Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 305: About that raise and *you're* not fired

Episode Date: May 23, 2022

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I recently told my boss I thought my comp was below market value and that, while I enjoy working here, I may have to start looking elsewhere for my next opportunity unless there was a way to adjust my salary. He actually agreed with me and said he would go to HR to see what he could do. A few days later, he came back to me and said they could do a market-rate adjustment of 20k per year. I was super happy. He said, “great I will let HR know that you accepted by EOD tomorrow and they will get the paperwork started.” At 10am the following day, he, along with a couple hundred other employees, were laid off. So my boss, my boss’s boss, my boss’s boss’s boss and the HR rep that my boss was talking to are no longer here. So my questions is, what’s the appropriate amount of time to wait before bringing this up to my new boss. With so many of my colleagues now out of work , it seems a bit insensitive to be so concerned with a raise, but also, I like more money. I am 8 months into my first job out of college in an entry level role and today the other new hire (4 months) got fired for poor performance. I have been assured that my performance is still satisfactory, but I have been unable to think about anything else since it happened. I know that I am probably fine, but I am still very shocked and on edge. Any advice on how to move past this without destroying my bloodpressure would be appreciated! Signed, your fellow high strung engineer

it takes more than building an abandonware product so that you can get promoted to be a great engineer this is soft skills engineering episode 305 i'm your host dave smith i'm your host jameson dance soft skills engineering is a weekly advice podcast about the non-technical stuff that goes into software development like how to navigate the infamous so famous that it's infamous promotion process by building things no one needs but that check the complexity box so you can get promoted as opposed to the the famous very healthy promotion process of i feel like i feel like i've seen instances of good promotions but i don't know if i've ever seen a just a really awesome widely applied held up to real world concerns promotion process

yeah maybe that's too pessimistic there's so many incentives in there it's hard to get right yeah but instead of doing that i'm gonna thank our sponsor hired do it this episode is sponsored by them and it is the best way to quit your job and get a new one and you can hear more about them in a little bit i want to thank our patrons who have generously donated their money to jameson's yacht payment fund and i have one-time shout outs for it's been rough because i had that yacht payment fund invested in lunacoin which went down like 99.999 percent did your yacht shrink i don't know i can't bear to look at it i'm guessing not uh shout outs one-time shout outs to jenny kim and brian j weekly shout outs to memester josh owen shardle craig motlin rum and code i love mavis

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that literally travels at the speed of light, payment processors still require days to settle. I don't understand it, but I'm sure if we all followed Patrick McKenzie on Twitter, we could understand it better. I was just about to say, if only Stripe had just a little bit more funding, then this would be solved.

So they went to softskills.audio and clicked support us on Patreon, and they picked the level where we say their names an emoji or anything in any language that you could challenge us to pronounce we will attempt but any dollar amount above zero gets you access to our Slack community and we just want to say thank you to the hundreds of people who have done that and you can go there too if you'd like thank you very much I would suggest that the delay in getting added is a feature don't we have too much instant gratification in our world today yeah this this is about building your

character yeah wouldn't it be nice if you could just wait for something to happen and no have no control over when it happened yeah that would be nice yeah and and this is why that you know even if stripe could raise another few billion dollars and fix this problem we would still impose an artificial delay yeah if we just have to write some code with some sleep statements in it yeah all right let's do our question should i read it yeah go for it okay this is from an anonymous listener who asks i recently told my boss i thought my comp was way below market value and that while i enjoyed working here i may have to start looking elsewhere for my next opportunity unless there was a way to adjust my salary they actually agreed with me and said they

would go to hr and see what they could do a few days later they came back to me and said that they could do a market rate adjustment of 20k per year that's awesome i was super happy they said great i will let hr know that you have accepted by end of the day tomorrow and hr will get all the paperwork started. At 10 a.m. the following day, they, along with a couple hundred other employees, were laid off. So my boss, my boss's boss, my boss's boss's boss, and the HR rep that my boss was talking to are no longer here. Oh my goodness. So my question is, what's the appropriate amount of time to wait before bringing this up to my new boss? With so many of my colleagues now out of work, it seems a bit insensitive to be so concerned with a raise,

