Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 228: Unpaid team lead and banking hours

Episode Date: September 21, 2020

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Questions I’m a team lead right now, but I’m leaving the company. When I discussed with my manager, I recommended a team member to take over my position and suggested raising his salary. In the end, the manager asked that team member to take over as team lead, but refused to raise his salary or even give him the title. He said he needs to prove that he can take responsibility as a team lead. Then he will get the title and raise. But I feel they just want to procrastinate and save the money. What can I do to help my team member fight for the title and raise? Hi Dave and Jamison. You have a great show and I really enjoy listening. I am currently a software engineer at a small/medium sized tech company in the healthcare industry. I was recently asked to interview for a similar role at a pretty large hedge fund. I am wondering if there would be a big culture shift if I were to end up making that change. I am under the (possibly inaccurate) impression that for bankers something like an 80+ hour work week is common. I’m wondering if this impression is accurate, if it extends to the finance industry as a whole, and how much it extends to developers rather than bankers/traders if so. I also remember you guys mentioning in a previous episode that video game developers also typically work long hours. Are there other industries where this culture is typical?

it takes more than learning how to pronounce kubectl or kubectl or whatever to be a great engineer this is soft skills engineering episode 228 i'm your host dave smith i'm your host jamison dance soft skills engineering is a weekly advice podcast for software developers about the non-technical stuff do you think when people invent acronyms or hard to pronounce words do They always have, it's like, how much does the creator get to decide how you say it? And how much do the people decide? Like, the inventor of the graphical interchange format, didn't they say it's GIF? Yeah.

But like, who cares if you invented it? It's not, it's GIF. Obviously. And whoever the patron saint of kubectl, kubectl is, I don't know, we just need some consensus. if if history is our guide the inventor gets zero say in how to pronounce the thing that they created and like how to use it as well that's right and not only do they get zero say but when you create something that's our like has ambiguous pronunciation rules you deserve what you get i think i mentioned this before on the show but i heard an interview with the

inventor of the database frequently known as sequel light and i've heard this pronounced sq light sequel light sql light but for the first time after having used this thing for like 15 years i heard the inventor say the correct pronunciation and it's nothing i've ever heard anyone say you gotta say it now okay so it rhymes with like stalactite and it's sqlite sqlite that's what he said on this interview interesting yeah so he deserves what he got yeah that's why i use the vime text editor because it's there's only one way to pronounce it all right i want to thank our wonderful patrons thank you to these folks who are contributing at the level where we shout them out every single episode thank you to oladapo fadey karen sveinsen ragnar hardison

alexander microconfig.io nick travis sanders evgeny sladkowski dennis bogdanov braden canes steven armand lee john grant luke bayliss philip john basile the agile ventures charity sean and vinlock thank you to everybody who has contributed in the past if you want to join this illustrious group and join our wonderful slack team as well you can go to softskills.audio and click support us on patreon any contribution of any amount will get you an invite to the slack team which is great and friendly and uh intelligent and handsome even though i've never seen most of them in person i just know they are because they contribute they must be look have you seen the way they type handsome well we don't like to say this too loudly but we do offer a guarantee that if you

contribute you will become more handsome this guarantee is not legally binding cannot be exchange for i need like that speed up lawyer voice i know disclaimer everything i just said yeah so thank you this episode is also sponsored by veteri veteri is an online marketplace for job seekers to find great employers in the software development field and you will hear more about them later all right should i read our first question hit it this is from a listener named andrew who says i'm a team lead right now but i'm leaving the company when i discussed with my manager i recommended a team member to take over my position and suggested raising their salary. In the end, the manager asked that team member to take over as the team lead,

