Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 268: Title inflation and solo remote engineer

Episode Date: August 23, 2021

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Questions I have a question about ‘title inflation’, where you get promoted faster than your experience would normally suggest for that specific title. If I’ve been a ‘Senior Software Engineer’ for all of a year, and am now getting recruiting offers for Director and VP of Engineering jobs, is it worth interviewing and seeing where it goes? I don’t really see myself at that level, but I… might be able to level up to it quickly! Should I take a remote work offer or find a new job in a new place? I am moving to another country with my husband in 2 months. I am the only frontend developer in the team and my company has been having difficulty hiring people, so my boss asked me if I could work for the company as a remote employee. I am reluctant to the offer because my plan has always been to find a new job so that I can blend in with the local community. Not to mention the 12-hour time difference and lack of new challenges. Sadly, I find it difficult to reject him and leave my colleagues behind. What is a better action to take?

it takes more than writing a blog post titled x considered harmful to be a software engineer this is episode 268 of the soft skills engineering podcast i'm your host jamison dance i'm your host dave smith soft skills engineering is a weekly advice show where we answer your non-technical questions about the technical field of software development and we also note that lots of people use the same title for their blog posts do you know about the i guess i should explain the joke because that that's how you make jokes funny oh man i can't wait explain them you know the the go-to considered harmful letter that dykstra wrote yes and you know what i'm so glad that you just said that because i was thinking to myself do i actually know the origin story of the x

considered harmful meme and i and i thought to myself what was it it was go-to right it was yeah go-to statement considered harmful it was a letter to the acm or something like that i think yes dykstra was like he was like the original snooty genius uh computer scientist i feel like yeah and for some reason that title of thing considered harmful just really stuck in people's brains and now what is it 40 years later you still see no more than that 53 don't make me do math live on the air yeah but many years later you still see the same title yes i wonder if we're gonna see like the listicle title last for half a half a century the what the what title the listicle you know the article that is just a list of things like oh top 15 cool hairstyles you won't

believe number seven right which you can never get to seven because of all the ads yeah the distant future when we have flying cars and teleportation you'll be like teleporting through hyperspace and then on the side of hyperspace will be projected an ad for an article called top 15 alien body modifications or something like that you want to thank our patrons dave i do our patrons are not considered harmful just so you know no i'd like to say thank you to those folks that are contributing at the level that gets them a weekly shout out they are nick cantar brayden canes john grant philip john basile dennis bogdanoff travis sanders nick hathaway taras harouk bites of wisdom.com with the y ragnar hardison oladap of 48 yarn spain's and fizzbuzz influencer

roman denisov adrian boarding jonathan king testing is documenting.org will angel monkey face emoji ira chan patreon.com.au we're hiring and kashokton ohio we should go there sometime we should just read that sentence read the patron in the town square tribute in yeah in the middle that'd be cool should i read our first question now let's do it okay this is a question from a listener named jack i have a question about title inflation where you get promoted faster than your experience would normally suggest for that specific title if i've been a senior software engineer for all of a year and am now getting recruiting offers for director and vp of engineering jobs is it worth interviewing and seeing where it goes i don't really see myself

at that level but i might be able to level up to it quickly wow congratulations so i you know i am excited that you're getting these offers but i think you've missed the boat because i've been getting recruiting offers for president of the earth whoa yeah i just roll my eyes and and and and click delete on the email yeah these global i don't know what are they for the secret global elite recruiting yes they have to recruit yeah so okay if a company is offering recruiting you for a director or vp of engineering job with no management experience i'm assuming you don't have any management experience because of the senior software engineer um title then you do not want to work at that company if if that's how they judge talent and fitness for the role then you

don't want to see like what their ceo is like what do you think is happening here is this just recruiters casting a very very wide net of just blasting emails out to literally everyone thousand people they just find on linkedin yeah i was thinking to myself if you got one of those you could chalk it up to you know someone clicked the wrong filter checkbox on linkedin but when you get a bunch of them in a row it's like what are are we really that desperate yeah then we're just we've just been like yes clear all the filters send the email to everyone on linkedin wasn't there a famous manager ceo guy named jack jack jack dorsey jack oh oh jack welch yeah he was the ceo of general electric for a few decades maybe they think you're him they just saw jack and they're like oh well i

