Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 54: Sneaky Contractors and Job Titles

Episode Date: April 4, 2017

Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Our codebase is really bad, and management hired a contractor behind our backs to rewrite it. What should I do? How important are job titles when looking for a new job? Here is the Khan Academy Engineering Ladder Jamison mentioned towards the end of the show.

It takes more than great code to be a great engineer. This is episode 54 of the Soft Skills Engineering Podcast. I am your host, Jameson Dance. I am your host, Dave Smith. And on this podcast, we answer your questions from technical fields about non-technical things. We give you wisdom straight from our brains to your ears and then to your brains.

Yeah. Wow, thanks for that detail. You're welcome. I think you missed a few of the media that are in between the ears and brains, but that's between the mouths and ears we have some pretty advanced technology that allows us to skip a lot of steps around nerves and yeah i think we have a comment from a listener do you want to read that dave yeah we do um back in episode 52 we talked about uh the guilt you feel when you're going too slow and the listener who wrote the question actually wrote back with some

follow-up which we love hi dave and jameson i'm the listener that asked you the question from episode 52 i wanted to say a big thank you it helped me a lot and hopefully other listeners it was such a relief to know that other developers even some veterans are feeling the same way when they start to work on their new projects in their new job i can relate to what jameson said about himself feeling guilty about going too slow and wanting to make people happy i think i am also a people pleaser and want others to look at my work and say good things only don't we all i had a few conversations with my team and asked what do you think is the optimal speed for development none of them actually said something concrete and it was obvious how little everyone knows about each

other. Maybe it's because everyone on my team is working on different parts of the application. Funny enough, last week we had a team meeting and the manager announced that we had completed our first milestone 10 days early. Dave, your three suggested methods on how to control my workflow was a great way to deal with my problem. Now I'm time boxing a lot of things I do and also have a deadline for my research with acceptance criteria. To answer your question, if my feeling about being slow comes from myself or from external source it is definitely self-inflicted i think i'm just trying so hard to be that mythical 10x developer thank you again great podcast best one in the world really wow that was nice official thank you um i okay i've learned from this that as a manager

i should just randomly announce to my team that we're way ahead of schedule and just make everything feel better that sounds great it's cheaper than giving raises or bonuses you're giving satisfaction cool thank you for that comment yeah i am gonna dive in and read the first question we have a dumpster fire code base on the front end it is a really terrible mix of multiple javascript frameworks customers complain about it being slow and outdated looking i've been asking management to let us rewrite it for a long time then without consulting us management hired a contractor to rewrite it. The contractor is planning to use the same set of old technologies that the current UI uses, but I want to use one of the newer frameworks, which we used for another

internal project and have agreed to use as a team. Do I stay headstrong and keep pushing the new framework since that's what we decided to use? Do I go covert and rewrite the UI in my free time using the new framework and give the business the ability to run both applications side by side and pick a winner? Keep in mind that I have a family and little free time. Do I suck it up and keep dealing with a mess do i lose my stock options and quit i really don't want to quit oh covert dude if you go covert you definitely have to like put like camouflage paint on your face while you're doing it yeah that'll help try and sneak into the office without anyone noticing blend in with your surroundings have you ever played metal gear games like metal gear solid

or anything like that uh i don't think so you end up sneaking around inside of a cardboard box a lot and then you just like if someone turns around and looks at you while you're walking around inside the box you just drop down to the ground and they just look at the box sitting on the ground and they're like that looks the box and they keep walking so you could try that man covertly rewriting the ui in your free time sounds a lot like unpaid labor yes that seems like the worst thing to do so don't do that dumpster fire code base on the front end isn't that just a code base on the front end yeah the word dumpster fire was redundant we already knew that yeah so there's a company called Instructure around here they have a I think

it's maybe I don't know it's probably seven ish years old yeah that sounds about right open source education application that they build as their core product and right now it has server rendered rails views jquery um backbone ember and react all in the front end it's a pretty large app so i think this state of lots of javascript frameworks existing together is kind of pretty standard for long-lived applications if you're not yeah outrageously disciplined like i think it's just the default it doesn't i mean it sounds unpleasant but i don't know that it's like unprecedentedly awful so we could call this a dumpster fire or positive spin maybe it's more of a melting pot of diversity yeah just somewhat as melting is like plastic bags

