Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 500: Am I the only one not getting raises and firing my whole team

Starting point is 00:00:00 it takes more than getting laid off because of ai rehired because of ai and told to be a 10x engineer by using ai to be a great software engineer this is episode 500 of the soft skills engineering podcast i'm your host jameson dance i'm your host dave smith soft skills engineering is an advice show about non-technical things for technical people and dave has a very special announcement about our 500th episode yes hey congrats on 500 episodes but no congrats because 500 is a completely meaningless number it carries no emotional value for me other than reminding me of the status code i get every time i have a bug on my back end i choose not to celebrate plus 500 is not even a power of two yes so i don't know what all the

Starting point is 00:00:53 hype is about we got a little hype online people been asking us what are you gonna do for 500 and And I'm like, you people, you silly people in your base 10. Nothing. In space, we do base 2. Yeah. And sometimes we represent it as decimal. And when we do, we celebrate those milestones, like 512. Yep.

Starting point is 00:01:13 So you just wait. 512 is going to be something else. Build your expectations. However high they are, raise them. Raise them higher than that. Even higher. Yeah. Yeah, higher than that.

Starting point is 00:01:23 And then we'll give you like an ice cream sandwich like on The Office. Yes, exactly. Meanwhile, keep your 500 internal server error celebrations to yourself because we're not interested. Yeah, yeah, we don't believe in 500 errors. We avoid those by doing no bugs driven development. Why would you want to celebrate that? It's completely antithetical to no bugs driven development.

Starting point is 00:01:44 Yeah, 500 means it's your fault. Exactly. Nothing is ever our fault. That's right. We change all the 500s to 400s. Yeah, exactly. hey you you held our product wrong you broke it don't don't hold it that way dave do you want to thank our wonderful patrons you know i do thank you so much to those that

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Starting point is 00:03:53 Kent, thanks for the shout-out this week on the X platform. This podcast was recorded at 2026-02-10-T-05-53-07-Z or later. That is correct. That is correct. Quite a bit later, actually. this particular one was recorded about three hours after that no no no 10 hours after that i think we'll see i shouldn't do times on math in public okay continuing jenny kim the stochastic barrett ira chan jonathan kings and i beautiful functional user documentation i don't understand the patrons

Starting point is 00:04:30 on this list that don't change their name regularly what are you even doing chuck norris formerly will angel ragnar brayden canes john grant britney ellick and the word closed parenthesis followed by a single closing parenthesis character big thank you to those of you who caused me to read the weirdest stuff i read every week and also the stuff that makes me the happiest thank you so much if you'd like to join this illustrious gruesome go to soft skills audio and click the support us on patreon button where you can enter a dollar amount and any amount gets you an invite to our slack workspace slash community slash team whatever they call it now and we'll send those out the first week of every month and if you contribute enough we will say

Starting point is 00:05:14 your patreon profile name on the air thank you i just i don't know i don't know how much i don't know how else to thank you other than to say they're so good it's so freaking funny but a good bunch yeah dave should i read our first question that is one of many reasons why i invited you here today that's the best way i can think of to thank them is give them yes more of us the best gift um All right. This is from an anonymous listener who says, I have been with my current organization for five plus years. I like the company and have generally had a good experience working here. However, the last several years, I have not really gotten a raise except for the standard merit raise, which does not cover inflation. So effectively, the last several years, I have made

Starting point is 00:05:54 less money than the year before. I brought this up to my EM who said there is no chance of the company increasing the merit raises to meet inflation unless I get a promotion. However, My EM also said there are no promotions available. I don't know if this means the company knows the job market is tough and they don't have to pay us as much, or if the company is in dire financial straits and unable to keep salaries up with inflation. This job market is tough, and I don't know how long it would take me to find a new job, but I will certainly look. My question is basically, how can I go about getting my manager to help me level up to make myself a more attractive candidate for a future job without necessarily tipping my hand that I'm job searching? On one hand,

