Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 427: Under to over-employed and wibbly wobbly timey wimey

Episode Date: September 23, 2024

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Hi! I enjoy your podcast a lot, been listening to it almost since the beginning before I even started to work in tech :-) I’d like to keep this one anonymous, though. I’ve been working fully remote for a pretty small software company for a few years. The workload was very big in the beginning and I was learning a lot, but now I barely work a couple of hours every week and I’m mostly using what I already know. It’s fine, but boring. I have plenty of time to get another job as well, which is exactly what I’ve been looking out for recently. I’ve been approached by a startup. They use many tech stacks across different platforms, so it would probably be a good place to learn a lot of new things. And the pay is better. But, they have an entirely different work culture compared to what I’m used to. They require people working there to be in office all the time, and work like 10hrs/day sometimes. It’s my first time having the chance of working 2 jobs at the same time, so I was wondering could this actually work? What if the first company decided to take on another project soon and the workload increases again? If that happens should I tell them I have another job at the same time? I was wondering maybe you guys have had any similar experiences in the past you could share about… Thanks I am living in Europe and got an offer from a FAANG company. I am on the one hand really excited about the opportunity but also a bit scared of the timezoneshift of 9 hours. The hiring manager already assured me that the team will plan meetings to fit into a 5 hour slot that works best for me. Meaning that I will have to work 6-11PM for sure and the rest is up to me. I have two kids (0 and 4 years old) and am excited to have more time in the afternoons with the family but I am also not sure how to adapt my life to such a schedule effectively to prevent burnout. What do you think about this (and please don’t tell me to quit)?

it takes more than being kicked off sesame street for discussing dead letter cues to be a great engineer this is soft skills engineering episode 427 i'm your host dave smith i'm your host jameson dance soft skills engineering is a weekly advice podcast for software developers about how to not misuse software terms and get kicked off of a kid's show. So where do the letters go when the kids get them wrong? To the dead letter queue. I feel like there would be an Oscar the Grouch type of character that lived in the dead letter queue also.

But even grouchier. Maybe the garbage can is actually the dead letter Q. Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah, Oscar just handles them. I take care of these. Oh, should I thank our patrons? Yes, that is one of several reasons that I invited you here today. I will fulfill that reason and then peace out.

All right, I want to shout out all of the people that contribute at the level where we shout them out every week, starting with a one-time shout out to Il Wengel. You are Jameson and Dave, makers of the Soft Skills Engineering podcast. you answer listener questions with humor and wit that sounds like that is literally what someone put in as the thing we should say javier gonzalez chewy ted timbrel become his 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 dress panda the computer science book.com kyle boss Kent C. Dodds, Nivar is not just a planet in the Vulcan system, Jenny Kim, Owen Shardle The Stochastic Parrot, Helicone.ai best observability tool for AI Red Panda is best panda, everyone in this list Jonathan Kings and I, beautiful functional user documentation Il Wengel

is a great engineer are these coordinating? Travis, Brayden Caines, John Grant if you would like to join this illustrious crew, go to softskills.audio and click the support us on Patreon button and please, someone put this on a shirt, I use Vim but I'm not good at it

thank you wow you continue to get more elaborate and further confuse first-time listeners i think i think we got jailbroken there i think we did a little prompt engineering yeah i will proceed to do the thing that it says i guess so i don't have a choice if you want to if you want to help support the show and have us say stuff it used to be your name and it's just slowly metamorphed into arbitrary words, then you can do the thing that one of the people typed in as their name in Patreon. Southskills.audio, click support us on Patreon, where you will be able to contribute any amount and any amount will get you an invite to our Slack team. And then any amount above what it says will get you either a one-time or a weekly shout out. And we appreciate it so

much. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Dave, do you want to read our first question? Yes. This comes from an anonymous listener who says hi i enjoy your podcast a lot been listening to it almost since the beginning before i even started to work in tech smiley face emoticon i'd like to keep this one anonymous though okay that's a long time if you've been listening from the beginning that's uh that's probably an unhealthy amount of listening but you've grown with us yeah put it that way you've grown we've all become more eyes together all right i'm gonna i'll continue reading i've been working fully remote for a pretty small software company for a few years the workload was very big in the beginning and I was learning a lot but now I barely work a couple hours every

week and I'm mostly using what I already know. It's fine but boring. I have plenty of time to get another job as well which is exactly what I've been looking out for recently. I've been approached by a startup. They use many tech stacks across different platforms so it would probably be a good place to learn a lot of new things. And the pay is better but they have an entirely different work culture compared to what I'm used to. They require people working there to be in the office all the time and work like 10 hours per day sometimes. It's my first time having the chance of working two jobs at the same time so i'm wondering could this actually work what is what if the first company decided to take on another project and the workload increases again if that

happens should i tell them i have another job at the same time i was wondering maybe you guys have had any similar experiences in the past you could share about thanks huh i wonder why they want to stay anonymous that's weird you're saying the quiet part out loud as they say i think this is bad. I will take a stand. I think it is bad to work two jobs at the same time when each of your jobs assume that they are your full-time job. I guess it depends on what exactly your relationship is with this small software company. I'm assuming you're just a normal full-time employee. In the US, you'd be a W-2. It'd probably be a W with an umlaut in the European Union or something i don't know what the term is there but usually there's some thing in the employment

agreement that says and like this is your main thing this is your job you need at least permission from us to do other work and it it can't impact your work here and getting a full time in the office all the time sounds fairly intense fast-paced startup job could not possibly not impact your other job no matter how chill it is i feel like yeah so i think this is don't do this this feels dishonest and unethical to just go get another job i know people do it i think they should not. But I have a solution. You could help yourself and this company. So one of the options is quit this job and just do the other job. I'm assuming you don't want to do that for some reason, like maybe money and you like the people there and stuff. You can maintain some of the

benefits if you move to a contractor role with this first company. If you're only working a few hours a month or a few hours a week, you can... Part of... I've thought about this before and I would be so stressed out and just sweating bullets all the time that I would be discovered as a fraud or as a cheat. Someone would see my chat window with the other company or something. But if you're just a contractor with this other company, they know. They know you're not full-time with them. Maybe you have a retainer with them, so they pay you at least a fixed rate to have you on call to respond to stuff but there's some kind of understanding that you are not a full-time 40 hours a week employee there and thus you are not going to be asked awkward questions like

i emailed you at 10 p 10 a.m in the workday and you didn't respond for two days like what's going on i think you should just formalize that relationship i thought about that as well but don't you think that will torpedo one of the main objectives here which is to make more money because yes wouldn't they probably be billed by actually i mean you mentioned a retainer so maybe that resolves this problem i'm about to say but no i think you would still make less money than as a full-time employee yeah but oh i mean i would feel so much worse and i don't think the two salaries would make up for the feeling like crap part just the ethical like ethical pain yeah you feel you're just being above ground and above board above ground more honest more

that's the way yeah yeah i agree with your ethical conclusion oh i didn't even address the other company the other company could fire you like if they're hiring you for this full-time thing and they're expecting high performance and lots of contributions if they find out all of a sudden you have another full-time job they do not sound like the type of place that would be chill with that yeah but if you work for them and you say hey i just have this side gig that i do a couple hours a few hours a week i it won't impact my work and and can kind of like show this formalized thing that feels again you get to be above board with them above ground in the air in space where ethics are better where the ethics feel good yeah yeah i just i think it's so scummy to

And it's not like the working class hero of you're working three hourly jobs and you bounce between them. There's sort of this implicit contract, sometimes explicit, that we get all of you, not just only the hours you are clocked in and being paid. I mean, setting aside the ethics of floating above the ground for just a moment, there is a good chance that you signed an employment agreement with your first employer that says that you will disclose any other employment arrangements that you make while you're employed with them. Yeah. I've signed some of those. Yeah, I have too. I've also helped people carve out, there's usually some way of saying, we can allow you to do some stuff if it doesn't impact your work. And I've helped people get that written down somewhere, like they get to work on their side project or contract with somebody or their app or something.

