Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 260: Pay cut after hired and new job ramp-up

Episode Date: May 24, 2021

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Questions Hey guys! I’m a long-time listener and like many of your other listeners have listened to each episode! Until now I didn’t have anything to ask, however, I have a story to tell and I was hoping for your opinions on this. Someone I know is a somewhat junior dev, they left their first job for a new job that had better pay. They were pretty good at negotiating a good salary, while still being transparent about their work history. But a few months ago management said they were underperforming compared to other coworkers and their pay would have to be cut. At first, they said at most it would be 10%. However, it ended up being 23%, which way less than even their prior job. Needless to say, they’re taking the softskills option and looking for a new job. My question is how commonly does this happen, and what are some telltale signs that this could potentially happen? Thanks for your time and a have great week! I’m 8 years into a career in software engineering and I just accepted a senior engineering position at a well respected tech company in Silicon Valley. While I believe I am qualified for the position, it will be a big step up for me in terms of the caliber of engineers I’ll be working with as well as the overall scale of the system compared to my previous jobs. The standards of engineering and general productivity will likely be higher than I am used to, though I’m excited to level up. I’m not looking for advice about my specific situation, but I’m curious: what are your guys’ priorities during your first days, weeks or months at a new but senior-level job, to ensure you hit the ground running and set yourself up for a successful tenure at the company? Anything you used to do that you don’t anymore? Any common mistakes you see engineers make when they join new teams?

it takes more than creating one cryptocurrency for each cat breed to be a great engineer this is soft skills engineering episode 260 i'm your host dave smith i'm your host jameson dance soft skills engineering is a weekly advice podcast for software developers about the non-technical stuff like creating cryptocurrencies for every cat now the creating crypto part is technical but knowing all the cat breeds is a soft skill yeah i mean depending on your profession i guess yeah cat breed knower yeah that's the one identifier i think there's a major for that yeah i think whoever whoever named the first like 10 versions of mac os 10 majored in that they were they were a cat breed identifier yeah yeah my favorite one

was when they were like this version of mac os 10 is called leopard and then the next one that came out this one is called snow leopard different leopard yeah i was like what's coming next ice leopard sunny leopard i don't know like what's the opposite of snow i mean snow leopard is a real thing i know i know it is it's just dave you didn't major in cat breed identification so you have no appreciation for the the amount of work that goes into it i just thought like people are going to read that and think that's the same name i don't know it's kind of like a java javascript thing yeah people like leopards will capitalize on the popularity of leopards

oh man we'll license the snow technology or the leopard technology i mean i think leopards and snow leopards our new snow leopard on top of it i think leopards and snow leopards have a lot more in common than java and javascript yeah that's true although maybe not maybe not that's just my non-cat identifier perspective i mean you can cross compile java into javascript okay that's true and you can compile leopards into snow leopard i'm using up my google early my one show your one google per episode yes they can crossbreed oh okay cool you you learned it here. Question answered. And that's how our show works. You've got some great stuff to read that

I want you to read. Can you read it? Yes, I will read it. Here goes. So last week, alert listeners will note that we did not record an episode. And rather than coming up with a real excuse for why we didn't do that, I asked our Slack community to come up with excuses on our behalf. And boy, did they come up with some good ones. So here, I'm just going to read you some of these from our Slack community right now. Okay, so John says, the standard quit your job advice could not be applied to any of the questions in our backlog, so we didn't record. Brett says, the hard drive with the recording quit its job. Lynn says, it takes more than coming up with an excuse to miss a week of your podcast to be a great engineer. And this one hit me hard after

an incident we had in april someone named clee says it's a dns issue oh yeah that's uh it was dns is the standard answer to downtime or certs wasn't there one that said we were rewriting the podcast in rust i liked that one yes brayden said we were busy rewriting the podcast in rust yeah salius says windows media player cannot play the file because the required codec is not installed on your computer maybe the best one is you dropped the production database that one came from james and then steven said and we do not have a backup database since prod is the backup oh man we got some good ones those were not all of them but i'm gonna read one more which is questions in q 404 was misinterpreted

