Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 230: Not seeking promotion and taking code

Episode Date: October 5, 2020

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Questions Taylor asks, Is it frowned upon to not want to be promoted and get more responsibility? I want to keep a good work-life balance but feel that saying so will have my manager think less of me. Hi Dave and Jamison, love your show! The time has come to quit my job and I am wondering if I should keep a copy of the scripts I wrote for the project?

it takes more than cursing your flaky vpn from your makeshift home office to be a great oh crap it went out again oh it's back to be a great engineer this is soft skills engineering episode 230 i'm your host dave smith i'm your host jameson dance soft skills engineering is a weekly advice podcast about the softer side of software development all the non-tech stuff that was a pretty speedy vpn blip if it didn't drop any audio no distortion at all i had a backup recording oh okay with your backup vpn yeah right so i've worked from home since before the bad times right and it's nice one silver lining is that the vpn is now suddenly the cto's problem too when it goes right it's not just suddenly got

way better amazing weird yeah i'm sure that was a coincidence yeah surely we hadn't been complaining about it for years i would like to thank our patrons thank you so much to the folks who are contributing at the level where we shout them out every single week thank you to oladapo faday karen sveinsen ragnar hardison alexander microconfig.io nick travis sanders evgeny Sladkowski, Dennis Bogdanov, Brayden Cain, Stephen Armand-Lee, John Grant, Luke Bayless, Philip John Basile, the Agile Ventures Charity, Sean, and Vinlok.

Thank you so much to those folks. You help make the show possible. You help pay for bandwidth costs, hosting costs, food costs to keep us alive. The podcast snacks. Podcast snacks, yeah. Our startup water

extensively stocked. No, yeah, thank you so much. We really appreciate the support everybody who has donated or contributed it's not a donation because we're not a 50 whatever non-profit whatever that is obviously we're not one because we don't even know what that's called i swear we're legit we're one of those non-profit thingies we're a non-profit cult yeah our paperwork is the bright cheery smiles that we wear every day how can you mistrust that. Your donations are tax deducible. If you support the show by going to softskills.audio and clicking support us on Patreon, then you'll get an invite to our Slack team,

which is great and friendly. And they all smell nice. I haven't smelled any of them, but I just know that they do. Like you've never smelled bad. Like you've never smelled anything bad when you're on slack yeah i just i think it it's one of the unspoken reward tiers in patreon it's like you just smell good yeah i would like to thank a special listener named hector who sent us a gift in the mail from sweden a wonderful little pair of butter knives that are apparently every house in sweden has these little butter knives it's so good they are so cool i just wanted to say thank you hector for sending those and if you'd like to send us a weird little item or not weird i mean i'm not saying the butter knives are weird they're awesome but i mean in the strict

definition they are very unusual i've never seen a butter knife like this it's very interesting yeah i'm gonna buck the trend and try and use it to cut steak yeah that would be against the culture so do so at your own risk yeah just want to say thank you for sending those and if you'd like to send us some weird little item and have us talk about it on the show we will happily accept that just send us a dm on twitter or join our slack community and you can send us a message there and we'll give you a mailing address yeah thank you these are rad all right i will read our first question this is from a listener named taylor who asks is it frowned upon to not want to be promoted and get more responsibility i want to keep a good work-life balance but feel that

saying so will have my manager think less of me hmm have you ever had someone say we don't have a good work-life balance i'm just thinking about that phrase and everybody says their work-life balance is good but then they slip in little hints to tell you it's bad instead of saying it is not good like yeah work-life balance is fantastic we're really intense about shipping like yeah yeah that means no right bad yeah we work hard but we play hard yeah okay that means that you work long hours and then have a second unpaid job where you have to hang out at the bar with your co-workers yeah even later i you know i've had the opposite where i've asked someone if they have a good work-life balance and they've just said no actually okay no here's what i said