thought he's been dead for like 20 years but here he is he pivoted to software he's got plenty of experience you can't blame him he died last year so maybe they just didn't get the email oh i thought he died in 20 in 2001 okay hasn't died that long ago yeah i mean last year that makes it more plausible then yes i think you're jack welch if you only last year have you ever seen those like very strategic on the other side of the recruiting table, very strategic outreaches to get a job at a company. Like I read an article by someone who wanted a job at a particular company. So they created an extremely targeted Facebook ad campaign that ended up only targeting like five people. And one of them was the CEO of this company. Like he did a little research on the

company, figured out some of the CEO's interests and just tried to get lucky. And like they put the name of the CEO right in the Facebook ad and said, hire me. I found you through this Facebook ad. I'm really good at marketing. Hire me. Something like that. Anyway, that's like the exact opposite of this. Yeah. Just anybody with a pulse. We don't mean to poo-poo your experience or skill, Jack. I'm just assuming that you are not qualified to be a director or VP of engineering. yet but five minutes after you sign this offer letter you will be so director can mean a lot of things depending on the size of company but i feel like the baseline is you are managing other managers you have multiple teams reporting to you right um if it's less than that then it's

a weird director role which i've had in the past because my previous company was very cavalier with titles and they thought you manage people let's just call it a director and i said okay you know like on a movie set 20 something yeah yeah didn't realize that meant a thing i might be able to level up to it quickly i don't think you will be able to i'm sorry i don't i don't think you can just pick up being a vp on on the job if you have not managed before the abstraction level is way higher than working as a software developer and the abstraction level of working as a line level manager is already higher than than a software dev so you're like several levels removed from that line level manager amount of abstraction but jameson engineers are good at abstraction

it's what we do i don't think they are i think they build abstractions well we i think we build abstractions and then we curse them as they shoot us in the foot later as they as they betray us later on as they leak yep should jack interview though and just see what happens well geez i find it hard to believe you would pass a phone screen though i mean if the recruiter calls you up and then asks you tell me about your career and your experience growing a business from like 10 million to 100 million in annual revenue and you just say uh i haven't done that about postgres i mean that look so it could very well be like you said that they're throwing the word director and vp around because it truly is a case of title inflation in which case this could actually just

mean there's two engineers you're one of them and you're in charge you know here's your vp of engineering title yeah so if that's the case yeah apply but if it's like there's 75 engineers at this company and they need someone to lead their distributed team of 20 teams and managers and managers, I don't think you're doing anyone a service. I don't think you're doing anyone a service by applying for that job. I think you should still talk to the recruiter just to see what happens. Yeah. Just call them up. Look, recruiters love it when people write back and they really love it when you say, yes, I am available for a quote, quick call to quote, hop on a call to discuss this opportunity they love it so you'll definitely get that call why i

will forward this opportunity to all of my friends and colleagues who i think might be a good fit yeah you know what i will do your job for you geez jameson how mean but seriously like i it would be fun just to kind of feel some of these out and be like what exactly i mean you know what i mean it'll be interesting to see if they're honest and just say uh yeah i i just got a little over eager on the linkedin search yeah i spammed just too many people but they won't say that probably i have an experience that makes me cringe to think back on it and so i will tell it to several thousand tens of thousands of people millions millions of people yeah well technically if someone broadcasts this over the radio those waves go out to space right

that's right if someone downloads it over wi-fi then i'm assuming it's going to all of all of space yes it is yeah so i was i had been a consultant for a while i was looking for something more full-time i had a a moderate amount of management experience i had a friend of the family who had a software company who i found out was hiring a vp of engineering and i thought that kind of sounds like management which is more of what i want to do i'll just go in and talk to him and I went in they asked me about my past experience and then in retrospect I I see a lot of signs of them trying to let me down softly I think this is a family relationship and tell me yeah this is not at all for you and I didn't get it I was just like huh I guess they're not

