Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 425: Org chart bait and switch and ole' reliable

Episode Date: September 9, 2024

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I was hired at a medium sized company as a staff level IC a few months back and a big reason I accepted the job was because I would be reporting directly to the CTO. I took a significant paycut in exchange for the opportunity to learn and grow directly under this leader, as this is a career path I am interested in. Three months later and without any heads up, I was reassigned to a different manger one rung lower in the org chart. One month after that, my new manager abruptly left the company. Still don’t know why. I was then reassigned to a leaf-node manager and I am now several hops removed from the CTO. So far I haven’t said much because rocking the boat too early in a new gig has gone poorly for me in the past. In hindsight this was probably a mistake but I’m afraid I missed the opportunity to say “hey now, wait a second…”. I don’t want to hurt this current manager’s feelings by telling them I don’t want to report to them, but also I am now both severely underpaid and reporting to someone who is technically at a lower career level than I am. What do? I’m a manager in a company which I joined after college. I’ve been here for 16 years. We have grown to 180 employees but still work like a startup in many senses, like talking multiple responsibilities. So although I manage a team I’m still hands in the code at least 50% of the time. I know most of tech stack and services but am jack of all master of none type. Recently, management has been pushing me to take more technical responsibility. I want to do that, but it is challenging and takes more time. My CTO is super fast and churns out CODE like a machine and I feel much slower than them. The work is pretty decent and challenging. I get to work on new stuff but have gotten comfortable here. When I think of looking for a change and look at the expectations from other companies they are technically challenging. I worry I have missed out on learning new things by staying so long at one place. What should I do, stay or move on? I haven’t interviewed for a new job in 11 years, so that’s another fear I have.

it takes more than dropping a production database like it's hot to be a great engineer this is soft skills engineering episode 425 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 know just exactly how to tell their boss they dropped the production database or tell them good news our backups work and where you are 100 sure more sure than we've ever been not coincidentally http 425 error code is too early it is always too early to drop the production database oh yeah never a good time always a learning experience though i always remember this i think there was a company called magnolia that was one of those old bookmark aggregators

and they dropped their database and did not have backups that worked. So the company just shut down. They, yeah, they just died because they deleted all their data on accident and could not get any of it back. Ah, ouch. So it's better than that scenario

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will breathe you will live you will die that went morbid yeah honestly the tech humor channel has been on fire recently i've been super digging it yeah i haven't checked in in a while that means i've got a backlog don't tell my team at work but i actually i plagiarize all of the tech humor stuff into my work tech humor how does dave keep up with all these tech memes i swear he does a full day's work but man he's always yeah don't know also don't tell my team this but i schedule the slack messages out so like these the ones that really make me laugh i'll copy them into my work slack and i'll schedule them out a few days it's great aha you don't just copy them copy the whole channel all at once with everybody's username still in there i gotta like you gotta stagger

them you know so every morning you wake up there's a there's a funny meme from dave in slack waiting for you it's like the apple on the desk meme of yesteryear yeah the teacher bought you an apple though this time in this metaphor yes dave do you want to read our first question yes this comes from a listener named herluf who says i was hired at a medium-sized company as a staff level individual contributor a few months back. And a big reason I accepted the job was because I would be reporting directly to the CTO. I took a significant pay chunk, pay chunk, pay cut in exchange for the opportunity to learn and grow directly under this leader, as this is a career path I am interested in. Three months later, and without any heads up, I was reassigned to a

different manager, one rung lower in the org chart. One month after that, my new manager abruptly left the company i still don't know why i was then reassigned to a leaf node manager and i am now several hops removed from the cto so far i haven't said much because rocking the boat too early in a new gig has gone poorly for me in the past and in hindsight this was probably a mistake but i'm afraid i missed the opportunity to say hey now wait a second i don't want to hurt this current manager's feelings by telling them i don't want to report to them but also i am now both severely underpaid and reporting to someone who is technically at a lower career level than I am. What do? This is an interesting question for many reasons, but one of them is you often hear

advice to negotiate on all kinds of things where salary is one piece of what you can negotiate on. You can negotiate on benefits or role or, I don't know, title or type of work. And it's a lot harder for a company to change the financial terms of your employment than the non-financial things in in other words you're seeing the downside of being very flexible about pay in order to get an opportunity which is it's a lot easier for the company to say jk about that opportunity but no take backs on the lower pay like yeah if you had so it's it's a dangerous trade-off to make to take a big pay cut for stuff that isn't financial because it can be easy for that stuff to change. That doesn't help you now. It just probably makes you feel bad.

