Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 237: Salary vs tech stack and how to quit an ad agency

Episode Date: November 23, 2020

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Questions I am REALLY into music. I mostly get paid to listen to Spotify. With this in mind I decided to apply for a new job at a ��globally leading audio technology company”. The job would be paying a lot more. About 30% more minimum based on the advertised salary range. However, I hate the stack being used! I have been given a homework assignment to complete, but it has not been an enjoyable experience. I enjoy my current job, however the company doesn’t seem as stable, and their are complications with tax/benefits which i won’t get into. So to summarize, should I take the classic SoftSkills engineering advice and quit my job for a sweet pay check and an interesting industry, to suffer the stack? Maybe I will learn to love it? Any advice? I’m at my first developer job at an ad agency, and on a regular basis I and my co-workers are working well in excess of the 40-50 hours a week (closer to 60+). On many occasions we work the weekends as well. I’ve worked on websites, a couple of apps within a proprietary system, banner ads, and html emails. I’ve learned as much as I’m going to at this job. There are no code reviews, no training, and no on-boarding. I no longer want to work at the agency, but I can’t afford to just quit my job. Given the perceivable lack of transferable skills(recruiters have said this to me, ie no product experience), what are some of my options? Mind you, I also don’t have a fancy CS or CS-related degree that I can leverage. Show Notes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knuth%27s_up-arrow_notation http://boston.conman.org/2003/12/02.3

it takes more than asking dave what i should do to be a great engineer this is episode 237 of the soft skills engineering podcast i'm your host jamison dance i'm so sorry i'm your host dave smith i can tell you didn't read that one before i said it this is like is this flattered laughter astonished laughter what emotion would you say you're feeling right now it's like a cornucopia of embarrassment and hilarity well it's true it does take more than that but it helps soft skills engineering is a weekly advice show where we answer your non-technical questions about the technical field of software development and make dave feel embarrassed when i talk about how

awesome he is do you want to thank our patrons dave i'll try okay okay thank you thank you to those who are contributing at a level that gets them a shout out every week they are fizzbuzz influencer code lemur christian polanco oladapo fadiyi kayaran sveinsen ragnar hartesen nick hathaway travis sanders dennis bogdanov brayden kane steven arman lee john grant agile ventures charity nick canter and philip john basile if you would like to join this illustrious crew and get access to our slack community go to soft skills.audio and click support us on patreon and if you submit even a buck or even a million bucks you will get access to our slack community no matter how much money you yeah there's really i just want to be clear there's no upper pound

i fear that sometimes people wanted to give more but just felt like maybe there was a cap where they wouldn't get an invite they see that there's there's only one zero on their keyboard and think oh i can only hit that once but really yeah you can hit that as many times as you want oh there's a bunch of other numbers too you can use all those as just as many times as you want anyway if you do that we'll send you a slack invite at the first of every month you can join the hundreds of people in our slack community who have just some fantastic conversation you know one of the things that i really appreciate about the slack community is that i have a very narrow view of the world that's just through the lens of my own experience and people share stories this week

there was a great story about someone who was asked to resign and it was just fascinating hearing all the weird shenanigans that hr tried to pull on them and i'm like oh that's not something i've experienced and i'm really glad to know about that huh i gotta read that one you can tell them behind yeah it's a good one all right i was just thinking about how you said you can use all the numbers and then i thought well maybe you could do factorial and then i thought what if they made an input that let you do the up arrow notation so you could do like exponents what do mean well do you know what up arrow is no the up arrow notation it was invented by donald newth okay and it's like more than exponentiation i don't understand it well enough to explain it

well but it's basically a way to make numbers that are large enough that you cannot comprehend them in a very small number of characters that doesn't take much for me one two and more that's what i got okay anyways so first i'll add that to the show notes and then i'll build you know what the support creators space really needs is a way to contribute more money than there are atoms in the universe by typing like four characters exactly okay okay got it well i just gotta ask why can't people like donald newt just be satisfied with being great computer scientists and making contributions to computer programming why do they also have to like be amazing in other fields like mathematics it's like it's the same to him i think i feel

