Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 186: First job negotiation and am I a senior engineer?

Episode Date: December 2, 2019

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Hi! I am 29 years old and a couple of years ago I decided to turn my career around by going from teaching history to frontend development. After 2 years of education I am now doing my first internship in small but established company. I have the feeling I will soon be offered a full-time position. How can I ask for the best job offer (salary-wise) accordingly to my age but few experiences? I don’t want to be perceived as ungrateful, nor be exploited and get underpaid. How do you know that you are a senior engineer? Not just the title you are given, but when do you really feel like one? Some people relate this to experience, but you can be coding or doing crappy stuff for 10 years so for me this is not the answer.

it takes more than name dropping tick tock when talking to kids about a career in tech to be a great engineer this is episode 186 of the soft skills engineering podcast i'm your host dave smith i'm your host jamison dance soft skills engineering is a weekly advice show for software developers about all the non-tech stuff it takes to be a software developer i have never downloaded of the tiktok app i only know about it because people repost stuff from tiktok to twitter and i feel like that layer of distance is important to me i think i would feel just weird hanging out with the teens in tiktok as would they so it's for the best it's mutually beneficial but pretty soon here you'll need to host like recruiting seminars on tiktok i guess

you're targeting new college grads that's true it's coming all right i want to thank our wonderful patrons thank you so much to these folks who donate at the level that we shout them out every single week thank you to vin lock matthew voidovich bartek tatkowski the agile ventures charity brandon canes ted nugent crash bandicoot zach grannon john grant this list is getting long louis santos nick cantar taras haruk steven armand lee sean sunny tie britney alec sonic the hedgehog ivo robotnik florian tatzel philip john basile chris hogan luke bayliss and stanley tactical radio thank you to those people and thank you so much to everyone else who has donated at any level if you do you get to join our slack team slack workspace slack cult cult slack cult

join our slack cult that's better yeah everyone wants to be part of a movement join our movement that's right you can donate by going to softskills.audio and click support us on patreon your money goes to pay for editing for hosting for stickers for i don't know dave's very expensive hairdo he just has the freshest fade and those don't come cheap so thank you i am on tiktok if you want to see it you can just feel the quality emanating off of his tightly shaven head on the side. Yes. This episode is also sponsored by Vetteri, an online marketplace where you can find awesome software engineering jobs and we'll share a little bit more about them later. Do you want to read our first question, Dave? You bet. This comes from a listener named Christina who

says, hi, I am 29 years old and a couple of years ago I decided to turn my career around by going from teaching history to front-end development. This is awesome. I mean, isn't Isn't history just the ultimate back end? What? It's like back in the past, front in the future, looking back. Okay. It's the back end. Yeah, I guess.

I mean, maybe it will teach you the hubris of saying this time we'll do it right. Like all those other systems were wrong, but we got it this time. Oh yeah, it'll be great. You'll avoid that mistake. You will have, yes. That's what the Huns thought too. Look what happened to them. I've seen empires rise and fall.

this for loop is nothing. Oh man, that is going to be so good when you drop history, history gems and with your teams. Okay. Sorry. I just, yeah. Oh, this is going to be awesome. All right. It's not, it's not common for us to stop reading the question in the middle to comment, but that's how good this is. All right. Let me resume. After two years of education, I am now doing my first internship in a small but established company. I have the feeling I will soon be offered a full-time position. How can I ask for the best job offer salary wise, according to my age but little experience i don't want to be perceived as ungrateful nor be exploited and get underpaid great question i mean i would turn to history yeah that's what i was gonna say

is there some story from like roman i don't know from rome what would caesar do though how would he handle this situation well ultimately he would get assassinated so maybe not the best path yeah but only because he rose so high so okay i mean he lived pretty large for a while i'm sure he had some pretty good salaries who was his friend there was there was an old an older guy who was a famous general who was part of the triumvirate with him and someone assassinated this guy because they thought like oh caesar will love this and he got really sad because it was his old friend turned kind of enemy but he still didn't want him harmed if only we had a history teacher close at hand to answer these questions yeah can you arrange for these job

