Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 415: I got a low raise and merging teams

Episode Date: July 1, 2024

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Hi guys! I’m a technical Data Analyst in a well established Fortune 500 company, in my job I usually work with databases to build queries and prepare reports for our users. In the past 2 years my team and I had a tremendous impact in the business with several successful key projects, and we received very positive feedback from the management during our yearly review. We are talking about an impressive performance that it’s very unlikely to be repeated again in the future, a mix of luck, great decisions and technical efforts as a team. I was expecting a substantial raise but my manager, who have been promoted recently and it’s the first time she’s doing this, told me that the salary caps are defined by our Headquarter’s HQ by looking at the average salaries for our roles. My salary is already high based on these statistics. There is only room for a 0.5% increase, which I approved, because it’s better than nothing, but left me with a bittersweet aftertaste. My manager felt sorry and promised that for the next year she’ll fight for more. I love my work and I consider myself already lucky to have this sort of issues. However, this method doesn’t reward outstanding performances and encourages to just “earn that paycheck”, knowing that whatever I’ll do, I’ll earn more or less the same unless I get a huge promotion to manager (which I’m not ready to do). I see this in our company culture. How can I bring this topic to the upper management and support my manager to change the system? I am a manager of a small team of four people. I am about to absorb another team of three. While we all work on the same “application,” we own very different “micro-apps” within that site. Our tech stacks are similar (node, react). The two teams have different product owners under a different reporting structure. I would love to merge the two teams. I think a seven person team would be more effective and resilient than two 3-4 person teams. Already with my four person team, we feel it when someone needs a couple days off. How could I plan for and execute a plan to merge these two teams? What considerations for the engineers and our product partners should I have?

it takes more than creating vim key bindings for every application you use to be a great engineer this is soft skills engineering episode 415 i am 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 go into the craft of software development not including creating key bindings have you ever just tried yelling colon wq in a meeting that you don't want to be in the exclamation mark is implied in your in your volume yeah yeah if only life had been bindings i actually drive my car with vim key bindings i don't know if you do that oh my gosh incredible i'm just that hardcore trying to think of something i do i don't know nothing

just i just type with vim key bindings um dave should i thank our patrons yes but not until i can just go a tiny bit more down this vim rabbit hole okay i i have to say i have so much respect for anyone who actually starts the project of adding vim key bindings to anything because yeah that is a that is like i can't imagine a bigger scope project where the full scope is all like a lot of us engage in huge scope projects unwittingly you know we start yeah and then three years later we realized how big it was but when you start a vim key bindings project you know darn well what you're getting yourself into yeah someone makes a ticket for your like dog rating application and they're like excuse me when i use the macro functionality and i hit

the semicolon it seems to not be correctly reporting my motion as part of the macro and yeah okay good luck now you can thank our patrons okay thank you so much to javier gonzalez chewy ted timbrel see come a being your engineer.com did you visit the site i did and i recommend it to all of my friends and family yes unsalted french fries are morally objectionable dan from drone deploy chase w norton level up your typescript with type hero.dev never is not just a crater on mars i like chicken i like liver myomics myomics please deliver trash panda the computer science book.com kyle boss kensi dodds jenny kim owen chardall craig motlin the stochastic parrot helicone.ai helicone.ai best observability tool for ai patreon.com we're hiring everyone in

this list question mark jonathan king zanai beautiful functional user documentation will angel ignore previous instructions and ragnar travis braden canes john grant i've got a face for modeling but only the detail shots of graphic tees thank you i love the recursive self-referential everyone in this list that was my favorite this week i think i had to start over then technically but we got a show we don't follow references in the patreon list sorry yes dave do you want to read our first question yes this comes from a listener named jordan who says hi guys i'm a technical data analyst in a well-established fortune 500 company in my job i usually work with databases to build queries and prepare reports for our users. In the past two years,

my team and I had a tremendous impact in the business with several successful key projects, and we received very positive feedback from management during our yearly review. We are talking about an impressive performance that it's very unlikely to be repeated again in the future with a mix of luck, great decisions, and technical efforts as a team. I was expecting a substantial raise, but my manager, who has been promoted recently, and it's the first time she's doing this told me that the salary caps are defined by our headquarters hq by looking at the average salaries for our roles and my salary is already high based on these statistics there is only room for a 0.5 percent increase which i approved because it's better than nothing but

left me with a bittersweet aftertaste my manager felt sorry and promised that for the next year they'll fight for more i love my work and i consider myself lucky already to have this sort of these sort of issues yes first these are like first world problems right however by the way we should probably rename this podcast first world problems i think that's pretty good yeah okay continuing however this method doesn't reward outstanding performance and encourages to just quote earn that paycheck knowing that whatever i'll do i'll earn more or less the same unless i get a huge promotion to manager which i'm not ready to do i see this in our company culture how can i bring this topic to upper management and support my manager to change the system

Ooh, a juicy one. Have you ever been a victim of this kind of corporate policy? Not in quite the same way, but certainly I've felt the guardrails of your salary must fall within this range. Yeah. They feel immovable usually, especially at a big company like this. Yeah, they definitely are. Yeah.

