Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 246: Humanitarian salary conundrum and family benefits

Episode Date: February 1, 2021

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Questions I listen to the show while I’m working out and wanted you to know I’ve almost dropped the weight on myself multiple times when one of you cracks a funny joke (which is often, I’m learning to be more careful)😂. I work for a growing startup as a dev manager. Hiring has proven to be one of our most difficult challenges. We had one candidate in particular that would qualify as a potentially “Risky” since they lacked experience in our industry. We ended up hiring them because their salary requirements were so low, they were half of what we pay other junior engineers. They quickly proved be miles above the Junior engineer position. They have strong technical skills, are proactive with resolving problems, and have raised the bar for the entire dev organization. They currently meet all the criteria for what we would qualify as a Senior engineer at our company. I’ve started feeling uncomfortable about how little we are paying this person. I’ve brought this concern up with management, but their take is that if they asked for the little amount that they did, then we should leave them at that for as long as they are comfortable there. The part that takes this to a whole new level of humanitarian concern for me is that, in passing, I found out that this person is trying to get approval for adoption and that is why they had to leave their consulting background and settle for a salary job. I’m familiar with the adoption process and if we were paying them what they were actually worth (or even 25% closer to what that number is) the entire process would be different for them. I want to take care of the company, but I also believe that we should pay people what they are worth. What should I do? I’ve recently joined a new company (hoorah!) and even more exciting, I’m engaged (double hoorah)! Previously, I’ve focused heavily on my career progression and decided what a good job for me was based on my selfish reasons (more pay). Now, my priorities are shifting towards family first and I’ve been looking into any parental benefits the company may offer (unfortunately none). Is it worth looking around for a company that will provide better parental leave benefits and child-care days?

it takes more than not knowing what lgtm means to be a great engineer this is soft skills engineering episode 246 i'm your host dave smith i'm your host jameson dance soft skills engineering is a weekly advice podcast for software developers who may or may not know what lgtm stands for i wonder what you would think if you just had to pick it up from context because it could either be like a really it could be a really sick burn right you put in a poll request someone says lgtm they don't say anything else to you no one else comments like oh who did i offend losers go to massachusetts what i like this one from our soft skills engineering slack leaving goodbye try monday

oh man this like channel is so funny oh my gosh speaking of slack channel should i talk about from whence it came yes indirectly by talking about our patrons indeed all right thank you to these folks who get a shout out every week thank you to adrian board inc roman denisov fizzbuzz influencer code lemur christian polanco oladapo fade yarn sveinsen ragnar hardison nick hathaway travis sanders dennis bogdanov braden kane steven armanly john grant chris hogan the agile ventures charity nick kantar and philip john basile thank you to those folks who contribute at the level that we shout them out every week thank you to everybody else who has contributed if you're part of this group you get an invite to our slack unit our slack unit what is it called a team

no i think they stopped using the word team a long time ago i think they used the word workspace is now the slack moniker but i say slack community yeah you can come type words and we will read them okay and other people will read them more importantly yeah and they'll say funny things and we'll just not we'll just have a good laugh we'll crib from your good ideas and use them as intros yeah so that's exactly right and if you join slack i promise you'll see some reaction emojis from me once in a while i think i react to everybody who joins oh that's great that's how much i care i i press one keyboard shortcut and then click one button or sometimes if the emoji is already there i just click one button that's a pretty low bar if someone else

already put it in for you yeah it's a really good group i learn stuff there's some some wise folks in there that bounce ideas back and forth and you'll never know which one is my sock puppet account that i use to ask questions i'm too scared to admit i don't know the answer to in real life that's right jameson actually became a supporting patron just so that he could have an anonymous account i just use it to send creepy dms to dave yeah we okay so now now is a great time to join because we are six members away from hitting 500 members of this slack community oh cool which means that we're 18 members away from hitting 512 exactly and that's the number number that's the number that actually matters if you are the 512th member to join

jameson will personally give you a reaction emoji on your on your welcome message i thought you were saying they get their own we could do that too oh yes i mean technically everyone can do that in slack so it's not a big prize i don't know we'll think of something yeah we'll think anyways we haven't told people how they can do this they can go to softskills.audio and click support us on patreon and then do the stuff it says there they've they've got their conversion funnel pretty well worked out i hope so yeah i hope if you want to give us money and you click that button then it just works that's their job do you want to read our first question dave yes i do this comes from an anonymous listener who says i listen to the show while

i'm working out and wanted you to know that i've almost dropped the weight on myself multiple times when one of you cracks a funny joke, which is often I'm learning to be more careful. Or stronger. You're just getting stronger. Your core strength. You know, your core really does strengthen when you laugh. So good job.