like it's the same i guess you're right his computer science contributions are very mathy a lot of them oh it makes sense makes sense it just makes me feel inadequate is all well you're not oh okay moving on okay let's do you want me to read our first question yeah do it we've blathered on enough let's get let's get into it okay this is from an anonymous listener i am really into music i mostly get paid to listen to spotify with this in mind i decided to apply for a new job at a globally leading audio technology company the job would be paying a lot more about 30 more based on advertised salary range however i hate the stack being used i have been given a homework assignment to complete but it has not been an enjoyable experience i enjoy my current

job however the company doesn't seem as stable and there are complications with taxes benefits which I will not get into. So to summarize, should I take the classic soft skills engineering advice and quit my job for a sweet paycheck and an interesting industry to suffer the stack? Maybe I will learn to love it. Any advice? Suffer the stack. Stack suffering. Yeah, that kind of rolls off the tongue. This is the classic money versus enjoyment question. So literally yesterday, I was reading a study that got linked on Hacker News from the university of houston it's one of those meta-analysis where i'm sure it's a lot of work but it's just like reading a bunch of other people's work and then summarizing it okay and

the study claims that job interest is not a really big factor in job satisfaction it is a factor but there are several others that seem to have a bigger effect on job satisfaction could you define job interest what does that mean no could you could you summarize i think what it means is like you are inherently interested in the industry that you work in so this this feels like a place with a lot of job interest for this person okay they really like music it's in an audio tech company okay maybe you really like cleaning supplies so you work at a cleaning supply manufacturing company you're just passionate about bleach but but you're saying that that's that this study suggests that that's not a big part of job satisfaction it contributes positively

but according to this study the other things are like who your boss is who you work with how the organization works pay there's a lot of stuff that goes into it so you're saying that i could work in an area that i just utterly don't care about but as long as i'm surrounded by good people i'm paid a lot and my boss is great yeah and i'll be happy yeah or those are all kind of things you can trade off but what about the tech stack oh what about the tech what if it's a bad i'm sure the study didn't say anything about react versus angular or cobalt versus no no it did not okay so i have some personal experience here i have taken a job before that i was pretty interested in the role and really, really not interested in the tech stack at all. And this

is different for me because I'm a manager, but my first while in the job, I spent a lot of time hands on the code and it kind of just, maybe this just shows that I'm boring and like passionless, but I can sort of get interested in anything. And there were times where I was like, this kind of sucks, but the problem is interesting enough that I don't care that the thing I'm using to solve it is not the thing i would choose if i started from scratch so for me personally the tech stack is not a huge deal as long as i know i don't hate it if i know i don't love it i i know i can get over that and find interesting work to do no matter what the tech stack is but that's not universal i guess but is there an extreme though is there like an extreme to that argument

where the tech stack makes you so unproductive that it's just frustrating every day to work yeah i'm sure there is if you can prove that then you've found the holy grail of software engineering research there's a lot of things that can make you unproductive besides like the programming language that your code is written in though it's probably more about like what the code is than what it's written in i think it's more about how many tabs you have open with social media and youtube on them next to your tech stack well that's a good point this might cut into your spotify time that's true i think productivity a little bit of a tangent here but i think productivity is more of a feeling than a measurable thing and when an engineer feels productive they

are happy and do more and get more done and when they feel like their technology is holding them back it'll like it becomes kind of this tentacle that reaches into other parts of your work life and slows you down but you know it's like an unmeasurable presence yeah that makes sense like i i know i could get started on this problem but i'm gonna have to deal with this thing so i'll just kind of it's like hidden friction yeah okay it's like when you're riding a bike but your brakes are messed up and they're rubbing on your wheel but you don't realize that you're just working really hard you're like oh i don't want to get on that bike again yeah yeah huh i don't know i will say that i agree with you like to me when i was younger or i should say less experienced tech

