Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 448: Title over salary and from figure skater to software developer

Episode Date: February 17, 2025

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: A listener named Steven says, Long-time listener of the podcast here—it always brings me so much joy! Should I prioritize title over salary? I’m currently based in Europe, working as a Senior Engineer at a big company that pays really well. The problem is, there’s almost no chance for promotion due to the economy and budget constraints. Plus, because of the organizational structure, I’m stuck solving small problems that don’t have a big impact. It’s frustrating—but again, the pay is great. Recently, I got an offer for a Staff Engineer position at another company. The catch is, the pay isn’t as good (30%+ cut), and I’m not sure about their culture or structure yet. However, the title could potentially open more doors for me in the future. Should I take the offer, accept the pay cut, and hope it’s a step forward for my career? Hello! Long time listener, first-time caller :-) I’m on the final stretch of classes to finish my BS in computer science at WGU, most of which I’ve done while working. I’m now 40, and I have had 3 previous occupations and employers: aircraft mechanic for 5 years at a small shop, figure skater with Disney on Ice for 6 years, and most recently a partner at an environmental remediation/heavy construction firm for 10 years where my primary responsibilities were field crew management and technical writing for ecology reports. I would love your advice on how I could use these experiences to stand out on a resume or in a job interview. How can I indicate that I’m a hard worker and that I know just enough to know that I know nothing and am ready to learn? Thank you for your time, keep up the good work!

it takes more than adding that one sparkle icon to a feature in your app and telling your boss you added ai to it without actually changing anything else nice to be a great software engineer this is episode 448 of the soft skills engineering podcast i am your host jamison dance i'm your host dave smith soft skills engineering is a weekly advice show about all the non-technical things that go into the technical field of software development like changing expectations by adding the sparkle yes and then that gets you off the hook for all number of bugs caused by your own code yeah because you can blame them on ai now yeah it's all i don't know it's non-deterministic oh our evals are bad oh we didn't fine-tune the model

well enough like well are you sure because i see it say it says null pointer exception here yeah somebody did some prompt injection i think yes on the button on the button click somehow that's now ai powered yeah button click powered by ai and your boss is happy though because you just got 17 million dollars of venture capital funding yes for the ai powered button clicks yep you get to tell them about a cool new vendor called open ii it's just two i's together and you buy that domain name and then commit just some vicious outrageous fraud and funnel all that money to you perfect you'll have to escape to space it's the only place that's safe we can help you with the law there the fallout yeah once you're there we can help you with your legal

troubles we actually cannot help you get to space no that's different because that's coming from earth right yeah we don't handle that uh dave do you want to thank our patrons yes we have a one-time shout out to microsoft please bring back the team's desktop app for linux that you killed off two years ago i don't believe you i don't think that's what you actually think you know are you can you imagine what can you that's actually their patreon name no i believe that's their name but like i that's got to be a joke right that microsoft ever had a linux desktop apps for teams no like uh that teams is widely reviled linux users i feel like would look down their noses at all kinds of things and teams is definitely on the list so you're saying no one

would ever actually want this but on the other hand complaining about companies killing off wildly unprofitable linux desktop apps out of this like entitlement of like well you have to serve me even though it causes you to lose tons of money in time yeah okay maybe this is real yeah there you go i think you found it it took it took us a minute to narrow in on the motivation here but We got it. There are dozens of us. Surely it's worth the effort. Okay.

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who says, long time listener of the podcast here. It always brings me so much joy. Well, thank you. I'm glad. Should I prioritize title over salary? I'm currently based in Europe working as a senior engineer at a big company that pays really well. The problem is there's almost no chance for promotion due to the economy and budget constraints. Plus, because of the organizational structure, I'm stuck solving small problems that don't have a big impact. It's frustrating, but again, the pay is great. Recently, I got an offer for a staff engineer position at another company. The catch is the pay isn't as good. It's a 30% pay cut, and I'm not sure about their culture or structure yet. However, the title could potentially open more doors for me in the future.