Starting point is 00:06:32 i assume he knows that i might be looking on the other hand if the company is in a bad position and we have another round of layoffs we have had several over the past few years i don't want to be first on the chopping block because it looks like i have my foot out the door i'm just wondering how much i should make it clear what my goals are to have my em work with me or should i play it close to the vest yes oh good good timely question yeah basically like i think there's two i want to talk about two parts of this question the first one is about just the pay situation like is this normal you know or is this company about to go out of business or like in terrible financial situation and the second part is like how do you get your engineering manager to help position you

Starting point is 00:07:13 for your exit help you get a new job with and should you tell them as much uh yeah what do you think jameson are we what are we how do you describe the current economic situation for pay raises borked but it's borked that's how i describe it with a zero yeah i have seen a similar trend where you used to get lots of raises and now it's less common now you kind of don't yeah maybe that's career trajectory maybe everyone around me is all we've all gotten worse at our jobs at the same time every you and everyone you know have stagnated yeah yeah the rate of developer salary increase certainly seems to have slowed quite a bit over the past few years. Yeah. I was just reflecting on the time I spent trying to hypergrow a startup from November of

Starting point is 00:08:09 2020 till November of 2022. And it was crazy the amount of money I had to throw at people. Yeah. Just chucking money out the door. Mm-hmm. And we had just raised like $20 million. So the bank account was full. My CFO told me, my biggest problem this year is explaining to my investors why we still have so much money in the bank account. Yeah, I get it. You got to deploy that cash. Man, that was a different time. And it just felt like on a dime, the economy just pivoted so hard that right around that time, end of 2022, it just completely changed. Yeah. I feel like it was the SoftBank implosion. That was the single event that sticks out in my mind the most as, oh, maybe the music has at least

Starting point is 00:08:59 slowed down, if not actually stopped. Oh, sorry. SoftBank also exploded. But I was thinking specifically of Silicon Valley Bank. Oh, yeah. It was March 10th, 2023. It was March of 23. I remember that weekend vividly i remember thinking i wonder if i'll get paid or have a job because we use silicon valley bank i really genuinely thought that it was just as likely that we would have like 10 more banks crumble after that one but yeah crazy enough it was the only one anyway yep great call out james yes silicon valley bank that one stands out more in my memory than soft bank which i think has also been stored yeah anyway i was talking to my cfo about a job offer I wanted to make to an engineer to join my team. But the salary levels were pretty high. And my CFO

Starting point is 00:09:45 said, hey, what company are they with? And I told him, and he goes, oh, I'll bet they still have stupid money. And I was like, aha, yes, that's exactly what happens. I don't know. There seems to be a cycle. And I'll just like, can I just take a moment and describe the life I've lived over the last 20 years with these multiple cycles now that I've been through? You know, when I first started my professional job search in 2003, so now 23 years ago, it felt like today. Salaries were stagnant, tons and tons of layoffs being announced. It was the tail end of the dot-com bust.

Starting point is 00:10:20 So this is the bust from which several companies emerged as glowing phoenixes like Amazon, Google, even Microsoft eventually, but not immediately. And just basically the whole FANG concept kind of started at this point, although some of these companies didn't exist yet, like Facebook and Netflix, but they came. Then that kicked off a absolute boom cycle for engineering jobs. I mean, we're just talking people's salaries tripled over the next 10 years easily. And we also had basically no inflation, you know, or we had like, you know, the target, like 2% inflation in the U.S. And I think this is a pretty common story throughout the world, at least in like the developed world where there's a lot of high tech jobs. And that I just kept thinking this has to stop like this cannot this.

