Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 318: Staff and part time dev

Episode Date: August 22, 2022

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Listener Albert Camus asks, Hello Team. I am a long time listener of the show, and I really enjoy it. I’m a senior engineer and want to get to the next level in my career. I talked to my manager about this. I told them I preferred the technical side and staff engineer was the next level up. He responded positively, although he didn’t give me a timeline, not even a vague estimate. In a subsequent meeting they told me it wasn’t a linear progression at the company and there’s quite an overlap in the salary range between senior and staff engineer. I was also told that the company only had a few staff level engineers and they were considered experts at a particular sub-section of a technology. This makes me feel like I am being stalled. I have seen this a few years ago, at a previous workplace, where I tried for a promotion, and the manager at that place kept giving excuses to buy time. I am afraid that could be the case here as well. I am technically strong and have good soft-skills. I have designed, developed and documented multiple features for the company. Whenever there’s a complex bug, the product manager always turns towards me for help. I also handle inter-team discussions at times, always a part of the interview panel while hiring new team members and at most times the only person representing my team from the tech perspective during alignment meetings with the sales and marketing teams. I could also say with confidence that I bring more value to the table and have data to back it up. But I am not sure how I could use all this information without seeming desperate, to really push for that promotion and a raise. I could quit and get a new job, most probably with a promotion, but I have put in a lot of effort here and I intend to stay at the current company for at least the next couple of years to reap the rewards. What can I do to get that promotion in the coming year? We know that the salary is high in our area, and I don’t need all this money. So, what is your opinion on part time job and how can I get one? I’m a senior frontend with more than 15 years of experience and just want to live a little.

it takes more than using dali to generate technical diagrams so your manager will stop asking you to create documentation to be a great engineer this is soft skills engineering episode 318 i'm your host dave smith i'm your host jamison dance soft skills engineering is a weekly advice podcast for software developers who just want to have computers do all their jobs Those AI generated images always look a little bit horrifying. And I'm trying to imagine what kind of brain melting monstrosity it would create if you said something like generate a UML diagram. It'd have like gaping mouths open and all of the like diamonds or something like that full of teeth. So it actually generates the human perception of UML diagrams instead of UML diagrams. Yeah, I guess. All the pain and scariness.

You know, I feel like UML diagrams probably suffer from the same fate of a lot of tools, which is that they are associated with pain, not because the tools themselves are that painful, but because you only use them if you're in a bad place. Or a painful place, I should say. If you are cranking out UML diagrams, there is some complexity going on. So it's going to seem hard. That's not what this show is about. Nope.

It's also not about this, but I'm going to say it anyways. This episode is sponsored by Hired. the best way to quit your job and find a new one you can go to hired.com soft skills to learn more or you can wait and listen to our voices tell you more stuff all right do you want to thank our patrons dave yes here we go the following are supporting us on patreon at the level where we shout their name out every week and darn it if i still haven't invested the time to pronounce that name in wales but i'll get to it eventually here goes uh they are kent c dodds teodor seven nathan If you would like to join this illustrious crew,

go to softskills.audio and click the Support Us on Patreon button. And if you'd like to join our Slack community, you can do the same thing. it's just a degree of magnitude the more dollars you give the more chances you'll cross that threshold where we will say your name but any dollar amount over zero and we will give you an invite to our slack community i think will angel has gotten themselves into a bind because by saying will angel does not have stinky feet they have to keep sponsoring the show forever or everyone will assume that now will has stinky feet yeah you know there's more than one way to retain a sass a subscription customer

through blackmail and threats of reputational damage that's right it'd be a shame if we leaked all your draft emails that you spelled wrong to the press i'm gonna read our first question this is from a listener named albert camas and i can't tell if they're joking or not because that's the name of a famous french philosopher and i looked them up and realized i don't know what any of those words mean in wikipedia yeah but maybe they share a name with this person okay hello team i am a long time listener of the show and i really enjoy it i'm a senior engineer and want to get to the next level in my career i talked to my manager about this i told them i preferred the technical side and staff engineer

was the next level up my manager responded positively although they didn't give me a timeline not even a vague estimate in a subsequent meeting they told me it wasn't a linear progression of the company and there's quite an overlap in the salary range between senior and staff engineer I was also told that the company only had a few staff-level engineers, and they were considered experts at a particular subsection of a technology. This makes me feel like I'm being stalled. I've seen this a few years ago at a previous workplace where I tried for a promotion, and the manager at that place kept giving excuses to buy time.