interview questions to be tinged with a historical bent that you can just crush just knock out of the park like no i'm not going to reverse that binary balance tree but have you heard about let me tell you about sella even his statue looks intimidating this is a great question oh yeah okay how do you make sure you get the best offer i think okay there's a few actually a few questions here so the first one is how do i get the best offer but also a question of perception and i think we should tackle these one at a time perceived as ungrateful that's what you mean exactly do you want to do that one first sure i think in in salary negotiations

especially when i was earlier in my career i often was concerned about how i would be perceived by the company yeah in my case i was worried about looking too greedy and asking for too much you know oh we don't want greedy developers here no way this person wants more money yeah forget about it i was worried about that like you would lose your job offer or they would give you more money but be mad about it you know i never actually thought it through rationally like that so okay i was just worried yeah in general were you worried often in life at that age i don't know i i guess you could kind of say i was a hobby warrior okay it kind of sounds like warrior when you say it like that that sounds cool

well don't mess with dave he's he's a warrior he's a warrior wait did you say warrior or warrior that's when you tear open your shirt and let out a mighty howl and then they're like whoa is he so worried that he's like having an episode or is he trying to prove he's a warrior because i know you're a bicyclist a cyclist so i i imagine i don't have personal experience but i imagine tearing off the shirt would not be an intimidating experience not exactly not exactly you'd have to show off your quads exactly i could march so well anyways uh like like the romans did they were good marchers it's all come full circle

whoa you brought it back so what did you do to overcome that feeling i think i just let time pass maybe about 10 years worth yeah i took care of it my first ever job that i got paid to do software was a part-time position at a university and there was not a brain cell in my head thinking like ask for more money because i was just so so pumped for the opportunity and i was a poor college student and i had worked non-software jobs as a college student so it went from like nine to twelve dollars an hour and i was like flabbergasted by that's a is that a 33% raise or a 25% raise i never remember how those percentages work out it's a 33% increase but if you went back from 12 down to nine that would be a 25% decrease i'm just here to help thank you

That's a pretty huge raise. So I was pumped. Yeah. Then my first full-time job, I think I did ask for, I think I did negotiate with that, but I don't know that I had any concrete data. I just felt like my ego would feel better if they gave me more money. So I asked for a little bit more and they said, yes. Whoa. How much more? I think it was 5k more. Okay. So probably substantial at the time right it was pretty substantial for sure and and again this was my first full-time job as a professional going from working part-time jobs as a student so that was an astonishing amount of money oh yeah for sure what's the point of all this how do i relate this back to rome i think the point is never at any time was i worried about being perceived as ungrateful

I was worried about asking for too much and feeling like they would say, we don't want you anymore because you asked for too much money. That's probably a separate discussion. But I wasn't worried that they would be like, you dare, you sniveling worm? Like, how dare you reject the kindness I've shown to you? It was more just like, will they be mad if I ask for more money? I think it's pretty easy to not be perceived as ungrateful by saying, I am so grateful for this job offer.

like i don't know that there's a ton more that i would suggest for worrying about a perception of ungratitude you just show gratitude and then you got it i don't think asking for more money is ungrateful i don't think those are connected ah okay yeah i think i think you're right in fact i think one thing that's helpful to remember is that the person who made you that offer has been in exactly your shoes well not exactly but they've been on the other side of the table and they know what you want because they want the same thing you want more money and a good job always yeah they also want you to work there yeah exactly if they made you an offer it means they are ready to go and they're invested and i think if you were to ask for 10 more or something like you did in

your first full-time job it's not like they're going to be like oh man this is this relationship is over yeah so have we covered the perceived as ungrateful part i think so let's let that one be done okay i think yeah now how do you get the best possible amount of money which of course is 10 million dollars how do you say my wage will be 10 million dollars you're welcome i'm just gonna make this easy for you let's pick a nice round number 10 million have you heard of the concept of anchoring oh yes i love anchoring like the psychological oh we've talked about it on this show oh yeah for sure we have yeah talk about talk about millions and millions of years ago in ancient times when dinosaurs roamed the earth right several hundred