Starting point is 00:11:08 You know, what's the famous investor phrase? Anything that can't go on forever will end. I have not heard that. It's kind of a good one, right? It's like it's like almost stupidly obvious, but it's like, yeah, this can't go on forever. And it didn't. It just kept going. So, you know, 2012, huge raises, 2015, 2016, 17, 18, still big raises. 1920, you know, even the pandemic didn't stop it. If anything, the pandemic, you know, put a little blip on it, but then it got even hotter for the next two years after the pandemic. And then finally at the end of 2022, the music slowed down substantially. And for the first time in my

Starting point is 00:11:44 entire, at that point, 20 year career, for the very first time, I was like, oh my gosh, we're having massive layoffs. We're seeing salary stagnation. People are happy just to keep their jobs and maybe not get raises. And it's just been that way now for the last, I guess, I guess it's been four years almost now of that kind of mode. Yeah. So yeah, that is where we are. And that is normal. Companies just aren't able to shell out the cash. And that's true, I think, unless you work for OpenAI, maybe Anthropic, and that's about it. You know, and some other young upstart that has tons of easy money going into it because you have AI in your name. Yeah. I mean, at least it's not crypto anymore that's true it's still nvidia but it's not crypto yeah yep i probably maybe i

Starting point is 00:12:30 bought my last graphics card that i'll ever buy for games a few years ago oh yeah now they're unobtainium even more unobtainium than they were for crypto yeah crazy well thank you for the story time what do they do i mean i just the reason i told that little story time is because i just wanted people to hear my experience to know that actually this situation, not getting lots of big raises for a few years in a row. It's precedented. Yeah. This is not weird right now. This is kind of the norm. And the fact that your company's had layoffs and you've survived them doesn't necessarily mean that your company's about to go out of business. It might, it might though. You know, like I don't want to say it doesn't, but that's the norm right now. I'm curious,

Starting point is 00:13:13 Jameson, like did your, has your experience been similar to mine over the last whatever number of years you've been working yeah i i came into the end when did i get my first job in tech i feel like it was about a decade after you so i i only knew the good times and salaries rose quickly and career trajectories moved quickly and people got promoted quickly and didn't matter if the company you worked for died or not because you could always get another job yeah instantly oh yeah And then it does feel like it's slowed down quite a bit in the past few years, which has resulted in longer tenures, more, I guess, conservative, sticking with what you know, a little bit of a shift in the power balance between employees and employers, where I think employers used to just fear that the developers would leave and someone else could always pay them more money, no matter how much money they made. yeah yeah it definitely has changed a little bit which i think is exactly why you're seeing this behavior not just i mean laughs indicate could indicate financial distress it could

Starting point is 00:14:19 indicate over hiring i think that happened a lot or people claimed it happened a lot yeah they use that as the reason yeah but they're they're probably more willing to do stuff that might make you sad at work because you're more likely to stick around if you are not pumped with what they do at work yeah you were five years ago for sure i mean i remember the office perks arms race of the teams and it was just like insanity i kind of hated it at the time there's probably some kind of index you could make of like how big is the engine on the scooters that drive around the office how many cc's is that and there's some yeah like frothiness of developer hiring is probably tied to that this is where i mean jameson and i i don't know did

Starting point is 00:15:02 we pioneer this idea of the engineer ball pit in the office? I think we did. I assume we did. Yeah, that was a long time ago. That was like near the beginning of the podcast. Yeah, we made fun of that. And so, you know, here we are. There's no ball pit. It never happened. Yep. We flew too close to the sun. The ball pit was hubris on our part. I want to say that I just want to answer this implicit question in the first half of this question, which is, does my company know that the job market is tough and therefore they don't have to pay us as much? The answer is yes to that question, because what your company is experiencing right now is that when they post jobs online, like let's say someone leaves that they need to

Starting point is 00:15:47 backfill. When they post that job online, they're getting hundreds of applicants from all over the country. And a lot of them are saying things like, I will relocate at my own expense, or I already live in your city, even if they don't. And a lot of these people are actually qualified to do this job, a lot of them. What they maybe don't know is that the signal to noise ratio has never been worse in the hiring market for software engineers right now. And I mean this with no disrespect to people who have been laid off, but it is harder than ever to find a qualified candidate today. And I think that's because even though there have been massive amounts of layoffs, Engineers are scared to leave their current company. And so they're not out there casually applying and getting them to change a job right now, like the devil I know, is very hard to get them to leave it. So the hiring situation is, it's a strange combination of both hard to find great candidates and flooded with candidates. It's like a weird supply demand curve mismatch. It's kind of strange.

