Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 267: Cheap promotion raise and live coding blues

Episode Date: August 16, 2021

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Questions I work for an all-remote company and I’m about to get promoted. The company says they target a salary increase of 5-10%. Assuming they come to me with an offer on the low-end (5-6%), what’s the best way to go about negotiating a higher raise during promotion? I want to stay at the company and also want the shiny new SENIOR job title, so I feel like I don’t have much leverage in this situation. Any advice is appreciated! Rachel asks, Live coding makes me choke. As soon as someone else is watching, my brain immediately goes to mush and I’m like a chicken with my head cut off. Actually recently I learned it’s not just live coding – it extends to live spreadsheet-making and live cooking as well! I guess I’m not into performing? Anyway, this has come up because it’s impacting my career in real ways. For interviews I offer to do takehomes, which I’m great at, but sometimes I’m told live coding is the standard they apply to all applicants. What’s a non-live coder to do? Show Notes Consumer price index: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/cpi.nr0.htm @Channel Twitter account: https://twitter.com/Channel https://interviewing.io/

It takes more than trying to preemptively think of all the things you could accidentally break that were added 12 years ago on your legacy code base just because you want to add a new feature to be a great engineer. This is Soft Skills Engineering episode 267. I'm your host, Dave Smith. I am your host, Jameson Dance. Soft Skills Engineering is a weekly advice podcast where we give advice on all the soft sides of legacy piles of poo. where does that ring compared to spaghetti like really old spaghetti i feel like spaghetti is probably better well yeah i guess it's if it's rotten spaghetti i was thinking like you know how spaghetti dries out and gets hard and if you try

to take it apart it just breaks uh-huh that's what i think this code base is interesting that's that's a good metaphor what you may not know is that jameson and i also have a legacy code base but it's 266 episodes of recorded audio that we have to confirm that nothing we say on today's episode will contradict anything we've said in a past episode or furiously refactor all the old episodes to accommodate this new change in position yeah that's like a 1984 thing like we we've always said don't quit your job yeah what do you mean okay i want to thank our terrific patrons thank you so much to nick cantar braden canes john grant philip john basile dennis bogdanov travis travis sanders nick hathaway taras harouk bites of wisdom

with a y ragnar harrison oladapo fade karen sveinsen fizzbuzz influencer roman denisov adrian boarding jonathan king testing is documenting.org will angel monkey face emoji irachan patreon.com.au we're hiring and kashokton ohio they helpfully included a pronunciation guide for that so thank you oh that was just that was me oh thank you dave okay thank you to all these folks who support the podcast at a level that we shout them out every single episode if you would like to support the podcast as well you can go to our website softskills.audio and click support us on patreon any dollar donation will get you access to our slack team where you hear great updates like how my ceiling is doing from when it broke during the last some some previous podcast

recording and your good advice from kind people that's right do you want to read our first question dave sure do hold on here let's just jump in all right this comes from an anonymous listener who says i work for an all remote company and i'm about to get promoted the company says they target a salary increase of five to ten percent assuming they come to me with an offer on the low end like five to six percent what's the best way to go about negotiating a higher raise during promotion i want to stay at the company and also want the shiny new senior job title so i feel like i don't have much leverage in this situation any advice is appreciated hmm i think you just say to them i'm targeting a salary increase of 10 percent and then it's done

yeah interesting i mean the the meta point of this is that the question asker brings up leverage and and leverage is a pretty important thing for negotiating salary i mean you maybe have some implicit leverage of if you're being promoted they want to keep you happy and keep you around and you can kind of lean on that and say this makes me feel underappreciated or it doesn't reflect the value i provide or something this makes me feel you insult me sir this makes me feel underappreciated to the tune of i'm quitting my job yeah that's leverage this makes me feel five percent unappreciated take your 5% and leave. Get it out of my sight. Disgusts me.

