Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 273: Influencing people and getting a raise in a flat org

Episode Date: October 11, 2021

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Questions Listener Anonomomonous asks, How do you influence people and change minds? I work on a team where things often happen by inertia. I have a lot of ideas about how to improve our process, scope our work better, collaborate more effectively etc. I’m comfortable with sharing my concerns and suggestions with my manager and the rest of the team but the opinion of any single developer is usually politely noted and ignored. As an individual contributor, what’s the best way to influence the rest of your team and your manager without being the overly critical toxic person who tries to shut down every idea? For those who work in a “flat” hierarchy structure, is it unreasonable to ask for a 30~35% pay raise? Normally that would sound like an absurd ask. However, given the fact that everyone is considered an “engineer”, the higher compensation that comes with a promotion isn’t available any other way than explicitly asking for it (as far as I know). Not looking to jab an employer for more money, especially since I like my current one, but since what I’m doing on a daily basis sounds an awful lot like the senior engineer positions I hear about, I naturally would like my pay to reflect what I do. What do you suggest?

it takes more than endorsing your colleagues for microsoft office on linkedin to be a great engineer this is episode 273 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 i hesitated while i said weekly because we missed a week last week i think it's like the average number of fingers on a human is less than 10 and the average yeah the average period between episodes is slightly more than one week but we aim to come ever closer to the average although never meeting it that's right i don't know maybe we'll do like 10 episodes in a day just to get back on track that's true we can

counteract all of this that's yeah we don't have to be satisfied with the asymptotic approach yeah all right i know what i'm doing over the weekend you're about to get 17 episodes with just james it'll be so good dave do you want to thank our patrons sure i do these are the folks that are contributing at the amount that gets them a one-time shout out that is thomas farlaw and Zimmerly and then we have our weekly shout out contributors

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do and they smell good i think we've said before they smell good right they smell better every time i smell them i'll just leave it at that uh should i read our first question yeah go for it all right This is from a listener named Anonymous, which looks a little bit like anonymous, but they're trying to make me stumble over my words. Joke's on you. I'll do it anyways without you trying. Anyways, how do you influence people and change minds? I work on a team where things often happen by inertia.

I have a lot of ideas about how to improve our process, scope our work better, collaborate more effectively, et cetera. i'm comfortable with sharing my concerns and suggestions with my manager and the rest of the team but the opinion of any single developer is usually politely noted and ignored as an individual contributor what's the best way to influence the rest of your team and your manager without being the overly critical toxic person who tries to shut down every idea huh you really cut me off at the knees when you said how can i do this without being overly critical and toxic what are we supposed to do without our best tool for changing minds and winning friends and

influencing people i mean being overly toxic and critical not only gets what you want but also it ends up moving all the other people off the team so you can do whatever you want yeah i mean or it moves you off the team well true but you can do whatever you want at home without being paid freedom a lot of freedom there yeah you know use use whatever linting style you want in your underwear on the couch eating potato chips at i don't know 11 30 a.m yeah although in this remote work world isn't that all of us yes i've revealed too much okay i have one thought which is a prototype or a demo or some kind of straw man proposal is worth a lot

of meetings and talking if you are trying to convince people to do a thing if you can show them and here's what it looks like even if it's a half-baked implementation or an unpolished idea that can go pretty far in convincing people because they have a concrete artifact to talk about so this doesn't apply to every problem shape but often if it's kind of a technical discussion if you just put together a quick demo of maybe what this new technology or pattern looks like it makes talking about it much easier than having an abstract conversation about change which is hard i see your prototype demo and i raise you to the next level which is a toxic prototype what is a toxic prototype do this is where you present a new way of doing code except you do so

while yelling at everyone and criticizing all their feedback ah so you take advantage of the full power of both prototyping and being overly critical and toxic exactly okay i would like to let you in on a secret which is that how do i say this without revealing the secret i don't think i can i'm just gonna reveal it did you just ask how can i let you in on a secret without revealing the secret yeah i'm wondering if there's some kind of like public key cryptography thing i can do over text or okay all right how fast can you factor numbers in your head large prime numbers very very slowly okay this will be fine then so a healthy team will have discussion on things that could change or be improved sometimes there's so much of that discussion that a manager will let