Starting point is 00:16:53 Yeah. There's an old economics paper called The Market for Lemons that argues that used cars are generally crappy because if the car was good, they wouldn't be selling the car. So the average quality of car on the used car marketplace is much worse than the average quality of a used car because the good ones stay. Wait a minute. Are you saying like I'm a used car? Is that what you're saying? Like now that I've got some years of experience? yeah we're all used cars yeah no you have a sweet spoiler and you've got nos and what all the stuff from the fast and furious movies exactly and there's some crossover with transformers so you also can turn into a big robot but i am a three-wheeled geo metro only three wheels three wheels to match your three-cylinder engine or a gremlin isn't that a car i think so yeah that's even before my time i don't know that i quite believe it because it it sort of implies if you're looking for a job it's because you're

Starting point is 00:17:58 not as good as people who have their jobs yeah but there probably is some slight correlation to people who are laid off and overall talent level not certainly not perfect and yeah that feeds into it. The other part is just the AI-fication, the slop cannon being pointed at job applications. The slop cannon. I love it. That's certainly a thing. Yeah, totally. So you're saying the company might falsely believe you are more replaceable than you are, because it's going to be just as painful to replace you. In my experience, hiring has taken as long as it always takes, even though we have this infinite stream of applicants.

Starting point is 00:18:39 any position. It's still taking the same amount of time. It's just before I was kind of waiting and begging. And now I'm sifting through hundreds and hundreds of applicants, many of whom appear to not be real people. Exactly. 100%. I would say it's actually taking me longer. Like I've had a position open for a pretty senior engineer for like four or five months now. And I don't ever remember going more than a month or two without getting a really good applicant that i make an offer to painful painful all right so how do you how do you get your engineering manager to position you for a sweet exit to an awesome new job without letting your engineering manager know that you want to do a sweet exit to an awesome new job i think you focus on you say

Starting point is 00:19:23 the words level up a lot and it you can you can mayim said there are no promotions available say great i want to be ready for when they are available i want to be the most obvious just forehead slappingly yeah though of course we would promote this person candidate that has ever existed at this company let's make a plan and some portion of the work that would go into that will not be directly transferable or make you a better candidate because some of it is going to be internal systems kind of knowledge with a very context specific knowledge but some of it won't be some of it will be generic get better at doing good work and helping other people do good work type of stuff but i think there's enough alignment there that your em was probably going to be pumped

Starting point is 00:20:11 to want to have you want to be a lot better at your job and if you acknowledge i know there's no promotions right now i just as soon as there's one available i want to be the best candidate so let's work on it what's amazing about this is if you really want to get set up to be like a really attractive candidate to your next company, it actually, all the things you do look exactly the same as if you want to just be a really great employee at your current company. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:20:39 And it's basically like, think about the stories you want to be able to tell. Like, oh, I discovered this really gnarly problem that was plaguing our customers. I diagnosed it. I convinced the team to fix it. I came up with a novel solution to solve it. And I led a couple of engineers through the solution.