million years ago i guess we should talk about what anchoring is it's this psychology man psychology has their whole replication crisis sometimes i don't want to look up if these things have been replicated because they just sound so cool so who knows it could be totally fake but but it's it's fun to think about there's this concept called anchoring where if you just like drop numbers in conversation it will color negotiations further on in conversation or i don't know how strict the negotiations are but basically if you say large numbers and then you're trying to decide what a further number should be large numbers make that kind of inch up a little bit and vice versa small numbers kind of inch that down so hang your career on that i don't think

i would actually try this because i don't know if i would trust it in real life yeah well i mean it can't hurt right well maybe it has the opposite effect yeah yeah where they're like big numbers i hate those and then later when you're talking about salary they're all mad maybe they don't believe in dinosaurs so they're mad that you said that the earth was three was older than 7 000 years so it backfires horribly on you and then you end up with a seven thousand dollar a year salary no one should make more money than the number of years old the earth is that's a straight that's a firmly held belief i have as a person

i think the other kind of anchoring so you've given kind of a subtle almost manipulative definition of anchoring but i think there's a more concrete and obvious use for anchoring which is when you start a salary negotiation the first party who puts out a number tends to anchor the conversation for the rest of the negotiation meaning you will move up or down from that point in increments but if you're in the wrong ballpark when you start that conversation you might end up and you might stay in that ballpark yeah so if their range is like i don't know like 40 to 70 grand and you say i would like 35 grand please then they'll be like i have good news for you we can offer you 5 000 more than what you asked for right exactly exactly those are all

made up numbers i don't know what it is right now but yeah i've been in a situation where an engineer came to us, relatively junior compared to the rest of our team, and asked for a certain number. And it actually was below the bottom end of our expected range for that person for that experience level. And that actually puts management in kind of a tricky situation. Because on the one hand, you have someone here who is about to become underpaid by your company standards. On the other hand yeah you're going to be at the top end of their request so it's like you're doing exactly what they said but it can be harmful for them so this is why it's so important for you as the employee to come armed with actual facts about what salaries look like in the market that looks

like you comparables boy this is so hard to get this information but if you can know ahead of time like the best possible thing you could know is what are other people at this company doing my job with my level of experience earning and that is like yep the holy grail of fact that you need to make this negotiation go well yeah that's worth a lot of money so if you can manage to get your hands on that how would you go about getting that specific of information well we've already given the advice at one point which was to go into the dungeon where the hr people store these records but they're usually behind armed guards and so you'll have to fight your way through it and then pick the lock on the vault like some of the great assassins of history yeah exactly

i just imagine it's like the matrix where you you know of a thing and that means you know the thing like i know i know history so i know how to break into this vault yes it happened once in history exactly so i don't know i mean this is really hard to get if you know people at the company who are who you trust and are willing to share with you, that's a great way to get some data points. If you know people at other companies nearby who are in your similar experience, that's a great way to get some data points. But I would not go in until you have at least one data point. I mean, try to get that before the negotiation. It makes such a huge difference to know what the landscape looks like. Yeah. So when I applied for this current job I have now, I tried to get this

information out of the recruiter really hard. I just said like, hey, what's the range for this position? They wouldn't tell me. They kept saying, I don't know. What are you looking for? I tried like three or four times and then i gave up but i did know a few people who were on kind of tangentially related teams who were trying to get me to come there and i went out to lunch with them and we had kind of vague discussions about salary and one of them was like check out this link that i just dropped in your lap on accident by mistake and it was a link to a glass door and they were imagine a number bigger than that so that was helpful okay so there are there are ways i mean presumably if you've worked there as an intern you have some relationships there yeah what do

you think about asking around not saying like what do you make but saying hey what do you what do you imagine this entry-level position might pay yeah that's a that's a much less threatening thing to ask not to your like HR folks or yeah or the people extending you the offer but just kind of people there like I would find other developers with a few years of experience and say what do you think would be a good opening salary for someone moving from an internship to a full-time position like for example maybe me just hypothetically do you think there's a risk of being seen as like sneaky and I don't know I don't think so I mean I don't think so either I could see someone being scared of that but like scared of asking yeah scared of asking because what

