Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 254: Code makes my body hurt and level madness

Episode Date: March 29, 2021

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Questions Hi I just listened to your most recent podcast and you mentioned having gone to hand therapy for what I assume is something like repetitive strain injury. It would be great if you could talk about this, I assume lots of engineers have issues with aching arms and hands. Or, to phrase it as a question “my hands often ache after coding for hours. I can no longer work in bed on a laptop or my hands ache for a few days. what did you find out at hand therapy?” Cheers! I am at a large (non FAANG) tech company. We have salary levels/bands. My entire team was laid off, and I was offered a job that is three bands higher with another team. They said usually they would not hire someone of my level, but since they had worked with me before and I was a heavy individual contributor they were willing to interview me for this senior position. By the end of the process they decided I was the most qualified candidate and offered me the job. They don’t want to increase my level at all. This is displeasing to me. I was the most qualified candidate, why not offer me the higher level as well? If an external candidate was the most qualified, they would have offered that person the higher level. Unfortunately, I believe that since I did not negotiate on my initial offer when entering the company my perceived worth is tied to my compensation and low seniority level. How do I broach that I think this is unfair (or that they should increase my salary)? As additional information, I was given a raise by the previous team’s manager of 20k in January as I found out I was the least compensated on the team by 30k and I got upset at my boss because only about half the team had ever made a commit to any repo and most have no understanding of OOP. Perhaps this is why the team was cut. I feel my company might find it weird to see my salary increase twice in one year and reject for that reason. I feel you’re going to tell me to quit and find another job, but I have worked with the new team and can attest that they are kind, smart, have good engineering practices, and are given a lot of attention because they do AI, so it’s not an opportunity I want to miss out on. Thanks, love your show, it’s like car talk for the 21st century. Show Notes Voice Driven Development: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YKuRkGkf5HU Patrick McKenzie’s article on salary negotiation: https://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/01/23/salary-negotiation/

it takes more than producing technical debt at 10x the rate to be a great engineer this is soft skills engineering episode 254 i'm your host dave smith i'm your host jamison dance soft skills engineering is a weekly advice podcast for software developers of all rates from 1 to 10 we cover the full range we're a full spectrum advice show yeah and what that rate is like the number is clear but the the thing you're producing at that rate is is left as an exercise to the listener yeah at your discretion maybe it's docs maybe it's bugs maybe it's office gossip yeah office gossip yeah that'd be good maybe it's uh like team reshuffles yeah maybe it's layoffs maybe it's stories that people remember yeah not not user stories but actual stories

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this comes from an anonymous listener who says hi i just listened to your most recent podcast and you mentioned having gone to hand therapy for what i assume is something like repetitive strain injury it would be great if you could talk about this i assume lots of engineers have issues with aching arms and hands or to phrase it as a question my hands often ache after coding for hours i can no longer work in bed on a laptop or my hands ache for a few days what did you find out at hand therapy cheers hand therapy made my brain think of like hand boarding school or like hand reform school and then i thought of like your hand can only make obscene gestures and it has to go that's to go to a therapist camp yeah go to yeah hand uh what's the word um like cotillion or like

a behavior school what do they call those oh i think i know what you're talking about they're all they all sound kind of horrible yeah if you're famous and you go to one then you get to write a memoir about how it ruined your life afterwards basically yeah and if you're not famous and you go to one you could get famous for writing a memoir about how it ruined your life it's called hand finishing school that's what finishing school okay yeah yeah it maybe it helps you gesture eloquently yeah so you know lots about this i know nothing about this i'm ready to just sit back and and listen i am an expert in hand pain but you've got you've had other body pains too right yeah that's true i have had some back pain that's mostly been self-inflicted from either

