago when i was promoted to senior this is mostly maybe entirely because i was a horrid negotiator when i first started at the company it was my first quote real job and it turns out i really low-balled the company during salary negotiations i'm pretty ready to leave the company for reasons both personal and professional but i've submitted a talk proposal for an industry conference that takes place in six months in order to give the talk i need to still be employed by

the company so rather than ordering the soft skills engineering special you know what's coming next and quitting my job i'm going to give it a shot and ask for a 25 percent raise my question is what advice do you have for this conversation i've read all the usual quote state your value don't make it personal etc stuff but do you guys have anything else that's been effective in your experience on either side of this good question so there's some i just want to summarize the salary situation someone is a level below the question asker but makes almost as much as the question asker and a lot more than the question asker originally made when they were promoted to their current level which is a level above yeah the person they compared with yeah so so

they make a little bit more now but maybe not as much more as they would like i guess that's right basically the company is getting a huge bargain on you is what what we're seeing i mean there's inflation right so five years ago whatever money you made was worth less but without the exact numbers we just have to believe that it's not not commensurate yeah there's also so there's there's just economy inflation but there's also tech industry salary yes levels rising i guess that's not inflation it's just how it works but i i think those feel like to me they're rising faster than inflation where if you come into the industry today versus five years ago you generally get more money oh a lot more and i i feel like the pace has increased over the last five years compared

to the previous say 10 and the top end of that has increased a lot more too in terms of both lower entry level and kind of later career salary yeah like the i think that the salary range has widened which i think is what you're saying yeah the delta between the bottom and top is hot is bigger and the bottom has also moved up yeah to the tune of about double when i started 15 years ago yeah so some of this could be just based on that it doesn't make it better though no no feel better i i think there there are probably a lot of people in your situation though who have some seniority in their position or career and are looking at newer people who seem to be getting compensated a lot differently than they are and the company's very unlikely to say oh whoops sorry

about that we'll just uh bump you up yeah we'll just we'll just proactively step in and solve this problem you haven't told us about oh yeah there's there's some uh inequity there in our salaries we we've been thinking a lot about how to resolve this in a way that costs us more money said no hr department ever yeah well except google apparently they do this do they yeah i read an article about that recently but anyway that's good i mean it feels it feels smart because it feels like every there are all these traps hidden all over companies where there's people in this situation everywhere where they just joined at the wrong time or something and they're one conversation away from becoming disgruntled about their pay exactly exactly so it feels like if you

want to retain people it's probably worth having a i mean this is advice for the company not for the question asker but it seems like you would want a playbook for dealing with this that isn't just hope no one ever finds out how much other people make yeah yeah exactly you know the other thing that to point out here is that this is a case where a bad decision or bad timing or bad luck can follow you for years in terms of salary a friend of mine he started out his career at a very small in a very small city where salaries were generally lower because the cost of living was lower then he moved to a bigger city and made the mistake when negotiating for his new salary at a new company he made the mistake of sharing his previous salary which anchored his new salary and

that followed him for like that no that followed him for like 10 years and so he was just perpetually behind the industry yeah and i think the way he reset that was he changed jobs enough times to get caught up yeah this the negotiation at the beginning of a job is either the most lucrative or most expensive few minutes of your life probably so true where it's it's not just the delta in what you earn immediately but percentage-based raises after that and confidence like if you if you negotiate successfully it turns out it's easier to ask for more money later than if you it kind of stinks because it's it doesn't feel very fair but if you have positive experiences negotiating it's easier to negotiate more later yeah okay so what do you think the chances are

that if this question asker asks for a 25 percent raise that they'll actually get it i think they are single digit i wasn't i'm not going to say zero it's like that dumb and dumber line what are the chances of a guy like me and a girl like you and then she says one in a million and says so you're saying there's a chance yeah there is probably a chance but it feels very low i have asked for a 25 raise a few times in my career really yeah two two specific instances that i can think of but i feel like there was another time so maybe three and one time i actually got it but it was kind of an exceptional case where i was at a startup i had been there for a year i had taken a risk in terms of salary to get there in the first place so it was a bit low and they

knew that and i just worked my tail off that whole year yeah and so when i when race time came i said this is what i want and they gave it to me so that happened but i've also had it happen where i talked to managers i asked 25 and they're just like okay uh we'll take it into advisement and then you know the race comes out it's like six yep no what a good question good good for you dave for asking that question all right moving on exactly thank you so much for asking for that number I have never asked for a 25% raise. Have you ever asked for a raise with a specific dollar amount on it or a percentage? Yes, I have.

