Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 406: Acquired taste and limited mentorship

Episode Date: April 29, 2024

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Listener Brad asks, I am currently a Senior Engineer with a small software company. I have been developing software for more than 20 years. We were recently acquired by another mid sized company. Since the acquisition, things have been going downhill. It feels like they’re trying to nickel and dime their employees to death. They moved from a bi-monthly to bi- weekly pay, from accrued PTO to Flex PTO, they sat on merit raises for over 2 months , and have paused all promotions unless you are getting a promotion to management. We have a number of engineers who are deserving, but broaching the subject with HR results in excuses, pushback or silence. I have about a year and a half to be in a position to retire but I love what I do and plan to continue for many more years in the right environment. I’m really on the fence as to whether I quit for a new role or hope that they somehow become more efficient. I’ve been doing this long enough to know they will probably not change. So would you quit? Hello Dave and Jamison, My name is Angelo, and I’m writing to you from Italy. I’ve been enjoying your podcast for quite some time. I’m reaching out because I’ve been working for four years at a small company with 11 people in the cultural heritage sector. Although the company produces software, there are only 2 programmers (myself included), while the rest are roles like graphic designers, art historians, and archaeologists. It’s a rather unique company in its field, and for that reason, I’m happy to work there, also because I have many responsibilities related to the company’s performance, probably more than I would have in a multinational corporation. However, there’s a catch. The fact that there are only two programmers, and in this case, I am the more experienced one, often makes me feel that I don’t have the opportunity to interact with more experienced individuals, and this might hinder my growth as a professional as opposed to being in a team with more programmers. My question is: what can I do to compensate for the lack of work interactions with other developers and to keep myself updated? I’ve always read that the best growth happens in a company where you’re surrounded by more experienced people, but in this particular case, I find myself in the opposite situation. I participate in Telegram groups and often read software development books to stay updated, but it’s also true that the hours outside of work are meant for rest and leisure, so they only go so far. How can I keep pace with those working in larger teams on bigger projects? I don’t intend to change companies at the moment. Warm regards from Italy, Sinhuè

it takes more than training your llm replacement to be a great software engineer this is episode 406 of the soft skills engineering podcast i'm your host jameson dance i'm your host dave smith soft skills engineering is a weekly advice show about all the non-technical things that go into the technical field of software development like how do you sabotage the machine so it produces crappy code so you can prove that you're better than it and cannot be replaced i cannot be replaced by a poorly built machine that i myself created yeah maybe the answer to that is just have it copy my code and then it will produce crappy code if i train it my crappy code produces one bug per week but an ai system can produce the 50 number 50 bugs in a single week oh 10x the number

of bugs per week i have a bit of a cold right now so i can do this super low sick voice nice and it freaks my kids out like dad not like why why do you sound like that because you're in big trouble children episode 406 not except my intro was not acceptable Yes. Based on what I accept in my request header, your intro is not acceptable. All right. Well, we best move on then. Dave, we have some listener feedback for you to read. Yes. In our last episode, episode 405, I talked about how there was a giant project at my previous company to deprecate a piece of software, and it was probably going to be promotion fodder for a bunch of people. And we got a great anonymous listener who wrote in and said, I just listened

to episode 405, I believe I heard Dave mention a deprecation project for a system at his former employer. Just in case he still cares, I am currently working on a system that is the final replacement for that remaining functionality. And we still have at least a couple years of work. Thanks for the update. I'm glad to publicize that it's in progress. You know, for all the people out there, quarterback project managers, don't worry, it's going fine. Did I say quarterback? I meant to say armchair project managers. I messed up the metaphor. armchair quarterback what did i say you said quarterback i meant to say armchair project manager i was i was i did the thing where you just laugh because you don't know what it means

and hope that you wouldn't notice but now my folly has been revealed oh man by you being too honest to just continue onward yeah yeah those quarter can't can't live with them can't live without those quarterback project managers everybody knows oh well shall i thank our patrons yes you shall okay listen i gotta give a little caveat to this this week's list we told you that you could change your name to whatever you want in patreon and we'll update it every week and that is true and some of you have taken liberties and i and frankly i love it so here let's just read this the first name is do not the second name is become a senior engineer.com unsalted french fries are morally objectionable dan from drone deploy chase w norton

