Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 217: Quitting words and double COVID internship

Episode Date: July 6, 2020

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Questions Hi Over time I have heard many different terms that all seem to equate to “I no longer have a job”. Some examples are quit, fired, laid off and terminated. What is the difference between these (and others) and what is best (both from benefits and emotionally) for the employee and the employer? Note I am not planning to quit my job or fire someone, but I am curious to hear your views. Hey guys, I love your podcast and find it super helpful for me as I start my career in tech. I am in a conundrum. I am a student and I took the opportunity Covid presented me to take up two internships instead of one. Both are at top companies. My question is I am feeling like I am drowning in work, how do I navigate through this and what are your general thoughts. Thank you in advance!

it takes more than saying it depends to be a great software engineer this is episode 217 of the soft skills engineering podcast i'm your host jamison dance i'm your host dave smith soft skills engineering is a weekly advice show where we answer all of your non-technical questions about the technical field of software development and we don't need to answer your technical questions i guess because the answer is always it depends that's right this is kind of a trope in the engineering field but there's a lot of stuff where it doesn't depend it's like should i drop this database in production well that depends it depends yeah i mean there's a lot of trade-offs for different technologies and each of them has their own strengths and weaknesses and you just

got to evaluate them individually yeah although nothing's worse than when someone says it depends but they don't say what it depends on it just depends on i don't know the which zodiac sign we're in it always depends on something yeah it depends on the collective opinion of the places that programmers talk about technology on the internet i feel like that's the answer in a lot of cases when you say it depends depends what the hive mind believes it depends on what i've read on twitter this week yeah yep depends on the last most persuasive blog post that i read well let me ask you a question okay should i read a story from one of our listeners it does not depend you should okay all right i will uh this this is a story from an anonymous

listener not a question a story they write hi dave and jameson i'm not going to tell you how much i love your podcast because that would be pandering and i know you hate that you know so well anyways i just wanted to say thank you for your advice i recently got a job offer for a developer evangelist position and during my negotiations i channeled my inner soft skills to ask for what i think was a pretty drastic raise of twenty five thousand dollars per year from my current salary the company seemed a little surprised by my request but said they would take it into consideration i wonder if they said well that depends they came back to me with a salary increase of $20,000 per year, and I will be accepting this offer tomorrow. Looking back

over my offer and my current finances, I realize I'm currently making $10,000 per year under what I went into the salary negotiation thinking I made. So it turns out I had unknowingly asked for a $35,000 a year raise. Grimacing face whoops. I think that was a written version of an emoji, which is awesome. And their offer turned out to be a $30,000 increase. Anyways, thanks to the confidence i've gained from how you normalize the negotiation process on your end i'm making quite a bit more than my current soft skills engineering position i think i think soft skills engineering position means the one you're about to quit yeah okay thanks for all your advice keep it up what a great story that's awesome it's like not knowing how much money you're actually making gave you

the confidence to ask for even more than you realized yeah i'm just trying to think through how you could do that on purpose next time because it would i mean negotiating is scary but if someone gave you an offer that was much less than you were currently making you wouldn't be scared to say that's much less than i am currently making true it would give you confidence and certainty and sadly that counts for just as much as technical skill when it comes to negotiating raises or or pay this is why whenever i go into a salary negotiation first i go visit a hypnotist who convinces me that i actually make much less than i do wait the other way right no no no i uh oh right that's right your hypnotist has really sabotaged oh man oh man

okay now you have to go see a hypnotist to remove the like shame and agony you feel from all this money you've left on the table oh boy well i'm glad you got a raise and i'm glad that you forgot in a way that helped you usually i only forget in ways that make my life worse mm-hmm yep good all right i'm gonna read our patrons thank you so much to brayden canes dennis bogdanov evgeny sladkowski john grant luke bayliss microconfig.io nick hathaway nick cancer alexander philip john basile ryan real mccoy at the agile ventures charity sean stanley tactical radio steven arman lee travis and vinlock these are the folks who donate at the level where we shout them out every single week thank you to everybody else who has or who