I'm afraid that could be the case here as well. I'm technically strong and have good soft skills. I've designed, developed, and documented multiple features for the company. Whenever there's a complex bug, the product manager always turns toward me for help. I also handle inter-team communication at times, always am a part of the interview panel while hiring new team members, and at most times the only person representing my team from the tech perspective during alignment meetings with the sales and marketing teams. I could also say with confidence that I bring more value to the table and have the data to back it up, but I am not sure how I could use all this information without seeming desperate to really push for that promotion and a raise. I could quit and get a new job, most probably with a promotion, but I've put in a lot of effort here and I intend to stay at the current company for at least the next couple of years to reap the

rewards. What can I do to get that promotion in the coming year? Ooh, good question. I think this person's assessment of the situation is perfectly correct. You have been stalled. Why? Why do you think that? Oh, I mean, it's like, hey, I want to get a promotion. the next level of staff engineer let's do it manager gives no dates and then later meets and is like oh well not linear um oh look there's a big overlap so don't worry about it uh there's only a few people like this and you know they're kind of different crystal clear this isn't happening for you here at least not this manager at this moment yeah i'm not saying it's not possible just just to be clear but your assessment is absolutely correct you have been told you're

not getting a promotion right now yeah i wouldn't even say it's stalled i've been yeah i would say your manager has told you they do not believe that you are ready for a promotion yes they kind of indirectly gave you some criteria for what it would take to be promoted which is you have to be one of these handful of experts in a particular subsection of technology and you described to me what reads like attributes of a good senior engineer you ship stuff important stuff you help kind of coordinate things fix bugs are kind of a go-to person on your team but none of that screams staff engineer to me which is sort of like this mythical higher level of outrageous productivity and impact depends on the company too there's different definitions at different places but

generally it's not it's not like be really good at shipping code yeah there's some amount of organization-wide impact expected that doesn't happen from you just being very effective within your team right being good at your current job is not how you get promoted typically yeah and my boss told me once that they think there's there's two philosophies to promotion one is the recognition of past efforts so you did such a good job that we're going to reward you by promoting you through you've done all this impactful stuff and the other philosophy is a a belief that you will be able to perform at the next level and so one of those is kind of like you've proved it already that you can do the thing or you did something important the other one is we believe you're going to be able

to do a lot more work that we're we're going to ask you to do do you think that one of those is more common than the other i think it feels better to say that that we do the second one that we promote based on belief that you'll be able to succeed at the next level but i think it's way more common to do the first one oh really like a a reward i think so yeah oh interesting yeah someone performs really well and then they get promoted what i have seen is that companies who have actually taken the effort to put in place a promotion process and with levels and definitions also do the second the second one and otherwise it's just like well i guess maybe uh maybe i've got some sample bias here but you know what now that i'm thinking i'm going to argue against

myself. I think a lot of companies, they'll hand out the title like candy, like principal engineer. Sure. Whatever. Like we don't actually have a definition for that, but if that's what you want on your, in fact, I was at a startup some years ago, it's about 10 years ago. We had an engineer come to us in management. We really did not have defined levels. I did not have the vision about career growth at this point in my career and came to the CTO who I reported to and said hey i've looked around and a bunch of people who do the same job as me have the title senior engineer on their on their pay stubs they told me can i have that too and the cto is like yeah hold on picks up the phone hey hr department listen can you change uh so-and-so's title to

senior engineer all right thanks hangs up the phone okay there you go and i think i think some people are like i got promoted when that happens so maybe you're right like that probably is the more common approach also performing really well can be the evidence that you use to to convince a company that you will succeed at the next level so they're not totally unrelated i guess we're kind of wandering far afield though yeah it makes you feel like i'm being stalled yeah you're it's it's not stalled it's it's that you you need to you're not going to get promoted by twisting your manager's arm into giving you a date right because if they do they won't have the power to make that happen most likely without you doing a lot of stuff that is going to be a lot of work. So that's

probably why they're trying to avoid a timeline is like they know like they could submit you now and the answer would be no. So stuff has to change. So I think what would be more useful for you instead of focusing on how do I like make my case to them so that I can get promoted in the next year is figure out how can I learn what a strong case would be and then do that stuff. Yes. It seems like you're kind of assuming that you're already there and I think your manager is assuming you are or saying they don't think you are. Yeah, I'm hearing that strong as well. So I want to address that now because there was a point in the question where Albert Camus says, I don't want to seem desperate. Yeah, this is the same mentality that I hear when people say, I don't want to ask

