Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 404: Interview comedy and talking pay while new

Episode Date: April 15, 2024

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: “Hello, Is it considered ok to be a bit funny during an interview? To give more context: In a recent interview, I progressed up to the final cultural-fit round after clearing all technical rounds at a well-known company. One of my interviewer asked how I would deal with conflicts with a peer. In a effort to lighten the mood, I jokingly said I would snitch on them to my manager. I saw the faces go pale on the zoom call. So I backed-up and explained I was just joking and gave them an example of an instance where I had to deal with a conflict. The story didn’t help much to make my case, as there was some “snitching” involved in it. But in all seriousness, if I had a conflict in the past and have reached out to my manager to help diffuse the conflict, is it considered a bad thing. How do I make it sound like a good thing during culture-fit interviews? By the way I didn’t get an offer from them. Can’t help but think I goofed-up the culture interview. Thanks for your time and help.” I recently started my first full-time job out of college. I earned an engineering degree but took a job with a company in a more management/ business development/ leadership track. Now I’m the only person in a department with an engineering degree.I’ll be here for a couple of years before they move me into the next role in my track. In a casual conversation about going back to school, one of my coworkers jokingly mentioned they would get free school at a local university because they made less than X dollars. This threw me off, as I (having started less than 3 weeks ago), make more than X dollars despite us having the same position and them having worked in the department for almost a year. Should I say anything, or just assume that the difference in pay is due to the fact that I have a technical degree and am on a leadership track while they are in neither? I’ve been told it’s mutually beneficial to discuss salary with your coworkers, but I’m afraid to shake things up at my very traditionally run company in my first month here. My pay corresponds directly to the starting pay that an engineer in a design role in my company would be making and I think I was given this pay so not to discourage me from taking a role in the company in favor of an engineering job with engineering pay elsewhere.

it takes more than lobbying your company to reimburse expenses in counter-strike skins to be a great engineer this is episode 404 of the soft skills engineering podcast i'm your host jameson dance i'm your host not found dave smith episode 404 is an auspicious number where we will make the same dumb joke about many different things soft skills engineering is a weekly advice show about all of the non-technical things that go into the technical field of software development like trying to turn your expense reimbursements into pixels that you can then gamble on did you know that there are counter-strike skins that sell for 10 grand i didn't even know there were counter-strike skins oh yeah so i think valve invented the kind

of loot box skin thing with team fortress 2 and then added them to counter-strike but they are you can you can play the market if you're savvy or spend ten thousand dollars on a gun and then you still miss people it doesn't actually help you at all and then your team yells at you but they're like you rich idiot instead of you idiot i'm not rich i gave all my money for this gun yeah yeah yep and it all it does is raise your expectations yeah just makes me look even dumber when i miss all right sounds about right dave do you want to thank our patrons i do big thank you to those that are contributing at the level that gets them a weekly shout out they are seaman budvarson become a senior engineer.com unsalted french fries are morally objectionable

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listeners add some names so i can say them as if i've just eaten too much peanut butter i love the That's a great idea. Q's for how to say the next name is genius. Yep. And also, you all are geniuses because you had the great idea to help support the show. Thank you. Yes. I guess you could say that our supporters are not not found.

They are found. Yes. Several of them are found. Thank you. Should I read our first question? Please do. This is from a listener named The Fun in Fungi. Hello. Is it considered okay to be a bit funny during an interview? To give more context,

in a recent interview, I progressed up to the final cultural fit round after clearing all the technical rounds at a well-known company. One of my interviewers asked how I would deal with conflicts with a peer. In an effort to lighten the mood, I jokingly said I would snitch on them to my manager. I saw the faces go pale on the Zoom call, so I backed up and explained I was just joking and gave them an example of an instance where I had to deal with a conflict. The story didn't help much to make my case, as there was some snitching involved

in it. But in all seriousness, if I had a conflict in the past and have reached out to my manager to help defuse the conflict, is it considered a bad thing? How do I make it sound good during culture-fit interviews? By the way, I didn't get an offer