will yet donate and you can do that by going to soft skills to audio and click support us on patreon if you do that for any amount of money for any amount of time that is greater than zero for both of those things then you get an invite to our slack team where you can hang out and chat and learn from other folks who are like-minded and care about the non-technical side of of technical stuff that's right i'm not going to debate you on that does it doesn't depend nope nothing okay nothing you said depends on anything i would like to thank veteri for supporting this show sponsoring this episode veteri is an online marketplace where job seekers in the technical field of software development can find new jobs

and we'll hear more about them later would you like to read our first question so much this is from a listener named thomas hi over time i've heard many different terms that all seem to equate to i no longer have a job some examples are quit fired laid off and terminated what is the difference between these and others and what is best both from benefits and emotionally for the employee and the employer note i am not planning to quit my job or fire someone but i am curious to hear your views huh okay so thomas left off a few terms yes what do you think they're missing dave well my favorite which i learned as a youngster from monty python and the holy grail is sacked yep where does that come from is that from like the the act of taking a city and burning

it down like in war oh because you can sack a city yeah that feels like a pretty militant way to say someone doesn't have a job anymore maybe it means that they don't have a job anymore and you burnt their house down i have i have no idea where sacked came from yeah i'm googling it right now and i just can't find anything it's giving me the etymology for the word sack yeah like a burlap bag that contains things yeah it looks like it looks like google has failed me i don't know what what this means oh hey i found a thing google sent me to this place called phrases.org.uk the probable derivation of this phrase is an allusion to tradesmen who owned their own tools and took them with them in a bag or sack when they were dismissed from employment it has been

known in france since the 17th century as i speak fluent french so if you don't understand this it's because you don't speak the right kind of french wait that was german right no that was that was french but they're very similar if you speak them in the true way okay that i that i do okay so it means okay collect your things put them in a sack and go away so i guess the commercial version of that in modern office life would be boxed you've been boxed yeah you put all your stuff in a box you've been copied to google drive archived yeah deactivated okay what else so we we got through one extra term there's got to be more right yeah i mean we have we have redundant been made redundant i don't hear

that one very often that's like a uk thing i believe okay or one of my favorites is it's not that you got fired it's that the company moved in an exciting new direction that's like when you are a bad person and you litter on the highway and you throw like your cheeseburger wrapper out the window and it's not that you threw it out it's that your car moved in an exciting new direction without bringing it along that's right well the cheeseburger was just not part of our new vision it is weird some of these seem like they're to to to put more distance between the effect this will have on a person and the people doing this like if you say fired or laid off or doesn't have a job anymore and it's pretty clear that'll have a bad effect on somebody's life

but if you say the company is moving in an exciting new direction then you just get to think about these sweet sweet shareholder benefits and yeah i don't know the stock price going up and does this new direction involve me getting a ferrari because if so i don't care how many people you had to fire to make it happen you've been ferrari for the ceo ferraried i think we should double down on the the military metaphors and just say like slain job was slain defeated defenestrated have you heard that word oh yeah that's a historical reference yeah thrown out a window there's a specific word for being thrown out a window

and it should come up more often in real life so yes it should although i don't recommend doing this to people very much no yeah that's true yeah we just have to turn it into a more applicable metaphor yeah like the word literally we just have to change it from what it means to a different thing so we can say it more often so true okay did we cover them all i think so i mean if there any other words i sure don't think they matter at all because only the things that i think about matter okay good and i'm sure there's more but this is probably a good group yeah what do you think what do they mean what happens to a person or the company if these different words are used we should make a venn diagram i think to put the ones that mean the same thing or that overlap in

the same little sliver but i think there's basically three categories and really at the highest level there's only two and it's did i choose to leave or did the company choose for me to leave this job yeah and i can pretty much put all of the words into one of those two buckets pretty concretely i don't think they're most of them are not ambiguous they are all a subset of i don't have a job anymore that's right they all belong to the giant circle around all of them that says i no longer have a job yeah okay so i mean quits pretty clear you chose to leave yep or you did something really bad and are covering it up that's true actually so i was gonna say it's it's definitely your choice but there's have you heard the phrase managing someone out

