Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 323: Shopping offers and returning equipment

Episode Date: September 26, 2022

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I’m planning to leave my job purely because of low compensation. I like my growth in my current company - but low compensation than what market is offering is quite a mental hiccup in my regular work (yep! I’m slowly becoming one of the quiet quitters). I’m thinking of going to my manager with my new offer and ask him to match it. Do retention offers actually work? As mangers yourselves, how would you want me to approach a retention discussion? I don’t want my manager to make my life hell under the pretense of “Oh he’ll leave in a year” if I do decide to stay after taking the matching offer. Love the show - pretty much my single source of wisdom for all my behavioural interviews xD I was recently let go from a company. They said they would send me a shipping label so that I could return the hardware. I didn’t hear back from them for a week. A few days later a label came in for the laptop, but not for the dock or the two monitors they also sent. I did not enjoy my experience there and I’m feeling resentful at having to pester them so that I can get what I need to send them back their hardware. What is my due diligence on the score? I don’t even like the monitors.

it takes more than pettily breaking up your pull request into single character commits to be a great software engineer this is episode 323 of the soft skills engineering podcast I'm your host Jameson Dance

I'm your host Dave Smith soft skills engineering is a weekly advice show where we talk about all the non-technical things about the technical field of software development and sometimes

do not respond healthily when people ask us to break up our pull requests into atomic commits i'm trying to think of the corollary to a journey of a thousand miles starts with a thing a single step and it's like the journey of the world's greatest pull request starts with a thousand commits one character at a time yeah if you want to really be able to review each individual commit and and get the gist of it understand exactly what's going on in each commit have them build up to a coherent final thing done yep just like i read my books one letter one letter yeah this is this is what they mean by agile like i could

change my mind but only between characters what if i want to put a t next you can now i have that freedom you have yes you are agile enough to do that finally oh well do you want to thank our patrons dave i do i want to say thank you to those that are contributing at the level where they get a weekly shout out they are kent c dodds theodore savin memester josh jenny kim owen chartle craig motlin i love mavis the stochastic parrot alice jost andrew pollock no cheating here goes again lan flair plingling go go raging blah blah blah go go go go shocked in ohio patreon.com.au we're hiring ira chan monkey face emoji jonathan king testing is documenting.org ola dapa fadiyi will angel who does not have the stinky feet then who has stinky feet nick hathaway travis sanders

brayden canes john grant nick canter and philip john basile if you would like to join this crew and have us say or try to say anything you can type that is safe for work then go to soft skills audio and click the support us on patreon button and any dollar amount you contribute will get you access to our slack community where you can discuss all kinds of interesting things and if you contribute enough we will say whatever you want right now we'll try yeah we'll try to say whatever you want we'll exercise judgment as well the amount of judgment we will exercise is in proportion to how much you donate i guess as is traditional um i wonder if i was just thinking what if you pronounce the name of that town correctly and then you just hear like a ding noise

like unlock some secret of the universe when you walk when you're walking through the town you say it right is that what you're saying it's like a portal yeah yeah yeah i've been reading harry potter to my kids recently maybe maybe maybe this is magic we'll find out eventually if we i may never find out honestly yeah it's really challenging to say that and i try to say things i try to say hard things in other languages i just give up that one man it's elusive i look at the first and last letter and just fill in the gaps in between with just guttural noises yeah just kind of freestyle uh i'm gonna read our first question okay let's do it this is from an anonymous listener who says i'm planning to leave my job purely because of low compensation i like my

growth in my current company, but lower compensation than what the market is offering is quite a mental hiccup in my regular work. Yep, I'm slowly becoming one of the quiet quitters. I'm thinking of going to my manager with my new offer and asking them to match it. Do retention offers actually work? As managers yourselves, how would you want me to approach a retention discussion? I don't want my manager to make my life hell under the pretense of, oh, they'll leave in a year if I do decide to stay after taking the matching offer love the show pretty much my single source of wisdom for all my behavioral interviews oh behavioral interviews i guess you're welcome can't fathom the madness that would ensue if you used our show as the single source of wisdom for

