Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 346: Changing jobs with no raise and wrangling a cowboy coder

Episode Date: March 6, 2023

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I recently applied for a job for a great company. The interview went well until we talked compensation. I said I expected to get a pay raise for changing jobs, but it seems that they can only offer me as much as I already have. I have never negotiated salary before. With my current job (which was my first) I happily accepted what they offered and we have had regular bumps without negotiations. Although I am really interested in the job, I feel like it is a defeat not to get a pay raise when I’m changing jobs for the first time in my career. The benefits are also not as good. Do you have any advice? Should I lower my expectations for a non-consulting position and switch despite not getting a raise? Should I negotiate harder? Wait for something better? Hi Dave & Jamison, we recently started a new project with a new team of devs that never worked together before. The team consists of two experienced backend devs, two junior backend devs and a couple of frontend devs. One of the junior backend devs has a mindset of just jumping into tasks, doing things without any previous analysis, just writing code for the first thing that comes into his mind. I like him being proactive, but this is causing big trouble: bugs, technical debt and often absolutely useless code. We had several discussions in the team pointing out some of the problems, but he is not interesested in changing his behaviour. During the last discussion he didn’t react to any of our arguments, just insisted on doing things his way. After that discussion we realized he even made some commits on an issue that has not been in the sprint nor has been refined yet _while we were talking to him_. Our team has no dedicated lead nor a scrum master and we work remote only. The next organization level is our CEO. I love the company, i love the team, i love the project, i even like this dev on a personal level. If we talk to the CEO i suspect it might have a bad ending for the junior dev since he is still in probation period. I know that we must talk to our CEO if things do not change. Do you have any advice? How can we reach him? Thank you for your great show!

it takes more than handling february 30th in your date code to be a great engineer this is soft skills engineering episode 346 i'm your host dave smith i'm your host jameson dance soft skills engineering is a weekly advice podcast for software developers and we don't discriminate we will handle any date you throw at us it's interesting february 30th is when all the tasks i've been putting off are due well that's a i think i stole that joke from parks and rec no really good job parks and rec uh yeah there's this maybe is this where we switch from the office references to this is it references this is that point february 30th is the date we switch there's a a manager that doesn't like meetings and his assistant schedules all of his meetings

for march 30th february 30th 31st or yeah because they thought march 31st didn't exist but it actually does exist and then it does exist and people show up terrible day yeah oh i think i've seen that clip on youtube i mean i'll just if we have to handle february 30th i have to go update a bunch of if-else statements real quick okay the primary method of managing dates and times and leap everything's leap seconds leap february 30th should i thank our patrons go for it i will thank you to anthony ongaro kent c dodds oladapo fadye monkey face emoji i love mavis santa hopar jonathan King, Connie Lee, Bartek, Tatkowski, Nick Cantor, Ira Chan, Jenny Kim, John Grant, Gnandon, Houghton, Ohio, Kyle Boss, Brayden Canes, The Stochastic Parrot, Valentin at Datafold,

Cody Sale, Noah Frazier-Logue, Will Angel, Travis Sanders, Runiga, which is a rotation of Ragnar, I'm pretty sure. Maybe a permut... It's a swizzle. I don't know. It's all the letters. It's a swizzle, yeah andres reales alice jost nick hathaway craig motlin owen chardell testing is documenting.org patreon.com.au we're hiring and philip john basile thank you thank you i realize i don't look into the camera while i do these because i look at a point on my screen and i just assume it looks like i'm looking at my camera but it's not but for this i'm gonna look in the camera thank you we appreciate it your support helps us keep the show going it helps us uh put it on youtube where you can find it and pay for our hosting and editing costs all that other stuff and if you contribute

by going to softskills.audio and clicking support us on patreon any dollar amount we'll get you an invite to our slack community and any dollar invite or sorry any dollar amount above whatever it says on patreon we'll get you to shout we'll get us to shout you out i must say that lest you think the editing costs are low i bet you haven't tried to find editors who are willing to tolerate the sound of our voices for as long as it takes to edit one of these shows not easy i think most of the expense goes into the the de-beautification of our faces because the true majesty would distract from our words and we don't want that the de-beautification it's like the opposite of the zoom touch up my face checkbox

