Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 201: Too soon for a raise and management, masters, maybe?

Episode Date: March 16, 2020

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I started a new job 6 months back and a lot has happened since then. I signed on as a junior dev and have since been given more and more responsibility. Including (but not limited to) deploying and releasing after hours, shared responsibility with the resident senior devs for reviewing pull requests, and aiding in the creation of new processes and overall advancement of our company’s software development process and culture. How soon is too soon to ask for a raise after starting a new job? Listener Andrew asks, As a military veteran of 8 years, I have the opportunity to enroll in a masters program for little to no cost, but I’m not sure what kind of program to choose. I’m a web developer and also serve as my team’s ”Agile Owner” (kind of like a Scrum Master) which I really enjoy. In fact, before I got my first dev job, I trained in Scrum to try to get a leadership role in the software industry and use my bachelor’s in engineering management. It seems logical to continue in that vein and choose an engineering management masters program, but I enjoy being a direct contributor and applying my Agile training without any real responsibility as a manager would have. I sometimes think I should go for a masters in computer science and double down as a technical knowledge worker, but I fear I’d be in way over my head since I don’t have an institutional computer science background. On the opposite end of the spectrum, part of me thinks I should get an MBA like some friends from college to hedge my bets for climbing corporate ladders in the future. On top of that, lately I’ve been very interested in learning more about design. I’m just not sure what to do, and I have a habit of making big decisions with my head instead of my heart which sometimes leads to 8 years in military service which I don’t much enjoy, so I’d love any advice I can get. Thanks! Soft Skills Eng is my absolute favorite software industry podcast.

it takes more than making it through the first four chapters of the rust book over and over again to be a great software engineer this is episode 201 of the soft skills engineering podcast and 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 someday i'll make it all the way through have you seen that how to draw an owl comic i think so it says first you draw two circles and then you draw the rest of the owl yeah the rust book is great but i still feel sometimes like it's like here's how a string exists and then here's how the borrow checker works together with these several different types of pointers and i

don't know rust is great someday i'll learn it i was gonna make a joke about how you must be feeling rusty but that would imply that you ever knew rust in the first place yeah rust is where the grass is greener right now yes you know like it's there's always some other language that will be better than what i'm working with right now and i can't wait to learn rust until and find new greener grass after that that's true you can't even see the new grass until you've gotten to this current grass yeah the grass is always greener i mean it's like a halting problem thing there right like how do you know maybe you you have to find the greenest grass at some point but you can never tell anyways i'm in over my head dave do you want to thank our

patrons yes thank you to the following people dustin mcbride vinlock braden canes chris hogan dennis bogdanov evgeny sladkowski john grant luis santos luke bayliss nick hathaway nick kantar philippe john basile the eye jaw ventures charity sean sonic the hedgehog stanley tactical radio steven armand lee taras harouk maple syrup travis and zach granin if you'd like to support the show you can go to softskills.audio and click on support us on patreon and if you do we will send you an invite to our slack community which has been growing like crazy there's over 250 members there now it's super fun lots of good advice great connections and you can be one of them for the low low price of one dollar yeah i mean technically it's more than zero dollars so

So I don't know what the lowest amount you can donate is. Yeah, figure it out. One cent. A hundred. Yeah, it's great. I love hanging out in there. I learn stuff. I grow physically.

I just get stronger. I thought you were taller last time I saw you. Yep. We also want to thank Vetteri for sponsoring this podcast. Vetteri is an online marketplace where you can find your next great job. You can go to vetteri.com slash soft skills and sign up there. And you'll hear more about them later on. Do you want to read our first question, Dave?