Yeah. And when you drop barbells on it. I did not mean to insult you or come across as insensitive when I laughed at the fact that you almost hurt yourself because you were listening to our podcast. But I'm sure much worse things have happened to people's careers from listening to our podcast.

This listener goes on to say, I work for a growing startup as a dev manager. Hiring has proven to be one of our most difficult challenges. We had one candidate in particular that would qualify as a potentially, quote, risky candidate since they lacked experience in our industry. We ended up hiring them because their salary requirements were so low. They were half of what we pay other junior engineers. They quickly proved to be miles above the junior engineer position.

They have strong technical skills, are proactive when resolving problems, and have raised the bar for the entire dev team. They currently meet all the criteria for what we would call a senior engineer at our company. I've started feeling uncomfortable about how little we are paying this person. I've brought this concern up with management, but their take is that if they asked for the little amount that they did, then we should leave them at that for as long as they are comfortable there. Oh, humanity. Okay, it gets better. it gets better the part that takes this to a whole new level of humanitarian concern for me

is that in passing i found out that this person is trying to get approval for adoption and that is why they had to leave their consulting background and settle for a salary job i'm familiar with the adoption process and if we were paying them what they were actually worth or even 25 percent closer to that number the entire process would be different for them i want to take care of the company but i also believe that we should be paying people what they're worth what should i do oh man so it went from like this company is taking advantage of this person to this company is is evil like literally evil and needs to be stopped yeah most people who are underpaid are not trying to adopt so hopefully this advice is is general to situations where it's not just

that you need it to help another human it's just that you're not making what you're worth yeah adopt this person and then give them an allowance an allowance yeah you're now my you're now my child here's your allowance it's ten thousand dollars a quarter so i mean the company is is clearly dumb and wrong right like okay it sounds like they're saying it's for their own good they're they're more comfortable at this level yeah i wouldn't want to upset them i wouldn't want to give them any discomfort they would pay a higher income tax rate so it's like they would have less money oh yeah this is yeah for sure not qualify for food stamps anymore like more money more problems yeah i mean think of all the problems look they they might have to start they might

not qualify for roth IRAs i mean we don't want to get them anywhere near that this would be bad for them in the long run keep their life simple yes really it's the best yeah this just feels so obviously self-serving and short-sighted it's not just self-serving it's short-sighted because this person will eventually find out right like if they're this talented they're probably smart and can figure out eventually what developers get paid and if they find out that they are contributing well above what they're getting paid they could just go get a different job yeah it'll cost you a lot of money to replace this person way more than you're paying them but think about all the money the company saves while they wait for them to figure that out

Yeah, I mean, I guess. Do you want to be the bad guy in somebody's story? Because you are. And this person will tell lots of people. I got to say, though, you are the bad guy behaving exactly as we expected you to behave. Yeah, you're in a tough spot. It's almost worse for you that you know that they're going through an adoption process because your company does not care at all. yeah people care but your company as a whole isn't going to have a special field in their hr form saying it is this person experiencing a heart-rending situation that would be made better if they get a raise right they're built to not think about that's right they're designed to avoid thinking about that so it used to be you worrying about fairness but now it's now now you worry about fairness and like very deep impact on their family yeah i don't know this is

where i would like trip and drop a sheet that listed everyone's anonymized salaries or something like oh oh what have i dropped oh yeah i'm having trouble reaching down to pick that up could you get that for me oh hold on i'm getting a phone call just just hold that paper for a minute right up to your face oh the sun is so bright can you just hold that up and block the sun a little bit just look right at that it's been too long since we've made an office reference do you remember the episode where michael goes to get a raise from his boss who is also his secret girlfriend maybe basically he goes to try and get a raise they have a secret sidebar conversation where she says you have to ask

for this much and then i will counter and give you this much but you have to ask for this higher number right so that i can show i talked you down and then he steps in and asks for the higher number and she says no i'll give you 12 and he's like i will take not a penny less than the original number i asked for the point is the office is a show that is has happened in life i guess yeah and also that i think you have the chance to help your team and your company and this person if it's not going to torpedo the company to pay this person what they're worth then it's going to be better for the long run if you pay them what they're worth they'll stick around longer you're avoiding a time bomb that is ticking right now where they'll find out eventually and just rage quit