Should I take the offer, accept the pay cut, and hope it's a step forward for my career? title versus pay what do you care about we're about to find out i feel like i need to start by giving advice that kind of sidesteps the question and might be impossible and is kind of unhelpful but all right that sounds good you got an offer you could say hey this is a 30 pay cut from my current senior engineer position i'm really excited about this but the pay cut is rough can you give me more more money please like i don't know you can always negotiate an offer and they might say no this is the best we can do and then then you come back to your original question but the offer is a good time to negotiate it is the only time the best time

not the only time but it is the best time it kind of makes me wonder if the title is big because the pay is low yeah yeah that's that's the trade-off they've made well we'll give you this thing that costs us nothing tangible yeah potentially longer term consequences around our career ladder being messed up and whatever but sure is cheaper than paying you more money yeah i think titles are fuzzy and i generally you know how polls have margins of error around them yeah i feel like like you'll hear oh this this candidate is polling at this rate but there's a five percent margin of error in either direction i feel like titles have a margin of error and it's much bigger than five percent yeah it's like it's like one or two levels up or down exactly because there's no

standardization across companies about what titles mean you kind of squint and in general higher titles are correlated with higher expectation and experience but you can always find some exception where some company threw out a very fancy title to someone who wasn't qualified someone is is a senior engineer like six months into their career and i don't know that's just what they call people who write code at the company well yeah didn't you have an executive title like less than five years into your career yeah i was a director director which really was like manager bad manager that should have been my title clueless manager clueless manager how many years of experience i don't remember but it was not a ton yeah it was like five ish

certainly single digit not like six months but still probably not director material no not six months. But yeah, not what it meant in the real world, certainly. So my point is, you could look at this and say, aha, I will have staff on my resume, and that'll open new doors for me. And it is true within the margin of error. If you go to this company, take a big pay cut, it sucks, and you bounce out. It's in Europe, so I don't know how quickly people tend to bounce out of jobs that are bad. Maybe they stick around a little bit longer. But you might have to suffer for a while before you benefit from it. And the benefit is going to be a little bit fuzzy because I think there'll be some people who will look at it and say, staff, it's like, I don't know,

there's a lot of overlap between senior and staff across the industry. Yeah. I mean, I sometimes think of salary as a line on a time series chart and the total amount of money you accumulate is equal to the area under that line. So it's like if you got X amount of dollars in year one, then the line would be at X height. And then if the next year it was like X plus 10%, then the line would be a little higher. And the total amount of money you've accumulated over those two years is the area under that curve approximately. And so what I'm hearing here is that you are thinking about dropping that line by 30% on the hopes that at some future point, you'll be able to more than recover the lost area under the curve for the

years that you're at this company with a staff title. But it sounds like for the years that you're at that company, your pay is going to be so much lower that it would actually take multiple years where your pay is actually 30% higher than what you left at this company to compensate for that. And I just have to ask, does that seem mathematically reasonable? No, that's my answer. If I'm being like, if you're being cold and hard about the facts and then you have to discount like inflation and the opportunity cost, you could have invested all that extra money you made into to whatever meme coin went up by 10,000% before it got rug pulled.

And you could have bought OpenAI's newest subscription that they claim it costs 50 cents of compute and gives you $500 of value. And then you could have iterated on that. You keep spending more money to get more compute that gives you more value that you used to buy more compute. And then-

Think about all that value. All the money in the world. Yeah, and then you buy OpenAI. Oh, cool. Thank you for giving me this money printing machine. I'll use this to buy you. to buy the money printing machine yes the money printing machine making machine yeah so i think i would there is a non-zero value to a higher title but if you are not sure

that the company and position is something you're pumped about i would be pretty reluctant to take it yeah i think the combination of huge pay cut plus lack of clarity around structure and culture I don't know. I think there are other opportunities out there and this might be a good one to pass. And then there is probably a price that you could put on the value of having this title on your resume

where future employers will see it. But it's only going to be for future employers. This very much would be an investment, not for the company where you're going because they've already told you as staff engineer, you get a 30% pay cut, but for future companies. So you're kind of gambling on that.

