Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 419: Yoda or Han Solo and I swear I'm senior

Episode Date: July 29, 2024

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Listener Anakin asks, I have two former co-workers that work at great companies where I would love to work. I reached out to one looking for advice and while talking to him, he said I should join him and he offered to give me a referral. At the same time, unprompted, another old coworker reached out to me asking if I am interested in joining them. It’s like being asked to choose between training with Yoda or flying with Han Solo on the Millennium Falcon (Sorry, James)! But I have a big worry: what if by some miracle I get offers from both places? I don’t feel I can turn down an offer after my old coworkers vouched for me. I don’t want my friends to feel like I led them on. At the same time, I don’t think I’m close enough to either to say I want to interview, but I’m also applying somewhere else. So I’m thinking of applying to one, and if that doesn’t go well, applying to the other. Is there a better way to go about this? How would you approach this dilemma? Listener D says, I asked a question in an episode around number 110. I asked if I should switch my job, as I had just moved to another country and, after half a year, the new CTO wanted to change the tech stack. You suggested staying for a while to see what happens, so I did. It worked out well. On to the question! How can I be treated as a senior software engineer in my next job? When I moved the first time, I was downgraded to a mid-level developer, even though I had about seven years of experience. I did my job well, exceeded expectations, and got a promotion after four years. After working there for 4.5 years (half a year as a senior), I moved again to another EU country and was hired as a mid-level developer again! Now, after one year, I got promoted to Senior Dev, but I am afraid that the next employer could treat me as a mid-level dev. I understand that grades are different in different companies, but mid-level developers have lower salaries. How can I assure my next employer that I am a senior or even higher-level developer?

it takes more than one r to be a great engineer this is soft skills engineering episode 419 i'm your host dave smith i'm your host jameson dance soft skills engineering is a weekly advice podcast for software developers who want to be great is this are the programming language is this are like tony the tiger's slogan for frosted flakes i was thinking r for those who love statistics but maybe the next iteration it's like r plus plus because there's extra r's ah yeah here i was thinking it was r's in our name and none of us have r's in our name so ramison and you have an r in your middle name no i got no r's yeah same i'm i'm fresh out of art are free that's why we'll never make it

you want to thank our patrons i do thank you so much to the listeners who contribute on patreon such that we shout them out every single week thank you to hawk to uh some kind of compound banana family emoji javier gonzalez chewy ted timbrel 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 dot dev never is not just a crater on mars flamingo emoji i like chicken i like liver myomics myomics please deliver trash panda the computer science book.com kyle boss ken c dodds jenny kim owen chardell craig motlin the stochastic parrot helicone.ai best observability tool for ai red panda is best panda everyone in this list question mark jonathan king zanai

beautiful functional user documentation a one-time shout out to will angel nice that's the shout out every week hi dave travis braden canes john grant and cody sale thank you so much thank you we appreciate you and we show our appreciation by saying these words and by inviting you to our slack community where you can chat with like-minded individuals people who care about building good software and also having good soft skills i learn a lot from them yes if you want to go to softskills.audio and click support us on patreon you can get an invite to that slack community and any contribution above whatever it says on the patreon page we'll get you either a one-time or a weekly shout out and the the undying gratitude of of our hearts yes and a place in our

shrine that we keep it's in jameson's yard it's a little little shrine it's got a sloped roof on the top yep all the candles yes okay we got a lot of contributors so the candles are getting pretty fierce yeah it's great more like a fire it's like an out of this is perfect because we can now afford a bigger shrine yeah it's self-sustaining all right shall i read a listener follow-up comment yes okay we love we love it when you write in to say i took your advice and here's what happened which is one of my favorite things ever especially if it went really bad some might say i just want to see the world burn okay this comes from the same anonymous listener who wrote in for episode 405 who says hello dave and jameson in episode 405 i asked a question

about having had a few bad scrum masters in a scaled agile work environment and that i was willing to take up their duties rather than have the organization assign us another scrum master that might not work out in your response you ripped on scrum and save and in between your rants were some pieces of excellent advice you also openly wondered how such a bizarre situation could come to be and to that i have two words european government okay anyway the situation has progressed and i wanted to give an update i followed both your pieces of advice which were to convince my manager to assign the headcount to a much needed technical role and to figure out the responsibilities that a scrum master needed to be doing that I wasn't doing. That ended up working

out. Ding, ding, ding. Yes. As we managed to convert the headcount into ops, I was also officially made the scrum master of my team. And therefore I now retroactively take offense at your remarks during the episode. Unfortunately, the organization's inability to hire good people did not stop at our Scrum Master role. After a short vacation, I realized I've grown exhausted of constantly having to babysit expensive senior contractors who, after years, seem unable to write readable or stable code and refuse to follow good coding practices. As such, I've advised my organization to hire a new Scrum Master, as I will soon follow your third and final piece of advice and trade this job for a better paid position with fewer responsibilities in a similar sector.

