Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 236: Making mistakes and Lowball offer

Episode Date: November 16, 2020

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Questions Can you talk about making mistakes at work? How do you handle it, how do you frame it when you talk about it, do you try to minimize or be honest about it, how soon is it to pretend nothing went wrong and you’re doing great, etc. Thanks! Hello there, Huge fan of the show here, I often laugh hysterically listening to it on long commutes and people think I am on drugs. I just finished grad school in a foreign country and i am in the middle of negotiating a job offer with a company whose field of expertise is my passion. All seem to be going well and i have a feeling that the company is hugely interested in me. HOWEVER when we arrived at the salary subject i found that WAN… WAN… they want to pay me a fresh graduate salary even though i have 3 years of part-time and 1 year of full-time development experience abroad; i know their decision is not based on my skills as i did not even have to do a technical test (we mainly talked about the tools i used in the past and the work i did related to that field and it was convincing enough). As i see the situation, I have 2 options of either take their offer and use it as a learning experience before switching to a well paying company or say No and go on Vettery? Let me know what you would do in my case. Merci Show Notes Patrick McKenzie’s article on salary negotiation: https://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/01/23/salary-negotiation/

it takes more than being able to resolve git history and protected branches to be a great engineer this is soft skills engineering episode 236 i'm your host dave smith i'm your host jameson dance soft skills engineering is a weekly advice podcast for software developers about the non-technical stuff like not resolving git history and protected branches so i feel like usually in these tongue and cheek intros i'm like yeah it takes more because i know how to do that thing but now i'm wondering does it takes more mean i have to know how to do this thing because i do not i don't know how to resolve git history in a protected branch every time that a git problem comes up i google furiously and then i run across some blog posts saying oh it's simple it's just a directed acyclic

graph where time has no meaning and like the kraken exists and all things are connected into one and all you got to do is view reality on a seven dimensional hyperplane and like oh okay just tell me in order including saying out loud space right characters i need to type get space yeah space yeah because i'll just do it all in one word if you if you're not careful i'm going to create a command line our like system where the word the literal word space s-p-a-c-e is one of the arguments just confuse the heck out of people i think you just invented a new dialect of transpile to bash it's beautiful great should i read our patreon honor roll i don't know what to call them yeah

the dean's i sing their praises yeah the dean's list the dave's list thank you so much to the people who are contributing to our patreon at the level where we shout them out every single week thank you to fizzbuzz influencer code lemur christian polanco oladapo fadey karen sveinsen ragnar hardison nick hathaway travis sanders dennis bogdanov braden canes steven arman lee john grant the agile ventures charity nick cantar and philip john basile thank you so much to those folks thanks to the people who have been on this list before or who have contributed at all you help keep the show going and your amount of money greater than zero once it's billed by patreon gets you an invite to our slack community which is

helpful and wise and last time i said they smelled good or a while ago i said they smelled good this time i'm gonna say that they if you look at them with your third eye that they have a really good aura it's like what other of the fifth senses could i use what about the sixth sense yeah i mean hyper seven dimensional hypercube they look pretty good on that plane yeah oh that's what i can say they all know how git works right they're all beings of enormous intelligence that's right did did you ever listen to garrison keeler yes i grew up in minnesota oh is that in is that does that take place in minnesota it does yeah beautiful lake will be gone i don't think is real right i think it's not but one of the taglines is where all the

children are above average yeah he has a soothing voice but it always felt like humor for like dead people i don't know it's like i can tell that this has the shape of a joke but nothing funny was said but you feel like you wanted to laugh like yeah but like he paused right it's like it's like tickling all the right stimuli but you just can't figure out why you want to laugh yeah like something mildly silly and long was said huh anyways should we dive into our episode we should but first i gotta mention i think bob ross gets a lot of credit for kind of having that soothing sounding voice but don't you think garrison keeler deserves more credit than bob ross for that maybe but garrison keeler now has a checkered past and bob ross oh he does

is went went happily to his grave so well he bob ross is not exactly clean i'll just put it that way okay i gotta do some googling and yeah my childhood some more i guess oh gosh okay well let's read our first question do you want to do that dave yeah let's do it Yes, we are so off task here. I'll just bring us right on back. Okay. All right. Our first question comes from an anonymous listener who says,

can you talk about making mistakes at work? How do you handle it? How do you frame it when you talk about it? And do you try to minimize or be honest about it? How soon is it to pretend nothing went wrong? And you're doing great, et cetera. Thanks. I like that.