yeah de-beautify my face just really mess me up there's a checkbox that we click actually there's a slider from positive 10 to negative 10 it turns out touch up or touch down the tiktok filters they don't want you to know about all right oh we should we should do a show though do you want to read our first question dave i will this comes from an anonymous listener who says i recently applied for a job for a great company. The interview went well until we talked compensation. I said I expected to get a pay raise for changing jobs, but it seems they can only offer me as much as I already have. I have never negotiated salary before with my current job, which was my first. I happily

accepted what they offered me and we have had regular bumps without negotiations. Although I am really interested in the job, I feel it is a defeat not to get a pay raise when I'm changing jobs for the first time in my career the benefits are also not as good do you have any advice should i lower my expectations for a non-consulting position and switch despite not getting a raise or should i negotiate harder or just wait for something better i helpfully edited out i just realized while you're reading this i deleted the part of the question that said they're in a consulting role right now so that's where the non-consulting thing comes so switching from a consulting role to a non-consulting role at a different company though but but yeah the

implication is like i don't know you get paid a lot as a consultant maybe yeah maybe and and i guess there are i guess there are consultancies that are companies for which you work like a standard w-2 income but that don't pay you like the astronomical consultants rates like they they bank they take a haircut yeah that's that's where all their money comes from okay so that's that's that's what that's probably saying here yeah i don't know i think this question is interesting for two reasons one because it is it is a new era in tech yeah and a year ago i would have said heck no absolutely not don't take a job offer for the same amount of money throw that offer back in their face yeah tell them to print it out on a silk napkin and then blow your nose

with it show them what you think of that but stuff's different now maybe that's not what you should do yeah yeah and then the other thing that caught my eye was this is your first salary negotiation and it just so happened that they offered you exactly as much as you already make i wonder why yeah i i suspect that they asked you how much money do you make and then they said what a coincidence that's exactly the offer we have prepared for you why is the number written in pencil and everything else is printed on a piece of paper oh don't worry about that to show we care so so jameson i think you're saying that you made the first mistake of negotiation by saying the number first. This is what I always read on the negotiation tactics.

Yeah. I mean, saying the number first can be bad, but also saying how much you make instead of how much you want. I think that's a more clear error because it's very easy for a company to lower how much they will offer you if they find out that you make below what they expected and thus you would be satisfied with below what they were intending to offer you. And a year or two ago, even if you did communicate how much you're currently making, I would have expected the company to try to put a little on top of that. Yeah, you got to make it worth your while to join us. Exactly. And that is a common trend. And the fact that they're not doing that tells me that they probably know that it is no longer an employee's market as much. maybe they're testing the waters maybe they're like you know we actually just want to know

firsthand what the market's really like will people take jobs yeah that don't even include a pay raise so we've we've given them the the advice that is only helpful with the time machine which is don't tell them how much money you make already classic advice from us is this salvageable now say you told them here's how much money i make or even like here's how much i would like to make yeah negotiations are wild like you can say some stuff that is not true that is worse for you just to uh make make a situation less uncomfortable so it's not impossible that this person could have said not just here's how much i make but like and and i don't want any more please don't give me any more please i just i can't afford the tax bracket yeah is it possible to to go back and

and say, just kidding, I would like more money, please. Oh, remember when I told you how much I made? I'm sorry, I left off a zero when I filled out your form. It's actually $1.5 million. And I'm willing to work for half of that. What a bargain. Can you go back? In these kinds of situations

where you've kind of gotten toward the end of the process, they've made you an offer, or at least they've verbally signaled that they're going to make you an offer. They want you, they've invested time in you, but they also know they have some options right now. Like there are other people on the market who they think might be better than you potentially. So it's not a slam dunk. So what can you offer them right now that would make it worth it to them? What I would say, and a little technique that I've used at other jobs when negotiating is if I just want to squeeze a little bit more out of the offer to feel

great about it, you can tell them, look, I love the offer. I love the company. I'm excited about your mission. I would love to join your team. If you can make this offer $10,000 a year higher, I will sign it today. And that little, I will sign it today, it's like, what do I get? That's what's in the employer's mind. It's like, this is what I get. I get a swift, decisive yes out of this candidate as opposed to dragging it on or let me think about it for a weekend. Let me shop it around and see if I can get some other offers. But by promising them that if they'll just sweeten it a little bit, that you'll sign it today, that gives them something that they feel like they're actually buying by giving you more. Yeah. I think you can also

