Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 240: Under-leveled in the big leagues and pushing back

Episode Date: December 14, 2020

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Questions I became a software engineer 4 years ago after graduating from a bootcamp. I then worked a few software jobs in middle America. About a year and a half ago, I got a job in a well know tech start up and moved to a big city with heavy software/tech presence. Before I moved, I suspected I was good at software engineering, and after working in this tech startup “in the big leagues”, I confirmed my suspicion by quickly becoming the go to engineer for the team. I just finished a project that delivered a major tech component of our core system, and received lots of kudos. Because of this I suspect I was mis-hired for my current level; this is the first job that I can compare myself with more than 10 software engineer peers, and evidently I am above average. I used to tell myself I was not that good because I didn’t work at a “real tech company.” I am pretty certain I will get promoted in the next cycle, but how can I land my compensation to be above average in the pay band as well? Should I share my feeling that I was mis-hired in my current position? How do I push back the work I do not really want to do while still being a team player? My manager assigned me a project that I do not really want to work on and when I try to push back, he said he finds me the best person that suits this. I ended up doing it since I want to be a team player, but I don’t believe it will benefit me in the long term in the team. How can I push back to my manager in other occasion in the future? Thanks for your podcast, it has been very amazing.

it takes more than going through all the matplotlib code samples to find the one you need for a presentation to be a great data scientist this is soft skills engineering episode 240 i'm your host dave smith i'm your host jameson dance soft skills engineering is a weekly advice podcast for software developers and data scientists about the non-technical aspects of data science and software engineering we're diversifying we're expanding our brand tent what if we just add everyone it's for hunter gatherers luthiers is that how you say that word what those people who make instruments is that how you say the word i don't even know the word so i couldn't tell you how to say it

time for jameson mispronounces words the regular section of the podcast yeah it's a special we actually have a spin-off sister show that many people don't know about where jameson just mispronounces everything luthier i was not even close how do you spell this alleged word l-u-t-h-i-e-r okay and how do you and how do you pronounce it the luthier is what google says okay maybe this is just like machine learning from the ignorant masses but yeah it's crowdsourced so it has to be right yeah i mean if it's a pronunciation and it's crowdsourced then by definition it's right oh i'll die on that literally versus figuratively hill or comprised versus composed yes oh my gosh my kingdom my gravestone my kingdom for a sentence

that uses comprise correctly yeah on my gravestone it will just say but everybody was wrong it'll say my life was comprised of many my yeah many painful moments in grammar that would be the ultimate own if you wanted to just destroy me after death you actually know it would say yeah so you'd want it to be wrong on your gravestone right like to absolutely troll you so it'd be like my life comprised many painful grammar moments yeah i hope i didn't just make myself look stupid by using it wrong unintentionally in incorrectly impossible okay i'm gonna read our patrons thank you to these wonderful people who support the show at the level where we shout them out every single episode thank you to roman denisov fizzbuzz influencer code lemur christian

polanco oladapo fade kiaren spainson ragnar hardison nick hathaway travis sanders dennis bognan of braden kane steven armand lee john grant chris hogan the agile ventures charity nick cantar and philip john basile thank you so much to all you wonderful people and if you want to join this group of certified good humans yeah this is all it takes nothing about being nice to other people or serving or you can buy your way positive impact on the world yeah indulgence is where it's at yes you can go to soft skills that audio and click support us on patreon and then we will give you an invite to our slack team full of also other good people people who can afford to be good right

exactly oh my gosh yeah thank you so much we really appreciate it it keeps the show going we have a listener story yes i want to read that story this comes from someone whose name i don't know and that's okay they write hi folks i wish i had a question but instead i have a story I wanted to thank you two for the podcast your advice has been so useful for learning how to evaluate soft skill situations that's in quotes and make decisions based on my own circumstances now for my own story last May I found myself disillusioned with my previous employer a small but mature startup I had disagreements with the trajectory of the company and some key staff had left leaving me to contemplate my future at the company after weighing my own stress employability