but refused to raise their salary or even give them the title. My manager said they need to prove that they can take the responsibility as the team lead. Then they will get the title and the raise. But I feel my manager just wants to procrastinate and save the money. What can I do to help my team member fight for the title and raise? I wonder if the manager gets to pocket the saved salary driving wages down profitable on paper you tell hr that they're getting a raise but then you siphon that money off into your own direct deposit it's perfect yeah i don't know a lot of engineering managers that have access to payroll directly it'd be hard to pull off at my company yeah but this is a startup wait is it yeah that's true anything it's probably all

the same person yeah hr probably is this manager yeah all it takes is one couple of keystrokes into this google spreadsheet and bada boom bada I just pick up the money the envelope money on the desk that's laid out which is how we pay our employees right slip a couple dollar bills out don't do that it's bad kudos to you though Andrew for trying to set up a succession plan yes The more responsibility you gather in an organization, the more important and valuable it is to think about that when you're leaving. And the harder it is to just kind of flip a desk and say, I quit, I'm out of here and just walk out. The other side of that coin is the more exciting it is that you get to watch your empire crumble as you walk away from it. Yeah, you just pulled the last Jango block out of the tower.

Yeah, it was you. Down it goes. Slow motion walk away from the explosion. Yep. Mm-hmm. So there's this conflict between you wanting to kind of get your replacement what you feel like they deserve and your manager saying, I don't want to do that. I want to not do that. What do you suggest? Well, let's just say that as a fallback plan, if you can't manage to convince your manager to give them the salary, since you're quitting your job, you're probably

getting a raise. And I think you should contribute a portion of your new salary to your old team ever until your manager closes that gap pay it forward that's right so that that's your fallback plan but yeah in the meantime i guess the real question is how hard should you fight for this yeah i guess it depends on whether you promised this person a raise in a title change when you when you told them you were going to recommend them for this position yeah exactly i hope you didn't i've seen this expectation pop up a few times where there is an expectation that increased responsibility will move in lockstep with title and salary and in my experience it's been pretty delayed most of the time where it's rare that i have seen personally someone gets a new

responsibility and then immediately they get a title change and a salary bump to reflect that yeah i feel like the most common thing i've seen is they kind of try it out for a while and do well and then it's sort of recognized formally by some kind of promotion the problem with that is sometimes they can just not do that and say like thanks for all the extra work you're doing yeah attaboy here's a hearty handshake and pat on the back here's a clear acrylic award three inches by three inches that you can put on your desk that says valuable employee team player yeah and really can you put a price on that oh no you can and if you were to put a price on it it would be more than the amount of money you would have gotten by a raise so you're coming

out ahead oh man yeah i've seen the same thing so pay pay and recognition are lagging indicators of what you're actually doing. And I actually think there's good reason for this. And to illustrate that reason, I will give you a thought exercise. Imagine that you are hiring external candidates to come in and be the team lead for your team. And you're looking at all these candidates and the one you decide to hire has zero team lead experience. Would you pay that person like a team lead? And would you even choose them to be your team lead? And I think most people would say, no, if I'm hiring someone as a lead, I'm expecting them to bring some lead experience with them. From the outside, you mean?

Yeah, exactly. An external hire. Yeah, that makes sense. So you're saying that the opportunity to do more work and have more responsibility is because they're an internal person and have some more trust where they might not get that chance if they're coming in from the outside. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the company's taking a risk on an unproven variable here by saying, we're going to let you lead this team. We don't know how well you'll do because you've never done it before. You don't have a track record. So we're not going to pay you like you're an experienced team lead. But there is another reason why this might be a good idea. And that is that what if it doesn't work out, but you went through all the formal fanfare, you gave them a pay raise, you gave them a title, you announced it to the whole company, you said they're the lead. and then three months later you're like this is not working out maybe the employee themselves

says i don't want to do this anymore you've you've closed the door on their escape hatch and now their only escape hatch is to quit or be willing to take a really embarrassing title change and pay cut hmm i hadn't thought about it that way before it's interesting because there's there's a lot of rhetoric out there about how management is not a promotion from being an individual contributor but then there's a lot of reality where it is like often managers get paid more than individual contributors in lots of places yes and this feels like one of those areas of conflict where you might have someone who says this is kind of like a servant leadership position it's not more or better work it's just different work so it's just kind of a a sidestep it's not