if what if the wrong person finds out and then they it's kind of this perceived as ungrateful thing again what if the wrong person finds out and they think we don't want someone who's like going to negotiate for money we don't want someone who researches problems before they approach them yeah I think if you I think that would be a conversation you would want to have in confidence like I don't think you'd want to just blast out an email to the whole company and ask them to fill lot of survey but i would find people you trust and say rather than saying how much do you make say how much do you think it would make sense for an intern who's going to full-time to make i just have no context for this yep and that's much less threatening to the person too sometimes people can

feel like a little reluctant to share salary information about themselves but yeah that's that's a much easier thing for them to say now i will say this so i have two oh go why don't you go ahead and then i'll share my thing well i was going to change the subject wildly so if it's related you should share your thing okay i'll do my thing so i think that for your first job as a full-time developer and i'm going to say this with caveats but it might not matter that much what the pay is just being able to move into a full-time developer position is so valuable and will set you up for so much success in the future that it might be okay even if you're slightly underpaid i mean i don't want you to be grossly underpaid now here's the big caveat though i have

known a developer one of my good friends from a long time who took his first job in a very rural area and consequently started out his career at a lower salary range by like 20 or 30 percent compared to people in bigger metros and he revealed that information to subsequent employers and they anchored him and said well i'll give you a 10 raise to leave that city and relocate here and work for me and for the employer it was a huge bargain and for him it was still an increase but he was now behind and he stayed behind for a good five years before he was able to work himself out of that and so the caveat here is if you start out low that's okay it doesn't have to follow you but don't reveal the low pay to your next employer when you're in the negotiation process

yep i think i agree broadly especially that point at the beginning about for career switchers specifically it's it's often hard to find your first job and the value of taking that job and using it to get your foot into the industry might make up for potentially a little bit of a lower salary. Do you think there's higher risk of negotiating hard enough to lose an offer as an intern joining full-time? Oh, I don't think so. Because at that point, I think there's actually lower risk. As an intern, the company has already invested in you. Yeah. I think you have better footing to negotiate. I want to talk about this one last chunk of the question. According to my age but few experiences so so christina has a previous career is older than your typical junior

software engineer maybe has has more life experience professional experience about working with people and learning about romans and such things should that factor in and if so how you would expect that to factor in but i think most employers won't i would agree i think especially for your first job it probably wouldn't factor in i would say it's possible that it will help you kind of move up faster because you'll yeah you'll be several layers or several levels ahead in terms of i don't know interpersonal skills and communication and professional expectations and stuff like that but i would also agree i don't know that i would if i were if i were hiring a junior developer i don't know that i would pay them extra because they were a career

switcher yeah i wouldn't probably i think i'd be more likely to hire them but given yeah two people with the same level of technical experience i would certainly prefer someone who was shown they could succeed already in professional things yeah that's a good point and you know it really is kind of a fault of our industry that we don't value that stuff as much but i'm not saying it should be this way but i am saying that's in my experience that's how it is sure well we got to have one more happy thing to say because we can't end with that on the question uh i mean the romans had really great baths and we can thank them for that don't use lead pipes okay hey jameson before we go on to our next question did you hear that one of our slack community members just got a new dev job

with a 50 000 raise yeah that was wild they used a service called veteri veteri matches developers with employers based on what you want like your location salary requirements and technologies you want to work with. Yeah, so I actually signed up myself, and within a week, they sent me a job opportunity. The hiring manager wrote me a very nice note, and the salary was actually amazing. I was pretty impressed. I don't know. I'm a pretty big fan of my current job search process, which is quitting my job and then asking strangers on Twitter if they know anyone hiring for Cobalt. Okay, so once you sign up for Vetteri, you actually get a dedicated consultant assigned to help you tweak your profile

and find the opportunities you're interested in. And the best part is you get those pesky salary requirements out of the way early in the process. No more going through the whole interview process only to find out that your expectations are way off. Another thing I like is that there's no coding test to get started.

And as much as I love balancing binary trees on a whiteboard under time pressure, that's a pretty cool thing. If you're thinking of taking the soft skills engineering advice of quitting your job, you should check out Vetteri. Go to vetteri.com slash soft skills to sign up. That's V-E-T-T-E-R-Y.com slash softskills.

