Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 401: I AM the superstar and pro-rated raise

Episode Date: March 25, 2024

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: A listener named Metal Mario asks, A few weeks back in Episode 395 you talked about working with a superstar teammate. I feel like for our team, I’m the superstar. We’re a small software team in a large non-software company. I joined a year ago and very quickly took on a lot of responsibility. I think I’m a fantastic fit for the team, received *outstanding* feedback in my annual review as well as during the course of the year, and I get along great with my teammates. However, there are two problems. I joined the team on a lower salary compared to the rest of the team. I was initial ok with it because I changed to a completely new tech stack as well as a new role. Now I strongly feel like I should earn more than my colleagues. My boss hinted that he agreed in my annual review. I fear that by me joining the team and demanding a substantial pay raise, the cake gets smaller for the rest of the team, and that they feel like me joining the team prevented them to rising through the ranks. The second problem is related: a colleague of mine (mildly) complained that he lost responsibilities to me since I’ve joined the team. I talked to my boss about that, but given that things have been going very well, my boss would like me to keep doing the tasks. Again- I’m worried that my colleagues might get spiteful with me. Would it be better to take it down a notch (in order not to endanger team happiness and keep things stable for the company), or should I perform to the best of my abilities all the time? Impoverished By Pro-ration asks, Is it reasonable for a company to pro-rate raises for new employees? I recently received a raise that was smaller than expected as part of a promotion I got 9 months after joining the company. I joined halfway through the year and was under-leveled, so I quickly was put up for promotion, and got it! My raise was about half what I expected, and when I asked HR, they told me that the policy is to prorate raises, so because I joined halfway through the year, I only get half the raise that the promotion should come with, so instead of the 20% I was expecting to bring me up to the salary range of the job level I originally applied for, I only got 10% and am now making less than I think I should. Have I permanently crippled my lifetime earnings?!? What can I do to get the company to pay me appropriately? I understand if bonuses are pro-rotated, but why would raises also be pro-rated?

it takes more than realizing your book reading list is a first in never out data structure to be a great engineer this is soft skills engineering episode 401 unauthorized i'm your host dave smith i'm your host jameson dance soft skills engineering is a weekly advice podcast where we have finally transitioned to my favorite series of episode numbers the early 400 series we did miss our chance to say that the questions we answered yesterday were bad requests. Yes. We totally missed it. Look, I may not be the fastest to pick up on the HTTP status code memes, but I will eventually get there. Yeah, I feel like I buy books for the person I wish I was. The person I would like to be

would read all these books and know their contents and it would change their life. and the person i am will go buy like the two dollar amazon sci-fi pulp novel and then devour that instead yeah but if you look at my bookshelf wow do i look either really boring or maybe interesting i guess depends on what you're in is your bookshelf a first in never out data structure i've read some of the things on there first in 20 i should do yeah i should i should look at how many of them i have finished i'll i'll update you next week perfect or i'll forget yeah either way one of these two things is bound to happen this episode is sponsored by work os which is the best way to add single sign onto your app and you can hear more about them

later on in the show i would like to thank our patrons am i authorized yes all right you know it's 401 this time i'll allow it okay big thanks to those that are supporting us at a level that I guess I'm a weekly shout-out. They are E4, E5, King E2, King E7. Dan from DroneDeploy. Chase W. Norton. Typehero.dev. Never is not just a crater on Mars.

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has unsaved changes that was unsettling okay okay now that now it doesn't have to click the button okay this question is from a listener named metal mario who asks a few weeks back in episode 395 you talked about working with a superstar teammate. I feel like on our team, I'm the superstar. We're a small software team in a large non-software company. I joined a year ago and very quickly took on a lot of responsibility. I think I'm a fantastic fit for the team. I received outstanding feedback in my annual review, as well as during the course of the year, and I get along great with my teammates. However, there are two problems. I joined the team on a lower salary compared to the rest of the team. I was initially okay with it because I changed to a completely

new tech stack as well as a new role. Now I strongly feel like I should earn more than my colleagues. My boss hinted that he agreed in my annual review. I fear that by me joining the team and demanding a substantial pay raise, the cake gets smaller for the rest of the team and that they feel like me joining the team prevented them from rising through the ranks. The second problem is related. A colleague of mine mildly complained that he lost responsibilities to me since I joined the team. I talked to my boss about that, but given that things have been going very well, my boss would like me to keep doing the tasks. Again, I'm worried that my colleagues might get spiteful with me. Would it be better to take it down a notch in order to not endanger