Thank you for the great podcast. You make each Monday a blessing. Oh, thank you. Oh, thank you so much. It all worked out in the end. Yeah, it's like... Quit your job. We say, take this advice. If that doesn't work, take this advice. If that doesn't work, take this advice. And then none of it works, so you end up taking all of it.

That's what I heard there. I guess, yeah. Okay. That's different than what I interpreted it as. What did you say? Everything we said failed is what I think you just said. Well, the last one is pending, but everything else failed. I think it all worked. Okay. All of it.

Good. You take one piece of advice and it works so well, you think, I got to do the other thing that they said. Ah, okay. You have a bright future in sales. Well, Dave, do you want me to read our first question? Sure. Go for it. Okay, this is from a listener who claims their name is Anakin, but I am suspicious. I have two former co-workers that work at great companies where I would love to work. I reached out to one looking for advice, and while talking to him, he said I should join him, and he offered to give me a referral.

At the same time, unprompted, another old co-worker reached out to me asking if I am interested in joining them. It's like being asked to choose between training with Yoda or flying with Han Solo on the Millennium Falcon. Sorry, James. I don't know who James is. But I have a big worry. What if by some miracle, I get offers from both places? I don't feel I can turn down an offer after my old co-workers vouched for me. I don't want my friends to feel like I led them on. At the same time, I don't think I'm close enough to either to say I want to interview,

but I'm also applying somewhere else. So I'm thinking of applying to one. And if that doesn't go well, applying to the other. Is there a better way to go about this? How would you approach this dilemma? So we're asking, should we go with serial or parallel? Yeah. Yeah, that's a good way to put it.

What happens if you get an offer from both places? Well, one thing we've learned over the last four years with the pandemic is you can't accept both offers. That's what I was going to say. Yeah, you can be very parallel. Parallel interviews and parallel paychecks. Yeah. We don't officially endorse that.

And quite frankly, I don't know how anyone pulls that off, but it certainly happened. And I had firsthand experience watching someone try to do that to me. So that's out there. Yeah. Don't do that. I think that's bad. Bad. But don't you have kind of like a little bit of maybe a little bit of secret respect for

people who pull that off? It's like they found a cheat code. Yeah. I mean, in the same way I admire like bank robbers. Yeah, I guess. Exactly. you showed great moxie in doing this thing that you shouldn't do like a good heist movie yeah and and like yeah the bank is probably fine but it's i mean you you probably hurt people maybe not

physically but certainly made someone's day worse if they're at the bank that day your co-workers that work with you if you have two jobs probably are gonna suffer so yeah you said i don't feel like i'm close enough to either to say i want to interview but i'm also applying somewhere else i would just assume if someone was talking to me that they were also applying somewhere else yeah i don't think i don't think there's anything about a job search that makes me feel like i'm being betrayed if they're talking to other people yeah this is not a committed romantic relationship yeah you're not exclusive yeah i mean because you have no commitment i mean that's what the job offer is for they're saying i would like to commit to you will you commit to me yeah and

And now I do think that, like, let's talk about the scenario where they get offers from both places and you have close friends who vouched for you in both places and one of them you're going to have to reject. And that feels bad. And I think that bad feeling is really the source of this question. Yeah, yeah. So if you only do one, if you only work with one friend at a time, you presumably, I guess, accept the first one if you get an offer and then you don't have to turn down the other one?

No, I mean, well, that's if you do a serial application process, which I would not recommend. That's what I'm saying. Yeah, like that's the pain that you avoid if you're worried about saying no to a friend. Yeah. And the fact of the matter is they've both already asked you to apply. So you're going to have to say no to someone here. It's just the question is whether it's before or after the interview process. And I got to tell you, having interviewed a lot of people And having recommended a lot of people, I take zero offense when they choose not to accept my offer. I think I agree with you.