someday yeah i think it is in the company's best interest to pay someone a reasonable salary and not take advantage of them because they didn't ask for enough probably but i'm going to put myself in the shoes of the machine that was built to minimize expenditures do you think that you that this machine could string this person along and then when they raise the issue fix it then and keep them it depends on how long they get strung along it depends on how offended this person is by the fact that i mean maybe they know and they just feel like they they have to prove themselves before they ask for more maybe they think everybody makes like single digit dollars a year or something and that's just how it works everyone else just is fantastic at

sewing their own clothes and building their own cars from scratch wow your car runs so well i think there's a chance that they would quit but didn't you quit in this situation me yeah weren't you this guy or person or did you stay wasn't there some story i feel like you've told this story before where you found out you were underpaid or you you got a raise and you said it wasn't enough and then they tried to pay you more oh which of these stories was it i don't know i think you may have mixed three or four stories into one okay but i feel like there was a there was a time where a company tried to retain you and you you were gone already because partially because you were upset that they didn't pay you enough

earlier right well yeah maybe that played a little bit into it but i don't think i don't i do know the story you're talking about and it was a situation where i asked for a certain amount of money and they said no and they offered me about a fourth of the delta from my salary to the next to the level i was asking for so about a month later i quit and they immediately came up with a new offer that just happened to be what i had asked for previously and yeah it kind of just showed me that even though they said they couldn't they actually could under the right incentives so i don't know about adoption i assume that there's some incentive to show stable employment so there might be a problem with switching jobs that this person doesn't have

that option yeah it could be it could be good news just like the employer doesn't care that this person's trying to adopt someone so that they don't have to pay you more. They also don't care that you're trying to, this person is trying to adopt someone. So you're not actually going to take a competing offer from another company. Like you could just go out and interview and get an offer and then try and use that to negotiate. Yeah. That's one thing. Now, man, it's really a bummer. I know how much you love that. Oh, the slime ball technique. Yep. Yeah. You know, i'm i'm starting to hate that less and less it's just so darn effective you're fighting slime with slime i mean yeah well in this case definitely right yeah this is such a complicated situation

there are so many variables here where if you just removed one of them it would be so much easier like for example if if the adoption thing weren't on the table easier situation yeah just go get a job maybe it's the one you still have but they pay you more right if this person who's asking wasn't a manager. Easy situation. But now this person is aligned with the machine that's causing the problem. Yeah, it's rough. I mean, I feel like you have to make the financial case for why it makes sense to pay them a going rate. Salary adjustments are a thing that companies do sometimes. And it's a time bomb that's going to go off someday. It will. It will. And you do have a risk there. And it will be if they choose to leave because they find out how egregiously

underpaid they've been then it will it will definitely cost you a lot more than you've saved is my guess and you could probably make that case it's very expensive to hire people i've been holding this thought in my back pocket and i didn't want to say it but i think i will if you weren't a manager this would be an easier course of action to pursue but since you are this is kind of in conflict of interest territory but if you feel really strongly about this here's what i would do and i oh gosh even just saying this out loud i don't know if i would do that but you you kind of made a joke about dropping salary information in front of them i would go to them and one option you could do here is go to them and say look you are severely

underpaid and here's how much you need to be making to be on par with where you're performing the only way to get this money is to threaten to quit and if i go to management and say i have a flight risk here i'm gonna i risk losing this person unless we pay them x right now they you know they're ready to go to another company that's the only way right and so let's let's work on that together you know and maybe you do this off the record i don't know see that like just just even saying this out loud you could get fired for doing that as a manager and that's why this is such a complicated situation yeah you could i'm pretty sure it's sharing salary information is legally protected in the united states though so they would have to tell you it's for something

else i guess which is not impossible but i don't know i i feel like i like making people happy and companies are not people so i would be more inclined to try to suggest to this person that they are underpaid and here's some escalating sequences of actions that they could take to try and rectify them it is a lot easier to get a raise if your manager really really really believes that you're worth it yeah yeah i was a little unclear whether this person actually reports to the question asker or if it's like someone that was hired on another team but if they report to you i think that also makes it hard but at the same time easy because yeah i was gonna say you're supposed to go to bat for him but if it was some other team member you could do the surreptitious

thing a little bit better yeah that is such a tricky line to walk but i do think they've already gone to management and said i want to pay them more and management has straight up said no so now you don't have that option that's off the table we should leave them there for as long as they're comfortable there that's just such a such a soulless phrase yeah as long as they are comfortable double speak yeah they're comfortable don't disturb their comfort i don't know i mean quit your job always applies so that's the universal answer you could quit this job and go get a different one where you don't have to work with somebody who's dramatically underpaid i don't know i think i think it would be worth well i was about to say i think it'd be worth