Thanks, Jameson. Yeah. Do you think that the CTO knows about this? That's what I wonder. Were they part of the deal or was it some recruiter saying, oh, we swear you'll report to the CTO? That super matters in this situation. Did you actually negotiate this reporting arrangement with the cto directly or did you negotiate it with some recruiter and the recruiter has some mystical magical button they can push to slot you into the org wherever they want

yeah until someone notices and says wait a second i i can't have another direct report and then they just shuffle you around hmm yeah if you talked to the cto directly about this as part of the hiring process i would definitely talk to the cto now because presumably they were involved in this decision and if not then i don't know they're maybe the one that can do the most about it if yeah this is tricky though honestly i would probably go interview for other jobs though because this feels unlikely to roll back into the state you wanted it to be because it's changed so much yeah this is interesting i mean depending on how important this was to you at the time you negotiated it it certainly does seem reasonable to me to say hey part of my job offer and

part of the reason i accepted this job was because i would report to the cto and i took a pay cut in order to do that and i'm saying it sounds reasonable to say this but there's there's a dot dot dot at the end of this and so it seems like you you know to be to balance the cosmic scales of justice you should either get a pay raise to compensate you for not getting the perk that you negotiated for, or they should let you report to the CTO at your current pay. Now, here's the dot, dot, dot. This is really dangerous territory, especially in today's job market. I think it's very possible that they would say, look, you've been here three months. You're not even ramped up. No big deal. We'll say goodbye if this isn't working for you.

Yeah. I mean, I do think you are looking at an exit from this company as a possibility here. could be voluntary, but I don't know. If you took a significant pay cut, a staff level IC is a pretty solid role. I'm assuming that means it's rough out there to get jobs, but they're not impossible. So I think you might have some leverage. If they're doing this because they think, wow, this person is not what we thought they were. And so we need to like find a normal spot in the org for them. Then you have no leverage because maybe they're disappointed with your performance that'd be good to find out yeah they do this partially because they thought you were a staff level whatever that means their engineer and then they kind of yeah realized oh

you're not going to have the impact we want a staff level engineer who reports to the cto to have so we'll just find you somewhere else to work i think you do have to find out why and i think the the risk of getting fired for asking why this happened i think is still pretty low i think it's i don't know you should be able to have a reason for why you have been moved around if no one wants to tell you a reason that maybe means that it's because they think you might not be that good at the job but i don't know the manager left maybe they changed projects maybe the cto got really busy and decided to not have any more direct reports like they should have a story that they can tell you and then you should be able to decide is that both a reasonable story

and do I feel like I can, given what I learned from that, can I change this situation here or do I need to agitate more, which is the conversation Dave suggested saying, hey, I came here to do this thing. I'm not doing this thing. Can we change my job so I get to do this thing? Knowing the answer could be, nope, good luck here or good luck somewhere else. Yeah. That's to me the risk. If this was like four years ago or three years ago, I would have said, yeah go ask for what you want you might even come out of it with a raise but today i'm thinking i don't know it's very risky i don't know i guess it really depends on how like you were saying jameson it depends on how much risk tolerance you have for losing this job because the job is not

what you wanted so you can either try to make the job what you want which is possible but one of the side effects of trying that might be that you have to go find a new job that you want and so if you're okay with that possibility, then yeah, I would go for it. And at the very least, I would start a conversation with the CTO, who I presume you know well enough to start a conversation with because you report it to them. And I would ask them, hey, what's up with all these org changes? Don't even start with, I was promised to report to you and now I'm not, I don't want to work here anymore. Start with, hey, lots of shakeup in the org, what's going on? And see if you can get a little Intel. Yeah, you do need to find some facts. I don't want to hurt this current manager's feelings

by telling them I don't want to report to them. I don't know that you have to tell them, hey, I don't want to report to you, but they might be helpful in trying to answer why this has happened. And you could just say, you don't have to say, hey, I don't want to report to you. I wish I was reporting to the CTO. You could say, hey, when I joined, I thought this was going to be the plan. do you know kind of how i ended up here is there like some need on this team or or i don't know i think you can dig into that a little bit without directly saying i don't like you slash don't want to report to you yeah i hmm i guess it depends on the manager and people you can always find someone who will be offended by something but this is not the kind of work i want to do