What do you think they should do? You know, this is a very interesting year to be looking at these numbers because, at least in the United States, inflation is upon us to the tune of about 6%, which coincidentally is right around your low end. And this is according to the Consumer Price Index, which I read about two days ago. I saw a nice, concise version of a report put out by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Is that just some fun, light reading that you do? Let's check out the Consumer Price Index. It is a very long report, but they have this ASCII art table showing all the different consumer goods and actually lots of goods, food, automobiles. Do they have ASCII art pictures of

them? Because that would be rad. Here's an ASCII art banana. It's going up by 8%. percent you'll notice we used a whole bunch of number eights to draw this banana and percentage signs for this percentage signs for the shading yeah anyway it was remarkably consumable you know used car prices are on their food is on their gas oil energy bunch of anyway but the average of all these things is like six percent you know for the trailing 12 months so that's a little bit of leverage where you can say look anything under six percent is actually a pay cut yeah i have not heard of using the consumer price index as a negotiating tactic before i don't think i have either a novel invention dave i think i'm looking at the ascii diagram or ascii table

now oh yeah everything should have ascii tables i know it's so i'm like this is very approachable yeah it's great yeah you can see it yeah fixed with fonts just hand hand align everything yeah totally that's i can like our forefathers just like the four like our ancestors did no matter what device it renders on it'll be fine i know it was awesome i looked at it on my phone and i was like this is really cool all right okay i'm putting a i'm putting a link in the show notes who needs html when you have fixed with fonts okay consumer price index is going this is terrifying i think this is probably going to make my life worse so maybe i'll obsessively check this now nobody click on the show notes you're not going to want to know

used cars and trucks 41 i feel worse about the raise i got now they're taking money from me that's right i mean it's crazy our pretty much your entire career and mine has been marked by very low inflation in the United States, like record lows for the last 20 years. I'm not really an economist. And even if I were, what I would say next would be even less- Well, the domain of your economics expertise, let's just say it's more celestial. You're a space economist. That's right. Anyway, I do think that we have had a very unusually low run for the last 20 years on the inflation front. And so when you got like a 5% raise, it actually was a raise. But I believe

this year, a 5% raise will not have the feeling of a raise when you pay your bills and buy your groceries well it would have until you told me this oh man huh well don't worry because uh medical care commodities are actually down by 2.1 so as long as you buy a lot of whatever medical care commodities are yeah what if i replace my energy consumption with medical care what if you buy pills to burn them for energy yeah exactly to avoid that 41 rise in gas prices it's perfect i think you could probably do some pretty sweet life hacks with these numbers you might experience some strange effects depending on which pills you burn besides your car now so there's a i feel like there's a common principle in a lot of the

questions we get which is ask for the thing that you want and it sounds really trite and obvious when i say it but it doesn't happen that often and yet people don't ask for what they want yeah they don't so so they might have no idea that you are expecting or wanting a higher raise than five percent if if you ask for it then your chances of getting it go way up it isn't a foolproof thing but it's better than not absolutely in my opinion and that applies to anything whether you want to refactor a 12 year old legacy code or i i want the consumer price index to fall so i'm gonna go ask for it in what twitter can you can you at the consumer price yeah well no i'll just i'll just add channel on twitter and see what that does there's got to be a channel twitter account

is yeah okay yeah ask for it that's my that's my really helpful mind-blowing advice is tell them so you say assuming they come to me with an offer on the low end don't wait for them to come to you just say i i would love a raise of this amount can i expect that sorry this just in breaking news i need to interrupt there is an at channel twitter account and all they do is retreat people complaining about at channel etiquette who mentioned at channel in their tweets so it it mentions this account i think so another one for the show notes it's going in so i'm sorry what were you saying i was busy looking for the at channel twitter account oh just the same thing but with more words the question asker says assuming they come to me with an offer on the

low end so don't wait for them to come to you you should go to them because it's going to be more work to change it after they already give it to you more work and it might even be so much work that the roi is just upside down they're going to make you wait till next year this is something i mean it's possible that they might have to like claw back money they've already told other people they're going to get they're going to give you more money or something which is great i mean i love getting a raise if i know that it's at the expense of my co-workers i just love look at them in the eyes and knowing nothing that makes me feel as good as a zero-sum game when i'm on the positive end and you're on the negative end delectable

something that james and i have said a lot is you have to start having you have to make these requests to your management probably a lot earlier than you think probably months earlier than you think in fact if you've already been told by your manager that a promotion is on the way it's probably too late to talk about the amount and uh you know like i don't know just depends on your company of course and the smaller your company is the more flexibility they will have and the less advanced notice you're going to need to give and the more guilt tripping your manager will work what do you mean i don't know i mean if it's some gigantic megacorp and you give them the puppy dog eyes when they tell you what your raise is and say please my my pet hamsters won't

