Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 257: Oops I didn't negotiate and really another raise question

Episode Date: April 19, 2021

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Questions I’m currently in my first job as a software engineer. Before working full time, I worked at the company as an intern, and during the last few weeks of my internship the engineering manager asked ““We want to bring you on full time. What are your salary expectations?”” Naive me, not wanting to cause any trouble, responded with a very moderate number. They give an offer that was 10% less, but with ““really good benefits,”” so I accepted. Just over one year later, I feel like I’ve proven my value to be substantially more than what I asked for, and I know I’m making 10-30% less than my peers. A couple weeks ago, I had my salary review, and rather than the management being open to negotiation (which is what I had expected going in) they just told me ““You’ll be making 4% more this year.”” After the meeting, I mentioned to my manager that I felt that the raise wasn’t representative of the value that I would be giving the company. He responded that they pay ““Within expected ranges for my job title and experience.”” I was a little hurt by this, because I want to be paid based on the value that I provide, not based on my title or experience. I don’t think I should quit the job, because I get along well with the team, enjoy my work, and they are paying for my master’s tuition on the side. What should I do? Hear ye hear ye, Gods of podcasts, I have a question for thees! I think my salary is ok, £60k (UK) and I’ve brought up the subject of raises a couple of times with my boss (2 years ago and 1 year ago) - both times I was told I’m doing pretty well but they’ll look into it. So far no sign of a raise but I’m not annoyed, I really like my job and the people I work with are great. I’m now on paternity leave and have taken the time to do some interviewing to see what’s out there and keep my skills sharp. Turns out I could earn a lot more! Who knew!? I’m now caught between going back to my boss with these other offers to say ““actually no, turns out I’m not doing great, gimmi more money”” or quitting my job for more money but a potentially worse job… help! How do I say ““more money please or I leave”” but nicely?

it takes more than advocating for pink mode as the new dark mode to be a great software engineer this is episode 257 of the soft skills engineering podcast i'm your host jameson dance i'm your host dave smith soft skills engineering is your weekly advice show for all the non-technical stuff around software development so i just got i noticed when i pulled up github today that it detected my operating system and it used dark mode and i was immediately unsatisfied with it you know like why i felt nothing i i thought it would fulfill me in some deep way like the thing that was holding me back in life i was looking forward to it so much and now i just on to the next palette yeah so you had a hole in your heart and you thought it was a dark mode shaped hole

but it turns out it was something else no this is yeah this is hedonic adaption for color themes for websites i guess on to pink mode yep surely surely that will give you the satisfaction that you so desperately crave we haven't hit the right mode yet just there's only so many there's a finite number of hex codes for colors yeah i mean what would be next after pink mode i feel like blue and orange mode would be interesting that's like the classic movie cover color combination to make stuff pop what if we just come full circle to light mode ah light mode as like a novel thing it's like ironically modern oh so kind of like the uh okay it's like ugly on purpose design but but like the same on purpose but called different design

right and the whole purpose is just to drive ad impressions somewhere someone is making money off of oh yeah not us though nope speaking of money do you want to thank our patrons that was as smooth of a segue as i've ever seen you do okay thank you yes i do want to thank our patrons all right this week we have shout outs for ira chan eric larko monkey face emoji jonathan king testing is documenting.org adrian boarding roman denisov fizzbuzz influencer oladapo fadi If you would like to join this crew, you can give us your entire retirement account at softskills.audio. Click support us on Patreon and then enter in the credentials to your stockbroker. i found out that david bowie sold royalty shares of his future earnings so maybe we could do

something like that like the highest patreon tier is is like 50 years from now when this podcast is taking over the earth you're paying for like a 0.1 share of the revenue stream or something like that yeah i like that and and we'll be dead 50 years from now i hope i'm not dead i mean that's 84 i could live is it 85 84 i'm 34 okay fine you can you can still be alive you can deal you can deal with this problem you've created yeah future jameson will solve this once he's old and wise yeah i need to need a little more wisdom and age and years under my built and i'm sure i can solve this problem i created 50 years ago i sold 100 million dollars of future podcast stock and i gotta come up with the money somehow but i got 50 years to come up