I don't think that is a an offensive thing to hear from someone who reports to me I don't think that would hurt my feelings yeah would it be any softer or better if instead of saying this is not the kind of work I want to do if instead they said the kind of work I want to do is fill in the blank yeah I think so I also think you could approach this another way by I'm assuming your title is still a staff engineer and the role of a staff engineer usually involves some kind of organization wide impact you said you're a leaf node assigned to a leaf node manager yeah so you could also go about this even more roundabout by saying like help me have this org wide impact i still i'm like i'm reporting to you that's fine but i want to do my staff engineer job and maybe

not even talk directly about like who you report to or what you were looking for but just how do you enlist your manager's help in doing the kind of staff level work. Yeah. And you could even job craft it a little bit to where you say, look, I don't need an org chart to give me permission to do the kind of work I want, but here's something I need. I need regular access to our CTO. And this is not out of the ordinary. In fact, I would say it works pretty well. So I've actually got a staff engineer on my team right now. I am currently the CTO in my engineering organization. And I have a staff engineer who I do a one-on-one with every two weeks. And I personally benefit from this, even though the staff engineer reports to a manager

who reports to me. So you could say that the staff engineer on my team is in exactly the same situation that this question asker is in. And I love it. Personally, I really benefit from having kind of leaf node level visibility into what's going on. It helps me do my job better. And I provide a little bit of direction, you know, and kind of like insight into my vision and what my thinking is for the long term and stuff like that, which I'm glad to have them take and hear from me. So you could still get what you came here to get. Yeah. And there's so many directions you can go with this question too, because there's probably a way to ask for regular time with your CTO that comes across as a burden. It's just one more thing they have to do. They just got to show up at this

meeting, or as a thing that they are excited to do because they know they're going to meet with someone who will help achieve their technical vision. And you want to make sure it's going to be the latter kind of feeling that they'll have. If they're doing you a favor by meeting with you, then they've got a lot on their plate already probably and it's unlikely to stick around. But if you are trying to work with them to craft technical strategy and move engineering in the direction they want it to go that's pretty important you make time for that yeah well have we answered the question yeah i don't think you're trapped i don't think you're stuck i don't think you need to quit i think you can get what you came here to get even without the org chart

exactly reinforcing it but you do need to go tell people what you want and figure out a way to get it from them and you might just find a solution that actually is what they want too yeah love it all right i'm gonna read our next question all right not even gonna ask well i give you permission even though you didn't ask oh well i reject your permission i don't need it this is from an anonymous listener who says i'm a manager in a company which i joined after college i've been here for 16 years we've grown to 180 employees but still work like a startup in many senses like taking on multiple responsibilities so although i manage a team i'm still hands-on in the code at least 50 of the time i know most of the tech stack and services but i'm a jack of

trades master of none type. Recently, management has been pushing me to take more technical responsibility. I want to do that, but it is challenging and takes more time. My CTO is super fast and churns out code like a machine, and I feel much slower than them. The work is pretty decent and challenging. I get to work on new stuff, but I've become comfortable here. When I think of looking for a change and look at the expectations from other companies, they are technically challenging. I worry I have missed out on learning new things by staying so long at one place what should i do stay or move on i haven't interviewed for a new job in 11 years so that's another fear i have oh yeah that's a hard one oh boy yeah i if you came to me and just read

the first two sentences i've been in this at this company since college and i've been here for 16 years unless there's some amazing retirement benefit or some incredible pension or something I won't even I don't even have to read the rest of the questions to know what my suggestion is yeah we give these questions little titles in our in our kind of organizing tool I call this one all reliable because I think I'm thinking the same thing you knew exactly where I was gonna go with this yep this definitely feels like a quit your job type of problem or at least go interview for other jobs type of problem good news that solves the I haven't interviewed for a new job in 11 years problem yeah you just have to royally bomb several interviews which you probably will yeah

that's fine you just you look at them as tools to improve your interview skills not necessarily job opportunities yeah the job opportunity that i must get so if there's somewhere you really want to work maybe save that until you've gotten a few interviews yeah your belt yeah go to a few that you don't so much like they don't mention the specific tech stack here but yeah there's a lot of things here not none of them individually are horrible but i agree that it all kind of sums up to it's probably time to go yeah manage the team but code at least 50 of the time management is pushing you to become even more technical what are they saying that you should not do in order to do that i don't see anything that they're taking off of your plate maybe they are and

you just haven't said it but it feels like they're just saying please do more work for us which is tough. It's tough to manage effectively a team of several engineers and do a lot more technical work than you are doing. I feel like you're kind of at the edge of what I think a reasonable amount of technical contribution is for a fairly small one pizza team. I don't know, three to five engineers. I think you can maybe get away with 50% of the time coding and much above that then you're you're gonna be missing stuff isn't a one pizza team just like me and one other person i guess it depends on the other person how big the pizza is and yeah how much you eat i felt like a two pizza team is like eight ish eight to ten people is that too big for a two