be able to survive on only five percent um they'll the person across the seat from you will be shackled by bureaucracy and say your hamsters are not my concern because i can't do anything about them but if it's a smaller company then you can influence them with emotion more yes that is true the best way of making decisions that play on someone else's emotions yes indeed that is sad but but true it's true anyway there you go have we have we advised this question enough let me just see here what's the best way to go about it yeah so okay how do you negotiate this well you've already taken your biggest card off the table which is the threat of leaving that's for better or worse really just for worse in our industry that's the ultimate

leverage and so if you really want to you know maximize your potential you essentially threaten to quit i i there are in my opinion there are better ways to do this but that does have a really good track record so if that's off the table for you then i think really do what jameson said ask for exactly what you want and frankly five percent to ten percent for a big promotion feels like not very much i don't know but maybe it's like a mid-year thing and on your next review cycle whenever that lands maybe you'll have a chance to do five to ten percent again and it could have it could be a little bigger for the year yeah that makes sense i think you need a you need another promotion offer from a different department in your company

a counter yeah you need a counter promotion well i like the senior engineer promotion but over in uh in the data team they offered me a principal engineer role with a 20 pay increase what can you do to match that can you match this promotion it's foolproof yeah go for it all right that's all i got i got nothing okay i'm gonna read our next question this is from a listener named rachel rachel asks well technically the pronunciation guide said rachel with a lot of at the end live coding makes me choke as soon as someone else is watching my brain immediately goes to mush and i'm like a chicken with my head cut off actually recently i learned it's not just live coding it extends to live spreadsheet making and live cooking as well i guess i'm not into

performing anyway this has come up because it's impacting my career in real ways for interviews i offer to do take-homes which i'm great at but sometimes i'm cold i'm told live coding is the standard they apply to all applicants what's a non-live coder to do non-live so you're a you're you're better at dead coding is that what i'm getting dead coding uh what is live cooking yeah i wonder about that like like cooking in front of an audience yeah or maybe you uh or just like one other person yeah like you have a friend over and you're like look you just put the noodles in the boiling water like this interesting this so i've i've had an internal debate about hiring processes um and there's i've seen this debate reflected externally as well in the real world

not inside my mind palace every process has a trade-off and you're making it easier for some group of people and harder for some other group of people. So the take-home thing, right, is great if you don't do well in live coding, like this question asker. It might be great if you need a lot of time flexibility to do it. So you're saying that you do a take-home process and you hire a bunch of introverts who don't like sunlight and keep their webcams off. Is that how that works? No, it's just, I mean, to me, the benefit of a take-home for the candidate is you get to see more of a real world indicator of their performance because the interview is so artificial it's that is not a normal work environment you don't do your work in an

adversarial environment ever although frankly that's a revolutionary new idea though for software development it's like the it's like pair you shouldn't take into the extreme it's like 10 to 1 pair programming audience edition that's like mob programming but the mob is like an angry mob coming after you and you're actually running from them while coding yeah the mob is chasing you yeah and and the skill sets that could make you do well at live coding don't necessarily correlate with the skill sets that make you do well at the job because it doesn't reflect the job really well at least the the l the elements of live coding that are unique from that are distinct from the regular kind of code coding that you do is what you're

saying yeah like a people staring over your shoulder a lot of pressure on the outcome maybe an unfamiliar environment or or technical setup uh no no time to like research or or think about it so i guess my point is that i like hearing myself talk what is my point i mean that was my point so yeah hmm okay bring it back to the question asker the interview at places where they do take homes yeah you so actually i've seen this at a few places where they talk about having accommodations for interviews okay what's that mean i i think it might be for like disabilities or something like that but i'm not entirely sure i wonder if that accommodation could extend to something like i i would love a take-home exam instead of like live solving elite code problem

in front of you frankly i don't understand why almost virtually like if you have a coding component to your interview process why wouldn't it always just be a take-home because because it turns a lot of people off i can tell you from experience that it is a filter that lots of people do not get through but some of those people would probably be good at your job but but i mean which filter is going to exclude more qualified candidates live coding or take-home because to me it's live coding by a filter i mean you ask them to do it and then they say i'll do it and then they never they don't because it takes too much time or i don't know they just don't get around to it where the live thing you just show up to the interview and then and then you do it as part