You bet. this comes from a listener named more than i signed up for they say i started a new job six months ago and a lot has happened since then i signed on as a junior dev and have since been given more and more responsibility including but not limited to deploying and releasing after hours shared responsibility with the resident senior devs for reviewing pull requests and aiding in the creation of new processes and overall advancement of our company's software development process and culture how soon is too soon to ask for a raise after starting a new job you can ask before you start technically yeah i just like to as part of this salary negotiation process

can i also ask for a raise i mean actually i said that because i thought it would be a dumb joke and it is that's not a good joke but it is a thing that has happened in real life where i worked at a place where we hired someone and as part of hiring them we'd bring them on at one rate and then say if you're meeting expectations you'll move up to this rate at six months kind of like built into the contract so it might be a thing i've done that as well six months back but you're six months too late yes to do that it sounds like at first i was reading this question because the very first extra responsibility was deploying after hours and i thought oh boy the new kid gets dumped on you know yeah it sounds like they're very grateful to have you there because

they can have you do all the stuff they don't want to do yeah shared responsibility with the resident senior devs for reviewing pull requests this is interesting because it sounds like the question asker has an expectation for what they signed up for or their name is literally more than i signed up for it but and this is not it it did not include reviewing pull requests contributing to processes deploying after hours and i think you need to figure out what that expectation is on your side and also on the company side because maybe they did expect you to do this maybe it was like yeah you'll review pull requests everybody reviews pull requests you just might not have as much context to contribute but but we we participate equally and same with

deploys it could be their expectation that this is a normal thing that everyone does and and like it's not some earth shattering above and beyond the call of duty extra effort that you're deploying it's just just what everyone does so you want to make sure you don't push really hard for a raise and then they say but you're doing the thing we want you to do as a junior at your level like there's no your your reward is to not get fired right congratulations yeah that's a good that's a really good question you should find out so what if they do find out and they find out they have exceeded the expectations. The expectation is that they would hide in a dark corner and write code slowly and poorly. And they're doing more than that.

So is it too early? I think absolutely not. I think it's basically never too early to start asking for a raise because even if it technically is too early per whatever HR policy, you start asking now and you plant the seed for later when it's not too early. Yeah. There's sometimes this built-in clock that starts when you ask and goes like six months or a year or whatever and if you haven't started the clock ticking then yeah that's interesting it also depends on your company's formality here some companies have you know they'll they'll adjust your comp on your one year anniversary some companies adjust everyone's comp at the same time in the year and some companies have no formal plan whatsoever so you need to figure out what's going on in your company

and then figure out what you need to do to get on the train at the right time is that a question you can just ask oh yeah you just say hey how how does comp work yeah and who do you ask and well you just ask your boss well i know what you do is you ask the office gossip the squealer and when you say how does comp work you mean like how does how many dollars get into each person's bank account yes i think i think there are ways to ask this question that can be more comfortable for someone who hasn't talked about these topics a lot because i think for some people it feels weird to approach say your boss and just say hey when am i going to get my next raise yeah but one way you can do that

is you can say hey what's our company schedule for compensation adjustments or comp reviews yeah that would shake out if it exists it's possible that you haven't been through one of those if you joined at the right time six months ago. And if it's been six months, I'm actually surprised you haven't heard about this because companies, well, okay, I was about to paint the entire industry with one stroke of my magic brush,

but most companies I've worked out are pretty transparent about what this process is, at least the schedule for the process. Yeah, it definitely is a bigger company thing though. I feel like most smaller companies, it's a little more loosey-goosey. So, yeah, that's even more reason to bring it up early is because no one else will bring it up for you potentially at a smaller company without a defined process. Yeah, for sure.

OK, so how do you how do you do it? First of all, the reason I said it's never too early is because there comes a time in the comp review process when it is definitely too late. And that is after the decision has been made. And a lot of times that decision is made months before you're informed about the decision. so getting ahead of this is really important so if you first you do the sleuthing and figure out what the schedule is and then you go talk to your boss and you tell them like point blank i think i should or i want to earn x and you know if they're an excellent boss they might tell you well you need to do a b and c to earn that much salary here which would be great because then you