for a raise because I don't want to seem greedy. And it's interesting because companies want you to get promoted generally, because that's, that means you're doing amazing work and you're engaged and, and you're contributing, you know? So yeah, it also means you have to pay you more and companies don't want to pay you more, but, but like as a, as a leader, I love it when people come to me and say, what do I need to do to get at the next level? Because that gives me an opportunity to come back to them and say, I need you to do bigger and harder things. And I wasn't going to ask you to do these things, but now that you're asking me for how to grow, this is it so you know i feel like your boss has kind of missed an opportunity here when you came

to them and said i want to get promoted and they were like yeah well here's a bunch of reasons why that's not going to happen and instead your boss could have said here are the five things you need to do which by the way are going to make me look good and our whole team perform better that you need to do to get promoted opportunity squandered as far as i'm concerned well you can unsquander that opportunity by asking your boss that question so they haven't given you a timeline but yeah just ask them what what should i do let's make a plan to help me do those things and yeah check in and it could be that your boss is going to say and this is absolutely true that promotions are often 50 your own contributions and 50 the right opportunities at the right time

and and your boss may actually know some things you don't know where look these opportunities they're just not coming yeah so check in there that might be worth worth it knowing yeah there's a lot of like potential unsettling information that could be behind this maybe they genuinely believe that you do not have what it takes to be promoted like this person albert camas is a famous philosopher but not a staff engineer doesn't have it in them yeah too busy yeah and i could be thinking about painfully here and by the way your boss may never say that to you yeah even if they absolutely think it you know because whoever who wants to be the person to say uh listen you're just not staff engineer material yeah that sucks to say it does yeah that's a good point so you

don't you don't need to corner them and say like tell me do you think i'm a staff engineer do you think i have the what it takes like yeah you just need to just it sounds so easy when i say it and it's hard to do on both sides you need to work with them on a plan that your manager and you feel like is achievable and also will demonstrate the skills required to be a staff engineer and then you need to check in often to see like is this plan still the right plan are we where we need to be meeting it like maybe we were wrong and it needs to be something else or maybe we were right but your manager doesn't think that you're you're kind of on the right trajectory so yeah it could take a while but if if uh if you want to do it you need to kind of follow up a lot

exactly the other thing i feel like i'm just ragging on this on albert i'm sorry albert i'm gonna do it some more though albert's very resilient he's already dealing with a boss who doesn't think he can get promoted so don't worry that's true he'll be fine yeah he'll be okay dealing with podcasters who tell him to do something different it's fine to have a timeline you cannot control the timeline you get promoted in you can control what you do and the kind of conversations that you have with your boss but there could be like resource constraints maybe they really only do have a certain number of staff engineer slots in the way their organization works there's like the promotion juice in projects you kind of mentioned this the opportunities and maybe

maybe the juice is not flowing towards you yeah maybe your manager changes and you get a new one so so i think it is useful to have that timeline as a goal to work towards but i would be prepared for it not to happen on that timeline and and i think you you just need to decide whether i am willing to stay here and keep working towards it even if it takes a few years more than i than i want it to or if this is like a i'm giving this a year and then i'm gone type of situation and this is i don't know that i feel great about this but sometimes that can work to to say that about promotion like it seems kind of slimy but i have seen promotions happen to retain people the company kind of justifies it by saying like well we didn't we didn't realize how important they

were until they they really told us that they were going to leave if they didn't get promoted and then we we kind of just looked and decided oh yeah it just so happens they they are promotable like oh interesting a lot of things change when you are ready to leave yeah there's a balance there though too and and yeah if if you're not close then it will be more pain for your manager to promote you or try to promote you if if they think you're just not ready for it then to have you leave yeah so i don't know well well well well well there is a book called staff engineer oh it has sections on there about getting promoted to be a staff engineer and it has interesting it's like a collection of interviews and and blog posts with different folks at staff

plus levels and shows a lot of different perspectives which shows that staff engineer is not the same role at every company or even within the same company that was going to be my next question is how could you possibly write a book on staff engineer roles i think they just found people who had that title and said tell me about your life and what you do at work and how you got there and then kind of like yeah and half of them are like well i got out of a boot camp six months ago and uh now i'm a staff engineer because no no these are these are very senior people okay does the word senior mean nothing anymore though i mean is it like staff is the new senior yeah there's probably some of that and principal is the new staff and then distinguished principal