from them. I can't help but think I goofed up the culture interview. Thanks for your time and help. oh this one had a sad ending yeah oh oh there's so much going on here i love it so let's talk about the the humor during interviews part first what do you think i think that if you're going to be funny in an interview it only works if the interview is going really well otherwise i think people just feel like oh no yeah yeah you can't salvage a bad interview by telling a hilarious joke no you just bomb a bomb a whiteboard problem oh now i know you're hiring for technical skill

but what if i were also an accomplished comedian yes who couldn't do whiteboard problems non-overlapping yeah that's a good point i i feel like there must be something in human nature about this desire to lighten the mood with a joke when something isn't going well that just makes it go even worse because i feel like this is a thing oh yeah i mean it sounds like it was going well overall though until your joke ruined it also there's the zoom factor here you know it's really hard to read a room and do comedy over zoom yeah yeah it is it's a high risk maybe reward maneuver high risk maybe reward what's the opposite of reward maybe that i don't know yeah so trying to think about what i would do i don't think i would deliberately go in and say i will

tell jokes or not tell jokes but i think i would kind of respond to the vibe of the interview I've been in interviews that felt very serious and and almost dour and so I kind of try and match the tone and I've been in ones that felt more friendly and conversational and those are probably more likely to to get jokes the jokes might be bad but at least there's kind of a context they might fit in but yeah I don't think I would deliberately say like I've got to put a joke in here the snitching thing is interesting too because i think that is not a great joke in this context because it adds a like uh it adds another layer to these tricky discussions about how you handle conflict and there's like hr stuff and i don't know i think i think this

could raise a red flag of like sounds like a dramatic way to put a thing that is already maybe kind of dramatic so maybe it was just this specific joke was bad but if you had told a different joke it would have been fine like a really high quality tech pun yeah if but they weren't found oh jokes not found oh yeah yeah i have a i have a bunch of layers of thinking on this. One of them is, yeah, kind of high risk, not super great reward. Another one is, it's so hard to generalize based on the experience of one company's interview because every company is so different and every interviewer inside the same company is different even. Maybe if you got a different panel that they would have been pumped about this. So sometimes it can be tempting

to look at failures in an interview and say i will i will not do this thing anymore but really the failure is a mismatch of culture and if you like to joke around as yeah like the fun and fun guy hey like i don't know it seems kind of kind of goofy and jokey would you love it if they said okay we hated that joke about snitching but they did so well on the interview we want to hire them and then you work there and everyone's like just glaring at you as you make your incredible astute jokes yeah i think i don't know i think you kind of filtered yourself out slash they filtered themselves out a little bit as well so part of what you're looking for is is fit between you and the company both directions not just like will they hire me that's also a lot easier to

think if if jobs are easy to come by so yeah that's yeah i agree i think on the one hand you may have dodged a bullet here by avoiding a team that clearly has an underdeveloped sense of humor compared to you, just based on the amazing pun in the question here. Also, I worry that, you know, interviews are so performative. As a candidate, there's a role you're playing. And the role is, I think sometimes interviewers expect the role to be kind of groveling, really nervous. I want this job. I'm going to give you my absolute best foot forward. And if you make a joke... Please, sir, please give me the job. Yes, exactly. And if you make a joke in the middle of the interview,

it you might unintentionally convey that you're not trying hard and and i think that's probably the biggest risk of joking in an interview like this is why i said it has to be going so incredibly well that you can pull off a joke at the end because everyone is like now they've all decided hey we're gonna hire this person for sure we're all having such a great time the chemistry is alive there's fireworks in the air now yeah they crack a joke and we're all like yeah we put our arms around each other we jump up in the air freeze frame legs bent in the air yeah you stroll off into the sunset yeah but anything short of that perfect almost unicorn level interview experience and i'd say no jokes allowed just if you want to get the job i am thinking more about

the specific story too of conflict with a peer it involved telling your manager about the conflict with the peer the snitching terminology makes me think maybe you were telling your manager your peer was doing a thing you did not think was right or didn't think they should be doing that seems fine and hopefully what your relationship with the manager should be is you have concerns you talk about them and yeah you don't want to just go bad mouth everybody to your manager but that's part of what they're for is to help resolve conflict and help the team work together smoothly so i don't think the specific from what i can tell at least i don't think the description you provided of how you handled this conflict would would cause any raised eyebrows by