with it yeah uh if you'd like to join our slack community all you have to do is also go to patreon at soft skills.audio and click support us on patreon any dollar amount gets you an invite at the beginning of the month to our slack community where you can join hundreds of people who love chatting and have something in common which is making fun of us it's so good yeah there's worse things all right i think we have a follow-up story from an episode a few months back would you like to share this with us i would hey if you don't remember i was that ad agency guy from episode 237 and guess what i was able to take the patented soft skills advice of quitting my job and getting a new one mind you i had to look while working but given enough hard work and a bit of luck i

landed a new job and i'm starting this coming monday and at a product place i hope you're both doing well and i'm still an avid listener have a good one all right congrats i'm still waiting for someone to i feel like this is like a villain in a movie like they quit their job and tried to get a new one on our advice and it there's their life just spiraled downhill yeah angrily typing to us about how we messed it up i mean that those are all the follow-ups that we don't read on the air that's true yeah you have no way of knowing for every one positive story we get there's probably a hundred that we have to throw away that we're about how terrible it was to follow our advice in fact you have no way of knowing if this one is even real that's true just say whatever you

want into a microphone you can i've i thought maybe someone would stop me but they haven't not yet should we read our first question dave sure i shall okay this comes from an anonymous listener who says i'm currently in my first job as a software engineer before working full-time i worked at a company at the company as an intern and during the last few weeks of my internship the engineer manager asked we want to bring you on full time what are your salary expectations naive me not wanting to cause any trouble responded with a very moderate number they gave an offer that was 10 less than that but with quote really good benefits so so i accepted just over one year later i feel like i've proven my value to be substantially

more than what I asked for and I know I'm making 10 to 30 percent less than my peers well you know you're making 10 percent less at least a couple weeks ago I had my salary review and rather than the management be being open to negotiation which is what I had expected going in they just told me quote you'll be making four percent more this year after the meeting I mentioned to my manager that I felt that the raise wasn't representative of the value that I would be giving the company He responded that the pay, quote, was within expected ranges for my job title and experience. I was a little hurt by this because I want to be paid based on the value that I provide, not based on my title or experience.

I don't think I should quit the job because I get along well with the team, I enjoy the work, and they are paying for my master's tuition on the side. What should I do? What you shouldn't do is go into the salary discussion expecting it to be a negotiation. We've said this before, but that's like a few months too late to have anything happen, especially if it's a big company. That's all been in spreadsheets for months. Right.

And we have said this before, but this bears repeating. I don't think people understand just how early salary changes are decided. And let me just say, it's not when you walk through the door to get your salary review. I can see why this idea is attractive too, that if you're just smooth enough, if you have prepared enough you have the right arguments that you can just talk your way it's like it's like thinking you can go into a car dealership and if you're good enough at negotiation they'll just give you the car for free like there's some constraints there that that are immutable no matter how slick you are yeah no matter how tall you are and how perfect your hair

is yep the two keys to uh excellent negotiation skills that's right tall and good hair that is the stereotype so what uh what do you do is this going to be another time machine answer no i feel like i get one of those a month okay you already used april's time machine but if i had a time machine i could borrow from future months oh i'm starting to detect a theme here jameson yeah time machine won't work you're working for next comp cycle or an out-of-band compensation change yeah oh man this this actually sounds like my first job which was i joined a company well first of all i interviewed with the company got a job offer but the start date was a couple months out and between my interview and start date the company that i had interviewed with got