raising the issue more strongly yeah but then the risk there is if you raise the issue more strongly with management and they still say no and then mysteriously this person comes in and says hey i found out i make half of what all the other junior engineers make there will be some pointed looks going towards you yes yes oh yeah how did you find this out yeah so you either i think you have to go one track or the other you have to either go all in on convincing management to pay this person more or you have to go under the table and i think if you go all in one option you could do is you could play the the finance card like you just described which is basically this is financially not in our best interest to do this to keep them low or you could try to appeal to

their humanity and say you are a bunch of scumbags for paying this person so little you know you know they're worth more and you are extorting labor from them and just try it in my experience that approach you know you win more you catch more flies with honey than vinegar that's one of those But it could work if you've already tried the other approach and it didn't. The other one is, this is potentially a wild success, right? This is a person without a ton of experience. They started at a low rate to make up for the fact that it was a risky hire from the company's part.

Yep. And then if this ends up as, right now it's half of a good story, where they succeeded wildly and the company is the bad guy and is taking advantage of them. If it turns out to be a pipeline to success, then that's a thing you can use for recruiting. like that's that's a thing a ton of companies are looking for how do we identify junior developers or junior engineers and and bring them in well and if you don't adjust the compensation of this person it turns into a more of a predatory thing of like how do we take advantage of these rubes or these people that don't have a lot of options yeah and i'll tell

you that technique the the first one you mentioned the success story turned good that does work i've seen that work where you can go to your company and say this person we they were a risky hire we took the risk it paid off we got them for cheap for a long time they've de-risked the situation now we need to we need to bring the compensation up to to account for that de-risking that took place and by the way to hire someone who's pre-de-risked in other words who walks in with the pedigree and the credentials we'd have to pay them a lot more than we're going to bring this person up to so the replacement cost is high and i and i think that that should work and if that doesn't work you need you might want to consider a new employer because you work for scumbags

yeah especially given that this is a well-funded startup that's in like hyper growth mode this money means nothing to the company the amounts we're talking about here wait why do you know it's well-funded in hyper growth mode oh it's something i edit something i edited out was that it's a well-funded yeah oh yeah that totally changes it yeah if they have a fridge full of startup water that costs more than this person's salary then you got to tip that fridge over in a rage that's the only option like yeah if they have money this is what it's for it's not for their hammock beanbag chair massage combination things a hanging beanbag massage chair

it's the ultimate it's the ultimate startup perk that's how i know i've made it forget the corner office in the sky rides oh my gosh that's so all right have we answered the question i think so let's read our next question your turn i think i will read it this is from an anonymous listener i recently joined a new company hooray and even more exciting i'm engaged double hooray previously i've focused heavily on my career progression and decided what a good job for me was based on my selfish reasons like more pay now my priorities are shifting towards family first and i've been looking into any parental benefits the company may offer unfortunately there are none is it worth looking around for a company that will provide better parental benefits

and child care days huh congratulations on your new job and your i guess they're not new your your new relationship with the same person that you've had a relationship with before your new your new level of commitment pre congratulations on your upcoming wedding that's right yeah that's cool i don't think there's anything wrong with saying so quit your job is always an option to repeat the advice from the last question yeah you can just say i mean there are companies with great parental leave policies oh yeah i think netflix famously has a year of parental leave paid paid yeah paid parental leave good heavens that's a lot it is my company has 12 weeks which sounded like an outrageously large amount of time until i used it and then seemed like a good amount

yeah yeah i mean these are i think expectations are changing a little bit and companies are starting to use these to incentivize and attract talent not just because the government said they had to or i don't know somebody like a high enough person in the org chart wanted parental leave or something like it's i think the the momentum is behind this so i don't think it's wrong for you to say, yeah, I want this and you don't have it here. But another option besides quitting your job is turn this job into a job that has parental leave. You can push for this stuff. Okay. Someone usually does when it first starts, right? Like they don't have leave, then they have it. Something had to happen. So this could be you. You could be patient zero on parental leave. You could be

patient zero. It depends a lot on the culture of the company and you might be opening yourself up to a lot of risk if you work at a horrible place and say you're a woman who's pregnant or something we don't know the gender of this person but if they're evil then they'll say like oh we can't have a woman who has a baby because then she'll quit and not want to work here anymore and it'll be a waste of time so you might find out some values from your company very clearly right it's it's a great way to get a clear picture of what your company actually wants to do and it's like It's like you can't ask someone, are you evil? But you can say, will you give me parental leave and then see how they react.