and savings account balance I gave my two weeks I didn't have another job lined up it was the peak of the spring shutdowns due to the spread of COVID-19 and I was now totally unemployed. Here's where you two come in. I had knowledge and confidence to calmly figure out the next step in my career and make some hard decisions. I nailed the interviews and ended up with a hard choice at the end of it. Take boatloads of money and stock options from an extremely hot Silicon Valley startup working on amazing technology or take a pay cut to work at a local university supporting scientists working on renewable energy. I ended up taking the local boring lower paying university work and i couldn't be happier all of your advice over the years gave me a solid framework to

evaluate these decisions and i wanted to thank you for it i'm so glad so glad it worked out i don't know i mean sounds a i'm sure are you saying it didn't no my question is what podcast were you listening to because i would have said take the money really no i'm just kidding i don't know it's the christmas season this sounds like a modern reboot of it's a wonderful life yes you're practically jimmy stewart yep exactly i'm i'm glad that worked out i'm glad that you were able to glean something helpful from this and i'm glad that you learned from my admirable example of just up and quitting your job and then saying what do i do now yeah i'm glad that worked out for you i'm happy sounds like you're in a good spot it is a dangerous trajectory though i just

want to be clear like jameson does not usually go on the record saying you should do it that way yeah but people pay more money to watch trapeze artists without a net that's that's where the real thrill is that's true the thrill danger is higher but i usually pay more money to see other people risking their lives not my own self so yeah whatever well i don't i don't go base jumping i don't go off big jumps on my snowboard anymore i do quit my job and then figure out what i do next that's that's where i get my risk from okay um i'm gonna read our first question yep this is from an anonymous listener i became a software engineer four years ago after graduating from a boot camp i then worked a few software jobs in middle america

about a year and a half ago i got a job in a well-known tech startup and moved to a big city with a heavy software and tech presence before i moved i suspected i was good at software engineering and after working in this tech startup in the big leagues in air quotes or word quotes typed quotes they're not made out of air yeah i confirmed my suspicion by quickly becoming the go-to engineer for the team i just finished a project that delivered a major tech component of our core system and received lots of kudos because of this i suspect i was mishired for my current level. This is the first job where I can compare myself with more than 10 software engineer peers, and evidently I am above average. I used to tell myself I was not that good because

I didn't work at a quote, real tech company. I'm pretty certain I will get promoted in the next cycle, but how can I land my compensation to be above average in the pay band as well? Should I share my feeling that I was mishired in my current position? This is a great question. Why? well i'm just reading back over it here and i i love the perspective that moving around gives you there's nothing like working with lots of other engineers to really nail down where your performance level is you know yeah that's great i think it's i think it's great

perspective so yeah yeah it's a good point this is a this is like an indirect pitch for the benefits of seeing different stuff it's like yeah you can't you can only i don't think i'm gonna land this analogy i'm gonna pull back yeah never mind they're they're like you can't just look at yourself and in a vacuum and recognize what you're good at you you see it by comparing it against other people yeah that was a pretty good comment but now i want to hear the analogy i don't i think i was gonna like make up some physics thing about like particles or photons or i don't know something about like you don't perceive it's not worth there i will use to say it like heisenberg or something i don't know what relative relativity

no it was gonna make less sense than that it was worse than that anyways yeah so now now you know a little bit more because you've seen more yes not only do you know more about how to do your job you know about how that compares to other people how can i land my compensation to be above average in the pay band as well it will probably not happen if you don't say anything about it well that's fair especially if you feel like you're well no i mean there's always almost always a pay bump with a promotion yep but very often it's like a fixed percentage and there's also a thing i've seen before where there's sort of an expectation that if you are newly promoted to a role you'll

be sort of in the in the bottom half of the pay band yes for that role where it just feels weird to promote you and then say and you also make more than other people who have been in this role for a while right not only not only did we just barely promote you into the role but you're better than everyone else here congratulations yeah so i think you're right in in identifying that this probably isn't going to happen if you don't do anything i think what this listener has just stumbled is about to stumble into is that the difference between pay flexibility at a startup and a mega tech company and the answer is there's a lot of difference and in my experience here's something cool james and i have both worked at huge tech companies and therefore we know everything about

