Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 429: Should I quit my job for free hoodies and manager to IC

Episode Date: October 7, 2024

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I have a job I mostly enjoy, with a super flexible schedule and the freedom to work from anywhere. I learn a lot, and the engineers here are top-notch. However… the pay is only ok, no bonuses, and the stock options feel like a bit of a scam. Asking for a raise isn’t really an option since the company doesn’t have much money. We’ve even cut back on perks, and our yearly kickoff was postponed due to financial issues. I don’t think we’ll go bankrupt, but things will be tight for a while. It’s an exciting, futuristic company, but… there are other exciting companies that pay more and toss in a free hoodie now and then. Should I start looking for a new job? Hey there! Love the podcast and the advice you give! After a year of managing of an engineering team, I asked to step back to IC. I was asked to continue working on the team I was previously managing, but this time as a senior engineer. I’m worried about the transition. I know a lot of how the leadership works for good and for ill, I hired some of my peers, and I know everyone’s comp and more. I want to be a peer on the team after having been their manager. What advice can you give to help me become their peer? Thanks in advance and keep up the incredible episodes with your extremely beautiful voices.

it takes more than recognizing off by one errors to be two great engineers this is soft skills engineering episode 429 i'm your host dave smith i'm your host jamison dance soft skills engineering is a weekly advice podcast for software developers who just never could figure out the difference between one and two i think if you by induction yeah there's off by infinity errors right i was just thinking the induction is the way to demonstrate this but i don't think it's off by infinity it's uh for any n i can't distinguish n and n plus one yeah how many children do i have again it's either n n plus one or n minus one yeah uh somewhere in that range um it's not a bad range the more kids you have the better it gets as a percentage oh like the yeah you're

forgetting a smaller percentage of your children the accuracy rate goes up and up yeah that's true that's the beauty of off by one errors they don't matter much if you have big numbers so just work in really big numbers and you'll be fine yeah that's that's fair uh zero to one is a big it's a big jump it's the biggest it has a percentage that's that's true um should i thank our patrons uh yes please do if by the way if you go too fast i will slow you down with an http 429 in recognition of today's episode number oh uh i will ignore it in recognition of most implementations of HTTP. All right.

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angel or will angel doing it themselves it just is a link to willangel.com or willangel.net williamangel.net ah i've gone wrong okay what it said if you want to join this group go to softskills.io and click support us on patreon we would love to uh say the words or concepts that you write down object object that one haunts my nightmares it's almost as bad as undefined it's not a function yeah i mean i can't it is possible that they pasted in a bunch of javascript or something and it i don't know it actually caused maybe it got mangled yeah probably not though you got two stringed yeah get two stringed punk any amount we'll get you an invite to our slack team any enough amount we'll get you a shout out and uh all amounts are welcome yes do not

discriminate based on amount of money you give us all positive amounts are welcome yeah that's true we don't expect except bills yeah invoices that like dumb joke that pops up every once in a while where someone takes a picture of a receipt with a negative one million dollars for a tip aha i've done it i broke the system hey dave do you yeah do you want to read our first question Yes, I do. This comes from an anonymous listener who says, I have a job I mostly enjoy with a super flexible schedule and the freedom to work from anywhere. I learn a lot and the engineers here are top notch. However, the pay is only okay, no bonuses, and the stock options feel like a bit of a scam. Asking for a raise isn't really an option since the company doesn't have

much money. We've even cut back on perks and our yearly kickoff was postponed due to financial issues i don't think we'll go bankrupt but things will be tight for a while it's an exciting futuristic company but there are other exciting companies that pay more and toss in a free hoodie now and then should i start looking for a new job i love that you titled this question should i quit my job for free hoodies oh that's the real crux of the question here is how much value do you put on hoodies that were given to you with monograms of your company's logo yeah have you seen the full like head-to-toe company apparel i'm sure you can do it at a big enough company you can get like a hat and socks and underwear and pants and shoes and necklaces gloves a bathrobe