stack was a huge part of what made me choose a company over other companies and there were really two things i took into into consideration with the tech stack one is enjoyability like will i enjoy working with this and the other one is will this look good on my resume and in the early years of one's career i think many people focus on accumulating the right list of buzzwords on their resumes so that they will look more attractive to prospective employers i don't want to discount that because i think that's actually pretty valuable you kind of get in the door by oh you've got experience with X technology that we happen to use, then that'll give you a leg up in the interview process. But over time, most of the technologies that you use today in 10 years will

be considered old and busted. And so it's really a kind of a short-term view on the world to try to just stick with hot technologies. But at the same time, it definitely does help, I think, from an employability perspective, especially in your early years to have an in-demand tech stack. yeah there is a little bit of like i like video games i want to go work at a games company feeling to this question which kind of conflates the act of playing a video game with the sheer mind-numbing drudgery of trying to build a video game like it is it's more fun to play games than it is to make them huh in in large quantities and same with music it's more fun to listen to music than to build audio technology stuff i bet although i don't know not for me

you only listen to like straight sine waves so you can just experience the joy of your audio technology uncluttered by human noise isn't there a thing called eigen radio or eigen audio or something have you heard about this there no i heard about this like 20 years ago it was like perfect sound plays only the most important frequencies only the beats with the highest entropy and it's like kind of background music and like yeah this is awesome the claims but it sounds it just sounds like noise it's like a high frequency white noise oh my gosh all the stations all the time i can't actually find it okay oh 2003 whoa yeah i heard about this 17 years ago and haven't been able to forget it i remember listening to it and i just turned it off

immediately but yeah that that's what you should be listening to if you're really into music yeah up your music intake well i'll find out how i can actually listen to this after this might look like this might be a post describing it but this is rad okay the statistically optic optimal music yes that's that's the tagline i remember statistically optimal music it's like it's like donald newth's music right like yeah why waste time listening to all these different songs when i can just listen to them all at once and experience the same joy exactly my brain can pick apart from the eigenvectors of all these songs the individual experience exactly all these songs point to one ideal and this is it okay anyway so tech stack tech stack yeah i think it depends on

where you are in your career today i don't care at all about the tech stack i feel like things have improved so much over my career that we can get so much done now compared to what we could 15, 20 years ago. And I think a tech stack doesn't make much of a difference. However, it does attract engineers. So if you're choosing a tech stack at your company, you need to make sure that you have one that will attract the right people because you're not just choosing a stack, you're choosing a community and you're choosing values and culture. But then when you go to look at a company, I would probably take the domain, in this case, audio domain, and the pay over a tech stack unless it's like really bad i'm trying to think i mean it sounds like c++ but i don't

know what they're doing right maybe they're building web stuff for this audio technology company and it's in some web language they don't like but yeah it's like plugins or something that's all c++ maybe they don't love that you know maybe maybe this is tongue-in-cheek the question but liking to listen to music does not mean you will like working on audio technology necessarily that's probably a bigger call out than the tech stack yeah so make sure you would like the day-to-day work of right i don't know building an eq thing to make the bass boom or whatever it's going to be yeah and talk to your team like figure out this team and management like you said i agree those are much more important like if you're if you chose to go

into this field or into this company because of the field but you're going to work with a bunch of toxic jerks no amount of awesome music at work could compensate for that i think also it's cool that they some people don't like homework assignments i like them they have trade-offs but i think it's useful to be able to work on your own time at your own pace makes it more like what you would do at work than sitting down to write something by hand on a whiteboard it might not reflect what it's like to work there i've been on several teams that have homework assignments and they're always contrived sometimes the language is the same but sometimes it's not and it's always some small enough problem that somebody can do a thing but it's not like

here's a bug from our issue tracker go go solve this or something you know so if you hate the homework assignment you should try and dig into how much is this assignment like the kind of work you'd be doing day to day if the answer is a lot then i guess that tells you something if it's not at all maybe the homework assignment is even better and you'll hate the real stuff even more but or the opposite i guess that's some data you can use that to go get more data i bet especially if they like you right like if you do well on this if they're interested in hiring you then you can dig in quite a bit yeah for sure and you should i mean job is a job i just said job like apple says ipad well i hate it so much i don't know why it bothers me so much that they