And I'm saying strictly in the dollars and cents, you're gambling that a future company is going to be able to compensate you for it. And then you have the intangible value, which to me is basically zero. The intangible value of having a fancy title is nothing. Like I would much, I would every day trade a crappy title, a perceived crappy title for more money. In fact, I've actually done that. I've gone from being a director of engineering to a senior engineer and increased my pay by a big chunk. And so I guess I proved to myself that not only do i say that but i actually did it so i believe it i guess yeah do you think europe matters here like what if they're working in a company maybe they pay really well because they're

kind of a multinational company but i believe in general software engineering salaries are lower in the in europe than in the united states so maybe their offer is for uh like a local company right um so yeah they're just different pay scales i think if that were the case it's probably even more true. It's probably more prestigious in a way to be a senior software engineer at a big kind of multinational tech company than a staff engineer at a smaller local company. Yeah. And I'll tell you what, if anything is going to hurt your chances for earning in the future, it's not your title. It's your current pay. Like I had a good friend who started out his career in a low cost of living location. And as a result, his starting salary

at his first, quote, real job as a programmer was probably about, it was like more than 20% lower than mine. And I started in a more like average cost of living place. And that followed him for like five years, even changing jobs, because inevitably your next employer will ask you, well, how much were you making at your last job? And then boom, your salary has just been anchored. And they're like, great, I'll pay you 10% more than that to get you out of that job and come work for me. And even if you don't answer that, because the advice is always don't answer them, tell them what you want, how much you were making your last job still anchors in your own mind, right? Like, well, an outrageous bump from this would be 30% more. Yeah, now you're

back to ground zero. Yeah, 30% more than the already lower place I started. So yeah, that definitely has an impact. It does. I would say it's more impactful. But you know, if you want to work on interesting problems, once in a while, these things are kind of an opportunity to step up. So I guess I've been on both sides of this equation where I've taken the action that resulted in both an increase in title and a decrease in title. And in both cases, my pay went in the opposite direction. So the first one I already shared, I went from being a director of engineering at one company to a senior engineer at another, my pay went up. Then I had an opportunity to become a member of an executive team and get a vice president title, and my pay went down. And

that's coming from the senior engineer company. And so I guess I've done this transaction both ways. And in both cases, I had specific reasons for wanting to do the move. The first time it was to get more money. And the second time it was to change the direction of my career. You know, I had decided, all right, I want to go into executive leadership. It sounds like there's a lot of fun and interesting problems there and more challenges. And there was. And I had to take a pay cut to go in that direction. But in this case, it's like going from senior to staff. It's like, actually, you're just moving up a rung on the ladder you're already on. So it's not like a i don't know it doesn't feel like a totally door opening decision yeah that that makes sense

there there could be another opportunity that isn't a pay cut to maybe not this company still but maybe somewhere else i think i get what you're saying because i made it hard but hopefully no no it makes it makes sense that the distance in some made-up arbitrary space yeah career space between senior and staff is really not that huge, but the distance between I see an executive is a bit bigger. And so it's more worth the pay cut is what you're saying. Exactly. Like it's almost like if I wanted to go into work as a lawyer, I certainly couldn't leverage my skill. Sorry, terrestrial lawyer, just to be clear, we're not talking space. But if I wanted to go to work as a terrestrial lawyer,

I couldn't leverage my salary history as a software engineer to do that. You know, I would have to basically start over as a junior associate lawyer. I'm doing space law right now. So if I ever sound like I'm not paying attention, it's because I'm dealing with a particularly tricky case of space law. A case of space law sounds like a space disease you get. Sounds like a space case. Space, yes.

I think that's how you do induction, right? You start with the space case. Yeah, that's called the spaces case. All right, we've answered the question. All right. Dave, will you read our second question? yes this comes from an anonymous listener who says hello long-time listener first-time caller with a smiley emoticon i'm on the final stretch of classes to finish my bachelor of science in

computer science at wgu most of which i've done while working i'm now 40 and i have had three previous occupations and employers one aircraft mechanic for five years two figure skater with disney on ice for six years whoa and three most recently a partner at an environmental remediation heavy construction firm for 10 years where my primary responsibilities were field crew management and technical writing for ecology reports i would love your advice i just got to interject here so like a really standard software developer engineer career track yeah like the yeah the water slide say i i got into it the normal way right yeah we would have understood what you meant yeah if i had a nickel for every software engineer who used to be a disney on ice

performer oh yeah i would okay i'm gonna i'm gonna continue reading now i would love your advice on how I could use these experiences to stand out on a resume or in a job interview. How can I indicate that I'm a hard worker and that I know just enough to know that I know nothing and I'm ready to learn? Thank you for your time. Keep up the good work. Wow. Well, I know exactly one way for you to stand out during interviews. Okay. And that is full-on costume from Disney on Ice. Bring your skates, try to find some carpet that works well on skates, and do an amazing routine in a corporate office yeah bring a little mini ice rink oh yes just big enough to like spin in place yeah i don't think you could do anything else really although i don't know anything about about ice skating like