actually that's not a bad idea i would i would rock some swag slippers yeah that would be cool i've never gotten no one would see them well actually you know what people would see them because sometimes i wear them to walmart which is the place you're supposed to wear slippers to all the right people would see them yep i don't think we'll go bankrupt hmm stock options feel like a bit of a scam that's funny always yeah that's interesting i they're definitely a gamble that is hard to evaluate with perfect information when you say they feel like a bit of a scam that makes it sound like they're misleading in some way instead of just like maybe this will be worth money at some point i think the scam is that you take a

lower pay and no perks yeah because you'll get rich from the stock exactly that's the scam yeah that's that makes sense and you really mostly don't yeah statistically speaking you have about a 10 to 20 chance of making good money on most stock options for startups you said statistically speaking which makes me trust it it just sounds like got it i'll write it down yeah definitely true statistically speaking i only make up statistics some of the times we won't go bankrupt but things will be tight for a while i mean what's your alternative i think this is a fairly common dilemma in that you have a job there's something or things you don't like about your job and you're trying to weigh the current known situation against the potential future

unknown, that might be better in some areas and worse in others. If you have specific offers or companies that you feel pretty good about, I don't think it would hurt to interview. It's possible that you'll find out that there's not much out there that fits what you're looking for, but I don't think it would hurt to look around. It sounds from what I read here that getting fired or having the company lay you off does not seem like a likely outcome. and that to me is the differentiator between whether you should definitely go look for a new job or just stick it out and wait. Well, that and whether or not you don't get paid enough. Wait, how is getting fired or laid off the differentiator?

So here's my thinking right now. In today's economy, we have a situation where getting a new job is something that can take time. And if you are quite confident that you are going to need to look for a new job because you're going to get laid off or fired, then you want to maximize the time that you'll spend doing that while still collecting a paycheck by proactively going out and finding that job now to start that clock ticking. You know, whereas previously you could go and interview what two, two years ago and have three offers within a week or two. Now you're, you might take you three months, you know, to get your first offer. And so if you're going to get laid off and you're quite confident in that, then I

would say go start the job search process now while you still have a paycheck so you don't have to spend three months without a paycheck but you're saying it doesn't seem like yeah in this case in this case the question asker just didn't really say that like they said yeah the company's not going to go bankrupt we're not doing great i didn't but i didn't see anything about layoffs and the major cuts are just we're not having a christmas party yeah i mean to be fair those are the cuts you make early because they're easy to make they're a lot easier to do than laying people off. So it's not a great sign. I think there is certainly some risk. There is. And so that's what I'd probably, if I was in this situation,

I would dig into that, which is what are the chances that we're going to do serious layoffs and that I'm going to be part of it. And based on what I learned from that, I would start looking for a new job because you're going to have to anyway. And I think that's basically what I'm saying is if you're going to have to look for a new job, let's do it on terms that work better for you. Yeah. I feel like you started off saying it depends on if you think you're going to get laid off or fired. But it sounds like you're saying you should just look for a new job anyways. Oh, I don't know. See, this is okay. So there's kind of like the Maslow's hierarchy of quitting your job, which is his second opus. Many don't know about this one, but it basically goes like

this. There are several triggers that can cause me to go look for a new job. The first and most obvious trigger and the one that has no ambiguity about it is, am I going to be fired or laid off in a timeframe that would not be advantageous to getting a new job in an economy where it would take too long to find a new job than I can tolerate financially. If so, boom, trigger happened. Go interview now before that comes to pass. But then there's the second one, which is a little bit more of a blurry line where you say, is the pay low enough and the perks absence enough that i want to go try to find something better and now you're in that weird balancing scale where on the one side of the scale you're putting things like awesome co-workers cool project and on the other

side of the scale you're putting low pay no annual kickoff party no hoodies you know yeah and it's just like it's such a hard balance to decide but jameson and i have both had an opportunity where one side of that scale was like crazy heavy heavier than i ever thought it would be and so heavy that i thought that if i ever had a job with a scale that heavy i would definitely never quit but i did yeah that was when i was i was making a lot of money at a mega tech company and i quit anyway and i took a huge pay cut more than 50 and i it was so strange to me because i finally realized oh i guess i guess i actually do know what the calibration looks like when comparing quality of life and enjoyment for dollars maybe you're hoping to go the other way

in this case you want to trade some quality of life for dollars yeah i want to go suffer a little more with some worse yeah i want to have a less flexible schedule learn a lot the engineers are top-notch the engineers are top-notch i kind of skipped over that part that's pretty important Yep. And being somewhere that you feel like you are challenged and raised up by the people around you is, is not, not nothing. It's not. And you're not working with people that drag you down constantly. Yeah. It's hard to evaluate that when you're interviewing. Yeah. You can kind of go by reputation if some, if it's a big enough place to have a reputation. Or if you know someone. Like, yeah, that's true. That continues to be the universal answer for every job search.