404 questions in queue very very good anyway so thanks so much and if you want to join this slack community and just have a great time chatting with each other and sometimes even meeting over video you can go to softskills.audio and click the support us on patreon button and if you donate as little as one snow leopard you can be given an invite at the beginning of every month we will quickly sell that snow leopard for cash though we're not no interest in getting into the exotic animal business we have some shout outs for our patrons that contribute at the level where we thank them every single week thank you to chitalane hey just

i think that's chitalian by the way chitalian okay chitalian cool which is a kind of pizza it turns out oh like i don't know if this is who this person is but there is a pizzeria called chicago italian yes i think so i think it's chicago italian that's another trope of the show where i mispronounce the word check on brand check that one off patreon.com.au uh ira chan eric larko monkey face emoji jonathan king testing is documenting.org adrian bordink roman denisov fizzbuzz influencer oladapo fadey karen spainson open bracket unpronounceable emoji close bracket that's written out in text ragnar horrison nick hathaway travis sanders dennis bogdanov braden cane steven armadley john grant taras harouk chris hogan

the agile ventures charity nick cantar philip john basile and bites of wisdom with a y thank you so much and what dave said if you go to support us if you go to softskills.audio and click support us on patreon then you can join this crew or you can just support the show go We'll cover the expenses of hosting and editing and all that stuff. And we'll invite you to our Slack team. And now, Dave, I want you to read the first question. Will you accept this mission? Our desires are aligned.

I accept your reasonable request. Okay. The question comes from an anonymous listener who says, Hey guys, I am a longtime listener. And like many of your other listeners, I have listened to each episode. That is incredible. What an accomplishment. Good job.

Just for the record, I would probably never listen to every episode. We could barely be troubled to record every episode, but here we are. Yeah. Including last week. You should listen to all of them. I'm going to take the opposite position for controversy. Listen to them all. All right.

The question asker goes on to say, until now, I didn't have anything to ask. However, I have a story to tell, and I was hoping for your opinions on this. Someone I know is a somewhat junior developer. They left their first job for a new job that had better pay. They were pretty good at negotiating a good salary while still being transparent about their work history. but a few months ago management said they were underperforming compared to other co-workers and their pay would have to be cut at first they said at most it would be 10 however it ended up being

23 which was way less than even their prior job wow needless to say they're taking the soft skills option and looking for a new job my question is how commonly does this happen and what are some telltale signs that this could potentially happen thanks for your time and have a great week huh So it sounds like they fired your friend. But without the backbone to actually fire. Yeah, without having to pay unemployment. I don't know what country this is in, but in the US, if you fire someone, you need to pay their unemployment benefits. Yeah, I can't see a company doing this and not thinking there's a pretty good chance this person is just going to quit.

Yeah, maybe the next step is then we're going to go another 23% in a month until they finally leave. but if it's 23 percent of their current salary it's it's less of a an absolute pay cut right the dollar amount is smaller that's right it's like that frog that hops halfway to the pond every time yeah what is that xenos paradox where the arrow yeah the arrow is fired it's halfway there then it gets halfway through the next part before yeah before it can get to the next step it has to go halfway there yeah there's an infinite number of halfway there's to every step is that is that what it is i believe so yes yes that one keeps me up at night i'll be honest that's one about achilles and i think achilles and the tortoise is the original version where

they're racing isn't it i don't know forgot what we were talking i think what we were talking about is someone needs to tell xenos about plank's constant if only he knew about that how would life have been different yeah i i mean maybe the business is having funding issues like maybe they're trying very hard to cut costs and and this is their unique approach but i can't imagine doing this and yeah i'm just repeating myself someone's got to be thinking and probably they'll quit and and maybe that's an unfortunate reality and they hope they won't quit but are willing to deal with it or maybe maybe that's a solution they're pushing towards deliberately but either way yeah i mean i don't blame your friend for quitting now

i wouldn't blame them either but it doesn't necessarily like i would say there there is a universe wherein this is not a an attempt to get them to quit i'm thinking like if you have a a management team that's very attuned to compensation disparity and just pays really close attention to people's performance and comp and they really want things to be equitable across the team and maybe that's what's happening here why do i feel like they wouldn't raise i'm just being suspicious here but it feels like an easier thing to do i just wouldn't trust them to jump on raising pay if it if it was too low with as much force as as reducing someone's pay yeah well i mean raising like raising everyone else to come up to this new level

yeah that does sound expensive yeah maybe i feel like i feel like the scrutiny would tend to apply to people who stick out as being paid too much and and pass over people who are underpaid because You hear that a lot, too, of folks who just feel very underpaid and then find out they often are by comparing their pay to their colleagues. And businesses are happy to leave that. I guess that's money for you. Right. I mean, that is how it works. Businesses are happy if you're underpaid.