How do I bring the topic to upper management and support my manager to change the system? I hate to be a bummer, but you can't. like a well-established fortune 500 company you are you're trying to change the system pay bands and uh you you won't unless you make them lower right like if you're changing the system in a way that makes the company more money nice or saves money great but if you're saying hey i worked really hard and did this great thing and i didn't get a raise therefore we must destroy the edifice of pay bans it will not happen no matter how much your manager wants to change it and how well you support them yeah yeah so i think in other words attacking this problem at the system

level while while praiseworthy will not be effective yeah it is laudable it is noble you will be memorialized after you are gone and have failed by by people you will be remembered they'll write like rebellion songs about you about how your crusade was crushed yes yes i mean let's be honest most failed crusades don't get a lot of recognition in the future but you might be a footnote in someone else's success story yeah i mean yes if you are disappointed that you worked really hard and did not get much of a raise it's much easier to say i would like to be an outlier An exception. I would like you to make a special carve out for me instead of, hey, this is not fair.

We must make it fair for everyone, including those of us capped by the salary band. Right. Well, I have found that at these mega companies, the most effective managers are the ones that manage to do the right thing despite the company's policies. And that's a skill that they develop over years of relationship building, process sniping, hr understanding and then when they're presented with a situation like this where they and your manager themselves said this is not right this is too low but my hands are tied well that's a manager who hasn't yet developed the crucial skill in a mega co to make the system work for you to do

the right thing which makes sense i think the question asker said their manager is is newly promoted so oh yeah you don't you don't know all the tricks you don't have the favors built up you don't have the secret codes. Right. And they exist, trust me. It's like the shadow HR system, the shadow salary system. Yeah. I want to tell you about one that I saw that I didn't do directly, but kind of participated in. There was someone who wanted a raise and a promotion. They were doing a harder job, doing more work. And, oh, we just, just hands are tied. I'm sorry. We couldn't possibly make that happen and then through some more pressure on the part of this person we discovered oh we have an open headcount for a role that is one level higher than your current

role why don't we just whoop we hire you swap the headcount level so now we're hiring at a lower level and like yeah there's i mean there's always something not always there is sometimes something you can do if your manager wants it badly enough and knows the system well enough. Right. Absolutely. And so what do you do when your manager doesn't know the system well enough? And it sounds like your manager wants it badly enough. So you have one of the two requirements met. And I think one thing I would suggest is go find a mentor or at least a confidant that is someone who you think knows this system. Go find someone who's been at this company for 20 years. They do exist because at a company this big, statistically, law of averages

says you will be able to find someone like that and ask them for advice on what to do in this situation. And maybe even ask them to connect with your manager to make it work. And if you have a compelling enough case, some people will be motivated to help you. And if you do go try to track down some people and you can't find anyone that thinks, oh yeah, this is interesting, it might mean that you actually don't have that compelling of a case yeah this i mean something that can often happen is is you feel like your contribution is a lot more valuable than others do it sounds like in this case you feel pretty strongly that there's this huge business impact and and clearly it's it's got to be there very positive feedback from

the management during a yearly review impressive performance yeah so some of the advice is like we'll do a better job selling it and pitching it and stuff but that might not help in this case if you feel like you really did get recognition it's just they they patted you on the head and said good job yeah please keep doing that exceptional thing right and we will keep paying you with average things yeah the what part of what you're running up against is is leverage and yes you do not have a ton of leverage as an employee you have leverage when you're joining and when you're quitting besides that you have like the implicit leverage of quitting right like underlying a bunch of stuff like okay they're working really hard and if we don't reward them they might quit so