I can't think of a person I've tried to hire that said no, that I was like, how dare you? You know, like mad about. I thought we were more better co-workers. It's usually because there's, yeah, there's a better, I don't know, someone else offered them more money or a better role for what they're looking for. like it's not it's usually because they feel like there's a better fit somewhere else and i i would like if it's someone i would like to work with i would like to make this place the right fit for them but i don't want them to join if they don't if they don't want to be there that's a disaster

so yeah i think i think we're both saying you're probably over weighting the negative feelings or the possibility of negative feelings if you tell a friend, hey, I'm going to go with this other thing. Yeah, totally. And I think there's words you can say, and I'd like to give you some of those words right now, that can take the sting out of this so that it doesn't feel like you're rejecting a personal friend.

But look, you got two offers in hand. This is awesome. And you're going to have to weigh those two offers against each other and against your current job and decide what makes the most sense for you. And now put yourself in the shoes of the person who you're about to reject. If they were in your situation, they would do exactly the same thing you're doing. They would choose the offer that they think is best.

And what I think you're really worried about here is that you're implicitly telling them your second best. You're not the best to work with. You're a good coworker, but you're not so great that I'm willing to take a $10,000 pay cut to work with you, which is, which is, I think on it kind of the most vicious way to say this kind of the most heartless way to say it. But at the end of the day, but there is, I really don't think they're going to be all that offended if you say it well. And here's, here's how I would say it. Look, former coworker, I really loved working with you in the past. And I super appreciate that

you recommended me for this position. I was really surprised that I got two offers during this job search. I didn't even expect one. I'm super thrilled by this. And it was a really hard decision to choose between the two. But I kind of did an analysis with pros and cons. And I summed everything up. And I feel like I have to take the other one. It's just a little bit better. You don't even have to explain your reasons why. Frankly, they don't want to know. It's like that could hurt a little too much. And then you say, this has nothing to do with our work history. I loved working with you. And when I was evaluating the offer, I was really tempted to come work with you again.

And I wish we could work together again, but I got to take this other job. Yeah, you can even, and I hope we work together together. Yeah, and right. This isn't- Together again. Exactly.

This isn't the last time we may have the opportunity. And I look forward to that day when we can work together again. So all of those words will just completely smooth it over. And I think this person is worrying too much. I agree.

And- Yeah, working with you is in the pros column of this offer, but there are just some other things about this other job that I cannot pass up. Exactly. And if this is the kind of friend or former coworker who gets all mad and bent out of shape because you didn't want to come work with them again, then now they just moved

to the cons column. And you avoided it. A jilted former coworker. I have seen that pattern of there's some people go through their career and they kind of orbit each other a little bit. And it's not like they always follow each other or always work together. But there are people that work together at several different places. And, and it, yeah, it doesn't mean you won't work together with them again.

It doesn't mean you have to work with them every time that they're somewhere, but I don't think this is shutting any doors. Yeah, for sure. And I think if you say that explicitly, like, I hope the door is still open to work together in the future. They will feel good. Yeah. And, and you know what else you could say?

Hey, if this place turns out to be awesome, maybe I'll recommend you come work with me. Yeah. You could reunite. These things often go two ways. I've recommended people to come work with me, and I've had those same people recommend me to come work with them. It works out great. So keep that recommendation flowing in both directions.

Yeah, that's true. That's another way you could work with them. Bring them on in. Okay, well, have we answered the question? Well, I feel like I did. Does that mean I did? I feel like you feel like you did. Okay, I was going to ask if you feel like you answered it.

No, I feel like you feel like I feel like I answered it. Okay, good. Which is good enough. Dave, do you want to read our next question? Yes, I do. Okay, this comes from a listener named D, just the letter D. I asked a question in an episode around number 110. I asked, whoa, 110.

What are we on, 419? Yep. Okay, that's a lot of questions ago. I asked if I should switch my job as I had just moved to another country, and after half a year, the new CTO wanted to change the tech stack. You suggested staying for a while to see what happens. So I did. It worked out well.

On to my next question. What is this, like every three years or something? No, wait, six years? Yeah. 300 episodes divided by 50. Yeah, six years. Okay, well, we'll see you in the year 2030 for your next question. Okay, on to the question.

