Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 234: Job hopping and untenable counter-offers

Episode Date: November 2, 2020

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Questions How can I stay at a job for a long period of time? I’m on my second job after graduating and as I’m approaching my first year at this company I’m already thinking of moving somewhere else. A similar thing happened at my previous job where I stayed for around 15 months. I feel that by switching companies so often I’m hurting both my personal development and future employability. At the same time the easiest way to get a better role or a raise is to switch jobs. What should I do? Have I just not been lucky enough to find a company that offers better career progression which would give me a reason to stay? Is the problem with me? How did you deal with this in your own careers? How about when you’re making hiring decisions - are you wary of hiring frequent job switchers? Great podcast btw, keep it up Is firing the new counteroffer? A junior dev on my team confronted us with an offer he got from another company. He is already paid at the limit of his range, his upcoming performance review is “not great, not horrible”. The amount offered to him would put him in our lower senior range and there is no justification for that at all. He made it clear he is in a complicated financial situation (got his bank account emptied and credits maxed out). I don’t see a path to him getting close to the salary he got offered in the next year or even longer. We are not a company that fires people if they do not grow at a certain rate, but given his situation he is probably not going to stick around for long. He also made it clear he would like to stay if not for the salary, but now I am thinking it might be the best for the company to fire him, maybe even for him. Is that cruel, which other options am I missing? Given your eternal backlog of questions your advice is probably coming late, I would still be interested in it. Thanks for all the other advice, it’s both entertaining and very helpful. Best from Colombia

it takes more than updating your linux kernel and breaking production in the process to be a great engineer this is soft skills engineering episode 234 i'm your host dave smith i'm your host jamison dance soft skills engineering is a weekly advice podcast for software developers of all operating system preferences i don't understand that thing about updating the kernel and breaking production because it should only be better if you make the number go up right that's true yeah maybe they accidentally made the number go down oh yeah yeah that would make sense it was a down date you want me to thank our wonderful patrons yeah let's do it okay thank you to oladapo fadye karen swainson alexander microconfig.io nick hathaway travis sanders dennis bogdanov braden

canes steven arman lee john grant vinlock the agile ventures charities nick cantar and philip john basile they're the super ultra mega platinum level supporters who get shouted out every single episode yes and thank you to everyone else who has also supported the show you can do that by going to soft skills.audio and click support us on patreon and any dollar amount once it is billed by patreon we'll get you access to our slack thing slack unit slack slack battalion slack what should the collective name for so soft skillets right i think was suggested as the collective collective but that's not a collective noun it's just like the plural form right so you're talking like a gaggle of geese or whatever yeah yeah like a murder of soft skillets or

something i don't know yeah no idea i'll look at that i think about every three months i look at that wikipedia page of all the list of collective noun words it's amazing it's good i'm just like who approves these things? There's a detailed and complicated submission process with a committee. Gosh. It's got to go through RFCs. Yeah. Should we get into our first question? Yeah, let's do it. This one comes from a listener named Aaron who says, how can I stay at a job for a long period of time? I'm on my second job after graduating. And as I'm approaching my first year at this company, I'm already thinking of moving somewhere else. A similar thing happened at my previous job where I stayed for around 15

months. I feel that by switching companies so often, I'm hurting both my personal development and my future employability. At the same time, the easiest way to get a better role or a raise is to switch jobs. What should I do? Have I just not been lucky enough to find a company that offers better career progression, which would give me a reason to stay? Is the problem with me? How do you deal with this in your own careers? How about when you're making hiring decisions are you wary of hiring frequent job switchers great podcast by the way keep it up great question right back at you yeah how can i stay at a job for a long period of time this has a trivial and dumb answer which is just don't quit yeah like do nothing don't quit and don't

get fired right and you did it and you start start a timer though and i guess you have to define long time first and then don't quit until that timer reads zero yeah have you have you ever heard of the monty hall problem i have and every time i hear of it i have to like re-remember what it is and then still not understand it okay so i it's i don't either hit me i also like you had just totally broken intuition for this problem but i'll just briefly recap the problem because i think it applies here in a kind of a funny way uh and i'll leave it up to the listener to figure out why it works but before i tell you i just want you to know that i had to write a python simulation of the monty hall problem before i would actually believe believe that it was right

okay the problem goes like this you're on a game show hosted by a guy named monty hall you're presented with three doors behind one door is a valuable prize behind the other two doors are a goat if i recall and the goat is considered not valuable in this scenario which that's a little goatist that seems i mean yeah that seems unrealistic how much does a goat cost i mean that Yeah, they're not free. I think it was like a new car was behind the third door. Anyway, so you don't know which one is where, but you make a choice. You make a guess and you say, I don't know, door number two, for example.