okay i'm gonna sit down like i sit probably an hour a day my butt is as far off the edge of the chair as is possible and my back is at maybe a like a a 45 degree angle with the chair okay my neck is at a 90 degree angle or like your neck is straight up against the chair okay yeah so like yeah i will spend an hour or more a day in this position your body makes like a like a wicked z shape in your chair it does yeah and someday it's gonna kill me i know one day you're gonna stand up and you literally can't change the shape of your neck and back from that position yeah but it will have been worth it because think of all the code yeah it is like my hunker down and get stuff done position sometimes

i just gotta think really hard by contorting myself in this horribly painful way that's right clearly clearly your brain well i you know what's happening here is you're cutting off blood flow to all the other organs in your body except your brain eliminate the non-essentials like my digestive system yeah heart exactly my heart that blood straight to the brain well i guess it can't cut the heart off because well well you only anyways you only need half your circulatory system and that's the half that goes to your brain yeah we need the lungs and the heart but those parts only send blood to the brain right the legs and arms they can all just die can die yeah uh and that's how i produce my greatest

work so the worst uh like repetitive stress related pain i've ever had is when i played a lot of dota i'm talking like two to three hours a day this was several years ago when i was much less wise uh and and better at video games are those things on a on a trade-off continuum where they're like inversely related yeah i think so okay i just wanted to make sure yeah yeah but i i would finish a game and notice oh i have this agonizing pain in my like upper back and then i would start again and it would disappear because i would try to slay the bad guys but you found the treatment apparently yeah it's play more video games so that i don't notice it and then the next day when i sit down at work be in unbearable pain apparently your work doesn't

provide you with a dopamine response that video games do no it does not it doesn't hide the pain as well i i think it was something to do with like how tense i was sitting while i was playing and when i stopped playing and spent even more time sitting in front of the computer it seemed to go away so that's my tip spend even more time in front of the computer sit like a z the other thing i've hurt my back on is exercise which is supposed to help you but i was betrayed by i foolishly thought i would only be helped by trying to lift way more than i possibly could and right then it hurt a little bit and i thought that's weird better keep going and just gotta push through yeah it turns out it hurt way more yeah there's a theme here because the only time

i felt good when my back was really hurt was when i was sitting down working like standing up hurt laying down hurt sitting on my computer in a z shape did not hurt very badly so um i think my my hot tips are just sit down longer don't exercise okay because you could hurt yourself and yeah and then it'll be good okay now i'm just wondering like if we lost every single one of our 20 something audience members oh this show is two old guys talking about body pain yeah from things that actually that's the other secret tip it's be young doesn't matter for most people that's right i'll write that one down okay stop getting old yeah be in your 20s and then this is perfect because it really it aligned so well with our other philosophy

which is called no bugs driven development yeah just don't write bugs and don't age revolutionary physical therapy methodology of be young and healthy it's perfect okay i mean that's good advice let me tell you about my problems okay tell me it all started on one late evening sitting on my macbook pro with my palms pressed deep into the cold aluminum the rough edge of the corner of the MacBook Pro digging into my skin. You were wrenching those bits out of the ether like you had to get a good firm stance. Yeah what I found though was the tighter you squeeze the more the bits just slip through your fingers. Oh no. Anyway hunkered down hunched over my laptop screen no exterior monitor. I remember it was a Christmas break so you know it was like

the holiday season in the U.S. between Christmas and New Year's and I just wanted to get ahead on some things so i did a bunch of late nights hunkered over my computer i spent a bunch of time laying in bed and the bed position is like the prone z but it's more i guess it's more like a w where it's like laying on your back neck and head propped up unnaturally with pillows so you can look forward with hands kind of like a t-rex you know like squished up to your chest and just barely poking out from the front of your sternum with your laptop sitting on your stomach and chest and propped up with a pillow behind it to keep you warm oh yeah for sure and just typing in this totally natural ergonomic position as our caveman ancestors jumped it on the planes