And if you use that link, you'll help support the show. And if you get a job through Vetteri, you get 300 bucks. Thank you so much to Vetteri for sponsoring the show. All right, next question. You want to read this one? I do. This is from a listener named Juan Carlos. How do you know that you are a senior engineer?

Not just the title you are given, but how do you really feel like one? Some people relate this to experience, but you can still be coding or doing crappy stuff for 10 years. So for me, this is not the answer. Yeah. i love that last bit yeah that's kind of like yeah the the phrase you can have one year of experience 10 times just like repeating your first year 10 times over yep just yep you're a junior developer with 10 years of experience as a junior developer that's right yeah this is an

age-old question yeah you know you're our senior engineer yes well i mean there's a few telltale things that you can see just right off the bat and the first one is when you walk into the meeting room does everyone reverently bow their heads when you enter sometimes sometimes when you when you comment on an architecture like do your eyes glow a little bit just just a little now is it a is it a terrible glow this is like a like a terrifying like a red or is it like a soft yeah like a fierce makes you want to grovel glow or this is a soft like nightlight comforting glow well the answer to that question depends on whether you've joined the dark side of senior engineering or the light side of senior engineering i think that depends on whether you're in design

or whether you're in front end and back end but i won't tell you which one is which one of them gives you a dark and terrible majesty and one of them gives you just an aura of comfort and love and both lead to worship but different forms some of them have kind of a docker colored aura uh yeah and some of them have a kind of like a resolving conflicts in package.json or uh okay those are good criteria i mean if that hasn't happened it doesn't mean you're not a senior engineer necessarily so it's like but if it has happened you're definitely senior okay and this is important too because this is often your recognition as being a senior engineer is

often disconnected from you feeling like one yeah so if you feel like you are one that that can help you maybe get a promotion of some kind or if you are promoted to one but you don't feel like it maybe it can help you succeed in that role that you've been given yeah because i think the title can sometimes lead and sometimes lag the ability and also the title at some companies senior engineer means you know more than one year of experience and at some companies it means capable of leading a small army of engineers to success i'm reading a book where is it it's called linux kernel development by this guy named robert love and i was reading his bio. He's been a Linux contributor for like 15 years. He's worked at a bunch of fancy schmancy

companies. And he builds Android's kernel. And he's a senior software engineer at Google. And I was like, huh, maybe that means something different. I have not done very many of those things. So you were expecting like a loftier title? Yeah, expecting like staff or principal or some some fancy schmancy title. But like, yeah, the big tech co's tend to downplay their titles quite a bit yeah so we haven't answered the question yet i'm gonna answer it with a quote from that supreme court justice i think oh yeah let me look at potter stewart i know it when i see it okay on a different subject not senior engineer slightly different but i feel like that's the standard for the industry right now is nobody can define it in a way that is clear

and cross-company but everyone just kind of knows it and it is kind of you've made these jokes about auras and stuff but it kind of is it's just like they just seem senior-y you know yeah exactly and that's not great because auras are susceptible to bias and and there's a lot of things that aren't technical ability and ability to get stuff done that lead to people being considered senior if you have a deep voice and broad shoulders it turns out your code magically seems better like how how some stuff is but sadly that's that's that that's like the null definition that's the working definition that we're trying to get to a better one. It's got to be at least as good as I know it when I see it. Okay, that's a low bar. Yeah. What do you think, Dave? Well, I think there

are different flavors of senior engineer. And that's part of what makes it hard to define. But like the two broad, broad strokes that I see are generally there are engineers who are good at people leadership. In other words, I don't mean people management per se. But I mean, they're able to help reconcile differences on teams able to help like communicate clear vision toward the future educate things of that nature the softer side of of the skill set but then there are also like super deep technically people like that person you were just describing at google that sounds like you know in the bio i didn't see a lot about like led team x or you know collaborated across n number of teams what i heard was more like extreme depth on kernel development yeah no

No, he didn't do those things. He made the process scheduler. Yeah. So very, very deep technically. But I didn't see a lot in the bio about technical leadership. And so I think you kind of have to decide what does senior mean? And I think it can mean both those things. So one of my friends, Brandon Hayes, he actually comes up on this show a lot.