Yeah, I guess the phrase, very in tune with compensation that you said, or some phrase to that effect kind of tickled me because I feel like it's unlikely that they're very in tune to someone being undercompensated by 23% though. Oh, they're in tune and they're probably taking action to keep it that way. And maybe that's what's happened here. Because, you know, when management hires someone and they're paid more than the other people that already work there, there is a concern, not that you're overpaying that person, but that everyone else will demand to be paid that much. Because that, I mean, whoa, that's scary, right? Let's say you have a team of 10. One of them is paid 20% more than all the rest. And so suddenly everyone asks for a 20% raise. Well, now we're talking about a huge increase to my budget. And that's when management says, we're going to give you all a 20% raise, but two of you

have to be let go. We've solved the problem. Yeah. So how commonly does this happen? What are some telltale signs that this could potentially happen? I mean, underperformance sounds like one of the core problems here or their perception that you're underperforming, and that should never be a surprise. Part of your responsibility as a worker is to know what the business thinks of you. And some places make that easier than others, but you should not be surprised that someone thinks you're underperforming and they think that long enough and severely enough to change your compensation.

hopefully this isn't the first time that this person ever heard they were underperforming but yeah i guess one one half solution is is like figure out that you're underperforming and then fix that earlier before these changes come into play generally you don't get pay cuts for overperforming yeah so do that instead right oh yeah just be better oh man why didn't i think of that if the problem is underperformance why don't you try overperformance instead just work better but yeah i think uh the my real solution is is like to everybody not just people in this situation you should know and if you don't know you should ask hey how am i doing am i performing well that's true because we've said over and over again that it's a manager's job to communicate clearly what

whether and how your employees are meeting their your performance expectations but as time has taught us not all managers are very good at this and frankly as a manager it's a very hard thing to do and i think it is just like every human being managers like to do easy things so yeah you got to take it on yourself have you ever seen this happen before though jameson someone get a pay cut no i have seen someone who negotiated a a pay raise on a schedule so they were going to join at x and then if the valuations were going well they're going to get a raise to x plus some percentage after six months or whatever and i saw that not go through oh and then the decision was just on them of of are you just gonna stay here and work or are you gonna go somewhere else but

i haven't seen an a pay cut that i know about yeah and i think i haven't either except for i've seen bonuses withheld for performance related reasons yeah i guess that's true i guess depends on if you think that's a pay cut or not right and i i don't know i think bonuses frankly in most companies, they exist so that they can be withheld without having to go through all the paperwork of adjusting someone's comp. It's like a slush fund. Interesting. I mean, that's why a lot of the big tech companies do stock-based compensation because it's super variable and you can change it every year, but your base salary, much harder to change. And so I think that's why they're there. So I think people do this effectively, but through other means besides like a base salary change.

So I've never seen this happen to a base salary. It sounds like you've never seen it happen to a salary either and i think that tells you that we've worked in very cushy jobs yeah i picked a good time to be born and then look into deciding to go into software that was a wise choice on my part to be born in this location at this time in this environment that would lead me into programming that's right by which you mean you chose to go into programming i mean obviously well yeah obviously we're just dumped into this no no i'm yeah but it wasn't i'm saying I'm lucky that I joined a booming field at a booming time. I know. I know. I'm just teasing you. But I agree. It's very fortunate. And I think that

there are a bunch of companies, even though the field is booming and has been for the last, oh, I don't know, 17 years, 16 years of my career. It wasn't booming for the first few, but it is now. But anyway, even though it's a booming field and engineers are in high demand, there are still a ton of companies who hire more junior engineers with lower, like with fewer credentials. And I think they treat them really bad. This is an example of that. Like if most of the people I know that are experienced, tenured engineers with plenty of time under the belt, if your company came and docked your pay by 23%, they would have an offer in hand to go to some other company within like four days. Yeah. What about the negotiation side of it? So it says