Yeah. That last bit. How long do you have to wait before you... i guess i didn't quite follow that last bit but it's all i kind of interpreted it as how long do you have to wait before you can just pretend nothing went wrong yeah say you delete production how many times do you have to apologize until you can like push back on someone in a meeting and they can't say well that's rich coming from the person who deleted production can you talk about so one side effect of having how should i put it sometimes i can't

tell if i have low self-confidence or high self-confidence i feel like this is a weird combination of both i'm really comfortable talking about screwing up at work which in some ways i feel like is because i'm like expecting to screw up so it's fine when i do but also i could see people being worried about it and feeling like i don't have the like the the cred to own up to a mistake okay my point besides talking about how cool i am is to okay let me reel it back to things that are helpful it's helpful to have examples and a lot of it comes from the culture around you and if you work in a place where you see leaders especially acknowledge mistakes that they have made i've seen that have a huge impact on folks in the organization it's it's like proof

that it's okay you know whereas if if it's the other way if people get punished very openly for mistakes then you will drive them into the ground it turns out you will not stop people from making mistakes you will just hide the mistakes oh that hold on hold on you just kind of just kind of blew the lid off my mind there for a moment you can never stop people from making mistakes you can just either know about them or have them be hidden that's that's really good thank you never thought about that that way before none of this is answering the question though like i i guess if if you don't work in a culture that encourages owning up to mistakes someone has to start pushing for that culture and if you have some amount of reputation or organizational clout it's helpful

if you do rather than someone in a more precarious position and it can it can make it a much better place to work if if that happens i guess my advice is just yellow and do it i thought you were gonna say if you're not in a position of authority where you can establish this culture then you need to find a fall guy who you can blame for all your mistakes ah okay yeah i was in an hr training gosh like 15 years ago and we were a remote like a satellite office for this kind of giant corporation and hr would come down from corporate every once in a while and give us these just utterly well intended but in the end utterly useless trainings about things and i don't even remember what this training was about but it well i think it was actually

about owning up to mistakes or something like that. And so the HR person is up at the front of the room talking about a scenario and then says, what should you do? And this office was particularly, let's just say, playful in culture. And one of the engineers raised his hand and said something like, well, in this scenario, you should have found a better patsy to blame for the problem. And he could just see the flustered face on the HR person. I felt so bad, but also laughed a little so after it i was listening with half my brain and thinking with the other half my brain like a true good listener does and i i think the the the idea of blameless post-mortems has become more prominent in tech in over the last decade i guess it started in etsy and it's kind

of flowed out to a bunch of other places and the idea is that if stuff goes wrong it's more beneficial to examine what went wrong without blaming it on a person because blaming it on a person hurts the person but doesn't fix the systemic issue and one of the the things that i think applies to that is when when a mistake happens if you just are self-flagellating about it and say i messed up i'm so bad i'm so stupid i like i am the worst yeah i'm just the worst like it's kind of uncomfortable for other people groveling yeah oh how can you all stand up even be around me yeah but if you look at it as like here's a system that failed and examine the failure and figure out how to fix it then often the the mistake isn't like i pressed enter when

i should have pressed delete there's this whole chain of things that went into it there's a field of study called resilience engineering or human factors kind of fall into that too where it's looking at disasters and how they happen and how systems recover from them that's a really bad definition so someone who's actually into it can correct me but that's my outsider's view of it okay and one of the things that that field emphasizes is that i think it's called the rational operator theory basically people think they're doing the right thing when they do it so no one no one is no one is sitting down to say like how can i mess this up like people are operating under information and assumptions and those might be wrong and so it might break stuff