acquired by a huge company you know i was like well do i even have a job well yes i did so i went and started the job at the now huge company and the new huge company came in and said yeah we're gonna do raises a little differently which means better better for everyone right everyone gets more money right good news we're changing how raises work we just bought this little company and you know what we think none of you are paid enough yeah oh man that's like bizarro world anyway so no that is not what they said what they said was we're moving everyone to have their raises happen on the same month of the year regardless of how long you've been here which for me of course meant that i went like 18 months without my first raise because the date that they

picked i was like you know how in the american public school system how depending on your birthday you can be as much as almost a year younger or older than the other kids in the class yeah that's kind of how i felt here like i i was yeah i was off so anyway 18 months in and uh i did not know anything that i know now and i went into my salary review just like this question asker and sat down and they said look dave we're just really happy with your work uh we think you're doing great and that's why we're giving you a 3.5 percent raise and yes that is 0.5 percent higher than we gave other people in your position and uh do you want to know what i did you felt 0.5 percent better i felt so appreciated uh no jameson i quit my job and i got a 20 percent raise to do that

it's really hard to change this and i know you said you don't want to quit your job but that is that's the ultimate leverage you have right is i can go somewhere else like it's it's really hard for companies to reevaluate someone's value without taking into account how much they're already paying them and i don't know if it's i mean this is one of those cases where if we knew everything it'd be interesting to do some analysis to say like does it really cost them more it would it be cheaper to just give people raises that ask that think they're worth more or like overall is it still better for them somehow but either way the the vast majority of companies will just say like especially for junior developers they're kind of anchored at your early skill set and early

value and it's hard to change that trajectory even if you're improving and growing quite a bit yeah i know you don't like this i can't well i can't remember i know you have not liked this in the past but i mean market value is a is a powerful argument and bringing some data about what it would cost to hire someone with your skill set and ability is is a thing the other thing is a promotion if you feel like you are contributing well above your level and are and are very strong then maybe that means you're ready for the next level and that can be a time to do sort of a salary reset yeah although sometimes promotion salary changes are anchored by your current salary as well the reason a promotion might be a good option is because it it usually

can happen out of cycle so otherwise you might have to wait a whole year to get an adjustment but a promotion can maybe get you an adjustment before that yeah depending on the company those are sort of like two opposite approaches trying to get competing offers or market data and getting a promotion because one of them is is like pulling back from the company a little bit and saying well i could go these other places and the other one is almost doubling down and saying i am working really hard to to grow and and i want to be recognized for that so maybe you do both it's like the carrot and the stick i don't know i yeah your manager should know what kind of raise you're looking for and it shouldn't be a surprise that's that's like the key to yeah salary negotiations

and i think maybe that's what's really missing here is the person showed up and just said please sir may i have some more and yeah the answer was no i mean yes you can have four percent but what what they should be asking is i want this dollar amount this amount of money what do i need to do to get that and i think people they go into these negotiations actually not knowing what they want it's almost like christmas you're like i hope i get a good present from santa you know and it's like yeah that's fine if you don't care about maximizing your income which i think some people don't i don't want to poo-poo that that's great but yeah if you want to have a really great christmas you should give your friends and family a list which is a little bit uncouth in social and

family circles but in the in the workplace if you have something you want and it's a dollar amount or british pounds as we'll find out in our next question then just ask for it say the number your your boss is really comfortable with these numbers because your boss sees all the people's numbers you know so yeah just say the number you want and if your boss has a problem with that what are they going to do they're not going to fire you because you asked for too much money yeah i mean you got to know the constraints right maybe maybe it literally is impossible to to achieve that number yeah but how would you know if you don't ask for it yeah exactly or or maybe i mean maybe you'd have to switch teams or get a promotion or or yeah like you you just need to know how to help

your boss build the case for you that you are worth that much money and that takes a while and you want you want them to be your partner in this not like you said your your santa claus your benevolent fairy godmother just bestowing like magical gifts upon you yeah exactly uh have we answered the question i think so let's summarize you're way too late you uh should be talking about specific numbers well in advance of the salary review and odds are you're gonna have to quit this job to get the number you want yeah i mean i'm sure it happens sometimes but i just the the vast majority of salary raise like i got more money discussions are coming i've heard come from quitting your job so yes that's that's what the money's for i know you really like the

