Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 357: Waiting to be paid and survivor's guilt

Episode Date: May 22, 2023

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: A listener Steve asks, How long is too long to wait to be paid? I’ve worked for 4 early stage startups in my career. Two were successful. One failed. My current one is “limping along” but showing signs of taking off. At the startup that failed, we stopped getting paid and some of us stuck around for 2-3 months until the CEO closed the business. I ended up unpaid for nearly 3 months of work. At my current startup, we are 3 months behind, and it has been this way for 6 months. The CEO is transparent about fund raising and clients slow in paying invoices. My question is still how long before I follow your age old advice? Listener Jess asks, ‌ How do I get past survivors guilt when my company does mass layoffs, but I am not one of the casualties? I’ve been at the company less than a year, and this is the second time they’ve fired THOUSANDS of people, including from my team; folks I work with at least weekly, and folks who have been at the company significantly longer than I have. I feel guilty that I, “The new guy”, am still employed, but the folks who’ve been there for years aren’t. How can I get past this and keep working to ensure I’m not caught up in the next round of layoffs? My manager says I’m doing good work, and the layoffs included complex inputs, but it that only helps a little bit.

it takes more than converting your treadmill desk into a kickboxing desk to be a great software engineer this is episode 357 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 about all the non-technical things that go into the technical field of software development like the ever escalating arms race to do more intense workouts at your desk first it was the humble yoga ball oh yeah the standing desk and then the treadmill desk and soon it'll be the deadlift desk the pilates desk what about a desk that you actually have to hold in the air while working there are no legs

or you have to just like crouch and rest it on your lap yeah like you're squatting like air squatting yeah or like wall sit wall sits but you're holding a desk yeah listen i need to i need to buy your cheapest monitor i mean sorry your lightest monitor you're gonna call with your boss and you topple over because you can't keep keep the desk held up anymore oh boy everyone would be strong and healthy and sweaty and red faced all the time we're always out of breath sounds like a strange work environment that's not what this show is about dave do you want to thank our patrons yes big thanks to the computer science book.com kyle boss valentin at datafold santa hope our noah frazier low kent c dodds

jenny kim owen charlotte craig motley and i love mavis the stochastic parrot alice just At least we no longer have that awful name. Fluxinacinahilification is common in L'Enfoir, Pwilgwyn, Gilgogory, Schwandrob. Gnadon, Houghton, Ohio, patreon.com.au, we're hiring. Ira Chan, Monkey Face Emoji, Jonathan King, testingisdocumenting.org. Ola Rapafadiyi, Anchor, this shout-out,

sponsored by Will Angel. That actually belongs to Anchor, just so you know, like the, that's one line. Ragnar, Nick Hathaway, Travis Sanders, Brayden Keynes, John Grant, Bartek Dekowski, Cody Sale, Nick Kantar, and Philip John Basile. If you would like to join this illustrious crew, go to softskills.audio and click the support us on Patreon button, where if you contribute a sufficiently large amount that makes Jameson's eyeballs pop out of his head, we will say your name or phrase or unpronounceable emoji of your choice on the show every week. And if you

contribute any dollar amount, we'll give you access to our Slack community at the beginning of every month. Big thanks to everyone who's done that so far. if the the amount is so high that i topple over i can't hold up my my like overhead press desk anymore there's a secret unobtainium benefit i found out i have some kind of issue with names in in prose i i just can't not can't uh when i'm reading i i like gloss over the names and sometimes i remember the first letter but the whole name i never say it out loud in my head or or hear it so i've i've read very long book series where i i have ideas of what the characters are like but i just don't know their name at all or if i do it's it's like wildly different from

how it's actually pronounced so this is my my excuse for why i'm so much worse than you are pronouncing okay i accept land fair or whatever you're great that's the point i'm no i'm not good at it either it's i've heard people say it and i'm nowhere close well good thing you have the opportunity to practice yes every week uh should i read our first question yeah go for it this is from a listener steve who asks how long is too long to wait to be paid i've worked at four early stage startups in my career two were successful one failed my current one is limping along but shows signs of taking off at the startup that failed we stopped getting paid and some of us stuck around for two to three months until the ceo closed the business i ended up unpaid for