itself but it is possible that the joke about snitching kind of poisoned it a little bit and then everything looked a little bit more nefarious or dramatic or i don't know scheming yeah yeah i mean it is it doesn't it make sense that there are certainly conflicts that do benefit from having a manager involved certainly yeah certainly yes but yeah i wonder what happened here i don't know i mean i i have all my like cultural biases here and stuff too but when i when i hear the term snitching i think like oh prison you snitch on people in prison and that's bad the other prisoners want to stab you because of that yeah i don't know anything about prison but this is what like two episodes of the wire have taught me yeah and that is kind of like an icky vibe to bring

to an interview potentially yeah it could be maybe they brought that vibe also i couldn't help jameson you said cultural bias but i think you meant to say cultural objective fact ah my cultural truth it's the universal objective truth of all things grand unified cultural theory fair fair i think culture fit interviews are just a crapshoot anyways yeah they can be challenging if anyone feels like they have a really rigorous way to judge culture fit that isn't i like this person i would love to talk to them because i i haven't seen it yet in practice i cultural fit always comes down to i like this person in my experience yeah i really i really dislike the word cultural fit, specifically because of the word fit. I'm a big believer in intentionally

designing and shaping a company's culture, or frankly, for any group of people, which really is nothing more than saying, here are the beliefs that we hold, and here are the values that we choose as a group. And that's great. And I think that teams work better when they have shared beliefs and shared values that they operate under. But culture fit, for some reason, it just feels like it completely undermines that whole idea. It's more like, do you fit in with us? It's like a Mean Girls. Yeah. Yeah, I haven't thought about it that way before.

It does have a Mean Girls vibe. Can you sit at our table? Yeah, exactly. I actually heard one- No, you can't. You told a joke that bombed. Yep. Mean Girls rolled their eyes.

Exactly. Not at this table. I heard a phrase once. It was a good replacement for culture fit, which was culture add. And the idea is, will this person add to the culture that we want to build? instead of focusing on do they look and sound and act like us you know yeah and i like the idea of that that's one of the benefits of having a well-defined culture that you strive for is now you you can actually assess where your group is deficient in that culture because no one's

no group's going to be perfect and then you can go out and hire people who fill the gaps and or at least influence you to fill the gaps i like that yeah i like that too anyway we're getting off i think we should get back to snitching no i'm gonna keep taking us further afield which is to talk about the idea of immutable teams it's an idea that you you cannot change a team by hiring you you get a whole new team so you add a person to the team and now the team has to kind of reform and re-decide what their values are and culture and and it doesn't all start from scratch but it does fit i think with what you're saying that you're acknowledging that stuff will be different with this person they will not just join and and immediately act as like the average of all

of the existing people on the team and that's fine that's good oh did we answer the question i think so good luck i hope you find somewhere that appreciates your jokes me too dave do you want to read our next question sure do did everyone notice that there was no sponsor on this episode i guess you could say sponsor not found for episode 404 but go to our website and we'll send you a 201 created right don't we go check out our material send us an email and then instead of signing a contract we just send you a text that says 201 yeah sponsorship created yes okay all right this comes from an anonymous listener who says i recently started my first full-time job out of college. I earned an engineering degree but took a job with a

company in a more management slash business development slash leadership track. Now I'm the only person in a department with an engineering degree. I'll be here for a couple years before they move me into the next role in my track. In a casual conversation about going back to school, one of my co-workers jokingly mentioned they would get free school at a local university because they made less than X dollars. This threw me off as I, having started less than three weeks ago make more than X dollars, despite us having the same position and them having worked in the department for almost a year. Should I say anything or just assume that the differences in pay is due to the fact that I have a technical degree and I'm on a leadership track while they