just like know somebody on the inside for whatever question you're asking i don't know i think we're just kind of waffling back and forth but i feel like if i were you i would at least go poke around to see what's out there and maybe the answer is nothing and then you know great i'll uh wear this threadbare hoodie from several years ago with my previous company's logo on it yeah yeah i don't know have we answered the question almost i gotta say i think maybe jameson you and i should chime in on how much we weigh these different factors co-workers hoodies and annual kickoff parties and flexible schedule and i gotta say for me i don't care at all about swag i don't care about shirts hoodies monogrammed slippers i just be like i don't want it it's fine you can keep it

yeah i pay me more you know and i assume the swag is a stand-in for like general perks maybe yeah but you're saying you don't really care about those either it's like the perk is not the i don't know the monogrammed ping pong paddle they give you it's like interesting work with smart people and good compensation i was just yesterday having this conversation with some of my team members who have worked at companies, including our current company, that just showered them with perks. It was like the 10 years ago, the arms race among startups to see who can provide cooler ways to burn their venture capital money. Yeah, yeah. And what's crazy is our company has toned it down substantially over the last 10 years. It's

an old company now. And we no longer have venture money. We're now self-funded. And so the perks are still they're toned down a lot compared to what they were 10 years ago but my from calibrating from my experience this company has more perks than any company i've ever worked for and so we're just we're both both my team members and i are coming at this with completely different perspectives yeah and so when i say are some of them from the pre-toned down era exactly they are that's the man we used to have like the sponsored turboprop plane that the boss would take you in a ride on every quarter. Exactly. And it's like, oh yeah, we used to have access to the ski resort and golf course. And we used to get free lunches every day. And it's just like, wow. And a lot of

them say, companies I worked for had that too. But for whatever reason, the companies I chose to work at just did not have that level of perk. It's all part of your no-nonsense attitude. just just the business just the facts i don't need lunch yeah i'm a i'm a robot that takes in requirements and outputs code my job is turning jira tickets into working product yeah and that's where i get all my satisfaction i don't know i think i'm just easily adaptable to whatever environment i'm in because i feel like i don't care a ton about perks but i feel like if i was somewhere that had a ton of awesome perks then i think i would think they were cool oh yeah but i don't think they would motivate me at this point flexible schedule and freedom to

work from anywhere that is pretty important especially if you have built a life around it if you are used to traveling and bouncing around it'll be a dramatic life change to not have that anymore yeah for sure if you're lucky you join a company that had it kind of like deployed it during the pandemic while everyone was doing it and is just about to launch their brilliant return to office initiative. That everyone's been looking forward to? Yeah, exactly. I can't wait to end this amazing life of flexibility and no commuting. Yeah, I can't wait to be part of a rebellion at work. Okay. Surely we've answered the question, right? Yeah, I think so. I mean, it's a deeply personal

question. And so you're going to have to really inquire. And I think one of the things that will be interesting to this question asker is what do they choose because it's one thing to think what you value but then it's another thing to watch your own self carry out a decision that you make and then it's so crazy that the same brain that makes the decision is also surprised by the decision that's been fun for me watching my own self yeah it's it's i mean i know the the agony i feel but strangely enough every decision i've made i look back on it it feels like i made the right decision every single one i mean that that's the power of every yeah i thought that was the power of me no i mean that's just great in your decisions yeah that's right in your case that's