have something concrete you can work on but at the very least they now know what your desire is And I got to tell you, having been on the other side of these discussions, when someone comes to me and says, I want this much, it does plant a little seed, a little, I don't know, a little planetoid vibrating in my brain that, you know, reminds me this person wants this. And even though we pride ourselves on being so unbiased and so, you know, data driven, when it comes to these things, you can influence the outcome. yeah i mean that's a good point there are places that try to avoid this problem by having defined salary levels and i don't think i've ever seen one it's probably exists i can't think of one where it's so strict that there's literally no wiggle room but some places try and get around this problem of like the person who complains or or agitates more for a raise gets a raise and people who don't don't by just having these very strict criteria of you're in this location you are

in this role here's how much money you get right but then the problem turns into like negotiating for role versus for money right so there's i feel like there's always some some subjectivity in here where there's room for you to present a better or worse case well i gotta tell you i so i think this is a good time for my story which is right when i got out of college i started my first job in june of the calendar year and this company did what they call a focal review which is where everyone gets their comp changes at the same time every year. And the review time for this company was like October. And so what that means was that after four months being on the job, when I hit my first October, they said, you're too new to do a comp change. So we're keeping your comp like it

was. And then when the next October came around, it had been 16 months. And remember, I was fresh out of college. So 16 months with no discussion on comp is kind of a long time for a 20-something young kid who doesn't know anything about how this works and also is pretty sure I got I kind of got lowballed during the negotiation process when I started my first job so yeah when I finally got to the to that review time my manager sat me down and said you know Dave you did a great job over the last year plus you're one of our top performers and this was a mega gigantic company and so he had very little room that he could move my money around and he said look the average raise for the office was three percent but because you did such a stellar job you got 3.5 percent

did you calculate how much money it was oh yeah it was probably like hundreds of dollars or something oh yeah it totally was I mean I'll tell you it was like I was making $49,000 at the time So whatever 0.5% of $49,000 is. Anyway, so I was actually really upset by that because I had done so much for this company. I just thrown myself into the work. That's $245. For the whole year?

Yeah, I think I also did my math wrong. So that's like $20 a month pre-tax. Yeah, congratulations, you can order one taco a week extra. from Taco Bell. You know, the cheap taco. Treat yourself, Dave. Anyway, I actually quit that job the very next week because I was so upset by this. Really? Yeah, I did. And I got a $10,000 raise to go to my next job. So it's like, take that $245 raise. Did you tell them that was why? uh you know i i was such a dumb hot-headed young whippersnapper that i i probably was

super unclear in anything that i said to them yeah but anyway the the point is i failed to talk to my manager in specific detail until after he was sitting across the table from me delivering the bad news yeah and that literally was like two months too late at that time at that point yeah hmm that's a really good story i don't think you've told that one before oh really yeah well there you go so earlier the better that's that's the point yes is there a downside to asking too early i mean if you if you become a nuisance and ask every week for six weeks in a row or something then maybe i think another downside could be if you are perceived as kind of out of line if if if your perception of your performance is way off from what they think

deserves a raise then not only are you i mean maybe you're doing fine before or not bad enough to cause a problem maybe they're avoiding giving feedback or something but now they have this other little thing that's not only is their performance just fine at best they also have a very wrong understanding of their performance but you see i think that could work well for you anyway because what that'll do is it'll force a conversation because the manager will realize how out of line out of alignment you are on how well you're doing hopefully i mean i think a good manager would true there's also a possibility that it just gets lost in the bureaucratic shuffle of like sorry hands are tied no money to give we just can't make it work and then it's unclear why

to you i mean do you think someone would get retaliated against for asking for a raise well there's a lot of bad managers in the world so i mean somewhere someone has probably been retaliated against yeah that that just seems so icky though it feels like yeah i don't know that's get out i guess if that's yeah what happens yeah okay so i think our advice to this person is basically the sooner the better yep and and make sure you understand what it takes to deserve it yes but asking can can shake that out too and i like how you said make sure you understand what it takes to deserve it and you can ask that question to say look i'm not just asking for more money for more money's sake i want to know what you want to see me do to earn this much

yeah and make them get concrete and this by the way is hard for managers to do yep putting a dollar amount on specific behavior is difficult for them especially when they're operating within the constraints of an hr imposed you know raise policy yeah but i do have i do have a tip for what you can say to try to encourage your manager to actually give you the raise hit me you say look i want this raise i want this much and then you say look when i am your boss i will remember this day all right i think the question is answered if you've been a software developer at the same job for a few years it might be time to start looking around quit your job is our favorite