instead of like fondue style melting yeah erase it yeah so so that part while unpleasant to work is not yeah it's not not awful especially if it's large and has been around for a long time so it may be awful but it's not uncommon yeah yeah that's that's like a byproduct of um a successful product that has engineers that want to try new things and are trying to move fast because they're just going to like put in new stuff as an experiment which is the right way to do it but then they don't go back and update everything to match the new standard yeah yeah it's hard to do yeah it's really hard to do especially if it works right i mean yeah it's like i'm not gonna touch that i'm not gonna put my hands back on that dumpster fire yeah it's burned

me once so they hired a contractor instead of letting you do it um yeah i can see why this is where the painful yeah this is where things go weird in this story like what yeah did they have like a competition and the contractor won or something did you also show up for the yeah for the feet of strength yeah uh yeah why i mean why would they can you think of a plausible reason why they would do that i could think of one reason to hire a contractor and it wouldn't be like a re-architecting and a rewrite with new technologies it would be to prototype new designs like maybe you know so you hire an agency and you say give us some new look and feel for our website or our web application but that's more kind of front end uh like ui ux not build the application out

for us right yeah i was just trying to think of reasons why i would hire a contractor to do that i have seen it done where the the other stuff the team needs to do is just so important and and they need some extra bandwidth really quick and they know it's kind of a trade-off that it often it's on this kind of self-contained chunk of of functionality that you're okay handing off to someone else and not having the team own it but you just need need to get it done real quick without slowing down the rest of the team and it's an explicit trade-off in that case but there's some reason for it but but this just sounds like it was like we were going to have the team do it and now we're not we're going to have this rando do it yeah that i in this knowing what

i know about this i don't think i would do that as if i were in the leadership role yeah like i just can't imagine a way this goes successful where if you bring in someone from the outside to like the real application yeah exactly which the team owns and works on and meanwhile like the team is working on something else i guess and then when this contractor is done then the team comes in and it's like okay now you get to own this thing that this contractor built yeah this doesn't help you but it does feel like management's job to explain why they're doing this and they probably have a reason but it sounds like you don't really understand the reason so it makes sense you feel pretty betrayed and this is i think this is important um and i would

go talk to management at this point find out who made the decision figure out what the rationale was because maybe there's actually been a misunderstanding here and you believe that this contractor is there to like rewrite the core of the application and design new patterns for going forward and you choose new technologies but maybe it's not maybe it's something else that just looks like that and there's a different plan yeah there's also a little bit of i'd say technical focus so so the app is kind of old and slow and uses old technology which feels bad to a developer customers complain about it in details that we didn't read it sounds like this is kind of a banking financial application and i'm going to assume that means it's an enterprise application

and one of the defining features of enterprise applications are the users are not the customers that you that that the people who decide to buy it do not use it and they don't make decisions based on how easy it is to use so there's some weird incentives around uh like user experience versus breadth of feature set that can happen in enterprise software where the sales people have an easier time selling it if it just does more stuff um but it's easier to use as a customer if it does less stuff that works better and there's kind of that tension there and often the sales side wins because that's how you make money that's right so you can make it fast later after we get more sales exactly yeah yeah or or there's some cost to not making it fast but

the the benefit of having more features outweighs that cost it's it's a better i don't know it's fine we lose a couple customers because it's slow and cruddy but we gain a bunch more customers because it has like these 10 check boxes checked off for the feature set so reconciling that if you want to convince the business that it's worth fixing it being slow and outdated focusing on outdated tech is not quite the way to do it like they no business cares about the tech that you use they don't care at all if you say no yeah it's in backbone but we need to rewrite it in angular then they're just going to be like no like stop your developer complaining uh so you have to make a business case why this will help them make more money and that's difficult i think it can be