it flow over them like water in a stream and and kind of wait for it to become loud enough to be signaled to pay attention to there there can be a lot of changes a lot of suggestions flying around all of them or some of them might require some work on their part they probably have other work to do and your manager can sometimes just like get used to how it works and and be effective there and then let things stay the same inertia so they might have some incentive to not change stuff because it makes their job briefly harder even though it might make it easier later on or maybe they think it's going to make it harder later on too that's true not all ideas are good except your ideas mine are all good yes yours are all good i don't know what you do to counteract that

actually i do i think you need to show that the try and give some representation of what the cost of implementing that idea is in how much time is it going to take? How much is it going to, is it going to add a step forever to a process, which now, however long you do that process is going to take longer? Is it, what is the cost to trying this out? If you can somehow illustrate that, and especially if you can demonstrate that, then that can get around the inertia or the, the laziness that your manager might have. Are you saying that if you present your path, and i'm sorry if you just quantify the effort to do the idea that it will somehow motivate your manager to want to do it more i think if you show them it's it's not that much work look we could

just do so not just quantify it but also make sure it's small yeah that's true do you have 12 to 16 months to devote yeah because i mean that's how long i've estimated yeah i mean let's rewrite the whole app in haskell it's only going to take three or four years for the entire team i have quantified it let's do this yeah problem solved yeah thank you for pointing that out yeah well i mean astute observation so pedantic right but i mean i think it matters because that's another part of the puzzle i think is ideas that are cheap to implement that have big positive impacts are the most likely to get some traction in the team especially like like jameson said if you do the the first steps ahead of time and bring them an already half

working thing that really helps any other strategies well you know what else in addition to just making it fast like being able to get to the solution you're proposing quickly also if you can show an escape hatch plan where you say look i'm not i i'm never certain about anything and there's a chance this idea will fail if it is a here's how we'll know and b here's the escape hatch that we can use to get out of here so in other words i'm not going to lock you in to this idea forever let's just try it for two weeks and see how it goes those ideas almost always get the green light because it's really clear like a the manager doesn't have to do very much it's not a big effort and b we're gonna know like within a few weeks we'll know if it's a good

idea and we'll just chuck it out if we if we have to i like that good idea dave you made it easy for me to try it yeah let's just try this jameson okay here's an idea let's just try letting me answer a question just once have you ever had someone bring an idea to you and you were like look this might be a good idea but i'm worried that it's just going to be one more thing on my pile of things that i have to do every week and we're never going to be able to stop doing this yeah and it's an endlessly growing pile is that what you mean for sure you just added one more thing to it yeah all right is your question have i ever felt that way yeah yeah exactly yes like when someone brings an idea to you and it's just like oh man this is going to be a pain

for me yeah right or wrong i have been guilty of feeling that way again this gets back to the cost if you can say and i'll do it that's a it's a pretty easy that takes away the the concern about is this going to take up more of my time and and it leaves the concern of is this going to make the team or the project or whatever better or not which hopefully it should yeah but if it doesn't you also have promised your manager that you'll be the first one to kill it if it doesn't ah or it will get you it'll what you'll go down with the idea oh i'm staking my whole career on this idea exactly so so far we've talked about how to bring ideas to your manager but also i think there's another aspect of this which is building a coalition of your peers and building

consensus among them i have found that there are two elements to that that make it work well kind of two patterns the first one is give the project a name for whatever reason when projects have names or ideas have names they they get purchase in people's minds more permanently instead of like that long thing that takes three paragraphs to describe that people can't ever remember all the details of if you just give it a name like the jabberwocky project yeah you know that reference right uh i know there's a poem that talks about the jabberwocky oh you are oh you're way too cultured james that was jabberwock oh yeah this was okay so you you didn't ever watch the it crowd did you no okay well that's an it crowd reference anyway the vorpal sword went snicker snack isn't

that how it goes i don't i don't actually know the original i just know the pop culture reference now i gotta look it up okay nope that's not how it goes at all but yeah it is the vorpal blade went snicker snack it's a vorpal blade not a vorpal sword okay all right adding it to the show notes okay this is crucial information you're gonna want to click this link it's it's by lewis carroll is there like an affiliate program we can sign up on this one and make sure we get a kick back when people read the poem let's talk to lewis carroll and see what he thinks okay anyway if the project has a name it will occupy space in people's minds that is harder to flush out and it will stick like oh yeah remember that project the jabberwocky project oh yeah instead of remember

that thing where we're going to take this module and then we're going to refactor it over here but then it's going to have a dependency on the database schema change over there which will then you know it's like it's very hard for that idea to stick in people's minds that's number one is give the thing a name and number two is go to individuals individually on your team and talk to them about the idea get feedback from them in a private setting not in a big group meeting where you've got all the meeting dynamics and politics potentially at play and other things happening that can influence people go to them privately show them your that show them your idea show them your enthusiasm for the idea and get their buy-in then when you bring the group together for whoever