just drop the article right yes they do that all the time even in like their user manual yeah it's almost like they've built like a planet or something yeah it's like earth is a great place to live iphone is a great phone for you to use don't you mean the iphone no no it's just it's as important as a planet maybe there's some russian influence don't they not have articles in russian yeah yeah russian the language i believe has no articles so maybe apple is uh has its roots in over in the east over there it sounds good to me i think articles are kind of a waste of time anyway articles are waste of time you mean yes articles are waste of time i have no idea why we started talking about this i don't either but all right i think that means

the question is answered good job take the job it'll be great all right shall i read our next one please do okay this comes from a listener named kevin who says i am at my first developer job at an ad agency, and on a regular basis, I and my co-workers are working well in excess of the 40 to 50 hours a week. It's closer to 60 plus. On many occasions, we work weekends as well. I've worked on websites, a couple of apps with a proprietary system, banner ads, and HTML emails. I've learned as much as I'm going to at this job. There are no code reviews, no training, and no onboarding. I no longer want to work at this agency, but I can't afford to just quit my job given the perceivable lack of transferable skills which recruiters have said to me i.e no

product experience what are some of my options mind you i also don't have a fancy computer science or computer science related degree that i can leverage huh oh that's rough yeah i feel like agencies are are actually an okay way to get into the industry because they usually churn through people pretty quickly for better for worse so they're they're often hiring so this feels like i don't think you've made a bad choice in coming through an agency to get into the industry and there are so many people who cut their teeth this way yeah you should probably pause here and say there are different kinds of agencies and i only i only became aware of the agency developer job maybe four or five years ago but like you said they have a lot of people and they they have a

reputation for paying them less than say like a tech company who's focused on building software as a product that they sell like a sas company or something but this looks like it's an advertising agency yeah which i think might be even a different animal than a typical agency like a body shop that does software development for hire yeah that's true html emails banner ads and stuff no code reviews no training no onboarding long hours that kind of matches what i would expect where there's just very intense time pressure to get stuff out because the faster you do the more money you make and and there's probably tight deadlines working in media like this and stuff i guess the question is how do you transfer this skill that you have developed which might not be like i built this

app front end to back end that shows i can do all of the things right right a more technically focused career the sense i'm getting from this write-up is that this is a content creation job so you've probably got marketers and advertisers who are specifying what kind of content they want to put on the web in email form or web form or at you know banner ads or whatnot and your job has been to craft together the html and css to make them look on the web like they did in the advertisers mock-ups and so i can i can see why this would be challenging because you're not really writing application logic per se like there's not a lot of business logic in what i'm what i've just described it's more like i'm just cranking cranking out content you know and that's that makes it hard

to get your next job but what you could do is you could embed easter egg applications in your ads that you're creating like in your banner ads like try to craft them so that they'll catch the eye of a prospective employer did you ever see that 90s movie the net uh no sandra bullock you did not see this no i don't think i did one of these days we have to have like a netflix party where we watch this movie together okay anyway sandra bullock the net i think it was like early 90s but the internet was so young must have been late 90s right it couldn't have been early 90s anyway there was this little like pie symbol in the lower right hand corner of a web page and if you held a certain key down on your keyboard and clicked on it you got access to like this spy network or

something some nefarious nefarious activity you like held up your decoder ring and then the nsa just like let you in exactly okay it was 1995 that's exactly right so i'm saying you work in an ad agency you're cranking out tons of content it's you know central limit theorem says if you put enough easter eggs out there eventually someone will stumble upon one of them and you can say you know it turns into like a marketing site for yourself hire me aha yeah you might get some objections when you start really bloating those page load numbers to include your special konami code that pops up your resume and all your banner ads your 10 megabytes of single page app that you're embedding in the banner everybody already hates third-party javascript so why not