level up your type script with type hero.dev never is not just a crater on mars flamingo emoji i like chicken i like liver miyamix miyamix please deliver trash panda the computer science book.com kyle boss santa hobart kent c dodds jenny kim owen chardle craig motlin the stochastic parrot patreon.com we're hiring ira chan a question mark jonathan king zanai beautiful functional user documentation the settling nature of knowing the content at williamangel.com ragnar travis braden canes john grant and the genius pita butter guy oh well done if you would like to join this illustrious crew go to softskills.audio and click the button that says support us on patreon and if you contribute enough we'll read

whatever the heck you want. And it's probably going to stay in this order because it's all automated now. So do what you will with that little nugget of information. And if you contribute any amount, we'll invite you to our Slack community where you can come and chat with other like-minded listeners and get advice and have a good time. My favorite channel is the Tech Humor channel. Great memes coming through there. Pretty much about one meme a day. That's pretty sweet. I just realized that you've built some automation, which means I think now we pivot. We're not a podcast. We're a platform for making podcasts,

and we can go raise a bunch of funding. Yes. We'll give you our proprietary technology, which is code for a handful of Python scripts. Actually, it's not proprietary. It's all in GitHub. Oh. Well, it could still be.

You better not steal it, though. Probably doesn't have a license. Assume the worst license, and that's the one it uses oh my gosh all right well jameson you want to read our first question i do this is from a listener named brad who asks i am currently a senior engineer with a small software company i've been developing software for more than 20 years we were recently acquired by another mid-sized company since the acquisition things have been going downhill it feels like they're trying to nickel and dime their employees to death they moved from bi-monthly to bi-weekly

pay from accrued PTO to flex PTO. They sat on merit raises for over two months and they've paused all promotions unless you are getting a promotion to management. We have a number of engineers who are deserving, but broaching the subject with HR results in excuses, pushback, or silence. I have about a year and a half to be in a position to retire, but I love what I do and plan to continue for many more years in the right environment. I'm really on the fence as to whether i quit for a new role or hope that they somehow become more efficient i've been doing this for long enough to know they will probably not change so would you quit oh boy a year and a half uh until retirement after a 20-year career congrats you beat the game this is like when you're in a

cop movie and your partner says oh i got two days left until retirement i can't wait till i can spend all this time with my family and by that you've you've summoned the assassin's bullet you know that guy's dead yes 20 years year and a half left till retirement of course you'd get acquired to a company that does some frustrating things yes you summoned it by just saying out loud yep oh i can't wait i've been working 20 years and i don't have a year and a half left i think this person just speed run speed ran the career game yeah nice work yeah good job i'm impressed that's like uh i think you would have a pension now if you were a public employee yeah right i think so don't you you work 20 years and then you just get to go like have a different

career and still have a two incomes regular paycheck one job yeah something like that i think that's a thing for some things okay okay i gotta say if you've muscled through this profession for 20 years and you've got a year and a half left to retire i'm like look you know how to run the clock down i mean i think you can pull this off you have all the skills there's one thing you've learned it's how to not how to stick your head in the sand and not care have you seen that episode of the office where michael takes all the office employees down to the warehouse to play basketball wait am i remembering this right i might be remembering the wrong episode but that you're smushing two of them together but they all they try to make

this new system to load all the trucks oh that's right it's not basketball yes yeah and it's it's totally inefficient and someone says to stanley like hey stanley you could do that more efficiently stanley says we are in a run the clock down situation right now i think of that all the time stanley is one of my all-time favorite characters in the office anyway yeah listener brad you are in a run the clock down situation right now I wonder what being in a position to retire means. I wonder if they're vesting some equity in this acquired company or something

and it got rolled over to the new company. Maybe you're banking on something. Yeah, I bet there's some kind of financial incentive to stay here a year and a half. When I read that- It does not surprise me. Oh, go ahead. When I read the year and a half,

I was thinking that's a strange, it's an oddly specific timeframe for someone who's just putting money into a retirement account regularly. Well, after 18 more months of retirement contributions, I'll be ready to retire. It's like, that's probably peanuts compared to what you've accumulated after 20 years. Maybe there must be something more, Jameson. I think you're onto something.

There's some kind of retention incentive or something. Or maybe they were just living large the rest of the 18 and a half years. I guess the rest of the 20 years they've been doing 20 years so far. And they're like, all right, fine. I'll save for retirement now. It's like 18 months. I'm going to put away a hundred grand a month. Yeah.