what that is yeah can confirm that i always make the right decision that's what confirmation bias means i think yes i can confirm that i always make the good decisions okay yes we've answered the question and i can confirm that we did answer it correctly excellent i will read our next question this is from an anonymous listener who says hey there love the podcast and the advice you give after a year of managing an engineering team i asked to step back to an ic role i was asked to continue working on the team i was previously managing but this time as a senior engineer i'm worried about the transition i know a lot of how the leadership works for good and for ill i hired some of my peers and i know everyone's

comp and more i want to be a peer on the team after having been their manager what advice can you give me to help me become their peer thanks in advance and keep up the incredible episodes with your extremely beautiful voices you just said thank you wait jameson did you add that less part. No, I swear. Written in by a human. Nice. Well, this is great to hear someone making the transition back from the world of management into individual contribution. I love that. I mean, a lot of people worry that that is not possible, but here you have standing as a witness that it is possible. So I participated in a very similar situation. I actually cut out part of the question that said, I think they started off as a team lead, but not a manager on this team. And then

they moved to manager and now moving back to IC. So a couple of jobs ago, I worked with a really talented engineer on a team who then we moved into having them manage this team. They managed for about a year and a half and then moved back to an IC on the team. And it was fine. I think they didn't have any issues with it they were also i don't know that it would work for everyone's management style they were they were very much like a highly technical engineering manager who still writes a lot of code they also were very close with the team and there wasn't like a weird power dynamic of like everyone being afraid of working with them like yeah so in in this case it went fine because the team got along well already and they got along still when when

it was just working with their peer instead it wasn't like they were like finally i i can stop pretending like i like listen to your voice oh my gosh how would it be to work as a peer of a team where you know how much every team member makes i mean they know you know right like i don't know it's not secret yeah i think it'd be fine. I don't really understand why that would be weird. Well, it's different, right? I mean, most individual contributors don't know what everyone else makes. And there's certainly not this information disparity where they know, but you don't. Yeah. And you also had a relationship where maybe you talked about

problems at work with each other or struggles on the team or something like that. So I assume that's what they mean by, I know everyone's comping more. Yeah, exactly. And so here's another way to ask that question. Let's say you hire a new person in on the team. And on their first day, you welcome them to the team. You say, this is Bob. Bob's new to the team. Hey, everyone, just so you know, I shared all of your salary information with Bob. And I also shared some of your secrets that you've shared with me privately. Bob also knows those too. So Bob, go ahead and get settled in. Welcome to the team. But it's not that situation, right? Bob already works there. yeah bob has just taken a new role so i i don't think it's i don't know maybe i'm just missing

why this is weird i guess you could make it weird right if you oh yeah use this knowledge to drop awkward hints to people about oh this is a great pr i'm just surprised about where you fall in the comp rage given how how excellent this code is yeah like i'm surprised someone who gets paid in the bottom 20th percentile of the team could write such great code. Yeah. What advice? I mean, it sounds obvious, but I think the biggest advice is... I was about to say the most clear advice. That is not true. This is not going to be clear advice. Lower your expectations. The main thing I can think of is you just have to be very explicitly not their manager anymore. If you're used to running meetings and kind of

leading groups and making decisions and kind of being where the buck stops and having authority, it might be easy or natural to fall into that pattern. And that would feel weird if you used to be the manager and you're still kind of acting like the manager, even though you're not anymore. Yeah. At the same time, if you're going to be a senior engineer, you do still have influence on the team. But it's a very different kind of influence than if you know how much everyone makes and have the relationship with their boss's boss and all the stuff that comes with being an engineering manager. So I would just say be careful to make it clear you are working as an individual contributor as you work with the team. I was thinking exactly the same thing.

here you have a relationship that is changing. Your relationship prior to your IC change was that you did these people's performance evaluations, you knew intimate details about their work and probably personal lives in some cases, and you needed that to do a job. Your job is now changing and you need to be very outspoken and articulate about how the relationship will change and say it out loud or else everyone will wonder. I mean, people are going to fill in the blanks with how they think you are now treating the new relationship. And so i would say get ahead of those blanks and just tell them how it's going to be and just say yeah i know it's it might be a little awkward that i knew some of your salaries because i was your

