Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 226: Declining job offers and being the outside hire

Episode Date: September 7, 2020

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Questions How do you politely decline job offers that you never intended to accept in the first place? I’ve been trying to interview more often recently to keep my interviewing skills sharp and check how employable I am. I always struggle declining the offers politely. What usually happens is that I set high salary expectations hoping that the company refuses me, but sometimes they do match it and I end up in an even worst spot. Any tips? Should I come clear earlier in the process? I was recently hired as a Staff Engineer at a large tech company. After joining the company I was told I was the first outside Staff Engineer ever hired into the organization and the expectations for me were very high. After the first month I noticed that coworkers were acting strange around me and less responsive to my ideas. During a 1:1 one of my coworkers specifically stated that he and several others have been at the company for 5 years and were passed up for the promotion I got and were upset that an outsider was hired. Based on this they would be watching me closely. I’ve talked to management about the conversations and their feedback has been to try to “make friends”. I am the most Sr Engineer in a group of 15 engineers who work across 5 different teams. The situation is turning very toxic where the other engineers are trying to “one-up” me in effort to obtain the promotion for the next cycle. What do I do?

it takes more than canceling out of sublime's unregistered evaluation version pop-up every 20 minutes for three years to be a great engineer this is soft skills engineering episode 226 i'm your host dave smith i'm your host jamison dance soft skills engineering is a weekly advice podcast for software engineers who are so persistent they will click that pop-up instead of handing over the ten dollars or whatever it is that's like the modern do you want to register winrar thing oh man yeah it's hard to get software developers to pay money for their own software which is ironic yeah i'll spend my company's money sure i expect you to pay tons of my company's money

yeah i expect you to pay me money to create software but i'll be darned if i'm gonna pay money to others to create software yeah speaking of paying money i want to thank our wonderful patrons thank you to these folks who support the show at the level where we shout them out every week thank you to oladapo fadehi karen sveinsen ragnar hardison alexander microconfig.io nick travis sanders evgeny sladkowski dennis bogdanov braden canes philip john basile steven armand lee john grant luke bayless ryan real mccoy vinlock stanley tactical radio the agile ventures charity nick cantar and sean thank you so much to those folks and all the people who have in the past and also the future thank you to the future folks yes will future support us evergreen yeah someday

the last person ever will become a patron on patreon to this show okay and it's just sad maybe it'll be you the person the next person that we're asking to become a patron right now yeah maybe they'll be the last one ever who knows well i don't want no it's not gonna be you okay millions more will follow okay that would be nice you can support the show by going to soft skills.audio click support us on patreon the support will get you an invite to our slack team which is great and also will pay for the servers that keep the show going which is also great. Otherwise, this is just Dave and I having a weird weekly call. To be honest, I would do this if we weren't even recording it. I would too. It would be weird if we were just collecting bad

things that happen to people and talking about them by ourselves, though. I'd still do it. That's true. I do love the drama. Yeah. Oh, man. All right. I'd like to thank Vetteri for sponsoring this episode veteri is an online marketplace for developers looking for jobs you can learn more at veteri.com soft skills jameson how would you like to read our first question i would like to a lot i guess i was trying to think of a unit but you said how which is more like a method how oh sorry yes i would like to read it in a bad australian accent oh just kidding okay this is from an anonymous listener how do you politely decline job offers that you never intended to accept in the first place i've been trying to interview more often recently to keep

my interviewing skills sharp and check how employable i am i always struggle declining the offers politely what usually happens is that i set a high salary expectation hoping to hear that the company refuses me but sometimes they do match it and i end up in an even worse spot any tips should i come clear earlier in the process wait i i offer an unusually high salary and the company matches it and you're worse off boy what a good problem to have yeah oh boy being a software developer is so weird it is so weird i have this problem where companies keep offering to pay me more money to do the same job oh yeah i think we've talked about this before but it's like the humble bragging about how overloaded you are with recruiter spam like

yeah you just won't leave me alone begging me to come work for them so annoying it is funny just pretend like you're a celebrity okay like and what does that look like was it kate moss who said i don't get out of bed for less than ten thousand dollars a day oh my gosh and i think she's from the 90s right so inflation maybe you're up to like 20 000 a day oh wow famous software engineer kate moss i don't get out of bed for linkedin recruiters unless they're offering 10 000 a day so i've heard this advice a lot and i think it's even been given maybe by me i don't know i i disavow anything i've said ever in the past ever okay but i've probably said it's good to