advice but first you should probably find a new job trust me it is better this way check out a service called vettery which matches developers with employers based on what you want like your location salary requirements and technologies you want to work with i actually signed up myself and within a week they sent me an opportunity that looked really good my current approach to job seeking is tweet dumb stuff and hope the company notices me so this sounds like an improvement i think yeah once you sign up you get a consultant to help you find opportunities i also like that veteri lets you specify your salary requirements early rather than going through the whole interview process only to find out want want your salary expectations were way

off that actually happened to me in an interview would have been nice to avoid that you can start using veteri without reversing a linked list on a whiteboard too they don't have a coding test to sign up if you are thinking about taking our advice the soft skills engineering patented advice and quitting your job, check out Vetteri. Go to vetteri.com slash softskills to sign up. That's V-E-T-T-E-R-Y dot com slash softskills. If you use that link, you will help support the show. And if you get a job through Vetteri,

they will send you $300. Thank you so much to Vetteri for sponsoring the show. I'm going to read our next one. Okay, this is from a listener named Andrew. Andrew asks, as a military veteran of eight years, I have the opportunity to enroll in a master's program for little to no cost, but I'm not sure what kind of program to choose.

I'm a web developer and also serve as my team's Agile owner, kind of like a Scrum master, which I really enjoy. In fact, before I got my first dev job, I trained in Scrum to try to get a leadership role in the software industry and use my bachelor's in engineering management. It seems logical to continue in that vein and to choose an engineering management master's program, but I enjoy being a direct contributor

and applying my Agile training without any real responsibility as a manager would have. I sometimes think I should go for a master's in computer science and double down as a technical knowledge worker, but I fear I'd be in way over my head since I don't have a traditional computer science background. On the other side,

part of me thinks I should get an MBA like some of my friends from college to hedge my bets for climbing the corporate ladder in the future. On top of that, lately I've been very interested in learning about design. I'm just not sure what to do

and I have a habit of making big decisions with my head instead of my heart, which sometimes leads to eight years of military service, which I don't much enjoy. So I'd love any advice I can get. Thanks. soft skills engineering is my absolute favorite software industry podcast why thank you andrew oh

thanks i love how andrew says i have a habit of making decisions with my head instead of my heart and i thought wait a minute don't most people have the opposite problem yeah i think so i think i even read it backwards head instead of heart so it seemed like a really good plan to to do eight years of military service and then i assume he found himself not loving it oh so maybe he did the math but yeah i made the pros and cons list yep and he left off the con that like but i will hate this yeah yeah i i think that's actually great that you make decisions with your head not your heart though i guess i guess really you need it you know this ties in so perfectly a good friend of mine did a master's degree in engineering management at stanford a few years back and took a

class on how to make good decisions and and you know you would think that a academic institution would focus on just like how to be a cold-blooded logical analytical decision maker but no the class was all about how to balance head and heart it was like talking about it said lay out all the pros and cons do all the analysis and then take a step back and see how you feel about it and i was like huh that's interesting and you didn't even have to go to stanford you just had to talk to your friend i saved thousands of dollars education it saved so much time in fact i went ahead and update in my linkedin profile to say that i have a stanford degree now stanford trained it's a it's a transitive master's degree

i read a book by someone that has a master's degree yeah so it's kind of a core assumption that they will go to a master's program because it's cheap yeah i think i mean you can just not do that too yeah that's not there's opportunity cost even if it's cheap for you i mean maybe it'll be a part-time program so you wouldn't have to give up a job but then you're giving up your time this is a very good reason to invoke an opportunity cost analysis don't you think we should probably talk about what opportunity cost is yes do you want to explain it dave uh no you brought it up you want to laugh at me while i explain it okay you have to do it so i mean i have a master i have a transitive master's degree from stanford