they negotiated pretty hard do you think that has any bearing on on this result this is so you're so you're saying like reading between the lines maybe this person over negotiated yeah like maybe they set their maybe they set expectations too high for themselves by pushing for this salary i i have very i can't actually remember let's see gosh i'm thinking back over the last 20 years i don't know if i could count on one hand the number of instances where i felt like someone over negotiated meaning they got paid too much to come in and set expectations too high i hear people talk about that like oh you don't want to get that title because then you're just setting yourself up for failure but i don't think i've ever actually seen it play out firsthand i've

seen it a couple times what does it look like it looks like well i've seen it in two ways one i've seen just pay the level is is the same but they were paid exceptionally well for their level okay so they're topped out on their pay band i mean they weren't even topped out it was just it was just like oh we're paying this person this rate for this position they better be just absolutely incredible and they were fine they were not absolutely incredible and so that perception that that gap between expectations and reality bit them another one was i don't even i don't even think it was this person's fault really they came in and said a number and then someone else said okay that means you're this level and then that level was higher than the expectations at

that level were they weren't able to meet very well so that was explicitly like i don't know from from like junior to mid-level or something like that like they they were they were a level above where they were performing but but they didn't push to say like i don't think i'm a junior year i think i'm a mid-level they just negotiated on salary and the end result of that was they got bumped up right a level to make the salary work and that was bad and that brought with it expectations yeah it brought pain yeah they they had pain from it okay so it can happen um that's interesting i think in both cases i mean i guess it could have been solved by being more skeptical or being harder to negotiate with you know like maybe the candidates

would have just said no um but maybe they also would have come in with more reasonable expectations but presumably they asked for those rates because that's what they wanted yeah they meaning the the employee so i i guess i'm i'm trying to figure out what would happen they probably would have just said no and not worked there yeah meaning if the if the company had come out with a lower offer yeah so so if so if we're saying uh this this position pays i don't know 80 grand and the and the the dev says okay but i'm worth 120 because i'm incredible okay in this case these are made up numbers but the dev joined at 120 they were not incredible and then they they suffered for being expected to be incredible if if the company instead had just said like no it pays

80, then they just wouldn't have joined, I guess, or would have joined and then exceeded expectations and maybe given, being given a raise. But that, that's kind of a lot of good behavior from the company. Right. Or they would have just not joined and they would have ended up in the same situation as they are now, which is going to find another job. Or found another job where the expectations were lower. Yeah. Or the pay was higher. Or I don't know. Maybe that's the key is you need to go interview at places. And what you're actually assessing is, are these people unskilled can i look can i look good here are they unskilled and very wealthy

at the same time right do they make a lot of money and do a very bad job yeah you need you need like a patron like a wealthy family in the renaissance that just pays you but but with terrible taste in art okay pays you to do like scribbles commissions your scribbles yeah you're like the michelangelo of stick figures got it oh man so i i guess my point is we talk a lot about negotiating salary and and joining the company is the best time to do that should should you be concerned about this and ideally when you join a company it's something you're both happy with and if the company is like kind of sad that they paid you that much money then you're probably setting yourself up for bad expectations but i i don't think they would say yes if they were sad i don't

know i'm just talking myself in circles on this one yeah you are we still think you're great though thank you should we move on to the next question yeah let's do it and all right i would be from an anonymous listener hold on now remember i have to ask you to read it oh and i would be just so honored if you would do me the favor of reading the next question. Dave, it would be my pleasure to read it. And I will. Thanks. All right. An anonymous listener asks, I'm eight years into a career in software engineering, and I just accepted a senior engineering position at a well-respected tech company in Silicon Valley. While I believe I am qualified for the position, it will be a big step up for me in terms of the caliber of engineers I'll be working with,

as well as the overall scale of the systems compared to my previous jobs. The standard of engineering and general productivity will likely be higher than i am used to though i'm excited to level up i'm not looking for advice about my specific situation but i'm curious what are your guys priorities during your first days weeks or months at a new but senior level job to ensure you hit the ground running and set yourself up for a successful tenure at the company anything you used to do that you don't do anymore any common mistakes you see engineers make when they join new teams oh that's great this is an awesome question congratulations congrats sounds like you're in a good spot or a good opportunity. Sounds way cool. I don't have a