interview to practice yes but i think i always assume that like there's a chance that if the interview went well enough you would accept yeah it does seem weird to interview with absolutely no intent ever of accepting the job offer no matter what they possibly do like if it's in another state and you don't want to move no matter what or something like that yeah so i think what i would do is say there's no way i would ever accept this offer if it proceeds and then stop interviewing yeah i feel like if i wanted to practice i would i would still try and do it at some place that had some reasonable chance of me working there yeah i think i think that's ethically i think you're ethically bound to do that that's actually well now that i said that the downside is if you're

doing it to practice and you really need the practice you're gonna like burn all the places that you want to work at right yeah so you know choose places that are not your top three but maybe in your top 10 so choose your 10th place and lead them on and then work backwards from there ninth eighth seventh just just leave those top three alone that's the podium you're trying to reach yeah okay there's a service that hasn't paid us to advertise them called interviewing.io yet which is yet this is our pitch to them but this is the service they offer it's it's like mock interviews with people from oh yeah bang companies basically oh i would love to do that i would mock interview people yeah i yeah i'm sure they get paid the people who do the interviews

i'm sure the people who do the interviewing pay money i mean i already do like a hundred interviews a year anyway just for regular work i would love to do i don't know 100 more in a year why not oh okay maybe it doesn't cost money i don't know they have somehow it's a recruiting pitch somehow if you interview really well in the practice interview maybe they like funnel you on to other people or something like that oh and then they get a referral fee yeah i thought you were gonna say they do deals with companies so that their employees can get interviewing practice which seems a little weird yeah well anyways do that pay for the service instead yeah do this do the startup thing i maybe it's not paid okay if if they're getting money from referrals then i

would assume it's not paid i don't know i follow the founder of the company on twitter and she is insightful that's why i know things about it okay all the things that i clearly know right after i finish saying i have no idea how it works that's why i've heard of it okay i was i mean twitter has obviously given you deep and unique insight into this company and its business model yes much like it's given me deep and unique insight into everything that i see on twitter namely that it exists yeah the most the most valuable part of knowledge the oh i've heard of that i know that word the most useful and practical knowledge yes well honestly existence knowledge is pretty darn valuable like yeah for some stuff i mean i know i know a lot about like popular youtubers that

exist that i didn't know existed before and that's kind of useless that just makes me sad why because you don't get time to watch them because i feel old oh they're these huge cultural phenomenons that i've never heard of yes wait so in that case existence knowledge makes you feel young no it makes me feel well hmm at least you know it exists yeah that's true if it makes me feel bad when i find out it existed at some point i have to find out it exists yeah i don't know i gotta make a patch for my brain i guess i mean don't worry you'll you'll get to my age and you won't even know that it exists and then you won't feel bad and i'll never know yeah so i think what i want is to never know okay or know 10 years ago before they even existed right right so you can

know them before they were cool that's really the ultimate existence knowledge yes and before they were born some of them i was there when you were born and i watched your rise to famous youtube i knew that my little niece was someday going to become a famous unboxing youtuber and that makes me somehow better than the other people yeah obviously yeah okay so that was a huge tangent but let's break down this problem this listener has you do interviews for practice you're obviously improving your skills and wait a minute it says here i've been trying to interview to keep my interviews skills sharp and check how oh how employable i am i misread that as enjoyable just doing a little enjoyability check here

do you enjoy me send out a net promoter survey to the people who interview you perfect okay so but what ends up happening is you do an interview and then they offer you what you would consider high salary and then you have to turn them down i mean do you have to turn them down yeah i mean presumably there's some number where you'd say like yeah okay i'll move yeah so just ask for that number that's right you set set the number to where if they met matched it you would definitely change jobs and then you'll never have this problem again so i have a hard time doing this because i feel like i feel like it's hard for me to go interview somewhere else without already being mentally gone from where i currently am okay so i don't have a ton of

experience with this just like practice things i think i've taken interviews at places when i'm looking for a job where i think like i don't think this is going to work out but maybe it will and then usually i find out no i don't think so either because i screw something up or because i don't like something i see and then kind of end it but i don't think i've gotten very often to the end of an interview cycle and gotten an offer and felt like there's no earthly way i would ever accept this because you would have bailed out before you got to that that deep yeah i think so yeah okay so i guess what i'm saying is uh i can't help you i think that's the point of me thinking out loud like well no i've never been in this situation so uh just don't just do what i have done and