So that is a pretty normal thing that, especially startups, I think it's some of the giant megatech companies, that's a little bit harder, but I think a startup would have an easier Now that you mention it, I actually did that for this podcast with the Megatech Co. that I worked for. Oh, really? Yeah, I remember I had to submit a ticket to- Wait, I think I did that for this podcast for my current job, actually. Okay.

And it was just vaguely worded enough that I thought an angry lawyer could maybe interpret this in a way that allows them to say, hey, good news about the podcast. It will now be venture funded because we own it. And actually, second news, now that we own it, it will be unfunded. Yes. Yeah, I'm glad. You know what? Now that we say this out loud, I'm glad we both did that. Because I would hate for your employer to own this podcast.

Yeah. Yeah. I wouldn't like that. Yeah. Good to know. We probably should have talked about this a while ago. Probably. Yeah.

Glad we could discover this live on air, though, together. We've been doing this show for- We both avoided a potential legal pitfall. Eight years, and we just found out that we are accidentally above board with our podcast legality. I don't know the statute of limitations is on this stuff, but I don't remember if I have done this for all of the jobs I've had while we've done this podcast. So they're coming for us. Let's hope the statute of limitations are less than whatever amount of time you've been

away from those companies. Okay. Well, can I just say a few things about this, Jameson? Yeah. I agree with everything you said. And yet somehow deep down inside me, I feel this opposition to what you said because it feels like we've had two or three episodes in a row where we stand up for the corporate overlords yeah yeah it's just weird feeling it does feel weird yeah i mean there's there's sort of like a stick it to the man like i don't know you are you are stealing from the rich and giving to the poor who is yourself in this situation the robin hood like the little guy needs to find a way but i don't know except robin hood is upper middle class is he yeah i

think so in this case oh oh in this case especially if you have two he probably was if if i don't know if he was real or not but if he was real he probably was too because i don't think they wrote about anybody who wasn't yeah exactly yeah so i i just on a prac from a pragmatic view on this thing. If you're working 10 hours a day, I really question whether you'll be able to do even the small amount of work you're doing at this other company. That would just sap me. It's like, okay, 10 hours a day, fully in office. Now you got to commute. So that's adding another, I don't know what, five hours a week or something. And on top of that, you got to figure out a way to do this other job that currently only takes you a couple hours a week. I don't see this working

out. I just, I think you're going to do a crap job and feel super stressed. You might also be less efficient. It's possible that what takes you a few hours a week right now will take you longer if you're just exhausted and your brain is full of other job stuff from this other job. It's not fully invested or churning away on problems for the part-time, full-time job. Yeah, for sure. So I agree with you, Jameson. Look, if you want to work for multiple companies at the same time, there are arrangements for that. Now, unfortunately, I think that these arrangements will not be very appealing to you because I believe, although this wasn't stated, that the real appeal here is that you can get paid two jobs worth of salary for doing about 1.1 jobs worth of work. Yeah. Yeah. If you're doing contracting, you're usually billing by the hour so you good news you can earn one job salary in 0.25 increments

across a bunch of different people exactly or there's there's always this dream of the like value-based consulting where i feel like you can fall down this rabbit hole of sketchy youtube videos that promise ways of making money and then you wonder why aren't you doing that and they always say well it's because i find so much joy in teaching other people and empowering them of course but like this dream of you become this very highly specialized highly skilled consultant this drops in for what takes you a very small amount of time but you charge a bunch of money for because it's so valuable right i think in practice for most people that is not how it works yeah they just bill by the hour because no legal no legal or finance team is going to sign a