Well, once you pick a door, the host will reveal one of the remaining goats. So you either pick the goat or you pick the car and the host will reveal the other goat. And so now you know that one of these doors has a goat. And the question is, should you change your answer? and the answer to that question is yes you should change your answer to the other now not yet opened door and statistically you have a better chance and i won't explain why that is but i think that applies to picking jobs right out of college so you pick a job there are hundreds of companies out there that you could work for you pick one and you find out that it's crap

it's a goat so now there's only 99 left so your odds of picking a good one have improved it's instead of one in 100 it's one in 99 the the monty hall problem is you pick one and you don't know if it's good or not you just know one of the other ones is yeah it's a slight variation on the monty hall problem okay the point is you now have more information so whereas originally you had a one out of n chance of picking like let's say there's only one good company which is also kind of silly but whatever now you have a one over n minus one which is a better ratio better odds so you're saying you're better off switching because if you know the company you work at isn't great you've like eliminated that not great company from the pool

that you're going to pick from yes and and never mind the fact that a hundred more companies have been founded in the time since you started your first company yeah just ignore that and that great is like so relative for who you are and what role you have and what team you're on and who your manager is and yeah ignore all of that i've got some pressing information which is that a goat can cost anywhere from twenty dollars to a thousand dollars that's pretty good so you could be doing okay even if you do get the goat or if you just really want maybe you want a goat you're like car why would i want a car when i could have this companion yeah a goat companion that also mows your lawn this car will not let me snuggle it i don't know if goats are snugglers either

though i don't know much about them okay so back on track i think the pattern that this question asker is describing is relatively common where earlier in their careers folks will have shorter stints at jobs yeah it seems less common to do that deliberately as you get more experience some people just do it because i mean if your company goes under or you get laid off or something then you don't really have a choice to stay longer at that job but the pattern i've i've seen the i don't know that seems most common feels like this where you start off you work somewhere for a while you don't know anything you kind of get your feet under you and then you go somewhere else and kind of uh eventually you settle down for a longer period of time yeah i don't know

why this is i have some theories but it's because of the money hole problem obviously well yeah that's true you already explained it i think it's partially because it's really hard to shake the junior developer label once you have it like at us at the company yeah like if you come in knowing nothing and you you stay there for 18 months or 15 months or whatever you know way more than nothing but um you have spent a lot of time there knowing nothing and asking questions and learning stuff and i think it's hard for people to like treat that person like they would if they had hired them with that current level of experience so you're saying that people's impression of you changes more slowly than your actual skills i think so i think when you're when

you're first starting out it can yeah i agree i never changed my impression about anyone so yeah yeah so by definition first impressions only impressions more like yeah so there's some incentives there the the pay thing is real too oh yeah it's very unlikely that you'll get as much of a raise at the beginning of your career i think that flattens out towards towards the as your career goes on though yeah i don't know how would you know that's true i haven't i don't feel like i've hit like the the the place where i will stay the rest of my career yet so maybe it doesn't i don't know but i mean the place i stay not the job that i will stay at but like the like compensation level like yeah i will be at this level and if i switch

jobs it'll be roughly around the same level it won't be like a giant fatty raise it hasn't happened yet i definitely have noticed in my career that the percent increase in pay when i leave one company and go to another has gone down over the years yeah and actually the older i get or i should say the more experienced i get the more complicated the job situation becomes and it's not even always an apples to apples like you might decide to go work for equity more yeah or like benefits right vacation so it's like it's not always a clear one number to the next yeah that said if you're worried about hurting your personal development future employability we've talked about this before there's lots of cost of switching but one of the costs of switching

is you don't ever see the long-term consequences of your decisions and kind of live through them and and work them out if you only stay somewhere 12 months and then just bail you don't get to see like the arc of a project after four years you know and kind of how decisions you made earlier bite you or help you or right or kind of how long-term strategy can affect the things that you will do day to day and stuff like that like there is there's kind of like a a depth related to that specific company and problem you're working on that you will miss out on if you don't stick around for that so i guess you have to ask yourself the question is that knowledge worth the ten thousand dollar a year raise you got by switching yeah a better way to put that

question if you had the choice and someone said would you pay me ten thousand dollars a year for the next four years and i will teach you all of this knowledge right now would you do that yeah what does the monty hall problem say it says i say yes first and then later i say no right after understand it right yeah yeah so so i guess the the the question isn't like should i switch jobs or not it's more like it seems like the question behind this is like how do you find success without switching jobs i guess and i think that takes a very special company yeah that's true well yeah the answer could be you cannot at this company right the people i have seen that have stayed in jobs a long time or not not jobs that's the wrong way to say it that have worked at the