but also i like more money that was the best way to end this question yeah but also i like more money oh my goodness it's like can you imagine like you couldn't script this yeah it does feel fake it's like hey look uh listen my new boss i just got to tell you my old boss promised a twenty thousand dollar raise but everyone involved has been laid off so you just got to take my word for it this it feels like you know how in in like detective movies there's that trope of the detective who's about to retire and you just know that they're dead it's like that like you were your your boss was about to get you this awesome raise and suddenly tragedy struck predictable tragedy maybe your boss knew the layoffs were coming and and sure thing buddy no problem

for you anything yeah you want 20 let's do 40 man i'm your butt oh that's so good this is this is an interesting risk you take on while working at a big company that theoretically the risk of the company going under is much lower but it's like you're on like a i don't know like a submarine or something okay probably the submarine is safe no this is already going off the rails let's see what would it be i was gonna say but if it gets hit it's going down but that's not that's not what happened it you just have no control over over some gigantic part way up the org tree getting totally cut right and and you might be subject to very arbitrary decisions or or to you arbitrary seeming it's like it's like collateral damage right yeah or it's almost like

it's a dice roll like you work at a company there's a 1000 sided die and they roll it every day at some point your number's coming up yeah and 200 of your closest friends i have no idea where this person works but i'm furiously trying to think of all the news of layoffs i've heard yeah what are the headlines twitter well twitter was those execs so i don't know if there were any people uh down in the org chart laid off i don't know we do have a layoffs channel on our slack community i we should don't look at that because it makes me slad oh in fact someone recently just shared there's a new website called layoffs.fyi it's a layoffs tracker actually it's not new it's been around but people now care about it i just looked at that the other day oh look yes there

was a tech company oh they laid off 2500 oof hmm well here's what i think you should do you still have below market value compensation yeah and i think you probably have more leverage now than before as oh really hundreds of yeah i mean if hundreds of people were just laid off there's probably a lot more work to do yeah but i'm thinking to myself okay now you're going to go to hr or to your new boss and say i want to raise and they're going to be like yeah you know what you're you're number 201 never mind but if you're going to quit anyways i mean i don't know if you're going to quit if you don't get more money if you take the layoff you might get a severance too yeah that's true i don't know i i can see how this would be very awkward and i really

hope you have some email records or something of these conversations that you had there's a good meta point here about getting stuff in writing i guess yeah true very very good point but it doesn't change the needs that you have and the ability of the company to meet those needs you just get to go have an awkward conversation with your new boss about this thing that was in progress so i i don't know i was going to ask you about this because despite my 20 years of professional experience i've actually never been through a big layoff like this where it directly or even closely affected me i i did work at novell during a layoff about 20 years ago but it was i was an intern so it's like kind of i was more like a spectator and and i wonder like when a company goes through a layoff

like this is there just no budget for salary increases at that point typically or is it like oh yeah and everyone who's left gets a big raise we we laid off an extra 20 people to reward those who stay yeah also i mean i've heard of layoffs and then companies that are still hiring after that too especially if it's a really big company where the layoffs could be isolated yeah yeah then then the buckets that money lies in are very disconnected right there's always another bucket with money in it right so i mean that may or may not be true but i i still don't think that changes the need that this person had and if they were previously willing to go search for another job in order to get more money yeah the fact that their company just laid off a bunch of people

I would assume would make them more likely to go search for another job, not less likely. Yeah, yeah. So I guess I'm not thinking about if the company is more or less likely to meet your needs, but I don't see how this changes what your needs are. If they were real before, they're real now. I mean, if you can go get another job for more money, you still can after this company laid off a bunch of people. Yeah, that's right.