Yeah. And if they say no, because it wouldn't be worth it because then you'll quit afterwards because that's what we think moms do. Then you say, what about now? What if I quit now? Yeah, they're out there. They're definitely out there. By they're out there, I mean, well, evil is out there for sure.

But good parental policies are out there. Yeah. And this is something that has changed a lot over the course of my career. So I've been in the industry now for about 20 years, depending on how you measure. And I had never heard of, A, parental leave for fathers, first of all, and B, 12 weeks. That's a ton of time off. Now it's commonplace. In fact, most companies that I've seen recently offer that.

And I had a lot of kids over the last 20 years, and I kind of feel like I'm owed something now. you're owed like teenager rearing leave or something for for my like for one of my children i i think i took enough leave to go to the hospital with my wife deliver the baby and then went to work like the next day oh my gosh yeah so yeah i feel like i'm owed something okay well maybe this listener can tell you what company it's for and then you can be the advocate for them oh so i have to give even more now hey i know i haven't ever worked for you but just the universe owes me this leave so i would like you to pay me to not work there for 12 weeks and then i'll go back to not working there for free think of the bargain it'll be for you when i stop taking my

parental leave you'll save a ton of money yeah i don't think this is wrong at all i mean life events happen and they change priorities pretty regularly and i think it's fine to say i don't think you've made some solemn pact to stay at this job for forever despite them not giving you what you feel like is important to you now yeah definitely so now is it worth looking around for another company that will provide better parental leave if you choose to do this which i think is absolutely fine i mean it is like the theme song of our show to go looking for other jobs if you choose to do it try to find out the leave policy outside of the interview process and let me explain what i mean by that if your main motivation in changing jobs is all around

work-life balance and that becomes the main thing you talk about the questions you ask all the interviewers is all about that it can bode poorly for your prospects at that company it can make you look like i'm just looking for a job that i can come and not do right i'm looking to not do a lot of work yeah will that be okay yeah what kind of culture do you have in terms of not working so try to find all that information out on the sidelines before you dive in and then you can just jump into the interview process and put your absolute best foot forward and it's hard though because you want to ask these questions in the interview from actual people who work there and say yeah i know on paper that your company says you have a nice parental leave policy and child

care days but do you actually take those you know and that's a question you want to ask try to find another vector for asking those questions yeah that's a good point there have been a lot of unused parental leave days at companies across the world so the the policy and practice is important too yes yeah i don't think it's ever a bad thing to have an insider at the company that you're you're evaluating for working there oh yeah this is a very specific case of where it's really helpful not just for recommending you but getting this sneak preview inside it i had a friend put me in touch with somebody who had just come off of parental leave at a company and they described both like how they approached taking it and also what the culture was around the company

at it and it left me with a very positive impression of like yeah this person took it it was great it was celebrated it had no negative repercussions whatsoever in their work and it had very positive effects on their life and i feel like i i would trust them to do that for me too if i went to that same company awesome so that's the other universal advice besides quit your job is find someone who already works there so you can ask them questions and then use it to ask about parental leave yes there's so much more than just quitting your job yeah you have to do this first before you quit your job i also wonder if in some ways remote is better for child care and in some ways it's worse it's better in that there's more flexibility and it's worse in that

they can blend together a lot more than they used to be able to where before if you needed child care and you had to go to an office then you had to have daycare or send your child to someone else to watch and now you can sort of try and juggle them both at the same time and it sucks and it's really hard and you can't do them well unless you're superhuman. So I think my point is you might think, oh, I can just work remote and take care of an infant. And if you can, then I look forward to you leading the country as president one day because you are pretty talented. You're unstoppable. It's going to be hard. Oh, that's another point. You look for jobs, selfish, more pay. You can

just use money instead of your own time and pay someone else to raise your child. like 1800s aristocracy or something yeah the wet nurse or whatever yeah yeah your kid would just disappear until it could speak full sentences to you until it could support you with its own income exactly yeah money can solve all problems that's true and it doesn't create any new ones no well we better tell our last question asker that yeah i think their company thinks it's going to create a bunch of new problems for him yep all right have we answered the question i think so good luck this is a great question these are two really interesting questions actually that i'm still kind of reeling over the other one it's just oh it's such a catch-22 okay we should stop

answering questions all right i declare the questions answered what can people do if they want their own questions answered dave go to softskills.audio and click ask a question thank you so much to everyone who's done that we get so many questions we really appreciate every single one we will eventually answer all of them and if you want to support the show go to softskills.audio and click support us on patreon we love you catch you next week