it's not a growth or promotion track thing but i feel like i slept more when i was an individual contributor i would like to be better compensated for losing sleep yeah so so you're saying that even if the person doesn't bring the skills necessary to do this job they are going to bear the burden of being a manager and they should be compensated for that i think you're pulling meaning out of nonsense i don't know that i had a point but i'll i'll believe that one i was just kind of rambling no i think i agree with you overall that there's this is sort of a trial period a thing that you could do is try to make that explicit and say okay let's put a timer on it or i guess i don't know you can just leave and go to your next job but what you could what you

could encourage this person to do is get some kind of time box on it where we say i'll be the team lead for three months and then we'll evaluate and either it's going well and it'll be formally recognized or will make a change and that avoids the situation where you're just forever kind of in this limbo of hoping you're doing well enough to finally merit it and it never quite happening i totally agree with that because guess what the company will do if you don't put a time limit on it nothing they're like wait you mean i would have to do something extra to change this situation where I'm getting more work out of you than I'm paying you for.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, if you have a good manager, they might recognize that and push for it and maybe succeed, but it also might not happen. Yeah. So I think the best thing you could advise

your team member, former team member to do is to make sure that the agreement has a time box on it and that that's in writing. And six months is not unusual for this. So my company also has the same process. If you're an engineer,

individual contributor, and you want to move into management, you will not be given the title or the pay change at first but you will be given the responsibilities and you'll have people reporting to you and you'll be doing all the manager things but your title is still software engineer and not software engineering manager and six months later if you've done a good job then you may get the title in the comp change if there is one officially recognized at that point and i like that i think it's good and i think employees know that if they want to transition from individual contributor to manager, they know that there's a process and a

proving period. And I think it lowers the, it doesn't like lower the standards, but I think it opens the door a little bit more for people who are on the fence about whether they want to go into management. Or maybe feel like they would like to, but aren't. Like you said, if they haven't done it before, they're not going to be able to get hired in as a manager necessarily. Yeah. Yeah. Actually, it's great because it creates growth opportunities in your own company. So people don't have to always come in from the outside into management positions which is nice yeah but also people don't have to risk their entire career at your company to move into management they can say i'm going to try this for six months and if i don't like it i'm going to go back and i actually

know several software engineers who tried it and then went back and have continued to have successful careers nonetheless well do that do the thing dave said i like it which is nothing no oh the time box thing yeah time box it yeah there you go six months all right have we answered the question? I think so. Good luck and enjoy your new job where you will not have to worry about any of this stuff anymore. Where there will be no problem. That's right. Only bliss. 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, wah, wah, 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 Vetteri 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 soft skills to sign up. That's V-E-T-T-E-R-Y.com slash soft skills. if you use that link you will help support the show and if you get a job through veteri they will send you 300 thank you so much to veteri for sponsoring the show okay do you want to read our next question dave yes this comes from an anonymous listener who says hi dave and jameson you have a great show and i really enjoy listening well thanks very much to you anonymous listener i am currently a software engineer at a small slash medium-sized tech company in the healthcare

industry i was recently asked to interview for a similar role at a pretty large hedge fund i am wondering if there would be a big culture shift if I were to end up making that change. I am under the possibly inaccurate impression that for bankers, something like an 80 plus hour work week is common. I'm wondering if this impression is accurate, if it extends to the finance industry as a whole, and how much it extends to developers rather than bankers and traders. If so, I also remember you guys mentioning in a previous episode that video game developers also typically work long hours. Are there other industries where this culture is typical? Well, banks close at five. so i'm assuming that means the banking industry closes at five as well

