Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 258: Addicted to scrolling and underpaid with equity

Episode Date: May 3, 2021

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Questions Listener “Scrolly McScroll-Face” asks, Hi Team! Love the show. Keep up the great work and congrats on 256 episodes! I think I’m addicted to my phone? Every time my code goes to build, or something I know I need to wait on, I open my phone and start scrolling. 40 seconds later when the build is done, I’m still scrolling. In between thoughts, I also open youtube in new tab fairly regularly. It’s definitely gotten worse while working at home during these times. I’m surely not alone in this slipping of discipline…. I’ve tried to put my phone in the next room and that has some success, but I don’t always remember to do that. Do you have any tips? Anything you’ve seen while managing folks? I love my job and I love the work, so I dont think I’m not engaged enough, and I struggle to see how a different job would engage me more. Hi I am the under-leveled engineer from episode 240, and I want to provide an update and ask a follow up question. I was promoted in this cycle, and because of my shyness I used Jamison’s favorite problem solving technique of doing nothing prior to my review, my compensation in the new level is also underwhelming. Or is it? Comparing my pay with some data point on levels.fyi, my salary is slightly below average. As part of my promotion, I have another equity award, and that is also slightly below average compared to the data points on the site. However, I already have an existing equity award granted to me when I started at my previous level. It is unclear to me if the data points on the site have taken into account for an internal promotion vs an offer extended to an external candidate. If I add in the previous equity awards and my compensation in this new level, then my total seems too be way out of band, on the good side. Digging into it more, there are other sites and blog posts that talk about things like refreshers and bonuses. These are brand new concepts to me since my previous jobs only pay salary, event the tech jobs in middle America. Could you talk about how compensation is structured in the big leagues?

it takes more than pushing for design compromise and trade-offs and then closing all customer issues as works as designed to be a great engineer this is soft skills engineering episode 258 i'm your host dave smith i'm your host jamison dance soft skills engineering is a weekly advice podcast for software developers who like to design yeah this is the design process oh yeah the trade-off is that it's done but it doesn't work yeah but at least i get to close that pesky ticket that's been hanging over my head yeah you're trading off working and i mean yeah those are it's like good fast cheap um and then they added another axis which is works at all and you pick two

still you still pick two works at all it's not a very long axis it's infinitesimally small in one direction and the other direction it's binary

oh man should I thank our wonderful patrons go for it thank you too Ira Chan Eric Larko Smiling Monkey Emoji

Jonathan King testingisdocumenting.org Adrian Bording roman denisov fizzbuzz influencer oladapo fadye karen sveinsen ragnar hardison nick hathaway travis sanders dennis bogdanov braden canes steven armand lee john grant taras haruk chris hogan the agile ventures charity nick kantar and philip john basile thank you to this this crew what do they call valhalla is that where the vikings go valhalla it's like the hall of heroes in valhalla yeah i think that's after they die though oh well this one's easy it's you just pay

money and then no get together while you're still alive this is the group of folks who contribute to our patreon at the level where we shout them out every single week you can join them by going to softskills.audio and click support us on patreon and you'll get invited to our slack team where hmm what new benefit can i make up right now that we'll have to deliver where we 100 accurately predict the value of bitcoin over the next six months oh it sounds useful the catch is that by joining you have to sign away your right to buy bitcoin so unfortunately it's not the path to riches but it's the path to knowledge still sounds like riches yeah i also have a listener comment i want to read i'm a new listener and i was just listening to

episode 27 writing great resumes and pushing back on non-engineering tasks i don't know if the answers given really captured the experience of folks just starting out in their careers especially from underrepresented or non-traditional backgrounds for example getting a job just through recommendations can be tough if you haven't yet worked in a professional capacity and can be a catch-22 for new developers you need recommendations to get a job and you need to have worked with contacts to get a recommendation i think this would have been a great segue into talking about the importance of networking via meetups or contributing to open source to get your name out there with a caveat about the economic privilege involved in having time to dedicate