i said what is what are some of your favorite things about working here in a job interview and the person interviewing me says that they really like how little pressure there is to deliver okay that was like the truest of true work-life balance question answers we don't really have to do any work ever it's great and i'm like check the work-life balance checkbox like i'll just fill that bubble all the way in yeah but i think there is something here where generally as you get promoted the expectation is you are doing more and often that looks like or is correlated with putting in more hours there's often higher demands and it's not necessarily that someone says you have to work more hours it's just like you have this important thing that

more people depend on that has to get done and right turns out that takes more time right i think that i think time is actually a derivative effect uh generally i think companies don't care how much time you spend yeah as you move up this promotion ladder it's just hard to spend less time Right. Yeah. So my answer to this question is, you know, in other words, can you tell your manager, I don't want to be promoted because I value having more free time without it having some negative effect on you or make your manager think less of you? I think in some cases your manager will envy you for taking a stand. Wish I had done that before I became a manager. Yeah, you are brave in a way that they could not be. Yes, exactly.

I actually heard, okay, this might be a rumor, but I knew someone who, according to legend in my company, had actually turned down a raise. And he said, I make enough money and I don't want the attached increase in responsibility that comes with raises implicitly. So no, thank you. Huh.

i can't tell if that person is very smart or very dumb well i can tell you i worked with this person and even though it's a legend that what they said i never heard it from their own mouth but i can tell you they were very smart yeah it seems like the kind of thing you would do if you really had life priorities figured out yeah and strongly defined and you also didn't care at all what other people thought about you yeah and that that perfectly defines this person huh interesting he's doing fine by the way is it frowned upon not want to be promoted and get i i feel like this might depend on the context and the culture like there might be some very competitive kind of ladder climbing cutthroat places where

that's just the way it is and you're supposed to want to grow your empire and if you're not doing that you're you're staying still you're falling behind and there might be some places where the work life balance is really great and and yeah more responsibility isn't really a thing that people are pumped about that famous netflix culture deck that who knows if it's real but it like created an idea of what culture at netflix is like in a lot of people's heads and that has a slide i think it has a slide about up or out where people you're trying to like advance them and if they stop advancing then they you just say here's your generous severance package i should confirm well the generous severance is definitely a quote from that alleged deck in fact i've heard that

from a netflix employee they've said average performance yeah generous severance a general severance yep we're just gonna generally just they're they'll sever something you've been generally severed so up or out is in there it is in some like clickbaity articles that are quoting Netflix culture. Sounds great. I did not find it in the slides, but I feel like it's there. You know, like really in this day and age, can you get a better source than that? I submit that you cannot. Filtered through like 15 underpaid part-time writers who are just trying to get up there in the SEO rankings. And on the right-hand side of the page, it's just like absolutely littered in advertisements. Or it would be if I did not have copious amounts of ad blockers.

Right, like three layers of ad blocking. Yeah. Yeah, so- So probably not there. Not Netflix. Yeah. Okay. But good news, you probably don't work there, because most people don't.

Right. I built a classifier that identifies whether or not you work at Netflix. You can go to a website and just click on it, and it just always says you don't work at Netflix, and it's right 99.9% of the time. It's very high precision. Whoa, there must be some intense machine learning behind that. Oh yeah, big time. Level of-

You should see my F1 scores. They're off the charts. I know exactly what that means, and I get it, and it's funny. Ha, ha, ha. F1. I don't know what that means. That's fine. I've seen this concept called like a terminal level or a, well, no, that's the only thing

I've heard it called, where below a certain promotion level, there's this idea that a competent person who has worked here long enough should get to this level, and if they don't then they probably need to be let go but once they get there then it's sort of like opt-in to go above that okay so it might be like i don't know senior engineer or or regular software engineer or something but like if you're if you're below that level and you can't get promoted to that level then they might say well you'll never make it and then give you the the firm handshake in the generous seven severance package but i would expect there to be less pressure to get promoted at places with that idea so i i lost you just a little bit there but i i understand the

idea of the top end where they you are no longer expected to grow beyond a certain level but are you suggesting that at some places there's also like a minimum achievement level yeah i think it's like the it's sort of like a it's like up or out with a cutoff like get above this level or you're out got it and then and then once you get above this level it is no longer up or out so that the top level or sorry that level is called terminal level yes and that is it's not like there's a spectrum there you're saying that like that terminal level is the bar you have to clear before you can stop growing yeah it's like a it's like a career ladder level it'll it'll have like a title like you should get to this title in this amount of time if you kind of are are going to be