nearly three months of work. At my current startup, we are three months behind and it has been this way for six months. The CEO is transparent about fundraising and clients slow in paying invoices. My question is how long before I follow your age old advice? Yes, we haven't given that advice in a while. Yeah, the advice has different consequences than it used to. Yeah. As someone currently on the job market it used to have only good consequences yeah yeah have you ever been uh unpaid had had payroll fall behind at work you know knock on wood but i never have i have not either the closest i came was that silicon valley bank yes where lots of startups were almost in the same boat and then and then suddenly weren't anymore and even the thought of that i was like well maybe i need to

go find a new job someone that doesn't bank with silicon valley bank yes exactly someone that either contributed to the run and got out early yeah exactly uh yeah that i haven't either i haven't been in this situation and i'm trying to i think i would have a really hard time working without a paycheck based on the promise of a future paycheck so the fact that you stuck around for two to three months without being paid is already pretty different from i think my my normal action which would be to say you failed to fulfill your side of the bargain or of the of the contract which is you pay me money and my side is i work yeah we're three months behind has been this way for six months so i interpret that to mean they've been three months behind on pay for

six months so they they haven't been unpaid for six months but they are owed three more months of dollars yeah i i trimmed the question for brevity and it was like um they've been behind by three months two months four months varies over the last six months which tells me that this problem has been ongoing maybe for a little longer than six months which in my mind is a long time to have partial pay i mean just judging by the numbers here this means they essentially got a 50 pay cut averaged amortized over a six plus month period and that's pretty intense so i'm not speaking from experience here but i feel like if i were to work without pay i would need to be either very strongly convinced that this is a brief anomaly that will soon resolve itself

or have some kind of other upside usually as an employee at a startup that's kind of past the seed phase your opportunities to get more equity are pretty limited once you already work there sometimes there are refresh grants but it's it's you kind of get what you get when you're hired and then maybe you get a little bit more if you believe in this company enough to work without pay one thing they should have is is equity and you might be able to say to turn i don't know work for sweat equity basically but in a company that like has existed for a while and has had revenue in the past and is kind of more real than the sweat equity opportunities that are sometimes out there we should define what that is what is sweat equity dave uh it's when you collect your

human body sweat in cauldrons over an extended period of time this this builds up and increases in value basically what you're hedging against is your lack of fame so one day you're going to be famous enough to sell your sweat and so by vintage sweat even from before you were famous that's right pre-fame sweat it has a much higher valuation than post-fame sweat see i'm glad i asked you to explain this because i i really thought i understood yeah no i mean a lot of people have the wrong idea about this maybe everybody besides you has the wrong idea about it well okay as a counter argument to that jameson how much would you pay for one gallon of tom cruise's sweat from 1987 that's a horrifying image i just what color is that

jug it's got to be mostly like stratified into whatever is in sweat uh i would pay to not have to think about that anymore hey it works both ways i will uh i'll send you a bill for the latter thing that you wanted your order okay anyway that's the best definition i got okay i'll try and give an alternative definition maybe a more mainstream definition you work for equity in the company instead of for cash. Either the company doesn't have any revenue or cash or often, I don't know, very early stage employees or founders might do this. They might not take a salary or something, but yeah, you're getting equity instead of money. And right now you're getting nothing except the good intentions to pay you back what has been lost. But there's a couple

ways this could go either the company makes it through and they're able to pay back the back pay that that is kind of mounting up or they collapse and if you're going to keep working there i think if the company makes it through this there's a chance that equity can be pretty valuable and and so i think i'm stumbling through this explanation i'm just going to not explain it and instead say if i were you and i were still if i were if i were not running for the hills to get a different job, I would say, can you pay me in equity of commensurate value at the current valuation to the cash I am missing right now? Yeah, and it'll be an interesting question to see if the company is willing to give up ownership in exchange for continued labor. So far, you've

demonstrated that you're willing to work for free for at least some amount of time. And so you're coming at it from kind of a, I guess, I don't know if that makes it too hard of a bargaining angle but the fact that you've got a few months of back pay accumulated is good leverage because you can say look i've hit a line i'm not willing to work anymore until we get this sorted but you can compensate me through equity at least but i'm with you jameson at this point i'm evaluating a backup plan in fact it doesn't hurt at all to start the job search which we should share is maybe be a little bit um what's the word the opposite what's the opposite of abbreviated extended i don't know the job search is going to take a little longer than it may have in past

