Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 48: Quitting a Death March & Am I Underpaid

Episode Date: February 21, 2017

Dave and Jamison answer these questions: When and how do you quit a company that is on a death march? How do I find out if I’m underpaid?

I am also recording. Ma-na, ma-na. Soft skills engineering. Ma-na, ma-na. Is that our intro music? Oh, no. It is now. It takes more than great code to be a great engineer.

This is Soft Skills Engineering, Episode 48. I am your host, Jameson Dance. And I am your host, Dave Smith. And today we have a brief message from a wonderful sponsor. are you interested in perhaps taking the soft skills engineering advice and quitting your job and getting a new one well boy do we have the opportunity for you algolia is a company that builds a hosted search platform they power search on hacker news periscope twitch a bunch of other popular sites and projects yes and algolia is hiring solutions engineers in san francisco

california and paris france so they sponsored us to get the word out the solutions engineers work with Algolia customers to build SDKs to help solve client problems and basically make the service look good. We talked to Algolia recently and one of the things that impressed me about them is their culture. They take it really seriously

and they work hard to create a good environment for people to do great work. They are also looking for a specific kind of engineer. You'll have a lot of latitude to solve customer problems without a lot of oversight. So they want someone who's good at self-direction and exploration. And they also have told us about their interview process.

So they want you to go to algolia.com slash soft skills engineering and check it out there. The process is a phone screen followed by a GitHub take-home assignment where you'll publish your code on GitHub. After that, they'll fly you out to one of their offices for an in-person interview. So that's the process, and we definitely recommend that you go check it out if you're looking for something new and exciting. algolia.com slash soft skills engineering. Yep. Thanks again for sponsoring. all right i think we have a comment to share from a listener this week this comes from listener

named philip and he writes in thanks for doing the podcast it's definitely aided me in dealing with superiors better before i tended to side and show support with one side now i tend to be a peacemaker and make everyone happy good job philip that's so good literally making everyone happy that is hard to do you have done it i does that mean when i feel happy it's because of you yes and if so thank you thank you philip thank philip for philip um but seriously good job yeah good job all right i will read our first question when and how do you quit a company that is on a death march normally i would just quit but i've recently been promoted to team lead there's also a certain level of camaraderie among the devs and i'd hate to leave and force someone

else to work harder to take my place even if it's only temporary hmm should we start with a definition of what a death march yeah yeah does it literally end in your death yeah because if so you should not quit wait why not because you'll die it's the only thing keeping you alive is the march i thought isn't that backwards maybe this is you stayed maybe this is why we need to define death march yeah so the listener included a link to wikipedia i read the page and it basically is a project that people think is doomed to fail but also has intense deadline pressure so usually people work really long hours and they feel like the effort is not going to result in something they're going to be proud of yeah so should you quit in the middle yes should you like

abandon your team to this this bad situation and and i think you might think as a knee-jerk reaction well yeah of course you should quit but i don't think it's that simple why not well if you quit then you're leaving your co-workers in a rut to carry the weight through the rest of the death march that you're leaving behind right yeah i think i think that's their concern especially because they're in some leadership position and i haven't been in what i would call a death march before i have done periods of crunch time where it's working uh really long hours for a set period of time and it's kind of like sharing a foxhole with someone like you're in this situation together and it builds a closer relationship the relationships i have with people that i did

crunch time with are probably closer than other professional relationships just because you're spending so much time together you're like putting out these fires together you're going through this intense pressure together and so i can see that being hard to leave like you feel you feel closer to these people and you don't want to hurt them see you later nerds enjoy the foxhole remember how you work in 80 hour weeks well it's about to be 100 hour weeks forged in the fiery furnace of affliction how'd you like that alliteration yeah there's also this weird feeling where looking out at people that aren't in the death march half of me was like i am so jealous that those people have lives outside of work for these few weeks and the

other half of me was like they're not elite enough to like work this hard and it was almost this point of pride that we we could we could do it and the stuff we were working on was so important that it demanded all of our time so i would say that you suffered from a mild case of stockholm syndrome yeah very possibly um but again i wouldn't call it a death march because we had very clear timelines for when it would end and we stuck to those timelines and i think a common thing is uh you start with very clear timelines and they just keep getting extended and Yeah. If I found myself in a death march and it was so bad that I was contemplating leaving, but I still felt attachment to my teammates and to the company, I would probably see what I could do to end the death march without ending my employment. You mean just talking to a manager or someone who's responsible for setting the pace?