place you're in and and that's why it's a hard decision because you might be trading more money for worse other stuff could be good other stuff too i don't know could be or it could be very very bad in which case you can come back with your tail between your legs to your previous job and say i'm sorry sir four percent was enough for me more you want some more well i mean thinking so the precedent is they negotiated you down last time you gave a number so it's possible that if you came back they would say yeah you got to take a pay cut to come back just to prove you want it yeah just to rub your face in the dirt a little bit yeah just to prove that you're not ever going to do this money thing again yeah yeah know your

place i don't think that will happen next question i'm gonna read it i'm not gonna ask i'm gonna do it i'm feeling bold okay you have my permission anyway even though you didn't ask for it no i don't nope i did it before you gave me permission here you hear you gods of podcasts i have a question for these it's actually a question for the let me correct your old english grammar i think my salary is okay 60k in the pounds in the uk and i have brought up the subject of raises a couple of times with my boss two years ago and one year ago both times i was told i'm doing pretty well but they'll look into it so far no sign of a raise but i'm not annoyed i really like my job and the people i work with are great i'm now on paternity leave and have taken the time to do some

interviewing to see what's out there and keep my skills sharp it turns out i could earn a lot more who knew i'm now caught between going back to my boss with these other offers to say actually turns out i'm not doing great give me more money or quitting my job for more money but a potentially worse job help how do i say more money please or i leave but nicely i like that are we allowed to make fun of british politeness is that i don't know is that okay okay i just didn't know is that a trait well i just love how i don't know like formality i guess is that what you mean you know i you know what i think i'm mixing up two cultures here i think i'm mixing up canadian culture and british culture so sorry great now i just made fun of both cultures do they both have the same queen

makes sense that's the direction your brain is making that culture just flows from the top yeah yeah no i'm just thinking i just like the final question here how do i say more money please or i leave but nicely i love it say please twice please more money please or i leave and then that cancels out the threat at the end two pleases cancels one threat yeah okay got it so good job you have brought up the subject of raises for a while now right like that's you're not just showing up in the salary discussion and saying i would like more please you're already taking some of the advice we gave our past question asker and also you're taking some of the other advice which is you you went out and got market data so now you know you know what you could go make i think

you can make a case to this company why it's in their best interest to pay you more in a way that doesn't sound very threatening even if they i don't know even if it is a threat i guess under under the hood but you can just tell them this like i want to stay here it's costing me like i like working here i like the impact i have and the work i do and and my boss here's how much money it's costing me and and i'm having a hard time putting up with that cost like how can you make it easier for me to to stay here and i gotta say a couple years ago maybe five years wait a minute when did we start this show has it been five years uh 257 divided by 52 yeah five years holy cow oh my goodness first of all oh my goodness episode one was march 7 20 we missed

our five-year anniversary jameson what it was march 7th oh that's how i roll on this not the first time that just crept on by and no one even noticed well see you at six years yeah maybe no we have to we remember okay well anyway anniversary the reason i was thinking back is that my perspective on this question has evolved over the last few years maybe even over the last five years and one month and one week and that is that i used to think it was a super scumbag slimeball move to go out on the market and get offers only to then shop them back to your employer to say give me a raise to meet these and i've just kind of stopped thinking that i don't know what changed about it why i don't know you became a slime ball

i guess it just kind of occurred to me that like we're not really in this we don't program for money as a job just because that was very poorly worded um wait you hang on dave i i get paid have you been working for free this whole time so my yes my perspective changed when i got my first paycheck last year but i think i just i think for a lot of years i thought of you know the missionary versus mercenary analogy yeah where people who are mercenaries well you're just in it for the money you don't have any heart you have no soul yeah the people with all the equity want missionaries it turns out right yeah anyway i guess i just was kind of on the missionary side like look you got