to networking activities when say you need to work a lower paying non-tech job to pay the bills While it was very valuable to know how the hiring process can go after a well-established reputation has been built in this industry I was hoping for more insight related to the process near the beginning of that journey Thank you. That's uh, that's interesting feedback So I was looking at the timeline episode 27 was in 2016 and that was before I was right now i'm right All the time. I thought I thought we had established that because you're aging you're now wrong. Oh, shoot. Yeah. Well, okay but i had a streak where i was right for a little bit just for this yeah but it it certainly did not include 2016 yeah yeah i i remember vaguely the advice we gave and i do remember this was

back when i thought titles were dumb because they were just like i don't know just the man just busy work just trying to like signal uh it was it was like lame to care about titles but it turns out it's not it's important for people and and part of what i have learned and grown or how i've learned and grown throughout these years is learning that signaling your experience and value is helpful and it can be more helpful if you have less like i don't know traditional markers of experience so yeah i agree with this thanks for sharing this feedback all right shall i read our first question yes please do okay this comes from a listener named scrolly mcscrollface okay scrolly mcscrollface says hi team love the show keep up the great work and

congrats on 256 episodes well that won't age well okay uh scrolling mcscrollface continues on i think i'm addicted to my phone question mark every time my code goes to build or something i know i need to wait on i open my phone and start scrolling 40 seconds later when the build is done i'm still scrolling in between thoughts i also open youtube in my tab fairly regularly it's definitely gotten worse while working at home during these times i'm surely not alone in the slipping of discipline i've tried to put my phone in the next room and that has some success but i don't always remember to do that do you have any tips anything you've seen while managing folks i love my job and i love to work so i don't think i'm not engaged enough and i struggle to see how a different

job would engage me more oh preempted yeah oh how did you know to say that how did you know to say that last thing listen guys i don't want you to just say the same stupid things you say every time someone asks a question so i'm just gonna say i'm not quitting my job okay this is how we know we have a listener on our hands like a real proper listener it's been 257 episodes so far and it's time to get some new tricks okay time to pivot to my phone every time i so it's a mixture of phone and open youtube in a new tab that sounds like computer to bring your phone in a different room sounds good there's all this research i don't know if it's all this research it might just be that the case where there's this one paper that was done on like three undergrads

and then it sounds really fancy so it got quoted in a bunch of news articles but have you heard of the research about just having your phone on your desk even if you're not looking at it makes it harder to pay attention oh gosh i haven't heard that but i'm not at all surprised that's like having your phone on the table during a meal all right i found it in teen vogue that was the first result in youtube so i'm saying this is the canonical source teen vogue said that having your phone on your desk or in your bag can affect your brain power study shows oh it's 500 students okay yeah so this is a real study not three undergrads okay there's hundreds of undergrads hundred hundreds of undergrads this is in 2017 undergrads were still millennials then right

i just wonder if gen z is immune to this yeah oh gen z is the is oh god they're the current current generation was there was there a generation y there wasn't no because i'm generation x it's like xyz yeah i think you're x i'm yeah don't you know the alphabet goes x m z right generation x x to millennials and zoomers okay did we call them zoomers because of the pandemic and everyone using zoom or was that something else i don't think so okay but i'm not gonna google i already used up my one google on the show and just these these young people just zooming around on their technology yeah i i think okay the fact that there was a generation that called themselves the greatest generation well that feels a little hold

up they didn't call themselves that that moniker come on dave you really you really believe that you believe they weren't pulling the strings behind the scenes that's true that's true 20 years later they're like we need to hire an influencer yeah to call us the greatest yeah proto-influencer i think every generation should do that so i think i think the zoomer it's too late for the millennials but the zoomers should start lobbying to have them be called like the um i don't know the unobtainium high quality generation the shiny pokemon generation those are super rare and good i think yeah okay so i think we've just demonstrated how easy it is to just get completely distracted with anything okay my phone is not on my desk or even in my