huge tech companies so that's good yep it's pretty easy it turns out to know everything but the the fact is that i'm pretty confident in saying that there are fixed pay bands and when you move when you join a tech company a huge tech company frankly any big company the tech companies i don't think are all that different from other non-tech huge companies but when you join these companies you get into a pay band based on your level and usually you know if you want to make substantially more money you have to move to the next level on the promotion ladder and as Jameson said you're almost always locked in by HR to the lower half of that pay band and depending on the company it might actually be very hard to get up to the top of that pay band because now

you have to demonstrate skills that so it's actually more than just demonstrating skills but you do have to demonstrate skills that are commensurate with the upper half of that pay band but also there might just be artificial limitations where they say no in your first year you just cannot by policy sorry so the answer is you can't yeah sounds like i mean there's there's a principle with anything about compensation which is that nothing happens if you don't make your company aware of what you want to have happen i feel like i see this with raises sometimes or with promotions or it's it's very very rare that the company will just kind of wave a magic wand and bestow out of the goodness of its heart extra money on people and they need to be incentivized to do that one

of the best incentives is to be someone they want to hire and that incentive is now gone so you have some kind of yeah experience for future you it would be way easier to get this pay bump if you're trying to be hired into this position instead of moving up into it from inside the company that depends on the company though that i mean sometimes it's actually really hard to get hired into the higher levels and i know one particular tech company that i may or may not have worked for that just loved to down level people in their interview process because it de-risked the hire and yeah that was very very common um and then they would it was up to the engineer then once they join to work themselves up to the next level which usually takes a couple of years

yeah but i think still in general it's much easier to negotiate when you're yeah when the thing you're bringing to the table is i will join your company instead of i will quit your company if you don't or i will be put out if you don't do this thing yeah and they're already getting getting stuff from you for for sure yeah share my feeling that i was mishired in my current position yeah i mean the the the thing you want to provide is a strong case for why you are worth that much money and the answer the response you might get you could get might be you're not like maybe because of the timeline stuff that day was saying there could be things around other people's compensation that it needs to line up with that that there's a whole bunch of stuff

beyond how good you are but you need to provide as much information you can about why you are just going to be worth so much more than they're currently paying you to your manager to help them make the case up. So if you want to make up for being underleveled or underpaid when you're first hired by a promotion, it will have to be something different than the normal promotion process because it's likely that a promotion will have a percentage increase based on what you were making before. So if you were underpaid in your previous level, you might still be underpaid in this next level from your perspective? I think so. Yeah. I mean, that's not how it worked at my previous Megatech Co. So, I mean, the bands are pretty wide. There's room to be underpaid at many

levels. Oh, I see. So you're saying that even though you moved up to the next pay band, you're probably going to occupy the same quartile within that pay band that you occupied in the previous one. I think so. I think it's possible. Those feel like two separate problems to me. go ahead in my company every time you were moved up to the next level you were dumped into the lower quartile of the next level regardless of where you came from in the previous level interesting well i guess i was wrong when i said i knew all there was to know about big companies or i was now i know all there is to know congratulations after dave filled in that one missing that was it that was the only piece

um let me i actually but even though i just corrected you in front of all the all seven of these listeners and that probably hurt your feelings a little let me just make up for that by saying that i agree with you and i want to add one addendum which is that when you make the case to your manager or hr or whomever that you are ready for promotion and want to get more money the case needs to be made in the language that aligns with the company's promotion criteria One thing that I learned moving from startup land to mega huge tech company is that there are very well-defined words that must be used when you are applying for promotion. And the assessment process for determining if you are worthy of a promotion are very much couched in that vocabulary. And so your submission needs to also be written in that vocabulary so that you can check all the boxes the way they need to be checked.