interested it took me it took me longer than it should have to realize wait I don't think I am qualified for this job but i'm still alive it didn't kill me and that's how i judged the success of any endeavor if you're around to think about it then it was a success yeah you're like for today's retrospective i would just like us all to call this a green sprint successful because we're here to talk about it we didn't devolve into a battle royale scenario where we all fought each other until there was only one survivor and that's the vp of engineering right congratulations you've advanced this stage of the interview

so okay have we answered the question oh well let's have it you have more wisdom i don't have any wisdom. And those of you who've listened to more than zero episodes already knew that. But what I will say is that is there a title inflation to this degree? And I would say I have not observed that. I have not observed director and VP engineering jobs being so widespread and diluted to that point. I have certainly seen the startup garage engineering team with three people and one of them's got to be the VP for sure. That's been around forever though so i'm not seeing it devolve to that level now the you know the other titles like senior principal staff engineer these are these are certainly getting tossed around willy-nilly by

whoever wants to all the time and we've we've talked about that like from one company to the next they they have basically no translatable meaning yeah even sometimes from one team to the next yeah that's true that sometimes the the levels are in relation to the other people on the team sort of yeah your staff on one team you might be senior on another team because the the team is is more competent or something interesting well not not that you would get down leveled i guess i'm saying in a how do i put this there is a world where you join a team the team is not doing great because they're not very talented you do very well on that team and then are recognized for that and get promoted right but if you had joined a higher functioning

team with more productive team members, then you would not stick out as much and would not have gotten promoted. Right. Okay. There we go. I'm done with those words. Do you want to give me some different words? Nope. I like those. They came out really good. They did. Thank you. Shall I read our next question? Please. This comes from a listener named Melody who says, should I take a remote work offer? Sorry, let me emphasize the correct words here. Should I take a remote work offer or find a new job in a new place i am moving to another country with my husband in two months i am the only front-end developer in the team and my company has been facing difficulty hiring people so my boss asked me if i could work for the company as a remote

employee i am reluctant to the offer because my plan has always been to find a new job so that i can blend in with the local community not to mention the 12-hour time difference and lack of new challenges sadly i find it difficult to reject him and leave my colleagues behind what is a better action to take reject him leave your colleagues behind easy you're so heartless so i am heartless for the boss and have the best interests of the question asker in mind i have worked with folks on a 12-hour time difference for several years now and they are some of the most talented people I've ever worked with. And it's brutal. It's so hard. It's, oh, I hate it. It's so hard to communicate. And someone's always up late or up very early. Yeah, it's just really hard to make

work in a very smooth way. So that would be rough, especially if you haven't done it before. You're probably underestimating how rough it would be. Imagine how isolated you feel as the only front end developer, the only person that knows your HTML from your CSS, and then add that to you never ever see anyone else online ever again from your company you only just send them emails and then hear back the next day if you thought right if you thought it was hard being a remote developer where you have video you know real-time video interaction imagine how hard it would be if you don't even have that in your remote i mean they're they're there's the open source model where it's very distributed and very autonomous but i have found that most companies do not work in that

same model and you can't just kind of let someone go off and noodle for six months on a thing and then they come back and present it you there's a lot more coordination required that's exactly what i was just thinking it's one thing if your team is already time zone distributed all over the world and it's another another thing entirely if you've got yourself a local team and you're going to be the only one in this 12 hour time difference like oh man that's like the absolute setting yourself up for failure yeah it's gonna be gonna be very isolating and guess by the way guess who gets blamed for everything my code was working when i went to bed it must have been that developer on the other side of the world right must have changed it while i was asleep oh and who's not here to