Yeah. I mean, if you go to a manager and say, this is getting really intense and I'm hearing rumblings of people quitting, that's going to very possibly move things to end the death march. Because the only thing that makes a death march worse is when the marchers start quitting. Because then what? i i don't know that someone who thinks that a death march will save it is the right way to run a company will respond well to that kind of feedback though because in my mind these don't work and reaching for one is a sign of failures in other areas yeah and you're just trying to like grind people up and convert them into productivity um yeah so so someone views people in this way where you just kind of like chew them up and spit them out because that's what it does like people don't have happy productive careers in death marches i i feel like that might be a hard conversation to have it would be especially if the answer is well if we don't succeed then

we're all gonna lose our jobs anyway yeah yeah yeah if if if they're if the person who decided this isn't just like i'll i'll kill our team but i'll get a 10 bonus but if it's literally like if we don't ship this product for this gigantic customer then the company will cease to exist but if it's anything less than that you have negotiating room and you know there are ways to ship product without necessarily meeting a schedule or meeting all of the needed required so-called needed features um maybe you can negotiate the feature set downward a little bit or maybe you can push the date out a little bit yeah i mean the the way to ship a product on a deadline is to cut scope until until it fits so let's talk about what would happen if you quit

what would your co-workers think of you i mean i i could see them feeling like oh so and so abandon us but that's from within the stockholm syndrome the weird prism that the death march puts over your vision what if after you quit the company goes oh this actually was bad and they end the death march and you're the hero yeah that could happen too it's okay first i want to examine some things we haven't examined yet why did you start a death march how how did you as employees end up in a situation where your manager comes to you and says hey everybody we've got it's a really important thing we're gonna need everybody to work nights and weekends for like five months to hit it or whatever because to me if someone came to me and said that uh i would say no and

then if they said but we have to then i would say okay i will now leave so in other words you would never even start marching not if it was something i could see coming there's an implicit agreement or relationship with the company i think that you have when you get into a death march which is like i will sacrifice for the company and in turn the company will reward me or pay me back somehow and i i don't know that the company is likely to hold up that end of the implicit bargain i have a story about a this is a friend of a former co-worker so it's a little bit it's secondhand but he was married and he was working in the video game industry which is notorious for hard deadlines and death marches but they're also that's like the default way they operate yeah

basically they're also notorious for big bonuses at the end of the death march so theoretically you go in one into one of these things with your eyes wide open and then you come out with bags of money at the end and he was working on a game with promises of tons of money and he was like occasionally sleeping under his desk and working like 80 to 90 hours a week but he was holding on hope for that big payout at the end and when they finally shipped the game he got his big payout and it went into his bank account and then it disappeared and then he came home and his locks were changed and his wife served him divorce papers so it was really really unhappy situation for this guy so i think that if your personal life is taking that big of a toll that there's

basically no amount of money that can compensate you and i would say get out while you still can dave you earlier mentioned stockholm syndrome and i don't know that it's quite stockholm syndrome in this guy's or in this question askers situation but the fact that they have this leadership position makes them feel a sense of responsibility not just to the company because if it's just the company you can say well like i don't care companies are faceless soulless entities that will betray me at a heartbeat but it's my teammates and they're real people and i don't want to hurt they're counting on me yeah yeah and and i don't want to let them down that's a really good point and i'm not sure how to deal productively with that besides just explain it to i don't know

you well explain it to who to your to your yeah maybe maybe that would cause your whole team to yeah it's kind of like pandora's box once you reveal that you're disgruntled with the situation then that'll spread like a virus yeah because the the traditional thing you're supposed to do when you quit is say like oh the i had a great time here the company's in good hands everything's fine like you don't want to quit and say by the way you're all suckers yeah taking advantage of and all the more reason to go back to your leadership and say this is serious it's a big deal we need to end this or at least make a plan to get out of it yeah there so there's this thing we do it with questions where we try and answer the question before the question which in this

