Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 484: How to get a raise after slacking off for YEARS and my PM won't stop DM'ing me

Episode Date: October 27, 2025

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Hi! Love your show and how casually you talk and make fun of everything! I started my career as a freelancer and then joined a mid-size software development company to learn how the sausage is really made, salary wasn’t that important back then. A few kids and a lot more expensive lifestyle later the compensation has become more motivating, but I’m not sure how to sell myself to my manager if I don’t feel like I deserve a high salary myself. (The manager decides the salaries for all our team members.) For years I’ve been focusing on my family and other life stuff, so I’ve spent a looot of working hours not working and basically doing the minimum progress acceptable. Slow progress has come up once with my manager, from which I wiggled out of with various excuses. I’ve realised that this way of working isn’t really fair for the company and my teammates and I’ve started to take this job and my career seriously in the last few months. The company and everyone working there are super supportive and it’s been a terrific experience for all of those years. I’ve gotten a raise multiple times with always me initiating that conversation. There aren’t any clear metrics to improve that directly ties to the salary: I’ve asked my manager about it and the answer was vague like “we have this local salary survey that we take as the base and work from there”. So long story short: how to ask for a raise while not feeling like a criminal since I feel like I haven’t earned the salary I had thus far? I’m a team lead who’s growing increasingly frustrated with my project manager. Every planning conversation ends up in my private DMs, no matter how many times I’ve asked him to move these discussions to the team chat. When he messages me one-on-one, my team loses visibility into decisions, questions don’t get addressed openly, and important context just evaporates. It’s not only slowing us down, it also makes me feel like the burden of relaying everything falls squarely on me. I’ve tried gently redirecting him back to the shared space, but he keeps defaulting to my DMs. How can I get him to respect the boundaries of team communication without damaging our working relationship? Sincerely, Lost in the PM’s DMs

it takes more than remembering that the blackout blinds that cover your window actually open to be a great software engineer this is episode 484 of the soft skills engineering podcast where i'm your host jameson 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 bringing dark mode ui into real life that's hilarious every window has blackout blinds you're like the day star is behind them it's such a stereotype but i feel like it's true i don't know if i roll into the office we work mostly remote and so sometimes attendance is sparse and if it's just engineers the lights are off they're always off oh funny it's because you

sunburn easily yeah i don't know yeah it reminds us of the that shiny orb in the sky that hurts us dave do you want to thank our patrons yes i do big thanks to the patreon people who are supporting us at a level that gets them a weekly shout out they are joel harks says hi to friends ex-colleagues and deprecated classmates thanks joel harks how to test front end.com beta test compiler cache another awesome benedict cumberbatch reference engineering leadership summit october 24th, an open source event. Register at ESLimit.com. Let's normalize calling curly braces squiggly braces.

Even though they're pretty curly and not so squiggly. Anyway, use NeverEndingStory Pointer.com so I can. Oh, there's going to be a saga with that one, I'm sure. Alright, next up. Woke up this morning. Got myself Dave watching Sopranos. Forget delusions of grandeur. My coworkers have delusions of adequacy.

My actual name on LinkedIn is Yammy Debugging in the Dark Canny. The mobile development ordinary, first of his name. Quote or one equals one. Drop table miyamix jacob chandling bjorn sorry i forgot to change my patreon name the smell is no longer an issue we've gotten used to it the missing semicolon christy the world's okayest programmer noah labhart unsalted french fries are orally objectionable that's more accurate that is more accurate i wa on holiday but now i'm back soft skillet nation soft skillet nation i read the

typo in that one because i just i want to be accurate yes of course daniel remsburg nick if the service org uses a subservice org and the controls of the subservice org are necessary pretend it's not javier gonzalez chewy ted timberl jameson dance dance refrigeration i've never heard that before that is great that is a new one you could dress up as that for halloween jameson dance dance refrigeration you know i'm working on the body type nice nice if i remember right he was a portly gentleman and i am yeah doing my best sliding right into that yep okay continuing on a single open parenthesis dan from german deployed chase w norton never is not just greater remarks flamingo emoji i like chicken i like liver miyamix miyamix please