never be in this situation well i do have a hard time saying no though i write these like flowery overly gushy emails because i want to like yeah let them down soft i don't want to offend the company by saying no to their offer it's really weird yeah so i can get the thing about like i have a hard time being polite and saying no although now that i read that maybe the i always struggle declining the offers politely maybe they flip out and just like send an all caps email full of insults yeah i just can't be polite about it but then you get to frame that email and you win you wait you but but you're sending the email because you're not declining politely oh i'm sorry i thought they sent it to you after you declined politely they sent back a flaming email

full of capital letters oh yeah that'd be cool that that's frameable but okay so you're saying the alternative is to just throw politeness out the window and just tell them they're terrible i guess yeah if you're i mean yeah if you're having a hard time declining it politely just lean the other way i mean if this is hard let's do the opposite thing 10 times harder or more intensely. Okay. I've had a couple of chances to decline offers. And depending on the level of intensity of the company or the recruiter that's trying to get you to take the job, they can be kind of pushy. Yeah. And I actually had a recruiter one time, I declined the offer and the recruiter in very subtle terms, basically told me that this would be a black mark on me

in the industry. And it was going to be hard for him to not make it look really bad. Okay. He basically said, I'm going to have a hard time telling this story to the management team in such a way that doesn't make you look really bad. And at the time, I did not have the wherewithal to say, are you threatening me? Because that's basically what he was saying. I'm like, but I was just like, okay, well. And so I actually kind of backpedaled. I was like, well, you know, great company.

I try to be very diplomatic and polite about the whole thing. But in the end, like he's basically threatened me. That's probably the most extreme I've ever had it where he basically told me that my reputation was on the line here. By saying no to this offer. Yes. That's really dumb. It was.

I mean, very unprofessional. And it reflects poorly on that recruiter because if that recruiter ever shows up again in a cycle with me or someone I know, I'll probably warn them like, hey, this guy doesn't exactly have your best interest in mind here. Well, he's just got a book full of black marks. A hit list. i could i could hear him on the other end of the phone flipping the pages and scribbling my name down yeah with a flourish yes feathered pen yes so that's that's what's on i think that even if

you are super diplomatic and polite that is still a possible outcome although in my experience pretty rare usually when you decline an offer there is a reason and usually you can say that reason if the reason is there's no way i would i think this is the core of my feeling about this question if you want to say it's not enough money or i didn't like the position or didn't feel like a fit or whatever that's if that's why you're declining that's fine to say if the reason you're declining is because i never intended to ever work at this company right then like maybe you feeling bad about it is a signal that it's kind of a weird thing to do yeah because it it's a it's a big time commitment on your part and their part too right i'm lazy i i just wouldn't want to

interview that much for something I had no intention of ever doing. Yeah. But on the other hand, you like to keep your interview skills sharp, but you don't really do this, do you? No, I just don't. I mean, I have advised people to do this and I do do this, but I'm willing to put up with the awkward conversation where I say, I appreciate your offer, but I've decided not to. That's another, yeah, that's another point. You could just say like, no, thank you. Not a good fit. Yeah. You don't have to explain it away. Yeah. And by the way, the one bad experience I had where that recruiter threatened me, I did go to great lengths to explain everything that had gone on over the course of the interview process that had changed. So my current employment changed

and improved for the better. And I no longer wanted to leave after all. And I explained all of that in great detail to try to make my case for why it was a reasonable thing to decline the offer and he still got pushy with me so in the end what i should have just done is said you know i appreciate your time it's been good working with you i've decided not to proceed that's all i should have done that's the real advice took us 17 minutes to get there yeah i like that yeah when i've gotten no's from candidates that i've been interviewing um unless they were like i'm declining because you suck i've just always shrugged my shoulders and said oh that's a bummer because usually if i mean i made them an offer so i wanted to work with them but it's never like

i don't know i don't i don't go investigate i don't send the investigators to their house to watch what they're doing and if it matches what they told me and if yeah i don't know now however i have been on the other side of that table as well and i did have a candidate once decline the offer and i didn't want to push but i did want to understand why and the candidate explained to me something about their personal situation and health insurance and vacation policy. And it turns out the candidate had made the decision on some wrong information. And when I clarified that, they changed their mind and decided to join the company. And that was like six or seven years ago. And I think they still work there. So it's totally reasonable to expect the employer to push back a

little, at least to figure out what's going on and make sure that you haven't made a decision based on wrong information. Yeah. Well, have we answered the question? I think so. I think being willing to put up with a little bit of awkward situations kind of comes with the territory.

