Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 428: Interim tech lead and asking for a raise when a peer leaves

Episode Date: September 30, 2024

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Listener Muszyn asks, I have been working as a SWE for almost two years. My team lead was recently fired leaving me as the most senior junior developer on the team of 4. I was given the option to be the interim team lead until we are able to fill the now open role. I was always indifferent on whether I would go the technical or managerial route in the future so this could be a really cool opportunity. On the other hand I could be setting myself up for failure in the future if my SWE skills diminish if the hunt for a new lead takes too long. Should I accept this opportunity knowing I won’t get the chance to gain this experience for quite some time, or continue to hone my engineering skills just to end up in meeting marathons in my later years? note: Team leads here are more like resource managers that interface with PMs/TPMs than engineers that happen to have direct reports. How do I demand a raise when a peer leaves? I’m one of two tech leads on a larger team (structured as two teams, each with a team of 4 devs of various levels plus 1 lead, but we all pretty much work as one large team). The company is a sinking ship and I have been half-actively interviewing but not having a ton of success; and for some personal reasons there’s an advantage to staying where I am vs. leaving right now. But this peer leaving means my workload is going to increase substantially. I might try talking to my manager and demanding a raise, but I’ve never really played this game before. What tips and tricks should I know to make the conversation go as favorably as possible? difficulty: The reason everybody is unhappy is because of budget cuts and hiring freezes to begin with, so the company probably sees this as an opportunity to save money by not backfilling this person. I don’t know if that’s good for me (even a hypothetical 50% raise for me would have the company ““saving”” the other 50%) or bad for me (the company will be less amenable to giving me the raise and will probably be happy to drive me away and ““save”” even more).

it takes more than an led keyboard and mouse tuned to your editor to be a great software engineer this is episode 428 yeah soft skills engineering podcast where i'm your host jamison dance i'm your host dave smith soft skills engineering is your weekly advice show about all the non-technical things that go into the technical field of software development like how you want it to flash every time maybe it's tuned to your your your code theme right so your cursor is hovered over a keyword the mouse lights up underneath with the color of that keyword yeah that'd be cool or warning you are currently three levels deep inside of a nested ternary it's like starts flashing yeah it gets yeah more and more ominous make some music come

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I'm going to read our first question, which is from a listener whose name I will butcher. Moosezen, I think. Listener Moosezen asks, I've been working as a software engineer for almost two years. My team lead was recently fired, leaving me as the most senior junior developer on a team of four. I was given the option to be the interim team lead until we are able to fill the now open role. I was always indifferent on whether I would go the technical or managerial route in the future, so this could be a really cool opportunity. On the other hand, I could be setting myself up for failure in all the future if my software engineer skills diminish, if the hunt for a

new lead takes too long. Should I accept this opportunity knowing I won't get the chance to gain this experience for quite some time or continue to hone my engineering skills just to end up in meeting marathon in my later years? Note, team leads here are more like resource managers that interface with pms tpms i think that means project or program manager and technical project or program manager then engineers that happen to have direct reports okay so it's more like uh you're not a people manager that's what i'm hearing yeah you're a meeting manager yes a spreadsheet manager a tech lead maybe a gantt chart manager yes huh so two years into the career most senior junior developer i like that phrase interesting that means we're all junior but i'm

the most i'm the least junior is that what that means i think so i think that's what this means i can relate to this i had a similar experience in my first little while out of college and i kind of found myself accidentally in a leadership role and in my case yeah what it looked like was attending industry conferences and standing with all the other vendors in a booth and trying to hawk our wares i was like yeah this is awful get me out of here yeah oh man management's the worst it was so bad i didn't know it was so much like sales oh i did leave that job and i'm i think it was a good call okay i think the opportunity is cool there is a risk that interim becomes forever and you're also very early in your career