oh yes we should put that on the list yeah they were managed out that basically means that you made their job bad enough that they quit because you wanted them gone but for some reason it was hard to fire them yes or you didn't want to pay severance yeah and that is a good point about quitting if you quit you generally don't get very much from the company i don't even think you can file for unemployment in some cases if you quit in the u.s at least that is correct i think so quitting can be expensive if you don't have an alternative lined up okay but but generally when someone says i quit it means they chose to leave and probably the company didn't want them to but maybe they did so next term i mean fired is the next one

on the list okay fired the company made me quit and they say it was my fault that's what that means do you ever hear about do people get severance if they are fired like does the company give them anything yeah it depends on if they're an executive or not i have seen severance when people have been terminated with cause sometimes you don't get it though yeah i think it depends on the cause so if you're underperforming and the company doesn't want to pay you anymore i think it's pretty common for those people to get severance if however you decided to drop the production database and remove all the backups maybe you wouldn't get severance yeah or if you i mean if you broke a law or were yes abusive or something like that right yeah but

huh do you have a sense for i don't know if this question has an answer that is knowable but do you have a sense for how often you would get severance if you were fired i mean is it more often than not or less often oh i know exactly how to answer this question okay it depends ah i knew it i knew it was coming the computer in my gut the very accurate data-driven gut computer tells me that it's probably less likely to get severance than like i would say most people to get fired probably don't get severance but yeah i think i think so too i think in most cases if someone got severance the term the company would use would be laid off yep or let go or something like that let go let go yeah is there really a difference between let go and laid off i think

let go is kind of uh more in the fired category and laid off is more in the we had to remove you from your position because we didn't have the money to pay you anymore i think so too yeah Yeah, there's many layers of Venn diagrams here. We're going to need a 3D Venn diagram of spheres. Yeah, let go is often a nicer way of saying fired. Yes. But I mean, maybe the effect of it being a nicer way is that you might get more severance too.

Oh yes, potentially. And then of course we go to the venerable term terminated or sometimes abbreviated termed. What? Termed? Yeah, I've heard this. So I've heard managers say, I have to do a term. okay i have so many questions now do they do they fire so many people that like there's jargon for it they they're like look they have to save those two syllables and it really adds up when you just

chop this many people out of your organization exactly i don't know i think it's more of like a code word if i just say term then someone walking past my office might not clue into what i just said aha it's like security through obscurity hey bob did you take care of those terms yeah sure thing fred with gusto oh man so many terms this week oh such a hard life to term this many people that would raise some eyebrows term this many people how do you term a person okay so terminated what does that mean i think terminated and

fired are basically the same thing i mean we didn't explicitly well no we did laid off is is like probably not your fault but maybe some larger structural changes the company moved in an exciting new direction right you're a cheeseburger rapper and the company is a car on the highway yeah you work in retail and the company doesn't anymore that's right yeah your your whole project was eliminated. You know, that's right. And that is, I think, the softer kind of layoff where the company says, all right, strategically, we are cutting this department and everyone in it has to go. It's a little bit harder when the company says we have to make across the board cuts and you three people were selected to be cut. That one hurts a lot more than, oh,

you know, my company no longer sells microwaves and I'm a microwave expert. Yeah. Generally, when those things have happened i've seen some attempt to identify here's who we will miss the least or here's who's it's not that we would fire them for performance but they're they're the lowest performing out of this group of people or something like that from the other side i have never seen that it's not never i've often not seen that explained well yeah i feel like being around layoffs people are very quick to invent their own stories because often there's not a clear story of why someone was let go that was why someone was laid off that that why they were laid off so people imagine like oh they got enough that that email they sent two years ago that was nasty to

this powerful person has come back to bite them or right or like i don't know they got rid of all the highest paid people or yeah yeah yeah and maybe they did and they're afraid to say it and they would rather deal with people speculating than saying hey we got rid of all the highest paid people yeah and dealing with that fallout but like it's hard to tell someone satisfyingly here's why we here's why we had to lay all these people off like here's why these people don't work here anymore so often that's where like corporate double speak like moving in an exciting new direction comes in right so a long time ago i think i was just a couple years out of college and someone was telling me that they had gotten laid off but they used the term fired