And to be frank, interviewing itself is awkward and hard and socially challenging. So this is just kind of the icing on that cake. Plus, this is your chance to give payback. You know, as an interviewer, interviewee, I mean, normally you suffer,

you get put through these tests, stressful, nerve wracking. this is your chance to really take it out on them great also by declining their offer especially if it's a high one you're giving them a data point for their current employees and maybe they'll all get raises because of what you did yeah maybe you're a hero well probably you're a hero but i don't think they'll all get raises okay all right question answered for sure now 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 Vetteri, 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. Do you want to read our next question, Dave? Sure. This one comes from an anonymous listener

who says, I was recently hired as a staff engineer at a large tech company. After joining the company, I was told, I was the first outside staff engineer ever hired into the organization and the expectations for me were very high. After the first month, I noticed that co-workers were acting strange around me and less responsive to my ideas. During a one-on-one, one of my co-workers specifically stated that he and several others have been at the company for five years and were passed up for the promotion I got and were upset that an outsider was hired. Based on this, they would be watching me closely i've talked to management about the conversation and their feedback has been to try to quote make friends i am the most senior engineer in a group of 15

engineers who work across five different teams the situation is turning toxic where the engine the other engineers are trying to one-up me in an effort to obtain the promotion for the next cycle what do i do ask us and do what we tell you which will surely work oh man yes this is tough this is crazy this is always my fear getting hired somewhere is that someone else wanted the job i got hasn't happened yet to the best of my knowledge yeah i you know i've always worked for companies where the growth was so fast and so broad that there were plenty of opportunities it wasn't like we were all clamoring for one position and then someone yeah yeah i really get that feeling at the end they're all trying to one-up me in an effort to obtain the promotion

it's like it's like the prize at the end of a race or something like that you know like there is the promotion cup you must battle through the obstacles and whoever survives yes grasps it only one will be left alive yeah this is tough but you know brownies just do whatever they say like what do you mean i don't know just to become a yes person just say yes to everything they ask yes to everything they ask cringe a lot around them cringe status what do you mean not not i don't know you're trying to apologize for having a more senior role uh you're upset that an outsider was hired so this is interesting because it is a valid question to ask if if if you feel like there's an opening and you have the skill set to qualify for it and then that doesn't happen

like why was i not considered for this role or something like that maybe maybe because get it maybe you weren't considered for this promotion because you're toxic and you keep telling people we're watching you because they're all backstabbing jerks management's sitting here going we could promote one of these jerks or we could hire take our chances on an outside hire i think it's a fair question for the question asker to ask though why was i hired from the outside instead of filling this position from within yeah it's a fair question and then they tell you and then you just use that as a weapon to defeat these people who are backstabbing you maybe you could start telling stories about the engineers at previous companies and the fates they suffered because

they crossed you oh okay yeah or you could just become a really good like yarn teller you know just like a folksy spinner of tall tales that and kind of people want to sit around a campfire and listen to you but what are the stories about that doesn't matter as long as they're just i don't know mildly amusing you're saying everyone loves a good storyteller so they'll stop hating you yeah just just become a a character one thing i am unclear about is is it all of the engineers who are against the question asker or is it a select few i would imagine it's a select few if 15 engineers hate you um yeah i mean probably get out i don't know there's not if if the group of 15 people you work with are all toxic then i don't know if there's a great solution

to yeah reverse that yeah would you would you ever address it with people that you felt like uh had a problem with you well by address it i mean address the fact that like hey i got this promotion i or i i was hired in this role i understand it was a role you're interested in i could see that's causing some negative feelings like let's talk about that yeah i i think i would do that i think that's a very very healthy thing to do and not super aggressive either i think that's a great the wording you came up with was really good i like that yeah it sounds like they have one-on-ones with co-workers so there's already an opportunity to have like peer kind of discussions i think a hard thing about this would be people feeling like you didn't

deserve it and like you weren't capable of it and kind of like second guessing you and that would suck to not feel supported at all another dynamic that could be at play here is that this engineer is doing staff engineer leadership kind of things and these other engineers feel like that there's no room for them anymore because now someone is doing all the things that they would need to be doing in order to qualify for promotion into that role. And so you've kind of filled that up. So if you talk to them about that, and I'm sure you would be happy to delegate some of your activities to them so that they can have a chance to demonstrate those next level skills. I like that. I like that because it also helps work against this notion that these