same company for a long time have changed things up quite a bit either the company has grown a lot and so there's room to move around or the company's just large and there's room to move around but i haven't seen anybody that's just like on year 19 of being on this same project in this same role i'm sure it exists but that doesn't seem very common to me yeah very very uncommon there's a person i work with who's been at the company for 25 years i think and and they've done wildly different things over that time period but they're they're kind of like open to trying new things within the same company because they like some things about working for that company and you happen to work at a pretty big i'd say moderately big company it is the biggest company okay by

number of employees that is true so one could say there's a few options in there there are a few options yeah there's also there's also like lateral movement versus upward movement and um some people are really pumped about kind of climbing the ladder and advancing their title and stuff and you have some control over that but some it's very context dependent i've found that you have a lot more control over lateral movement where you're saying i don't want a promotion i just want to work on this other team or on this other problem or something more control what do you mean like you can say i want a promotion and then the answer is often like great do these things and in like two years we will see if you did it yeah and then the answer could be like sorry you didn't do those

things as well as this other person who took the slot right but if you i think it's easier to say hey, I'm really interested in working on this other team at this company that does this kind of work and we can like swap that around. I think that's easier to pull off. Yeah, I agree. Because you're not fighting for scarce resources as much. You can like position yourself for it.

You can like go buddy up with that team if you want to. And the company has incentives to make this happen because presumably if they say no, some percentage of people are going to say, okay, I'll quit and go work somewhere else. right and they would rather kind of keep that company knowledge that you have in-house already so let's let's get back to the part of the question where aaron says is this going to be harmful to my future employability i would say no i think it's actually more common than not i think

what would be harmful to your future employability is if you stayed at your first job for like 10 years yeah you think that'd be harmful i think so i think it'd be more harmful to stay at your first job for 10 years than it would be to have let's say like four companies you've worked for in 10 years why i mean it depends a little on the company but the problem with staying at your first job out of college for 10 years is that you become really good at that company and i think other employers are leery of that and they're like well you've been successful at this company but all that you know a big portion of the knowledge you've acquired is not relevant to my company like you have a smaller pool of transferable knowledge maybe exactly exactly so i'm not

think it's a huge risk but it is a risk i've seen it so rarely that i would be interested in talking to that person right if if they had one job for 10 years on their resume and then they were looking for their second job i'd feel like i don't know that that'd be kind of unique the rarity of that person i think is is part of the problem because it's like someone's gonna look at your resume and go this is weird you know and then you have something to explain yeah i mean if you're at the same company for 10 years probably you will have at least one title change yeah if you're at the same company if you if you join as a junior developer and 10 years later you quit as a junior developer then yeah that would probably look kind of kind of bad but yeah i think i think you could

say like if i moved from junior to mid-level or senior or something over this time period at the same company you could sort of argue that you are learning different skills and applying them even if you're still working within the same framework of the company yeah i absolutely think you could and and it's not all bad and i'm i'm just saying that i think you'll have some explaining to do in the same way that if you changed jobs every year for 10 years, you would have some explaining to do because both of these are weird. Yeah. It's just not as normal or not as common. Right. Right. You're going to raise eyebrows. But I will say from a strictly financial perspective in the US, if you're just starting out, it actually makes a lot of sense to change jobs

every one to two years for the first few years, I think. Yeah. Very common. Yeah. That's been what i've seen as well and it's what i did so it must be right exactly same yeah have i just been not lucky enough to find a company that offers better career progression i think it would have to be a pretty unique combination of person and company to go from fresh new worker first job to like very clear understanding of how to progress their career like the company has to have a lot of stuff going on right for that to happen and the person has to have a lot of knowledge that they might not have just because they're new in the field so i don't think that's i don't know i i don't think that's weird how did you deal with in your own careers yeah the same basically the same thing

you did i stayed at my first job for i don't know a couple years next job for a couple years so it seems common because that's what i did yeah it seems so familiar i don't know why yep almost almost like it was the right decision for you to make that's right i still remember how i fretted so bad about leaving that first job i had been there for 14 months and i was just so nervous i felt like i was stabbing my co-workers in the back and you know just this terrible treachery but in reality they were fine and they didn't think twice about it and yeah i also remember getting a 20 raise to switch and i was like how am i possibly gonna spend all this money so much money it turns out it wasn't a lot of money well you can always find a way to spend it it's very