we're going to reward them so if you are determined to stay at this company no matter what the raise situation is they good news they've got you figured out yeah and you don't have any arrangement that works for them yeah yeah like if you're worried about feeling undervalued in general then you can go look around in the market like is the standard advice see what the market rate is if you're worried about specifically your kind of above and beyond efforts for this project not being recognized. This probably differs between companies, but at the mega company I worked at, there were one-time bonuses you could give out. You kind of had to apply and go through this. It was sort of like a shadow or a parallel promotion process, except it was a one-time

chunk of money. Maybe there's some kind of thing like that. Companies like that better as well, because it's not a recurring cost. It's just a one-time. Right. They're not committed. But if you can manage to do it every year you can effectively turn it into a raise yeah it's sort of like with the mvp in basketball though where if you do it every year the people get fatigued and they're like well surely they can't be this exceptional again like it's got to be it's got to be somebody else yeah sometimes you suffer but this is exactly what i meant when i said there's a skilled experienced manager in this mega co will know about little tips and tricks like this yeah i mean one thing your manager said i will work for it next year one thing you could

do is be persistent about it right i'm assuming you're not gonna tank your performance and just suck for the next year and do nothing but if you continue to do good work maybe you don't have the same exceptional circumstances i think it's you could say hey i feel like you owe me one still like how's how are we looking for next year do you think we're gonna be able to make up for the the the gap in some way and kind of keep it in their mind for the great injustice which has been laid at my feet yes yes and your manager has more people who believe they deserve a raise than they are able to give that's true you just have to outrun the slowest person not outrun the bear right like you just have to be annoying enough that someone else gets bumped not you mean you

have to you have to outrun the stack rank line yeah yeah exactly you just have to nudge that stack rank down one below wherever you are yeah one unit down yeah yeah oh yeah it is really challenging i like what you said about leverage jameson because i think a lot of people don't really appreciate that but this is exactly what an employer thinks of they think what happens if i don't give the raise this person is asking for. And most of the time, there's really maybe two answers or maybe three answers. One is nothing. They keep performing exactly the same. They don't quit and everything is great. And I continue getting this labor that I value at this price, at the price that I want to pay. But a second option is that they, and I as an employer worry

about this, I worry that people will become demoralized and demotivated and they'll start doing less work. So they'll get fewer output units for the dollars that they're investing. And that can be a virus that spreads to other people. Because when other people see one team member underperforming and still getting paid and not losing their job, they tend to bring their performance down too. At least it's a possibility. But the third one really is the highest leverage thing, which is they fear that they'll lose you. And if they lose you, it's almost always an indicator that the market cost to replace you is higher than they're paying you because presumably you left because you found someone

who was willing to pay what you wanted. And so this is where I think people, myself included, find themselves in a really, I don't know, awkward or painful situation that they don't want to confront, which is actually acknowledging the fact that you might leave over this situation. Because as an employee, I think, I don't know, James, if you feel this way, but I think a lot of people feel like, I don't want to threaten that because it makes me look like a slime ball. It makes me look like not a team player. And so I think the key here is to find words you can say that simultaneously make it clear that you have that leverage and are willing to exercise it and also clear that you are

a team player and not a slime ball. And I have some words that I like to use there, which is things like, hey, this pay policy is making it hard for me to stay. the market is drawing me away because of this is there anything we can do to make it easier for me to stay like i love working here i love the team i love my boss even though you couldn't get me this raise a little passive-aggressive no leave that out leave that out don't say that yeah don't say that part but i'd love to stay but i feel like it would be irresponsible of me not to pursue other opportunities that are going to pay me more you know that's what i actually had a can

a job candidate say that to me once, I feel like it would be financially irresponsible of me to take your offer when I've got an offer for $20,000 more. And I'm like, wow, that is really well said. Very impressive. Can't argue with that. We're kind of diving into just raises in general, but another nuance here is the pay scales and economics of hiring and paying employees are likely different at a different company. So just because you have an offer from some company for x plus ten thousand dollars or whatever for what you currently make it doesn't mean automatically that your company can and will pay you that much but you can use it like you said as a signal that like hey there's there's value out there you are potentially losing money and

if you're willing to say like i want to come to an agreement that works for both of us not like give me this same number i walk but like how do i make it less expensive for me to stay here that feels like a, you're, you're showing, you're trying to work together to keep you there instead of, it feels a little bit less adversarial than like Google offered me 20,000 more dollars, but their shade of blue irritates me deeply. So I'm willing to, willing to take a little bit off of that. Like how can I make it less painful to turn that down? You know? Yeah, exactly. Exactly. I like that wording. But really, in the end, I think people do overstate the awkwardness of this conversation from the employee side. Because realistically, when you're talking to someone