joke. I just would say whatever you do, don't pretend to know stuff because you're worried about looking dumb. Pretend to know stuff that you don't actually know, like fake notes. Yeah, that's, it seems backwards, but the more senior and experienced you are, I think the more that hurts you. Yeah, I think the more senior you are, the more transparent you have to be about the limits of your understanding or knowledge. Yeah, it's sort of an expectation of like, you're you're senior so you should be mature enough to understand that we're not better off when you say like oh kubernetes yeah i know all about that kubernetes that's where you run duker

yes of course we'll take five of them do i want to do kubernetes or do we want to do k8s i just i can never decide they're competing they both have strong arguments yes in fact one might say the pros and cons list for both of them are nearly identical okay why not k9s why set our sights solo at k8s anyway yes i 100 agree with you on that one like now more than ever it's time to be super transparent with what you know what you don't and in some ways being new at a company gives you an excuse to do that like everything is new to you so you get to just go out and explore explore the systems there how does this work what do we do for this thing and ask a ton of

questions i think that's that's sort of what i would expect for a more senior level individual contributor is is they're good at quickly getting up to speed on how things work and they're cautious about coming in and saying everything is wrong and despite it being my second day like let me tell you how it should be done because you just don't you don't have the context yet and that would make me trust you less yeah for sure what else networking i wrote about networking especially i bet this is probably a bigger company if it's a respected tech company in silicon valley lots of those companies are pretty large and it's going to be really important not just to learn the technical stuff but to learn the people and who to talk to and dave i think you've talked about

this before about just setting up one-on-ones with people that don't report to you and you don't report to them just i don't know if you have to do that but something to just reach out to people and talk to them about what they work on even if you're not directly working together is, I would totally do that. That's exactly what I was just thinking. And this is probably the biggest adjustment for me when I went to a big, well, not really Silicon Valley, but the Silicon Sound up in Seattle. And I joined a big company based out of there. One of the surprises was that people just expect you to put time on their calendar and show up and just say hello. And that's not a pattern I ever saw at a smaller company. And it was totally

normal. And so in my first few weeks, I would probably make it a point to do that with like 20 people. Yeah. I mean, I would ask your boss, like, who should I talk to? Yes. Maybe they don't have a culture of this setting up peer one-on-ones thing, but they certainly know who are the important people to work with, or they should know that. Definitely. And one of the best ways to become successful at a big company is to find out who knows what. And I got to tell you, man, when i when i started at a big company about five years ago i would catalog you know take notes from my one-on-ones about who had good answers to questions in certain areas and later when questions came up in those areas i knew i could go back to them and it made a huge difference in

how quickly i could resolve problems because i could find answers fast yeah yeah that's a big deal at big companies because somebody probably knows it and it's probably too complex for you to at a startup, nobody knows it, but you can kind of solve it yourself because the organization is small enough. And at a giant company, there's probably a solution already. And it's probably tough for you to just dive in and say like, firewalls. I don't know how we open firewalls. Let me just go make it. That seems unlikely to succeed. What else? So I, you know, I'm, this one might be controversial, especially with you, Jameson, but you know, when I start a new job, especially one that I'm concerned is going to

be super overwhelming i tend to put in a lot of hours to start ramping up it's just something i've done do you do it and and you do it deliberately and and say like i'm choosing to do this and or do you get sucked in i think it depends on the circumstance you know the first time i did that starting at a big company senior role i actually had relocated so i was living apart from my family for a couple of months no friends that's right nothing to do no friends perfect tech employee yeah and i worked a lot of hours but it was super fun at the same time come stay at our sleep pod no seriously i mean i had an apartment right around the corner from the office building so it was like a two minute walk home and i'm like well i can go sit in my

apartment or i can stay here in the office and work on stuff and it was super fun like i learned so much stuff in those first six or eight weeks just because i was deep diving on everything and It was great. And it really set me up for a good foundation. I learned a lot of stuff. You know, not everybody can do it, but it helps. Yeah, I think I usually work a lot of hours at the beginning of my job. It's usually because I want to make a good impression.