so that you're you're missing quite a bit of technical experience if you want to really hone your craft i think two years is not long enough to be able to move into management and be effective with you have to have some amount of technical background to to make good judgment calls and help recognize problems with the engineering system as a whole so if you feel like it's actually going to be a time-bound thing i don't know there's another word there that i can't think of i would do it if it's sort of unbounded and it might take a long time to fill this role i would be a little bit worried about um this early in my career getting sucked away from technical stuff which it sounds like this is i don't know if you're not going to be writing

any code doing it for more than a couple months this early in your career feels feels bad but if you are going to write code still or if it you know it's going to be i don't know a few months i think it'd be really valuable actually to see what goes into organizing the work of a team or whatever it is a team lead does there because i think it will make you a better engineer gant charts yeah if it's a quick little dip of the toes that's in other words if you have high confidence that it's time limited i think time limited was the word maybe you were looking for i don't know yeah uh then the exposure is worth the potential harm to your technical skills i think so yeah what do you think though um i think you're right i think uh adding i think

especially okay i'm cluing into just a cut one phrase here which is i've been interested in management or at least okay no hold on what does it say here i've been indifferent on whether i would go into the technical or managerial route in the future. Yeah. So this could be a cool opportunity. Absolutely. It's a cool opportunity. It's actually pretty rare for people to get firsthand experience doing an adjacent job that they might be interested in in the future without having to fully commit to that job. And that's great. That's a good opportunity. Yeah. I'm with you. I would totally take this opportunity. And then if it starts dragging on, they're like, wow, wow, you're doing such a good job.

I think I might close this rec for the position to replace you. Yeah, yeah. That's the scary part. Yeah. So don't do too good of a job. You gotta sandbag a little bit. Yeah, exactly.

I do think the way that they describe the job, it's more of a, what did they say, like a resource coordinator who works with TPMs, interface with TPMs than engineers that also happen to have direct reports. Okay, so maybe you do have direct reports still, but you're doing a lot of coordination across teams so that's still valuable your team lead was fired it would be worth exploring why that was maybe you already know and you just didn't

put it here but if they were fired because the job is really hard and it's hard to it's hard to be they have really weird expectations yeah then you might be stepping into a problem but if you know it's like oh yeah i saw them show up just wasted at work all the time yeah and i do not plan on doing that then you're probably fine if it's like they just couldn't produce a gantt chart that we all believed in yeah but clearly no one would step in and volunteer for this interim role if they didn't just have it down pat right yeah the gantt chart skills yeah i think you're right to call it the risk that your engineering skills could diminish if if you are fully sucked in i think the fact that you're an interim could give you the excuse to say you just don't have to do

the parts of the job you don't want to yeah actually not if you want to still keep your toe in in code yeah like oh i'm just a i don't know man i'm just a stopgap sorry i didn't i didn't make that report that takes 14 days i yeah i don't know just i'm just trying to keep the lights on yeah listen manage expectations in fact you might even say look i accept this position but i insist on and i for the benefit of the team and for the good of our goals i insist on maintaining at least 50 of my time doing individual contributor work so whatever yeah managerial duties can fit in the remaining 50 i'm on board but we're gonna have to rank those in priority order so I know what to cut when the time gets too scarce. I like that. Do what Dave said.

Which more people would say that? Well, have we answered the question? I think so. It's fairly straightforward. I say there's very little downside here and lots of upside, provided that it is indeed time limited and you manage expectations to, especially mitigated by the fact that you can manage expectations to work like halftime as a developer as a developer still and not just full-time management and you get out if you get sucked in for real then yeah bad move yeah and you might even i might even recommend putting this in written form to say here's the plan here's what i'd like to do and then say here's you know for two months i'm gonna do it from this date to this date here is my time allocation 50 management 50

development and just lay all that out in like a written a very small like written one-page doc hand it over to your manager and say this is what i believe we are agreeing to does this work for you and it's not it's not meant to be a contract and it's not meant to be a cover your butt thing it's meant to be a way to make sure you're both saying the same thing to each other yeah yeah you want to be explicit you want to uncover hidden assumptions yeah those pesky things and with that i think you're in great shape and i would totally take this opportunity all right dave you want to read our next question you bet i do this comes from a person someone named joe anonymous anonymous sarson did i say anonymous mouserson not a mouse