harder to do in the enterprise space but i think there's a way to do it um it'll show off better in demos right if it just responds really quickly that's a huge part of the enterprise sales cycle is you do the kind of dog and pony show it'll lower our support costs or something like that right we have all these support people that take phone calls from frustrated customers and that costs us money and there is a feedback loop back to the people that buy it it's just kind of slow but eventually they kind of hear back if it is just painful to use so yeah yeah yeah i think focusing more i understand it's painful as a developer to say like this tech is painful to work in um but if you can focus that to terms that make sense to the business i think you'll

have more success in lobbying than if you just say this uses jquery ui and jquery ui is not cool anymore there are two other ways i think that a new technology stack can appeal to a business and the first one is bugs like if you're finding that every time you change or try to add a new feature to your old software that it comes along with a bunch of bugs that show poorly and demos or that cost you contracts you know maybe you're losing customers because of it then you can make a strong case usually that hey we're going to keep cranking out bugs until we can get a new technology also bug bugs can be like hostages you know so just yeah you know just kidding i would never do that this bug sure would be easier to fix if we were on react or or even better i'd

hate to see what would happen to your software to your sales if a bug happened i like it when we philosophize about what it would be like to be evil and manipulative it's a fun little experiment so the second way that it can come back to the business is speed of feature development like sometimes your old software gets so crufty and nightmarish that it just takes you a long time to actually add new functionality to it and if you can show the business that you know you'll get like a 2x speed up for churning out new features if you switch to this new technology which by the way is probably not demonstratable and maybe not even true you you might get a little more traction with them if you can go down that path

yeah it was uh where did i read this i can't remember as a blog post i read recently talking about comparisons between existing old applications and new technology and there's always a speed up when you try and rewrite something in a new tech but the speed up is not yeah it's it's not necessarily because the new tech is so much better often it's because the code base is brand new and small and it's really easy to add a bunch of stuff really quick to a small code base much easier than it is to move things around when there's a lot of intertwined pieces already i think i guess the point of this is that these technical issues feel pretty constant this just feels like the struggle of being a software developer where the code is not perfect it's hard to work in and you always

want to rewrite but the the cultural issues of like management bringing in consultants to own this core thing that feels more concerning to me because that that seems more broken yeah i agree i think i would be very tempted to sit down with management and ask the poignant i don't know if poignant's the right word pointed poignant isn't that like it'll kind of make you have the sniffles a little bit as you gaze wistfully into the distance yes i would ask a pointed question why did you not consult the engineering team before bringing in a contractor to do our job yeah like what why why is it that you think you need to go to an outside source and then if i'm feeling really paranoid i would ask myself this question because i think the

listener asked or mentioned stock options yes i don't want to lose my stock options and quit right so i would ask this pointed question to yourself this is just a question you ask yourself silently not to your manager which is if i can't trust the leadership of this company to talk to me about doing basic engineering can i really trust them to honor my stock options and not come up with a way to screw me i thought you were going to say can i trust the company to be successful and that turned way darker yeah i i was really wearing my heavy paranoia hat yeah it's like a full cast iron helmet i believe that lots of companies are bad and still make money so

can and can be successful despite being broken i don't know i wouldn't be concerned about dark manipulative things like that it could be that management is kind of separate from engineering and they don't quite get this feeling of ownership of a code base because that that's the hurtful thing to me like this is our baby we built this and now you're just bringing in some stranger to like fix it up and that feels like you think we can't do a good enough job or that we're i don't know yeah i i raised this child until age three and now you're taking him taking that away from me yep let's let's go back to the the a little bit about the new hotness you know like i'm hearing this undertone in the question of there's this cool new technology we

really want to use it we've been talking about it for a long time management's clearly not bought in we feel frustrated i think it's important for an engineer just like jameson said this is pretty normal to have to deal with old crap as an engineer it's just kind of part of the job but i think you should ask yourself honestly how much of this is about creating value for my customers and my business and how much of it is that i want to use new cool stuff and try to answer that honestly yeah new cool stuff can be a recruiting thing too it can be a cultural thing yep so there can be benefits to being on more on the cutting edge it's true but there are definitely costs the part of the bleeding edge is that's your blood there's blood