but i think you would be more suited to to explain this my backpack has a master's degree because my dad took it to school it's been passed down to me opportunity cost is where you choose one thing but you're giving up choosing a different thing so it's like what value what value are you giving up by not doing this other thing sort of okay so for a master's program the opportunity cost would be like the cost of just not doing a master's and having more free time or focusing more on your current job or whatever you do at that time kind of like the next best option right so like if you have a family it could the cost could come in the form of lost family time yeah it could come in the form of lost dedication to your employer because you're going to be out doing homework and

class assignments and stuff yeah and then that make no mistake that is a cost right it's a big one and in this case that's basically the only cost yeah free is weird it doesn't say little well it does say little to no cost but yeah free definitely ignores opportunity cost there's a restaurant around here i guess it's around everywhere that has like a free sandwich day and people will line up for hours to get their free sandwich and you could not pay me enough money to sit in line for a sandwich that was free that's like a classic opportunity cost these people have like they're like well i mean i was just gonna sit at home and play xbox so yeah but it's even worse than that because presumably you're you're less

happy it's like you value my time is less than zero that's what you're saying i don't know anyways opportunity cost yes think about that and and it also depends on your goal like if you want to get into engineering management or into individual contributor work i don't think a master's is a i don't think it's a it's a clear path to that necessarily so let's let's lay out the options here so we have no degree to continue a cs degree engineering management degree an mba or some kind of design master's i think those were roughly the five options that we were looking at i would like to include going back in time and not getting your original degree as well yeah a sixth option removing the degree you currently have

as boring as it sounds i kind of want to march down each one of these options and talk about the pros and cons march me down okay let's start with we already talked about the no degree i mean the pro of the no degree is that you can focus more on your work and your personal life and maybe you could get into tennis i know you've always wanted to get into tennis so just think about that now let's talk about computer science so you already have a full-time job as a web developer. So you already have a foot in the industry. A computer science degree is a great way to get a foot into the industry, but you already have that. And so once you're already in the industry, going back and getting a master's degree in computer science, I'm not

totally sure it's going to like give you a leg up to the industry that you're already in. What do you think? I agree with you. My impression of masters in computer science is that they're relatively theoretical, but they're also not deep enough for you to go get a job as a researcher or scientist at a company so it's this weird mix of like it's not pragmatic in that it'll help you in your day-to-day writing web developer code yep and you won't be able to get hired as like a an an ai developer engineer or something like that and i think there's a really strong chance that given that you don't have a bachelor's degree in computer science that that absence that foundational gap might cause you a lot of struggle in a master's program yeah i mean if you are

interested in it it seems i think it would be rad yeah it's probably fascinating if you like that kind of stuff if you're not inherently interested in it though yeah my my gut is it would not advance your career a whole lot i agree now i do have an interesting story on this front i have two friends well i have many more than two friends who did this but i have i have two friends yes no i have i have 250 friends in our slack community yeah true okay but i have two friends who went down this master's degree path with different motivations. And I want to just tell their stories briefly because they had different outcomes and they went in for different reasons. So the first friend got a master's degree and he was already gainfully employed at the same

company as I did. And I asked him, why are you doing this? And he says, I'm doing it to make more money. And I just looked back at him and said, you're not going to make more money with a master's degree. But that was his only motivation was the money. And I think in hindsight, I was probably right. Now you can always find examples of people who got the master's degree and have more money than people who don't have the master's degree. But in this case, I make more money than him. Okay. Setting that aside. Who got the last laugh now? And I did not get a master's degree. But then I have another friend. So this guy, I actually said, the first guy, I said, look, don't get a master's degree. I think you're wasting your time. He ignored me, got it anyway, and he's doing

fine. But the second friend got a master's degree because he loves computer science and he loves programming languages and he loves compilers and he loves theoretical stuff and he he was going to spend all his time studying and fiddling with this stuff anyway so he went and got an online master's degree from like a well-known university and it's been great for him plus when he came back to work he insisted that everybody call him master which i think how do you put a price on that it's whatever the price of enrollment plus his time so and him i actually said yeah you should get a master's degree this is great and he just loved it he loved all of his courses he produced a master's thesis that he still references now 10 years later and shares with people because it's