deliver swiss python sub it every october gotta keep the patreon name latency resistant kyle boss can't see dodds that guy over there jenny kim the stochastic parrot quentin we have not heard from you in a month please go see susan and hr asap jonathan kings and i beautiful functional user documentation okay slash slash open paren oh close paren slash backslash which chat gpt says is a cow but i don't i don't really know if i buy it will angel wants to drone at dan deploy softwar's episode for a new sprint brayden canes john grant britney ellick and closed parenthesis followed by an actual literal closed parenthesis you rock oh boy thank you everyone i'm I'm just getting over a cold.

So the laughter was not appreciated today. It made my lungs go into a fit. You've probably extended my symptoms by at least a few extra days. Thanks a lot, team. And you can't put a price on that. I can measure it in tissue. Yeah, like tissue seconds. Some measure of consumption of tissues per second.

That's a rate, I guess. Not a time. Let's get into our first question. Shall I read it? I was hoping you would. This is from, coming up with fake names is more difficult than variable names. Aren't all variable names fake in a way, though? Yeah, I guess.

Well, I don't want to get that philosophical right now. I don't know if I can handle it. Okay. Well, I'll read the question anyways. Hi, love your show and how casually you talk and make fun of everything. I started my career as a freelancer and then joined a midsize software development company to learn how the sausage is really made. salary wasn't important back then a few kids and a lot more expensive lifestyle later the

compensation became more motivating but i'm not sure how to sell myself to my manager if i don't feel like i deserve a higher salary myself the manager decides the salaries for all our team members for years i've been focusing on my family and other life stuff too so i spent a lot of working hours not working and basically doing the minimum progress acceptable slow progress has come up once with my manager from which i wiggled out with various excuses oh i'm just imagining that conversation and why are you so slow oh well you know just a one-time thing it's not because i often don't work when i'm supposed to be definitely wasn't on purpose and intentional for years yeah i've realized that this way of working isn't really fair to the

company and my teammates and i've started to take this job in my career seriously in the last few months the company and everyone working there are super supportive and it's been a terrific experience for all of those years i guess does that mean in general the company's been a good experience because it's only been a few months that they've been trying harder right yeah yeah a few months i think change of uh yeah we'll i'll summarize what i believe the question is asking after you're done reading the whole thing sorry for interrupting for you it's not an interruption dave it's a welcome insight okay i've gotten a raise multiple times with always with me initiating that conversation there aren't any clear metrics to improve that directly tie to

the salary i've asked my manager about it and the answer was vague like we have this local salary survey that we take as the base and work from there so long story short how do i ask for a raise while not feeling like a criminal since i feel like i haven't earned the salary i had thus far okay this is a great question i mean there's a beautiful story unfolding behind this question that i just love and there's also a really interesting ethical situation that you're now in that i also love i love it because it's yours not mine i was just talking to a friend this week about a challenging situation like an interpersonal situation and he was like oh i love hearing about this and i'm like i don't like living it he's like oh it's so much easier when it's someone

else's problem that should be the theme of our podcast is so much easier when it's someone else's problem yeah emotional labor no this is emotional reality tv drama yeah entertainment yes tell me all your problems i will eat my popcorn yes exactly all right now i'm gonna now i'm gonna summarize like i promised yeah i demand it okay your demand is my command whoa is that like is that like the your wish is my command equivalent but where your demand is my command yeah i like that better though okay well here here i go so this is a just an absolutely lovely coming of age story where someone this is the this is the simba hakuna matata converting to i actually have an obligation and responsibility and i will do my duty story you know what i'm saying that the way

i perceived this person basically it was like look i've got a job it pays the bills my main priority in life is comfort and entertainment and to do as little work as possible yeah that's how i read this and i'm like look we all relate to that you know and something happened and what's so beautiful about what happened is this person had kids and suddenly feels like oh i need to take care of these kids. And I need to make more money to do that. Except I have not earned more money. I love the honesty. I love it. And by I have not earned it, I mean to say this person is so in touch with reality. They recognize that they don't deserve more money. So now here comes the entertaining ethical quandary. You've spent years being overpaid. Even though your income

