Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 193: Playing the field and paying for speaking

Episode Date: January 20, 2020

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I’ve been recently looking for summer internships and I have had a couple of video interviews. I don’t consider myself an interview rookie since I’ve had my fair share but there is one question I can’t understand whether to answer honestly or not so here it goes: “Are you applying to other job opportunities?”. The question is kind of stupid since no one puts all of its eggs in one basket but on the other hand I’m afraid answering ‘yes’ will make it seem as if I don’t care about the company (spoiler alert: I don’t really care :)). How do I answer honestly to this question and at the same time make them feel like they are special? By the way, love the podcast! Hi guys! I just started listening to your show and I already have experienced a steep improvement from a puny 10x dev to 11x one. My question, if you’ll be kind enough to answer is: How do I convince my cheapskate boss to sponsor me flying across the pond to give a talk at a conference I was selected for. Should I sponsor it myself in case of a decline? Should I hint at a possible job quitting if I am declined (I am currently seeking a new job)? Should I go forward with the talk if I do quit and the content of the talk is largely about the job I did there in the last couple of years. Note, I am widely regarded as an excellent employee by my superiors and colleagues. I earn quite a bit less than my current value and I am currently back, looking for a job. That’s it from me, love you guys!

it takes more than caffeinated beverages to be a great engineer this is episode 193 of the soft skills engineering podcast i'm your host jameson 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 just started drinking caffeinated beverages as like a 31 year old man a while ago what it felt like a new childhood i don't know i just never drank i don't know she didn't like soda didn't drink coffee thought red bull would give me wings and then i wouldn't be able to control them and then i would die okay i would just like fly into a building but it's wonderful i feel like i'm i'm going through the cycle that people go through in

like their late teens early 20s where they are like whoa caffeine it makes you awake huh that's useful and then soon i'll crash really hard and yeah exactly and then you won't be able to get to a normal state without it yeah then i'll write a blog post about giving up drinking caffeinated beverages and how it's unlocked new heights of productivity oh man that's awesome hey we have some new patrons to thank because it's a new month thank them okay i will one-time shout outs go to alina pisuha barodi evgeny sladkowski Thank you so much for supporting the show and your patronage. If you want to support the show, go to softskills.audio and click support us on Patreon.

Any contribution greater than, strictly greater than zero, any currency. dollars or otherwise just some like seashells you find on the beach that you mail to dave's house any legal tender oh geez how can i constrain this hmm not seashells let's just put it just a piece of paper with iou scrawled on it but actually you know what i would accept that so if you even if you send that to us we will give you access to our slack community where you can join and chat with the well over 100 folks who are there sharing hilarious awesome insightful great stuff bad stuff fun stuff sad stuff one fish two fish red fish anyway join us there it's great soft skills that audio all right yeah we'd

love to have you this episode is also sponsored by veteri veteri is a marketplace where you can find great developer jobs and you will hear more about them later dave do you want to read our first question? I shall. This comes from a listener named Vicente who says, I've been recently looking for summer internships and I have had a couple of video interviews. I don't consider myself an interview rookie since I've had my fair share, but there is one question I can't understand whether to answer honestly or not. I love that lead up. Okay. The question is, are you applying to other job opportunities? The question is kind of stupid since no one puts all of their eggs in one basket but on the other hand i'm afraid answering yes will make it seem as if i don't

care about the company spoiler alert i don't really care how do i answer honestly to this question and at the same time make them feel like they are special by the way love the podcast well thanks vicente that that was refreshingly honest i think you should tell them i'm not interviewing at any other companies and i never will if i don't get this job my plan is to starve to death just to show your commitment i think we should ask vicente if he's listening to any other podcasts yeah this is this is interesting i honestly can't imagine a company that i would want to work for that would also be offended if they found out i was interviewing at other places

you what yeah you but what about the contract that you signed unwittingly by opening this email to not interview at other places didn't read the end user license agreement yeah that's that's just that's horrible also as a hiring manager i feel like people that tell me they're interviewing at other places there's like a little little sound that goes off in my brain that's like oh this person's in demand and then i think it biases me positively towards them because it's external validation that they're yeah that other people think they're smart and i'm not trusting enough of my own evaluation of them i guess i actually put that in all of my linkedin recruiter responses i just say oh and thanks for reaching out by the way i

am talking to other recruiters so it's a race actually is it is it possible not to be talking to other companies these days with with the linkedin spam that we get maybe i could see somebody doing it maybe there's a there's a they're not actively looking and there's like a dream job that reached out to them or something i don't know okay but i don't think i would ever go through an interview cycle and just like do it one company at a time like in do it serially like yeah work my way through the list yeah especially for your first job out of college it's like no you'll take two years to land that first job doing it that way yeah so sometimes when i when i hear this question i think to myself what are they actually asking and i think you could