contract that says i'll pay you the market value of the thing you deliver what even is that yeah yeah yeah it's good news that's the market value of your labor yeah it turns out it's an hourly thing and well now you just take longer to do it i guess i don't know the last thing i'll say about this is that whether right or wrong for good or bad when when employers find out when when traditional employers of software developers who employ them as full-time employees and provide benefits and they pay their payroll taxes and provide paid time off and vacation and all that stuff and a 401k and retirement plan, when they find out that you are secretly working a second job that also pays benefits, paid time off, retirement plan, and payroll tax covered,

they will be pissed. And whether you've signed an agreement or not, 99% of people who find out about this will be pissed off. And I believe that they'll be pissed off for two reasons. Number one, they feel like you're stealing their labor. They're stealing your labor dollars and giving them less than what they thought. And in fact, they will be mad probably to find out that you're only working about two hours a week when the implicit or explicit understanding they have is that you're working 40. Oh, like you're the current employer. Your current employer. Yes, you're current. Well, both of them will be mad. And the second reason is they will be so jealous that you managed to pull this off. I'm so glad you said that. When

you said that, I was like, oh, immediately I recognize that is part of why this bothers me so much because there definitely is a part of me that's like oh but wouldn't it be cool if you could i wish i it's like you found the cheat code and i haven't been able to find it why and why are you able to extract twice the dollars for your labor than i am yeah it's not fair it's not fair i'm you are the crab trying to climb out of the bucket and darn it i'm gonna pull you back in yeah there's some of that there is some of that definitely in my in my heart in your heart which is normally so warm and and wonderful but for this moment it's vengeful yes it's cold and crusty like a crab shell oh anyway so i mean my advice is don't do it if you want to do it try to make

an arrangement to do it above board you will immediately meet the friction that will stop you from doing it but it's worth a try yeah all right we've answered the question i believe so you want to read our next one i do this is from an anonymous listener who asks i am living in Europe and got an offer from a fang company. I am on the one hand really excited about the opportunity, but also a bit scared of the time zone shift of nine hours. The hiring manager already assured me that the team will plan meetings to fit into a five-hour slot that works best for me, meaning that I will have to work 6 to 11 p.m. for sure, and the rest is up to me. I have two kids, zero and four years old, and I'm excited to have more time in the afternoons with

family but i am also not sure how to adapt my life to such a schedule effectively to prevent burnout what do you think about this and please don't tell me to quit called us out that's no fair that's fair pulled the rug right out from under you got an offer so you can't you can't quit the offer oh i mean i guess it would be a different word you could just say no yeah i declare we won't tell you that assuming you will you will take the job okay nine hour time zone shift by the way i'm just guessing this person is in germany because they so beautifully combined time zone shift into one word with no spaces it's beautiful it's like a german kind of thing that i really yeah admire it should be a word huh yeah time zone shift nine hour time zone

shift that's painful this is probably a california company and you're working in western europe is my guess that would be about right or living in western europe i should say and they said there's a five-hour slot that works best for you that would be the overlap. So I'm kind of thinking, what would that look like? So if they wander into the office at 10 a.m. California time, that would mean your workday, or even 9 a.m. California time, that would mean that your workday starts at 6 p.m., or rather the overlap starts at 6 p.m., which means you probably work a few hours before that, and then you'll work the overlap from 6 to 11. Oh boy, that sounds really tough for me. Yeah. I'm assuming if you have two kids, bedtime will probably fall somewhere

in that region. I don't know how it is for you. For me, bedtime is the most stressful part of my day. Oh, so you're saying take the job. You can get out of the bedtime. I guess. Yeah. It depends on your living situation and how your partner feels about maybe either doing bedtime solo or having to juggle the stress of bedtime plus maybe sometimes you have to like run and fix a issue while two kids are trying to go to bed and yeah i i think i get worse at bedtime every year it feels like it's just only become harder instead of easier must be doing something wrong you're just wearing out that's how it goes yeah that might be eventually you just stop doing bedtime and hope the kids eventually go to sleep on their own and they do they do it they survive okay that's