I think that's right. And then also I think that it's kind of... So I sense in the question that they're worried about being rude and insensitive. You know, like all my coworkers and my boss and everyone above me just got laid off. Would it be rude now to ask for more money? And here's what I think. It might be rude, but I got to tell you that you're going to have to ask loud and often because everyone who's left at this company is about to be really busy, I think.

You know, we just lost hundreds of workers. Yeah. And so someone's got to do that work or, you know, maybe, or they could have just like dropped a whole bunch of product lines. I don't know. But my guess, there's now even less capacity to do the same amount of work that there was. And the people who are left are having to hold that bag. And so you're going to have to be loud and obnoxious.

Is that the right word? Like spammy? Yeah. I think you're going to have to work harder now to get the same offer you got before. I think it was pretty rude of this company to lay off a few hundred people. i don't think you need to worry about being rude especially given that you had an agreement in flight yeah you can be rude to people but you cannot be rude to companies that's true and you should not conflate an uncomfortable conversation to bring up with your boss to to being rude to

the company that doesn't change the fact that it will probably still be uncomfortable but i don't know part part of the deal the company tells you to do stuff you ask the company for stuff you give them work like i don't know it's all yeah probably how it works you give them labor, they give you money. You value your labor more than the money, then you ask them for a new arrangement. And they might say no now. Like you said, they might be more conservative financially, but at least you know that. And I think that would give you very clear direction if they did. Well, have we answered the question? I think so. We're just saying, yes, go for it. It's not an issue. You got to ask. It's going to be harder to ask now, maybe.

And the answer might be no. Yeah. Or it might be like, I don't know who to talk to to do that. like you said there's there's just so many structures have been removed yeah that's gonna be some of that who even is my boss i don't know yeah let's talk next month when i knew who my boss is yeah also be aware that it could have been that you asking for this raise the first time actually caused the layoff so tread cautiously yeah this is the butterfly that flapped its wings yeah be careful this time yeah someone looked at a spreadsheet to see how they could fit in this twenty thousand dollars and then oh no the chain reaction is just yeah be careful you have a lot of power obviously yeah i wonder if you can like adjust the number of the rays to adjust where it's

where the layoffs are targeted maybe there's some mapping there of like okay well if you mean 25 000 and then suddenly another company yeah all right i think we've answered it all right let's do it moving on hey jameson have you heard about the great resignation is it that charles dickens book wait no the entire population on earth has started taking our advice of quit your job oh yes that's right apparently we have achieved influencer status we've been telling developers for years to quit their jobs and now we want to tell you how to do it we're ready to reveal the secret i mean you don't just walk out shooting finger guns yes well you do that first but after you do that there's a new service we want to tell you about called hired what is hired

dave hired is the biggest ai driven marketplace that matches engineers with companies it is a great way to find your next job i've been watching this industry for 20 years with a keen interest on hiring in particular and i've never seen anything like hired tell me about what you're seeing so i've interviewed about 150 people in the last year and i am serious every candidate that's come to me through hired has multiple offers and they're incredibly high scary high like 30 higher than other candidates is that before after the finger guns yeah uh both the beauty is it's totally free for engineers uh and we would love for you to go try it go to hired.com soft skills to check it out hired.com soft skills quit your job the best way and check

out hired okay shall i read oh yes yes oh man the polite yes i i insist okay i i agree with your insistence i will read our next question this comes from an anonymous listener who says i am eight months into my first job out of college in an entry-level role and today the other new hire of four months got fired for poor for poor for poor performance i have been assured that my performance is still satisfactory just i'm just going to insert i love the word still here it's like so far my performance is still satisfactory but i have been unable to think about anything else since it happened i know that i am probably fine but i am still very shocked and on edge any advice on how to move past this without destroying my blood pressure would be appreciated signed