years yeah i mean it depends on your financial situation and your faith in the company but as as a sign of the company's health not paying your employees for several months is not a good one but we're so close to busting out it's going to be amazing that's what people say yeah you know most companies i know uh maybe 99 of them did not have overnight success it's a grind to get a company going from the start to to major success you know the yeah if people look at big companies like you know they look at the top 10 list on the s&p 500 and every single one of those took years of just toil before they got to anything sizable and that's really true for any company i know even the smaller ones i i also think i know it's not unheard of to have a company really struggle and

go and miss payroll and then kind of make it back but i would be interested to see how it i imagine it makes it even more rare that the equity will be worth something like the default expected value of equity in startups is basically zero and i feel like overall it's probably you're probably less likely to get value out of equity from a company that has sunk to the level where it cannot pay its employees for several months really why do you say that oh sorry you you mean to get value no not stock up more stock options yeah yeah yeah like like say you stick around and they they end up being able to make payroll and you got some equity out of it for staying through this period of of no money you're still betting

at that point that this equity will be will be liquid and worth something at some point and i feel like that bet feels riskier because the company had to go without paying its employees for a while yeah but it's an option if you are interested in staying or you feel like the bet seems worth it or you have other reasons for liking it yeah you don't like the idea of working for money you actually like working for free i don't like the entanglements that money brings into my life i prefer to treat my job more like open source yeah where there's no obligation that my customers have to me but i also have tons of obligations exactly they pay me nothing but they demand to make huge demands on me yeah

it's i love it let's have more of that please yeah oh yeah yeah i i would have been gone after the first well i don't know gone is i feel like after the first missed paycheck i would have started the job search yeah with the ideal of of not having to miss another one at that company and obviously you don't control how long it takes to get another job but yeah yeah and that's you know that says a little bit about you jameson you know i i'm gonna go out on a limb and say you're probably not an entrepreneurial spirit this person though i think is my wife and children are less entrepreneurial with not having money to pay i'm not i'm not in a i'm not in a large financial risk time of life yeah for me this question asker

though i i gather is a bit a little bit more entrepreneurial and so maybe this is just okay because a lot of like i said earlier a lot of companies that are huge successes they had a lot of toil and grind but they also had a lot of failure and i hear this story over and over from founders who are like oh yeah there were years there were many months where i was worried we wouldn't make payroll or we did miss payroll or i had to do creative funding of payroll for a period of time this is a common story so the fact that they're missing payroll right now doesn't necessarily mean they're going to be down and out forever and i would hate to give advice to someone who has equity in a company that might be the world's next i was going to say a successful

company. And then the word Enron jumped in my mind. I don't know why. It's so cynical. I would hate for you to miss out on the upside of a huge valuation on an awesome company in the future. So you got to keep that in mind. But that is like rolling a 10,000-sided die and hoping it comes up with one number. I think I would be thinking a lot about the opportunity cost and how it felt to pay that. Because part of the opportunity cost here is a full-time salary at some other job that you might get and yeah if you uh maybe your expenses are low maybe maybe it said uh two were successful two early stage startups that were successful maybe maybe they made a bunch of money from that and they're more willing to be risky i spent all my money on yachts so

i gotta keep the income coming in so i i would have a harder time sticking around that long yeah as an employee maybe if it was like a co-founder or some kind of higher level leadership role and i had more visibility on on the payroll stuff but yeah that's my advice all right did we answer it yes okay guaranteed guaranteed yes this this answer comes with our usual guarantee it's a limit of warranty it's um it's a hundred thousand miles or five years whichever comes first and we'll replace the whole powertrain for you if you if you have an issue here we really value customer service yeah the reputation of our vehicles that's right make we haven't had any recalls though we should probably start issuing some of those well it's because we build fine

automobiles every machine that we've produced has been perfect that's true we've never produced an imperfect machine all right uh shall i read our next one please this comes from a listener named jess who says how do i get past survivor's guilt when my company does mass layoffs but i am not one of the casualties i've been at the company less than a year and this is the second time they've fired thousands of people including from my team folks i worked with at least weekly and folks who have been at the company significantly longer than i have i feel guilty that i quote the new guy close quote i'm still employed but the folks who have been there for years aren't how can i get past this and keep working to ensure i'm not caught up in the next round of layoffs my manager