whoever signs off for these things whether it's your manager or maybe a more senior engineer or something then you can look around the room and say jessica signs off fred signs off and they're all nodding right they're all sitting there heads moving up and down with you and then all looking at your manager together and your manager's like you know and so that like breaks the inertia where it's like oh yeah i don't want to do anything new but i've got these five heads nodding at me i can't have them stop nodding or i'll die that's how i think i agree the importance of of giving people a chance to mull over an idea i've seen ideas succeed or fail based on whether people had heard them or not and the initial reaction is like what i haven't had a chance

to think about this how dare you and then yeah later on it's it's much more reserved it's like oh yeah that's fine yeah yeah exactly that's a very good point you don't want the knee-jerk reaction to be the final reaction yeah which that can feel bad because it means that sometimes it takes longer right you have to gather consensus and get feedback and chase people down but if it's gonna be tricky to convince people or tricky to implement it's i think it's worth doing yeah May I suggest that aside from the skill of quitting your job, consensus building might be the most important skill for more senior engineers, especially in larger organizations. That makes a lot of sense to me. That's how you get stuff done.

And that will remain true until next week when I say something else is the most important skill. That's all I got for you, Jameson. Clearly it's answered, right? Let's wrap this jabberwocky. Okay. Shall I read the next question? Yeah, you shall. Okay, this comes from a listener named Lee who says,

for those who work in a, quote, flat hierarchy structure, is it unreasonable to ask for a 30% to 35% pay raise? Normally, that would sound like an absurd ask. However, given the fact that everyone is considered a, quote, engineer, the higher compensation that comes with a promotion isn't available any other way than explicitly asking for it, as far as I know. I'm not looking to jab my employer for more money, especially since I like my current M1,

but since what i'm doing on a daily basis sounds an awful lot like that senior engineer position i hear about i naturally would like my pay to reflect what i do what do you suggest quit your job quit your job quit your job quit your job yeah if you want a 30 35 pay raise it's not impossible to do at the same job but i bet if you rounded up a group of people who had gotten a 30 to 35 pay raise most the vast majority of them would have done it by switching jobs it's still not easy to do by switching jobs necessarily but it's there's just a lot of i said inertia for the last question i feel like i need a new metaphor but i don't have one there's a lot of inertia that a company has or it's it's anchoring right they they have some perception of your value based

on your current salary they have some perception of how much that salary jumps for promotions and in my experience it is not 30 to 35 percent what is it five percent i don't know i feel like five ten percent something like that so this this feels like this feels outside of the range of the salary bump you would get from moving up one level it does at a normal company that has a structure and hierarchy to it but i almost wonder if given how flat this company is maybe that also means that there's no like pay scales and there's no policy on how big the raise can be like pay caps so maybe you ask for that much and they're like oh i don't know we're a flat hierarchy a flat org so yes why not they just point you towards the spreadsheet where you change the number of

dollars you make right next to all your peers yeah anything goes it's flat it's flat the total number must add up to this so you gotta go subtract some dollars from somebody else i suggest the ceo he won't notice yeah how many yachts does he need uh yeah that's a good point i mean i guess it doesn't hurt to ask we've said this a bunch you absolutely will not get it if you don't ask right way up front so flat could mean a few different things do you think it means that there aren't levels or that there aren't uh reporting hierarchies or something else i think what this usually means is that uh actually just had a wicked thought the cynic in me thinks that this means the same thing that the uh open open office plan means

which is that people try to describe why it's advantageous to productivity and to the employer and also to the employee but in the end it just comes down to cost savings you know if i can cram 17 people into the same square footage as i could cram four people i can save a lot of money on my on my rent and i think the same thing is true here if i can just get rid of a whole layer of middle management i can save a lot of money on my labor budget yeah you could get a lot less stuff done too depending on whether they add value or not hmm yeah who do you ask if it's a flat hierarchy who do you who do you ask to say i would like 30 to 35 percent more money please yeah it's a good question maybe it's one of your peers the group yeah yeah put it put it before a vote yep pop it