pocket it's on the ground behind me but it's mere proximity let us down that tangent yeah it's got this field that emanates distraction field the oh man 5g field it's 5g that's what it is is that what distracts you yeah oh man all those radio waves just moving so fast let me just say on this question i feel this question so much do you feel it more in the pandemic oh no this has been going for years yeah i listened to there's a there's an author slash influencer slash former google employee named tristan something or tristan i don't remember his last name this is sorry i'm just looking at facebook here let me okay i'm back anyway so wait is that i can't tell just kidding anyway this guy tristan something uh he wrote a book the title i don't remember okay good

all right i i feel awful right now i am i live distracted all the time thanks to stupid technology yeah and i can't even remember anything you know there was a book written by a person it has a first name i typed in tristan google something in google and it came up with tristan harris i think that's him which looks like the right person wants to fix silicon valley's addictive something something yes thanks google he wrote a book and i think also produced a netflix documentary on the same topic about how you are in a war for attention but you are not on either side of the war you're like the scorched earth between the two sides raging war against each other uh because what's happening here is you know these companies that want your attention

to sell you advertising they have had a decade head start on this problem and they've employed thousands of scientists and engineers to build systems that are designed to keep you engaged engagement engagement engagement is what it's all about what we have today is the product of thousands and thousands of ab tests which have led to what we have today which is something that just keeps your eyeballs on the screen so i don't know i don't really know what to do except just give up because i mean it's it is a battle i'm trying to think what works for me being deeply engaged in a problem that i that i am not blocked on helps me the question asker mentions waiting for code to compile and i think this has a technical solution which is just switch to an

interpreted language doesn't compile anymore bingo i say that like sort of tongue-in-cheek but there are a lot of places where i sit and wait even though computers are really fast right now like our continuous integration step takes a long time yeah and if i do a task and then i have to wait for ci for the output that's like 10-15 minutes sometimes yeah and i can't just sit and do nothing but also i don't want to context switch so i cleverly solved this problem by context switching into reddit which is context switching into context switching oh gosh then i'm lost but if i'm yeah if i'm like chewing away on a problem that gives me tight feedback loops then yeah that's more interesting than whatever is on the internet that isn't that thing there's

something to what you're saying here because that tight feedback loop cycle also keeps me engaged and i think that you know sometimes people go oh congratulations you've improved your build time from five seconds to 2.5 seconds like la-di-da you save 2.5 seconds a few times a day for a year you've saved yourself 20 minutes whatever you know but the reality is 2.5 seconds is a gateway drug that takes you to reddit which takes four minutes you know or 20 minutes before you're like oh so So yeah, maybe you're right. Maybe we should surround ourselves with tools that keep us engaged

because they're fighting off the evil internets that suck our attention away. There's this, this is specific to the JavaScript space. I'll add it to the show notes, but there's a tool called ESBuild. So JavaScript is kind of famous now for having tools with sort of long feedback cycles. I guess long is in the minutes,

but for a language that started off as interpreted, that feels long to a lot of people and often you will bundle all your code together in what's basically a compilation step please don't fight me i'm abstracting over complexity um and yeah the standard tool set takes minutes to do this and someone went and wrote a different tool set called es build and it can accomplish roughly the same task in below a second and it feels like magic because you're going from doing a thing and sitting and waiting to it's just it feels it's fast enough that it feels instant and and i yeah it changes the type of task you're doing okay it changes it from like a asynchronous task to a synchronous task yeah it's much easier to handle

yes that's a good point that's a good point you can do that without knowing anything more about the kind of work you're doing every time my code goes to build or something i know i need to wait on yeah jameson you've done something really cool with this uh was it you i think it might have been you you uh modified your etsy host file on your computer is that right oh yeah i did yeah i have a bunch of sites blocked in my etsy house file on my work computer to combat this because i had really bad muscle memory where it just anytime i hit a new tab in my web browser my fingers would automatically like auto complete twitter um yeah it turns out that's not what i wanted to do most of the time but your fingers did it anyway yeah that's like instead of reducing the cost of