behavioral interviews it's like just sampling the behaviors we read about here or that we hear about here and then use those in your behavioral responses well that's a good point i assumed that it was the answers but what if you're using the questions too yeah and the questions are like how do i handle this horrible co-worker and then you you forget the how do i handle this part and just remember oh yeah some co-worker did someone did this thing yeah that's what i would do someone someone someone stuck their stinky feet under the desk right and so that's how i would improve collaboration okay so we got a quiet quitter here who's dissatisfied with pay but curious if if they could actually shop a offer and get a counter offer and stay and not have it be a mess i have

seen this work both ways well how many ways are there there's get a counter offer and not get a counter offer and there's also stay and go okay i'm doing the combinatorics here yeah which is If my mental math is right, yeah, that's four ways. Careful, careful. We're about to go exponential, so just be careful. That's true, because there's also what the company does if you give them the counteroffer. Oh, good, but you trimmed the decision tree down a little bit

because it's only after you give a counteroffer. Yeah, that's true, so it's not three full bits. We've got to get out of here. 2.5 bits of commentatories. Yeah, two and a half bits. have you heard of partial fractional binary computers no is this real i mean no we just made it up oh got it it's probably real someone probably has their phd hold on i'm submitting the patent application right now just give me a moment okay all right done cool i admire how

you were able to submit it without us talking about what this is oh well i mean that's not necessary okay anyways i've seen people get counters bring them back to the company and have the company increase their compensation and also not increase their compensation and i've seen people both stay and go in both those cases actually seen people who left even if they got a counter so the combinatorial possibilities say that it's possible to get yes an offer the bits work out oh i mean getting getting the counter offer is absolutely doable i see it all the time and then getting the pay bump and staying those bits work out too well that's that's where i think the big question is i mean i'll tell you if you ever want to see hr move fast it's go get an

offer bring it back to your manager and just that raise you've been asking them for for months and that they've just been like ah wringing their hands and agonizing it's like boom here it is on the table right there i've seen it in my own life i've seen it on i've been on the other side of the table from that so that part absolutely doable it's in fact it's probably the the fastest way to get a raise is to go shop an offer and bring and bring it back to your current company but what happens after that i think is the real question i mean there is the chance that they say no to but you're you're saying skip over that assume they say yes yeah because they i gotta say if you're a good okay well let me back up i have seen one instance where somebody shopped

for job offers got some offers brought them back and i was in a management position at the time and when the offers came back actually my boss and i had been contemplating uh letting this person go for performance concerns for a while and so the the counter the offers actually came to my boss and my boss sat down with the individual and said hey you should probably take that job you know it's kind of like a little like a professional nod like look you know just just you know you might want to go take that and it was like oh okay like and so that is an outcome that could happen so be prepared for that one i guess yeah i've also seen a case where um the numbers that they were comparing were not the same where the company was thinking of it as total

compensation yeah and the employee was thinking of it as like cash compensation and and so they They kind of had different definitions of how strong the offer was. And so the company looked at the offer and said, we would be happy to pay you less money if you wanted less money. That's like worst case scenario. Oh, it appears that the market suggests we're overpaying you. Yeah, okay. So we'll drop your options.

Listen, I agree. I agree. I agree. I have a counteroffer that's perfect for both of us. Tell you what, we'll meet you in the middle. So there's also, I see this especially at startups. If you go to a FANG company, a giant megatech corp, and get a really strong offer from them, most likely your startup will not pay that same scale. So you will not be able to say, look at this offer I got from Google or whatever for so many bajillions of dollars, and please give me that.