equivalently ask are you going to be easy to lowball are you desperate yes are you hoping to get paid as low as we can possibly pay you yeah yeah i mean are there any so we've jumped on that as kind of like sketchy skeezy motivation for companies to ask this question are there is there any other reason why they would be inquiring besides to know like how much pressure are we under to give this person a good offer i think i think there is one valid reason which i experienced firsthand some years back when i interviewed at google and they told me very early on in the process hey we have a slow interview process you know it's like an eight-week deal so are you interviewing anywhere else and if so we want to know it so that we can put you on the accelerated

track and go a little faster and apparently they just have limited bandwidth and so they can just put some people on that track but only if they're under time pressure to do so i have asked this question but it's been sort of similar to find out kind of to plan timing like like you mentioned with the google thing like if they're interviewing at other places then i'll try and interview them faster i also want some rough idea of like are they going to wait to get offers from all these places to do i need to or can i plan on them making a decision relatively quickly like just it's not to find out how how i can screw them over it's like how how is this going to work if things work out how yeah what are the what are the other factors in play i guess yeah like for example you

might say hey are you interviewing somewhere else and they say yes in fact i have offers in hand or an offer coming tomorrow or something. And in that case, you might say, well, we have an X number of week process. So you probably don't want to wait that long and it might not be worth it even start an interview. Yeah. I've had it go both ways fairly recently too, where there was a candidate who wanted to start interviewing, but they were so far along with their other role and our position wasn't quite open yet. I basically told them like the timing just doesn't work out and I would hate for you to potentially lose another offer just to like wait for the chance to interview with us. and then there's another candidate who has another offer but the timing works out better for us and

it just told us like we got to speed it up we got to schedule these quickly which we can do so yeah i i would like to think it's for benevolent reasons that i asked but i that's a good point i don't think i specifically said here's why i'm asking so maybe people took it the wrong way and that's the only thing i could do in the future yeah you should call up those candidates and apologize hey i'd like to pay you less money yeah i just need to know is that gonna be okay yeah how do i answer honestly to this question i also like the spoiler alert i don't really care spoiler you could try that too maybe that will make them want to hire you even more oh yeah it's like the uninterested party yeah like i don't really need this job but i guess if you

throw these piles of money at me yeah i wonder it kind of comes across as a loyalty test in this the way that it's worded here but yeah but you don't work there yet yeah it's like a pre-test you know loyalty this is when i would say i am looking for a company that will pay me money in exchange for my time like i don't know it's just it seems like they are misconstruing the relationship they're hoping for your passion before you even work there yeah my guess is that most people are not doing this as asking this as a loyalty test i really don't think so i mean i don't know that in the times i've experienced it in the times i've asked it it's never been about

is this person going to play the field once they come to my company yeah but that is different than the thing you were mentioning earlier about affecting your your offer i i do but i i my my gut is that that does happen where they're asking to determine how competitive the offer needs to be interesting maybe very competitive is the answer yeah i'm interviewing with enough companies that you need to pay me a lot of money yeah so next time someone asks you are you applying to other companies just say the salary needs to be very high let me just shortcut this yeah we can bypass the uh small talk here all right have we answered the question i think so good luck and i would say to get right to the answer the answer is i think yes you should be honest and

you should say yes i am interviewing at other companies and yes i am extremely in demand i am hot i am trending yeah 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 fifty thousand dollar 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 it's a pretty cool thing if you're thinking of taking the soft skills engineering advice of quitting your job you should check out veteri go to veteri.com soft skills to sign up that's

v-e-t-t-e-r-y dot com slash soft skills and if you use that link you'll help support the show and if you get a job through bettery you get 300 bucks thank you so much to bettery for sponsoring the show all right i'm gonna read the next question this is from an anonymous listener hey guys i just started listening to your show and i already have experienced a steep improvement from a puny 10x developer to an 11x developer my question if you'll be kind enough to answer is how do i convince my cheapskate boss to sponsor me flying across the pond to give a talk at a conference i was selected for should i sponsor it myself in case of a decline should i hint at the possible job quitting if i am declined i'm currently seeking a new job should i go forward

with the talk if i do quit and the content of the talk is largely about the job i did there in the last couple of years note i am widely regarded as an excellent employee by my superiors and colleagues i earn quite a bit less than my current value and i am currently back looking for a job that's it for me love you guys no love you too anonymous love you too anonymous you know you're a very stalwart question asker just always sending us questions yeah so many anonymous people what a weird name i don't know if we've made that horrible joke yet no i don't think we have it's been a lot of episodes without yeah we had to hit it at least once okay well put that one in the cam we're done with that joke yep hmm how do i convince my cheapskate boss do you think they've