easy to find a way to spend money i just thought oh my gosh this feels like i'm robbing this new company because they're paying me so much but this was 2004 it wasn't a lot of money even then i was underpaid and i think what was happening was that the new company brought me up to like slightly below average instead of very below average they got to feel real good about themselves Oh, they did. They did. I remember the hiring manager actually called my home on my landline because I didn't have a cell phone. And my wife answered the phone and he told her, hey, we're going to make an offer to your husband. She was like, oh, great. And he said, I think he's going to be very happy with the offer. And she called me and told me that. And I was like, that's kind of creepy and weird. Then I saw the offer and I was very happy. He was right. nice so i gotta i gotta say if it's good to change your job after a year or two then is it better to even reduce that time like why not push it to six months or why not go to the absolute minimum like two weeks notice on day one just

yeah you're you're there to like pinch hit i guess i don't know so the thing you talked about could be called freelancing yeah true and that is a thing i've seen with freelancers where if things are going well and you have constant streams of work coming in the fact that you do one job for i don't know three months and then you can do another job means that you can kind of reset pay expectations at that next job or at that next contract and some people increase their rates by quite a bit and then end up making a lot more money yeah but the real reason is that yeah that would be a red flag i feel like six months or less is is gonna raise questions even if it's early in the career yeah i think so for whatever reason it feels arbitrary but i agree yeah yeah that feels

short enough that i'd be like what did you do wrong to right not stay longer and even even later on in the career would i mean i guess it'd probably raise more questions later on in the career but yeah early on i think you get more of a pass for having shorter stints at jobs and later on you get less of a pass absolutely all right have we answered the question yes yes we have do you want to read your no wait no i read our next question do it okay this is from el matador de juniors that's my gringo spanish accent good work is firing the new counter offer a junior dev on my team confronted us with an offer he got from another company he is already paid at the limit of his range, his upcoming performance review is not great, not horrible. The amount

offered to him would put him in our lower senior range, and there's no justification for that at all. He made it clear he is in a complicated financial situation, bank account emptied and credit cards maxed out, etc. I don't see a path to him getting close to the salary he got offered in the next year or even longer. We are not a company that fires people if they do not grow at a certain rate, but given his situation, he is probably not going to stick around for long. he also made it clear he would like to stay if not for the salary but now i'm thinking it might be best for the company to fire him even for him is that cruel which other options am i missing thanks for all the advice it's both entertaining and very helpful best from columbia wow huh very

interesting question so should i out of compassion for this employee should i fire him so why why would it be out of compassion what possible good could that do i think it's because there's severance involved. It would be my guess. Yeah. I guess it could also be like clarifying that you're not going to get a matching offer. Like that's a pretty emphatic no. Yeah. It seems like an expensive way to clarify that. Yeah. Not only are we not going to match this offer, but you're fired. Yeah. Just to show you how clear it is. Yeah. It's so clear. Do you remember the episode of The Office where someone quits? Someone says, I quit. And Michael, the manager just says you can't quit you're fired yep and then later he's on the phone with his his manager

and she says do you realize we have to pay them severance now yeah and he blames it on dwight it was dwight's idea yeah i was thinking about that it's been a while since we've referenced an office episode but truly it is the most universal work of culture related to soft skills questions yes i guess if you can say hey we're gonna we can't match you that offer match that offer with you and do you for sure have it and we're fine paying severance then i guess in a way that wouldn't be cruel it could go really wrong though like what if the counter offer falls through yeah what if there's like a timeline on it that is extended i i feel like firing them to give them severance would be a thing i would do for a valued and beloved employee

who has been there for many years as a way to say thank you not for a junior developer who's done not great not horrible and and yeah that just doesn't feel like i think it makes more sense to me to just say hey we can't match it like good luck yeah do it do what you want yeah sounds like you're happy to have them there you won't be crushed if they leave so why why force anything yeah why not just let them make the decision it would be weird to make the decision for them i think there's one point in this story that makes things a little bit more complicated which is the complicated financial situation it says he got his bank account emptied and credit cards maxed out which tells me that this person needs a continuous income stream yeah

anything that would jeopardize that would not be compassion it would be yeah potentially very harmful yeah again if everything goes well you could say well it'd be nicer for them if we gave them severance because it would be like this little bump and then they'd start their new job and then and then they'd be in a slightly better off position i i just i don't know why i don't think that feels like the right thing to do yeah i i agree and i don't know why either but i will say that when someone approaches you with a offer and you're their manager a few words can go a long way just to say you should take that offer yeah exactly yeah i think that that will cause them to be like oh okay message is clear i'm gonna go and you don't even have to say you're fired yeah but