there's blood on the edge it's yours it's not the text blood it's your blood when you're trawling through stack overflow and everyone asks the same question or you're the only one who's even asked the question because you're the only one who's tried to do that thing that's your blood that is it that's the digital representation of you bleeding yeah yeah okay i have one more one more comment okay when i'm when i'm in situations like this i don't often have the presence of mind to take a bigger picture view of the situation but sometimes if i live through the situation and then look back on it i i can say to myself honestly it wasn't that big of a deal i'm and everything's fine now um this happens to me periodically where i get worked up about something

i don't know if you have this jameson where you're like oh crap i'm you get nervous or something makes you feel ill at ease you know and then time passes and suddenly it's like oh that was no big deal right have you ever had that experience um based on what you know about me what do you think i'm curious what you think the answer to this question is i'm gonna guess this is a constant state of mind for you correct yes i have had that experience i i think sometimes it's good to clear your head and look forward about six months and say am i going to care about this in six months time you know and and just try to think of where you might be in six months the contractor finished the job we took over the project you know or whatever the contractor didn't work out you know

just try to run down those avenues predict the future a little bit and then see how you feel about yourself looking at yourself in the six month future you and i think sometimes that can have a calming effect and sometimes it can say i really don't want to be here in six months and it might give you the perspective you need to decide whether you should walk away from your job or not yeah i i've harped on this a little bit and i want to just say it one more time that the core of this is um it feels like it raises the question of does management trust engineering to do good work because one reason to have a contractor do it is because the the work you're doing instead is just so important and they really need it done and another reason is they wonder if

it would get done well if if unless they hire a contractor yeah that that feels super important to understand and then if you if you know the answer then you can either decide okay i need to work on restoring trust or i don't want to work somewhere where they don't trust us and go from there all right question answered question answered we did you want to read the second question dave yeah sure this one goes hi guys love the show how important are job titles when looking for a new job i'm currently a senior consultant in the boston area and have been looking to grow my career by moving into a team lead role specifically i want to be more involved with strategy and new technologies and planning on how to offer these to customers my current company i

do not have the opportunity to grow in speaking with potential employers i can't help but notice i'm not being seriously considered for the more senior roles even if i apply for the position i want i get a response like we love your experience but you don't have any experience as an actual architect why don't you come on as a lower level position and we'll work on a growth plan as a secondary question should i avoid taking a job that is perceived a step backwards in title like from senior consultant to consultant um as president and ceo of the soft skills engineering podcast i feel like i thought i was the president and the ceo uh i've got bad news dave are you oh man well no no you're the c you can be the coo oh right that's fine right

yes and the vice president and then you just report to me on the podcast and it's oh yeah okay okay i'm gonna read my linkedin titles in reverse chronological order my current title is his exalted highness primarch of bogo sorting at five stack my consulting company uh my previous titles were assistant fire marshal at kawali co i i was the assistant fire marshal there that's the real thing and also his serene highness archduke of computering before that i was director of engineering um at itv and also his illustrious majesty grand visceroy of code and then before that i was like software developer that one seems so boring yeah yeah there's less royalty i i spent a lot of time on wikipedia

looking up like royal styles and there's some good ones out there primark of bogo sorting um yeah i mean that's your current title so have you been doing some of that bogo sorting recently it's more of like a life philosophy around how i approach things with with like lots of chaos and randomness and and then it all comes out in the end eventually given enough resources yes isn't bogo sort the one where you just randomize it and check if it's sorted yeah i think so yeah uh yeah that that describes a lot of my approaches to life okay so i would say i'm something of an expert on titles that's the point of all this oh my gosh you know so it turns out you can put whatever you want for your title on linkedin

yeah oh wait these didn't come from a drop down uh i wonder if they'll auto complete now for someone else oh my gosh okay so i guess we know where you stand on titles yeah i've i've also only worked in small companies which is like this company i work at now is my company that has one employee me so i get to pick whatever i want and before that no one cared and we we did have like some management but i don't think it i don't think people cared that much about titles it was just like you knew who your manager was but but i've never worked for a company with more than 100 employees so my my world is very constrained to that i i think this is very interesting that you were able to basically mock a social construct of job titles um and just basically make fun of