And I asked for a raise to get up to six figures because a friend of mine was making six figures and had been at the company less time than me. And it was totally 100% ego-based. The actual percentage delta was pretty small. It was just like from not six figures to six figures. And they were grumpy, but accepted. i don't know but but i that was a weird place and i didn't do it right at all it was just but you but you made it but i i yeah i crossed the threshold my reward was an extra 20 on each

paycheck so worth it i mean it was definitely more of an ego thing than a yeah financial situation thing but it also feels very dumb to hear me sound like i'm complaining about making that much money i'm not at all yeah it's great it's a privilege but but i it wasn't i think it was a yeah much smaller percentage raised than that yeah so you're saying basically it's not gonna happen i don't think it's gonna happen so so it would not happen except in extraordinary circumstances at most places that i have worked yeah and the bigger the company the lower the odds yeah the more extraordinary the circumstances now i will say this at the same company where they declined my 25 request i then quit that job a couple months later to go get another job

and it was crazy but they my manager said hold on dave before you announce that you're resigning just give me 48 hours i said okay so i said no problem i'll keep it quiet 48 hours later and then your manager just partied for those they didn't say what they would do with it Dave is out of here finally so no 48 hours later he came back and he goes we'd like to offer you a oh what's the term they use not a counter offer but uh retention package I don't know basically they offered me a 25% raise and and I was like oh wait a minute so I think what what that taught me was that under duress, every rule has an exception. And so your HR department might have a cap on raises for a given year. And then there are exceptions that can be authorized

based on circumstances. So if you truly are willing to quit, but you'd be willing to stay for 25% more, now may be the time to just say, I'm quitting, obviously, after you get a new job. But that then leads to this talk at this conference. And I think we should talk about that. Well, I want to go back to before that. I want to go back to this thing, which is if you are not excited about staying at this company anyways, this is a great experiment where you don't have anything to lose, you know, like you're not worried about, I don't know what the negative consequences would be even if, if you asked and they said no, but that's a worry people have.

What if I come across as greedy or get a bad reputation or something and you don't have to worry about it. Like, yeah, if you're going to quit, I don't know. It's fine. The worst that they can do is say no. And then you still quit. Right. Exactly.

Well, the other worst thing they can do is say, oh, and by the way, that airline ticket and hotel we were going to pay for for your conference you're going to, that's on you now. You'll get a pay decrease. Yes, effectively. Yeah. So the conference talk. Yes. Let's talk about that. So you've committed to give a conference talk in six months. I think that the question I would ask you now is, what if you got a 25% raise, but the condition was you can't give that talk? And so let's just say that that's $20,000 per year that you would be getting. If someone came up to you and said, hey, I will write you a check right now for $20,000 if you will simply not give that conference talk, would you say yes?

Yes. I, yes. You're not asking me, but yes. You would not give a talk for 20K? I would not pay 20K to give a talk. Oh, that's a- I would not give up 20K. That's another way to think about it is would you pay $20,000 if you were making more in order to give this talk?