they said oh that i got fired from my job and i was like whoa whoa whoa buddy i don't think you got fired i think you got laid off and he was like well what's the difference and i'm like well if you say you got fired people are gonna think you did something bad if you say you got laid off then everyone will feel bad for you yeah it's a much better story to future potential employers to say microwaves are not selling anymore so they got rid of the microwave division then i added a fun button to the microwave that makes the door spring open with spikes on it so i got laid off you know how you have to like put holes in potatoes before you cook them in the microwave so they don't blow up i just thought why don't i make it so when you

open the door you hold the potato right up to it and the spikes jam into the potato and it saves you a step and there's a few lawsuits now so anyway they laid off the automatic baked potato door division they moved in an exciting new direction where the company did not want to murder people that bought their microwave anymore yeah so that's basic breakdown yeah did we talk about from the employee and the employer i would rather be laid off than fired or terminated but i would rather quit than all of them because quit generally means that i have something better lined up but you didn't get severance actually i could also quit if it was just like so horrible that i couldn't bear it anymore and i wouldn't want that to happen yeah true it depends it

it's our new favorite answer yep all right well did we answer the question then i think so yeah 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 veteri 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 what 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 veteri go to vetery.com soft skills to sign up that's v-e-t-t-e-r-y.com soft skills if you use that link you will help support the show and if you get a job through vetery they will send you three

hundred dollars thank you so much to vetery for sponsoring the show do you want to read our next one all right this next question comes from an anonymous listener who says hey guys i love your podcast and find it super helpful for me as i start my career in tech i am in a conundrum i am a student and i took the opportunity covid presented me to take two internships instead of one both are at top companies my question is i am feeling like i am drowning in work how do i navigate through this and what are your general thoughts thank you in advance what they say they're a student but not what they're a student of and i think they're a student of the art of grifting because oh no

yeah it sounds like they have two jobs yep and i don't think each internship knows about the other one probably not how do you manage that do you do you like work odd hours at one company and even hours at the other or do you stack one after the other they follow the linux completely fair scheduler okay do a lot of swapping between them they just have it running on another tab another terminal window or something and it's like oh the scheduler tells me this microsecond i work on job one oh i've been preempted yeah boss is looking over my shoulder that's an interrupt i mean do you have two laptops on your desk and it's like pivot 45 degrees to join one stand up and then rotate to join the other stand-up so okay before we keep telling this person how dumb

this is i do want to say there might be a way that this is not them being naughty if their internships so when i hear internship i assume it's basically a time limited full-time job for students yeah that's usually how they work in tech but sometimes it means there's like a project for a period of time that takes the place of a class at school and it you get credit for it but not money so maybe they have two of those at once like two co-ops yeah sort of yeah but i don't think i don't know that seems less likely to me than someone saying like i don't know google and facebook both like me cool i'll work at both of them oh my gosh i can't even imagine that seems really difficult yeah i mean it would be difficult to have two full-time demanding jobs you're right

yes it would be hard that's why i don't do it maybe they're just like copying internal technology back and forth between the two companies oh no so if the one company has like a really rad container scheduler and the other company has like a really cool load balancer they just look like these container slash load balancer geniuses yep by our forces combined yeah and in that way you could say it's really making the world a better place yeah i think the end justifies the means it certainly does huh yeah i don't really know what to tell you besides like you probably shouldn't have two jobs at the same time for different companies because i don't think they would be pumped about that if they knew and i don't think you could do a good job at two companies at the

same time yeah i mean that's called like a consultant right oh yeah i guess maybe that's what it is maybe it's an internship in a consultancy you're producing lots of detailed powerpoint decks about strategy for 80 hours a week and you just sort of find and replace and swap all the names out of the companies yeah i think i think the key here is finding two teams in two companies that are so similar that you can actually write the same code and have it work for both i mean code reuse and like software components and stuff that's sort of the dream of of lots of lots of different methodologies and you get the chance to see if this object-oriented programming thing really is all everybody says it is yep can you really just build these reusable