the way the body was designed it's like paleo coding anyway and then what you learn in this position is that it's comfortable it feels good and then as long as you never ask your body to leave this position you're fine what i found was in doing this so i had neck pain back pain but mostly hand pain from just spending too much time with my hands just on this laptop and you know that these laptops have straight keyboards and so and they're close together so like your hands can become close together is what i mean so what ends up happening is you're contorting your wrists outward while bringing them your hands close together and typing like that for long periods of time

jacked my wrists up and it got so bad that i would be laying in bed at night and my palm would just have this shooting pain that would wake me up in the middle of the night like it was it was pretty severe and here's what i learned if you have hand pain like this for about five years straight so badly that it wakes you up at night one strategy for dealing with it is just to ignore it and that pain will never go away maybe by year six yeah i know magic year i did stop testing at year five so i don't know maybe it's like a halting problem right like eventually the pain may go away yeah that's true but you don't know so anyway that was the dumbest it was just dumb i'm waiting for the you're like and there's an there's an and coming right i got i kind of just

got nostalgic and i'm just sitting here looking at the palms of my hands i'm wondering why I did that to myself. Anyway, so I did eventually go see a therapist like an occupational therapy therapist who treats Repetitive stress injuries and this of course is painful Because you have to go to your regular doctor and tell them that your hands hurt really bad And then they'll write you a note that says you can now go see this special doctor that you can go tell that your hands hurt really bad and then that special doctor will look at your hands and say Show me how you use your computer and i'll be like, okay

I opened up a computer put my hands on it and she was like, oh boy you're doing this all wrong and literally she goes okay take your palms well did you take offense at that and and show her the code that you'd written excuse me look how fast this is have you seen how how good my code can reverse a string like do you even know what fizzbuzz is huh i don't come in and tell you that you're prescribing medication all wrong so she goes she literally walks over and goes hmm and she just says why don't you take your palms up off the laptop and have them kind of float in the air and type that way and i was like well i just wasted a whole copay on

you know sure enough that's all it was i just had to take my palms up into the air so that instead of resting my palms on the cold aluminum of the macbook pro i just need to float them in the air so that my fingertips are touching and nothing else and it fixed it it was that simple five years of pain and all fixed i i think there is a pretty wide spectrum though of some stuff like that where it's very clearly you're doing this simple thing wrong and then there are some much more complicated issues some of which are maybe underlying health conditions some of i don't know maybe your body is just shaped in a way that is that is worse for sitting at a desk all day or something so that's why doctors exist so you can go ask them about that stuff but i have

a another example there's a great talk on youtube called voice driven development by this engineer who codes completely with her voice and i believe it was because of repetitive stress injury hand pain and and i think she was unable to solve it or make it go away completely and her way around this was just totally optimize her workflow to a very impressive degree so that she can be effective at manipulating code just by talking and i encourage you to watch it even if you don't care at all about even if you're still in your 20s pain from sitting down is a exactly just a a myth that old people tell you um that's right it's pretty wild so there's a lot of solutions some of which are like fix the problem with your body sometimes that's hard to do or or you don't know what the

problem is and yeah you can go further we'll link it in the show notes it's a really good talk yeah i remember watching that that was really cool i wonder if by using your voice you could contort your body into even more unnatural positions because now your hands don't have to be in front of you yeah okay so you could you could like this would be good because often when i'm programming i feel the urge to huddle into the fetal position but that does make it hard to type but now perfect I can finally do it now you can do fetal driven development yeah that's true neonatal coding yeah so that's not super helpful advice besides I guess I'm saying it can get way worse than what you described Dave and maybe you have to give up using your hands completely I don't know that

feels like a downer when I say it that way the boring stuff that I don't do I mean just be healthy right like exercise and yeah walk around that's what I was going to say next is that there There came a point in my life where exercise, the pain of not exercising exceeded the pain of exercising. So now I exercise regularly because if I don't, it hurts really bad. And I think that day probably comes for many people and sometimes they can mask the pain with video games, but not always. Play more video games to mask the pain.