They'll say, we would love to, and we cannot, because that will tank our burn rate, and they'll probably be right. so so you do have to have some judgment of like yeah there's not just this magic key that unlocks extra money forever from that's right situation that's right there's there's no right like you said there's no key that can turn your company into google yeah like there is a cap and you need to be aware of that so yeah like okay so those are all the ways that it can go wrong but what if the company does come back with a counter offer that does meet the other offer and you're like hey i would take this what happens like six months from now one one year from now i want to stick one more step in there which is that you bringing an offer to the company they could counter at a

number that is between what you currently make and what that offer is as well like they don't have to they don't have to say like this can be part of a negotiation not a ransom that they have to pay that's right that's right and so part of what you need to figure out is do i want this many dollars do i do i want more and and if so what what what would i be willing to accept to stay here if they're not willing to pay that much you know yeah exactly but yeah assuming that's all done you you both arrive at a number that both of you say yes to yes i will stay yes we will pay you that much so the question was as managers yourselves how would you want me to approach a retention discussion and i kind of have a recipe for this but historically i have not used

competing offers to get a raise at work. Once I decide to leave, I typically will go get the offer from another company and just go with it. But if someone came to me, and several have, who said, I do have a competing offer, I think it depends, the way that I want you to approach it and the way that I will respond depend on one important factor, which is, are you already paid equitably for your role at my company? Do I sense that you're already well-paid? like if you're severely underpaid and i'm working on bringing you up but i'm just not going fast enough and you come with a competing offer it's actually a super easy situation and it really arms me with all the data points i need to come back to my leadership to get approval for a raise

right like you say hey uh i got a competing offer it's like all right i can go to my company and say we're going to lose this person unless we make a compelling offer here you know and it's like all right what's the cost of losing them easy business case to make unless it's that scenario like i talked about a minute ago where it's like you should take that job but so that's actually pretty easy if however you're already at the top of your pay you really put people in a tough spot and it and the conversation just no matter how you approach it might just not go well it might just be like look i just can't i can't create a pay dynamic on your team that puts you stratospherically higher than everyone else like that's just not going to work and i'm also not

going to give seven raises this week yeah yeah that's a good point your your boss is going to think about the precedent it sets and how this fits in with salaries on the team and what kind of budget they have not not just will you be happier with more money because probably yes right unless it's cursed unless it's cursed money yeah cursed you'll you'll only spend it on things that'll give you fleeting joy and then you'll look back and remember when life was simpler and you had less money but i was so happy good yeah i was so happy then but again like this is assuming that they say yes to some larger amount of money they've hopefully been through that how do you want me to approach a retention discussion i would expect really strong performance

with someone especially if they were moving from like well paid to super well paid not from severely underpaid to like solid yeah um and i think i would make that clear in some way of if this isn't a promotion i would certainly still expect uh you should be better in your job after this than than before to to like make me feel like this was worth it so you're saying like the employee should bring evidence of why they are performing well is that what you're saying no i think i think what i'm saying is you should expect your boss's expectations might be higher after this ah yes in their mind you're you're more expensive right like and if they're if you're performing at the same or a lower level then they might compare your like value per dollar or

whatever made up metric they make up in their head and think like this was fine when they're making x dollars a year but now x plus y seems less than fine i'd expect more it's like every line of code is more expensive now than it used to be yeah if you make your manager look wise and capable and and shrewd for advocating for the company to spend more of its money on you and you staying i think that will that will go a long way you want them to feel like it was a good decision. Not just that they avoided you leaving and avoided disaster, but like it made things better. Yeah, that's true. I have another suggestion for how to approach this with your manager, starting with how not to do it. You know, one way is to march into your manager's office,

slam down the competing offer on the table and say, I demand a raise. Like that's not going to end well, but you could come in and say, look, I love this company. You're a great boss. I love working on this team there's just one thing that is making it hard for me to stay here and it's it's pay and i just want to be at market rate you know because here i mean we're saying look i'm very low paid uh lower than market i just want to be paid market rate you know so that it's not a constant temptation and a worry for me that i could that i'm wasting my time or making financially bad decisions by staying here so look i've gone out to the market and gotten some data points and this is where i think i should be based on how the market responded can you meet can you

meet this offer like that that's a very different approach and one that i think tends to be more productive and it will hopefully set you up so that in the future your boss doesn't think of you as that kind of person who's just constantly out shopping for counter offers so that you can you know so they can come back and ask for more and more and more yeah i like that you're you're trying to be on their side a little bit yeah give them all the reasons why it's a proactive thing that that you're doing that they're doing to help you solve a problem rather than just being demanding i do want to read part of this question again i don't want my manager to make my life uh hell under the pretense of oh they'll leave in a year if i do decide to stay after taking