waiting for the current work tasks that's like increase the cost of switching away to other things that's sort of another in line with uh put your phone in the other room but you can do that so for the for those that don't know what we're talking about here there is a file on every modern desktop laptop computer and actually even old ones too called hosts and it's located in different places depending on your operating system but it's there and if you search host file in google you'll find it and it lets you specify what the ip address should be for any host name and it takes precedence over dns servers over everything so you can set the host name for twitter.com to the ip address of 127.0.0.1 and since your local computer is not running in a

a web server well probably not i mean a lot of our listeners are probably web developers but anyway it's certainly not running twitter and so when you try to go there you just get an error page yeah and it's not that this is some unhackable like airtight system to prevent you from ever doing this and you can just go change it again it's more that that little nudge to say oh yeah i at some point i decided it would be a bad use of my time to go here that's usually enough to get me over the hump i also did a thing years back going on i don't know almost close to 10 years now using an app that i think we've mentioned on the on the show before called rescue time i haven't i haven't used it in probably five years so it could have at this

point devolved into a spyware malware infested thing i don't know it could be like the ultimate key logger yeah i don't i have no idea because it knows everything about every piece of software that you ever switched to in your... So it could very well be. So this is not an endorsement, but what it did was it kept track of how much time you spent with different windows in the foreground

and it kept track of their titles and stuff like that. So you could track things like how much time did I spend on Twitter this week? And if you paid for the pro version, I think it would even give you goals and it would send you a weekly report to say how much time you spent on different things.

And you can categorize tons of stuff like this is work, it's productive. This is entertainment, it's not productive. And then you could come up with a report at the end of the week and that that was really good for me it helped me to have a bird's eye view of what i was actually doing with my time on my computer there is an open source thing called activity watch that is apparently the same thing great and i've also heard of people that hack this together somehow with like shell scripts that'll i don't know it'll plumb your operating system for

details of what's running or what's in focus yeah but yeah i've done something similar i did use rescue time i think on your recommendation and it was revelatory to see just how much time i thought that quick trip to twitter or youtube or whatever actually was taking me and it was a significant chunk in in my worst times yep uh now i take naps instead now you're well rested it's so good i'm not joking like oh if i think i'm just gonna do nothing on the internet for half an hour while i wait for this other task just go take a nap and then life is better my day is better and i know slightly less about like the dank internet memes or whatever but that's a fine trade-off and it's enough of a time commitment i can't just sit down and take a nap in five minutes right i have to say

okay i'm gonna like yeah power nap for half an hour so i plan around it instead of just accidentally starting a thing that then stretches on forever right right that's impressive that you can go to sleep that fast uh in half an hour yeah like go to sleep and wake up that's cool i'm always tired it's like the you're like it's easy it's easy when you're exhausted all the time exactly yeah i'm always prepared to go to sleep at any moment let me add just one more thing and i'm only saying this because we got that last sentence in this question i struggle to see how a different job would engage me more let me just tell you that i've been in some pretty disengaged jobs and back in the day i don't know for those of you that were around for when slash dot was

the reddit of the world they gave you karma points for contributing comments and material and things like that and uh i could i saw a direct inverse relationship to how high my karma score was on slash dot compared to how engaged i was at work and i did change jobs once and my slash dot karma score fell just absolutely fell it was great oh did it decay yeah it decayed uh i read slash dot but i never participated yeah yeah it was whatever it's like reddit the modern innovation is that your karma does not decay yeah strut around with it forever and and i've been in jobs where i'm not 100 engaged and i've been in jobs where i'm 120 engaged and i don't have a problem jumping onto social media or whatever reddit and whatever nowadays at my current job

and it's directly a result of the engagement because there's always things i need to be working on also it depends on what you do for a living if you work on you know single threaded tasks that are just one after another sequential and you never context switch between tasks then i think you're more likely to have these engagement lulls or these little distraction moments but for me i work on a lot of things at the same time it's just the nature of my job right now and so there's always something i need to go give my attention to that's work related you know so i'm almost never off on other things so part of the advice with kanban i think is to limit work in progress you're you're not supposed to be juggling a bunch of different things at once and i i believe they

