Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 399: Higher paid than my boss and crossing over to management

Episode Date: March 11, 2024

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Listener Jim asks, I am currently a senior software engineer in a well funded (but not profitable yet) startup. I am highly effective and well regarded, to the point where the tech lead also comes to me with questions and always takes my technical input onboard. I also get along very well with the rest of the team and with my manager. I am confident that I am in a good position to bargain for a decent pay bump, however there’s a chance I might be asking for pay that exceeds the salary of the tech leads or even my manager’s. Would it be a hard no from the start if that’s the case? Do you know of situations where certain people were paid higher than someone from a higher position? Thank you, I’m loving the show! I did it. I crossed over… I’ve been a software engineer for nearly 25 years. I worked my way from junior to senior, staff to principal, and for the last six years I’ve been a technical articect. I’ve been very deliberate in my caraeer path and told myself that I would always be on the tecnical side of the wall rather than the managerial side. Most of my boses over the years have been former technical folks that just seemed to have step off the technology train at some point. Maybe they couldn’t keep pace with the rapid changes in their older age, or maybe they just didn’t like IC work, who knows? But I always had this feeling about them, like “they just don’t get it anymore”, or “their technical knowledge is so outdated, how can they make good decisions”? Much like a teenager looks at their parents who stepped off the fassion train many years prior and now doesn’t want to be seen in public with them. Well, I just accepted a job leading a team; with headcount, and a budget, and the works. It was not the role I really wanted, but in this market, I didn’t have a ton of choices. It’s billed as sort of a hybrid Architect/Manager role, but it *feels* like I crossed a threshold. I feel like my future will be that of a retired race horse living out the last of his days if the middle-management pasture. So, 2 questions: What can I do to not become a hollowed out shell of myself as the technology train eventually starts to out pace me, and eventually speed away at ludicrous speed, because I’m not “doing it” every day Is this just the envitable for every SE? I mean, I don’t see a lot of 70 year old coders, so this is normal, right?

it takes more than searching the internet for a solution to your problem only to find your old blog post outlining the solution to your problem to be a great engineer this is soft skills engineering episode 399 i'm your host dave smith i am your host jameson dance soft skills engineering is a weekly advice podcast for software developers about all the non-technical stuff that goes into the technical craft of software blogging i feel like the modern iteration of this is you are in a chat session with a large language model and it cites your own blog post back at you you ask it what's the source for that and it says your name yeah i saw some attacks on one of the early microsoft ones i think before they even partnered with open ai that someone tweeted something and

then somehow use that to inject into the into the llm like what do you know about this person and it sort of repeated back some stuff they tweeted or i don't know i'll have to dig that up but they continue to be delightful yes delightful and interestingly manipulable manipulatable like us yeah like real humans isn't that what artificial general intelligence really is about making it so you can manipulate it just like you can in person. It's just faster. Prompt injection.

Don't you mean gaslighting? This episode is sponsored by WorkOS, which is a great way to do single sign-on and a bunch of other awesome stuff for your app. You can hear more about them later. Would you like me to thank our patrons? Yes, please. Big shout-out to this illustrious crew that are donating

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button where any contribution you make will get you access to our slack community at the start of each month which it is now at the time we're recording this time to go generate some invites and if you contribute enough we'll say your name on the show or whatever you can type into the patreon field indeed thank you so much we really appreciate it on to the questions all right shall I read the first one? You know, I would love it if you did. Okay. This comes from Jim, who says, I am currently a senior software engineer in a well-funded but not profitable yet startup. I am highly effective and well-regarded to the point where the tech lead also comes to me with questions and always takes my technical input on board. I also get along very well with the rest of the

team and with my manager. I am confident that I am in a good position to bargain for a decent pay bump. However, there's a chance I might be asking for pay that exceeds the salary of the tech leads or my manager. Would it be a hard no from the start if that's the case? Do you know of situations where certain people were paid higher than someone from a higher position? Thank you. I am loving the show. This has an office reference. There's an episode of The Office where someone asks Michael for a raise and he says, there's no way. This is more than I make. and then the employee that wants a raise goes to try and get Michael a raise

so that he can get a raise. No, that is extreme ownership. Am I right? Yeah. So be prepared to negotiate for your boss's salary as well, I guess. That would be so funny. Yeah.