are in neither? I've been told it's mutually beneficial to discuss salary with your coworkers, but I'm afraid to shake things up at my very traditionally run company in my first month here. my pay corresponds directly to the starting pay that an engineer in a design role in my company would be making and i think i was given this pay so as not to discourage me from taking a role in the company in favor of an engineering job with engineering pay elsewhere this might be time for us to reintroduce the salary game yeah have we talked about that recently jameson not recently i was actually just on a phone call with the person in my life who introduced me to the salary game almost 20 years ago let's see did you play the game with them i did on the call yes oh nice

the salary game has three rules and if i can remember all three i'll say them and if not i will change the list to say there's only two rules rule number one is you both agree not to get mad if you're mad hate the game not the person playing the game not the player that's rule number one rule number two is you must play to completion and i think and i think oh yeah rule number three is you only play the game with people you are talking to you can't play the game on behalf of someone else so here's how the salary game goes what does completion mean it means you're about to tell me yeah i'll tell you so here's how the salary game goes we both agree we're going to play the game we both agree to the rules of the game and then one person tells the other person

their salary and the other person tells the first person their salary and that's what playing to completion means you can't bail out after you find out the other person's salary and say i don't want to play this game this is the salary swindle yes that would be yes that would be a something that a snitch would do i guess yeah so they did not respect the rules of the salary game because they just they just played it yeah they i guess they didn't technically they didn't say how much money they made no they did the other person did oh i guess less than x no no they said they make So, like, maybe the university has some deal if you make less than $100,000 a year or something. And they're like, well, I could get that deal.

Yeah. Right. Hmm. Yeah. So, I mean, the question here is, should we do that? Should we exchange salary information? That's one of the questions. And, of course, the answer is, sure, play the salary game.

But make sure you're clear on the rules. The other question here is, should I say something, you know, or maybe state it another way. Should I worry about this? do you mean say something as in to the person that's what i'm not quite clear on what you know it's like maybe we should answer both those questions just in case should i say something to the person should i say something to the company i i'd like to tackle the second question should i say something to the company company i've discovered a great injustice please can someone do something about this no to me the answer is no on that one why

first of all this is just one of many injustices and the company doesn't care it's like to you it seems like a problem to them it's like okay kid get back on the bus and get back to work yeah i mean i i guess a question i am pondering is to to what end what would your goal be in saying something to the company about it i mean they already know how much you make yep and how much the other person makes and they know how to try to advocate are you trying to advocate for a raise for the other person are you trying to understand the intent why or the expectations on that they have for you because of that i'm gonna be unsurprisingly more wishy-washy than dave and say i could see some cases in

which it might make sense to to tell somebody at the company if for example you think why we make so much more than this other person but we do the same job like am i am i am i worth it like am i meeting expectations am i do we have do we actually have a different job in a way that i don't understand yeah that could be useful as long as you make it clear you're not volunteering to make their same amount of money yeah i'm so concerned that we make a different amount of money and the company says great i have a solution yes i can resolve your concerns yep easy peasy yeah did we both say

easy peasy we did that's embarrassing we both say easy peasy it's embarrassing in a really cute way I guess oh we are cute Dave oh boy yeah I mean I've I've been on lots of I was about to say both sides but I

think this is a more complex shape than a plane and a piece of paper I've been an employee who wondered what everyone else made. I've been an employee who felt like I made a lot of money and also wondered what everyone else made. I've been a manager at a place that had some control over what people made and I've been a manager where I felt like I had very little control over what my team made. If your manager or your company as a whole are wise, they should assume that in general people will figure out what other people make it's protected in the

united states to share salary information at a company with your co-workers to tell them how much you make and if it's protected in the u.s i feel like it's got to be protected everywhere else because we're generally a bit more uh wild west on yes wild west about those things so at the same time i've also worked at places where well did i say this your your your company should expect that people will find out what other people make and should have some plan for the uproar that will inevitably result because i've never worked anywhere where i could look at the salary distribution and think this seems fair to me and also fair to everyone else on this distribution right like someone someone will be upset by it no matter what so they should kind of expect this at