isn't that the next one uh distinguished engineer or fellow engineering fellow fellow that's right i've heard fellow and is there anything above fellow jolly good fellow is that the ultimate yeah that is the highest ranks the jolly good fellow yeah weird yeah so i mean i i'm with you jameson i think listen your boss clearly has some kind of criteria that are being used here to evaluate you you need to figure out what those are and this is true at every company you know and sometimes the criteria is nope we only give this promotion to three people and we're never given another one so sorry about that but a lot of times if they've really got their stuff together there is like a written document somewhere with

criteria you just got to read it deliver on it and then figure out who are the people that review and approve these things and help your boss navigate that and those are the people to get promoted but takes a fair bit of work the same person who wrote staff engineer wrote a blog post about kind of career progression and talked about it as a tree which means that there is math words are going to come out of me in the wrong way a exponential decrease in the number of positions at the next level up oh yeah we call that a pyramid scheme yeah yeah basically yeah yeah the the staff engineers have a lot of people in their downline yep there are just fewer of those roles generally the the higher up you climb so that's one way to look at it but the other way

look at it is every level you climb means there are fewer skulls you have to crush under your boot to get there that's well yeah because i mean because you've already crushed so many yes as a ratio of the skulls crushed so far each level presents many fewer yeah but the skulls are going to be tougher to crush that's true because they've also all crushed a lot of skulls these are skulls that know how to crush other skulls so be careful oh we've answered this question okay good luck yeah good luck tell us how it goes 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 do you want to read our next question dave yes this comes from a listener named francisco eugenio endler kahil we know that the salary is high in our area and i don't need all this money so what is your opinion on part-time job and how can i get one i'm a senior front end with more than 15 years of experience and just want to live a little now that's a great problem yeah what a

good sentence to say i just don't need all this money i mean have you tried conspicuous consumption have you tried finding expensive hobbies that fill your life with stuff and no meaning but suddenly you do need all this money yeah i don't know how to play a synthesizer but i sure need forty thousand dollars worth of modular synths because i saw them on tiktok and i know i'm gonna need the gold connectors for sure yeah i don't know if this is a dumb i have a simple answer which is just work part-time i guess you're saying how can i get a part-time job be a consultant or contractor work hourly work 20 hours a week or whatever part-time is to you those are the only people i've seen in the engineering field who have done this effectively for the long term yeah

and boy do i sometimes feel envious of those people yeah they're kind of like opting out of the of the rat race is the cliche like yeah i'll just work until i have enough money to live and then I'll do other stuff. The way that I've seen that most successful is when you develop an expertise, like a very unique specialty that allows you to charge a high enough hourly rate that you really only have to work 15 to 20 hours a week and still cover your living expenses. And I've seen this done in a few different areas. One is, there's probably tons of these areas, but I've seen it very specifically in business intelligence, like data warehousing and video. It's just where I've happened to have been exposed to it, but these people show up.

video yeah video so like people who want to do online video video and coding stuff uh even simpler than that like you don't even have to be an expert on that the thing things like i know how to design an application that uses third-party video services for two-way or one-way video i know all the gotchas ahead of time i know i've seen every bug you can possibly imagine i know what all the weird browser quirks are that's maybe the way to put it things where there's a lot of quirkiness in the in the technology landscape and also it takes a lot of time to develop enough knowledge to know how to work around the quirks because it takes time to bump into them and then see if there's teams out there who are currently in the process of bumping

into those quirks and you're needed yeah i don't think you even have to do that though i think you could you could also just sell your labor for money and just sell half of your labor for money Like, you can just go be a developer and work on a thing, and you might not be able to charge as high of rates as some very niche specialist, but you still might. Like, I've seen some contractors that just make web apps, and they still charge a bunch of money. Also, a pyramid scheme is another way you could do this. If you just get enough people on your downline, then you don't have to work at all. so you become you start out as a contractor but then you start hiring other people to do your work and then eventually you're not doing any work because you actually hired the person who also