of showing up you just don't tell them in advance maybe we need to follow up at home with candidates i've actually knock on their door i've actually found out that uh the best way to maximize your hiring is just to have no interview at all and just say yes to everyone who applies and like and don't filter anyone out we got all the qualified candidates and a bunch of other ones do i mean there yeah there are people who would be good at the job who either will choose not to or be unable to do take home for some reason but also you you're a kind of person who would be good at the job but wouldn't show it in the live coding interview so yeah they're not good enough for you so that's what i'm saying i'm reading into this question a little bit that

says you know yeah for interviews i i offer to do take-homes but sometimes i have to do live coding fine i'm also not good at live spreadsheeting i wonder if this is impacting the career of this question asker a little more than just in interviews like maybe when it's like you're in a team meeting and you need to discuss a design decision or you need to whiteboard an idea or a new architecture or something, maybe that's coming out, you know? Yeah. I was going to say that those should be collaborative, but there are situations where it could be a little more high pressure or high stakes when you're presenting something. There could be a debate, right? Like there could be two competing ideas and you need to weigh the pros and cons. Yeah. Do you think if you got really

good at live cooking, it would carry over to live coding in any way? Definitely. They share a lot of letters yes in between those two words how could they be similar those two words well i mean i i do i do think there's something to that i i think first of all i think live coding skill is very rare people who are just super comfortable and able to crank out code as effectively in front of an audience as they can uh in in the privacy of their own workstation are very rare, but I've seen a few of them and boy, it feels like a magic trick when I watch them. It kind of does. It's fun to watch.

So I think, first of all, you're not alone in this. And I think if you insist on interviewing for jobs that have live coding as a component, the only way to get better at it is the same way you get better at everything. You practice it. How do you practice interview? You just do an interview? We've kind of talked about this before. I have this bad habit of doing what I think is a practice interview and then ending up with a new job it's like not not really a bad outcome yeah if it turns out that the thing you were practicing for was getting a new job anyway and you got it while practicing that's pretty good that's true no i just wanted to get good at interviewing i didn't want a new job well yeah i mean interviewing is its own end it's its own

reward yeah sometimes yeah the joy is in the work so i had a friend who well and my previous company one of the types of interviews they did was called a system design interview. And these are like where you present a kind of a vague problem and the outcome you're looking for is a well designed system on a whiteboard with drawings and boxes and lines connecting them and a description of design, a reservation system. Classic, classic, right? Classic. Anyway, I had a friend, a former coworker at several jobs who said, I'm really bad at these interviews and I'd like to get better, mostly because he hadn't done them so i said i'll i'll interview you if you want he was like yeah let's do it so i did it i he came over to my office and was he was employed at the same company

as you no he was employed at a different company oh okay i was gonna say that would be suspicious to me like why do you want to get better oh yeah true true very true so you're practicing interviewing huh well he and i have a pretty close relationship so if you were leaving yeah you know he would have told me but anyway for me it was really fun he did the interview i asked him a bunch of questions i treated him just like i would treat a candidate in a system design interview and then at the end we got to do something that i never get to do with candidates which is give honest and complete feedback yeah it's hard it's it takes so much time to give good feedback to strangers and yeah we've talked about this before too the risks are are there without it

becoming a legal liability. Yeah. There are certainly risks and the cost to you of not giving feedback is invisible. That's right. You just get more time. So yeah, exactly. So anyway, that I found that to be fun. He really enjoyed it too. At least he told me later, he's probably like, Oh my gosh, I'm never getting in a room alone with that guy again. He grilled it. I thought you were my friend. Anyway. Yeah. I think it's fun. It's a low pressure way to do that. Find a practice partner and do that with, and in my experience, you really do need an audience because if you if you practice just doing it with only yourself in the room i think you don't give it your whole heart you know yeah that's what i would do i like that idea of doing