the team happiness and keep things stable for the company? Or should I perform to the best of my abilities all the time? Whoa, very interesting. New hotshot in town, huh? Making everyone look bad, taking all their money. I think the business would like it if you performed at the best of your abilities all the time and also didn't ask for a raise so no to the first question yes to the second question yeah i think so i think if you could say actually i'm gonna return some of this money yeah take a pay cut and do more work yeah the kpis will thank you like isn't that what it's all about yes at the end of the day if i don't have an okr telling me i'm great what am i even doing steve jobs paid himself a dollar don't you want to be like him yeah don't you

one of these i feel like a decade ago everybody kind of wanted to but not anymore huh what happened did a book come out probably i think just the the backlash of just the thing you know the thing that happens to famous people like what will happen to us when we die where we're super famous and beloved and widely admired and revered are you referring to the famous thing that will sorry the thing that happens to famous people that won't happen to us when we die because if so i think i know what you're talking about oh and then then all our dirt gets uncovered well a we're not And B, we don't have any dirt. That's what you think.

Oh, maybe we do. I'm hiding a secret past. Everyone has some dirt or at least some sand. Some sand. Yeah. Well, what should Metal Mario do? Oh boy. Yeah.

This is going to sound just so silly and cocky and arrogant, but I had this exact experience about 15 years ago. Let's see. 15 years ago? Nope. Even longer. 19 years ago oh man well actually it's going to be 20 years ago this year oh it was october of 2004 whoa it's gonna get real specific here oh yeah i showed up in a team that i absolutely

loved got hired the team was wonderful the other engineers were so great i love working with them and i had a ton of success for just for whatever reason you know you get into one of those jobs and you just click, you know, you do good work. And sometimes it's because of your predecessors just having a different skill set than you. And sometimes it's just because the organization hasn't seen anyone with your particular talent yet. And so you just shine and management loves you. You make great money, but sometimes you're the, the let's call them legacy team members. Is that an okay thing to say? um sometimes i think no i'm gonna say no like it's probably not good to call

your team members legacy the people who predated you and stayed while you were there soon to be former team members your future former team members sometimes they complain a little bit you know and and look that's in part because i i performed really well on the scene but also i was a young hotshot with a quick mouth and i was loud mouth and obnoxious so i'll just say that Itchy trigger finger. Yes. All in the interest of trying to be funny and sometimes not failing, but most of the time failing. Anyway, I heard some grumblings that I was, I don't even remember what they said, but it was negative.

And I actually went and talked to my boss about it. And I said, I'm hearing from the team that some people are maybe not super enthusiastic about me being on the team. And I was super sensitive to it. It really shut me down. I actually changed the way I behaved in meetings because I got the impression that people thought I was talking too much and needed to, you know, quote, find my place or remember your place, you know, that kind of feeling. But I did talk to my boss about it. And my boss said, who's saying these things? And I said, well, I've heard these two people. And my boss said,

and this is kind of unkind of him, but I'll just say what he said. He goes, look who you're talking about. And I was like, what? He's like, those are not our top performers. And I thought, i didn't even know like i honestly had no idea who was a top performer who was a it was i was just doing i was just having a good time honestly writing about a bunch of fun fun code solving really cool problems enjoying the team and i was like oh okay he's like don't listen to those guys yeah all right huh huh shout out to my old boss mike love that guy yeah so what about this idea of if you ask for a raise, you're kind of taking from the shared pie. That might be true, especially in this market.

Yeah. I think that is just kind of a feature of business, though, that you are trying to influence the allocation of scarce resources. And at some scale, you can kind of like squint and shuffle money around. But even at kind of megacorps, I think that's harder to do than it used to be these days. Would it make you feel better to know that your department leader might be able to get funds from, say, the marketing team for your raise? Yeah. I think one way to think about it is that you can make the best case you are able to for your value to the team, and other team members are welcome to make their own best cases for the value. And in an ideal world that we know we don't live in, but sometimes Dave and I assume exists too

much there's there's a kind of decision and and it's not your fault if if the decision goes your way except it is a little because if you didn't ask for a raise then you could keep having a good time and your co-workers could all get bigger raises yeah i mean imagine a world where your co-workers are stepping it up and all doing better i think if if you feel like you are genuinely performing outside of your compensation for the company it's kind of not your problem if if you get more money because you're doing a lot better of a job i think an answer to the rest of the team could be if you would like to earn metal mario type money then do metal mario type things then be as productive and capable and whatever as uh indestructible to i don't know what metal