explicitly acknowledge that means you will have some downtime but to them they think it's it's actually still faster overall even if you account for the wasted time of like being blocked on something yeah instead of just picking up an extra project that you switch to while you're blocked on the other thing i don't know if that's true or not but you could also just recognize the solution might be worse like if i pick up extra work to do instead when i'm blocked on this thing then that might it might make my first task take even longer even though my time might be used more productively potentially maybe that's not what you want maybe you want that task done as fast as possible even if you waste some time on it race cars use a lot of gas that's where my brain is

going they're not very efficient but they go real fast so if you want this task done real fast um your your lines of code per times you open twitter might be a little less efficient than different tasks i think we better move on to yeah i agree i agree all right i'm gonna read this question uh this is from an anonymous listener who says hi i am the underleveled engineer from episode 240 which was about being underleveled in the big leagues and i want to provide an update and ask a follow-up question i was promoted in this cycle and because of my shyness i used jameson's favorite problem solving technique of doing nothing prior to my review my compensation in the new level is also underwhelming or is it comparing my pay with some data points on levels

dot fyi my salary is slightly below average as part of my promotion i have another equity award and that is also slightly below average compared with the data points on the site. However, I already have an existing equity award granted to me when I started at my previous level. It is unclear to me if the data points on the site have taken into account for the internal promotion versus an offer extended to an external candidate. If I add in the previous equity awards and my compensation in this new level, then my total seems to be way out of band on the good side. Digging into it more, there are other sites and blog posts that talk about things like refreshers

and bonuses these are brand new concepts to me since my previous jobs only paid salary even the tech jobs in middle america could you talk about how compensation is structured in the big leagues and i assume we're not talking about baseball here yeah where compensation has actually dropped a little bit like yearly compensation in baseball yeah they moved to this they're still breaking records for total contract value but they're stretched out over more years it's kind of i know it's depressing some guy just signed like a 13-year contract and it's the most valuable contract ever but also he makes less money per year than some previous most valuable contracts interesting baseball's boring though yeah so let's talk about something else okay

so big leagues referring to i mean are we just talking fang companies here i think so yeah giant megatech corpse let's go have a look at levels.fyi so levels.fyi has google facebook microsoft amazon apple and oh gosh if i click the more button there's a ton more amd carta databricks instacart nasa nasa looked at this site in a long time plaid redfin robin hood spacex tinder zillow and the list goes way on okay so this used to be like the fang salary site but it sounds like they've expanded quite a bit maybe i wonder if their data has become useful yeah like Like if you want to compare, for example, working at Facebook or working at Kroger's grocery store, you can do that.

Or Macy's. Well, so while you're levels.fyi-ing, I'll talk about my experience with this, which is similar in that before I worked at a giant mega company, my compensation was entirely salary and then fake money in the form of options. I worked at startups and they were always pre-public. and so i don't think i ever even exercised any of the options so you just get a number of money that you make and then another fake number and that number turns into zero and you know how much which is the first number right the first number plus zero yeah exactly or sometimes minus if you

exercise your options and then have to pay the tax burden and that's right oh only stock options are the only form of compensation that can actually take money away from you yeah it's great but when i joined a mega company i got a base salary uh-huh i got a bonus that in this case is fairly consistent it's some bonuses are very performance dependent maybe my performance is consistent i don't know it's been it's been consistent though okay based on a percentage of my base and then i got uh some equity grants which vested over a schedule these are not options just to be clear yeah these are stock yeah that's a good call out they're real money the technical term that people should know is rsus so these big mega tech co's tend to pay you in rsus which

stands for restricted stock unit whereas startups and other smaller companies tend to pay you in isos incentive stock options so there you go sorry didn't mean to interrupt with that remarkably unimportant fact no i like it when you add knowledge to my rambling because i don't think i even anyways yeah the other confusing thing is that for me each year i stay i get another grant of equity that then starts vesting again at a at a four-year schedule so i have some from when i first started i have some for the first year i have some for the next year and they're all vesting on their own schedule and they also all have their own they give me a certain dollar amount of equity based on the price of the stock at the time that it was granted right and so the