How can I be treated as a senior software engineer in my next job? When I moved the first time, I was downgraded to a mid-level developer, even though I had about seven years of experience. I did my job well, exceeded expectations, and got a promotion after four years. after working there 4.5 years half a year of which was senior i moved again to another eu country and was hired as a mid-level developer again now after one year i got promoted to senior dev but i'm afraid that the next employer could treat me as a mid-level dev i understand that grades are different in different companies but mid-level developers have lower salaries how can i assure

my next employer that i am a senior or even higher level developer well very interesting I have a dumb way, which is, I feel like there's sort of an expectation that you might be, your level is sort of plus or minus one level of where you currently are, depending on the company. But it's pretty rare to be plus or minus two levels. So if you want to be a senior developer, wherever you go next, you could try and become a staff level developer at your current role. And then if you get down leveled, you'll be right in the right spot. Yeah, you get down leveled to senior. Perfect. Yeah.

I've done that before. easy easy peasy yeah in fact that that is a tried and true interview technique for the american megacorps you go you go interview for a higher level and rather than rejecting you outright they offer you a down level and so that's why you got to apply for a one level higher than you want and you have a much much increased odds i mean i guess that's another option that's easier than oh just go get promoted which is apply for apply for a level up and see if you can yeah see if you can get the well i guess you could apply two levels up and go for the promotion that's true through interviewing yeah you get down leveled to one level above where you are right now yeah

worst like one possible outcome is you actually get a double promotion yeah i mean i'm looking at the history here and i'm thinking okay seven years of experience got a mid-level title then worked at a new company for four and a half years then worked at another company so now we're 11 years in and promoted to senior actually 12 because it was one more year so we're like 12 years into the career here and and now promoted to senior i mean the good news is you're clearly demonstrating excellent skill because getting promoted at your current company is actually much harder in my opinion than getting an offer from a new company with a bigger title yeah i think i mean it's just titles are things that are i don't know if it's true in the eu but in the u.s

titles are often thrown out as offer sweeteners at these non-mega huge companies because the people at these smaller companies, they know that the titles actually mean nothing internally in terms of your actual day-to-day work. And so they're happy to throw them on if it's something that is appealing to you. It's easier than giving dollars or equity. And so the fact that you've actually gotten the title increase at an existing employer, and I assume along with a pay increase, that's great that means you're doing a really good job i also looked at i was hired as a mid-level developer i hope that wasn't a surprise i guess i hope you didn't show up and then they said oh by the way your title is mid-level like this kind of gets back to the we'll just apply

for senior roles but i have heard stories i've actually worked with someone who was hired on and they found out after they got hired that their their role was just more junior than basically everyone they interviewed with said it would be yeah so i know it can happen that you can get shuffled or or misled or something so i think it's it's good to be really clear about what you are getting into but also what you're looking for i mean maybe you didn't have a lot of choices but don't accept a mid-level developer role is one way to do this i do think if you have several years of experience as a senior engineer it's it's pretty easy to say i've demonstrated i can do it yes that's what i was gonna say and if if someone was pretty far into their career

they had this senior role and i felt like i had questions about their ability i feel like i wouldn't think oh maybe they're really a mid-level i would just think they're not a good fit like someone who has been a senior for a long time i don't feel like i'm betting on their potential their ability to increase a lot so what is my point i don't know i mean how well do you interview that's that's part of it demonstrate you are a senior developer not just in your resume but in the interview process yeah that's true how do you do that i think you talk about you say the word collaboration a lot. You say force multiplier, cross-team initiatives. I don't know. I generally think of senior developers as people who can take on somewhat ill-defined problems and help

define them and work on them without a ton of direction. Yeah. And in an interview, I think the way that comes out is through stories about things you've accomplished. And people are usually assessing the scope of the problems you've solved? Was this like a problem that someone gave you that was well-defined and the solution was well-prescribed and you just implemented it? Or were you actually exploring the solution space yourself and presumably influencing other engineers to help solve it? Yeah. Yeah. So if you can accumulate experiences like that and talk about them in the interview, you will be perceived as more senior. But also you've got actually a big tailwind going in on this because you've got 12 years of experience. And when you show up to an

interview and you've got 12 years of full-time software development experience, the default assumption that people will make is that you are a senior engineer. Yeah. I would venture to say that, I don't know, this math might be off, but I'll bet half of all software developers have less experience than you right now. There's probably a survey somewhere you can look at to get a feel for that. I wonder if the Stack Overflow survey. Yeah, that's what I was just thinking. Experience levels. That's what I was just thinking. That'd be interesting. Yeah. But The point I'm trying to make is this problem that you're worried about is basically a non-problem because I think this time the situation is so different just because of the number of years on your resume. And so I would focus on the other part of the question.