I think it's a trend, but not a rule that generally subordinates are lower paid than their bosses in software at least but i've definitely seen ics get paid more than their managers it's usually if they're very senior very experienced and in the cases i saw it the manager was pumped to have that person on their team yeah there could be some ego with it was in in some places where like well i can't i can't pay them that much that's more than i make but in these cases they were they were good on both sides the manager was good the employee was good

and it went fine yeah if it was just like a rando i don't know kind of mid-level team member though then that's probably tougher because they i've seen this trend as well of trying to have sort of equivalent comp scales at equivalent levels on the ic and management track that's another way that this could be fine or or achievable is if maybe your manager is a an m4 and you're getting promoted to a an s4 where it's like manager or software engineer for something or even an s5 i guess you could have that make those numbers as high as you want yeah yeah so i don't think it's a hard and a fast rule it also probably depends on how they're feeling about their compensation. Yeah. I think there is some truth to that. If they're not pumped about their

compensation, it's going to be weird. They feel they're underpaid. I don't think it'd be weird. I mean, I'm just thinking about how I would respond to the situation. If I had a team member who reported to me as their manager, and they came to me and asked for a raise and justified it and it was a reasonable expectation, and it was more than I made, well, I know exactly what I would do with that. I would take that information to my boss and say, I need a raise. So it's like sometimes we struggle to negotiate new salaries because we don't have good comparable data points for other people's salaries to say, I should make this much because I'm producing as much value as that person or on the market, I'm worth this much because I can have these three data points to

compare. Well, you just gave your manager a gift of a free data point. Are there, I mean, is there a downside to doing this? I'm just wondering what, why would you not want to just say, here's what I would like, even if I suspect that is more than you make? I can't think of a downside, but it would be really funny if it plays out like michael scott at the office yes managers have a strong incentive not to respond like they really want to keep a poker face because they say if they reveal you make more than them it's embarrassing right it's like oh no i don't know but you know that and so probably if they did say no on the grounds on this in my opinion silly grounds that that you that they can't have anyone reporting

to them making more than them then i think that'd be a really crappy outcome but you may never know that that was the reason. Yeah. I feel like sometimes we talk about how we haven't really worked anywhere terrible or toxic. There's got to be some way that this can bite you if you work in an awful place. Oh, yeah. For sure. But I think I'm failing to imagine that because I haven't worked in anywhere really that bad. You have a remarkable lack of trauma from your employment history. Yeah. I think that's a good way to put it. I have been lucky. You absolutely have. And I have too. I've lived a very charmed professional life of last 20 years. I've had generally good bosses, almost no abuse. I was trying to think of a joke where I could say the most abuse I've

had came from Jameson, but it's just impossible to even joke about. Yeah. So undoubtedly there are conniving evil people who will make this bad for you, but I can't see how that could happen. And I think if people are willing to set their ego aside a little bit and let the paycheck size govern their behavior, they could definitely take advantage of this situation and say, hey, so-and-so on my team wants a raise. They definitely deserve it. It made me realize I'm also probably due for one as well. Yeah. Having said that, though, I have participated in multiple engineering organizations where I had access to pay information about multiple levels of management, including myself, a layer of managers who report to me, a layer of managers who report to them, and people who report to them. And I saw many instances of people who report upward making more money than the people that they report to.