successful here i do not understand why i mean i understand technically why they call it a terminal level it's because that's the last level that you have to get to but boy i really hate that name it's like achieve this level or you will be terminated yeah i mean that's kind of what it is though so yeah i guess it it needs some corporate double speak wrapped around it yeah exactly it's an achievement motivator right yeah it's the incentivization level that is what they call the person who stands behind you and cracks the whip the achievement motivator yes so i guess there might be some very explicit signals but what if there aren't what if you don't work at netflix like you don't right 99.9 percent precision and there's no idea of a terminal level or an

expectation of a career ladder that you have to climb what if i think the hard case here is where you have a boss or someone higher up in the org who is uh believes you are capable and wants you to do more yes and you refuse it's one thing to say like i just won't go for that thing that i have to explicitly chase after but it's another thing when someone is saying well you take on this extra stuff because i think you can do it and we need help you're like nope good luck i kind of like not having any pressure to deliver yeah i like my work-life balance just the way it is yeah in fact i'd like to go the other direction i'd like to have more life and less work in my balance yeah i mean that is definitely frowned

upon so i mean i think in theory even at companies that claim to have a terminal level i think in theory you can go to that point and stop growing but in practice when you have someone who sees potential in you and you like a leader who sees potential in you and you refuse to engage with that i do think that you're that leader will think less of you if not like even at a very semantic level very pedantically they will think that you're going to achieve less in terms of the promotion ladder at your company so i mean that's there's that so you kind of have to be willing to live with that but but also i mean i think that i don't have any evidence of this but i think that unconsciously people will start trusting you less and giving you less interesting stuff to work on

and really i maybe not i don't know maybe maybe this is just my i'm just speculating here um but i mean imagine if you have two people that are both available to do a project and one of them is like i just really want to grow i want to i want all the challenges uh i want to be you know i want to climb that ladder whatever and the other one's like no no just hold me steady here and your manager has to decide between the two of them who do you think they're going to give the interesting project to yeah so i've said no to promotions before because i didn't want to manage the team that had someone on it that i didn't want to manage oh wow and then i said yes later so it didn't ruin me forever but uh i do feel like i was a little clueless going

into that i didn't really consider the ramifications or the potential opportunities or anything i was just like uh shying away from pain i guess yeah i know a few people who have been gently guided towards a management path and resisted enough to say like no i want to be technical i don't want to do this kind of work that's not the direction i want to grow in they didn't say that i don't want more responsibility though they just said like i don't want to do this kind of thing i want to grow in other ways i think and i think that's a very different scenario it's fine yeah yeah i think that reflected well on them and and worked out well for them like that's like saying i want you to do a different job at the same level yeah exactly and they're like no i like this i want to

do this job yeah i don't think i've seen someone just like say no flat out to yeah a promotion or or like two important tasks that would be kind of moving you closer towards promotion right Yeah, I've only seen it the one time. And it was awesome, I thought. But also, I think the risk here is overstated. I think a lot of times people are like, well, if I take that promotion and get more responsibility, suddenly I'm never going to see my personal life ever again. And I think that's actually usually more fear than reality.

Yeah. I found in my experience, the thing that controls my work-life balance the most is me and my willingness to say no to things or yes to things and i can often have more life and less work than i choose to have yeah but i mean yeah that depends on situations and maybe so okay maybe you need to show that you're very high achieving in life so that you're still trusted and respected you just get really good at hacky sack just a hacky sack wizard to show that like you're really driven in general it's just that uh you work to hacky you work to hack okay you work to sack okay not sack to work you know got it i know exactly the person you're talking about