and they have a whole bunch of very inconvenient holidays yeah the stock market doesn't open till like 9 30 right yeah yeah that's pretty reasonable yeah and then it closes at like 4 30 yeah yeah 9 30 to 4 30 easy easy peasy that's a 35 hour work week plus you get to take lunches out just please pause trading it's lunchtime yeah shut all the computers down yeah i'll be at mcdonald's put the algorithms to sleep yeah so i mean i guess the question inherent in your comment is are banks anything like finance or in this case hedge funds i thought it was a statement that hedge funds are banks made from deep personal experience in hedge funds and finance yeah i i don't have any personal

experience in this my impression is the same that it everyone generally works more hours in finance and it sort of applies to developers yeah i did ask a friend if they work crazy trader hours as a developer and my friend said some people do but it's not that bad some startups are the same or worse and there's sort of like an expectation that you're around during market hours where at some dev jobs you can kind of like be the mysterious night owl that just programs from 2 a.m to 10 a.m or something you sort of have to be around during daytime hours okay but it doesn't sound as intense as the non-developer folks i'm sure that depends on which place you're at too but well that kind of take you kind of took the wind out of my sails there i was really hoping

we could riff on how terrible it is to work in the finance industry as a software engineer always still can i mean sometimes you give yourself paper cuts when you dry your tears with a hundred dollar bills oh man throw your back out carrying your giant bags of cash home oh man flat tire on my wheelbarrow again how am i gonna get home Yeah. I mean, so I've, I have literally known one person directly who worked in the finance industry at a hedge fund. And this person told me that it was insane hours and that it was soul crushing and that he's never seen as many grown men cry as he has in this company. So.

Was he a developer? He was, he was more of a science, kind of a scientist algorithms person. A quant. Yeah. It was, that's exactly what it was. It was a quant firm. I guess my mind went to hedge fund because i think quants are a flavor of hedge fund i mean hedge fund is a very broad brush right yes i know what all those words mean i am smiling and nodding my head at quant is like someone who does algorithmic trading things yeah i don't know more than that about it i don't know what a hedge fund is besides like where the bad guys work in

movies the movie bad guys are always at hedge funds i mean it my understanding of a hedge fund is anything that invests in something that's not really investing in something i'm i'm not nodding because that doesn't make any sense like you're basically a hedge fund is you're placing bets on things instead of investing in those things okay that's my that's my like general purpose understanding which means a lot of stuff there's a lot of weird stuff there's even like futures contracts on the weather where you can literally invest in whether or not the temperature will be above a certain level at a certain point in the future that's pretty rare those are those are small low volume hedge funds but or futures but they're in there anyway long story short

yeah i have heard this stereotype that engineers at these quants and hedge funds and various financial companies especially in like chicago and new york uh that these folks work just crazy hours so i don't know i don't know any engineers personally besides this person i just asked i know some just friends who aren't engineers who worked in finance and it was pretty brutal it's like 100 hour weeks yeah and misery and i don't know how they survived but yeah i would expect that to just if if even if there aren't any explicit expectations on developers i would just expect the presence of those people to kind of pull the average up yeah like if someone's there till midnight every night, then I don't know, maybe you're going to go home at 435 after

the market's closed instead of 430 right on the dot. Yeah. This listener says they're moving from healthcare into a hedge fund. And my impression of the healthcare industry is that generally it's pretty relaxed. However, even though it's slow moving and relaxed, it's intensely regulated and very hard to get things done and all kinds of check boxes to check whenever you want to do something. So my impression of hedge funds is that even though it's in finance, which itself is a pretty regulated industry, the hedge fund industry itself is a little bit more wild west. So I would say that's going to be a pretty big culture shift for you. So moving from super heavily regulated healthcare to

moderately heavily regulated finance will be the wild west to you. Yes, exactly. It's not exactly a video chat startup, but you know. Are there industries where this culture is typical? That's a good question. E-commerce? I work in e-commerce. There are some long hours around important e-commerce times. Like Black Friday, Cyber Monday?