case we're trying to say like what do you do when a death march starts yeah or how do you avoid it from starting because that's so much easier than what do you do once you're in it uh dealing with it yeah i don't i mean i don't know that there's a pain-free way to to extricate yourself from the situation it's like your like arm is stuck in the rock and you have to saw it off with your pocket knife yeah exactly so i think at this point you need to try to quantify the problems or the pain that's going to come from leaving are you going to carry a black mark with you with the people at this company with your employer with future employers are your co-workers going to feel like you betrayed their trust and if you can come up with satisfactory answers to those questions

then you can quit but i it could very well be that it's going to be too heavy to leave it you could also ask if what the potential upside is this is a common part of the startup myth where there's some period of time where everyone's working really hard and they're trying to rush to get to the market first or solve some really intense problem and they push really hard for a period of time and then persevere and pass through and then they're into the magical unicorn billion dollar valuation land or whatever and uh it's exceedingly unlikely that any company ever gets there but it does happen so i mean if if you feel like it's not a march towards failure but it's just really intense high pressure but there is some upside then it could potentially be worth

it to push through but that's that's so hard it is and you could actually ask for the upside you could say hey we're putting in a ton of hours i want a commitment from the company that we're going to get compensated after this is done yeah yeah there's if if you have created a situation where you need to do some crunch time um there are responsible ways to do it and one of the things is to put explicit stop times on it and the other thing is to recognize that after you finish there's a period of recovery where people are just burnt out and they can't do the work that they were doing before they can't even do like normal work yep uh and people either will quit or they'll just like come in and do nothing or you can recognize that and and give

vacation time or i don't know just like say hey take the week off just be on call for prod outages yeah i was gonna say offering vacation is a nice way to do things if your company is strapped for cash you can say hey after this is done after we ship everyone gets a week off or two weeks off yeah yeah i guess you said strap for cash so bonuses but i mean people won't say no to money but i don't know that that's a great reward for missing time with your family for months at a time or well tough one um how do we sum it up i think we sum it up by saying this is a really hard situation it's best to not get in it in the first place and once you're in we have no advice for you i think i personally would quit yeah you definitely would and i yeah i would 100 percent

quit like i'm gonna work 80 hour weeks for myself and not for anyone else i think you would work 80 hour weeks for about one tenth of one week yeah um i honestly don't think i don't think the downsides of quitting are that bad honestly i think we've kind of erred on the side of staying a little bit during this conversation but um oh heck no i don't you wouldn't don't stay i think sometimes we overplay the downside of quitting especially in the industry the way it is today there are plenty of jobs and no one would fall to you later if you said we were death marching and i didn't want to do it for the fourth month in a row you know yeah and and some people might worry does that communicate that you're not dedicated to the company and you won't give everything to

the corporation like yes it does because that's an unrealistic expectation to have it turns out there is a limit to how much i will give yeah commensurate with how much you will pay me that's not that's actually not true it's not that simple well yeah but but this agreement that you work 40 hours and you get paid a salary and then you go home and have a life outside of work i think um companies that can successfully plan around that are places i would rather work anyways than places that will ask in the interview like what would you do if we had some product and you had to work 100 hour weeks for six months to get out the door can you be dedicated enough like yes i have the passion i want to work here yeah i can be passionate and my passion is spread across all

kinds of different things and that makes me a better employee question answered all right our next question comes from a listener named klaus he says hi i am a software engineer with a small company of nine people my annual review is coming up the company told me they are willing to pay me more i have a strong but unconfirmed feeling that i am underpaid in relation to my colleagues how can i find out if i'm underpaid without looking like an ambitious greedy slime bag note that my company is very small thanks in advance i love the show it makes my commute really enjoyable and weird for people watching me laughing alone glad to help make you look weird yep congratulations and sorry about that