promotions are um scarce resources that that are consumed upon use you know and then like no everybody else is stuck there's there is some competition i think we had a question a while ago about why are there fewer ceos than middle managers or whatever but i feel like if there are 15 people doing staff level work that's a problem that a company would be pretty happy to have sure and some of them would probably would get recognized if it was awesome work yeah if it's someone who's just bitter because they feel like they deserved it but they don't right i don't know if you're gonna i don't know if there's a solution there you know you're kind of the scapegoat for their career frustrations another way to address this which is a little bit more

systemic is to because because the underlying problem here is you have a i don't want to call it a jealousy problem but it's kind of in that same ballpark where you have a resentment among people at one level against people at the next level and one way to counter that is to say is to remind them that the people at the next level are the ones who give feedback on whether you're ready for promotion yeah you know you laugh but this works very well as a way to make sure that everyone works well together because the people you need to impress are the in this case the very very people that you are being toxic to. And if I'm the staff engineer in this situation, if there's folks who are actively creating a toxic environment or, you know, looking for me to mess

up or quote, watching me, you know, with a negative connotation, those are people I'm not recommending for promotion because the last thing I would want is to take that kind of behavior and give them more influence. Man, if only this was a question about like queuing systems or something. That's the easy staff engineer stuff okay i'm reading between the lines here but do you think there's an ageism thing going on here where the staff engineer is younger the listener says i am the most senior engineer in a group of 15 engineers and i we know that this listener is not the most senior at the company so it must mean that they're the most senior in terms of experience i don't think so i mean if the feeling is that the question asker does not deserve the role or

took the spot of somebody else i don't know that doesn't seem directly related to ageism you're saying if it was some someone much younger they would be happier that an outside hire had taken this role well so sometime okay here here's my here's my cynical view on this some of these folks are younger and they look at this more senior engineer more tenured more years of experience engineer coming in and they think well management had to give them that position because it's the only uh title and comp structure that aligns with their experience and now we all got the short shrift because we aren't that old and so we don't get that you know that that basically they gave away the position that we were vying for because of

circumstances that don't actually qualify the person just age yeah that's my cynical reading i mean i guess i don't know there could be many ways this could go bad i i feel like i don't know if that changes how you address the situation though like you need to i think you need to try and talk to folks about it and i think you need to try to win trust i mean if yeah if if you can demonstrate enough competency as a staff engineer that that provides a lot of value to the team i think they they might eventually accept that hey this is a good thing that this person came in because they solved these problems for us and helped us avoid this situation.

That's hard to do if everyone's trying to one-up you. That's a pretty adversarial environment. True. That's not a great place to do collaboration, but that's why you're the staff engineer. That's right. You weren't hired to solve the easy problems. Yeah.

Another thing you can do to earn the trust of this organization is to take on the crappy grunt work that no one else wants to do, but that is at that higher level, and then delegate the easier, not easier, to delegate the more exciting glamorous stuff to some of these these other people but be careful not to delegate it to the ones that are particularly toxic because the last thing you want is for them to get promoted yeah or to ruin it and blame it on you and as a staff engineer you are in a position to influence the culture of this company and it sounds like maybe the the idea of supporting

leadership is not inculcated into this company culture if these people don't have any problem saying things like, we're watching you. And what else did they say? We're upset that an outsider was hired. These are internally unsupportive behaviors. And if you can help management codify what a constructive, healthy culture is supposed to look like at this company, then management can now support you in reinforcing that and guiding their engineers to be better in that way. So that's the long game. I like that. But I mean, in reality, I'm going to assume you're a senior engineer. You're more senior than any of these folks. You have a responsibility to mentor and coach these people out of this bad behavior as best you can. I don't really get in the habit

of advising people to just bail out on jobs when they're this senior and they have leadership responsibilities like this. If you bailed out on every company as a leader, when you saw bad behavior then you would never work anywhere but what about our advice quit your job taking away our our crutch well yeah you should just quit yeah that makes sense if all the problems were solved then they wouldn't need you yeah as much as some engineers might not like this the more senior you get the more people problems you need to help solve i have felt that yep well i'm out of wisdom have we answered the question i think so good luck let us know how it goes sounds like a very difficult situation but i'm confident you can do it you show good taste by

listening to this show one of the qualities you will need to resolve this situation just don't do anything we say oh what can we do what can other people do that aren't us okay they want to have their own question answered. Go to softskills.audio on the worldwide internet web and click the ask a question button and you can fill out our form there. Thank you so much to everyone who does that. We really appreciate it.

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