express it in terms of, ideally, you would be excited to join the company and you can say, this number this would make me excited to accept the offer like yeah i don't want to i don't want to begrudgingly say okay like it's barely enough for me to not blow my nose with it and throw it in your face that's another thing that you can give them i you there's less snot involved less unless you use the traditional snot rocket celebration to seal the deal now you spit and do the handshake why is the candidate covering one nostril with their face oh oh my gosh another technique that i've seen used uh i don't want to say against me but when i was on the other side of a negotiation like this and i had made an offer that the candidate

was obviously they wanted a little more money this particular candidate said to me look i'm willing to accept this offer if you will promise me in six months a raise to this amount and you and I can agree on some conditions for achieving that raise. I'm still in good standing. I've delivered work that meets your expectations. And if those are met, then I will get $10,000 more as a raise and not a bonus in six months. And sometimes companies are willing to sign off on that too, because it's like, oh yeah, you've taken some of the risk out of the equation because you've given us a little bit of flexibility to try before you buy, you know, but only with a portion of your salary.

You're kind of betting on yourself a little bit. Yeah, exactly. I bet I'll do a good job and I'm willing to take this risk of maybe I don't get a raise in X amount of months to prove it. I'm willing to bet 4% of my salary that I'll do a good job. I mean, obviously you would want this in writing. Yeah. Not a handshake deal or not even the legendary,

snot rocket handshake deal wait is that different than the spit brothers deal i don't know what that is so maybe that's where you maybe it is maybe it's not hands and then shake your oh i guess oh sorry family show yeah it's different it's more binding because snot is stickier it's i mean literally binding it's more adhesive yeah yeah contract law is heavily based on metaphor oh my gosh oh okay all right did one or two other suggestions one one other suggestion is hold on but can we just agree no more bodily fluids yes i will commit okay one of the suggestion is bring up the benefits thing right it is costing you something and a way for that company to make up for that cost is give you more money you can say hey that

i i know this the salary is the same but actually it's like i don't know five fewer days of vacation in a year or my insurance premiums would go up so much. Can you, can you make that pain go away with dollars or local currency, whatever that may be. Right. Right. And then the last thing I would say is, should I negotiate harder weight for something better? I'm going to abdicate this question because every time I've made this decision of, of should I take this job off or not? It's been like pretty agonizing, I will say. So today I feel pretty reluctant to cavalierly say like, nope, reject the job offer or yep, accept it. I would definitely negotiate harder, but I don't know if I would reject it given the economy.

Yeah. I would say that the heuristic to apply there on whether you should reject this and move on is how much pain your current job is causing you. If the pain is low and tolerable and the enjoyment is high then it might be okay because the work you know the the fallback position is you stay at your current company yeah but if it's really painful and the the relative risk of taking this other opportunity outweighs the pain of staying at your current job then go for it yeah all right but no guarantees another one's coming around the corner it's just not that kind of world right now done and answered the linkedin recruiter spam that i've just come to love to hate for so many years is all but dried up it's dried up and it's become less relevant i got one asking me to

come write java at the bbc which i assume is in the uk like that's that's showing the they're like we don't have to put in the effort to target this come come beg for the scraps yeah okay see wow let's uh let's read another question dave do you want to read it wait no i would like you to do the yeah yeah it's my turn okay this is my attempt to shirk my responsibility you got nice try this is from an anonymous listener who says hi dave and jameson we recently started a new project with a new team of devs that never worked together before the team consists of two experienced back-end devs two junior back-end devs and a couple of front-end devs one of the junior back in devs has a mindset of just jumping into tasks doing things without any previous

analysis just writing code for the first thing that comes into his mind i like him being proactive but it often causes big trouble bugs technical debt and absolutely and often absolutely useless code we have had several discussions in the team pointing out some of the problems but he is not interested in changing his behavior during the last discussion he didn't react to any of our arguments just insisted on doing things his way after that discussion he realized he even made some commits on an issue that has not been in the sprint nor had been refined yet while we were talking to him i'm sorry what did you say i was busy uh working on this bug that's not in the sprint yeah sorry i missed your lecture about how i shouldn't be a cowboy coder because i was too