I'll be ready. That's like the math that goes on in my head. Every time I procrastinate a homework assignment in school, I'm like, okay, I just need to write 400 pages an hour. And then I watched 10 more YouTube videos. I'm like,

okay, I need to write 800 pages an hour and I can make it. Look, I've got a plan. Just regular steady progress. Oh, it doesn't surprise me that there's all these HR-related changes. I think that's pretty normal. And the fact that you are moving to a bigger company, I mean, by definition, if you're

getting acquired, you usually get acquired by a bigger company. They usually have more process and more bureaucracy to deal with managing more people. And so their stuff is less flexible. I will admit my ignorance Which I guess I do all the time I'll do it again Alright Bi-monthly versus bi-weekly

Does that mean They used to get paid every Those sound like the same thing to me You used to get paid every two weeks And now you get paid every two weeks Or you get paid twice a week No I think I don't know what that means

What it used to be is I got paid 24 times a year Now I get paid 26 times a year Because it's every two weeks Regardless of the day of the month Okay Okay. What a confusing phrase. Yeah. The word bi-monthly and bi-weekly in English is just terrible. I believe if I were

writing this question, I would have written semi-monthly to bi-weekly. I would still not know what that meant. That would not help me. Okay. I tried. Tried and failed. Okay. Let's try this on. We went from getting paid on the 1st and the 15th to getting paid every two weeks. Does that help? Like every second Tuesday or something. Yes, every other Tuesday. Yeah. Makes sense why it would be potentially disrupted too if you budgeted. I hate bi-weekly pay schedules because so much of life's bills are on a monthly cadence. You

pay your electrical bill every month. You pay so many, your Netflix bills every month. But when money comes in every two weeks, you end up with this weird sine wave. You have two competing sine waves and sometimes they constructively interfere and sometimes they destructively interfere and so you end up with troughs and peaks in your cash flow situation not a fan okay this makes more sense why that is confusing or why it is potentially disruptive accrued pto to flex pto yeah that's i think big companies have unlocked the secret that if we tell people they can have as much pto as they want you don't have to pay it out and when they leave there's no there's no minimum you can take zero pto and not accrue and yeah i don't know this all feels like

big company stuff it also makes sense they would sit on raises and promotions for a little bit because they want to kind of get a get a feel for what they have like there's an assimilation process to consume this small company into the large corporate entity oh yeah and the rhythms of the small company are going to be thrown off because they're going to adjust to the new rhythms yes and it doesn't mean it sucks less but it makes sense why they're doing this they don't want to acquire a company and all of a sudden the company costs like the headcount costs a lot more because they had all these raises they're expecting and stuff and yeah i don't know yeah and they got to calibrate like oh you say you're a level three engineer but at our company level three means

something else we got to re and reassess everybody and get everyone on the same pay scales and that's a lot of time. Look, we're just trying to say everything is great. What are you so worried about? Yeah. Stop whining. Yeah, we are kind of doing that. I think my point is if you feel like you can comfortably get over this period of adjustment, then you'll probably be fine at the big company. If you're expecting things to go back to the way they were at the old small company you will probably be disappointed but if you approach this trying to understand how it works now instead of when why did they make it not work like it used to yeah if you can do that and keep your sanity then i think you'll be okay i think there'll be this is just kind of a the the growing

pains of getting acquired and you you should get over it as you assimilate more if it keeps coming up or you really... I don't know. In my mind, this comes down to, is this a one-time thing of you just go through the pain and then you adjust and deal with it? Or does it span beyond HR? Is it the code review process and the architecture and the colleagues and then everything? That feels worse. Yeah. I'm going to say, if your ability to retire is connected to your staying at this company for another year and a half. And if you leave now, you don't have that ability to retire. I'm probably staying. I'm probably taking the year and a half of pain. Just take it right in the gut. Just punch, punch, punch. And knowing that there's a big prize at the end here that

is going to give you so many options once you live that year and a half. I mean, Brad here says, I love what I do and I intend to continue for many more years. I'm like, great. And how awesome would it be if those many more years, if you had tons of options? You know what I mean? I don't mean stock options here. I mean, actual, like you have choices at your disposal. I love that. I mean, I'm a big fan of optionality and I'll pay for it, even if it means living through some pain. Because when you leave this place, imagine going to a place where you truly, you truly are free to pick employment that you absolutely love and you can completely ignore the financial aspect of it. I mean, that's great.