the matching offer so it even sounds like the question asker isn't even sure yeah do they even want to stay i wouldn't it be interesting like there are very few statistics in engineering that are solid, but wouldn't it be interesting to see what percentage of people who accept a counter offer and stay are still employed one year later, two years later at the same place? Yeah. I'll bet it's pretty low. I would bet it's like under 20%. Yeah. Although maybe those numbers will start changing now. It's getting rough out there. Yeah. That's a good point. Well, I don't know. We probably answered this right. Good enough. I think so. Good luck. Good luck. Dave, will you read our next question yeah this comes from an anonymous listener who says i was recently let go from a

company they said they would send me a shipping label so that i could return the hardware i didn't hear back from them for a week a few days later a label came in for the laptop but not for the dock or the two monitors that they also sent i did not enjoy my experience there and i'm feeling resentful at having to pester them so that i can get what i need to send them back their hardware what is my due diligence on the score i don't even like the monitors could you pull some kind of hijinks so that the monitors only display everything upside down and then send them back yeah return them probably takes a large amount of skill in like the hdmi protocol or something yeah exactly it sounds hard sounds fun so i assume this was a

large company large enough that like someone not returning monitors maybe just gets lost in the shuffle but then you're left it's like the halting problem right like you never know that they have given up wanting those monitors yeah you can only tell that they haven't they haven't asked you yet but maybe maybe you you just decide i'll chuck them i'll smash them like that scene in office space the printer or whatever and then the next day they say about those monitors yep you know that it happened like the day you get rid of them yeah it would i have seen this in action not the smashing and then the comeuppance afterwards but the the slow grinding wheels of bureaucracy at trying to recover equipment from people yeah and at giant megacorps it just makes

me wonder how many how many dollars are just sitting there like in someone's closet across the world because like some laptop didn't get returned so many dollars it's just they're unextractable dollars it's like it may as well be or like gold or buried 10 000 feet under the earth's crust for how distributed it is and how much junk it's sitting under in people's closets i think i just need to build some kind of blockchain off of unreturned laptops and then profit will flow these are monitors you could use these i guess you don't even like them but like yeah you could plug them in and they probably wouldn't phone home yeah they probably wouldn't maybe you could make oh maybe okay disassemble like take them apart gently so that if called

upon you could put them back together and replace the plastic bezels with some kind of picture frame or something and and just take it as a fun project to build like a a digital picture frame for your for your home two of them yeah just hang them up yeah just put them on the wall but they're tainted right what about every time you look at that smiling picture of you and your pet ferret you just remember how much you hate that company yeah but this is fueled by that evil company laid me off oh that's a good point maybe give them to your enemy on loan here these are great monitors i promise they won't infect your home with an aura of pain and suffering send them to your enemy and then send your company an email saying i sent them

to person x to return to you follow up with them talk about passing the buck yeah do you remember that i think it was some kind of art project where they built a friendly little robot and had it hitchhike across north america it was not like a fully functional autonomous robot it was just like a little cute little anthropomorphic looking thing that blinked and and people would pick it up on the side of the road and drive it somewhere and then drop it off i gotta look this up trying to show i'm not gonna look it up because i choose to remember it the way i want to not how it actually happened uh but i think it started in canada and it had this delightful adventure and people post all these pictures and then it made it to like philadelphia and got smashed to bits

pretty quickly made it down to the u.s and uh did not did not travel on it was called hitchbot hitchbot yeah so it made it across canada yes it was philadelphia so it made it across canada no problem and then it started in boston and only made it to philadelphia it's like 10 i'm really glad that i didn't unfairly besmirch a city and instead correctly remembered the city that curb stomped a cute little hitch pot oh my goodness so so i think you try something like that you don't have to return them to the company you send them to a person who's like one increment closer to that company than you are oh yeah it's a social experiment yes oh you just need some way to track progress but man that would be great and if you