So it's important to do investigative journalism first. we're sort of mixing up two different things and just focusing on the promotion side though it's not just i mean they think they're already going to get promoted oh yeah just want to be promoted and get bumped up to higher right it sounds like they feel like they they're sort of operating above the average at the next level up and want to be paid related to that i should probably pay more attention when i read things i read this one so that's why you didn't pay oh right of course i was just looking at looking at the sheetrock in my office so interesting patterns yeah so this is this is like doing two hard things at once which is getting a raise and

getting promoted you're already going to get a raise as part of getting promoted but you want to get another raise on top of that so okay so there is i have one more technique to propose for ensuring that you maximize the raise when you get the promotion and that is that it's kind of a slimeball move and i don't actually recommend it but depending on your level of comfort you might be okay with this and i'll share this by telling a story about i don't know well over 10 years ago i was at a company that i loved and wanted to keep working there and i but i felt like i was underpaid so i asked for a 20 raise which was a lot for this company and they came back and told me sorry we are capping you at like seven percent and we just cannot go higher than that and i'm

sorry but you know we'll do our best and next year we'll you know we'll try to do another good one another one at seven and you know eventually you'll get up there and so as luck would have it another job opportunity came along and i decided to take it and when i went back to my manager and said hey i decided to go to this other company my manager said okay pause that pump the brakes let me go talk to hr i'll be right back i'll talk to you tomorrow so he talked to hr and came back the next day and said we'd like to offer you a 24% raise and I was like well I guess there's always an exception to the rule yeah and this happens a lot in companies where they they kind of anchor their value of people based on what they come in making or capable of

and it's really hard for a company to reset and say what would we pay this person if we are hiring them right like and and we we knew what we know about their skills now what would we pay them and sometimes that number is pretty different and a counter offer is a good way to well i don't know if good is the right word it's it's a pretty high stakes way to force the company to try and make that evaluation because you're you're effectively saying this is what someone else will pay me right now like can you can you match that value yeah i i've waffled a little bit I think I'm less negative about counter offers if you have some intention of pursuing them than you are. It is really expensive to switch jobs too. So it's an expensive form of leverage to

exercise because you have to upend your life to do it basically. But I think the underlying goal that you are trying to accomplish is make the company evaluate you where you are right now instead of based on the context and there might be another way to do that besides just get an offer from someone else you could have the old salary swap data that you get from talking to peers or from peers in the industry not necessarily at the same company or the the all those sources of anonymous data that are out there of salaries yeah and that might be a lower stakes way of saying here's here's where other people with comparable value get paid can you match that so that i feel valued here instead of saying here's how much this other company will pay me

to leave right now with the kind of the high stakes that that brings yeah yeah and it can be a slimeball move especially if you never intended to actually go join that other company you just were willing to go waste their time to collect that data point i feel like there's two more things i want to say about this and then i've burned up all the wisdom that i have if there ever was any so the two things i want to say is number one be specific if there's a number you want say it it's often uncomfortable for engineers to bring up salary discussions with their managers but i gotta tell you it's not uncomfortable at all for your manager this is what they are paid to do so be willing to be specific say i want this number absolutely that's number one number two

is do it a lot earlier than you think these things are often set in motion six months 12 months before they are made known to you and so it could be that there's some spreadsheet already sitting somewhere in some hr file that has your number on it for next year and if you wait until two weeks before you're going to get your promotion it that is like six months too late start now and your manager if your manager is wise will probably say to you okay to get that number you need to reach the following objectives you know here's three things you need to achieve this year to make that and that would be the sign of a great manager but also that you'll need time to do those things so plenty of time needed yeah that's a good point it is really hard for a manager to say

you have asked for this and the answer is yes right now and i'm just thinking from my own personal experience it's it's really true that it takes a while to get their machinery in motion right and there's there's a point at which it's not worth it like if if you're demanding a raise with a date with an ultimatum it's probably going to require like a phone call with the ceo who is up on their mountaintop you know you'd have to do something extraordinary to make it happen as a manager that you possibly cannot do and so that means the answer is no right it's not just you have to work around the constraints that exist and those constraints are worsened by tight timelines yeah for sure i think i just said the thing you said but longer

all right that means it's time to move on to the next question great job you want to read it dave sure this one comes from a listener named eric who says how do i push back the work i do not really want to do while still being a team player my manager assigned me a project that i do not i really do not want to work on and when i try to push back he said he finds me to be the best person that suits this project i ended up doing it since i want to be a team player but i don't believe it will benefit me in the long term in this team how can i push back to my manager in the future for occasions like this thanks for your podcast it has been very amazing well thank you eric why thank you how do i push back do a really terrible job at anything that you don't