they're they're all worth different amounts of money too because this stock has that's right generally the good yeah and you've been lucky that it has uh the general um a metaphor that i like is that you you have like three or four trains on the track at the same time but they're spaced out right so your first grant is further down the track and it was probably a bigger train too because it probably gave you more shares when you started and since the stock price has gone up since you started then your next grant was probably smaller in terms of shares but equal value at the time it was granted yep fewer shares equal dollar amount at the time was granted but you got lucky and it went up yes and this what you are describing is a there is essentially how

all of the big tech companies do it now they offer pretty good base salaries and cash and then when people make just a ridiculous amount of money it's usually in the form of stock yeah that's a good thing to point out that often as you get promoted to higher and higher levels that your base salary doesn't doesn't go up by huge amounts but knowing how to value this is hard like i can value it um in and i don't know if they do this on purpose or not but my company doesn't make it very easy to calculate the value it'll just tell you the total value of all unvested equity you have all at once which can be a very large number but that's not money you have yet yeah and that's going to be paid out over years yeah exactly so so the way i try to think about it is like how

much will i get when it vests this year like what will my what will my pay be this year and then i have to figure out the size of each of those three trains and when they started and it feels like a word problem from middle school like you have two trains coming from opposite side and one is going 20 miles an hour and the others going 40 and they're 35 miles apart and when do they meet basic grade school math is hard for me i think that's what i'm admitting on the show anyways so i can use that to turn it into a number of how much money i expect to make this year that also depends on the stock price which is unpredictable unless you're part of the soft skills engineering slack and then it's perfectly predictable but right um you're

unable to act on it sadly that's right it's the heisenberg slack community principle so when the question asker says my total seems to be way out of band on the good side i wonder if they're considering not the yearly value like how much money they will get this year from what vest but just the total value right i think so because the the way that the numbers in levels.fyi work is this you add up all of the money that you expect to receive in the form of cash stock or bonus or whatever in the calendar year and that's your total compensation or tc i've wondered about that on like glassdoor some of these other salary sites because some of them don't make it very clear right what the number represents and and those numbers can be wildly different if you if you put

in the value of the grant that you get over the lifetime of the grant yeah it's four years worth that as how much money you get in in that year then yeah that'll be a big number or if you don't include that then then it's very low number yeah that's right i base my conclusion on what i see the majority of people do on levels fyi the numbers because what i'll see is you'll see like 10 numbers that all look to be in a similar cluster and then you'll see one that's like twice as high as all the other ones and you're like oh someone put in their four-year investing value you know that's how i conclude it or we're all that or that person has figured something out yeah just the shrewdest negotiator yeah oh but it is complicated i met several engineers in my time

at a big tech co who were frustrated with the situation because it was just hard to understand and and even after you got a baseline level of understanding it was hard to predict what things were going to look like next year you know it's like should i buy a house should i buy a car i don't know because i'm not sure what my income is going to be next year yeah especially if the price of stock for this company you work for is volatile if it always goes up then it's great easy congratulations yeah and like you you know the floor and it'll probably be more but if it is going up or down it's possible you'll get a grant and then it'll end up being worth much less than that if the stock price drops and yeah so it's it's easier to value than options if these are

rsus in a publicly traded company but there still is a little bit of risk to them yeah but stocks always go up so that's yeah gosh yeah knock on wood we're gonna rue the day you said that i don't think so surely i'll never rue the day i said that maybe you'll rue the day you said that second thing oh oh no i will never question yeah i think so let's wrap it up all right well thanks for asking this question thank you for listening if you want to ask your own question dave what should they do what if they want to answer their own question or if they want us no they want to ask their own question and hear us answer okay got it just the standard the usual yeah okay just say you're saying just say what i always say at the end right

unless you're proposing a radical new model for the show live on the air and then i'm all yours i want to hear it okay i'm just gonna say the same thing i always say okay go to soft skills that audio and click ask a question where you can fill out our form. Thank you so much to everyone who's done that. Alright, we'll catch you next week.