Starting point is 00:20:56 and we launched it and the results were customers loved it and we fixed this like churn problem or this like friction problem or whatever it was. And now you can tell this story. Well, it turns out like that story plays great at an interview and it also plays great in a promotion packet for your current company. And it plays great just in the eyes of your manager

Starting point is 00:21:14 and your team and it makes you feel more proud of your work. So it's like these incentives are already nicely aligned, I think. Yeah, this is a bit riskier for a promotion, but i think is probably better for a level up for my next job focus have an enormous amount of ownership which involves some amount of risk i think if you were to put your head down and just do a good job at the things people ask you to do that's that's not the promotion track or the the track of someone who is just obviously excellent and we we have to keep around and

Starting point is 00:21:49 there's i pressed a button and now something's beeping that was the good advice detector did you hear it go off found some after all these years wow 500 episodes we've had that i was starting to wonder if it wasn't working uh but it was no we're just dave we've only begun to hit our stride yeah um uh what was my point before the good advice detector ruined everything Oh, maybe there's some sacred cows. That's such a dumb business phrase. There are some special projects that are untouchable because some executive loves them that are just doomed. And you know, it's politically fraught to touch the project. If you owned the company and could do whatever you want, you would probably kill that project and put other people on it. Or there's some project that needs to replace it because it's actually the most important thing. If you're leaving for sure, then I think it makes sense to take a little bit more risk and try to shake things up a little bit more at your company. Not in a destructive way. You should do things that you think are genuinely better for the company.

Starting point is 00:22:56 But there's just a lot of stuff you do or avoid doing because it'll be painful or annoying or, I don't know, get other people upset with you or whatever. And this could be a fun time to say, what if I didn't care about any of that because I'm leaving anyways? Yes, I love that idea. And those are also great stories to tell in a hiring process. There was this pet project of an executive that had been losing money for years and no one wanted to kill it because they were scared. And I did it and I got us to build this other thing instead that was wildly successful. So you killed a project against the desires of an executive. Tell me again about your qualifications.

Starting point is 00:23:38 I have high ownership. I get stuff done. Make it clear what my goal is. Yeah, I think that's my advice. Kill the executive's favorite project. Got it. Is that what made the alarm go off? Yep.

Starting point is 00:23:50 You hear it? You hear it? Ding, ding, ding. Winner, winner. Yep. Oh, my gosh. That's so funny. Yeah, I love it.

Starting point is 00:23:57 I think it's fantastic. You get yourself set up with some amazing stories to tell. I think you could actually be positioned to do some of the best work of your profession so far by kind of forgetting about all these weird, like, personal, selfish motives and just make yourself look great for the next employer. And it turns out you'll be super successful at your current company. You might even end up staying a while. Maybe just to say it more explicitly, you should become a good story generator. Yeah. Do things that will make great stories.

Starting point is 00:24:24 We sort of touched on that a little bit. And the great story will be, here's how I did this hard thing, and here's how much better off the company, the business, the team was because of it, instead of just, I successfully completed the work assigned to me. And I'll just close that by saying, absolutely do not tell your manager that you're doing this so that you can collect stories to leave. Do not. Do not do that. Yeah. Yeah. All right.

Starting point is 00:24:49 Dave, do you want to read our next question? Sure thing. This comes from an anonymous listener who says, I am a software engineering manager with about 12 years of experience. I'm a few months into a new role at a medium-sized private company. The day I joined, I found out that all individual contributors under staff level are international contractors. Surprise! My team is mostly contracted, quote, senior developers. Nobody is anywhere near what I consider senior.

Starting point is 00:25:15 The company has a culture of aggressive performance reviews. However, I'm seeing individual contributors and other managers around me who are seriously below the bar compared to other places I've worked in the tech industry. I get a lot of vague pressure from the director or CTO to raise the bar and quickly exit people who aren't meeting it. I already fired one person for performance and behavior issues, but I feel like I'm between a rock and a hard place. If I'm truly going to hold my team accountable to my and the company's own published performance metrics, I should fire the whole team. That's probably not good. Ultimately, I can pad performance evaluations to convince my boss that everyone is meeting expectations. This also isn't good, but feels like what everyone else is doing.