to be loyal but but i've realized that your work environment has a lot to offer you as a worker and the financial compensation you get for doing work is a big part of that pie and i think for me that part has become more important as my children have gotten older and more expensive and more expensive yeah so but i guess i feel like it's not for me like i'm a slime ball for the children their lego habit is not cheap yes tell you what oh yeah legos are the most expensive plastic huh okay well i think i agree with you i mean they're looking for how to save money all the time right and and especially if it's a big company there could be these wide sweeping changes to reorganize departments and move people around and some people will get their jobs cut

because of that or their roles changed and that that just happens like people just get ground up in the gears of of these giant companies you can't change stuff without affecting some people and they're still going to do it because it's worth it to them so i yeah i think i agree with you like you're striking a balance where it's not unreasonable because you're not just asking for a number without knowing that that's a i don't know you could get something similar somewhere else you're not just waltzing in and saying double my salary or else yeah so you're not you're not being unreasonable and they can figure out if it's worth it to them or not and and you can also make that decision too i mean they might just say no like um we can't give you a raise sorry we just can't

afford it and then you get to decide okay is it worth i don't know this 10 20 whatever it is loss of income of potential income to stay in this environment that i know i like yeah and that's a that's a much better position to be in than just like i hope that this is the year they finally do it yeah exactly i think for me the thing that really changed my perspective on this whole thing of being willing to be more deliberate about it and more specific about it like you're saying is that i worked at a gigantic company where it was literally impossible for any individual who has joined this company in the last 10 years to feel like they could make that kind of huge impact like i'm a missionary for this huge company you know it's just yeah it's impossible right the

numbers just didn't work out it's like this company employs literally a million people it just doesn't work so i think i just i saw a lot of matter-of-factness about salary and earnings and i realized that that's fine there's nothing wrong with that so anyway yeah how does that actually pertain to this question i think the answer is like you were saying jameson it's just not that hard for for it shouldn't be that hard for you to go and just say the facts i think i'm i think i'm worth more on the market and i would like this company to to pay me market rates yeah and that that's just impossible to argue with and yet for some reason we as engineers we feel so emotional about that you know what i mean like we we carry a lot of emotion with that conversation

but your manager probably feels about 10 times less emotional about it than you do yeah i mean they might feel emotional in that like they're gonna worry that if they say no or we can't get the money to you somehow then then you're gonna quit and it'll make their life worse but they're not gonna be i mean they would they would have to be pretty immature to say how dare you yeah have the audacity to want to make a little more money for doing the same job yeah i think i think you're absolutely right like i just can't imagine one of my employees coming to me and saying that and then me being like i thought you were a good person i thought you were in it for the love of the game yeah turns out you're just another mercenary

like like me anyway so there is still the element of you are potentially wasting the time of other companies just to go out and get a data point for your company and your own personal good and i still don't love that so i would say just from an ethics perspective only interview at places where you think there's actually a good chance that you would take that job and i think with that and then a little bit of diplomacy on the other end, you can do just fine. Yeah. All right. You did it. You answered it. I did it. Wow. I helped, but you did it. You held my hand the whole way through that, Jameson. But I did it. Yes. What should people do if they want Dave's answers to more of their questions? Well, I don't recommend this, but go to softskills.audio and click the ask a

question button where you can fill out our form. And we just want to say thank you to everyone who does that every week. There are so many of you and we love you all. And we will one day answer every single question is this a new marketing technique where you're saying like i i bet you can't even go ask a question i dare you i don't think you have what it takes to ask a question what people don't know is that we use a google form and a google spreadsheet and google has a whole new advertising platform where we get paid two pennies for every row that i guess added to that spreadsheet yeah they're going for growth first and then they'll figure out the revenue model later engagement as measured by spreadsheet rows yeah brilliant somebody got promoted to vp

for that yeah all right i think we're done we'll catch you next week