but it's not that they have sat down to screw something up right so everyone has good intentions is the way that my my company would say that yeah good intentions but more than that it's like it's not just like people are good so be nice to them it's like why did they think that was the right thing to do at the time exactly what caused them to have that information that that led them to do the wrong thing. I've seen blameless postmortems be a vector for creating a culture of being forgiving of mistakes and making it easy to admit mistakes because postmortems are generally when stuff goes pretty wrong. And often there's pretty big real world effects tied to it and there's a lot of stuff involved. So if you can have a big meeting or discussion or a document

or something, however you do it, that is clearly outlining what happened without trying to save face or obfuscate it or hide or i don't know make it look better than it was but make that go well and make it clear that nobody's been punished and that your organization is getting better that carries over into other interactions from what i've seen like other interactions like what so like i mean there's a post-mortem like prod went down right but say say another issue is like i don't know somebody forgot about a task and missed a deadline or something like that or smaller mistakes or more individual mistakes that aren't directly like this technical impact was caused maybe maybe you got an assumption wrong on a product you were designing or something

just there's lots of let me let me list all the ways you can mess up i was gonna say like small mistakes like i accidentally embezzled four million dollars from the company accounts and accidentally bought this really awesome yacht it just tripped and now you you know you trust me because we do we do blameless postmortems yeah that's a good point i guess i'm assuming the intentions are good and there's no like negligence and and corruption and kind of outright bad acts are bad mistakes are not so if you see that stuff then you kind of react differently well i mean that's because the only people who do bad things are not engineers so it's fine this will work great i was told that they all wear black and white striped shirts and have masks on and carry

bags with dollar signs on them yeah and have little black mustaches under their nose yeah you'll know when you see them i promise i mean there's some nuance there of like some people could be doing naughty things that they think or they've convinced themselves are mistakes or someone else is trying to cover up but i think i'm assuming that generally these are well-intentioned errors, not people deliberately doing wrong things. So I got to say that when I make mistakes at work, actually one of my superpowers is my ability to own up to it right away and clarify with everyone what I did. And people react very well to this, I have found. And this is something that's been reinforced to me over 20 years, where the sooner I own up to it and the more completely

I describe what I did, the better everything goes. Yeah. And what I found is that, you know, we kind of joked about groveling like, Oh, I'm so terrible. Obviously you don't have to go that far, but the more you put the emphasis on yourself, the more it frees the rest of your team to say, okay, Dave understands what he did here. We don't need to spend a bunch of time like rehashing why Dave is bad. We already got that. And it free, it kind of liberates them from that part of the problem space and refocuses or gives them permission to refocus now on, like you said the systemic problem that led to the failure yeah and i love that yeah there is something weird about that it's like especially if you can project confidence while doing it

it like flips something in people's brains where they see it as a high status thing to admit to mistakes yes isn't it weird yeah now what do you mean when you say project confidence i mean like you said if you're like groveling or or like very sketchy about the details or it's clear you're trying to hide something yeah they double down on you at that point yeah yeah they're like okay we got to dig into this now but if if you have a clear understanding of what happened and why and and can demonstrate like yes like listen i messed this up but i got this instead of like oh that million dollars uh i don't i'm not sure let me get back to you so there's there's another aspect of that too which is sometimes you make a mistake and you actually don't know why it

went wrong. And I don't think you have to wait until you understand every detail before you come clean about what happened. Yeah, that's a good point. I think you should come clean first and, but you should be clear about where the boundary of your understanding is. So I will often say things like this happened and there are three factors involved and I understand one of them, but not the other two. I need your help to resolve my misunderstanding of these remaining two. So it's not so much, I think having a complete understanding, but being crisp about what you do and don't understand. Yeah. Also, this advice carries with it a lot of the assumptions of all my advice, which is that the world is just and everyone is kind and nothing bad ever happens

to people, right? Unless they deserve it. Yeah. I could see places where mistakes get used as political fodder. Of course. Yeah. I don't know. People get judged differently based on their backgrounds or things like that. So it's not always like that for everyone. That's true. And not only is it not like that for every individual, depending on how you look or who you are, but also it's not like this in every organization. And this is one of those cases where if it's not like this in this organization, if you have blameful postmortems and there's a lot of politicking when there are mistakes, that's when I just drop the quit your job bomb immediately. This is one of those things where you just bail. Unless you're in a position to fix it, stay. But