Starting point is 00:25:57 Also, I'm a little queasy doing aggressive firing and performance reviews for contractors. The company treats them as full-time employees, after-hours, on-call expectations, etc., and I'm not sure how Earth lawyers would look at this situation. Help! Final wrinkle. My last two jobs I've lasted less than a year. i wasn't fired but just haven't been able to find a good fit for a little while i'm worried that if i just leave this job six months in it'll start to look suspicious on my resume oh i mean good

Starting point is 00:26:24 news you you are learning a great list of questions you need to start asking during the interview yeah who is my team where where are they located what is their employment status are they good at their jobs yeah that's oh my gosh i think if you are managing a team of software developers with very few exceptions you should be able to demand to meet them before you start working there there are probably big enough companies where you're just dumped into a pool of managers and they kind of just smoosh you onto a team but i think yeah at least knowing them i I mean, you won't be able to evaluate them in a very detailed way. But yeah, there's some stuff you could have found out beforehand.

Starting point is 00:27:09 Yep. Some red flags. Yep. A little bit. Apparently, this company is not only very good at faking their performance evaluations, but they're also very good at misrepresenting the team structure to interview candidates. Medium-sized private company. Huh.

Starting point is 00:27:25 It does. I mean, it sounds like you're right that everyone's sandbagging. and this feels like the outcome of a an ineffective culture i can see the value of saying we want to have very high standards and aggressively hold people to them but boys it's so easy to do that in a way that incentivizes bad behavior it seems like that's what's happened here they're they're trying to give a bunch of lip service about high standards and really that means you sacrifice a person every now and then on the altar of look how intense we are and then besides that you're being held to just the same high standard so you don't want to look bad as a manager by having a

Starting point is 00:28:06 team that all sucks i wonder what would happen if you went to your manager and said my whole team does not meet expectations yeah whatever the thing below good is whatever weird hr phrase you use to describe it what do i do like is it okay to fire that can we can we replace them all can i hire a new team yeah i mean it kind of would be really crazy oh man this is such a tough situation because on either your your your so-called bar that apparently this company has established is just completely ignored well i think that's the only answer like they're clearly just totally ignoring the bar there is no option b it's like who are these people reporting to before and why didn't that person ever say something like these people aren't meeting the bar it's just crazy well maybe

Starting point is 00:28:51 that's why the roll was open maybe they got pushed out yeah maybe they didn't meet the bar and the bar is yeah just go with our weird performance system if okay say say there's stack ranking in your organization a team full of low performers makes every other manager's job in your whole org so much easier because if there's stack ranking yeah or curve fitting of some kind then there's this brutal resource battle over the very few number of top ratings and the required mandatory minimum of bottom ratings and often some person will get pushed down in a rating because they have to fit a curve at the org level and you can say i've come bringing gifts yes the gifts are sacrifices yes i have people i brought you sacrifices to the to the

Starting point is 00:29:43 CFO or whatever. Yes, exactly. I have a bank account for you to draw upon of people that can meet your stack ranking quotas. Yeah. In fact, I've heard that that is a practice that you would intentionally keep some low performers around on your team. So I guess you wouldn't fire them in this case. You just give them bad ratings and hope they would leave. That's kind of the company's goal. But your goal as the manager is keep them around so you can meet that quota. They're like cannon fodder this is what i hate about stack ranking it's like yeah i get it that on a big enough population the parade or distribution really is probably accurate and how it defines the performance of your team members but no individual manager is going to want to say oh

Starting point is 00:30:23 my team does have a lot of low performance like everyone's incentives are everyone's children are above average yeah yeah but also like there are teams of engineers that are just like all pretty good like it happens you know it's like oh there's five of us and we're all doing great it's like oh yeah so-and-so is maybe a little better than the rest of us and so-and-so is maybe underperforming a little but it's not like oh you gotta fire that one person like you're really you're just gonna take your chances with a new hire yeah huh i don't honestly don't know what to do in this situation it seems like this organization is completely messed up and i like how would you you're gonna have to figure out how things actually happen here you're gonna have to do