slack at channel everybody gets a little what i what i suspect might happen here or could be true of some flat orgs is that the flatness is is in like you said hierarchy right there's not layers of reporting that that kind of go up it's all everybody's sort of at the same level and then maybe there's some executives or something but there still have to be differences in skill and experience and and i would expect even if it was flat people to still be compensated according to the value they provide in some way or at least the value they convinced the company they could provide when they negotiated their salary there you go now you're talking i would be i would be more convinced of that than the first thing you said okay they are compensated according to the

second thing whatever their last job paid them and their negotiation skills a combination of those two things yeah so there's probably some some accommodation for changing what you pay people instead of you just dump all the people in an open office and throw a handful of dollars in there and say like you consider yourselves paid maybe if they're a flat structure they should do this thing where they just have you ever seen those like kind of glass boxes you can go a person one person can go inside and there's these fans that are blowing in there and there's all these dollar bills flying around and you just oh and you have to snatch them out of the air yeah you snatch them out of the air and however many you can you can fist out of the air you walk out that's

your pay maybe that's how the flat structure does pay and the number of minutes you get in the box is based on your seniority or something or tenure okay so you could be senior but if you are not agile if you don't have deft fingers to pull things out of the air yeah we practice agile agile here you should see every friday the sixth principle of agile put people in a glass box with fans and blow money at them and use that to pay them that's from the manifesto uh if you go to the website that lists the manifesto you just have to highlight it because they put it in in in white font yeah they didn't want to they didn't want to reveal their true intentions it's all a hoax by big glass box fan company yeah trying to draw up business maybe the number of tickets you

close that week is the number of minutes you can spend in the box with the money yeah but then you just turn it into like i open my editor ticket every every little task gets ticketed is that good good hearts law we talk about this so much oh yeah good hearts law when it measures when a measure becomes a target it ceases to be an effective measure yes only this time it's for tickets and dollars related to them i'm sure no one would do that yeah it'll be surely just get in the money box yeah i mean i don't know i'm trying to think of things that i haven't already said can you hear the sweet sounds of piano in the background yes just a little okay just a tiny bit you're welcome i guess i can't do anything about it

so what do they do i mean ask it doesn't hurt you to ask yeah but i don't think you will get it i don't know i i kind of think you will you think they will yeah i mean i've asked for a okay so one time in my career i asked for about a 30 raise and i got it but what i did was i actually brought a whole bunch of evidence including like so a whole bunch of things about my personal productivity a bunch of my contributions are all documented in one place put it all on a piece of paper showed it to the, you know, head of engineering and asked for the raise. I even had like a comparable. I said, I have a friend at this company making this much. I want to make that much too. So I had lots of data and this was a pretty flat organization at the time and a somewhat early stage startup.

It was like a series C startup and I got it. I got the 30%. And so I think like the smaller the company and the flatter the company, the more likely you are to get big salary swings if you ask for them. Well, you just destroyed my whole premise. Just go ask for it and it might happen. well that's not what you said you said prepare meticulously and then go ask for it bringing along the the large piles of evidence you've collected that sounds good yeah i think i probably need to say more about that so what i'm doing on a daily basis sounds an awful lot like the senior engineer positions i hear about you need to have the same understanding of what you're doing and how it relates to senior engineer as the person you're trying to convince i've seen

people try to use like a job description that's very vague and then slot in kind of some some things that they have done into that and that's just not the framework that we used for evaluating compensation or levels really so how do you check this i don't know you should have some idea that your evidence is compelling besides here's like a blog post i read about what a senior engineer does for sure hmm well have we answered it i don't know i mean it's a it's a hard one oh you got okay here's the real answer you have to take advantage of the inherent power dynamics in a flat organization which is not that there are no power dynamics it's that they go from explicit based on hierarchy to implicit based on popularity kind of so you need to just convince the crowd

that you are worth it and then they they they together decide or or not the crowd even you convince the popular people find out where the exclusive lunch table is in the cafeteria sit there win over the mean girls and then you got it it's mob performance evaluations yes which has a sinister ring to it now that you say that i think that's what they did to frankenstein's monster i don't think i have anything else to say about this my wisdom is used up well all right have we answered it i think so okay good luck i hope it works good luck we demand our standard one percent if it does work that's right all the credit and all so you can have 99 of the money that's how generous we are okay we just ask for

one percent of it and all of the credit and a hundred percent of the credit yeah but you can't spend that right so it's fine just kidding what can people do if they want their own questions answered dave go to our website at softskills.audio and click the ask a question button fill out our little form there we just want to say thank you to all those who have done that we've got so many questions we love all of them and each of you we promise to answer all of them eventually absolutely thank you so much and we will catch you next week I'll see you next time.