I wouldn't say it was the norm. Like 80% of the time, probably people made less than their bosses, but 20% of the time they made more. And I think in software engineering, that is especially common because the skill of engineering management and the skill of software development as an individual contributor are sometimes orthogonal skill sets and they can be valued independently as a result of that. And moving one up doesn't mean the other has to move up. Yeah, I think there's some truth to that.

you definitely want a manager who is technical i think that's generally better i agree but you don't necessarily have to be you don't have to climb the mountain of your team and defeat them all in whiteboard combat whiteboard architecture combat yeah if your job is to make these expensive divas more productive you kind of you're your support staff expensive you're like the groupie or the you're the roadie look you're not taylor swift you're the one that sets up taylor swift stage yeah and they make less than taylor yes get out of here i'm about to release the top album in via this pull request in fact i guarantee you taylor swift makes more than taylor swift's manager yeah which is kind

of a funny thing to think about um of course in that context manager has a slightly different meaning but she probably has a whole team of managers and i'll bet you she makes she out earns all of them it'd be weird if she didn't listen if you don't i'm willing to do it for less than i'll change that i'll do their jobs and you'll be able to make more money than i do right i'll do it for less i love it yeah so personally i don't have any concern with this i i would not allow this to hold you back or slow you down from making this request. I would just go do it. And you got about 398 episodes of Soft Skills Engineering you need to go listen to to pluck out the gems of salary negotiation advice that we've given out over the years. I don't know

which ones are the ones that you need, but I know that if you listen to all of them, you'll get what you need. I know which ones are the ones you need, but I'm not going to tell you because I want you to listen to all them. We've also cleverly hidden some bad advice to make sure that you're listening carefully. so you got to listen closely enough yes yes and then we call it out in the episode errata you know at the end of each episode we have a little call out it's a tiny little asterisk jameson i can count on zero hands the number of times i've been glad that my dev team rolled their own sso system yeah it's one of those things that seems straightforward and then you start hearing more

acronyms and more concepts and oauth and oidc and saml and skim and a bunch of other stuff and then you find out about new acronyms when stuff's on fire. Exactly. This is where WorkOS comes in. WorkOS makes it easy for developers to add SSO to their app rather than building it from scratch yourselves like I have mistakenly done. WorkOS has excellent, inspiring levels of good documentation. They have their own login UI they've created called AuthKit, which looks really beautiful. And frankly, I wish my company website it looked that good. And they have example apps in nine different languages, including Node.js, Python, PHP, and even Go. WorkOS is a drop-in replacement for Auth0, and it gives you great

pricing. You get a million monthly active users for free. Also, I have personal experience with WorkOS. I actually use them at my current job. I know some of the folks over there. And the stuff Dave said is true. Really easy to use, great docs, excellent support, no complaints about them. I don't know i don't know if that's a strong enough endorsement they're all right no complaints no workos is great i i like them i liked them before they sponsored us great listen don't punish your future self by building a homegrown sso system or locking into a multi-year contract with some legacy vendor with opaque pricing and low usage caps join the growing list of companies that are using work os today like vercell webflow and loom check it out at workos.com soft skills that is

workos.com soft skills all right should i read our next question yes this is from bobby tables dad father tables yes i did it i crossed over i've been a software engineer for nearly 25 years i worked my way from junior to senior staff to principal and for the last six years i've been a technical architect i've been very deliberate in my career path and told myself i would always be on the technical side of the wall rather than the managerial side most of my bosses over the years have been formerly technical folks that just seemed to have stepped off the technology train at some point. Maybe they couldn't keep pace with the rapid changes in their old age, or maybe they didn't like IC work. Who knows? But I always had this feeling about them, like,

they just don't get it anymore, or their technical knowledge is so outdated. How can they make good decisions? Much like a teenager looks at their parents who stepped off the fashion train many years prior, and now doesn't want to be seen in public with them. Well, I just accepted a job leading a team with headcount and a budget in the works. It's not the role I really wanted, but in this market, I didn't have a ton of choices. It's billed as a sort of hybrid architect

slash manager role, but it feels like I've crossed a threshold. I feel like my future will be that of a retired racehorse living out the last of his days in the middle management pasture. So two questions. What can I do