your fellow high strung engineer hey how did you know i was high strung i probably hear it in my voice i think i am high strung actually yeah i'm working on it i feel like i've made some positive you don't strike me as high strung really not in your behavior i mean not on the podcast oh maybe that's it it's because this is relaxing i feel like i'm pretty stressed out this is where you come to unwind. Exactly. Some people go on vacation. Jameson gets in front of a microphone and records for all 14 people who listen to this. Yes. They're my therapy group. Yeah. Okay. Oh, I had an idea and then I forgot about it. Oh, it's back. Yeah. Here's the idea. If someone gets fired, the person firing often has either a legal or ethical obligation to not

just bad mouth the person who was fired talk about how horrible they were and how much they deserved it and stuff when folks have been fired i've seen uh very little information besides like and they're moving on they are no longer with the company yeah yeah they've decided to pursue other exciting opportunities in their basement we wish them well as of five minutes ago yeah and i guess the upside of that is you're not really airing their dirty laundry but the downside is it does not provide any clarity about what they did to get fired. And if you are doing something at all similar. Yeah. And I don't know how to navigate that distinction. And it's very unlikely that your boss will come in and say, by the way, they got fired for doing this thing. It's some big

announcement. But you could ask for more specifics. And instead of say, like, am I going to get fired? You could ask more specifically, I'm concerned that this person got fired. And I might share some behaviors or characteristics or be in a similar situation as them can you help me understand like what they were doing so that i can avoid it or or how to i don't know something like that to get more details in a way that doesn't appear to be prying into some gossip yeah and then your manager says to you well you could start by not stealing thousands of dollars from the company every week and then you'll be like oh i think i'm good yeah yeah this is this is tricky it is tricky and i'll tell you i spent four years at a giant tech company worrying every week multiple

times per week that i was going to get fired and i think once i aired this concern to my boss who was so surprised that i felt that way and was like almost laughing like oh no but i was like well, look, we work in a company where people get fired and I see it. And so, you know, it's something that concerns me. And I'm like, the pay is really good. The job is really good. This just can't last, you know, like surely someone's going to fire me, but it never happened. And then when I did finally leave, my boss said, well, you, you know, you're a top ranked person on the team. And I really regret having you go. And I was like, oh, well, I guess all that worrying was for nothing it's pretty easy to feel like you don't have a sense of how how valued you are to your

organization or your boss for sure i think that's the default state in most of the jobs i've been in is is i have some impression of how i think i'm doing and just no clue if how how other people above me feel about that i feel like i know about my co-workers sometimes so yes this is not unique that doesn't mean it's great but the fact that you are feeling unsettled about your state is i think a enhancement of the normal condition of you not really knowing your state and the answer to that is kind of the same is is ask for more feedback you have a very specific event to point to here and reason for wanting that feedback but but you can do this even when you're not worried about getting fired because your co-worker got fired you're just worried

about getting fired in general maybe or something else yeah yeah ask asking for more feedback about how you're doing and and where you need to improve is always a good practice yeah it's good to know right and you'll probably perform better knowing that you're not on the brink of getting fired all the time yeah and i think there is some information loss between a manager's perception of your performance and like your understanding of your manager's perception of your performance but if you're if you're talking about it regularly it's hard to be too utterly surprised right you should have some sense of how things are going vaguely what else was i going to say about this oh yeah do you have any feedback is a bad question i ask that to people so i'm i'm including myself in in

that yeah i'm bad okay asking specific questions about specific behaviors or or like work products is is much easier and and better you'll get more concrete responses than just yeah you're good yeah it's easier to answer like do you have any feedback the answer is no that's the answer to that question unless is it is it performance review time otherwise no no i have no feedback but trust me it'll be a huge pain to write all your feedback later yeah yeah exactly but if you maybe you presented something in a meeting like how do you think that went do you think there's anything i could have done better or is my work speed you know do i work as fast as you would like or is the quality of my work up to par you know these these are questions that are both easier