if you're not which you're probably not most people aren't that's when you just got to bail on that my totally unsupported by any evidence assumption is that the higher up you go in a big organization the more tricky it gets yeah and so i it's probably possible that you could be in an organization where somewhere this kind of bad behavior is happening but you're isolated from it and that's fine but i agree if if that's the place you work and that's like who you work with thin. If you can, you should get out. Agreed. It is bad. So, so let's get, let's get right to the question here a little bit. So can you talk about making mistakes? Absolutely. Yes. How do you handle it? Come clean right away. Be absolutely clear about what you do and don't understand

and work to rectify it right away. And I'll tell you that the, so in my company, we do this a lot. We actually invest tons of engineering effort. When there's a mistake, we end up writing pages and pages of documentation describing exactly what went wrong. We have all these thought exercises, like how could you improve the time to mitigation? What were the root causes that led up to it? There's dozens of questions we answer about each failure. And the ones that go well have complete answers to those questions. And it's clear that the original mistake maker understands what went wrong. The ones that go badly is when they go through the motions and try to fill out the document but it's never really clear that they acknowledge what part they played

in it and for whatever reason human nature is that we just kind of laser focus on that and it's like we can't move on until the person who committed the mistake can acknowledge what went wrong and sometimes it's like look there's nothing i could have done to prevent this right and yeah you can be clear about that but sometimes it's like i contributed to this problem and i need to be responsible for the part that i did i just make so many mistakes that i'm just used to it by now so you're like you have like a little like poster on your wall in your office it says like days since jameson's last mistake and it's like always zero yeah i worked at a company a couple years ago several years ago now that one of its company mottos was make mistakes oh and i really liked

it and it was very true their mistakes were it wasn't one of this like there's kind of like a vague businessy startup bro like failures are just opportunities you haven't recognized yet it wasn't like that yeah but it was very very open and and one of the when i worked there was one of the more open to like honestly talking about what went wrong places i've ever worked remember i think we got a question from a listener maybe a couple years ago about how they accidentally deleted a whole bunch of production code or something because they were like editing files directly on the production servers remember that and they like deleted a bunch of stuff and then went to lunch and then came back and like the senior engineer was like

quick help the website is down oh yeah and this guy was like something crazy happened what happened and they were like we don't know we'll have to look that up and share the link to that episode in the show notes that was a great one yeah that's a good point like there might be boundaries to where you can exercise this behavior right like the people hopefully the people you work with directly you have the kind of working relationship where where you can openly and honestly talk about things that went wrong and improve there might be times where if you mention a thing you did that might lead people down a rabbit hole of oh well this is clearly the cause of this other problem and it might actually cost

time if you if you own up to mistakes too early without actually knowing like what went wrong it's the opposite of your example where in that question they probably would have saved some time if the person said oh yeah that thing i deleted which was all of it but like in a complex system stuff will be broken all the time and it often takes a long time to figure out what is connected to other things that is causing the issues and so when you're like diagnosing active incidents you got to be careful to make sure the the information you provide will be used well and not against you. That is helpful instead of distracting.

Oh, fair. Not even not against you. That's you. You're just adding noise to the problem. Yeah, you could be if you don't know if it's true or not. Right. And always qualify what you know versus what you're unsure of. Yeah.

What I found is that the best way to do that is to not just describe what you concluded, but describe your observations. So I saw X rather than, oh, Y must be happening. And that way people who know maybe more about the system or have more context can say, oh well i can conclude that z is happening from your x observation which is kind of cool why is it always xyz why can't we use i think for loops had it right where they pick some letters from the middle you know like i yeah i jk why stop there why not start d e f yeah why not let's do it okay so the last thing i'll say is that if all this advice fails you you can just try the opposite

it which is sweep every mistake you make under the rug and shout your successes from the rooftops but be sure to call out your peers mistakes as loudly as possible yeah and then we'll give quit your job advice to some of your co-workers that's right so true all right have we answered the question i think so i'm gonna read our next question this is from oh no back to haunt me again limoges nailed it okay good hello there huge fan of the show here i often laugh hysterically listening to it on long commutes and people think i am on drugs okay good we've done some good mission accomplished i just finished grad school in a foreign country and i'm in the middle of negotiating a job offer with a company whose field of expertise is my