Yeah, RSI is no joke though. Your hands, moving your workflow completely to voice-driven development is a pretty big change. and i'm sure has some short-term productivity hits at least if not long-term so if you can solve the underlying problem by preventing it that's probably worth investing some time definitely your hands make you a lot of money if you're a developer that's true and that was my biggest fear when i was laying in bed at night with this severe hand pain i was like oh my gosh like this is my livelihood it kind of hit me for the first time in my life that i might not be able

to do my job because we yeah there's very little that can stop a programmer from doing their job you know it's not like the nfl where you you know you might blow out a knee in one game and your career's over the risks aren't like that but it can it was it was stressful but i guess my only real advice is don't put up with pain for long periods of time because i think the vast majority of repetitive stress pain is fixable with the right with the right techniques it probably gets worse the longer you put up with it too right yeah there's a possibility you are doing more and more damage if you stick with it longer there's this thing i'm doing in my life that's causing me pain and i think if i just keep doing it maybe the pain will go away that was my strategy

for five years that's sort of like the startup narrative though right you just gotta push yeah work harder and and be driven to to move through the obstacles next thing you know you're theranos it all started when she had some repetitive stress pain in her hands i thought wouldn't a fake blood test i'll go recall my venture capital friends right now all right well have we answered that question definitively oh and by the way we uh we should we should clarify we are not doctors but we are space doctors once you leave low earth orbit then uh then we can help you out yep it turns out contorting yourself into a z-shape is the cure in space which is why you were so confused due to cosmic rays and yeah things things that are complicated

and that i can't say because they're so complicated right i'm gonna read the next question okay this is from another anonymous listener i am at a large non-fang tech company non-fang is non-facebook apple amazon netflix google and sometimes microsoft gets smushed in there yeah even though it's not part of the acronym microsoft is like the the silent y the silent m the silent m and fang yeah we have salary levels slash bands my entire team was laid off and i was offered a job that is three bands higher with another team they said usually they would not hire someone of my level but since they had worked with me before and i was a heavy individual contributor they were willing to interview me for this senior position by the end of the process they decided i was the

most qualified candidate and offered me the job they don't want to increase my level at all oops this is displeasing to me yeah i was the most qualified candidate why not offer me the higher level as well if an external candidate was the most qualified they would have offered that person the higher level unfortunately i believe that since i did not negotiate on my initial offer when entering the company my perceived worth is tied to my compensation and low seniority level how do i broach that i think this is unfair or that they should increase my salary as additional information i was given a raise by the previous team's manager of 20k in january as i found out i was the least compensated on the team by 30k and i got upset at my boss because

only about half the team had ever made a commit to any repo and most have no understanding of oop which stands for object oriented programming perhaps this is why the team was cut i feel my company might find it weird to see my salary increase twice in one year and reject for that reason i feel you're going to tell me to quit and find another job well come on how presumptuous yes sorry i've worked with a new team and can attest that they are kind smart have good engineering practices and have and are given a lot of attention because they do ai so it's not an opportunity i want to miss out on thanks love your show it's like car talk for the 21st century you can say anything and then say it's like car talk for the 21st century and we'll probably

read your question yes that's probably true that was one of our models honestly so it worked i guess finally finally yeah there's a lot here there is a lot here oh man my mind is swirling with all the big company dysfunction that went on to make this situation come to be a team where half of the people have never made a commit i mean i'm assuming that that's bad because their job is to write code if they're not yeah developers then that's probably okay but right that would explain partially why they were laid off have no understanding of oop i can guarantee that's not why they were laid off yeah let this be a lesson though to always learn object-oriented programming or else you're the first on the chopping block when layoffs come

yeah i mean maybe that contributed to it but the manager or whoever made this decision did not think who knows the least about oop in this org i'm gonna divide you all into two rooms imperative functional programming and object-oriented programming if it means they don't know how to build software then that could be part of why they don't write commits ever but yeah that's the bigger one to me like oh we hired you to write code and build this application and you haven't done it well not sure what i'm paying you for yep hmm here's what i theorize happened here the team was laid off you were kept for some reason probably because you listen to this podcast sorry that was just too funny that's like the dumbest thing i've ever