when you said practice i thought of actually going and interviewing somewhere but i have found that if i really bomb an interview it can take me a while to recover i don't immediately walk out thinking i've learned and grown and and now i will do the next one better it's usually more like i don't deserve to hit the escape key to exit vim like or and not even exiting them whatever to to vim so i like your idea of it feels like failure would be less costly in terms of your morale i guess okay yeah your ego it it might be easier to learn from a situation where it's it's practice but more friendly still believe it or not i have often thought that if it would be really fun to set up a group where you just practice doing technical interviews with each other i don't

know to me it's exciting and fun and i don't know it's kind of a hobby but i don't have time to go and interview anymore like i used to do every month would you really do it every month no no i probably at my height i did it maybe three times a year okay would you do the full interview loop as as or as far as they went with you or would you cut it off early ever trying to remember I mean, my goal was usually to get to an offer, you know, because you got to practice every stage, including the offer negotiation. Huh. So I don't know. Maybe.

I don't remember. It's been a long time, honestly, since I've been in that much of the mode of interviewing. Yeah. You already figured it all out. Well, what I found is that as you become more senior, interviews become a lot more non-obvious that you're even being interviewed. You know, it's like, hey, can I take you out to lunch? Sure. and then an hour later you're like wait a minute i just got a hamburger why are you making me

why are you making me build a tree out of my rice grains exactly so anyway wait a minute this is an interview this is a doubly linked list out of hot dogs these sausage links oh man so anyway i i mean you could try practicing but i gotta tell you live coding is kind of falling out of fashion i think i think i don't have my finger on the whole pulse of the industry but it's still being done at many companies but it's also not being done at many companies so i i think you don't necessarily limit yourself too much if you choose not to interview at places that do that yeah the the pool of companies you can still work at is pretty solid you're saying

yeah for sure that makes sense i i've really enjoyed you said it's kind of a hobby of yours to think about interviews that is one thing i really enjoy about interviews is comparing it to how i interview candidates and and kind of picking up new things from processes that i see or experience or or taking out things that i experience or saying i will never do this it's i don't know why it is satisfying but it is yeah i agree don't know why well don't know why we've answered the question that's what that means have we answered the question i think so i i mean the summary is practice makes perfect or if you don't want to do it avoid you'll have you'll be fine avoiding plenty of those companies that require you to live code

gosh sorry i'm i'm stumbling because i just thought of an anecdote well i have one suggestion i swear this isn't a shill for a product or anything but i've seen this company i think it's called interview.io or something like that and they their product is um interview practice interviews for engineers that if you do the practice interview really well turn into real interviews with fancy tech companies whoa yeah so i guess it's sort of maybe some pressure there because if you want to get a real job from it then you want to do well but also you could just go in and say i'm here to practice and oh i'll bomb a bunch of these and so you have plausible deniability with your own employer yeah i think so so it's interviewing.io i just found the website

anonymous technical mock interviews with engineers from google facebook and other top companies yeah it's a cool business model i think because if the interview goes well then i'm pretty sure the company pays some referral bonus or recruiting bonus and tries to get that candidate to actually join the company yeah we'll accept our our retroactive sponsorship check any day at your leisure i'll add that to the show notes what was the anecdote you were going to share well it was a live coding anecdote where i interviewed for my previous company back in 2016 i just remember it was my very first interview of the day there were five in a row and the very first one had a white board interview whiteboard coding interview and to this day i still don't know the solution to

the problem they posed to me. I thought about it a lot. I even went home. I just did not solve the problem. I think I did a good job of defining and understanding the problem, but I did not solve it. And to this day, I don't know why they offered me a job. And I guess the reason I share that is you don't actually have to be really good at live coding necessarily. Yeah. So you're saying despite you not coming up with a beautiful solution, your interview wasn't pass fail based on just that portion yeah yeah you can recover yeah i think as long as you demonstrate if you fail in a way that demonstrates that you're competent then yeah i could see that if you just freeze up and can't type the whatever keyword used for declaring functions in your

language or something like that you forget how to turn on your computer then that's probably that's probably enough to fail you but that's why you practice yep okay now we've surely answered For sure. I don't know how we couldn't. Okay. What should people do if they want their own questions answered, Dave? Go over 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. So many of you do that every week and we really appreciate it. We're making progress. We're getting through them. We'll get to them all before the universe ends. Yes. And we'll catch you next week.