says i'm doing good work and the layoffs included complex inputs but that only helps a little bit oh yikes i've been wondering when we were going to start getting questions about like a little bit more poignant questions about layoffs you know we've been hearing questions like how do i avoid getting laid off uh and so on but this is the first one i think that came across our radar where it says thousands of my co-workers have been laid off and i have survivor's guilt very interesting yeah so i'm on the other end of this uh i was laid off a few weeks ago hence being on the job search yeah and i've been there for other people i've i've been a survivor of layoffs as well i feel like by the time the layoff plan is being made

there's basically nothing you can do to put your name on one to move your name between the naughty list to the nice list so yeah or it's kind of a synthesis of a lot of yeah complex inputs especially if this is a org big enough to have laid off thousands of people then it's possible that they are targeting layoffs strategically rather than individual performance yeah based by saying we are going to stop investing in this large opportunity that has a whole department associated with it or i don't know decrease our costs in in cloud somehow and a bunch of kubernetes related folks get laid off or something like that yeah yeah this is an it's an interesting trade-off about working in a large company your overall impact on the financial health

of the company is pretty small um uh and it can be very comfy because there's this huge infrastructure around you that's probably not going to disappear but it can also feel stressful if things are not going great and then and then the question is well what what can i do to turn this fortune 10 company around right well you probably have to go talk to the fed and maybe work on the war in ukraine and think about some oil prices and like the the inputs are myriad and large i guess when they said inputs i wasn't thinking about macroeconomic inputs like interest rates yeah well it's got to be one of them yeah kind of is so are you are you basically saying don't feel survivor's guilt because it's not your fault well don't feel survivor's guilt doesn't feel

like very effective advice just when i have received that advice it didn't work it failed on me did you did you look at yourself and go huh no still feel it yep yep uh i did i also got advice when i was laid off that said don't blame this on yourself and i said nope also didn't work i'm gonna uh too bad um how do i avoid survivor's guilt i think part of it is acknowledging the scale of the organization that you work in and and oh this is gonna be a not very fun metaphor but imagine you're you're i don't know you're in a trench in world war one and there's all these artillery strikes going off okay you dig your trench but there's not a ton you can do besides that if if like things are happening to you at this massive scale and sometimes bad things will

happen to you and sometimes bad things will happen to people close to you and and those people probably got advice to not feel survivor's guilt either i wonder if it worked for them yeah i mean survivor's guilt the first context i heard survivor's guilt in was in the context of warfare that's i mean i don't know if that's where it came from but that's what i heard of so are you saying to to lean into the randomness of the world and be grateful for fortunes that fall to you and and uh just try to move on somehow i think so i mean i think that's one way you could think of it another thing you could do is if there are people you you feel particularly sad i mean one thing that happens when when there are layoffs is if you spend a

lot of time with someone at work suddenly you don't anymore and that can be pretty painful yeah it's grieving you can still reach out to those folks they're not dead you won't work with them so your your connection and relationship will not be the same at all but if there's someone you particularly miss uh you can you can add them to your network on linkedin if you i believe that's the standard approach for going through the grieving process yeah um sorry that that took me a moment to get but i realized yes linkedin connections are a key to the grieving i think any therapist will tell you that yeah i'm yeah you have a loved one who passed find their now defunct linkedin profile yeah that'll help connection this will be great your grandmother

yes you know i do have one perspective on this and and it's uh this might be a hopelessly optimistic way to view the situation. And it might also be the grumpy old person card that I'm about to play here. And I'm not even that old, but I was actually around in the industry working as an intern at one of these big tech companies. Back the last time we had widespread tech layoffs, and that was in the early 2000s. And it was just a little over 20 years ago that I remember coming to work at a company called Novell that has been absorbed by many other companies. And I think basically doesn't exist anymore, but was a pioneer in the networking space. And coming into work and watching people pack up their boxes and go home because they just got done with their layoff