said okay you were kept and they found a position for you that they thought would be a good fit but it was three pay bands higher than your current band that can double your compensation by the way depending on yeah levels like that's a pretty big jump yeah three three levels is huge especially at a big company although it depends there are some companies like like microsoft that has like they have like 60 levels or something so yeah it could be that three is actually only like two percent of the of the band i think in my company there are 10 levels yeah i've never talked to anybody in the top two levels so effectively there are eight and i've also never talked to anybody in the bottom two levels yeah so there really are six so yeah three levels is like

halfway through the the practical band or practical range yeah it's like the entire known universe as far as you're concerned yeah basically i mean halfway through the entire known universe anyway that's exactly the reaction i had because of the big mega co i worked at it was the same kind of thing there were 12 levels but functionally there were like seven for engineers and maybe even less if i moved up three levels i would be a person that i currently have never talked to right i would i would enter this fabled realm of yes people who only exist in the abstract figure figureheads on a corporate directory and sometimes email but whose voices are unknown and unknowable yep there would be an email sent out from the ceo saying we have hired this person

into this new role yes that's how you know you've achieved the the heights yes so i think we should probably assume that three levels here is not the same three levels that you and i are calibrated on because that's wild yeah i mean maybe there was an opening for that level and then they couldn't fill it with someone at that level i don't know there is something weird going on here though because that is confusing yeah they currently still have a job at their team where everyone else was laid off right now a team of one is that what's going on or i don't know were they laid off as well and this is their chance to like stay at the company i think that i think that's what's happening yeah if that's the case then you have very little power to negotiate you can ask and

they can say no and then you can say well i still want to keep working so so i accept okay yeah i accept you the thing that i previously said was unacceptable yeah yeah if this is like like get laid off or work in this role then then you can all you can do is ask and yeah be prepared to hear a no so what i would like to focus on is when you ask what do you say to make this more likely to come down the way you want and first of all i i'm latching on to a word that was in the question which was the word is unfair how do i broach that i think this is unfair I would never broach a conversation like this by saying it's unfair because I don't think your company or most companies, for that matter, care if something is fair or unfair. There are exceptions to that rule.

We're seeing a lot of motion in fairness in certain realms, but I'm guessing this doesn't apply to you. Often unfair means like good value for the company, too. Yes, that's right. That's right. Exactly. So you're now labeling something that they consider to be good as bad. So that's where you need to get aligned is you need to produce alignment on the value they're getting for the cost and speak that language instead of saying, well, this seems unfair to me. And they're like, well, this seems great to me. let's find something that seems great to both of us and yeah this is this is what negotiation is all about is understanding what's motivating them and of course what's motivating them is to try to extract as much value from you as they can while paying as little as they can and that's that's

fine i mean that's what that's what we all do all the time when we're doing everything and that's why i have no friends the instant my utility to dave drops below the threshold gone you're on you're on the street you're on the curb oh yeah you'll know because that'll the last episode before that will have will be the last episode ever yeah exactly this is how you know i'm a good person because at those casual fast food restaurants where they don't do anything but they still ask you for a tip i still tip them i don't think about the world this way dave you are so good i know everything about you is good it's amazing yep okay so the way that i would approach this negotiation and understand everything is negotiable even at mega codes it just doesn't

matter of how high up the ladder you're gonna have to go to get someone to put their name next to a checkbox to say that they've signed off on it what you need to figure out is what do they have to lose i mean if you decide not to take this opportunity but you are the most qualified position, they're going to have to fall back to someone else. And odds are based on your description that that someone else is more expensive. And so the way that I would couch this is I would say, how much would you be willing to pay someone else who comes and do this job? And there's an answer for that. And you could say, well, I want to get there or I want to get halfway there, or I want to plan to get there in the next six months. That's how I would approach