actually it was a pretty practical relevant thesis in fact i just went to lunch with him yesterday and he was telling me about how he was citing his own master's thesis to settle an argument at work which is like the best thing ever yeah so you know these are two two cases where i think in neither case did it really increase their earning potential significantly but in one case they just absolutely loved it yeah you brought up a good point about credentials and breaking into the industry where if it can be harder if you're on the outside to get in without without kind of outside validation and credentials but if you're already in there you already are developing a network like theoretically you should be able to kind of get your next job based on what

you have produced in your current job yes yeah so it sounds like you're leaning no on the master's in computer science in unless it's an inherent interest of yours exactly and i think one way to assess this is to ask yourself what doors will open as a result of each of these degrees and in the case of the CS degree I don't think any new doors will open for you yeah I mean maybe maybe if there's just an area you're really interested in diving deep in but to be just kind of a general developer who is better at their job than they were I feel like a master's is not necessarily going to do that so I think we agree cool NBA hit me with the NBA also the so the NBA is a totally different ballgame because now we're talking about doors will open that would have been

basically closed to you. And I have seen so many examples of people who went back and got an MBA and then like doubled or tripled their salary and got to work in positions that never would have been open to them beforehand. This is especially true for engineers transitioning into leadership, like serious leadership, executive level leadership within medium to large companies. So, I mean, if that's what you want to do, I think an MBA would be a fantastic option yeah i feel like there's an well i'm stopping the march down through the options what was the other one i already forgot we have engineering management and then something design related oh yeah i didn't even know there was an engineering management degree until this question

so yeah that's how much i have to contribute there well that's that in and of itself is a data point the fact that you haven't encountered this in your what 10 years of professional experience yeah that says something yeah i think there's this underlying desire i'm reading into this question to get better but they're torn between do i get better at engineering management or do i get better as an individual contributor and they're looking at it through this lens of which degree should i get right and i feel like that's the wrong i mean i don't know i'm biased whatever but but i feel like a degree isn't this magic piece of paper that will make you better at the job like if you want to be a better engineering manager i think being a really strong engineer is

an important component of that because it's hard to be an engineering manager without the the kind of technical baseline and you don't have to the skill sets are different like being a great engineer will not make you a great manager but not having a strong individual contributor background will make you a worse engineering manager okay so i'm not sure how long andrew has been in his current role but it does feel very much like if he's worried about moving into engineering management like how do i get that credential that proves i'm ready and it feels like kind of the wrong question to me in a way i would say that probably more than 90 of the engineering managers that i know and i know a lot of them do not have anything besides a engineering undergrad or

master's degree and they do not have an mba same same same and even at my current company which is very very large you have to go pretty high up the kind of executive hierarchy to find where you can't get there without some kind of advanced degree i mean i guess if that's what you're going for then then sure but what's my point my point is the caffeine has run out of my brain so it's shutting down i can just i can hear little pieces going like the little windows shut down little little lights are going out in my head i think that there's like this underlying skepticism or what's another word for it that word was in one of those lights that turned off yeah it's it's like this this like big boss man with his fancy piece of paper wants to come and tell us the real

practitioners what to do and i feel like that's that's that's kind of the a bad way this could work out if you think i will get this degree and then i'll be able to manage engineers where you you don't have the you don't have the the clout cred to back it up yeah it's like i don't think i would care if my manager had a piece of paper or not i would care if they seemed competent or not yeah and you can get that from a program from a master's program but there's almost part of me that would think like this is to cover up the fact that they don't they don't know what they're talking about oh yeah so you're saying that it might actually make people skeptical of your abilities i think it could i mean i have this like inner cynic contrarian like grumpy part of my