the same time it does trigger some disruption if someone who didn't know how much other people made finds out they're way underpaid usually that results in them either making more money and then that costs the company money or they quit because they're disgruntled or just become disgruntled and don't quit and i think all of those are worse to the soulless corporate entity than they don't know how much other people make and are blissfully ignorantly happy but that's not your problem if you want to play the salary game if you want to tell them how much you make and learn more about exactly what they make that's fine it might result in changes but again i don't know it's not not your job to deal with but it it i have usually found someone leaves that game

frustrated in general even if they're not upset at you for playing the game whoever has a lower number often leaves frustrated at their job yep i don't know i don't think i have a point i think i'm just talking through all this you just wrote the tagline for our podcast point not found yeah should i say anything yeah i don't know i don't think it hurts you to say anything to your peer in an ideal world although i guess we do have to consider the the non dave and jameson like real world sneaky scenarios that are out there yeah you could certainly be illegally retaliated against you you can't legally be retaliated against but i could see some company getting very upset at you and then maybe that leadership track just gets a little bit longer or yeah

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I just would not say anything about this. Salary differences are common, and sometimes there are good reasons for them, and sometimes there are not. And this... There are always reasons for them. Yes. But yeah, the reasons are sometimes this person started when the company was poor. Yeah, exactly. Or this person is a bad negotiator, or this person is the victim of some biases that shouldn't exist but do, or...

this person worked in a different geography where salaries are generally less and then moved here and made the mistake of sharing their previous salary with the employer and got what felt like a big raise but wasn't. Yeah. And there's a thousand reasons, right? Yeah. They're very path dependent. Yes. Path dependent is a great way to put this. And they very rarely, not very rarely, in the aggregate, maybe in the limit, oftentimes salaries tend to reflect someone's contributions or performance on the job. But when you sample individuals, that is rarely the case, especially at bigger companies where there's been a lot of varied past, like acquisitions, lots of different programs that have been born and died, things like that.

So there are so many reasons why this could be the case. You are never going to be privy to any of them when you pick one of these situations, like one person that you're worried about. And so I just wouldn't do it. And now, if you have the intention of helping this person know that they are underpaid so that they can then go and get that situation improved for themselves, then I think that's good. That's like a noble motivation. And I think that's probably something you should go do, but probably not by saying,

hey, just so you know, I make a lot more money than you. And then also, I just want to point out one thing that's a little bit youthful in this question, which is to say that this person has been here for how long? What did it say? The other person, I mean? Almost a year. Almost one year. And I've been here in my first month and I'm making more than them. Boy, there are so many ways. First of all, almost a year is nothing. They probably haven't even gotten their first raise. So I'm reading an implicit assumption here, an implicit expectation from the question asker that if someone's been here for almost a year, they should be making

more than when they started. And that is not true. As a general rule, you're not going to get any salary changes at all for the first year of employment at any company. So I wouldn't take the fact that they're almost at the year mark to mean anything at all. You're probably both living with your first salary and you probably haven't had any salary changes yet. I didn't even think about that. You're so wise, Dave. That's why I'm here is to think about things. I don't know. I had to sit on the line here. You think about the things I don't think about and together we both think about everything perfect combined between the two of us the full universe is thought about yes yep all right have

we answered the question i think so not a lot of good you can do here especially if it's a big company but you can certainly do some harm and you could certainly create a bunch of drama for no reason and you could hurt some feelings so a lot of downside not a lot of upside i'm probably not touching this thing all right what can listeners do if they would like their own questions answered go to soft skills.audio which is not 404ing at the moment although it would be really cool if we just for the week that this episode is out if we changed our website to render its content normally but with a 404 status code that'd be so cool i would super be down for that and probably break all the podcast apps though you think it would just a website i bet

i don't know i think we should try it so what if it costs us 50 of our listeners yeah who says who what is this tyranny who says that 404 pages have to be dumb error messages why can't they just be the content i mean i've seen 404 pages with content on them and i'd like to lean into that we need to make a new web framework it's 404 only that is such a good idea you could make a web framework that's just based on breaking all the semantic conventions of the web i love it all right anyway once you go to our website then you can click on the ask a question button where you can fill out our little form and ask us a question and as always we must say from the bottom of our collective hearts.

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