wasn't high you were doing very little for it so all these years you were earning more than you should have and now you're like okay how do i reconcile that against my newfound desire to give back work hard and earn more like what do i gotta do to pay my debt yeah i think just tell them say listen i slacked off a lot a lot you have no idea how much all those meetings i was in with my camera off at the beach and those days are behind me despite how awesome it was so i'm coming clean what would happen if you said that do you really okay are you half joking when you say that or all joking no i think i don't think it would go well yeah i don't think it would lead to you getting a raise now i'll put it that way yes maybe they would appreciate the honesty and they would say

yeah we all kind of suspected and so good of you to come clean and you lied to us about it like right it wasn't just yeah you didn't just work very little but when we called you out on it you gaslit us about it yeah i don't think it matters i guess uh for your future raised discussions i'll put it that way you have turned over a new leaf at work hopefully it's visible to your manager and it sounds like you somehow got raises before this without miraculously a good job so hopefully it should be possible to say look at how much higher my performance is right now i'm i'm honestly i'm more committed than i've ever been to this job and working harder than i've ever worked and i hope it shows in the results and i would like that to be rewarded

with a compensation increase i i don't know that there's a way to even bring up even if you both kind of know it i don't know that there's a way to bring up the fact that hey like that was the old me. I slacked off a lot. Listen, a lot. I don't know that there's a way to bring that up that doesn't make this conversation weirder. I agree. So here's how I would frame this. I agree with you, Jameson, that it's time to have a conversation with your boss. And I think the conversation I would have is, hey, I am turning over a new leaf in my life. I'm starting a new chapter where i am focusing on giving more to my professional life i'm going to improve my skills i'm going to improve my productivity and i started this process three months ago and i'm going to

continue it for the rest of my life i'm growing i'm maturing and i just want you to be aware of this i'm not i wouldn't even i wouldn't even talk about money at this point i just want you to be aware this is my intention can you give me feedback on how i'm doing just you know maybe i'll check in with you every once in a while say like hey how's my new chapter looking and you tell me do you see it do you sense it because i really want to give more than i've been giving and and leave it at that because here's the thing i love it when people say i want to do a better job i want to take my career more seriously but it's only been a few months yeah and who knows how long this will last before you slip back into your old patterns and i would hate to go and get some

raise or something just because you've done good for a few months after years of slacking off so So I would start with that conversation with your boss and just let them know. If I was a manager, and actually I am, so this isn't a hypothetical, when people come to me and say, Dave, I'm going to step up my work. Here are the things I'm doing to work harder and do a better job. There's just nothing but awesomeness. I love that. I'm so happy when people tell me that.

And you want to know how often that's happened in my career? So far, zero times. i choose to believe it's because you're already motivating them to to do the maximum they possibly can and just by working with you they're already they've already stepped up yeah right there oh i don't think so uh maybe who knows maybe they're maybe i just i don't know maybe we've hired really great we do i do i am surrounded by really great team members so i will say that and i always have been james and i have both been really fortunate to work with a lot of really great people anyway i would love it so this is not an awkward conversation it's not weird it's

just putting your boss on notice to expect great things and i'm gonna you know do my best now prove to yourself that this is a permanent change by doing it for at least six months six months then what the beauty is do it so you've already done it for a few months do it for a few more have the conversation with your boss today do it for a few more months and then come to them be like, okay, it's been a few months since I talked to you. Have you seen it? Do you feel it? And hopefully your boss says yes, because there's a chance they'll be like, nope. I didn't notice a dang thing. But they'll probably say yes. And when they do say, hey, I want to give more to this company. And I want you to help me develop a plan where I can earn more money. What do you need to