How can I assure that my next employer will see me as an even higher level developer? And what are those levels? Well, most, not most, many companies have very different views on what these titles mean. But probably the most commonly used next step title I see is super duper senior engineer. Yeah, that's when you put the cape on. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, sometimes there's numbers attached to it. You're a senior two or something, but usually it's staff.

Yeah. And then principal. And sometimes there's an adjective. There's like distinguished. Yes. That's a modifier on your level. And there's also... I wonder if there are any distinguished junior engineers.

There is, sometimes people will put the word senior in front of things like staff, senior staff, principal, senior principal. It'd be interesting if they do junior, senior, junior. Junior, senior, distinguished engineer. Yeah. So- A junior staff engineer. It's all about scope. If you want to convince an employer that you are senior or higher level than senior, especially as you move into the levels beyond that, it's all about scope of

of influence and the size of the impact that you make to your business and team. When you get into that interview room and they start asking you questions about things you've contributed and your answers are like, well, I fixed a log statement to make it more concise and easy to read. They're like, boom, junior category. Or if you say, yeah, yeah, I, you know, my job, I got our linters set up or something. Yeah. Well, I don't know. That one's bordering on depending on the boy, I can see that one going either way, depending on how you frame that. it's like yeah but if it's like i added a lint rule yeah like no but if you say something like i defined the qa process that we use on our team and influenced our manager to put that in place

and helped mentor the qa test engineer and i helped train the rest of the team on the process you know that's that starts to look a lot more senior or if you're like i chose the web framework that we used for this project and i evaluated four of them i created prototypes i researched them and present it to the team. And I convinced my team of 10 to choose this web framework. And now we all use the same framework and I'm the expert. That looks a lot more senior, maybe staff. And basically the more other people that are involved in your stories, that are influenced positively by your actions, the more up the seniority totem pole you will go. I think another way to think about scope is business impact as well.

For sure. It feels like a different axis almost. You can have huge scope that is very technical and that is sometimes less valued by the business than huge scope that is very impactful to the business. So like, I don't know, I owned all of our database clusters or something that could be a ton of technical scope, but might be hard to translate into dollars where I, I don't know, I saved us X million dollars a year in auto scaling or I don't know, something like that. Yeah, exactly. So those are the easiest ones, especially in today's climate. They're the easiest and also pretty darn attractive these days. You know, 10 years ago, if you had said, I saved the company $100,000, they'd be like, who cares? We had $30 million of cash in the bank from our VCs that we hadn't spent yet. You know, it's like, yeah, okay. But nowadays, you say something like, I found, I implemented fixes, or like, here would be like the ultimate story. I discovered a problem in the way that we were using insert technology here. And I led a team of three engineers over the course of a month to fix that problem. And now we are saving the company $100,000 a month, you know, and it's like, awesome, super impactful on the leadership side, super impactful on the business side, and just a very attractive narrative in today's economic climate. Yeah. Well, have we helped our listener D out? Way to go, D. I wonder what D stands for. Developer.

Developer, yes. That's exactly right. Yeah, I think so. I think good luck. I mean, I'm really not concerned that your next job is going to down level you again. I think those days are behind you. Well, what should people do if they would like their own question answered? Go to softskills.audio and click the ask a question button. And with that admonition, We also express deep and abiding gratitude for everyone who does that every week. We love reading all of your submitted questions and feedback. Please keep it coming. If you have been the unfortunate victim of our advice in past episodes, we would love

to hear how it goes. Even if it was 310 episodes ago, we would love to hear. There is a statute of limitations on our advice, but we would still love to hear how it went. we can't be held responsible if it went that bad that long ago or frankly ever yeah i think the statute of limitations is once the episode ends you can no longer you can no longer find us responsible for our terrible advice yeah please so use the same form go to soft skills audio and click ask a question and you can submit a little follow-up and just you know just write in your in the comment box what episode it was if you

remember if it's burned into your memory like episode 110 that haunts the dreams dreams of listener D and let us know what happened. We'd love to know how it went. What did we answer and did it work out? All right. Thank you very much for listening. We will catch you next week.