i'm not totally sure that's the right thing to do here either because this is a person who was not on the road to getting fired you know but if wait telling them to take the offer well not the right thing no no sorry offering to fire them yeah this is not a person who is on the road to getting fired so i mean saying take the offer great like if you tell them if i were you in your shoes i would take the offer fine but then on the other hand the other option is let's fire them so they get severance but i don't like that option because now you you've kind of breached your own policy where you've said we don't fire people who aren't moving to the next level unless they have a counter offer like i don't know it's like a weird weird policy yeah i i feel like i feel kind of

heartless saying this but i don't know that it's your company's problem that his bank accounts are emptied and credit card credits are maxed out like that's a sucky situation to be in and i could see how if there was like exceptional performance you could talk about like a spot bonus or if they were on the brink of a raise or something that might play into account but if they're just like fine and they would like more money it seems like they have done the correct thing which is go get an offer for more money like that's if that's what they need then then they have made the right decision for them yeah it also feels like if you make this exception for this person by by giving them severance when they're not really a top performer it it sets kind of a weird precedent

where i'm do you do this for everybody now that quits like say say a top performer quits do you fire them yeah say someone who's like a medium performer but slightly better at their job than this person quits do you do you fire them and give them severance is this like um and i assume that money is not infinite and there's some amount of someone will say no at some time like i would want to save this for when it felt really deserved instead of kind of play this card and try and maybe set this precedent that i have to fight with later on yeah and you and i think the probably the same side of the same coin you're talking about there's a weird incentive system that you're creating where people learn that they can quit by getting a better offer making more money and a

bonus from their previous company as they leave yeah that's not a precedent you probably want yeah he would like to stay if not for the salary i mean it sounds like he has a hard decision to make then that's and that's his decision to make if if he truly needs the money more like that's the thing people do sometimes where they sell out and make more money and maybe are slightly less happy but better for them in the long term or that's what they think or people often make the other decision too where they sacrifice some financial windfall in order to do something that they're happier doing absolutely you could give him okay so he's got one option which is go work somewhere else and make more money you could give him another option which is like

go work somewhere else that will make you even happier and make you even less money like start a skateboard shop or something i don't know go be a an artisanal pot spinner you know yeah maybe that'll clarify his uh his decision great job that'll really clear things up thank you that will really solve this problem yeah i think dave you are the smartest where if i were this person's manager i would say it sounds like a great offer for you i don't think we're going to be able to match it we'll be happy if you stay but we won't be able to match it yeah that's probably what i would say i mean that's what you have to say that's just that's the truth it's the truth yeah but what you're not going to do is take this weird off the beaten path suggestion of saying oh

by the way you're fired here's three months of severance don't let the door hit your butt on the way out it's just weird yeah oh there's one other aspect to consider here okay it sounds like in this case they already have an offer so this might i'm talking about a situation where they need to leave, they need to make more, they know that the market will pay them more, and you want to fire them to give them severance for some period of time while they find another job that they're confident they can find one. It's not exactly the situation here, but I wanted to point out this one risk, and that is the gap in employment changes the dynamic a little bit. Here's how. When your next employer, prospective employer, is talking to you, you don't currently

have a job. And that creates two questions. The first one is, why did you leave your previous company without having a job lined up? And the second one is, can I call your previous employer to do employment verification and get a reference? That question might be hard to answer if you've been fired and given severance, because you're probably not eligible for rehire at that previous company. And so that might come back as a negative mark on your new employment. I didn't even think about that. So that'd be if there's some company policy that says we can't rehire people that we have fired. Exactly. Yeah. And that's the third aspect is you might not be able to come back to this company in the future say you get some more experience under your belt

you want to go back maybe you can't yeah i mean this sounds like a sucky situation in that this person's under some financial pressure but it does feel pretty clear what you should do yeah i agree and leave it up to him to make the decision that's what he gets to do all right have we answered this question i think so where can people go if they want to ask their own questions go to soft skills dot audio click ask a question and then we will answer it you can also uh some people still direct message us on twitter with questions that's a viable option as well we are soft skills eng on twitter you can follow us there if you want to see announcements about the show you're already listening to i guess right sometimes see other stuff but most of the time really just episode

announcements yep it's a really strong pitch i'm a part-time social media manager as well uh space social media right right yeah where the rules are reversed and you want fewer followers it's like the social media gulf yes social media gulf can i can i start from where we are and get down to zero followers that will be my challenge yeah thank you for listening we'll catch you next week