good can confirm they eventually fall asleep yeah so i yeah i think well i don't know how dinner works or supper what do they call it isn't there isn't supper i think they call it dinner lunch and supper is the evening thing second breakfast maybe second breakfast yeah elevensies it seems like that time could work for you to either take a break or yeah you might be able to eat dinner with your family which would be nice but you might just be gone for bedtime that would be rough also the sleep schedule is rough here i mean i mean the way i'm seeing this is you're basically tired i'm tired at 11 yeah exactly 11 o'clock you're wrapping up your work day you stumble into bed think about that on a friday night like all right weekend well not

exactly your weekend you don't get it you only get saturday night for your weekend that's it you don't get a friday night ever yeah not to say that it cannot work but it's definitely good to be aware of these costs because there definitely is a cost i have actually never been on this side of it where i'm working offset from sort of the main team i've only been on the other side where there's one or more people offset from the main team yeah but you're not even on that side yeah i'm not inconvenienced in that my work day i mean there's always some kind of gentle pressure to say well i should accommodate them so maybe i need to have a little bit later for a meeting but it's it's more about just the, it's just more painful to collaborate if you need to collaborate closely

when there's a big time zone shift like this. Yeah. And I mean, there are some things you could probably do to make this a little bit easier for you, which is try to negotiate for a reduced overlap. Five hours is a long time. It's a lot of overlap. And frankly, it might not be fully necessary for you to do your work well, depending on how your team has compartmentalized the responsibilities a three-hour overlap could be plenty it's enough time to do stand-up enough time to get a couple hours of collaboration in each day and but this really depends on the team you know if the team is depending on you and needs a lot of questions answered by you then you're going to need a longer overlap and if they don't then you could do a shorter overlap and that could

really that could really save you yeah 5 to 10 p.m is an hour different but it sounds wildly different yeah the five time to do anything besides fall into bed after the end of your day then the start time might not work out there it's like because by the way i'm i'm interpreting this as these are just the overlap hours you still need to work a few other hours yeah that's true on your own presumably because your team's not there but 5 p.m yeah and if you're nine hours ahead and this is a california company say at 5 p.m what time is that that's 8 a.m for them if i know my tech companies on the west coast that's pretty early they don't usually come in that early. And so 6pm is probably the earliest that anyone will show up. But if you could convince

your manager to say, look, I only need a three hour overlap from 6pm to 9pm my time, that could be pretty workable. The least overlap I've ever had. Actually, this is not true. I've had technically zero overlap because for a while I was working with folks in India. They just killed themselves to be online during US hours, though, which sucked. I felt so bad for them. And then still like worked normal india didn't feel that bad for them i guess well i was up late i tried to alternate sort of like scheduled meetings for who's up late okay but anytime there was a thing that like happened during u.s hours that needed somebody who was in india they would just i don't know they just hop online at 2 a.m tough yeah it was brutal but besides that the least amount of

overlap i've ever had has been one hour of overlap and that sucked almost more because it's enough that you don't quite fully say well we have to do everything asynchronously you you can kind of put off some discussions and decisions until this sync time but it's not enough and it means every important meeting that the whole team needs to be at has to be squished into a one hour window basically five hours a week yeah two hours was slightly better but still was pretty painful so i feel like three hours might be okay if you're really good at asynchronous work meaning you are able to by the end of your work day have a really strong plan for what you're going to do the next day while all of your co-workers are asleep then most of the time turns out right

meaning you don't get stuck down rabbit holes or blocked or things if you can use that time overlap to kind of share progress and get your plan figured out for the next day and that's most of the time correct that feels okay the pain i've felt comes from when just a five minute conversation could change the next six hours of work yeah and that just never happens so then you just you don't have that conversation you spend all this time you kind of throw away the work or just wait and switch on to something else so if you can avoid that that that feels good i agree i have one more practical suggestion which is if you are working away in uh the early morning hours of the the i assume u.s based team it could be useful to give some kind of summary for when