just take advantage of that i wonder if you could nudge this company into doing more work that is interesting to you it it might just be too breakneck of a pace where they just have an endless conveyor belt of banner ads to crank out but you could also try to argue that we can move up market and get higher margins by trying to tackle some custom app development and nudge them in a direction that will help you develop skills. I like that. But there's also probably opportunities at your company to optimize the flow and automate some of the stuff you're doing with your team

that could turn into code that you write that becomes an internal product, you know? Ah, okay. So like better tools to build banner ads or something? Yeah, exactly. But don't make those because banner ads are bad. Can you make tools that make it worse? or like tools i don't know just to speed up load time so people hate banner ads slightly less exactly like maybe maybe there's there are steps in your workflow undoubtedly there are steps in

your workflow that are too manual and there are opportunities to automate some of that stuff like maybe you've got like an optimization step where someone like hand crafts the color palette on every ad or something yeah things like or maybe there's like a validation step where the the the advertising team that crafted the email validates the content. Maybe you could build a tool to help them easily validate all the different permutations of the email in like a web browser, in a web-based application. It could be really cool. Anyway, there are undoubtedly optimization opportunities that would require you to build applications. And that then becomes resume content. And it's going to be hard for you to

carve that out because you're probably billing by the hour is my guess. And so convincing management to let you take some hours and build this stuff. And by the way, you're already working 60 hours a week. So I'm never going to say, oh yeah, plus you should go add 15 hours to your work week. Sorry, nights and weekends that are already taken. So you're going to have to convince management to do this, but if you can convince them that if they'll let you invest some time into building some tooling, that they can get a measurable speed output improvement or something, you could maybe have a case here. And then you could actually start to have some stuff on your resume that would help you make that leap to the next job.

Huh. I like it. Yeah. You are in a bit of a tough spot because the classic advice of kind of just study on your own is going to be hard to pull off when you're fried from working in this high pressure environment for long hours. Super hard, super hard. You're also in a tough spot

because there is a stigma against content creation developers like this among application developers. So when a team is trying to hire someone and they see that all you've done is create HTML, CSS pages and banner ads and emails, it's not going to be appealing to them.

And, you know, deserved or otherwise, you're going to be up against headwinds there. There's a thing in here about recruiters. Recruiters have said this to me. So to me, this feels too early in your career to use a recruiter. Recruiters typically seem like they work better for more senior folks. Those folks are easier for them to place, so they're more motivated to look around for opportunities and stuff. And you're going to be looking for junior developer opportunities, just not at a content creation place or agency. So I think you're going to have to find those yourself more than have recruiters find them for you. Absolutely. Recruiters don't care as much about juniors because they get paid less money too, because they take a cut of the salary and it's going to be lower for junior devs. So you're going to have to hit the ground and look around for some stuff a little bit. Yeah, definitely.

And you might look at other agencies that are maybe adjacent to your advertising agency where you can bring... One of the advantages you have is you now have a domain knowledge about advertising. And so maybe there's another ad agency that's looking to hire someone who has domain expertise on cranking out ad content, but who need someone to build automation and tooling and internal products or something. And that could be your next thing

instead of just cranking out more ad content. But the last thing I would encourage you to do is quit your job and go get a new job doing the same thing. Wait, the last thing is in don't do that? Or that's my final piece of advice? Oh, sorry. Yeah, as in don't do that.

Okay. All right. Have we answered the question? I think so. I mean, the bottom line is this is a difficult situation. And if you want to break into application development as a software engineer building products, it's an uphill battle. And

unfortunately, the industry doesn't really smile on content creation roles. And so it might not seem like a good stepping stone, if you know what I mean. But you're closer than you were. Yeah, exactly. That's the upshot. You are definitely closer than you were. It is a stepping stone, even though it's not, you know, very far into the water. Sure. All right. Now we've answered the question. I think so. Good luck. Good luck. What can people do if they want their own questions answered? go to softskills.audio and click the ask a question button and we just want to say thank

you so much to everyone who's asked questions there are so many great questions in there and we will one day get to all of them all right we'll catch you next week