Like if the conference charged a fee. I could see it in some circumstances as like a marketing investment in your career where maybe it's a really big platform and you feel like good things will happen. But I don't know. There are a lot of platforms. True. There's probably another one. Yeah. But I don't know the specifics of the circumstance.

maybe there's a product that this engineer is working on at this specific company and they're very close to it and need to be an employee to talk about it or something that's possible i think the meat of your question is just look at the opportunity cost of staying to give this talk and that's super valuable i think that's really important the other option is you could just change the talk title to how i lost everything to give this talk yeah well so you know less funny thing i've seen talks like that before that are from people who used to work on a product that that there's just a little disclaimer at the beginning that's like hey i don't work at this company anymore but this is my experiences when i did yeah those were more

there's a certain genre of talk that that works for though it's not like talking as an authority on the project or yeah sometimes it's like a maintainer of an open source thing that was built while they were an employee at that company and it's used by that company or something like that but if if you're like a product developer on azure or something i don't know whatever i don't know what it is but i my gut is it's something like that where it's a commercial product then that might be a little bit harder to be like not employed by microsoft anymore but yeah talk about azure at microsoft's conference yeah but still opportunity cost it's a thing oh yeah for sure and you should quantify this and i think i love these kind of questions where you turn them upside

down and say if someone paid you x would you do y because that's basically what what you're up against here yeah i think we've answered the question i think we haven't given any advice on how to actually ask for the raise yeah true but i think your point about opportunity cost was really good i do i do think there's a little bit more advice that i would give on how to ask for this raise we we gave the nuclear option which is threatened to quit and and that is well that's, I mean, that's your leverage, right? It's such a weird dance here because that's what you are. Some people don't want to feel threatened or feel like they are threatening. But if you are saying I'm going to quit because I don't make enough money, it's very expensive for you to quit

that job for the company. They have to hire a replacement and train them and take months or years to get them up to speed and hiring is slow and expensive. Yes. And by the way, the replacement is going to make more than you. That's true. Yeah. As a new senior engineer hire, they will most likely make more money than you like there's there's a strong financial case but i also know dave you're kind of against this idea of using the fact that i might quit as leverage yeah like that's your that's your whole leverage it is but there's this there's this cultural thing where at least in my experience where people expect a little bit more subtlety around that and they don't just expect you to come out guns blazing and so i think what i would do is i would tiptoe

into the situation and then escalate only as needed to the nuclear option so i would start out by saying, you know, I want to work here. I like the job, which may or may not be true in this case, but I like the job. But the financial situation is making it hard for me to stay when there are so many other better financial options out there. And then I think you should give specific examples. And, you know, Jameson, you mentioned that you came in with an example saying my friend is making more than me. I don't know if you shared that with the company, but I've done that. I didn't. I was ready, but no, I didn't. I've done that before, but not with a salary that's at the same company and so like i've said my friend is making x and that's 20 more than i'm making

here they're at a different company i just want you to know that's a market data point and i could work with them you know and that's kind of like a more subtle gentle way of saying i'm gonna quit if you don't pay me more without saying i'm gonna quit if you don't pay me more yeah that's a good point i think that's the key is you have to get that point across without saying it without coming across as threatening what a dance exactly it is a dance because it would be fewer words if you could just say hey i could get a raise by quitting will you give me that raise yeah so i don't quit yeah it would cost you a lot of money for me to quit yeah but it's hard for whatever reason in our culture at least we don't say we'd say things like that we don't and also companies are really

bad about that how many stories do you hear about people who this this exact situation where someone is underpaid and they cannot get paid commensurate with their value at their current job and their only option is to quit and go get paid that amount in a different company like wouldn't it be better off for the company to just pay them yeah because the replacement is gonna be is gonna make that much they're gonna be worse for a while yeah and they're gonna make that much anyways and it's gonna cost a ton of time and money and equipment and yeah there's just there's a lot of expenses with bringing on a new person there's a risk of a mishire and you know anyway so yeah i agree meta point companies should be better at this they should give a vector for employees to address this

problem and i know very few companies have done this but they're they're out there anyway so yeah that's the dance that i would engage in with your management but it sounds like in six months after the conference you're gonna quit anyway again no pressure yeah there you go question answered good luck what should people do if they want their own questions answered go to softskills.audio and click ask a question thank you so much to everyone who has done that if you also would like to share with us your experience taking or rejecting our advice we would also like to hear that click ask a question and just fill out the answer to that there and what can people do to support the show they can go to softskills.audio and click support us on patreon they can tweet

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