it. That makes sense. And I would not use the word unfair. I mean, what if they say the amount that we are paying you right now? Oh, and then you find out that that's what, then I think maybe you need to go study your hr guideline because it sounds like maybe you don't quite have an understanding of how the system works here at this company yeah do you think it's worth digging into the the levels thing of you were you had an opening that was much higher level than than the role you're offering me and and i think i'm qualified for that i have found that big companies and i imagine james and you've had the same experience moving levels is much harder than adjusting your pay especially since a lot of these levels will have overlapping pay bands anyway yeah and the

reason it's hard is because when a crowd of people see that you've skipped two levels they will become upset and that will create more work for management i mean maybe it's not skip two levels but what if you what if you bump up one level yeah yeah this doesn't have to be all or nothing right yeah i like that you're totally right that sometimes there are carry-on effects from from promoting someone and some of them are good and some of them to the manager are bad which is like there's going to be i have to explain a bunch of times why because this person got promoted that doesn't mean that this other person gets promoted and so yeah there is a lot of calculation unfortunately beyond just are they doing the work that qualifies them for it it's like what is this going to do to

the perception of this level at the organization and and like what expectations will it set and exactly yeah managers worry about that stuff yeah and and at a large company those worries are multiplied by a large factor because it's not just one person who might be upset. It might be a thousand people. Yeah. Well, so far,

I still like your advice the best, Dave. It seems like they don't perceive your value the same way you do. So you need to demonstrate to them why that is different. If they can tell you, here's what we would pay to hire someone besides you,

then they're probably very nice or not very ruthless or I don't know. I'd be surprised if they just said, well, we'll pay you X, but really we would be willing to pay someone x plus 20 yeah and then you say please give me that instead that doesn't i don't know most companies this size don't reveal those numbers anyway by policy yeah so what do you do if if you can't get that information that directly well then that's when you take our second most

popular advice which is break into the hr department get past the ninjas who guard the secret filing cabinet that has all the pay bands in it under the cover of night and then figure out what it is through those means yeah that takes years of uh training and then just tell them i just know that the pay band is this yeah no but do not question how i know that many good soldiers gave their lives for me to get this information huh i feel a company might think it's weird to increase my salary twice in one year i don't know that they'll think it any i mean i think you should just look at it case by case and ignore the fact that you already got a salary increase this year yeah because that sounds like it was

a salary increase not a level change and if you treat this as i think i'm qualified for the next level up not three levels up necessarily or at all then that's a different conversation level changes at least in my experience have these automatic salary increases that don't have much to do with what your previous salary increases have been yeah that's true sort of right i mean well yeah i don't know i guess if you're like an outlier where you're way above or at the very top end of a pay band at one level then maybe it won't bump you much but it sounds like if if this person truly was as they say brought in lower than expected because they didn't negotiate then you might have a lot of wiggle room in your level to get your pay increase and at the end of the day

that's probably what this person wants just based on the question yeah you know the level is nice to have but if it's if you get the level increase but not the pay increase what's the point so yeah I would say you probably have some room for negotiation within your level. And another takeaway for me is always negotiate when you're applying for a job. Don't just take the first offer. It's so worth it. We need to link Patrick McKenzie's article once again here because here we are again with someone who didn't negotiate.

So I'm just going to go ahead and click on that, put it in the show notes. Okay. We need a keyboard shortcut that does that. Well, have we answered the question, Dave? I think so. Good luck. Fun conversation. Exciting conversation.

You can spend the weekend fretting about it and then go in on Monday. And tell us what happened. We'd love to hear. What can people do if they want to ask their own questions, Dave? Go to softskills.audio and click ask a question where you can fill out our form. And we just want to say thank you to so many people who do that every week. We really appreciate all your questions. And we promise to answer them all one day.

All right, catch you next week.