by the way i think they live in portland but go on they wear birkenstocks a machine learning algorithm that can detect with 99.9 precision that they live in portland i mean it's more like 70 percent but yeah yeah yeah and then that way you'll still show that you're high achieving trustworthy just like you know their heart belongs to the hack no not the not the other way around yeah i mean wait doesn't belong yeah there's just not enough room in this heart for your work yeah i'd love to stay late but i got a competition a a session right i mean well it's a competition they talk about it like like skateboarders or something right i gotta go sack i don't know i mean it is a competition it's just

me hacky sacking against my job yeah i don't really know the question no i don't really know where you're going with the hacky sec thing sorry oh well i'm there already so if it didn't if you didn't there's there's nothing else left there's no other reveal okay it didn't make sense there's no more sense to make i was on the edge of my seat just waiting for it well is this some kind of new performance episode i'll finish it okay it's like i'll i'll i'll just leave the chord unresolved forever and then it drives you nuts i like that that's going to be good listener retention metrics yeah yep we need more long-term story arcs in our show yeah 45 episodes ago yeah i'm not smart enough to do that yeah

do you want to read our next question sure okay this one comes from an anonymous listener who says hi david jameson love your show the time has come to quit my job and i am wondering if i should keep a copy of the scripts i wrote for the project huh gonna have to put on our space lawyer hats for this one yeah well uh i dabbled in earth law by googling can you take code to your next job okay and finding one page that says no oh so on earth i it i'm pretty sure that your company owns the code you write that's in a thing that i probably signed when i took my job yeah without reading closely enough uh some companies employment agreements go further than that and they own any code that you write while you're employed there whether it's during work hours on

work right uh hardware or not and and like the thing that you produce for them one of the artifacts that you produce is is code like they own it so i think if you take it you're basically taking stuff from them that belongs to them not you and by stuff you mean earthly intellectual property yeah there was a case wasn't there that guy who worked at goldman sachs and took some code to another job and got the pants suit off of him i haven't heard about that one let's see if i can do some quick investigative reporting by typing goldman sachs programmer took code into google sergey alanikov oh he was found guilty yeah so he stole some software from goldman sachs uh-huh or that's what the court ruled even though he wrote it okay so i think that means no

you can't right yeah i think so but on the other hand i did work with the guy who brought his own like fully formed deploy system composed of a series of inscrutable bash scripts okay job to job okay and i wish that he had been sued by his previous job so that he could not have brought it oh man you should go like you should go interview at his previous company get a job and then launch a lawsuit against him rat him out and then move back to your current company yeah well okay so what about so you're saying scripts uh in this i'm assuming scripts means like code i'm assuming they're writing well yeah and i think that's i think it's worth answering that question which is okay can i take a bunch of code we've seen

the example the goldman sachs example also a former google waymo employee went to uber and brought a bunch of code and got the pantsuit off of him as well uh that was um that was just last year actually i think in both these cases though like they explicitly took the code to build stuff out of it and use it in other contexts for a competitor i'm yeah yeah so like the reality on the ground is that these people are going to get caught and sued and if you take a few scripts from one company to the next you're probably not going to get caught but as space lawyers who have jurisdiction in this entire solar system we would suggest against that yeah now could you take a photograph of your code on a polaroid for example and take that with you you probably have to ask

regular earth lawyer i feel like no i mean i don't know i don't i'm not gonna speculate but it sounds like no it does feel like the legal no is maybe different from the in practice no like if if you are harming their intellectual property or they believe you are then they will come after you and if you're not and if you're taking it to like see how you wrote that one for loop that one time yeah uh you might get caught and then they can probably get you in big trouble but if you don't get caught it seems unlikely that some drone will fly into your house and like scan your laptop five years from now for code yeah but if you don't get caught you're it's fine feels like a bad stance to take oh yeah for sure i feel weird about that i agree i i i would not do

this but you know this is this is why employees always push for allowing their stuff to be open sourced yeah and i think if you brought code that you owned already to a job you could take that with you i've seen provisions for that in employment contracts where you list like these are my inventions already that i will use for this company these are inventions that i have already stolen from another company and brought to a new company which approved of them and now you can have them without stealing yeah and then just write like double jeopardy in big red letters at the bottom nice try and convince them that that somehow applies right yeah sometimes like contractors will do something like that too where sometimes contractors do work for hire where you