Yeah, like now. The entire fourth quarter of the year? Yeah, that can get pretty intense sometimes. Yeah. I would say maybe kind of extrapolating from that, places with real-world, real-life external timelines. might might encounter more long hours yeah i think that's sort of where video games come in yeah crunch is a thing there but also there are like marketing deadlines and i feel like there

are a lot of a lot of real world deadlines in video games i suspect the entertainment industry might also be this way like if you're a software engineer at pixar that's kind of speculation though what do you think the chillest industry is oh i already know that for sure what is it government contracting better yet direct government employee okay the united states federal government just pure gravy there's a lot of them though a lot of gravies a lot of government employees oh yeah quite a few do you think that's a cultural thing or like a regulation thing or maybe they don't have enough like cool startup guys with ponytails to say what if we just break all the rules yeah they certainly don't have those i'll tell you that

i don't know i i think there are two factors at play there the first one is that there's not a very cut throat like you'll be fired if you don't perform culture there uh and the second and the second one is these jobs tend to be a little bit lower paying and so i think people who take those jobs are deliberately often taking them so that they can not work these breakneck 80 plus hours a week they're attracted to the stability and balance and there's a little more long-term thinking that goes on, I think, in some of these jobs. So I've had a little bit of direct exposure to this over 10 years ago when I was working in the industry. And, you know, people there are thinking in terms of, you know, 20 to 30 year careers where they can get their nice government

retirement. And they're not thinking so much about what they can launch this quarter or the amazing impact they're going to make this week with their contribution. You know, I mean, they are thinking those things, not to say, and I met a lot of very skilled, amazing engineers in that industry, not to disparage them at all but like i said long-term thinking is a little more prevalent there you know when i'm when i'm at a startup we're all busted our butts because in three months when the money runs out we don't know what we're gonna do so we better make it work now interesting well have we answered the question i think so because we don't know anything about this the answer is maybe some people do and some people don't yeah which is kind of like normal

life the real answer is you should investigate that deeply at the company that you're interviewing dealing with because it could vary from company to company too there are game studios that part of their brand is that we do not do crunch and there are game studios where part of the brand is they do do crunch yes exactly and and i'll tell you you know if you're walking into a company that's going to require you to work 80 hours a week compared to a company that only required 40 it really behooves you to have that conversation early because you're about to take a massive pay cut potentially and i'll tell you a story about that which was i was just a few years out of college and I was making $60,000 a year, which felt really great at the time. And I got an

opportunity to join a company and they offered me $100,000, but yeah, it was, it was a huge raise at the time, both percentage and absolute. And they said to me, however, you need to be aware that the team has agreed to work 70 hours a week until we launch our product. And we all work every weekend and so yeah exactly so i was like okay let me just do a little math here you know kind of chunk and chunk and chunk on the calculator and then i was like oh that's not a that's not actually a raise at all and it turns out my current job i was being paid by the hour and if i wanted to make a hundred thousand dollars a year i could by just working that many hours already at my current job and i had already chosen not to so i used that prior decision that i had made as

a way to say you know i'm not going to work at this company yeah so yeah that sounds kind of miserable if if part of your goal for work is to make money so that you can have an enjoyable life and then your whole life is at work doesn't sound great yeah and in hindsight i i sort of made the right choice but sort of not the the company did very well and ended up selling to another company and made a ton of money but like almost the entire original engineering team had been turned over before that happened so none of them really cashed out yeah they all burnt out yeah exactly or were fired that founder went on to do many more great things too for himself tale as old as time so i don't regret that decision i have many other regrets but not that one well have we

answered the question yes it's a definite we don't know okay our job is done what can people do if they want their own definite answers go to soft skills.audio and fill out our form you can give us as much information as you want or as little as you want to identify yourself there's a little button called ask a question that's the same place where you can go to support us on patreon and join our slack community click the support on patreon button we'd love to see you there all right we'll catch you next week