to not become a hollowed out shell of myself as the technology train eventually starts to outpace me and eventually speed away at ludicrous speed because I'm not quote doing it every day? And two, is it just the inevitable way for every software engineer? I mean, I don't see a lot of 70 year old coders, so this is normal, right? Oh, great questions. 25 years of avoiding management ended. Oh, they got you. Got you. Had a good run. Got you in the end. You'll never know what it feels like to go 30 years without going into management yeah that's true but dave will you know 25 years without going into no i won't i don't think i will yeah too late i don't know

maybe i will i guess you could always bounce back and accumulate a total of 25 years that would be you know 25 consecutive years at the beginning of your career nope no that opportunity is also lost yes we all make choices yes we do goodness gracious how do i not become a hollowed out shell myself well one of the really cool things about management is you can kind of do whatever you want in a way that you didn't that you didn't in other words you have a level of freedom that you've never had before and you have the freedom to delegate things you don't want to do more so than you have had in the past. You have the freedom to keep certain jobs to yourself more so than you had in the past. And you really can, and I think should, job craft your management role

to your strengths. And I think in this case, the strengths are, first of all, very well-written soft skills engineering questions. This one was just excellent, a real doozy. And secondly, though, you got 25 years of individual contributor and technical leadership. Lean into that. Boy, this is going to be fantastic, Mr. Tables. I think I have always been envious of engineers who have a team lead who is their people manager, but also is highly technical. I don't know. That's just a dream. Yeah. I think I agree with you that you can job craft. You definitely have more or often wider responsibilities to also accompany the increased freedom. And more meetings.

And more meetings, yeah. More meetings, for sure, that will eat up your learn new technologies time. I think you need to be more targeted if you want to do it at work, where you have explicit areas of focus. Like, I have a problem to solve, so I'm going to go learn about this thing. where I remember as an IC, I would play around a lot more at work of like, whatever this is any good and kind of go poke at it. I think that's a bit harder to do. I guess I'm describing a style. You can maybe still do that. But what I'm describing is my style, which is the best one,

obviously. Obviously, it got you here. Yeah, I hear about a lot of stuff and I talk to the team about it. And then I dive into a specific thing and try to go deep on that thing. But being around a team helps me feel like i get some broad exposures to technology still and and i still feel like i'm picking up new technical skills maybe not at the same rate but and and some things are atrophying but i can use this limited time in a way that still feels effective i'm not grazing as much yeah and that still feels fine for me must be fine for everyone then yeah exactly i'm not quote doing it every day it depends on how big the team is too i mean it's a trap to ignore important leadership and manager things in order to code. But if your team

really needs the help and you don't have pressing, urgent, non-coding things to do, you can still make time to code and make that part of your job. Yeah, absolutely. In fact, just this week, you know, I've got a, I have a lot of managerial duties. You know, I'm a member of an executive team. I've got tons of stuff I have to do, like I got a board meeting to prepare for, investor reports to write, and all kinds of things that take my time. But this week, I decided to carve out some time and actually do a coding task. And it's been fun. It's been great. And it forced me to learn some parts of the system that I was not acquainted with as much. So now I have newfound knowledge. And I encourage all managers to do that, even if you're, like me, really occupied

with non-technical tasks. And I think in this case, you've got 25 years of consecutive technical development skill that I think would make this really easy for you to do. In fact, I would suggest that the challenge here will be to not do too much of that because it'll be the comfortable thing. Yeah, you also get to use those skills to give feedback and critique on designs.

Maybe you're not the one doing the technical designing anymore if you're managing the team. If you're an architect slash manager, maybe you're still doing some of that, I guess. but I think you still flex some of those muscles when you give feedback on designs that other people have produced. And I think that can be an effective thing for a manager, especially a technical manager to do. Totally. And what I have found is that even if you're not hyper familiar

with some of the technologies or newfangled frameworks that are being used, these architectural principles tend to, what's the word, transcend the technical nitty gritty details. And I have found that even for things I'm not super familiar with, I can call out important issues and I'm usually right. In other words, I can bring value to some of these architectural discussions. And I think in this person's case, that'll definitely be the case. So my specific advice is don't disconnect from that your team needs you to provide that value to them but at the same time you got to also balance that you may have team members on your team who are charged with that responsibility and you don't want to step on their toes so depending on the composition of your team