see from me? What kind of output do you need? What kind of productive habits? What kind of team contributions what kind of hours what kind of whatever it is what do you need from me to earn say 15 more money in a year you know and let your boss tell you then and and just they won't have an answer probably that they can give off the cuff yeah but this this will start the process of creating an individual career growth plan for you which by the way you need to take responsibility for anyway because most managers just don't have the time to really do that and manage it effectively for all their team yeah but just ask them make them put it in writing what you would need to do and now you have a real clear plan and uh that's that's at your six month mark so that's six months

after starting the new chapter and then you can work for the next six months to a year toward that plan and then earn the more money and i think that will help you feel better about your ethical quandary you know where you spent so much time being a net drain on this company i just started I think that's so funny. I love it so much when people take responsibility for the reality that they've created. It's like one of the most wonderful things because it turns out it's just so rare. Yeah. You know what I mean?

Anyway, so I think this is like a 12 to 18-month plan that's already started a few months ago. And it started with the most important part, which is you took responsibility. You know, you stood up and said, I'm going to do a better job. I have kids. I feel a sense of duty. It's just wonderful. and then in the next 12 to 18 months i think it'll give you enough time to be like yeah i earned this i deserve it and then you can set that ethical quandary aside earn more money take care of your

family and move on to greater things i want to point to a question there aren't any clear metrics to improve that directly tie to salary yes it's an implied question what what do i what specifically do i do that's i would say that's the norm and if there were metrics i would be skeptical of them because it's so fuzzy it's not it's not a multiple choice test where there's a right answer and you get the grade and you see okay i got i got this many right so i get this grade and so i get this outcome it's so multivariate and it's very hard to quantify and so i i think saying well they haven't given me the right metrics so i can go chase them is maybe true and also not useful and dave you mentioned go talk to your boss about it be very prepared for them to say yeah i don't

know or to give you something vague like you need to have more impact it's kind of on you to to develop a plan and get not approval as in a promise that okay if you do this plan we'll do it but yeah it's directional like yeah this this seems like the kind of thing that would lead to more impact yeah places try to invest in career ladders different companies invest different amounts and how much guidance there is but it's always there's always a ton of subjectivity in it so yeah of course you cannot you cannot find any certainty here like a metric to hit in all reality yeah so so don't look for them i think it's useful to look for impact in ways you can demonstrate impact but saying this is just too hard this is hard to do because there aren't any metrics to hit

like yep welcome to reality man it's like it's challenging yeah go work in sales yeah exactly So you want clearly defined metrics? There you go. Yep. There's a reason I don't have clearly defined metrics by working in sales. That's right. I would be bad at that.

I love that, James. And it's great advice. And it's a good reminder that it's not just about finding the right crank and cranking it faster. You know, it's just, life's never that simple. Yeah. But surely, surely, you know, or you can figure out what's important to your team, department, or company.

What is it? What is the thing that's so important? And help achieve that. Also, this reminds me of a really hilarious tweet that I read recently, where this 20-something-year-old says, I want to tell you all how I became a senior vice president of a Fortune 500 company by age 27. Have you read this one, Jameson? Yeah. i just focused on impact over everything i did every meeting i went to every presentation i gave i just focused i asked myself what is the most impactful thing i can do and then after several years of this the ceo who is my dad promoted me to senior vice president i really had that impact yep the ultimate advice how to get a raise after slacking off for years is

nepotism yes exactly so that's one way to do it dave i think we've answered the question i think so do you want to read our next question here we go yes i do this comes from a listener named lost in the pm's dms i'm a team lead who's growing increasingly frustrated with my project manager every planning conversation ends up in private dms no matter how many times i've asked him to move these discussions to the team chat when he messages me one-on-one my team loses visibility into decisions questions don't get answered don't get addressed openly and important context just evaporates it's not only slowing us down it's also making me feel like the burden of relaying everything falls squarely on me i've tried gently redirecting him back to the shared space but he