mario's powers are me neither hmm yeah i don't i don't know i don't think i don't think you're literally taking money out of their pockets just indirectly yeah but especially if you're not at a software company if you're kind of a small software team you might be kind of a special snowflake team already anyway. So maybe you don't kind of fit into the normal corporate hierarchy. I don't know. It feels, I can see why you'd be concerned about it. And I think I would have some of the feelings as well, but I don't think that would let me, that would stop me from telling myself, oh, it's fine. Yeah. And I like to think about this question in the limit. What if everyone on your team adopted this mentality that you're asking us if you should adopt? And they all backed off

and said, no, no, no, none of us want to be responsible for infringing on our co-workers raises. So we're all going to ask for a 0% compensation change this year. What happens then? Well, I'll tell you exactly what happens. Someone at the next level of the organization will be more than happy to allocate those resources to their own salary. So yeah, or some other team or some other team, like they'll go somewhere or they'll just go back to the shareholders' pockets as dividends or in the absolute farthest possible conception, that's where they would end up is in the investor's hands. So I prefer to live in a world where everybody makes the best case for the highest value that they can receive. And then wise

decision makers, again, ideal world, caveats apply. Wise decision makers make decisions on how to allocate those resources to best reward and incentivize those that they perceive are performing the best. Now, of course, there's like a thousand caveats here, but that's the world I prefer to live in. I think if the alternative where you, everyone kind of altruistically says, no, no, you first, you're standing in front of a door, the door opens and you're both trying to walk through. No, no, after you. And then the other person, no, no, no, no, after you. No, no, no. I insist after you. And this can go on forever. And neither of you walk through the door. Eventually someone's going to have to walk through that door first. And sometimes it'll be

you and trust me in the future at some point it won't be you well to to strain the metaphor someone in the business would look at that and say oh there's an unused door here let me just whoop take this out put it over here i'm like yes cool yes like it's not you're not you're not you don't need to donate to the company you can ask for more money and if they have it and think you're worth it or you can make the case then they can give it to you but i don't think yeah i don't think you need to make these kind of second order calculations about it that's your boss's job also The very related question is, should I do a worse job? Should I not perform to the best of my abilities? Also, I do not want to live in a world where we look around at the lowest performing person in every possible category, and then everyone brings their performance down. So, and I think, I think that, that also is, it's an extreme example, or it's a, it's a

taking this question to the limit, but, but really what if the best Olympic swimmer in the world was only as, only allowed themselves to be as good as the worst swimmer? You know, it's like, no, I don't, I don't, I don't like that world. I like the world where everyone is striving to do their best work, even if it means. Well, in that world, I would, I would do as well as the best Olympic swimmer. So I would feel great. You would get a gold medal, as would everyone. Yeah.

It would be great. I would love to have a gold medal. I would sell mine. Anyway, so I like living in a world where people are incentivized to do their absolute best work. Because I think some of the coolest stuff we have, both material possessions and art and culture, they come from people refusing to do anything but their best. And I love that. And also, you'll feel bad, I think, if you go, well, I'm only going to give 60% of what I'm capable of because I don't want John on my team to feel bad about not being able to do as much. I think you'll feel worse trying to make this other person feel better.

So I think there's some nuance here where if by you performing well, you are kind of coming in and stomping on your co-workers' work, if you're saying, oh, let me just take this task off your plate and do it so much better and faster than you, that could feel bad, and you can probably learn to navigate that better. There's a scene in the movie Amadeus about Mozart where some composer is just diligently working away at some song and he presents it to some famous person and he's like so proud of it. And then Mozart comes in and it's like, oh, delightful. What if you change it like this and just kind of goes nuts on it and is not intending to make the other composer feel bad. But it definitely does because he's effectively showing off how much better he is at just coming up with stuff off the top of his head than this other guy was at like carefully working away at it for years.

Yeah. And you don't have to do a worse job, but I think it is worth effort to make sure you are allowing other people areas of ownership and not stomping on them. If your boss says, hey, please do this thing. That's fine. Even if someone else is doing it, you should ask them for help saying, hey, can you can you help transition this so I'm not just coming in and squishing them. if you're kind of like looking around and like jumping in front of other people's tickets to take them and get them done real quick or kind of redoing their work, that can feel bad if you don't talk to people about it first. And that can lead to more worse feelings than just kind of being really good at your job in general. Absolutely. And I also don't want to suggest that you take the other extreme, which I'm only really saying here for completeness,

because I really hope that no reasonable person would conclude that I meant what I'm about to say, which is don't deliberately try to make your teammates look bad so that you relatively look good even though that could yield a similar outcome to what you are looking for here which is a pay raise and and more fulfillment it's not going to work like that that's also a terrible world so right in the middle of these two extremes i think is where we all do our best work and have the most fun and get the most satisfaction which is everyone does their best work no one is trying to undercut anyone else. And no one is deliberately reducing their work or worsening their work to make others look good. Yeah. Yeah. Well, have we answered the question?