does sales too yeah that's yeah you've described a software agency which is also kind of triangle shaped we'll call it yeah yeah so so we focus on contracting fair enough can you pull this off with a proper corporate job with benefits and paid time off and stuff like that because the big downside to taking on agency work is the tax situation is super bad the health insurance situation in the u.s is super bad and the paid time off situation well there isn't paid time off so you just have to say i'm going to take a certain number of a certain amount of time each year and just not make any money during that time probably depends on where you live i think there are hourly like number of hour requirements to qualify for benefits in some uh in some jobs

so you can't work fewer than i don't know 30 hours a week and still get health insurance etc by the way that's not a law just so you know what yeah that's just a thing that companies do to spend less money yeah there's there are policies and then there are also like there's policies at the company there's also policies at your insurance provider and sometimes your benefits administrator if it's third party i have seen lower than 30 hours and still get benefits cool we'll find one of those places i haven't seen this happen at a giant megacorp but they're probably big enough that there's someone somewhere that has pulled that off i'm sure you need a lot of leverage though it feels way easier to be a contractor than to find like the one out of 50,000

software engineering jobs at google that you can officially work like 15 hours a week and still get all the benefits i guess that's another way to do it is just just be lazy and be kind of scummy and find somewhere with really low productivity expectations and then just work 20 hours a week this is every every uh every executive that demands a return to the office's worst nightmare about what is happening with remote work yeah well they just don't work then You could make that nightmare come true. Congratulations. I mean, you did mention software agency earlier.

I do know someone who pulled that off and they started off themselves doing a lot of the work and then just kind of started hiring more people and stepped more and more away from the work and would sometimes take on a very early, like, kick things off architecture role, but arrange their life so that they really did not work that much. and they did cut their expenses but they were still able to earn a very decent living by running a software agency that was pretty small didn't have a ton of administrative overhead and also somehow did not require them to spend a ton of time writing code i don't know if that's the norm though i feel like most people i know that have worked at or run software agencies are frantically busy oh yeah i mean it's a lot of work to run a company right yeah just like way busier than than people who just work at a job yeah so you're saying i get all the pain of running my own company and none of the benefits meaning i don't get to reduce my hours and yet i don't have paid

time off i mean if it's your own company i guess you can give yourself paid time off you're just it's your money paying for your paid time off yeah so not really paid time off yes it's paid by you time off right i pay myself to take time off yes indeed so i mean we've talked about contracting almost exclusively we dabbled in this idea of maybe getting your employer to do that what about look just stay full time you already said you don't need all this money why don't you just become the highest contributing soft skills engineer patron of all time i see only upside to that and then all you have to do is get people to become your patrons oh man and then but there has to be some reason to send us a portion of what they give

you in a in a upward triangle shape i'll say one more thing there are in the u.s i think americans with disability acts accommodations that you got to talk to an earth lawyer about probably to get the real details but i believe it is possible to request accommodations that include reduced hours and the company might come back and say well you will have reduced pay as part of this but that could be a way if you feel like you're in a good spot at the company you can be productive you have their trust but you also have some kind of health issue or other kind of disability that that makes it harder for you to work uh full-time hours that might be a way to do it there and it might happen i've seen it happen before all right well did we answer the question yeah probably i

think the bottom line is you have to be kind of creative to pull this off like this is not the norm and the whole system is kind of set up to push you into full-time employment yeah so you got to be a little creative there isn't just a pathway you know yeah that's a good point you're not going to be able to like spam a bunch of recruiters on linkedin and say hey i'm looking for a part-time job and then have them all beat down your door with all these offers that's right although maybe maybe some of them will i don't know i've never tried that yeah me neither i'll bet if you if you hired a headhunter who was specific you know very custom to just you you could probably pull it off they would go out and find something like that for you but they're not

super incentivized to do that because part-time means reduced salary reduced salary means reduced commission reduced commission means every hour they spend with you is worth half of that that they would spend with a full timer as a very fair point so again gotta get creative all right well good luck we've done it we've made it to the end we've answered questions once again we'll do it again though yep we will what can people do if they want us to answer their questions next time or next next time even or even the time after that it sounds like we're on the verge of an inductive proof yeah the base case is we answer the questions and we promise to answer the next question ergo we will answer all questions forever more i think so yeah okay i see no gaps in that

logic by induction yeah if you want us to answer your questions go to softskills.audio and click the support us on patreon button where you can fill out our form and we just have to say not because we have to but because we want to thank you to everyone who submits questions each week we really appreciate it yeah we do thank you so much all right we will catch you next week We'll be right back.