That'll really help you make a fantastic choice. And you can live out the last years of your career, whatever many more years means. Maybe it's 10, maybe it's 20. I don't know. But you can have just some of the best years of your life being in a place where you don't actually have to worry about the money side. I think that's awesome. Yeah. I like it. Have we solved the problem? I think so. Also, you've heard this concept of so-called FU money, right? Yeah. I don't know. I just, I think it'd be really cool to walk out of this place with the finger guns, you

know, with that F you money confidence. Yeah. That's an experience not many people get to have. It might be worth it, a year and a half of pain just to have that moment. The no thank you money. Yep. No thank you. Yes.

That's the polite way to say it. The safe for work version. But although if you have no thank you money, you don't have to use the safe for work version, i guess that's the point huh you only use the safe for work version until you have enough money to use the not safe for work version yeah okay good luck this is a great problem to have want to read our next one yes i do want to read our next question okay this comes from a listener named angelo hello dave and jameson my name is angelo that's how i knew it was from someone named angelo and i'm writing to you from italy i've been enjoying your podcast for quite some time

I'm reaching out because I've been working for four years at a small company with 11 people in the cultural heritage sector. Although the company produces software, there are only two programmers, myself included, while the rest are roles like graphic design, art historians, and archaeologists. It's a rather unique company in its field, and for that reason, I'm happy to work there, also because I have many responsibilities related to the company's performance, probably more than I would have in a multinational corporation. However, there's a catch. The fact that there are only two programmers, and in this case, I am the more experienced one, often makes me feel that I don't have the opportunity to interact with more experienced individuals.

And this might hinder my growth as a professional as opposed to being in a team with more programmers. My question is, what can I do to compensate for the lack of work interactions with other developers to keep myself updated? I've always read that the best growth happens in a company where you're surrounded by more experienced people. But in this particular case, I find myself in the opposite situation i participate in telegram groups and often read software development books to stay updated but it's also true that the hours outside of work are meant for rest and leisure so they only go so far how can i keep peace with those working in larger teams on bigger projects sorry not keep peace how can i keep pace with those working in larger teams on bigger projects i

don't intend to change companies at the moment warm regards from italy sin way seen way what does that mean is that a name did we just leak their i'm confused now because i said their name was angelo i'm just doing a translation hold on i have no idea okay well i guess we just pick it back up hope you didn't say something offensive i don't know what that means but hey i understood the question just not the yeah the what's the word the sign off what's that what's the what's the term for the thing at the end of a oh i don't know there's a word for that there's a fancy word for that. It's like the opposite of a salutation. If you didn't say you were from Italy, I would maybe suspect you were from Europe by the way you said. It's true that the hours outside of work are

meant for rest and leisure, so they only go so far. I feel like that is a value I aspire to follow more. Sometimes in America, we like to work a lot. The hours outside of work are for work. they're for more work they're for free work yes yeah that's not great for us to do yeah wow archaeologists art historians graphic designers and programmers this sounds like the lead-up to a joke you know two archaeologists two programmers walk into a bar so this might be a grass is greener thing but i think it's awesome that you get to hang out with archaeologists and art historians i've worked with a lot of technical people in my career and a lot of tech adjacent people and they're cool we're fine but you probably get exposed to a much different

worldview than you would if you were surrounded by developers so i think i'm i'm telling you to look on the bright side a little bit that maybe you're not as immersed in the field of software engineering, but it's pretty cool that you get to go eat lunch with an archaeologist and that probably makes you a bit more well-rounded. So you're probably learning some other stuff or hopefully you are. Well, I'm hearing those words you're saying, but all I can imagine is Jameson being jealous that he doesn't get to work with Indiana Jones. maybe i do it's just indiana jones if if he had specialized in computer science what paths his life would have taken yes i've definitely felt this before i think i felt it

especially while i was consulting where i was supposed to come in and be the expert on the team and i was supposed to know things and tell people the things that i knew not learn things that's not what they're paying me for yeah and it actually did leave me lead me to leave consulting and go get a job partially where i felt like i would stretch and learn and grow more in the things i wanted to i can empathize with this with this i don't intend to change companies at the moment i think the only solution is to over complicate your work do you cram as many as many buzzwords in can you fit kubernetes in there how many layers of caching serverless blockchain llm embedded systems i don't know all of it trial by fire yeah i i definitely have

noticed a difference in the lives of developers like in their work life of developers who work for companies whose primary focus is producing and selling software compared to companies whose primary focus is something else and software is a mean to that a means to that something else you know for example like we are a we're a retailer well that's maybe a bad example we're you know we're a dentist office we're a giant corporate dentist office and we need a software engineer to help keep our our patient portal running you know something like that it's very different from you know we are a software product company and we sell a product that's software and And you end up surrounded by much more, I want to say, one-dimensionally focused workers.