meeting and they were told that they were on the list. So that's not the bright side yet. But the hopelessly optimistic viewpoint is we've had over 20 years of essentially unbounded employment and wage growth in the software engineering field. It's been a remarkably good time. I've been saying it's a golden age for pretty much 20 years straight. And I just thought, when is it going to end well i think it i think it didn't even end it just kind of reduced in its fervor a little bit and so one perspective on this that might soften the pain a little bit for those that are surviving after a layoff is that look this has been a very rare event you've had a lot of really good years a lot does that help you feel any better uh no nope i don't think it would because because

because it could feel like a change in environment it's not an event it's now this is this we are entering the hard times and yes we had a bunch of good times but but if those are over now doesn't doesn't feel better to think but but the good times sure we're good if you're worried about what's going to happen to me next that's a good point uh okay well i i disavow my optimistic outlook and embrace your cynicism my manager says i'm doing good work uh that's a good start good sign your manager could get laid off yes that's also possible some of i mean some of the advice for how to avoid the next round of layoffs is is generic and and generalizable to how to be good at your job. But people who are widely known as vital members of

a team of some important thing that the business must keep doing are much harder to lay off. And in times of cost cutting, one of the questions that is often asked is, who is essential to operate this product or team or company or department or whatever? and kind of make a list of those people and then think, okay, what about all the other people who here would hurt the least to let go? So if you can be on that list of who is essential,

your likelihood of being laid off is definitely smaller. There's two ways to get on that list. Number one is you can do really good work and make yourself indispensable and valuable. And number two is find where the list is stored. The Ferris Bueller method. Yes. Yes, I like it. Yeah. I mean, be indispensable is very pithy advice.

Also not great, by the way. Indispensability is, I believe, a poor career strategy because even though it makes it very hard for a company to fire you, it also breeds resentment among your coworkers and creates an organization with toxicity sometimes where you have these people that are untouchable because they have crucial information. this is our yoda you know who can never be let go and so that's not really good but i mean doing doing consistently great work and making sure you get feedback from your manager on how you can do better work will help you to be valuable even though i do think indispensability is a bad target yeah maybe we mean different things by that i guess i don't mean like you know all the secrets to the systems that nobody else does but more like you are so effective that if the team is much smaller around this thing yeah fair enough but the thing has to keep going like we need we need you to keep it going yeah you're the one we choose you're the one who could best keep it going

under constrained fewer numbers of employees i'm gonna send constrained resources but that means that the people are the resources and that feels gross you could also i mean that's that's kind of related to the other thought i had which is if the kind of work you are doing is still going to be done someone who can who can be more of a generalist and cover more breadth could be more useful in a layoff this is so if if they're just slashing a whole division or whatever then this is less useful but if they're saying we have 15 people on this project and we need to go down to four then competent people are easier to keep on that list and people who can spread wider through the stack of if this is a i don't know some web-based product and it's got some operation

stuff and some back-end stuff and some front-end stuff and if you can do more of those skills that might make you more likely to stick around yeah all right well there were two questions embedded in this question and i think we've sufficiently failed to answer both of them that we can probably call it done i declare it done good work i would say i was indispensable in answering that question i couldn't have done it without you that's you can't have this podcast without me no i've harbored great resentment because of it too i've been trying to find a way to lay you off for years and finally the advent of ai is making it yeah you've been watching those developments closely little did you know i've spent the last 356 episodes

collecting high definition audio samples of your voice for one reason only that's fair i know that I've seen stuff on YouTube where they clearly fake but take celebrities' voices. I feel like there's a genre of they're playing video games together. Yes, that is a thing. I've seen former presidents playing video games. Yeah. And I hear from my teenage children that they're very funny, but I haven't actually seen them. Do you think it's funny to hear the president say naughty words?

It'll happen. If so, we've got a video genre for you. Yes. i think someone needs to recreate a minecraft playthrough with our voices of two players on it maybe that's a project i can go take on because i am i've got some i've got some personal investment time yeah i mean jobs you want to become an ai expert now you know what to do i just want to play minecraft to generate the video that will play behind the audio yes all right well i think we're done answering questions what can people do if they want their own questions answered go to

softskills.audio and click ask a question where you can fill out our little question form you can give us as much or as little info as you want we love all your questions we get so many and we just love reading them thank you it's my favorite thing to read each week please keep those coming indeed thank you all right we will catch you next week