passion all seems to be going well and i have a feeling that the company is hugely interested in me however when we arrived at salary i found that womp womp they want to pay me a fresh graduate salary even though i have three years of part-time and one year full-time development experience abroad i know their decision is not based on my skills as i did not even have to do a technical test we mainly talked about the tools i used in the past and the work i did related to that field and it was convincing enough as i see the situation i have two options either take their offer and use it as a learning experience before switching to a well-paying company or say no and go on veteri let me know what you would do in my case merci all right that is that is their

sign off not their name we're gonna have to uh define the limoges reference that we got here oh yeah inside joke i can't remember why so maybe you define it i just remember what it means so limoges yeah i think limoges was the name of a city in france where the french army would send ineffective or incompetent soldiers oh that's right and it was kind of like it was like a demotion but they couldn't actually give you a demotion so they just put you on a patrol or they assigned you to be posted in limoges yeah it's the managing out phrase in french you got posted to alaska that's right although for some people that would be paradise yeah that'd be great it's awesome yeah they pay you to live here this is awesome they have bears oh my gosh we have two

hours of sunlight in the winter this is great the three things i love most in life okay so just out of grad school you have a few years of part-time experience and one year of full-time experience but you got low-balled on your offer as if you're a new grad what do you do so i know developer salaries are very different in europe than in the united states but i don't know anything about how negotiating works there so i'm just gonna assume that this works how i expect it to and perfect this is an opportunity to negotiate like an offer in in my experience at least is is never the end of a discussion if you don't take it like there you can always say something else and say hey what about this instead and as we've said in the past like they might say

no thank you and move on usually that doesn't happen though so very rare you don't have a ton to lose by just pushing back on this offer yeah exactly and i think i think that many many engineers think of offer employment offers from companies as first and final and best and there's nowhere to go from here except out the door yeah it's like the price of an apple at the grocery store right it's like that's that's what it is so that's what i will pay but jobs are more like used cars yeah yeah i just bought a used car i hated it yeah well i like the car the experience was miserable and i'm gonna guess you didn't do a lot of negotiating no we did we did a lot of negotiating but i ended up really wanting the used car salesman that we all said no to to like

me and and leave thinking you know jameson didn't buy that car but it was for a good reason and he's a really good guy and i don't know if i left with that feeling okay so i got the car at a price i was okay with but everyone i talked to that day did not love me so oh man the true goal of the experience was not met but for a few extra thousand dollars you could have walked out of there with their undying affection and genuine genuine love for you exactly and a car that i hate it. At a price that sucked. Yeah. But you would have gotten the most important thing, which is honest, genuine, deep caring for you. Yeah. You might even get a Christmas card every year from here on out. We could be hanging out right now. Yeah, you could be. I could be at

their barbecue except for COVID, I guess. You squandered an opportunity to buy the friendship of a used car salesman. And even their manager who came in to try and negotiate too. I could had two friends oh no if you're not spending your money on the things that matter most in this life what are you spending your money on yeah experiences are provide more happiness than things really when you spend money on them yeah oh well well fine well i've learned we all know now i've learned from this mistake oh yeah my wife doesn't know negotiating that's what you need to know oh that's fantastic yeah it is better than if i did it i mean this what you need to know now is if you're ever in a position to interview her for a job and jameson is the hiring manager

just know you're gonna get whatever you ask for because he wants to be your friend no i'm gonna say i need to go confer with my associates and then go talk with my wife your wife will get on the phone yeah so about that salary yeah I'm gonna need you to kick half of that my way and then we have a deal so yeah I mean this this strikes me as a situation where you've created a false dichotomy or a false dilemma which is where you have got a problem and you think there are only two choices for solving it one is take the offer and the other is leave don't take the offer but really there's a third a whole spectrum of options between those two which is i mean the first thing you could do is you could just ask for a different number but i would not recommend