yeah so the fact that your company said they're willing to pay you more to me is like a 99 confirmation that you're underpaid yeah yeah even compared to your co-workers um yeah you're probably unless you've been like threatening to quit and the company rests on your shoulders the only reason they would do that in my mind i mean like there's probably lots of reasons actually never mind not the only reason they're probably wanting to do right by you but also that to me just implies they feel that you're underpaid yes as a manager if i went out of my way to tell someone they were underpaid it probably means that they've been looking at the spreadsheet that has everybody's salaries and yours is like this obvious outlier and it's and they felt bad yeah they felt bad

and they're trying to prevent what we're about to tell you to do um so i have i have done this dance several times but never with co-workers where i think i'm underpaid and then i go find more information and it turns out that i have always found information that leads me to believe i could make more money what do you know we're in the booming market um i've done it by doing like one-on-one salary exchanges with people where we just say hey i'll tell you if you tell me and then we tell each other and like huh one of these numbers is a lot bigger um i have created uh anonymous surveys and kind of shown them to community people and collected a bunch of actual data and then plotted it on a spreadsheet with

like years of experience and language and created best fit lines and stuff uh and then i have looked at like salary.com and glassdoor and those websites but i haven't worked at companies big enough to have um reliable data about what my co-workers made so it was more to see like what industry people make i have done those as well and i have also just to make sure that it's scientific and a nice random sample i will stand on a street corner with a cardboard box that says if you're willing to tell me your salary pull over here and we'll talk and i have collected zero data points that way just so you know huh what do you know um did you did you make sure to put on the sign like

hey i'm not a crazy person i forgot no wonder i didn't get any any any bites i want to reiterate what jameson said about these various websites like salary.com it is so so wrong i just oh every time i go there i'm like what what is that like i never fit in the curve either i'm on the left or the right and the titles that they use it's like software engineer one through five and i think those roughly correlate to years of experience if you read the details of the job description but then they have all these other things like computer programming analyst expert you know like what's that you know so it's just so wrong yeah i've never really liked these salary these like aggregated salary reports because i think they

they put too many people into the same bucket and then you are trying to find exactly what you are worth on them in the market and you don't fit any you don't fit that bucket because it's too wide yeah in in my experience from looking at the salaries in the big famous tech companies and then talking to people i know that work there they feel they feel like they're on the low end the salaries at these websites feel feel lower than what i hear like if you're comparing to silicon valley or big city salaries yeah if you go like look up facebook and then you talk to someone that works at facebook in my experience they make way more money than shows up on that website yeah and that's another good point is that these big tech companies they tend to be in

very expensive high cost of living areas and so they may literally make twice as much as you if you live in like the united states midwest but they might have less money than you as a result yep where they live yeah so how to find out if you're underpaid i mean you can those websites are the the easiest thing to check and they can give you an estimate that's not very good but at least something to start at but then all the other options require a little bit more potential awkwardness yeah where if you tell someone how much you make and they tell tell you how much they make then um someone will be sad yes one of you either way one of you is going to be sad or maybe both of you like oh i was really hoping you made more well even if you make the same amount of

money exactly one one of you might feel like wait i know way more than this person i'm i'm way more valuable to the company so a good friend of mine has something he calls the salary game and we may have talked about this on the show before but there are three rules and you must agree to these rules to play the game first one is we both have to tell salaries we even though in time one person will go first the other person has to promise to go the second rule is we both promise not to get mad and then the third rule is we have to agree to these rules before we begin and i have played the game with him and it's been interesting and he has uh not gotten mad and i have not gotten mad good work yes i mean you won um i don't know but this is easier to do with non-co-workers yeah

because the salary isn't well like i hinted at earlier the salary is not directly related to your value to the company it's got a lot to do with negotiating and what the market was like when you applied and how many times you switch jobs and all these different things that aren't how much money does your work make the company um and that's easier to acknowledge in in people that you don't work with but when you work directly with the person you kind of expect or at least i expect things to be a little more fair yeah just irrationally i'm like yeah it's fine that other people like make more or less than they're technically contributing to the company but my co-worker is like it's fair here right yeah and then you find out wait no it's not it's