brain and i think it would influence me to look negatively on things that i would not have looked negatively on if i didn't know that about the person ah it's like it's like that that like suits versus i don't know what the other thing is suits yeah overalls are the things you wear when you're not wearing suits that's true but there's i don't know there's like this this negative view of mba graduates of these like corporate drones that just kind of are good at networking and theory and and are kind of clueless about how the real world works and yeah i think what i'm hearing you say is that you're concerned that getting an mba might actually close the door on engineering leadership or at least narrow the door for you a little bit because you'll have to

overcome the skepticism of your line level purely technical folks yeah i mean i feel like it would be it would be different if you were getting an mba as an experienced engineer and experienced manager but if you were trying to break into engineering management and you were saying hey i have an mba like that's why i am that's why i'm qualified to do this i feel like that would look negative yeah i think you're right but if you're going after mba things like executive level leadership for the business then i think an mba could be a leg up don't mbas make power points because in your job to be an analyst and work 100 hours a week like shuffling slides around probably i don't know i don't know anything about mbas you know i've seen product managers go get

an mba and it's been really valuable for them i actually work with somebody that has maybe that's an option i should talk to them about it yeah maybe you should have done that before before i maligned their whole their two years of their life they spent learning listen i i read harvard business review i don't need an mba it's the same another option to consider here is to just wait say look i'm gonna spend the next two years focusing on developing my technical skills on the job and then reassess where i am i'm assuming that this military benefit will not expire in just two years yeah that's i i know nothing i don't know i think that's a good plan though it does feel like yeah it feels like more real world experience might answer that question

too and and if the goal is to get into engineering management like you can just do that you don't need a degree in it yep well we answered the question oh almost there is one more very important factor for you to consider okay and that is the machine learning data science applied science field which is a a field that for whatever reason right now is dominated by people with advanced degrees it's it almost seems like a a completely required checkbox to get to get into these yeah to get into this field. Probably 90% of the people that I know, at my company who are working in machine learning, as not not, okay, so this is a little bit complicated. But there are machine learning engineers whose job is to like build ML infrastructure, and, you know, deploy ML models.

But then there are also the machine learning scientists who actually design, develop, train, and who deliver the actual machine learning science artifacts, and the research and, you know, the documentation and almost all of these people have phds probably 90 maybe 80 but a lot and so that's something to consider as well as if you want to go into that field which is a burgeoning field right now and just a fantastic way to have a great technical career is to get into that field but if you do that you'll need a phd in one of the hard sciences so that is another option you should probably consider a very challenging option but it could be one that opens a ton of interesting doors that right now are closed to you i read a tweet that said it's hard to get in

because everyone is thinking those same things that's my that's my contribution to that like the the advisors who specialize in that are kind of like full up at a lot of places what do you mean full up so oh it's hard to get into the degree program yeah yeah like if you're studying if you want to study machine learning or ai or get a phd in it you have to have an advisor that'll work with you and and there are a lot of other people interested in that same thing oh interesting it's almost like there's this new pent-up demand and and a short supply of training resources man what a bummer don't even try it's gonna be hard that's what i'm saying yeah yeah your point makes sense to me i do not work closely with the machine learning or ai folks i think you know that more

directly but from just my far-off vantage point it seems like that as well yeah not saying you can't do it but that certainly is a good way in it's like a water slide into it so you know i think final my final answer is if i'm in your shoes i would not go and get a master's degree right now. I would give my current employment situation a couple of years of just committed personal development in my craft. And during that time, not only will you be improving your own technical skills, but you'll also be rubbing shoulders with more people with different backgrounds and you can start to get exposed to some of the outcomes from these various educational pathways that they followed. Yeah. I think out of all of these, it feels like an

MBA is the one that would most make a difference in your career where I don't think a master's in CS would move your career much I don't think a master's in engineering management would move your career much I think you could probably do mostly the same work at the same places as a manager or as an individual contributor but I think you're right that an MBA is like the biggest addition to your current skill set and credentials yeah that makes sense but I agree that it feels like a thing to add after not not kind of how to start out yeah have we answered it i think so good luck all right good luck what can 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 we get so many questions we love all of them you are the lifeblood of the show keep them coming i have no more words i was being serious about the caffeine my brain all right we'll catch you next week