i mean in my opinion it kind of is so that just means everyone gets two slices because there's typically eight slices per pizza and yeah i don't know about you but i have a hard time stopping after two okay an eight pizza team that's 16 people yes perfect yeah challenging yeah and also i'm assuming there's some implicit comparison with your cto well look at how much they do they crank out all this code yeah and maybe they wrote the code base so they know it well yeah maybe they are a fabled 10x engineer maybe they're really neglecting a lot of crucial executive leadership things yeah in order to crank out a lot of code which is very common in in ctos that crank out a lot of code especially the founder ctos yeah that's a well now it's founder mode so that's

actually cool now yeah this weekend yeah that's cool yeah i don't know i i i don't i don't think any of this means you shouldn't just go interview somewhere else i think you should interview somewhere else yeah i think so too it's you know it's not the greatest time to do that but i don't know do you want to wait four more years and then do it like then you're going to have the 20 years at this place yeah and i don't know it's just i mean james and i are so of the similar mind on this that when you spend a long time at one place your skill like if there's a pie chart of your skills and there's two slices in this pie chart and one slice represents your transferable software development skill. And the other slice represents skill at working in this company. The slice

that's transferable starts to get too small compared to the slice that's just working at this company. And there's a tipping point that happens at some point where you actually are only really valuable to this company. And on the open job market, your skills are just not that valuable because so much of them don't transfer. And I've seen developers who get really deep into this and a little bit of a different angle, but sometimes they get deep into a tech stack that dies you know and it's like i have 10 years of experience with the sap in internal programming language you know yeah and it's like oh boy there's like mumps yeah so that happens though with companies too and like i was saying before unless there's a really

compelling reason like i've got some amazing retirement program or the pay is just astronomically higher than i could get anywhere else i would say it's time time to go look around you'll you'll be thankful you did you won't be thankful for the next few months but you'll be you'll be thankful next year i think you got a bomb well i don't know probably bomb is too strong of a word you probably have to fail 10 interviews at least 10 well yeah i don't know it's gonna be a bunch i remember in the i don't know how to pronounce that word so i won't say it in the in the beautiful years past of five interviews maybe four job offers yeah then i get to just look at them and stare down my nose from my lofty perch from my lofty Canada yeah that's definitely gone but

you're gonna have to do a bunch of interviews I think to get a job but also good news that gives you the practice at interviewing that you need so I think that's that's part of your job now the other thing you can do I agree with what your point Dave about being kind of molded into a company-shaped employee, I think you can take deliberate action and effort to try to make some of those skills more transferable. Sometimes it's as simple as reflection and thinking, what have I learned that's more generic from this problem or a way we do stuff here? Sometimes it's like trying to find business justifiable reasons to branch out technically you probably don't want to just do straight up resume driven development and throw in all the

all the buzzwords you get to practice them at work but you if you're worried about stagnating you could look at problems you have that might be solved well by some stuff that you don't already use yeah i don't know but still that's going to help when you get a new job yeah i think that's the core of it oh reliable reliable quit get a new one and then quit your job yeah for sure do it in the right order especially in this in this economy yeah you do not want to find yourself with no options oh boy very slow yep very long process right now yeah well have we answered the question i think so we haven't we haven't thrown out a quit your job in a while we've been very hesitant but now we're now we have all these like these caveats like get a job first then quit your

job yeah do a lot of interviews such dumb i don't know it feels we're so we're so foolish before so reckless i know well reckless times call for reckless advice podcasts did you if there's one attribute i want out of my advice it's reckless okay i i really have two questions for you though jameson do you really think people if in this situation would need 10 interviews just to practice oh no not just a practice i mean i'm i'm saying like practice plus pass one of them enough to fit and get an offer yeah i think that's right probably 10 interviews to get i don't know what the real numbers are but certainly higher than they used to be yeah it used to be and i'm sure there are people that have are on both ends of the spectrum somebody's probably done 100 and

gotten nothing yeah yeah and then my other question for you is what was the word you didn't want to pronounce i'm gonna look it up i have a guess halcyon that's the word how do you spell that h-a-l-c-y-o-n and what does that mean it's like idyllic past days kind of denoting a period of time in the past that was idyllically happy and peaceful so is it is it kind of like in the same ballpark as panacea but with a past tense connotation no not really panacea is is like a it's like a cure-all kind of right oh wow i completely did not know what panacea meant until this moment that's the one i do know yeah a solution a remedy for all difficulties or diseases yeah you are you are a treasure trove of vocabulary though i'll tell you that not

of pronunciation yeah i'd love that yeah i would i would not have gotten that pronunciation right so i'm glad i called you out on it but i have read that word before nice what could people do if they want their own questions answered, Dave? Well, if you would like a panacea for all that ails you, go to softskills.audio and click the ask a question button where you can fill out our handy little form

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