defend themselves it's like the changeling story somebody swapped my code out like they swapped babies out back in the day i find it difficult to reject him and leave my colleagues behind yeah i mean it's if you enjoy working somewhere it is difficult to quit i think your quality of life will be better if you get a local job i don't know where you're moving to and what the job market is like there so so maybe you could stay on at this role until you find a local job yeah like maybe this will help with continuity a little yeah and and you can pitch it to the company is i mean they're not hiring anybody in in your role so they need some continuity now i think it's worth it to them even if you're if they know you're looking around but you know you know

what's going to happen if if they're trying to find people to replace you they're going to ask you to interview them and you're in a 12-hour shifted time zone which means you're going to be doing interviews at 2 a.m yeah just tell them sure wake up at 2 a.m and then i'll interview them i'll be happy to oh man yeah someone someone is always awake at an astonishing hour if if there's a 12 hour time zone difference or 12 hour time difference lack of new challenges i've totally skipped over that i mean that's just that by itself is the reason people quit their jobs yes you did you did in fact call the quit your job podcast not sure if that was clear in the advertising i don't know i haven't i haven't seen what felt like such a clear-cut case in a while

and it's easy because i don't know the people i don't have connections with them i'm not gonna see the sad tears they will cry when you hand them like a react code base and they say where are the pointers yeah it's i'm i'm looking at it dispassionately but but with passion i don't see well with cold passion cold cold steely determined passion yeah i don't see how it will be better for your life to stay working for this company yeah now if there's no companies in your new destination that will hire you then you know but you really want to be in that destination then that's a different kind of a different situation yeah maybe maybe your husband is going to work on like an oil rig in the middle of the ocean 12 hours away and well it would be

tough to do your job anyways but it would be tough to find a non-oil rig job i imagine if you were living on that thing that would be amazing i'm a software developer i live on an oil rig how'd you get that kick well just one of my goals applied leaving colleagues behind so i do have a tip here i have um in the past when i have quit jobs or when i've had colleagues leave i didn't do this deliberately but i basically never talked to them again just like oh i don't know my time was focused on the current people i worked with but in the past few years i've become better at keeping up with people i used to work with and i actually do something really speaking of cold and mechanical i set reminders in my phone

to check in with people every few months so i'll just have a little reminder graph that says check in with this person and i think oh yeah and i just send them a text i mean it's not because i'm i don't need anything from them it's just i just want to stay in touch yeah so you don't have to leave them behind completely also you're going to leave them behind anyways because you're going 12 hours away so that's true yeah these people are dead to you they're going to be never awake when you're awake and always asleep when you're awake yeah i don't know i feel like i have a pretty clear opinion on this one any mitigating factors dave any any way we can hedge this at all let's see um maybe you're an extreme introvert and you actually prefer to be awake when everyone around

you is asleep and you could start working nights in your new place so that you can have real-time interactions with your co-workers but only your co-workers everyone else in your life is shut out okay maybe maybe you despise meetings so much and your company is so meeting heavy that this is your way of avoiding meetings you'll just be asleep during all the meetings someone has to tell you what's going on this so you just you just get some summary handed to you it's probably like two weeks out of date at any given point yeah but at least you didn't have to go to those meetings yeah right i'm flip-flopping back to yes keep the job skip the meetings keep the job no i think you should quit have we answered it i think so good luck you know send us

a message and let us know how it goes from your new time zone yeah that'd be cool what can people do if they want their own questions answered dave go to softskills.audio and click the ask a question but ask it ask a question button yeah we're gonna have to reword that to match what it's in latin for fun and you can you can fill out our little form there to ask your question and you know you can give us whatever information you like you can actually type any information into any of the boxes and it'll come through to us go crazy put your name in the email field yeah you can you can do that go wild our validation code is very weak you can even ask your question in the name field we'll figure it out

don't worry we're pretty good and and we just also want to say thank you to so many people who have written in questions there are a lot of questions out there and i feel like now is a good time to reiterate the fact that when jameson thought we should start this podcast five years ago five and a half years ago i thought we'll probably do two or three episodes and run out of material well here we are 260 something episodes later thank you so much to everyone yeah it's great all right we will catch you next week I'll see you next time.