could find some way to multiply the monitor so that every hand that they pass through they double in quantity that'd be awesome like a chain mail chain litter okay yeah that'd be cool a chain monitor add one monitor and ship it to two friends you know and if you don't you'll be cursed um you'll be cursed by the potential of bureaucratic revenge you're pretty close to cracking a code that i've often wondered about which is how could you go about sending something to someone and completely conceal your identity as the sender like how many layers would it have to go through and what would the protocol be for giving something to someone with instructions that makes sure that it would arrive at its destination but without you being known and

without them being able to track it back to you this seems hard but this feels like an opportunity to solve that problem yeah you need uh the human equivalent of a bunch of vpns or something or not vpns of uh like torno yeah yeah yeah a bunch of proxies and some of them need to have a very very short memory i'm gonna assume that the company that you worked for was kohl's the clothing store okay and you just need to find like someone who has a kohl's company like card like a credit card you know that they sign up for with the company and send it to them find someone who's one step closer and say get this to kohl's or find someone that can get it closer to kohl's it's like those stories where someone starts with a paperclip and ends up with a house keep trading bigger and

better yeah except like through through space instead of increasing in value yeah maybe you just ask your mailman like hey can this like hitchhike to your sorting center for a little bit just for fun yeah you don't have to deliver it just get it there and then ask someone else can you get this closer to cole's corporate headquarters yeah they're look you could take a bummer situation and turn it into a really great youtube video about this journey probably what you will do is leave them in your closet for all eternity yeah i think if you move houses if you if you that's that's when it's safe they that they can't follow you to your new place yeah maybe leave no forwarding address i guess we haven't it's probably telling that we haven't said you

could email them again and say hey you didn't send me a label these monitors can you do that please it's not fun at all yeah i was thinking like beyond the pale you want to reduce contact with this company down to zero if possible and the best way to guarantee no contact is hold on to these monitors because you know like you said the day you destroy or dispose of them you're gonna get an email from this company so oh yeah you can shift your mindset here and say i'm keeping these monitors as insurance that this company will never contact me again you could try and get a job at that company again and then when they go to send you equipment you say oh no thanks or now you have four monitors oh yes but then well then you have to return four monitors wait

what if you do this cycle as many times as possible and see how many monitors can i get from this company i mean if you do that enough then you never need to work a day in your life because you just sell the monitors and then live off that income look let me summarize let me summarize my real answer here this company is never coming back for those monitors don't worry i i think if you want to sleep peacefully at night you you email them a couple more times and say hey send me the thing and then if they don't i would feel bad about trashing them or giving them away so i really would just leave them in my closet until the end of time yeah that's my solution the the avoidance solution yeah i feel like if you've tried a few times it's on them now

it's not your job to like hand deliver the stuff back if you've if you've tried to do their thing yeah yeah exactly you send an email or two and boom you've done your diligence and now you you essentially own those monitors we're not lawyers and monitors are like way too terrestrial for our space law expertise but i would have no problem hanging on to those things or even trashing them yeah i think i would i would never be able to trash them i think they would just follow me around for a while but in a way this would be the company's final revenge on me because i said we'll give you this equipment you will feel this forever obligation to return it and you'll be unable to good luck they'll haunt me it is painful that is painful they'll hurt me way worse than i could

hurt them in any exit interview it's like this is this totally a first world problem i have hundreds of dollars worth of electronic equipment that i don't want yeah and i can't get rid of it yeah well now you can we told you exactly what to do look send it to us we'll send you a podcast sticker in exchange. Great trade. Yeah. All right. We will not cover shipping and handling, unfortunately. Well, actually, we will cover it for the sticker. Oh, yeah. We'll pay that. No one can say that we're cheap. No, no, no. We will absolutely. Free shipping on the stickers. Yes. All right. What can people do if they want their own questions answered? Go to softskills.audio and click the Ask a Question button. Thank you so much to everyone who submits questions every

week. We really appreciate it. All right. Catch you next week.