asked their boss and their boss said no already i think they just have a feeling like their boss dresses shabbily or something like that doesn't those aren't the shoes of a person who would fly me across the pond yeah i think the question based on the context clues here the question has not been asked and they're wondering how do i go about pitching it and then if they say no do i throw a job a job a resignation in their face as leverage well i quit that'd be really yeah i'm just imagining how that would work that would be such an escalation they they come to you and you're like we just don't have the budget for it i'm so sorry and then they just say okay i don't work here anymore i'm out like yeah i mean it sounds like you're gonna leave anyways if you're

wildly underpaid and yeah i don't know that quitting would make them pay for your flight though yeah i feel like those should be disconnected should i sponsor myself there so there is a secret trick that conferences do not tell you some conferences i would like this trick not to exist but unfortunately it does so conferences usually will have some budget for paying for speaker travel some of the conferences build it in so that they can afford to pay for everybody and they're pretty explicit about it some of them don't have enough money so they just don't say it very loud they're like hey come speak like if you need to we can help pay for your flights and travel but they make sure it's in like really small prints so that people don't

know to ask for it but you can you can just ask the conference and say hey i need you to pay for it if i'm gonna go speak there will you please do that and they might say no and then you're kind of in the same state you're in right now or they might say yes and then it happens that's happened to a friend of mine before who was accepted but they didn't pay for travel and then they asked and then they did so that's a thing yes and this comes on good authority because jameson and i are both conference organizers and we have both paid for speaker travel i guess jameson your conference that you organize actually explicitly offers it to all speakers yeah my conference my conference only offers it to those who can't you know need it because we don't have any money yeah but it

would be cool if that was an explicit thing that all conferences said but some some of the conferences is deal with the budgetary thing by just like not saying anything and then hoping people that really need it ask right so maybe you could try that yeah i would try it and i wouldn't stop there i would ask for lodging too they usually come hand in hand yeah i guess i guess that's i think i didn't say it explicitly but in my head those are included together yeah now if if there's a form where that they want you to fill out and there's a checkbox that says are you a 10x developer or an 11x developer be sure to check the 11 that'll help i think there's just 11 checkboxes and to count up how many you check check them all should i sponsor it myself yeah so that's kind

of a question for you where you have to think how much value are you likely to get out of this if you pay for it all yourself and i've paid for conferences myself both as a speaker as an and as an attendee that probably depends on your circumstance and budget and the cost and all that stuff i don't know that i can answer that screw it i'll answer it for you blow it all put it on a credit card get a new credit card get those airline miles that's right yeah i don't know that's a it's a budget thing okay oh no that's it jameson airline miles okay here's how it's gonna work rather than asking your company to pay for it just have your company send you on lots and lots of trips so you get enough miles to be able to do it for free ah okay yeah switch to

a sales engineer position that's right boom yeah okay got it it's a win-win how do i convince my cheapskate boss at places i've worked attending conferences has been part of the conversation around benefits either they've brought it up proactively or i have if you haven't yet then like i guess i'm rubbing it in your face but often often developers technical technical jobs include some provision for like we'll give you this conference budget or send you to one conference or whatever and it's kind of built in and then you could just say hey i'm i would like to use my conference ticket please you could also if that hasn't happened yet you could approach your boss and say like hey this would be cool to offer as a benefit to the developers yeah just don't mention

that you're underpaid and you're probably going to find a better job at the conference don't mention that because that'll probably happen so when it comes to actually convincing your boss to change their outlook on this i have one angle that seems to work pretty well. And I have some evidence that it does work. And that angle is brand marketing for recruiting purposes. When a company sends speakers to go speak at a conference, they get access to an audience of hundreds, sometimes thousands of other developers, and they can cast the company in a very positive light. And especially this topic, the listener says that the talk is going to be about their work at the company over the last

couple of years. So if you are willing to cast the company in a very positive light, then you are now opening a marketing channel to all these people and it could very well be worth the cost of a plane ticket and a few days a hotel and so i pitched that to my boss several years ago oh boy like seven or eight years ago and it worked out great in fact we got a hire from it someone came and applied and we they ended up relocating across the country to come work for our company and they told me later the reason i applied was because of your talk at xyz conference so it does work it can work yeah i don't know if we i think we have made the joke about you getting a different job there too though because like it's a two-edged sword yes but that makes sense

as as you pitching it as value your company would get it would be kind of funny if you pitched it as a benefit that helps retain people and then you quit shortly thereafter as well like this is the thing that will make engineers happier and more willing to work here and then you don't do that anymore you don't what about the question of of presenting work that you did when you don't work at that company anymore like the ethics of it does that seem dishonest to you yeah i don't know is that is that wrong boy that i think that depends a lot on the employment contract you sign yeah well that's that's not ethics necessarily that's more like legality right yeah yeah i think at most companies that i've worked at it's been very clear what was proprietary and confidential