I think so. And I'll just add, give it time. Because what happened to me in my situation was I felt really hypersensitive that my teammates or some, a subset of my teammates were frustrated with me, presumably because I was doing really excellent work, but also because I was a little bit of a loud mouth, and that part I could work on, and I did. But I just gave it time. I worked for that company for seven years, and it was seven awesome years. In fact, I'm still very close friends with several of the people that I worked at at that company, and we get together often. Well, when I say often, it's often for an old man, which is like every year or two. Yeah, I was going to say this. Grown up often.

Yeah, grown up often, every couple of years. And when we get together, we just all talk about how awesome it was, the work that we did together and how much we enjoyed it and how we've never been able to find another job is great. Honestly, this is what we say every time. But my point is give it some time. Things like this have a way of sorting themselves out where people who are dissatisfied with an employment arrangement, they will leave and they will find an employment arrangement where they can feel happy and successful. And if you're part of the reason that they don't feel happy and successful, well, that sucks, but you are going to have to kind of just grow thick skin about it and let it let it move on yeah love it 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 work os 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 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 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 vercel webflow and loom check it out at workos.com soft skills that is workos.com soft skills all Right. Okay. Dave, will you? Yeah. Yeah. Yes. You do it. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. I just, I always have to ask permission because even after 401 episodes, I'm just not quite sure if I'm allowed to read the next question. I mean, this is the unauthorized episode. So of all the episodes in which you should ask permission. Perfect. Okay. This comes from a listener named impoverished by proration. Is it reasonable for a company to prorate raises for new employees. I recently received a raise that was smaller than expected as a part

of a promotion I got nine months after joining the company. I joined halfway through the year and was underleveled. So I quickly was put up for promotion and I got it. My raise was about half what I expected. And when I asked HR, they told me that the policy is to prorate raises. So because I joined halfway through the year, I only got half the raise that the promotion should come with. So instead of the 20% I was expecting for the salary range of the job level I originally I applied for, I only got 10%. And now I'm making less than I think I should. Have I permanently crippled my lifetime earnings? What can I do to get the company to pay me appropriately? I understand if bonuses are prorated, but why would raises also be prorated? That is so weird.

Yeah, that's a weird one. I've never heard of this specific practice. It doesn't shock me to know that there is an HR policy around raises that just conveniently results in spending less money by the company. For a long time too, because a 10% raise over several years of employment is a lot of money. Yeah, that's the weird part is like your percentage increase shouldn't, I can't even articulate it because it just doesn't make any sense. Why should that depend on how long you've been there? So I think there's two kinds of raises that we need to discuss and this falls into one of the categories and not the other. So let me talk about what it's not. A annual performance review raise where you sit down with your manager and

your manager says, here's my assessment of your performance over the last 12 months. I am adjusting your salary correspondingly. Sometimes at some companies that happens on the same date for everyone every year. And that's called a focal review process where everyone gets their raises on the same days and their performance reviews on the same days or in the same month. That's not what this is. This is a raise that accompanies a promotion. And I have no idea why you would tie this to tenure or any kind of like halfway through. If you're just doing like the first category, a annual performance review and compensation adjustment, it makes sense that if you just happen to join the company halfway through that 12-month period, and you only have

six months when the time comes, that you would only get half the raise. Great. And then in 12 more months, you'll get a full raise that's not prorated by the time you've been there, because you've been there for a full 12 months. But for a promotion, this makes no sense at all to me. Yeah, it seems like a financial decision, honestly, that you can back up by a policy and say, well, there's nothing we can do. This is policy. Sorry. That's kind of the cynical view, like someone actually architected this raise to save the company money, or architected the policy. It could also just be a category error committed by the HR department where they lumped both types of raises into the same policy and didn't really understand or think that, oh, actually, a promotion has nothing to do with the amount of time you've been here. Yeah.

I have seen policies saying you could not be promoted within a certain window of joining because you haven't had time to demonstrate you've grown to this next level, which I think you could quibble with and say, well, maybe you were wrong or I don't know, whatever. But that's different than this kind of half. I mean, it would have been better if you waited longer to ask for your promotion. Yeah, I'm guessing that the longer... There's probably a break-even point where you would rather get a 20% raise six months later than a 10% raise at this point, depending on how long you plan to stay at the company.

I'm sure there's math you can do on that. It sounds like a question you could answer with math. Yes. But we'll never know the answer. We can't do that. I would go back to the HR department and say, hey, could we postpone this promotion for four years, and then I want an 80% raise on that day? Because it's prorated, right?