keeps defaulting to my dms how can i get him to respect the boundaries of team communication without damaging our working relationship sincerely lost in the pm's dms oh man this is so timely i literally got on my soapbox this week about this at work are you the pm no i am the dme often yes i pretty regularly will get dms about a non-sensitive non-secret thing just work stuff yeah and i have keyboard shortcuts set up that stick in snippets that say hey this seems i'd love to talk about it can we move this to public channel x and then i swapped out the channel name depending on what it is probably i should just stick an llm in there to infer what channel it is obviously we need more more llms in my workflow of course and i've been doing this for years of

my life and everyone has always responded sure and then done it and it didn't have the overall change in behavior the impact on behavior that i wanted to in that it kept happening yeah and today or not today this week i finally put it on a meeting agenda to say here's why i do this here here are the outcomes i'm looking for do we want those outcomes everyone agrees yeah this would be great it'd be great to have work more visible it'd be great to make it easier to participate make it easier to share etc like that's that's the kind of collaborative working space that people want and it's often just a habit or this i think politeness was one thing that came up like they don't want to bother other people with it so there were some legitimate concerns of here's why they

are doing it yeah and uh i think it had never moved from jameson's going to insist on this so yeah i forgot to like oh this is a practice that we should do because it's better for the company even though that they they did not object to it in any way right but they did not really do you feel like they didn't really connect the dots to why yeah because i just assumed well obviously if i annoy them enough this way then they'll finally get fed up and do it yeah which is dumb that was a dumb assumption in hindsight i should have talked explicitly about what i wanted and why i was pushing for this much earlier and i feel like i'm seeing the same the same shape here where you ask your pm yeah hey can we go to the shared space and he keeps defaulting to dms but have you

said all of the other stuff here like why you want to do it and why you want in the future when your to dms when your pm dms you why why should he instead default to shared spaces like i feel like there's a missing why behind here for the pm and dms are often easier to get responses in like how often have you put a message in a public channel and you just get crickets then you dm someone and they actually respond because it's a different notification or something so yeah that's a good point and that's probably why that may be one of the things motivating your pm yeah it's easier to get responses and i've been guilty of this too even even people that i redirect sometimes then sometimes i don't respond fast enough and like it's kind of on me to make it worth their

while but i think what i'm suggesting is you need to explain the same underlying concern you have that you've explained to us in the question to your pm yeah i don't think that would damage a working relationship you're not going to explode at him and say you moron you keep dming me when i tell you not to you you just need to say can we agree on this way of working together yeah like hey i just want you to know so okay actually yeah so jameson i think the economics term here is there are externalities from this product manager's behavior that they don't have to internalize as costs but you do and one of those is that you have to then you're now responsible for summarizing everything that was discussed and decided and then placing that into a public forum

again so it basically doubles the amount of work you have to do because not only do you participate in the private discussion but now you have to go and like share what was discussed and so maybe if you share with your pm like hey this mode i'm sure you have your reasons for it but i want you to know it creates extra work for me and i think that would be they'd be like oh yeah it could be great exactly my plan is working people often surprise me with how little they can infer about how their behavior affects you yeah you know and so like when you go and say hey just you know this creates extra work for me because i have to do this and this and this they might just be like oh my gosh never never occurred to me yeah you know and so you have to tell them that's the only way they

can find out yeah i i assume this is just a habit it's not a deliberate decision of well i i communicate in dms because of these benefits i think it's just how it goes i'm a slack admin at our at my employer because we're a small company and i get these metrics of here's the the proportion of private to public messages and i'm trying to shift them i i look at that and think oh that's there are too many private dms surely we can't have that much like secret drama happening that needs to happen in dms i had that same problem at my previous company i went through the stats and i i launched a concerted effort to get people to use public channels and i did it over and over and over again and i checked that metric month after month and it never moved an inch and i

actually realized part of the reason why which is there's never the right channel yeah for the audience you need to discuss something with and this this is like so i'm going to just assume slack or teams here but it's actually a huge pain when you're like okay i need a i need these two product managers involved i need a ui designer i need an engineer and i need someone from marketing you know it's like okay what channel does that go in well is it the marketing channel no that's that's not right because some of these people aren't in there oh is it the product manager channel no that's not right because the marketing team's on it it's like okay this is actually a problem with the tool yeah i have given up on the right channel thing and i pick one and if