and what was things that you could generally talk about and at some companies it's wide open it has been yeah at other companies though it's been very clear like do not talk about this yeah and if you do you need to get approved from our public relations team you know yeah that's kind of the two extremes so you have to figure out where that is for your company i think before you leave yeah i mean i guess worst case is you you spill the beans and then you could potentially get sued for disclosing corporate secrets or something and then they would have the conference would have had to be very expensive for that to be worth it to you financially i didn't think about that part i guess i was just thinking about i think that many of these

that i've seen either the person still works there so it's very clear that it's kind of like approved by the company that they're communicating this or it's some kind of open source or open collaborative project that maybe they they were sponsored by or the company incubated it but they were the the main open source developer on it or something like that yeah and then with stuff like that i mean it's not a secret because someone could just go read the code although if the code is convoluted enough then it's effectively a secret if you hide the the back door or the machine learning or whatever yeah should i go forward with the talk if i do quit and the content of the talk is largely about the job i did there yeah if if you do want to i've seen some other

talks that are kind of experiences or more human factors or or kind of team or or management things And especially if they're not very flattering to the, to the place the person worked, then they kind of just obscure all the details. So instead of saying, well, I was at company X, this horrible thing happened. They just kind of describe the situation vaguely. And then you still learn from their experience, but you don't walk away thinking, oh, like that company was horrible and I'll never work there. Hmm. Sounds like some of the answers we've given on this show. Boy, anonymous and company X, two very prolific. yes actors two very prolific characters in the podcast yes yeah i think if you don't work there anymore oh boy i i just don't think you can open the door on their internal technologies and architecture and details like that if i still had a relationship maybe i would just message my boss or something and say hey i'm thinking about doing this you you of course have to be ready to to risk

them saying please do not say anything about that then if you're going to reach out to them but Which, by the way, is the safest response for them. Yeah. Yep. It's the easiest thing for them to do is just say, please say nothing. So there has to be a pretty big incentive for them to not do that. And so, again, this goes back to what's in it for them. And I think if you've left the company and you agree to cast the company in a positive light,

they might be willing to let you reveal some of their internal workings. Ten horrible mistakes that company X made that I will never make again. which by the way is very rare you don't often see talks positive or negative about specifically about a company in the context of that company that you no longer work for that's pretty rare yeah you might be talking about a specific technology and then you have some kind of anonymized stories about that but yeah at a previous company then i pull up their linkedin profile and realize they've only worked at one previous company yeah i guess that's why you job hop a lot yeah disguise your past stories plausible deniability through job hopping

yeah there's this concept called k anonymity that i was reading wikipedia about where you anonymize a data set enough that i think it's like at least any any set of facts can be assigned to at least k people or k k entities in the data set okay so you need at least any two or three anonymity yeah it's like take take some i think of it as like a row from a database like take some row that row is anonymized enough that if you know that row at least like k other rows will have the same attributes that's cool yeah so you got to do that with your career basically yeah work it work it at least two startups because otherwise if you're telling startup stories then it's clear i've actually done that with my name

there there are 40 people with my name at my company right now it's perfect oh i didn't write that code that was the other dave smith yeah you can screw up a whole lot oh another dave smith strikes again stupid bugs there is one other day or one other jameson dance at my company and we did like the spider-man gif pointed each other thing once in slack seriously yeah we both have the slack the same slack name it's just jameson and i don't know how slack distinguishes between the two of us when people send messages but wow so it happens i'm actually surprised that anyone on earth has your same name like these are two fairly unusual names wait i'm an idiot it's not jameson dance his first name is just jameson i don't know why i thought dance this is like the

time when i spelled my own name wrong just add it to the annals of name related mistakes that i've made in my life yeah oh man okay well that was gonna be really cool so that story is like it's like one percent is cool now dave you wouldn't believe it there are other people named dave at your company i know it's incredible oh all right i gotta find him and convince him to change his last name okay well i think we've come to the point where we need to say we've answered the question. We've answered the question, clearly. Best of luck, anonymous listener. I hope it goes well. Let us know what conference you're at so we can come in and watch you. We'll sit in the audience with popcorn. Yeah. Tell us what company it was. All right. If you want your own questions

answered, if they want their own questions answered, what should they do, Dave? Go to softskills.audio and click on ask a question. We have a little form there. Thank you so much to everyone who has filled out that form. If you want to support the show, you can follow us on Twitter at SoftSkillsEMG. You can rate us on iTunes or Stitcher or wherever you listen to the podcast. And you can share it with your friends and family, although your family probably doesn't care.

My family cares. They're loyal listeners. That's great. Shout out to my family. All right. Catch you next week.