there it is joe anonymous mouserson okay joe says how do i demand a raise when a peer leaves i am one of two tech leads on a larger team structured as two teams each with a team of four devs and various levels plus one lead but we all pretty much work as one large team the company is yeah so hold on two teams four devs that's eight developers one okay eight developers and a lead got it okay moving on the company is a sinking ship oh no and i have been half actively interviewing but not having a ton of success and for some personal reasons there's an advantage to staying where i am versus leaving right now but this pure leaving means my workload is going to increase substantially i might try talking to my i just imagine the personal reasons are like they have

They have like an office plant that they care deeply about or something. An office plant? Oh, oh. Yeah, like they want to see their plant grow. Yes. I thought you meant like a mole. Like you've planted a spy. No, no, I mean like an actual living plant.

Yeah, yeah. They planted corn in one of the pots and they're like, I want to see what happens. I have personal reasons for staying. i can't take the corn home with me because it won't survive the outdoors to get to my house okay oh let's i haven't finished reading the question but i want to make sure we address this the plant situation thoroughly after i finish reading okay okay sure i might try talking to my manager and demanding a raise but i've never really played this game before what tips and tricks should i know to make the conversation go as favorably as possible difficulty the reason

everybody is unhappy is because of budget cuts and hiring freezes to begin with. So the company probably sees this as an opportunity to save money by not backfilling this person. I don't know if that's good for me. Even a hypothetical 50% raise for me would have the company saving the other 50%, quote, quote, saving, or bad for me. The company will be less amenable to giving me the raise and will probably be happy to drive me away and quote, save even more. You've asked for a raise. Good news. We've got a volunteer to downsize again.

Yeah. Huh. Demanding a raise. I've never really played this game before. I don't know. Do you think the way that you play it changes significantly based on the fact that the company is struggling? Oh, yeah. I think that would lower my expectations of success.

Oh, yeah. You would do it differently then? Well, it might even lower my expectations of even doing the ask at all. Yeah. What was the term they used in the question? The company is a sinking ship. So I assume that means that the company has not procured enough revenue to stay afloat with the expenses that they have. And there is no forthcoming funding to extend the company's runway.

So burning cash, no funding in sight. and so the question for this company is how long can we stay afloat before we are completely submerged under the water of burn rate in the sea the burn rate sea i this could be me being naive but i i don't think you asking would just mean they're gonna fire you necessarily yeah it sounds like your co-worker left voluntarily maybe because they too noticed it was a sinking ship and so if you if you are the remaining lead you're probably pretty important. But I think, yeah, pretty unlikely that you would get a raise if the company is in a difficult financial situation. And the math you have done here of my workload

has doubled because my coworker left. If they give me a 50% raise, they're saving 50% of the salary. That is not how the math works in the corporate world. I think there's some assumption that you will not possibly do twice as much work and just fully replace the person that was there before. And if they left a little bit ago, some number somewhere in a spreadsheet already got updated from burning fire red to slightly less red.

So you're saying, oh, there's free money. Just give half of that to me and you're still saving some. Like, no. No. That is going the wrong direction. Yeah, exactly. That will make the spreadsheet go the opposite way

it is supposed to go. Right. I had the exact same thought. I thought the listener Joe here is seeing this as an opportunity to go get some of those dollars that just stopped being spent and have them start being spent on Joe. And very likely that is not at all what's going to happen here. However, I have... Yeah, they are long gone. Yeah, I have done. I was in the unfortunate situation of presiding over a downsizing at a startup. And I will say that it is reasonable for management to use a layoff to then give raises to the people who stay. and you can do this where you you know maybe you let one person go and you can give four people decent raises and still come out saving money you know your your run rate is lower at the end of that and there's actually a good reason for that which is that when people start leaving or being