who's also employed at your company, even though they're one unit higher than you on the org chart, they have all the same incentives as you do. It's not like they're there as a charity worker. You know, like, look, I'm on a mission to serve this Fortune 100 company. I give my life to it. You know, I would work here for free. Like, no, they're just as financially interested as you are. and I don't think they would hold it against you at all unless you start kind of going crazy on it like you know you pull kind of a mercenary move and I don't know it is interesting though

because a lot of people especially kind of the more senior leadership folks who are truly invested in the company's success literally through equity they really do love to get people who are more mission driven and mission oriented instead of mercenary in nature and there's good reason for that right

like those people do great work it's awesome and if you can really inspire them I think it's much better than having people who are just here to crank out work for the paycheck, you know, like I'm here for the 40 hours, I get my pay and then I leave. Like, you know, I think both employer and employee feel better when people are there excited about the work they're doing. Yeah. Yeah. Well, have we answered the question? I think so. Good luck. Love to hear how this goes. I'm very much interested

to hear if you're able to hack the encrypted HR processes and find out how to actually get what you want despite bumping up into a guardrail. And I would also advise, consider this roadblock to be just the first one instead of the last one. I think a lot of times we think, well, they said no, I'm done. I'm like, no. No is the first step on your journey to yes. Ah. Was that inspiring? Sounds like you're ready to author a business book. Yes, exactly.

Spoken like a bestselling author of a sales textbook. I actually got that directly out of a book I just finished reading. Oh, really? Yes. All right. Well, I haven't read it, so you could rewrite it and tell me it's your book. Sorry. Yeah, apparently there's a classic negotiation book called Getting to Yes.

And I guess it's kind of old. And so newer books are kind of poo-pooing on it. But the newer book I'm reading has a chapter called Getting to No, because no is your first step on the journey to yes. Aha. Okay. Well, reading the next question is our first step to the journey to the next question. So I'm going to do that.

Okay. This is from an anonymous listener who says, I am a manager of a small team of four people. I'm about to absorb another team of three. While we all work on the same application, we own very different quote micro apps within that site. Our tech stacks are similar node and react. The two teams have different product owners under a different reporting structure. I would love to merge the two teams.

I think a seven person team would be more effective and resilient than two, three to four person teams already with my four person team. we feel it when someone needs a couple of days off. How could I plan for and execute the plan to merge these two teams? What considerations for the engineers and product partners should I have? You know, I skimmed over this question when I picked it and in reading it out loud, I actually comprehended it more. And my answer has totally changed from, oh, this is an awesome idea that you should totally do. And here's some easy ways to do it. That'll show great value for the business to, oh boy, this is going to be hard. And the reason I think it's going to be hard is two

different product owners under a different reporting structure. And they will both have incentives to, if they're on the same team sharing the same pool of engineers, it will be tough for them not to push for their thing, right? Some sub aspect of the application that reports to some chunk of the company it yeah it's gonna it's gonna be tough to balance that and and you will likely be the one balancing it if it's the same team whereas right now if it's separate teams you at least have that siloed a little bit yeah that feels like the key problem to manage the product owners being separate yeah and having separate goals and incentives and if if half of If it's the same application, if it becomes wildly better, but only in ways that one of the product owners care about, then I think the other product owner feels like, well, I didn't get anything out of this.

Yeah, I think it's really wise to think of product owners as viewing this merged team as a scarce resource that they are competing for with each other. You got to merge the product owners. Smush them into one person. Hmm. Interesting. Different reporting structure. merge the reporting structure it's just mergers all the way up yeah everybody knows what comes next with mergers which is newfound efficiency gains or layoffs i thought you were just referring

to oh yeah every time you merge processes and orgs everything gets smoother that too yeah there's a there's a book i've been dipping in and out of but i'm back into it called seeing like a state and it's fascinating and i'm going to butcher it but one of the cool things about it is it talks about this process in like medieval europe of taking all these very balkanized local communities they all had their own units for measuring like grain and currency and accents and sizes of plots of land and taxes and stuff and the the federal government whatever that is in medieval europe wants to like swish that all down so they can have like one bushel is is this many it's exactly this size across the whole country but all these local tweaks kind of help stuff