And I feel like I have a lot of pressure to succeed, especially because the interview process is so much about selling yourself. You're building up this image of yourself as the all capable, this giant of industry that can solve any problem. And then you come in and someone hands you a problem and you're like, well, time to justify it. So I don't know that I have a deliberate strategy of doing this, but I definitely do it. There might be a downside of this, which is expectations. Maybe you're setting unrealistic expectations for yourself of, oh, you're the person that works these intense hours or just always gets enormous amounts of stuff done.

And then when you scale back, once you're a little more comfortable, then that's a problem. but i think by then you can just coast on your reputation you don't even have to do any work right you can just just regale them with tales of your first eight weeks when you yeah did all that stuff i used to work until 9 p.m here every night yeah because i have nothing better to do i think you should i said this last question too but you should have a clear understanding from your boss of what the expectations are for you and how you're doing relative to those expectations because you are the worst at reading signals about that from the organization you you can kind of get better at that as you've been there for a while and and

learn what learn what the zoom body language is when you really nail something or blow it but when you're first there you need more explicit guidance or you'll just have no idea so i i would push your boss for that and like we said in the last question not all bosses will have this but you pushing will at least force them to give you something or find out early on that they either don't have them or can't articulate expectations for you and that's that's also important to know yeah for sure that's it there's nothing else that's that is the universe things of correct answers what are our priorities during the first days do we cover priorities Find the hot gossip spots, where to hang out to eat your startup snacks and learn about the happenings of the office. Claim the best seat, the most sunshine. I don't know. Establish dominance.

Yeah. It is funny, though, how you do have to kind of become an anthropologist and figure out what the culture is. Because I remember I was coming from a late-stage startup when I went to a big megatech company. And in a late-stage startup, there were certain decisions or things that just didn't matter and I could just choose. Like, for example, where's my desk? Like, I want to sit over there. Okay, fine, whatever. We don't care where you sit.

When I showed up at the Megatech Co., I just kind of plunked my laptop down on a desk. And then the manager came in and was like, oh, no, no, no, no. You sit here. And I was like, oh, that matters, I guess. And it did matter because there was like we were hiring tons and tons of people and the plans had to be carefully laid out so that we knew when we were going to bust, when we were going to overflow the capacity of the floor and have to rearrange everything. So it was like it mattered. It really did. Oh, so you putting your laptop on that desk caused someone in like ops, not like computer ops, like systems.

Systems, like physical operations to get paged. They got a page where the floor is full. Exactly. Like there's weight where there shouldn't be weight on this floor. Yeah. So anyway, you know, just kind of keeping an eye out for things like that. Put your anthropology hat on, your archaeology hat on, and try to figure out what the culture is and where it came from. Maybe equally important is where it came from so you can know what parts of the culture are actually real and what stuff is arbitrary.

I don't know if this is as high level as a tip or as vital, but a thing I found useful is when you come in, if you can quickly fix some small but nagging pain, that buys you a lot of goodwill up front. If you join and there's just some painful process that people are used to, if you can just whip out a quick little script that automates it and share it with people, that sets a really good tone of you're here to improve stuff, you're excited to be proactive. and it doesn't have to be big it's just the fact that you've you've made something better even without a lot of experience at the company yeah i love working with people that do that that's genius and it's a win-win because a lot of times in your first few weeks the expectations on you to actually deliver on the team's mission or like main big big hairy features and things like that those expectations are usually low so take advantage of that you know and tell people like i'm gonna take this to ramp up you know and take those things that are

probably been bothering the team but you know it was never high enough priority but it's like it's the best you can do right now for the first couple of weeks so take it that's great yeah rewrite that app in rust that's right take the time you've always wanted to take to learn it awesome well all right have we answered the question i think so what else could possibly be said here good luck on your new job congratulations on the on the gig i hope it's fantastic yeah me too if other people want to get their questions answered where should they go jameson they should go to soft skills.audio they should then click ask a question and then type into the text fields the stuff that it says to type i forgot the order and what they say but

fill out the info we'll read it we'll answer it before the universe stops that's right thank you so much to the people that send in questions we learn from them and they make us think we love hearing your feedback on them too if we've answered a question and you've taken or not taken our advice please let us know so we can adjust our advice in the future We're trying to become more accurate, more precise, more iterative. Which one would be? I don't know. Oh, yes.

We are. It would be accurate, I think. We're already pretty precise. We just say the same wrong answer every time. Yeah, I think that's it. We'll catch you next week.