pay them money and the thing that they produce is code for you but sometimes you're paying them to like solve problems and they can use their own suite of tools to do that yeah i'll tell you ways in which i have taken code as long as everybody listening promises not to sue me here okay put me in jail okay like i'll take notes about i don't know here's this random like oxed sort pipe monstrosity i pieced together to get like the middle 14 lines of this one log file okay i'll like keep stuff like that around in in notes okay so that i can remember it i don't take like whole systems but just like little snippets of things i use to manipulate computer stuff i write that down somewhere usually so i'm gonna go with the same approach i proposed earlier the

open source approach and say this is why you should blog about these things ah put it in a blog and suddenly it's you know i mean that's probably also a problem but i mean if you're If you get your company to approve the blog... No, no, officer. It's right here on WordPress. Yeah. Oh, my mistake. Carry on.

The medium immunity clause for anything written on medium.com is... Public domain. Protected, yeah. Yeah, exactly. So, I mean, however, having said that, if all you're interested in is little snippets and collections of tools and one-liners

and stuff like that, then I actually think it might make sense to blog those with the permission of your company if you want to be completely above board. your company might have like a blog approval process and you can put them in there and if they approve it then there you go yeah there might be something to like if you i believe that you should be learning durable skills at your job as in addition to kind of job specific things and there might be some kind of patterns that you can learn or write down that aren't the individual

lines of code but like here's how i generally solve this kind of problem or something that feels pretty useful and pretty unobjectionable to me. Yeah. Also, I got to tell you, I've, Jameson, you and I have both been through quite a few jobs in our day. I think I'm up to five or six, which I think some people would be like, oh, five or six, child's play. But still, five or six jobs. I mean, I've invested significant time into many of these companies. And I've often thought, oh, I'm so scared of leaving all this code behind without being able to at least reference it. But the reality is, once you start the new job, I've never really, once I'm on the new job, I've never thought back or thought, oh, I really want to get my hands on that code.

It just never comes up for me. And I take that as a sign that software engineering tends to be more about conceptual learning so that you can produce new code. And if you forgot the exact syntax, you know, you've learned how to learn that or how to find it. Yeah. And that's been true to my experience. I just have never gone back and been like, oh man, if only I had that one liner that

I, that would save this whole project. No, you learn how to reconstruct that stuff. Yeah. Yeah. If only that Python list comprehension was at the tip of my fingers. Yeah. I guess one exception I could see to that, if it's like really performance sensitive, like weird, fancy data structures tuned for some specific architecture. But then if that's the case, you're probably getting into like Goldman Sachs, Google, Waymo territory of like taking

valuable intellectual property that is the secret sauce. yep i wouldn't mess with that wouldn't touch that with a 10-foot pole yeah if you can just make it again at the next place though yeah exactly i mean you're you can take all your memories everything you've learned all your skills you've developed to your next company and i just would not recommend taking copied and pasted versions of anything i want to take like jameson's greatest hits of comments that he wrote that made him laugh okay that's what i would want not for using later but just so i could look back on them and say wasn't i clever when i made this giant like four page long ascii art thing to tell people don't touch this line or something that's all fun

and games until your company comes after you and says that was our competitive advantage yeah at least i'll have done this episode with you to have fond memories to look back on before you go to jail yep hopefully they'll let you listen to this episode in jail mr warden can i please just have an ipod or something so should i keep a copy uh no you should remember stuff you learned and how to solve problems but you shouldn't copy all the code over that's right and for anything you don't want to remember you can blog it or open source it

both with your company's permission that's your back door yeah all right have we answered the question i think so good luck and uh if you take our advice and end up in jail it was jameson's fault there was like a subliminal disclaimer at the beginning of the show that everything that bad that happens because of listening to it is my fault that's right and now i've just made it explicit because i don't want to mess around with any ambiguity here all right jamis and where can people go if they want to take our advice and stay out of jail they can go to softskills.audio click ask us a question to ask a question find places to subscribe there or click support us on patreon to support the show we will catch you next week