that wouldn't it be cool if they made like an infinideck for ice skating like the ready player one things oh yeah i mean i guess you could do it with rollerblades you'd have to make the treadmill out of ice yeah it just goes around and you have to solve that problem yeah yeah sounds reasonable i mean it's kind of like those infinity pools they have yeah why not it's just a different phase of water yeah how hard can it be it's still just water we'll get right on it yeah this is interesting partner an environmental heavy construction firm huh so cool yeah this is this is a fascinating background this is someone who knows how to pivot i mean look at these three jobs aircraft mechanic disney figure skater and field crew management for an ecology reporting

construction firm that's so cool this is like three i don't know it's like the venn diagram of people who are in all the overlap of all three of these circles like you're the only one yeah i could see some very aircraft mechanic feels more related to environmental construction stuff but maybe disney on ice does not feel at all the same universe as those two he's like oh no there's like seven of us that all came over to the same firm after our disney on ice tenure i worked with somebody for a while who is a former figure skater but they were not also an aircraft mechanic yeah so it's not this person yes i mean you have a you have a problem in that you don't fit the standard mold right if people are hiring graduates fresh out of college they have a mold that they're

looking for like okay they're 22 they're smart like we look for kind of the top graduates they they did cool stuff in clubs or some cool side project or something or they're just some i don't know software shop that's just like shoveling humans onto an assembly line and care that much but you will stick out quite a bit yeah from that i think indicate that i'm a hard worker i feel like if i looked at your resume i would believe you were a hard worker oh yeah who someone who had been an aircraft mechanic then a figure skater at disney on ice i mean figure skating is i think i'm justified in calling it insane like there's some fanatical devotion to physical fitness and like body composition and and then i assume it's super competitive to do stuff like disney on ice

i don't know but it just seems like the kind of thing people would be interested in and they they like disney characters so they want to do it and yeah i i would feel like this person is a hard worker yeah probably they can work professionally with other people i do not know if they can pick up technical skills quickly yeah and i think at the end of the day whether you're a hard worker or not is actually not something that most people ask about their software developers because no amount of just hard work just roll up those sleeves and muscle through can really compensate for some for well how do i put this it's hard to compensate for lack of technical skill as a software developer with just more hours. The outcome is definitely not linear from how hard

you work on the input. Exactly. Like there are software developers who are so much smarter than me that if you gave me a year to do a job that took them two days, I probably couldn't do as good of a job, you know? Yeah. And so it's like, it's just not a matter of me just, well, if I just could think harder about this. I mean, to be fair, there are definitely aspects of the job the benefit from hard work. Like, do you show up to meetings on time? Do you put in the time to make sure you're present when your team needs you? And things like that. And being an absentee software engineer brings with it a bunch of downsides. But it's not the hours and it's not the stick-to-itiveness-isms and the other kind of grit that necessarily is the difference between a

great engineer that a company would want to hire and one that they would not. It has more to do with your ability to actually write good code that gets the job done. And it's hard to demonstrate that in any other field or transferable knowledge that's what i believe i do think technical writing could be a big deal yeah because why do i think that i just have this personal bias that really strong written communication skills make for awesome software developers there's probably truth to that i guess it depends on the technical writing though like there's some technical writing business writing where it's just it's it's the english language ran through a wood chipper to turn it into incomprehensible slop and so that might be rough but if you feel like there's stuff

that is that shows your ability to distill complicated concepts into easy to understand formats and you write fun little jokes in it also at the same time that would catch my eye yeah um little disney on ice references yeah grit and hard work i do think they can help if you're trying to like understand an existing code base or like i don't know really really learn a library or the ins and outs of some stuff, but you can work really hard and just go really far down a really dumb wrong path. And I've actually seen this with the rise of AI.