classes between two different companies in different domains exactly and i mean this is great so not only are you going to help two companies but you're going to produce some coveted research on code reuse at the end of this oh like you're saying you're going to unmask yourself at the end and say hey that was a fun project that you helped me do to to do some software engineering research yep and you're welcome right and i'll even let you put your name on the paper yeah you can both be second author right i guess yeah i don't really know what to tell this person i feel like i'm drowning in work yeah you are so yeah so would i if i had two full-time jobs i mean i mean now what do you do what do you do if you you wake up one day and

realize i probably shouldn't have taken two full-time internships at the same time and the summer's only half over what now so it depends on what you want out of these internships i guess if you want to eventually work at one of these companies doing a crappy job at two of them means you will not work at two of them and you are more likely to get a job i think if you focus on one so not even from like a moral or ethical standpoint just from a self-interest of like i would like to work here i think it makes more sense to focus on the one you like better and good news you've got a really detailed look on what it would look like to work at each of these companies now, so you should be able to pick between one of them. You can make a really

informed decision. Exactly. Yeah. I mean, I guess I think what I'm saying is I would probably leave my internship at one of the companies. You don't think you would just buckle down and really go for it and try to muzzle through the summer? Through both of them? Yeah. Not if I wanted to work at one of them. I see. You think there's basically no way that you could do a good enough job at both of them to get a return offer i don't think so i don't think i'm smart enough that i mean i don't it probably depends on how capable you are and how well you know the domain and how high the bar is to have interns come back full-time and stuff but i would be worried i would not be able to hit that bar at two companies even if i felt like it was fine that i i'm assuming

implicitly each of these companies believes that they are giving you full-time right and so even if i didn't care about misleading them in that way then i'd still be concerned about just my ability to hit expectations yeah i get it i'm with you maybe that's why i'll never make the big bucks though because i don't have the ability to to work two jobs say the ends justify the means oh i don't i mean i could i could work more hours i would just get worse for each additional hour that i worked and then at some point it's not even diminishing returns it's negative returns it's yeah it's zero you just sit there and suck resources from the company yeah i mean context switching is hard within a company imagine switching context between

companies imagine like you're writing a comment and you're like at google we always do it this way and you're like oh crap i'm at facebook oh crap it would be interesting if it were those two companies specifically because they are very different culturally and have very different engineering practices and that'd be kind of be fun to see i just hope that you write a super fascinating blog post when this is over a juicy tell-all a scandalous memoir about your time in the tech industry yep it would be novel to write a memoir about your time in the tech industry where the scandal is like you did something wrong instead of here's all the crazy stuff that happened around me right that'd be pretty novel true if we are wrong and it is not that you are

working full-time for two companies at the same time and we've just like said all these mean things please let us know and we can help with the actual problem but i think your problem is you have done something unethical and you need to undo it by leaving one of the internships and even if it is ethical it might just be too much of a workload to take on and same answer though yeah that's true I mean, I guess, yeah, the ethics of it changed then, but I think it's better to do a good job at one thing than a crappy job at two things. All right. Well, question answered. Great question, though.

Question answered. Thanks for letting us know that the world contains possibilities like this. Yeah. I had never even considered this before. Now I will. Yep. When my kids ask me what they should do in the summer, I'll tell them, double internship at a Megatech co. anytime there's a performance issue with someone on my team i'll add to the list of things to

wonder do they have another full-time job and that's why that's why they're not doing very much work yes you should probably start asking that in your one-on-ones just checking are you employed by any of our competitors all right i think we've answered the question yep what can people do if they want their own questions answered dave go to soft skills.audio and click ask a question you can fill out our form there thank you so much to the people asking questions you are the lifeblood of the show and also you can support us on patreon there by clicking support us on patreon if you do that for any dollar amount at the beginning of every month we send out a round of slack invitations to join our slack cult uniforms pending uniformity of thought

all right we'll catch you next week Thank you.