Your co-workers tend to be all about software, all about tech, all about SaaS, all about the internet. But also, when you go and work in a place like a cultural heritage sector place with 11 people in the company, and only two of them are programmers, and the other one is more junior, you're definitely going to get to expose a lot of really cool stuff. So a little bit of trade-off. so if you're not looking to change jobs i wonder how dedicated to improving their craft your your co-developer is because you can get pretty far with two people bouncing off each other if they

also are motivated to get better yes two programmers i'm the more experienced one more experienced individuals hmm there is there is just like a there's a there's an unknown unknowns thing here where you just hear little phrases that expose you to a whole world that you didn't know existed like if you ever hear the phrase command query responsibility segregation and then you go like dive into event-driven architecture and holy crap what if the queue is the database and and all this stuff and maybe you you will not be exposed to that as the more experienced person but also frankly you probably won't need it if you're part of a duo of software engineers at a small place yeah yeah there's a whole category of tools and solutions that you don't have problems

for you know yeah i think i'm kind of backing into maybe it doesn't matter because that's not what you need and if you really feel passionate about i mean certainly anything around scaling you're probably not going to care about as much you can still care about good architecture and and design and the the ability to preserve the velocity of your small team but maybe it just doesn't matter like yeah why so what if you aren't up to date on the newest aws service design pattern i don't know like if you don't need it so what yeah yeah and then i mean you got to ask yourself the question what are the trade-offs of of making this decision to stay in this awesome, eclectic, interesting place, it could be that you're not exposed to some of

these ideas. And then when you go out on the job market, when inevitably you do have to find a new job at some point, you might find that you're a little bit underprepared or underskilled in areas that these other developers expect you to be prepared in. For example, you know, maybe you don't have a fully automated deployment process and code review process and all these things because you're like, yeah, it's no big deal. It's just two of us. And one of us pushes the button every once in a while. And so that's our deployment process. And so it's probably okay, but I would say that people who are really into software engineering, who just really, really want to become just the best of the best, world-class, they tend to gravitate toward

companies that don't look like this. They do tend to gravitate to companies that have lots of people that are experts in the field, where the primary focus of the company is producing software and selling it. It's just a little different. So when I ask myself, under these constraints, How could I try to approximate that level of exposure and learning while in this environment? But also, I'm not really willing to do anything outside of working hours. I think, I don't know. I'm not really sure there's a lot you can do. I mean, yeah, you can read books.

But I'm thinking about things like joining meetups, making connections with people who work at other companies that have other patterns so you can talk about it. Like I've had, I've derived great learning and growth from simply regularly going to lunch with people who work at different companies so that we can compare and contrast how we do things. And it's exposed me to a lot of interesting ideas. But it is still just an approximation of the exposure I got actually working at different companies, which is like baked into my soul and DNA, as opposed to just hearing about, you know, secondhand how someone does something. Yeah, I mean, side projects, open source, there's kind of some extracurricular

answers to expose yourself to to a different pool of developers and that might be different from reading books because you're doing more than than consuming so maybe if you want to limit your your time outside of work you can change its focus to build stuff more but i think i agree with you it is kind of a constraint it's it's hard to escape those constraints yeah which is why i was sort of saying make the most of them i think there are very few software developers who work in a place like you only one other one i guess technically it works in a place exactly like you but yeah i've never worked with an archaeologist that'd be rad yeah i agree definitely trade-offs and maybe it's just a season of your life maybe this is the time when you're going to make the trade-off in favor

of having a more interesting and varied professional exposure to things like archaeology and art history and maybe in a few years you'll have a different set of trade-offs you want to make and that that's totally fine too it's not like you're locking this in for your whole life yeah all right have we answered the question i think so good luck best of luck let us know what it's like working with indiana jones yeah tell us about your intrepid adventures or at least your colleagues intrepid adventures. Okay. What can people do if they want their own questions answered, Dave? Go to softskills.audio and click the ask a question button where you can fill out our form. As always, we must express our deepest and most sincere heartfelt thank you to everyone

who fills out that form each week. We love reading all of your questions. Thank you so much. All right. We'll catch you next week.