busy wrestling steer down too busy roaming the range our team has no dedicated lead nor a scrum master and we work remote only the next organization level is our ceo i love the company i love the team i love the project i even like this dev on a personal level if we talk to the ceo i suspect it might end badly for the junior dev since he is still in a probationary period i know that we must talk to our ceo if things do not change do you have any advice how can we reach him thank you for your great show you're welcome oh man this is very interesting you've got the i've brought up the x-men cyclops metaphor before right where you've got this kid who can shoot laser beams out of his eyes but they're completely uncontrolled and they just go in every direction and they just

roast everything around him until he can put on the the visor that helps him focus and actually send the beam where he wants it to go yeah i feel like that's this this cowboy coder yeah we've had several discussions pointing out some of the problems he's not interested in changing his behavior i i love the fact that while they were talking to him about that he's off working on an unassigned task yeah it's like the best yeah yeah this is this is yeah the added level of difficulty of of there's no hierarchy there's just the ceo and then the developers on the team makes this trickier that's crazy right the yeah i guess i mean the developers report straight to the ceo maybe maybe this is the whole company i don't know maybe it's small whatever i'm gonna

skip over whether that's weird or not but i guess you could ask to become the manager if you want to like hey i'll solve this little problem for you that you don't know you have if you give me this role maybe you don't want that role though probably this this is sounding alarm bells in my head though because one of the most important roles of a junior developer responsibilities of a junior developer is is to learn and respond to feedback because they're not gonna know everything and do everything correctly and and like they they will get feedback so the fact that this person has insisted on doing things his way despite your feedback is kind of scary to me not kind of is pretty concerning to me yeah i feel like i would have one more conversation and and express very

strongly like you need to change or we will i don't know have to talk to the ceo about it there's probably better ways to say that but i think this is at a point where if if they're writing a ton of code and it has bugs and technical debt and useless it's possible that they are taking up more of your time than they're yeah providing by getting stuff done like right they might be a net harm their presence might be a net negative to the productivity of the team yeah it happens concerning so the to me the economic principle at play here because obviously i'm i'm an economist now is the concept of externalities this this team member is doing what suits him but it's producing negative effects for the rest of the team effects that

that team member is not paying for or that they don't you know i don't mean paying for literally but that are he's unaware of it right and it doesn't affect him negatively even though it affects the rest of the team negatively so how do you create a world where externalities come back to bite the person who creates them so that they have to deal with it i mean you could hook the bug tracker up to like a shock collar and then look we've decided every bug is your fault now things would change in the organization i can't fathom in what ways they would go horribly wrong but something would be different for sure yeah you physically punished people when bugs were found you mentioned you mentioned bugs and i think that's actually a good idea and by

the way i agree with everything you said as well earlier i also think that it's probably time to help this person close the loop and deal with the carnage that this person is creating by saying look, you introduced this bug because you were being cavalier and working on things without consideration or review. You're now assigned to do this bug. You introduced some technical debt because you're being cavalier. And now we have database passwords in our source code. This is unacceptable. You have to fix this. Hey, you produced this useless code that actually doesn't do anything. So we've put a ticket in JIRA for you to remove that useless code. It's on you now. The problem is you don't have anyone on this team whose job it is to administer that.

And that just strikes me as very odd, or I mean, maybe that is the CEO's job on this team. Yeah. But this is exactly the kind of behavior I would expect to see go unchecked in a company where you don't actually have a designated leader for the team, for the engineering team. Yeah. If you have to deal with it collectively, it's a lot of work and really distracting for the whole team. A lot of tiptoeing around. A lot of hand-wringing. Like, is this really what I should do?

Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And I'm getting kind of an intervention vibe during the last discussion. He didn't react to any of our arguments. It sounds like they're like several team members trying to argue with this developer. Please do things in this way. I mean, yeah, one option is to just talk to the other devs on the team and either ask one of them to take the lead on dealing with this person or say, I would like to take the

lead i'm not trying to be in charge of the team but i do think some enforcement would be useful for for this developer and then do the stuff you talked about like hey work on this ticket or and maybe maybe you go around and kind of gather input from the other team members to say hey tell me your story about how you've been affected by this team member's cavalier behavior and collect those and then bring them to the team members so they just can't ignore them be very crisp and clear about the effects of their actions yeah that thought occurred to me as well if he's not convinced or insists on doing things his way and you say look look at what it cost like i spent a week fixing this thing like that's not acceptable and he still insists on doing things his way

that's a pretty clear sign to to pull the fire alarm and talk to the ceo and then probably let them get fired. Yeah, I think so. And I wouldn't, the fact that it's the CEO is a little, it makes a little bit harder, I think, to deal with this because it feels like it's more final or more intense or more highly escalated. But that's all this organization has afforded you. Yeah. And given the word probation here, I'm going to assume this is in Europe, probably the UK, because I hear that term a lot for British engineering teams. This may be the only time you can actually deal with this because once that probation period is over the actual ramifications or the actual tools you have at your disposal are much weaker in the way that they i

don't want to say threaten but you know if i don't think my job is more expensive to fire someone yeah exactly and it's like as the as the perpetrator of the bad behavior if you come to me and say you know you're not doing a good job and you're going to get fired i'm like the heck i am i'm not on my probation period you know it's like yeah i might have less incentive to respond positively. So now's the time. I would not sit on this and wait. And the CEO is probably the right way to go. And if you've already tried talking to them and they just aren't hearing it, then I don't see a problem with going straight to the CEO. And you have to have a little bit of trust to do that. Maybe your CEO is really trigger happy on that termination gun, but

hopefully your CEO is wiser than that and can offer some coaching and give some actual, listen, and give some gravity to the situation so that the team member knows how serious it is. You also said there's two junior backend developers. So you have another junior backend developer to compare this person to. True. And one pattern I have seen

is maybe the other developer is less flashy and cranks out less code, but is just more solid and less disruptive on the team. and and you can both point to that behavior as as examples of what you're looking for and also think like would we rather have someone like the solid dependable or the rootin tootin cyclops cowboy the pre-visor cyclops cowboy yeah scorched earth if it were me i would talk to him one more time and be very direct it's yeah people usually are less direct than they think than they think they

are being yeah so it's very possible that he thought you were arguing about a specific like a design pattern or something like oh we don't need a visitor here instead of you having this broad concern of like you throw in gang of four stuff because you like that book in our css we don't we don't need it there wait you don't need gang of four design patterns in your css what i don't understand that's you haven't best practices you haven't read the book enough yeah exactly read it harder maybe to lend a little bit of gravity to what you're saying you could actually say listen if you don't respond to this feedback i am going to share this feedback with our ceo boy that's a little heavy and it feels you know you might jeopardize it does feel very threatening

yeah but this person has demonstrated some really i don't know what the right word is here but disregard for the effects of their actions and either they're going to hear it from you and figure it out and get it fixed or they're going to lose their job so you know worst case scenario they just continue on their merry way and they do get fired best case scenario they hear you and go i'm so grateful that you had the courage to tell me what i needed to hear at a time when i wasn't hearing it very well yeah and you might get lucky but i doubt it yeah i doubt that's how they're gonna respond probably not it's hard yeah this person needs to learn it sometime and if they can learn it here maybe they'll be a really great developer if they keep that proactivity and desire

to jump in and do stuff and and learn to harness it a little bit more sounds like it could be something that's kind of nagging at me in the back of my mind is that given if you've been as straightforward and clear with this person as you say. And they've been so dismissive that they're actually doing the behavior while you're telling them about it. There's also a chance that this person might have some kind of, they might suffer from some kind of psychological concern or disorder or something that is a little bit beyond your ability to handle. And so that's something to keep in mind is you want to be sensitive that this might not just be a situation where this person is just being bad you know just you're just bad like it's it's probably not that simple

and given if you've been that direct like i said there's there could be something more going on here that is hard for you to understand as someone who is trained in software but not the software of the mind software of the mind new tagline for our show all right have we have we answered the question. I doubt it, but good luck anyway. Good luck. Dave, what can people do if they want their own questions answered? Go to softskills.audio and click the ask a question button where you can fill out our form. And thank you so much to everyone who does that every week. We love you. We love your questions and you keep the show going. Thank you. Thank you. Catch you next week.