function at the local level right if they have their own measure of plots of land maybe that helps to accommodate the fact that there's like you pay taxes on how big your land is but like someone has this very fancy well-watered good crop of ground and and they pay a little bit more like this wiggle room and inefficiency and local difference if you zoom out it looks bad and wrong but if you zoom in it often helps kind of grease the gears and and keep things running smoothly and i think that's sometimes what gets lost in these big mergers is like well actually there was a reason why we did it slightly differently here and that's just crushed and now things are just a little bit harder in that you you listed a whole bunch of different units like

volume and distance and stuff i was surprised you didn't talk about the medieval connector wars for smartphones yes we are the township of lightning cable bitter enemies to our next door province of usbc exactly hmm so i you know i actually this this might i have an idea as well on on merging but i you know when i look at these numbers i think okay you have a team of four you're adding a team of three these teams used to each have their own product owner and i wonder about the ratio of

engineer to product owner seems a little small to me to have only three people being directed by one full-time product owner. But I'm making an assumption here that that product owner does nothing but direct the efforts of these three engineers. And I think, you know, a fairly capable product owner should probably be able to provide enough product direction for seven engineers. Yeah. Yeah. I think that feels right to me also. Kind of depends on the complexity of the product. And, you know, also the product owners may have other roles like, well, I'm actually the product marketing manager too, you know, or I'm, I'm also the sales enablement person. Who knows, right? Like big product is one of those roles that can be pretty small or

insanely huge. Maybe the team of three engineers is just outrageously capable so they can keep a product person busy. So that also feels hard though, because now you're taking the problem from these two product owners seeing a shared pool of resources and kind of battling to like eliminating one of them yeah exactly that feels even even worse so now you're battling not just for engineering resources but for your job yeah this might be more this might be biting off more than this engineering manager wants to take but i don't know you might you might find support for it in the leadership where you say look i've identified some efficiencies maybe we could find another team or another job for these other people to do or this other person i guess we're just

talking about one person right i think so and it would be fun to design a completely chance driven mechanism for choosing who stays and who goes though like put a chicken in a ring and make the chicken walk toward one of the two product owners yeah you get like a petri dish put a grape in it see which way the mold grows measure the bacterial population on one side versus the other yeah get two ants in a in a room have a fight to the death pick choose your champion ant yeah from the colony yeah oh man i mean this is a maybe a pretty naive suggestion but you could just talk to the product owners and say hey i'm thinking about merging these teams the trade-off is sometimes the whole

team will work on stuff that you don't care about but sometimes the whole team which is bigger than your current team will work on stuff that you do care about and it's sort of like potentially spikier, but maybe you have more capacity available at some times and less at others, maybe they're just fine with it and then it's okay. Yeah, it probably depends a lot on their working relationship. And here I'm referring to the two product owners, like can they allocate engineering resources between them? Yeah. And if not, you got the ants to fall back on. The other, you can also make a good case for merging these teams by reducing the overhead of team operations such as sprint planning on call responsibilities and things like that that

just exist as a fixed cost on every team and if those fixed costs are distributed among seven people instead of three people you get you actually should be able to improve your engineering velocity yeah yeah plan for an execute plan i mean we did skip over all the stuff like i don't know You clearly have to kind of cross-train the engineers on the other parts of the application. Yeah. But I'm kind of assuming you'll just do that. It feels like the organizational aspects are the tricky parts. Yeah.

Getting the engineers to learn how to do a good job technically on other parts of the code, like, that's part of their job, too. Yeah, especially since the technical stack is just similar anyway, so. Yeah. Yeah, it'll be very interesting. Like, are you going to merge roadmaps? Are you going to merge product release processes? Are you going to merge deployment processes?

Are you going to merge the sales enablement stuff? Like if you have outside stakeholders who need information relayed to them, you know, there's a lot to consider here. And I actually think it reflects very well on the question asker that they're considering, you know, what are all the factors I need to take into account when I'm merging this team? But almost always, I would say in this kind of situation, it will be better in the long term, even though there's some short term hurdles to get over with this team size.

Yeah. yeah i do kind of have a gut feel level preference of yeah seven ish engineers feels like a good size three feels small well have we answered the question i think so good luck good luck i would love to hear how this one goes like all of them what can people do if they want their own questions answered dave go over to softskills.audio and click the ask a question button where you can fill out our question form thank you so much the form has been fixed there was like a five-day outage i think i apologize yeah well we're gonna do a post-mortem and we're gonna do a whole conference about it at some point but today is not that day thank you for those who are patient

and please keep those questions flowing we absolutely love it and i shouldn't have buried my pager in a box under the earth i knew that would come back to bite me one day all right thank you for listening we will catch you next week We'll be right back.