it and yet still be a successful developer yeah i guess i don't see all the recruiters that look at my linkedin and they're like and then don't message me but that's okay yeah it's very interesting so i i love i used i love and i jameson's titles and i've looked at them for the over years and i've just been like okay that's hilarious and then i joined a large company and then i grew up and then i entered the real world that is not what i meant that is not what in it no i know it's not what you meant but like i feel like that's what's coming my perspective on titles has changed significantly and i think if you work for small companies where personal relationships are the reason people get hired and stay employed then you don't need titles you don't

need a system to govern like who does what and what people's role really is for interfacing with you and how you can help them and how they can help you but when you come to a large company you need a framework for communicating with people and understanding who can do what for you and like just in order to get things done you need to be like well i need to contact an xyz title person i need to find a person with this title in this organization to help me yeah like someone who owns this system yeah that needs to be standardized somehow yeah because otherwise you would literally never be able to get things done in a large org yeah because you'd just be like now your name is what and you what do you do can you just describe it for me in like a paragraph

you know and then can you condense that to like four words and oh that's a title exactly that's exactly right so so on the one hand i hate titles and i hate the leveling systems that many companies have and and i hate putting senior in front of my you know senior software engineer i hate that junior software engineer i hate that um but on the other hand when in the context of a company's organization, those titles have, can have meaning that help communicate volumes about your role in a much more effective way than reading paragraphs of text. I think it makes a big difference. And not only that, not only that, but it can also make a big difference in how much money you make and in what kind of job you do day to day. Because when these companies hire you,

they're going to look at your titles and decide what level to bring you in at based on, in part, based on your experience from your previous jobs so yep i used to just totally not care and now i realized that i have probably paid a price by not caring paid a price as in you could have had different responsibilities more money etc if you had if you had procured titles more aggressively yeah i think so like if i think because what happens is like when you apply to to work at a new company there are especially if it's a large company there's going to be an army of people who are not they're going to be working on a lot of people at once they're going to be looking at your job history and trying to decide where to bring you in where to even interview you like

not only where like what level you should get a job at but rather like what process you should follow as your for your interview and i think it opens and closes doors significant doors at large companies so i don't know i mean on the one hand i love the playful silly titles but on the other hand i know that if jameson went to apply for a large company oh yeah if i like got hired at google i would be like i don't like software engineer number two or something like that level zero they'd be like well we don't have archduke of computering on our leveling guidelines so we're gonna bring you into the base level yep yeah i so so i've been doing a lot of um hiring lately for a client and titles are a great shortcut to understand experience um that's how

we've used them so we've been we've been trying to hire a lead developer for a while and if someone just has like team lead or like development manager or something it's a shortcut to say like oh they have done this before and this is interesting yeah we can also get that from reading the descriptions if they if they include details about that and if it's like chief engineer number three or something but then in this description it says like hired people led a team of this many and i can still get some of that same information but it is kind of a shortcut So even a Primark of BOGO sorting could list team leadership as one of their job responsibilities.

Yeah, what do I... I don't right now, though. That's because you're... But I guess I can change that. Yeah, you can write whatever you want. So we hear... So I've heard. Yeah. So what do you say to someone who has a senior in their title now and they're looking to grow into even more senior of a role,

but companies are like, nah, no thanks. Someone has done that before. I mean, everyone who has moved from senior to team lead, like has done that for the first time. Yeah. Do you think that happens mostly through internal promotion and then, and then they like go out and get hired again as a team lead or? Yes, I think so.