engineering manager for a little while but i'm gonna do my best to lobotomize that out of my brain and i'm going to act like your your peer now and they might also wonder things like how much are you talking to the new manager about the old stuff because a lot of times when you get a new manager yeah the old manager is gone or otherwise unavailable and so it's i don't know i just i think if i were a team member on this team where this was happening i would appreciate you saying out loud how the new relationship is going to be i like that yeah it also it always helps to give someone a narrative instead of allowing them to create their own narrative based on your actions, because boy, are we bad at coming to the same conclusions. If you're just

observing what someone is doing, it's pretty unlikely that you're going to come up with the same explanation for why they are doing it that they have themselves. For sure. Also, you might be able to earn this team's trust because you now have some very special skills and they might come to you and say hey former manager and fellow team member i'm going up for a raise this year what tips can you give me and now you can give tips that are like less less laden with conflict of interest because you are just a peer yeah that's true yeah you do have to if you're the manager you have to kind of balance the needs of the business and the needs of the individual against each other but as a peer you can say screw the business and help you get yours

i like hearing about stories of people going in both directions because they're they're so closely related especially at the kind of team manager of of a individual engineering team level i say this all the time because i think it's true that there's value in bouncing back and forth between that line over your career i think charity majors has a good couple of blog posts about this that you become a better individual contributor and a better manager as you spend some time kind of back and forth in each of those parts so that would be a useful thing too that you um you can think if i were my manager like what would i want me to be doing to help the team right now and and maybe you can help keep the keep your work and the engineering teams work a little bit more focused

on what the business and the team needs as a whole. Yeah, I like that too. And I've made this transition back and forth from formal management back to individual contributor, but I've never done it on the same team. I haven't either. I would feel weird. I know I would feel weird.

I have moved from like leading a team to reporting to someone else who is leading the same team. And I was leading a subset of the team. That was hard for me. I did have, I definitely had times where we were both like reaching to do the thing and sort of awkward of like wait oh yeah i don't do that thing anymore you do that but like yeah it was uh it was a tricky transition yeah stepping on each other's toes and yeah toes were stepped on each other in front of the whole team yeah

battles were fought and won and lost there were books written about this no no i mean it worked out i think i we we kind of figured it out in the end but it was it was a tricky transition i feel like this might be easier but maybe not i don't know it also probably depends on if you know the person who's going to manage the team now did you used to did you work with them already is it someone new if it's someone new it might be hard to see them doing things that you would not do or in a different way than you would do yeah and that's another important thing to do here. And I've been, I've been, in one time, I've been the manager who came in, and the former manager stepped down to an IC role. And one thing I really appreciated

that that person did, which I would advise this question asker to do, is they were very humble about saying, okay, our new leader is Dave. So everyone, let's please, you know, give Dave the direction. You know, I welcome him as my leader. You know, I commit to following him and I accepted it. And it was great because it turned what could have been an organ transplant rejection scenario into a really smooth, awesome situation where the team just completely welcomed me. And so I think that's one thing you definitely need to say is like, look, our old leader was me. That person is dead. I am now your peer. And I put my full force, my full support with our new leader and every chance you get to reinforce that through your actions take it yeah all right

we've answered it we've done it we did it confirmed good luck i think you will learn stuff from this transition oh yes and learning is guaranteed in this situation you know what one of the most fun things about this move is all the stuff you used to have to worry about that you get to you you get to briefly be like yeah you like startle yourself like oh no what about the oh yeah not my job any of that crap and your old boss will probably come to you or your you know sorry the replacement manager will come to you and be like oh what do you do in this situation and you get to give advice but not have it be your problem yep oh that's a lovely situation why do you think consultants are always so happy yeah you get to say well it's because you didn't

take my advice correctly right my advice was right you just didn't do it correctly if you done what i said i mean what i meant he would have been great yeah ah the the bliss of just doing things and getting stuff low responsibility what can people do if they want their own questions answered well i think they should just pony on over to soft skills audio and click the ask a question button where you can fill out our handy little form that will give you instructions which you can choose to follow or not really it's up to you we don't have a strong opinion on that And thank you. Thank you to everyone who does this each week.

We love reading your questions. They fill my heart with joy and they just confirm even more that every decision I've ever made is perfect. Just kidding. Thank you for listening. We will catch you next week.