someone's not in that channel i invite them general and then and then leave it to them to figure out if they want to leave the channel later because i feel that same pain of like who okay it should go sort of where the owner is if this is a marketing thing that everyone else needs to kind of help with and it goes there or okay we've got several different like report a bug related channels does it go in product or does it go in the bug with this area channel and then i in a rare occurrence for me i've defeated my analysis paralysis by saying it doesn't freaking matter just pick one and then i usually actually do that but woe to the person who wasn't in the engineering channel who now is i guess i don't know right oh it is a problem i i do hope people

tune their own notifications so that if they're in some other channel they don't get mentioned unless they they don't get notified unless they care but i'm sure there are people who don't do that and then are just spammed forever actually speaking of slack stuff that was a big difference in in behavior before and after i joined when i joined this current job slack was silent for the engineering team because almost all the collaboration happened in dm it was very point to point it was like one person as the hub everyone else was the spoke and they would tell each person like here's the context and i'm just not smart enough to pull that off i think to just know everything and tell everyone uh all the smart things i know so we do a lot of discussion especially per capita we're

still a small team but there's a lot of chatter in our public channel and there's a lot more chatter from other teams and i think they used to be worried like oh we don't want to bother the engineers which comes from a good place but also means we we miss out on a lot and that has gotten a lot better it just feels better to work where people are not scared to talk and and you can see conversations and let them pass you by if you don't care and jump in if you're interested or feel like you have something to lend i i like that and that's i think that's what you're going for by moving these communications out of dms yeah totally sometimes there's a leadership desire to see people are working and some of it comes from suspicions about productivity or remote

workers slacking off or whatever some of it is just i want like i want to know what's going on and i just don't if all i see are crickets and and pull requests or whatever the unit of output is for for your department so i i think it it's just nicer in general when it's easier to look around and and see what problems people are wrestling with because they're talking about them openly i think i'm just preaching to the choir here yeah but it's not just you and this pm i think the company as a whole would benefit if more communication happened out in the open i think that's totally true and i don't know how big this team is but on my team i insist that we actually document all discussions and decisions that are made in a central common place for every feature

that we build so we actually have what we call a dnd doc a discussions and decisions doc for every feature that we work on that sits right as like a parallel document to the technical design and other docs that we generate for each feature and so that kind of forces this because then it's like okay we can have this discussion in private but you're going to have to document the results yeah you know in this doc and you can kind of push it back on them if you had a if you actually had a place where you put those decisions i really like that i'm just thinking about it because i have a problem of losing decisions and i have to recreate them or they're scattered across a bunch of random different places in notes of one-on-ones or notes for the specific meeting oh yeah or slack

dms well have we solved this problem i think so i think we've solved this and many other of the universe's great problems i actually have one more solution which is you need to write a slack app that takes every dm you get from this person and publishes it to general and just say hey i've i've noticed this problem it hasn't resolved itself i'm just i'm just going to publish your dms just letting you know use the threat of corporate violence against them i guess yeah exactly radical transparency that's what we believe in here all the dms are now public exactly i'm just so transparent what should people do if they want their own questions answered dave get on over to softskills.audio where you can fill out our form after you click on the ask question button and

here's the beauty we will not auto respond with an llm and that is a direct message to us but if we choose your question we'll read it on the show and you will join many many people who have had their questions answered yep thank you so much for listening thanks for asking questions makes our lives better we appreciate you have a good rest of your week absolutely oh also we have to do our soft skillet nation sign off because we keep getting in trouble i remember what it is i just want to see you do it i don't remember the sign off i just know it's i don't remember what it is either i don't know what it is i think we did more of an intro than what's up soft skillet nation at the beginning but i guess we'll just say soft skillet nation see you next week yeah

that's so bad we'll practice we need a better one help us all right