they come online of your current state so it can feel like well there's nobody to talk to so i just won't i'm not going to type a message in slack for no one to read or to wake them up but when they come online at some point they need to synchronize work streams and and so if you have a little stand-up type summary of like here's what i worked on here's its current status here the questions i had or i don't know something to make it easier to digest that i think would be helpful too and it's a little bit more helpful to do it in a separate message sometimes i've seen people they sort of just talk to themselves out loud in slack so that when you come back online you can kind of see where they went but that sometimes requires you to reconstruct the context

and follow the meandering journey instead of just yeah where did it yeah what's the conclusion current state snapshot not yeah not the git history yeah exactly yeah what a concise way of saying what took me many more words to say if you're talking to yourself on slack does it help if you adopt different personalities so you can converse with each other yeah or the royal we that'd be cool we deem this code unnecessary then you submit your pull request to delete it yeah we discussed it yeah we found it unnecessary i i mean we've talked a lot about how hard this is i assume that there's some great things that make up for it i think companies usually pay really well they have wild technical problems and scale that exists nowhere else on earth so

it's not all bad clearly but i think it is useful to go into it aware that there will at least be some trade-offs and it's it's gonna cause some pain yeah and that might make it easier to finish that last half hour of work in your night instead of go rock climbing with your friends we're all hanging out. Wait a minute, you have two kids, zero and four. Yeah, you're not rock climbing with friends. Never mind. You're not going rock climbing on Friday night. Yeah. Oh, that's fine. It might also be worth asking the manager, hey, do you have anyone else in this kind of arrangement on the team right now? And if so, can I meet them and ask them how they work and what they do with their day? Because you might talk to them and realize, oh, this works great. Or, oh, I could

never do what you're doing to make this work i've had this work really really well twice once i was not their manager i just was a co-worker and they just went to europe for like three months um and it was kind of mixed in with vacation but uh i didn't work super closely with them but they got a ton of stuff done while they were out there the other time it was somebody i managed and they i think they had i don't know four or five hours of overlap but they had also worked on the team for several years so we had a lot of shared context and kind of knew how to work together well and that definitely made it easier i guess for you part of the takeaway is the the meta work around this is like you you have to work harder during those overlap times to develop the relationships

yeah to to smooth over the asynchronicity i would also ask if the company has budget to fly you out on a regular basis to be in person with this team which yeah i'm presuming that the rest of the team is in person at least some of the time and that will help you be successful if you can have some in-person contact sure it sounds like a cool opportunity yeah and i think you can make it work and then your long-term goal is to try to get an office established in your home city so that you can then create a new team and not have to do this anymore that could be pretty cool that's true i mean there's if it's a fang company they probably have some offices at least in europe somewhere so it's probably a different team different product area but yeah there's also

an option that you like the company the time is just real hard but you've worked well there enough that you switch to a closer office yeah transfer sense less overlap yeah it could be great yeah that could be cool all right well good luck yeah good luck good luck with the fang yeah the fang i feel like there is there a new acronym because i think microsoft got added and netflix is maybe like nvidia now yes nvidia it's f double a double doesn't even exist anymore oh boy this is it's alphabet is a thing yeah oh my gosh what the new acronym is it's it's mamana meta microsoft apple amazon netflix nvidia i don't know mamanova because alphabet also yeah that's the there's three a's

yeah my man my man okay okay i'm out of here yeah let's quit what can people do if they want their own questions answered go to thought skills the audio and click the ask a question button where you can fill out our form and this is the point in time where the teleprompter says i'm supposed to thank you and i knock over the teleprompter and said i don't need you to tell me to thank them i already have the gratitude in my heart and i thank you without being told i resent the implication that i wouldn't even think to thank them on my own you can't tell me what to do teleprompter seriously squishy pickles i'm just gonna say random words i agree with what the crazy part is everything we just said was actually scripted and

on the teleprompter including jameson's laughter right now we are so natural at reading it yeah All right. Thank you for listening. We will catch you next week.