let go because of financial reasons it can be really stressful on the remaining people and you can offset a little bit of that stress by giving them some recognition in the form of a raise and and i think meant a lot of managers do believe in that technique so it's not totally outrageous for you to request this what is outrageous is the 50 like that is not coming to you yeah yeah yeah the 50 it it just feels predicated on this fact that well my co-worker left so i will be my workload will be doubling i don't think that's possible even if you're work i mean i'm assuming you're working roughly 40-ish hours a week and you're trying to be relatively efficient, you will likely take on new things you weren't doing before, but it's going to push something

out. I don't think you're going to suddenly work 80 hours a week. And if you were working 80 hours a week, you still wouldn't be twice as productive. You'd probably be less productive from being very tired and sad all the time. So I don't think saying, well, it's twice as much, give me half and it's a bargain for you is the right pitch. I think you can say, I'm happy to take on the role of leading this whole team. And we can kind of smoosh it into one team. And I think that's more valuable for the company. And I think I should be compensated for that increased value. Feels like the approach you're going or that you should take, but don't anchor it on this, oh, there's one person's salary up for grabs thing.

Yeah, for sure. So the next question is, how do you position a request for a raise when your company is a sinking ship? That's a hard one. yeah i think the math they will do is how much sooner does the company die if we do this yeah and is the benefit of this person being more likely to stick around slash maybe they produce more is that worth the fact that now our runway is is x number of days shorter yeah exactly or we have to we have to let someone else go to like cover the cost or i don't know whatever it is and depending on the size of the company but you can do some pretty simple math here. Let's say there's 50 people in the company, which is a reasonable, I don't know, just a guess,

but 50 people. And you're talking about allocating, let's say, 15% of one person's salary in the form of a raise to your expenses for the company. Well, 15% of one person's salary is what percentage of the total salaries, it's actually very, very small. It's like, that's like three tenths of a percent. If I've done my math right here for the overall budget. So like if your runway, assuming that three tenths of number is right, three tenths of a percent, if your overall runway is like six months, then three tenths of 1% of six months is half a day, you know? So it's like four hours of runway that you've cut short. So that's unlikely to have a material effect on the day in which the company dies. And so by that argument, it's pretty reasonable to ask for that.

But what you're not thinking about and what managers will probably be thinking about is, okay, well, what about the other 49 people at the company? When some of them find out that you got a 15% raise, meanwhile, we're doing layoffs. They are going to be worried that that the management will be perceived as a bunch of clowns you know and that's a common concern that i think a lot of management has is they're like if we do this will we look stupid and yeah the unfortunate answer is yes and if and if they if they try to explain this by saying look it was just a 15% raise for joe and that's only four hours of runway reduction it seems like a reasonable raise to give then i think they'll just look even dumber so it's like well then yeah then

immediacy. Cool. I would like that 15% as well. That argument sounds compelling. You've convinced me. It's not a big deal to the company. Please do it for me. But 15% for the whole company is now shaving... Let's see. Oh, it's shaving 15% off the runway. So it's like... I did the math there. Assuming that your payroll... Assuming this is like a SaaS company, a tech company like that, then payroll is probably at least 80%. It's almost all payroll. Yeah, it's like almost everything. So you're shaving 10% to 15% off the runway, which on a six-month runway, not small. And they're like, every day counts. Every day is a day that we might get funding or might get a new customer that could sustain us a little bit longer. Yeah. I mean, I think as is our duty and tradition, standing up for the poor little company. But I don't think we are arguing it is correct that that is the belief or action they

would take, but it is going to be there. It's important to know about. So how do you work around that? I solemnly swear to never tell. Yeah, exactly. I think management assumes anytime they make a salary adjustment that at least someone else is going to know yeah and some companies work really hard to try to keep all that information as secret as possible even by making employees promise to break the law by not disclosing it yeah very illegal yeah i guess it's illegal for the company to to ask an employee to do that it's not illegal for a employee to do or not do yeah so hard to work around that i pinky i pinky promise i i mean i think you're just counting on it the risk of you leaving or being so painful that