actually not and but you sit next to that person and see them every day now so do you think that ranges are different enough at different companies that we have to tell klaus like find out with people you don't work with but also you need to talk to people in your company or is it okay to just get a general idea of the industry and location that you're in i think that especially since this company he's asking about is very small that i would not get salary data from my coworkers in this situation. I think that kind of news could travel really fast and I wouldn't go to them. But given how small the company is, I would go to my manager and say, how much less am I making than my coworkers? And what would be a reasonable level to bring me up to be on par with

them? And that can be a really awkward conversation to have, but it's a really good conversation to have i think have you done that before i never did it but once i became a manager i realized i would be perfectly comfortable talking about this um it's like the whole salary system is shrouded in mystery and then when you become a manager you're like oh this is actually just people making decisions and they're just as um self-aware and and what's the word what's the word where you are lack self-confidence uh jameson i don't know like they're just as like self-conscious self-conscious about their own

mistakes as you are about the things you do day to day so yeah it's a conversation that they might be a little bit uneasy to have it but it's something that they have a lot more concrete information about than you do that's really interesting i have always treated it as kind of an adversarial thing where i need to defeat them like keep it low keep their salary as low as possible no no no on the other end where i'm trying to increase my salary sorry yes uh yeah no i'm trying to crush my subordinates under my heel no well that no that can't exist on the manager's side too as you feel like it's a competition to keep everyone as low as possible because you feel like it's your job to keep the cost down but no that's not what i'm talking

about okay i'm talking about when i am working somewhere and i feel that i'm underpaid i like gather my weapons and my weapons are all these things we talked about yeah i have information from friends and colleagues and the industry at large and even potentially other job offers and i use that to defeat them in the salary negotiation battle and like make them give me more money but i haven't considered that more collaborative aspect where they want you to be happy and they're Willing to give you more money to make you happy and make you stay. Mm-hmm Yeah, I don't know. I think it's worth a try especially in this situation since his manager told him Uh, we're willing to pay you more

You know, like that's yeah, you just ask like how much more yeah, how much would you be willing to pay? What's the most you'd be willing to pay me? I expect they would say I don't know how much do you want, but they might not they might say a number And then that doesn't mean you have to take that number, but that's more information so a minute ago you hinted at coming in with other job offers as a data point in your in your armament have you ever done that have you ever gotten a done an interview and gotten a job offer so that you can negotiate for a better salary at work actually no i haven't and i am pretty sure several months ago on this podcast i am on the record saying that feels scummy to me

it does to me too but i think you but i know people have done it before yeah yeah and um i have seen it done i have not done it myself but i have gotten job offers and then declined them and then at a later date used that as a data point to argue for a bigger salary at my current job but i've never walked in you know with a hostage and said give me more money or i'm gonna i'm gonna let this grenade drop yeah i don't i think you could do it in a non-scummy way if you were genuinely if you were interested in taking another job if the money was better and i don't know if if it wasn't going in with the attitude of i'm gonna go get an offer from this sucker company that i'll never accept and then take it back to my company and make them give me more money but

if it was just like i'm feeling underpaid this other job could pay me more but i would also be happy to stay here if i made this this much more money too yes and this is an important point because just because salary.com says a number or even your co-workers have a number the only number that actually matters is how much someone is willing to pay you and the only way to find that number is to go ask someone to pay you and that you do that through the interview and offer process and so at the end of the day that is the most reliable way to figure out what you are actually worth on the job market yeah as a small aside this is one thing i really enjoy about consulting which is you have these conversations way more often than in full-time employment because you're

constantly working with different clients and you have to figure out your value and what you're um what you feel like you can convince the clients that you're worth a lot more often so i i feel like it makes that a little more clear to me yeah cool have we answered the question i think so good luck klaus i hope you make huge piles of money and find the happiness that you so desperately seek yeah i'd love to hear um what you decide to do and how it turned out and not how much money you make. I don't care about that part, but I just want to know how it goes.

Yeah, we'd love to hear about it too. Send us a message. How can people generally send us messages, Jameson? They can do it on Twitter. They can send us a direct message to ask us questions or just to leave non-public feedback. Also, there is a link on our website, softskills.audio, that lets you submit to a Google form.

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