you may or may not need to lean more or less into these various areas so writing code doing architectural views doing code review so you got to be really delicate about that or not delicate, but deliberate about which of those areas you lean more into based on how much you want your team members to grow into it. I'm looking at the second question now, too. Is this just inevitable for every software engineer? I mean, I don't see a lot of seven-year-old coders, so this is normal, right? I think yes. I do think there is some ageism in tech where if you are kind of like 50 plus, maybe as I get older, that number will kind of increase to still be like 20 years older than i am yeah that's how old is is that's when the ageism kicks in right

but i think you do start to get some raised eyebrows and like why aren't you in a leadership role or are you really gonna fit in this ic role where some hot new startup disrupting the kombucha world or whatever and i don't know so so i think that's a legitimate practical concern of like i i expect it would be harder you'd be you'd be there are less places there are more places that might filter you out whether that's legal or not because of your age yeah because people expect this pattern of you kind of just move into leadership but i don't know john carmack still writes a lot of code yeah the numbers it's interesting sometimes i try to think what are the what are the ratios of engineering management to engineers and i think okay you know anywhere

from four or five to 10 engineers to one engineering manager, right? At least that's the range I tend to see. And then of course, you've got more engineering managers who those engineering managers report to. And ultimately, the ratios get pretty big. It could be hundreds of engineers being led by one person at the top of a pyramid shaped thing that's actually more like a couple of parabolas coming out from the point and not so much like straight lines. But the point I'm trying to make is that I'm not totally sure if mathematically this is necessary or what's happening to these people. Because when I got into... Where do they go?

Yeah, exactly. Because when I got into software development, I remember looking around and thinking, all the people I know who are in my reporting hierarchy are not software developers. And this was 20 plus years ago. And part of that was because of my industry. I was not so much in an industry that had been, I don't know, inherited by software developers. But in part, I think it was because there were just far fewer of us software developers at the time. But in the ensuing 20 years since I started, there's now a lot of people who did software development for some number of years, something pretty material, like five years, 10 years,

15 years, who are now ready to move into management just because maybe they're interested in it. And now they've accumulated enough life experience to be good at it. But then I think about the vast, vast population of people who have joined the industry since I started 20 years ago. And for a while there, maybe not in the last year or two, but for a while there, it just felt like there were twice as many new software engineers every year than there were the previous year. So I think with that kind of dynamic where you just have this influx, almost exponential

growth year over year, probably not, it probably realistically was not exponential. But with that kind of huge growth, you get a lot of pressure among the more senior people to go and be the leadership layer for these growing people. And so I think the numbers do support it. I think it's like after 20 years in the industry, I think that there's just so much demand for you to be a software engineering leader of some kind. Oh, okay. So you're saying like, it's like the upswelling of newer people sort of kind of pushing you

up to a leadership role. Exactly. Because I mean, think about if each generation of new engineers is twice as populous as the previous generation. You know, you got 100 the first year, then 200 come in, now you got a total of 300. Then the next year, you got 400. Now you got a total of 700. You know, the next year, you got 800 coming in, now you got a total of 1500. And it's like, okay, that was just four or five years. So who's going to lead all these people? You know, it's like, well, that first generation is now after four or five years, that first generation could be the first generation. a full management layer for the other 1500 people you know so like it just works out now i know that's not actually what we're doing we're not software engineers are despite the rumors we are not we don't grow like bacteria you know we grow sub exponentially yeah but but i think still the numbers work out to where you know anyone who's been in the industry for over 10 years at this point there are enough people who have been in the industry less than 10 years that the ratios work out that you could have, you know, maybe a good half to 80% of those 10 year plus people be in