He does a couple other podcasts. One of them is Managing Up. He wrote an article called The Conjoined Triangles of Senior Level Development. and he breaks it down into a few different areas there's technical ability which you talked about dave this kind of deep like you can just get hard things done there's leadership which is some amount of like moving groups of people to get things done and some amount of identifying the right problems and there's also connectedness which is kind of like the softer side of of building community and mentoring people and getting along well with people and his his

definition of senior developer is someone who is good at all three of those things oh and so if you lag in one of them you kind of know where to focus if you just are great at solving technical problems but you have trouble getting groups of people to agree with you or pitching ideas or or kind of identifying what's important for the company then you you focus on that area we will link to this article in the show notes i swear we will probably say that all the time probably remember this time i wrote a link down this time so we'll do it okay that's a fantastic that's a fantastic definition so it's three facets yeah one of the problems with this is i don't know what specifically makes these senior level things versus like staff or principal or manager like it

seems like these are all just good things that someone should have and it's hard for me to measure like this is senior level technical capability but i don't know mid-level connectedness or something like that you know i see yeah but at least there's there's criteria of like you should be doing these things well which is more than i think a lot of people have okay so like the obvious next question is how do you know when you're doing those things well you could ask somebody am i doing these ask your peers and they can say well i don't know but i'll know it when i see it peer feedback that you solicit is an underused mechanism i think there's a lot of valuable info that your peers have about you and some of it is perception some of its reality but

all that is valuable and if you can figure out how to get that out of them that's really important it's it's going to be harder than just saying hey am i a senior developer because if people think you're not they're going to have all these motivations to say no so you'll have to figure out the questions to ask right that let them answer honestly without worrying about offending you or causing problems i think also you can measure you can indirectly measure your teammates perception of your seniority by observing some of their behaviors and one of the behaviors that i look out for is when i'm like assessing people on my own team is i think how often do engineers say hmm this is a tough problem let's ask so and so and so and so might be a senior engineer um now

Now, there can be false positives here because it could just be that so-and-so has the most experience or wrote all the code for that particular module. But if you consistently see the same person being called out as someone whose advice needs to be consulted before proceeding, there's a good chance that they are in senior territory. So that's one symptom you can be on the lookout for. Yeah. If your manager comes to you and, you know, let's say you have one-on-ones with your manager. and the one-on-ones are mostly about how you can improve and you know about mistakes you've made things like that that's one one thing but if your manager is mostly saying like where should what should we do with this team you know what do you think about the performance of this component or

how do you think our architecture should evolve next and if that's what your discussions look like it could be that your manager perceives you more as senior yeah one of the definitions at at my employer is it's kind of like breadth broadly so the more senior you get the more comfortable you are working on ill-defined things and providing the definition so as a junior you work on things where the problem is pretty well defined and the solution is pretty well defined and you go do it and as you get more senior maybe the problem is is more defined but the solution is kind of unknown yeah beyond that it's kind of like what even is the problem that we should be working on that's kind of the next level yeah that's a great definition well those are the definitions i got

do all those things together all at the same time then you'll be senior if it is related to title and promotion it is worth a asking the person who decides promotions to say hey what should i do to be this thing yeah because like we said there's no cross company definition so if you want to be promoted to senior engineer you kind of have to figure out what it means on on your team yeah and that's probably a little more tactical yeah very much so it means that person x has to really really like you exactly that's how we determine seniority company the most senior developers are all favorites of this one person they happen to be married to this person's children well have we answered the question i think so i would add one more thing

though which is if you find yourself in a situation where you are making decisions that impact the work of other engineers and doing so successfully meaning you decide how the team is going to approach a problem or you make important technology decisions that are going to have a lasting effect on the team that's a pretty good indication as well that you're senior i'm just trying to find like a list of things you can be on the lookout for and say yeah like concretely yes i do that or no i don't so that's one yeah yeah that's a good one i like that yeah so like long-term tech choices so that's all i got all right well what can people do if they want their own questions answered dave go to softskills.audio and click ask a question thank you so much to

everyone who has done that what can people do if they want to support the show go to softskills.audio click support us on patreon or just share the show with people we always are delighted when we hear from new listeners that's great keep sharing it thank you very much we'll catch you next week.