In my experience. People won't kind of hire a senior developer to step up to a team lead position. I have never done it. I have. Okay. So in 15 years, I'm just trying to think back. have i ever seen someone get hired directly into a team lead position having no leadership experience and frankly i can't even think of a time when even with leadership experience

someone has been hired directly into a leadership role really yeah like i've seen it happen okay let me caveat that i've seen it happen a few times maybe twice and it's gone badly in both situations and then i read this book by ben horowitz who is the famous horowitz of andreessen horowitz um called the hard thing about hard things have you read that one i have yeah and he he basically says the the rule for engineering leadership is always promote from within never hire leaders from outside and and he says that and he says for other works this doesn't apply like sales and marketing but for engineering for some reason he says always promote from within and i don't know why but that really resonates with me i i have not seen a person be able to

come into a role into a leadership role totally fresh and blind not having any rapport or experience with the team and then be successful as their leader there does feel like this weird resentment and and this sense of us versus them because i've been in that situation before and it's like you haven't you haven't paid your dues right you haven't worked in the trenches with us and then suddenly you get to come in and tell us what to do so that may be that may be what's happening in this listener's experience as they're applying for these leadership positions and they're like it's a big risk yeah so one side effect is i i do have one real title i mentioned there which is director of engineering which sounds very fancy uh and and really what happened there was

it was a small startup that i i joined while it was very small and then it grew to be like medium small and um although i was not very experienced i was one of the more experienced people there that and then all the more experienced people said no so through through like this complicated bouncy ball going through the pinball machine to the right spot i ended up in this position and recruiters do see that and they're like oh director of engineering and then like send me all this stuff so one way if you're if you're interested in growing your title titles are very non-standard across companies and it's much easier to get more responsibility at a smaller company so so small startups just small companies in general i think there's a lot more room to have

a large impact and have that reflected in your title it's a good point i also want to point out that seniority is not i'm going to use the term horizontally transferable in other words if you envision like a track of career growth as a vertical motion up and down like say a ladder as much as i hate the ladder metaphor and then imagine like a bunch of ladders standing up against a wall next to each other just because you've climbed up three rungs on one ladder doesn't mean that you can hop over to the neighboring ladder and continue to be effective you know so if you if you've been a senior consultant that doesn't necessarily mean that you're going to be effective as like a senior solutions architect or a senior

developer right so you can't i don't think that those things transfer horizontally i think if you want to transfer horizontally yes i think it's pretty common for you to take a step down in title lots of places i think you're correct in that there's often very different skills and the skill set of being a senior engineer is different from the skill set of being a team lead but I think the default is organizations assume they transfer like because you've succeeded in this thing you'll succeed in this next thing yeah that's true but I think you personally would be better off if you recognized if you do end up in this other senior role or like a more senior role recognizing hey I just because I wrote good code doesn't mean I know how to lead effective meetings

or whatever the new skill set you need is and focusing on developing that I also want to talk about the growth plan thing you mentioned where a lot of companies have said come in at this lower level and we'll try and and make sure that you're on this path to advancing that just feels very vague to me it feels on par with options like come in you'll get x number of options they'll be worth tons and there's just so many variables that can change in the future and they can have the best intentions and not be trying to mislead you but then someone else ends up looking better for that position that they hired you and said you would grow towards, or they hire someone directly into that position. That seems important to work somewhere where they can help you advance

in your career, but I don't know how you get any certainty around that. Yeah. Yeah. That seems hard. That's not very helpful though, is it? Just don't believe people when they tell you they're going to hire you and then you can advance look them in the eyes and say you're lying i don't believe you they might actually be it might actually happen i mean i think a good way to get something i i guess i'm not sure how you evaluate how likely it is to happen maybe that's yeah exactly that's what i was going to say and i think follow-up questions like hey tell me about the last person who you did that with you know and it's like if they have literally zero examples of that ever happening then the chances that they're going to make it happen for you are lower

or or like tell me about someone who who tried that and it didn't work out or yeah a really good question really and then they will lie to you and no it always works out yeah well if it always works out just hire me into that role directly and let's just skip the middle man here yeah there are also places that have title deflation that it's traditional that you'll join at a lower title than where you came from i think facebook is pretty famous for this that like engineering directors will join as senior engineers or whatever and i think i don't really know why they do that maybe it's just like the scope of our problems is so much broader that you you need to narrow down a little bit when you come here but that does happen at some places i

think that that definitely happens i've experienced that and i haven't worked for facebook but i can say that i think there's two two other factors that facebook and other big companies that make that possible one is they are famous for paying a lot of money and like it turns out people actually don't care as much about their titles as they do about a lot of money i mean if you're making x and facebook offers you like 1.5x but you have to take a title downgrade like okay i can work with that right um you drive a hard bargain but i accept the second thing is like these big uh i like they've heard the term fang facebook amazon netflix google like the big four um they they're like does people for some reason want to work for these companies like there's exclusive projects