management. I think some of this is also, I'm thinking about myself today and say I dropped myself into my first software job. Hopefully I'm better at it now than I would have been then, but I feel like I would get sucked into some kind of leadership role because I just know stuff that would maybe scale more so some of it is also i think i'm making the same argument you made that well am i no i think it's a little bit different i think what i'm saying is you see a lot as you get more experience you you learn a lot of stuff and at some point there's this tipping point where the value of you doing things yourself becomes less than the value of you using that experience to help other people do stuff oh yeah there's two ways that can happen right like either you're

really good at helping other people get better at something yeah you're just so much slower i like to believe that's not why i went into management yeah i couldn't hack it anymore couldn't keep up with the blistering pace of i i feel like i did kind of make the transition at the height of the javascript fatigue era though maybe that was it that's definitely slowed down yeah for sure i mean there's more fatigue if that's what you mean yeah now there's everything fatigue because i'm old and tired i have old age fatigue yes right wait a minute you're 10 years younger than me well how horrible must you feel then i feel great i bet you could defeat me in a physical contest

pretty soundly do you think i think so you you do physical activity more than i have recently Well, I have been lifting weights this winter. Cave slug. Yeah, I've been cultivating mass this winter. Cultivating. Well done. You've been on a six-month bulk. That's what my teenage son would say.

Yes. Yes. Yes. Very dirty bulk where you don't do any exercise. Right. And you eat whatever you want. Yeah. Well, have we answered this question?

I don't know if we answered it. I think so. Yeah, I think we did. I think we answered it. All right. I think you'll do well at it. Yeah. You will not become a hollowed out shell of yourself.

I think Jameson and I have done enough years in management that we can say with some amount of authority that if you want to stay connected to the technology train, you can. Yeah. And honestly, I don't know, Jameson, if this feels like it to you, but I feel like the technology train is actually moving more slowly now. You know, the breakneck speed of like a whole new language you have to learn, a whole new framework you have to learn a whole new paradigm for containerization you have to learn like these things are the period with which these things hit the market and cause everyone to lose their minds

and adopt them is increasing i think like we're kind of settling in on a way of doing some things i mean it's not to say there isn't some disruption here and there but yeah by and large the technology skills that i had 10 years ago are still very valuable today even though you know it's like oh well we don't have phillips head screwdrivers anymore we have these torx heads and i'm like Well, still a screwdriver, still turns clockwise, righty-tighty, lefty-loosey. You know, it's like I'm able to adapt, is what I'm saying, really quickly to new technologies. Yeah. Yeah.

So you can do it. Makes sense. You can do it. Don't worry. The industry is slowing down with you. Also, you can help slow down the industry. By the way, you're in a management role now. So you can veto any new technology that you don't think you want to have to learn.

That's true. Kubernetes. Maybe you relax that pace. Yeah. Who has time for that? No, we're not doing that. I evaluated it and I found it to be insufficient for our needs. Yes.

Not that I didn't understand it. Right, it wasn't. But I swear I did. I understood it very well. So well that I see its deep, inherent flaws. And I could try to explain it to you, but it's something maybe in 25 years when you've had as much experience as I have, you can understand. Yes. All right.

Now we've answered it. Good luck. I believe. Yes. Good luck. What should we do if people want their own questions answered, Dave? What should they do? I mean, I know what we are.

Yeah, we keep doing this. Yeah, what we do. What do they do? We answer the questions. What you should do is go to softskills.audio and click the ask us a question button where you can submit a little form that we have. It's on a technology called a web page, part of the World Wide Web, in case that wasn't clear.

This is a new technology that we've recently adopted because we're both in management now and we figured it was time to catch up with the technology train. We're only on web 2.0 though. We're trying to stay one major version behind. Honestly, our website is more like web 1.0. Let's be honest.

There's not really much going on in the web 2.0 for us. It's vintage. Yeah, it is vintage. Anyway, thank you so much to everyone who fills out that form each week. We love reading your questions. You keep us going. We really appreciate it.

All right, we will catch you next week. I'll see you next time. Bye-bye.