want to do sort of joking but i have seen this done in practice that is the passive-aggressive path to victory yeah and it is a tactical victory and a strategic loss right it turns out the person i saw do this did not get that work anymore and then eventually they didn't get any work anymore oh fired no they were it was a joint decision so fired they were encouraged to go get a different job okay and then they did so they didn't push back on that one yeah well that's a very harsh example but yeah there's there's a balance here

of you wanting to be fulfilled by the work that you do and you wanting to do things that are valuable to the team right and your manager has a list of stuff that they want done or someone does if it's not your manager and and presumably this is on that list or you're being punished i hope not yeah we really need someone to like muck out the stable in the data center the horse is powered by horses yeah they run on this wheel but you know horses poop and someone's got to remove it yeah it's yep we need someone to crawl through the vents clean out the rats in the data center i mean we call this maintenance this is called site reliability engineering that's right you're shimmying through vents

with a knife between your teeth killing covered in rat blood yep site reliability engineering oh my gosh what do you do i'm an sre oh how many rats did you kill is it a metaphor who knows oh my goodness yeah i don't believe it will benefit me in the long term in the team i mean that work exists lots of times there's there's like yeah important work that is not going to grow your career often that's a sign of drudgery or toil and there could be some way that you can turn that into work that will benefit you by trying to automate it or remove the need to do that work and people are generally in my experience they've been fairly aware of toil that requires

someone to kind of suffer and are super happy even if they're not directly affected when that work goes away so if you can turn it into higher value work or more beneficial work that might be a good way to accomplish your goal and still do this important thing for the team yeah like get a roomba for the stable in the data center right automate that job and then yes and automate the smearing of poop i think i think part of this skill is there's like a there's a prerequisite here the question was how do i push back but i think the prerequisite here is developing the judgment to know when it's the right thing to push back and when it's the right thing to just do the work because it turns out not all the work that software engineers do is glamorous and good and

fun you know and there's some of it that's just necessary yeah i work with a developer who spent a significant portion of their year doing stuff they really did not like and it was incredibly valuable to the team and they suffered through it and i'm really grateful and made sure to to recognize them for it. But I also tried to make it clear that this was sort of an extraordinary circumstance and it shouldn't, this shouldn't become a regular thing that happens. So I think one thing you could do is try to find out, is this a, are you, are you filling in for something that would normally be done in some other way? Or is this, are you becoming the go-to person for mucking out stables? Like you do it once and you didn't quit. So yeah, exactly. You must really

enjoy it because those are two different problems to have another thing you could do is is you could solve this positively so one way is to push back on things you don't want to do another thing you could do is fill up your manager's head with other stuff that you like to do more that you're the go to person for ah so if you have this very clear area of responsibility like you train the horses to ride in the wheel that generates the electricity for the data center then you'll be busy with that you won't have time to scoop the poop yeah and sorry i mean i could go scoop the poop but i've got all these horses to train yeah who's gonna train these horses we don't wanna we don't want us east to go down right so you're saying make yourself indispensable on a task that you'd

like to do yeah by starving out information so no one else knows how to do it and then you can never be taken off that desk no no do it in the in the positive way you create value somewhere so that it's worth more to the company to keep you on that valuable thing than to pull you off onto this other thing you don't want to do i think eric needs to hire a couple of interns who can just be standing by you know when they're not fetching you coffee eric can say oh hey project manager you want someone to do that task well i just happen to have this intern ready to go isn't that like fiverr i don't know what the gig economy oh yeah that's where you can hire someone to do a thing i think that's that's its business model so it's like uber for software tasks i don't

want to do no it's not for software it's for i think it's for anything it's like go find me paper with this specific stock and buy it and ship it here or or assassinate design this poster or yeah yeah let's assassinate this head of state yeah i'm sure that exists somewhere yeah solve the hunger crisis in this country i'll pay you one trillion dollars if you will eliminate poverty there's got to be an opportunity there for the gig economy applied to corporations where it's like an internal marketplace for somebody that that knows how to talk to the right person at your job right right it's like but it's all within your company exactly yeah it's it's like the giant fang company specific one it's the google specific internal fiber it's