they're willing to put up with the risk of of backlash and looking stupid and and making a number go up when they're trying to make that number go down everywhere else right at the very least you might seem tone deaf is that the right way to put this like don't you realize yeah we're in a emergency situation here and we're all gonna lose our jobs in six months if we don't write this. So please don't do anything that would contribute to this. Yeah. I think it's probably not going to happen. So do you think seeming tone deaf is damaging enough that you wouldn't do it? Yeah. So first of all, I would probably sit down with my manager and say, hey, I know we lost a tech lead. I'm now absorbing that role. With that backdrop,

tell me a little bit about the financial situation of our company. I mean, this person is assuming it's a sinking ship or has stated that it's a sinking ship, and maybe it is, but I would want to know what is our runway right now and what are the company's plans to make that last? Because it could very well be that you go get yourself a nice big raise and then three months later, everyone's out of a job. So who cares? Like that raise, you didn't get to actually yield. Yeah. You got $20 over the pay periods that you wouldn't have gotten. Yeah. So it's just not worth it. So if truly this is a sinking ship, then i almost think it just doesn't matter like you should be focusing on getting another job

probably not so much focusing on getting a raise i just can't help but think of titanic imagery here you know what did i say titanic you know it's like the skipper is like captain i know the ship is going down i know we've hit an iceberg i would like a race yeah that's all you can think of right now my bed is uncomfortable and i would like new sheets yes it's so it could be depending on the situation it could be so such an unaware thing to say that it could tarnish your reputation with this business where they're like look yeah it's fair you are so clueless about the actual business that is paying your salary and keeping a whole bunch of people employed that i will never trust you with sensitive business information or making

strategic decisions that would be in the company's best interest. It's almost like a fiduciary breach. It's not really fiduciary here because you're not in a fiduciary arrangement with this company, but that's how it could feel potentially to leadership who is hopefully trying their darndest to keep this company running and keep everyone's jobs. Yeah. Yeah. So you're saying the message this would communicate feels selfish in a way that would make you look bad, even though the company is also selfish and yes but that's that's a double standard that we will not uh we will not breach yeah yeah yeah it's like the i don't know why we're not gonna fix that right now exactly yeah weird anyway sorry once again we are standing up for the company that the underdog

i don't i mean i don't think we are i think we're just being realistic like they will not be nice to you out of the goodness of their hearts that also that doesn't mean that they will also not wish that you had shown more loyalty, you know, even though they would not be loyal to you if it was not in their financial interest. Right. Right. Yeah. I like what you said. It is a double standard. Well, I don't know. Good luck. Yeah. Good luck. Sound like you should get a different job. Yeah. I mean, that's what I would be working on and make sure you're- Give up on your corn. Yeah. Your corn. I'm sorry. I guess it's a small price to pay. How much were you going to sell that corn for? Maybe you could use that to get your raise, but only if you stay long enough to

see it ripen it was more just it's not about the money it's about seeing the product of your labors maybe it's the band corn oh the k it's spelled with the k right yeah yes i'm growing a new band one of their hit songs yeah all right surely we we have answered the question i can't imagine us not having answered it having spent this much time yeah we yeah we put in the time clearly we got the outcome right no other option right dave what can people do if they want their own questions answered if you would like us to stammer and mumble and misinterpret your questions please go to softskills.audio and click the ask a question button where you can fill out our form thank you to everyone who does that each week we love and cherish each of your questions i've

actually been printing them out and creating a custom wallpaper that i've been putting up in my office it's really pretty and surprisingly it forms i didn't plan this but when i put the wallpaper up on the wall it formed this when you kind of squint and blur your eyes at it it's a giant oh yeah oh like an impressionist painting of questions yeah it was actually it was actually a 3d illusion from the 90s where when you stare at it long enough uh it's like a 3d impressed it's like a magic eye thing yeah exactly that's the word how does your family feel about your new decoration well it was the foyer of my house which all of our guests see first thing when they walk in and so far everyone loves it oh good see our listeners are great they ask good questions

and had the forethought to ask them in an order that produced beautiful art yeah the wisdom of the crowd yes truly all right thank you for listening we will catch you next week