doing that just yet yeah the second thing you could do is say i was expecting to be compensated at more commensurate with my experience which is three years of part-time experience plus one year of full-time experience can you make me an offer in that range and just wait for them to come back don't i you know this is what i would do i would probably not throw out a number just yet i would just see how far they're willing to go upward with just that one quick question have you so the the advice i've heard a lot is whoever says a number first loses yeah do you feel like that applies to situations like this i mean they they said a number first technically right like so why why isn't it bad for you to just say a number now yeah so i think there when you say a number there's two

outcomes that can happen the first outcome is they can say sure that sounds great the second option is they can come down from your number a little bit and try to land somewhere lower. In the first option where they say, great, you just learned that your number was actually much lower than it should have been. That's how it goes. And in the second option, if they come back and come back a little lower, you probably are about maxing out where you can go. Probably. And that's the risk of saying a number. So what I like to do is first ask them to go higher and just see what they'll do and then get a sense for the range that they're working with and frankly you know information is power here sometimes if you're talking to the right person you can just say

what is the pay range for this position and sometimes they'll tell you what the minimum and maximum is and then you can then your job now you've got the constraints on either end of it now you just start working towards towards the higher end of it if you can yeah one thing i want to say that i haven't said explicitly is i'm assuming there's a number at which both of you will be happy where this company will be happy that they have you and you'll be happy to work there and i think you should negotiate with that assumption it's not like you owe it to them to take this job like you're trying to see if you can find a mutually beneficial arrangement where both of you benefit right it's their job to to figure out like how much is this worth to us and it's

also your job to do that together so it's not like you're not like asking them to do you a favor right right you're trying to make this work for them yes because they want to hire you they've already expressed that yeah so yes negotiation can kind of feel adversarial because you you have different incentives right they're trying to pay you as little as possible you're trying to get as much as possible but there is a shared desire there when you've made it this far you you both want to work together presumably otherwise you wouldn't have interviewed there and they wouldn't have offered you i love that and if you're having conversations by email or voice you can start out by setting the the atmosphere with that kind of a statement by like saying hey i'm really interested

in finding a compensation package that works really well for both of us, that we're both going to be really happy with. Yeah. And that message will come through loud and clear. And I think it'll set the stage for a really productive negotiation. Yeah.

So negotiate. That's the advice, I think. That is. That really is it. And we should link to Patrick McKenzie's just amazing article on how to negotiate as a software engineer. Don't you think?

That blog post has made me so much money. I know. over my lifetime that is absolutely true if there's one blog post that i could say probably that's the only blog post that's made me any money yeah this is from 2012 i mean it's coming up on a decade of age but it has aged like a fine wine i'm just gonna put this in our show notes right now it's so good perfect i should read it again just shed a little tear over the nerdiest thing which is really well written blog posts about negotiating for technical it is and it's really written for engineers it's totally written for engineers because like i'm sure that a typical

salesperson or marketing person or finance person they would read this and just be like uh why did anyone go to the trouble of writing this totally obvious article well it's also written for people that have some power right where if if you if your labor is a commodity like if you're going to work i don't know in in food service or something then you you don't have a lot of negotiating power unfortunately that's right so you can't just say like no mcdonald's give me more money please because there's someone else who will take your place so it is pretty specific to the to the industry and the assumption is that it's hard to hire people kind of yeah i think you're right and And in the year 2002, this article would not have worked very well, I think.

But as of today, at least, I think it's still pretty good. It's great. So we'll link that for you. Go read that. That should be required reading for everyone who is entering the field. Really, it's more... Actually, you know, it's interesting. This article is more written towards someone with a little bit of experience under their

belt. This is another one of those cases where it probably doesn't apply very well to boot camp graduates or self-taught people who are trying to get their first job and, quote, break in. Yeah, that's fair. Yeah. again that goes back to like you have some leverage exactly it's really hard to get that first job it's really hard to get come out of a boot camp and get your experience so the calculations are different there that's right but once you've got it a little bit of that experience under your

belt this is the article for you and i don't really think we should say anything more about it all right question answered what should people do if they want their own questions answered dave go to soft skills audio and click the ask a question and i just have to say thank you to so many people who do that every week we really appreciate it we will eventually answer all these questions i promise we're working our way through it all right thanks for listening we will catch you next week