You said it was prorated. Yeah. I'll, listen, I'll loan you my raise. Yes. How about that? I won't even charge you interest. And then, well, maybe, I guess maybe you would. Details to be worked out in negotiation.

We'll get paper in front of each other later and we can redline. But for now, yeah, I think this is botched, honestly. And I would probably push hard on both my manager and HR to say, I think this policy is wrong and I'd like to request an exception. I'd like to appeal this decision. What is the process for appeal? And the reason I'm using all these fancy words like process, appeal, and exception is because I think this is a big company.

And so what that means, that's good and bad for you. It's good because they can probably be negotiated with fancy words without wrecking your relationship with the business. Whereas if this was a startup of five people and you pulled this crap, they would be like, who is this joker? Get this person out of here. it's bad. It's good for you because like I said, you can negotiate without wrecking your relationship. It's bad for you because it's going to be challenging to do, but I would still go for

it because it's not personal. They all know they would do the same thing. If they really think about it and you make a clear case, they will feel obligated to at least look into this. Yeah. I mean, I'm trying to think of what leverage you have. I think the only leverage is the ultimate leverage you always have as an employee, which is like- Quitting. I guess I'll go work somewhere else. I don't think you can pitch an alternative where this is better for the company besides like, and I will be happier and stay longer and perform better. There is one piece of leverage that is not quite as harsh as I am leaving now unless you fix this.

It is, do you really want to be the company that hired someone under level, they clearly performed at the level. And then six months later, you cut them short on the promotion comp and they left. Because guess what? You just invested a ton of time and effort to hire me. Even before I was hired, you had to spend all the time. I'm now fully ramped and you're going to let me go and have to go through that process again. That kind of sucks. And I don't think that looks very good for you. So there's a softer way to say those words. I would not come right out and say those. That's like guns blazing. But companies are scared of that. It does not look good for a company's hiring brand when someone shows up and then leaves with a sour taste in

their mouth after six months aren't you more underleveled now underpaid more so you could yeah like well yeah underpaid you're at a higher level but proportionally you might be lower paid in your new band yeah and i guess that's pretty normal for promotions but still it feels weird feels weird in this case to say if you had been promoted later you you would make more money six feels very bizarre. Six months for a 20% raise. That's crazy, right? Yeah. One thing you could do here is you could say, all right, listen, I understand the policy to prorate me. The result here is that I'm 10% underpaid by the promotion, by the salary band for this level. At my next annual performance review, I am expecting at least a 10% raise. What do I need to do to get that?

So then you could in effect have the 20%, just half of it now and half of it in six months. that makes sense i like that too that's that's the carrot yeah that one's a little better than the stick the threat of quitting i think because it it which also is it's not as big of a threat yeah exactly because people in fancy offices are feeling more like it's easier to replace tech workers oh for sure for sure that i think the i think the biggest leverage you have is not the threat of quitting but rather the brand damage of you leaving this company with such a bad experience and possibly telling your friends. But I still wouldn't use that. I would lead with, okay, I guess I would take two different tracks in sequence depending on which one works. Take

the first one that works first. And I would start with trying to request an appeal for an exception to this policy because you feel that the policy is not serving the business well here. If that doesn't work, then I would say, okay, what do I need to achieve a 20% effective raise in six more months so that I get my 10% now, which has already been offered and grace gratefully accepted and another 10% in six months time so that I can get on the track that I felt I, or that I wanted to be on and that I felt I have earned. And I think that one would be good because it gives your manager an opportunity to actually really create a performance plan for you. And I don't mean a performance improvement plan which of course is irrecoverable but when i do performance get better

yes pgbp not a pip and do that and i really think that you can get some good mileage out of that well have we answered the question i think so good luck this is a this is super weird you were right to ask yes i want to hear how it goes it's just me too i'm continually surprised by all of the strange varieties of situations out there yeah lots of ways to do it lots of ways to do it that seem weird yeah good thing i know the the one right way yeah well of course numerically it just works out because there are more wrong ways than the one right way you know so that's if you randomly sample ways you're going to find wrong ones most of the time that's true it's probably wrong because it's probably not the way i have right just statistically all right well

Well, that's enough math for now. Yep. Let's get out of here. What can people do if they want their own questions answered, Dave? Go to softskills.audio and click the ask a question button. We thank you from the bottom of our hearts. We thank you for everyone who writes in questions every week. We love them.

We love you. And thank you for listening. We will catch you next week when payment is required because it's HTTP 402. Nice.