that you can't find anywhere else at that scale and so people are willing to come over and they're like oh do i have to take a title drop no problem like whatever yeah plus engineers at the end of the day really don't care that much about their title right they care about working on cool stuff um and uh making good money in some cases but like at the end of the day like if you have the word senior in my title or not i don't care that much i think you don't care that much about your title i think i think titles can be a route to making good money and to working on cool stuff yeah they can my point was though like at places like facebook you're gonna make good money but then you have to pay for it in the in the form of dropping a title a bit and i think i can't speak

for every engineer but i think a lot of engineers have no problem making that trade-off yeah i i also think never underestimate people's ability to compare themselves to each other and like find stuff to hold up and say this is better than this other person and yeah true that's that's a powerful human motivator so how do we sum this up well first of all what what should this person do i think they move to a different company as a lower title if they're kind of stuck at where their title is i would say step back and ask yourself what are you really trying to get out of this like is your end goal to get more experience doing a different role then in which case figure out how much you're willing to pay for that in terms of dollars and in terms of title

deflation and then that will i think will the outcome of that equation that little comparison formula will tell you uh how much you're willing to let go and whether you should actually step out of it yeah that sounds very reasonable to me what a reasonable guy dave i am a senior reasonableness engineer see i'm only a junior one so i say less reasonable stuff in time in time you'll get there i think we should put together a growth plan for you yeah that sounds good um like some some rubric that i can measure myself against yeah all right well okay that's in jest but that is an important thing i one tricky thing about titles is the criteria for achieving them can be so vague and it could feel like just like this i don't know what's a metaphor for it

you just like see it in the mist one day like senior engineer and it just kind of like happens and i think in an ideal world there would be more as objective as you can make criteria for for stuff like this but there would be some list of things like a senior engineer does this yes this is how we know what a senior engineer is yes um con academy has a really detailed engineering ladder that's it contains a lot of their cultural practices i don't think it's generalizable to everyone but it's a great example of like a company that has sat down and thought really hard about what defines these titles and what do you do to achieve them and then they just apply that in reviews to determine what people's titles are and in hiring too i have really come to

appreciate that by the way um over the last six months i didn't used to care about that stuff at all but now i have a newfound appreciation for well-defined um progression you know yeah it it is better than like i just feel it in my gut like i am senior yeah yeah or like this person is senior if you're in management and you're yeah assigning responsibilities and yeah finances and stuff cool question answered question answered we have done it dave what should people do if they want their questions answered go to our website at softskills.audio and click on the ask a question button and there you can fill out all the details you can be as anonymous or as anonymous as you want and we would love to hear from you if we've answered your question and sent you astray we

would really like to hear from you and if we have somehow improved your life through something we said we would also love to hear about it many people have been writing in to say great things that happened to them and it has been really refreshing and wonderful to hear yeah it's been great if you want to be like semi-anonymous then you could make up a a pseudonym or a persona and it doesn't have to be you you can just give as much detail as you want but it's all made up yeah i'm a sentient caterpillar working in cloud computing and yeah go wild i'm a junior caterpillar we're working at facebook junior caterpillar oh there's a some dumb joke in there about butterflies but oh i'm not gonna go for it also next week i think it'll be a couple days

after this episode goes live we'll be at ng conf in salt lake city so this should go live tuesday yeah the first tuesday in april and we will be at ng conf on thursday so if you are there come say hi we'd love to see you we'd love we're doing a live episode and we would love for it not to be dave and i and like the poor sound person that pities us and also adds like crickets to the track if you are there we have soft skills engineering podcast stickers that we will be handing out we do yeah they're and they're great you can put them on your laptop to signal to other people that you are senior engineer material well let's not go crazy you're senior podcast listener material different colors for different numbers of episodes you've listened to yeah

oh that'd be cool if you made some kind of gamified sticker yeah anyways i think that about does it yep thanks everyone catch you next week