like i will pay 25 if someone will share with me the email address of the decision maker who can change this permission for me exactly it's like oh it's the easiest 25 bucks i ever made you both win nothing could ever go wrong okay okay so so we solved that problem it's clear that capitalism is the solution right even more capitalism nested russian doll capitalism the problem with capitalism is if it doesn't solve your problem you're just not using enough of it yeah you need a market inside of the company that is operating in the market it's just markets all the way down yep so all right so how do you actually push back on a project manager have you ever done this oh have i i don't know i say yes so much that you'd think the nose would stick out more

yeah you suppress those memories i think i've done it with some delicate judo of of like the bus is coming straight towards me i flip out of the way and as i flip grab some innocent bystander and fling them in front of the bus i think i've suggested other people before yeah no no no that that person's no good it's got to be you it's got to be you jameson i think i've done the opposite more though honestly where there's something that people don't want to do and i do it even though it kind of sucks oh you're the one getting flung in front of the bus and you're like okay no i'm like flinging myself in front of the bus you're like no don't get that don't let that bus hit you let it hit me it's just a bus driving on the road and i like sprint

up beside it gotta get in front of it and then i just dive under the wheels you were behind it like somehow you get in front of it what on earth why am i always so bus driver's life yes i don't i don't i'm not good enough at saying no to do this so that's a positive quality that you have i oh i do you think i have this no though eric i don't know if you oh eric okay yeah i think i think i have developed the ability to diplomatically say no to things by putting so here's how i do it i bundle agreements into it so i say things like i will do this but in exchange for doing this i need your commitment that we will invest in x y and z technology that will make this unnecessary within three months or that we will hire someone within six months to do this

i will do it this time but i need your commitment that we will do x and that actually puts the project manager product manager's skin in the game a little bit so now they have to be part of the solution and they're clear about what you want interesting i really like that it's kind of the equivalent to the technique where someone in general comes and asks you to do something if you're already busy you say like yes here's what it will cost you to add this feature to this project like right tell me tell me what to not do instead instead you're saying here's what here's what you need to do to make it right and i like to oh i'm going to say the word couch for the second time this episode which is kind of weird i like to couch couch is a place you sit dave i

don't even know what you're talking about i like to couch those terms those addenda that's my second time saying addendum as well to i like to couch the agreements like the follow-up agreements in terms of benefit to the company so i can say things like having me do this is expensive or is wasteful because x y and z reasons and if we continue to do this it will cost us unnecessarily and we could do this more efficiently by having this so to that end i would like to i would like your commitment that we will do that within six months or three months or whatever it is oh it's brilliant if you turn every request you don't like into like a one year long project to solve the root cause these will just dry up that's right they'll find someone else who doesn't

have contingencies associated with them to form a task force to attack this at the at the root to solve the underlying problems here first let's start with our values yes so you're just bogging them down and follow-up commitments dave instead of listening i clicked a button in google and i have data hit me this other page in google says luthier is pronounced luthier if i just google luthier and click the word it says luthier but then if i click learn to pronounce underneath it and click this the icon to play the sound it says luthier do you like how the story arc of this episode has just so naturally come full circle back to where we started that's the hero's journey baby what an artist i mean what an artist

yeah i'm sorry i wasn't listening but was instead wallowing in my inability to even find out which way i pronounced this word wrong because i know i did it wrong i said it both of these ways they can't both be right or can they tomato tomato yeah it's a new dialect whichever one is wrong is actually correct in jameson english that's right well while you weren't listening to what i said i was wrapping up my final comments i have nothing more to add i just really endorse what you said wholeheartedly yeah and agree with a lot of the good points that you made thank you where can people go if they too would like to hear some of the good points that i make oh so many good points were made yeah you can go to softskills.audio click ask a question and it

we'll take you to a wait did you ask how they ask questions or how they hear the show i don't remember lost about pronunciation whatever i asked what i wanted you to say was what you were about to say so let's go with that yeah click ask a question and then you can do that thing that you just clicked nice you can ask a question and then we'll answer it thank you so much to the people that send in questions thanks for the stories too we appreciate yeah hearing how things do or don't work out based on what we talk about on the show and thank you for listening yes thank you all right we'll catch you next week