If I lean really heavily on just hitting tab in my editor to say, keep doing the thing I asked you to do. Since I'm not typing it all myself, sometimes I am not thinking as clearly about like, is this the right way to go? Because I can just see progress happening. But maybe some more thinking ahead of time would have pointed out,

what if I just do this totally different thing? That's not always the case. And sometimes I get that, what if I do this totally different thing experience from AI? But the point is, you can put in long hours to produce a bad outcome that you worked really hard for, and you would not have been able to cause as much damage if you did not work as hard. Yeah, it's true. How do I indicate that I know nothing and ready to learn? Yeah, I do think showing like, hey, I've done all this stuff. I'm, I'm 40. I'm not 22, but I, I am so ready to learn. I think pointing out your lack of ego and willingness to be the newbie would be important. And you also

have some evidence, right? Like, look at all these times I've switched into new careers as an adult. Yes. Like I I'm comfortable starting over and can figure it out. That's an important part of your career narrative. I think is you need to say, look, I'm not switching careers because I'm washing up and failing in each of these careers. I'm switching because I like to learn new things. And I have a demonstrated track record of moving to a new career and being successful. Yeah, that's a good angle. Other than that, I think that this person in this situation needs to follow basically the same advice of anyone who's starting out in software development with a slightly non-traditional

path to get there. So unless you're coming out of a computer science program, you are, quote, non-traditional. It turns out that's actually like 80% of software engineers are non-traditional, but well, they are coming out of a computer science program. So they're not quite the same as like a bootcamp grad or somebody who just is self-taught or whatever. That's a good point. And that's a leg up here. So that's a good point that, and when I say leg up, what I mean is you will be perceived as more capable than many other people in a similar situation who don't have that computer science degree. So that's, that's working in your favor. Yeah. You're a lower risk first hire in some ways than someone who doesn't have a degree. That's right. You will

be perceived as such. That's what matters. And what I want to suggest is that in all cases, if you're trying to convince someone that something about you is true, in this case, I'm a hard worker, I'm ready to learn, and I'm a fast learner, and I'm going to be a good software engineer, you can't just tell them. You have to show them. And I think the best way to show this is actually having lots of years of experience as a software engineer with a proven tracking. And in the absence of that, you have to show them something that can approximate for that. And so that almost always looks like projects where you can say, here's something I did on the side to learn how to use, I don't know, SQL. Like I want to learn SQL. So I set up

three different databases and I built a small web app that will interact with each of them to compare and contrast the syntax. Great. Good job. You know, pick projects just like that. They don't have to be useful. They don't have to be funded by Y Combinator or something. You know, you just need to have actually produced something. And if it's something that the user on the other end can actually interact with, so that the person that's interviewing you, if they can actually log into it, play with it, click around on it and see the code for it, all the better. Yeah. Yeah. I like that. I have seen people trying to get their first job who they try and show projects, but the project is not visible. They just say, I built this thing. And it's usually for a class. It's like a class

project, but I can't do anything with it. And it's tough. It's tough to use that as an example of capability when I just have to read the words that you wrote that said, I built, I don't know, a drone tracking app for my CS whatever class. Like, okay, I guess I believe you, but don't know how good it is. There's also a real difference between I built a drone tracking app for my class and I followed the step-by-step instructions in the course syllabus to type all the code that it told me to type and in the end i had a drone tracking app yeah i passed the test suite that has been hardened and just forged into this perfect instrument of detection of every stupid thing that students do in the class to detect every weird edge case and failure yeah my first

introduction to it's not the compiler's fault it's actually my fault was it's not the test suite's fault it's actually my code is broken i was like yeah i had to have tas tell me that a lot when i first started computering you're like huh that's weird yeah weird weird that the person who has never done this before and doesn't know how to do it would get it wrong instead of this test harness that is like 15 years old it's been battle-hardened by hundreds of students before me yeah no i'm pretty sure it's their fault all right have we answered the question i think so best of luck good luck to you i want to know what your fourth i mean not fourth this is your fourth your fifth career is going to be yeah yeah after 10 years in software what do you move to

maybe space law yeah there's there's not a lot of competition we might be retired by then yeah yeah it's very lucrative so uh it's lucrative in space dollars that you can only spend in space right which is weird but trust us they they're fine yeah i think you just described cryptocurrency no they're real trust us it's fine it's great all right what can people do if they want their own questions answered. Go over to softskills.audio and click the ask a question button where you can fill out our little form that lets you type in as much or as little information as you like. Send us a brief description of your question and situation and we will read it and then we will do our darndest to answer it on this show. Thank you so much for listening. We will catch you next week.