Starting point is 00:31:01 some like investigative journalism on this on this culture like what what really are the the so-called bars that people have to meet here and how do you actually do this yeah there's just there's just a few weird things combined into a fun unique combination i haven't seen everywhere or anywhere i should say everyone's a contractor below a level they're all overseas and are we have this fake aggressive culture that people don't actually follow and i think good news is this is your job your job is to have a get great performance out of your team and you have many tools in your toolkit for this yep one of the tools is a change to the composition of the team there's a bunch of other stuff there's training and i don't know culture and and tooling and and

Starting point is 00:31:50 project management and all kinds of stuff but i think this team will do better if we change the composition of it by getting rid of someone who is here is that's a thing that you should be able to do as a manager yeah and apparently something that this team wants you to do and you've already done it once i feel like i'm a rock in a hard place so i i guess i wouldn't say hold my whole team accountable and do it all at once and fire the whole team but surely there is the next lowest performer on your team and i think you could treat it like you would treat any underperforming team member where there's some diagnosis of why they are underperforming and some attempt to see are these are these things we believe can change or is it just the wrong fit overall and if it's the

Starting point is 00:32:35 wrong fit overall then then it's we'll be better off with no one and then later on a new hire that has to be trained than this person on the team so i guess i would focus less on i should fire the whole team right now and more on what is the next incremental step i can take to improve the performance of the team yeah and maybe that is just how you work on this you just slowly level them up just like you would any team work through it try to make sure that your leadership knows that you're working on it and what your plan is so that they can be supportive of you and not just be like why isn't this guy raising the bar we told him to raise the bar yeah the fact that you're getting a lot of vague pressure to raise the bar makes me feel like either the director or cto level

Starting point is 00:33:21 knows that your team is not meeting the bar that's why they're pushing on you but they're not they're trying to avoid micromanaging you and saying hey just fire your whole team or this is just they just kind of assume everyone is slacking off and the first one feels a little bit safer to have an honest discussion with them about this than the second one if they're just broadly saying well pressure makes things better so i'm going to apply some pressure here i could see it being tough to have an open discussion with them about this but i think i think if you if you have a manager who you can talk to about this that will help a lot if you fire your whole team that probably looks bad if you improve the performance of your team in a way you can demonstrate that

Starting point is 00:34:00 looks good and if that involves firing one more person on the team because they they weren't able to improve the quality of their work i think that's pretty defensible i think that's part like i said it's part of your job is to make the team great so i think you should be able to talk with your manager about this and and get a feel for what the practical limits are here maybe maybe there is this vague idea that well if you fire two people that's one person too many and you've already used your one ticket or something like that yeah i don't know this seems not great i could see why uh this would be unpleasant to work in but i think you do have options and and this is why they pay you the medium bucks part of why engineering managers often make more money than

Starting point is 00:34:44 i sees is because they're dealing with headaches like this yeah i guess so that's what the money's for i think you can do it and good news even if you don't last for years and years at this job i think you have a great story about how you came in and you raised the bar you dealt with pressure from above and below and you left the place better than you found it yeah uh also if you quit really soon you won't have to put it on your resume at all that's true just part of your uh your backpacking trip just finding myself in the swiss alps just make sure you build a nice list of interview questions for next time well have we answered this question i think so good luck good luck which people do if they want their own questions answered go to softskills.audio and

Starting point is 00:35:28 click the ask a question button where you can fill out our little form we thank each of you who have done that so many wonderful questions just pour in every week um i've actually started printing them out and stuffing them into my pillow and i rest my head on them every night and it just feels so wonderful i can feel the love and i just want to thank you for that because uh i've actually it's fixed some neck pain that i've had oh i think it transferred it to me because i've developed some new neck pain the amount of neck pain stays constant yeah it just rotates the law of conservation of neck pain yep yep all right thank you for listening we will catch you next week

Starting point is 00:36:12 You

Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 500: Am I the only one not getting raises and firing my whole team

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