to answer more informative and more likely to get you actual information yeah you do have to kind of be a detective if you don't want to just find out during performance review season which is yeah again unfortunately the default that is the default but good managers don't don't behave that way a good manager will make it so that your performance review is not a surprise and you know kind of segueing from that i i've had a lot of people who have worked for me and maybe this reflects poorly on me but they are they have told me that they are worried that they're going to be fired. And I have always assured them, if you're going to be fired, I will let you know that you're going to be fired. I probably won't say it in those words, but I will say your performance

is not meeting my expectations. And I've told people that, and I think that helps put them at ease a little bit. But the reason I share that story is because I think a lot of people feel this way. And it's amplified when someone close to you is fired for cause, like has happened here. But it's perfectly normal to feel this way. So I think what I'm trying to say is I give you permission to give yourself permission to feel nervous about this but then also understand that this is a common feeling and hopefully that helps you let go of it sooner if your manager has been around they hopefully have some understanding of the effect that firing someone can have on the team even if they were an underperformer or causing issues there's always some impact of

firing someone even if it leaves the team in a better state overall so it's possible that they well i guess if they were reaching out about this then you wouldn't have this feeling i don't know maybe this is advice for future you when you're on the other side of this then you need to take care of the team and be prepared to talk about status and and evaluation and performance quite a bit after someone is fired yes you do like this this will go through everyone's head guaranteed right oh yeah and and by the team like not even on the team yeah in fact i was gonna say now that the fact that your manager hasn't what's the word like preemptively discussed this with the team or with you individually either could be a poor reflection on the manager's ability to manage

the messaging or maybe you are actually going to get fired i don't i hope not it's like hey i'm really nervous that my co-worker got fired yeah about that um got some bad news for you i'm sorry you're nervous see you on monday maybe maybe oh man i hope that's not the case here but it also you know you should feel okay asking your boss hey am i on track to get fired too just ask it right and your boss will your boss's reaction will tell you everything you need to know because they're gonna be they're gonna say like oh no of course not or they're going to be like huh uh you why would you even yeah what a crazy question yeah weird hey can i'll look oh i'm sorry something urgent just came up can we talk about

this later after i've talked to hr i mean uh after i've dealt with this issue so yeah i mean your boss's reaction will tell you everything you need to know i think about where you are you might have to read between some lines but it's it's a question that's okay to ask you shouldn't be afraid it is And say the person that got fired was a famous serial killer, well-known throughout the company, and everyone's just heaving sighs of relief that their chances of being murdered have gone down. People are still going to feel like, am I next? Yeah, am I next? Not for being stabbed, but for being fired. For being fired.

Yeah. I feel like sometimes if you're on the other side it's easy to think well the team knows this person isn't performing well and they'll be happy that performance on average will be better and that could be true but still they're still all going to think am I next

yeah yeah you are you are but just also know that it's you are next wait wait a minute no sorry I just came out all wrong are you next and you said you are you are I meant to say soon to be a solo podcast also known as talking to yourself now you have to ask yourself jameson was i was that a freudian

slip in response to the question of you being fired or you being murdered i'll find out i don't know yeah you'll find out i'll just wait yeah see you're not high strong at all yeah good point yeah so i i think it's totally normal to feel this way don't sweat it there is a chance you're you're next like to be fired absolutely this question asker not you jameson you're not on the chopping block see how easy i answer that question you are not being fired james yes i appreciate that am i though is the question no you see how easy that was we both just asked this awkward question and got easy answers because we're not gonna get fired but the answer would be a lot different otherwise the podcast suddenly ends

yeah am i gonna get fired and the outro music all right did we answer this one i think so yeah okay what should people do they want their own questions answered go to soft skills.audio and click the ask a question button and as always we say a heartfelt thank you to everyone who does that every week we love reading all of your questions they come in fast and furious and we're just so happy with all of them thank you you keep the show going we will catch you next week see ya I'll see you next time.