Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 74: Switching Languages Without A Pay Cut and A Missed Negotiation

Episode Date: September 11, 2017

Jamison and Dave will be at the UtahJS Conference on September 18th. See conf.utahjs.com for more info and to buy tickets. Come say hi! This week Jamison and Dave answer these questions: Do I need to take a pay cut when switching languages? I was promoted at work but didn’t get a raise or a title change. What do I do?

It takes more than great code to be a great software engineer. This is Soft Skills Engineering, the podcast. I'm your host, Dave Smith. I'm your host, Jameson Dance. Hey, coming up on September 18th, Dave, or sorry, Dave, that's me, Jameson and I will be at the Utah JS Conference in Salt Lake City on Monday, September 18th. Come and join us. I will actually be emceeing the conference and Jameson will be heckling me from the audience

I bought some of those glasses with the googly eyes and I'm gonna try and make Dave laugh You may have noticed it's actually pretty easy to make me laugh. Yeah, it's not that hard I probably wouldn't need those I would just show up and I don't know stare at you and you'd laugh So go hit the website conf.utahjs.com and get some tickets and come join us. We'd love to see you yeah come say hi soft skills engineering is a weekly advice show for developers and whoever the heck else will listen to us like jameson's mother she has listened actually i think my dad listens more than my mom do they i don't think either of my parents have listened oh well you can have my parents if you want it sounds like they're better than yours

did they have any feedback uh just like good job son you're the best son yeah um i have been told that a lot because i'm the only son so my dad will use that awesome dad joke you didn't say what episode number this is this is episode 74 my mistake sorry about that for a little bit it was a fun puzzle show where you had to deduce what episode it was would you like to read our first question today i would i'm i'm a little bit sick and not in the give you a cool low voice way more in the gross trippy way so sorry about that but get ready for half an hour of it okay i'll kick it off this is from an anonymous listener and they say i have a lot of experience with dot net but i'm ready to try out some new languages and technologies if i switch jobs to

start working with different technologies will i have to take a pay cut how do i navigate this situation you're ready to leave the dot net ecosystem that's like that's a pretty big jump i feel like i feel like they're they're pretty separate for as much as people say c sharp looks like java if you squint there's there's all the other stuff that comes with it all the editors and deployment and everything so yeah like oh yeah so much it's not just the language yeah i'd say the language is like 20 of that ecosystem yeah um so yeah this is this is a big deal i have personal preferences here that i will try not to let in fact that's a bad choice of words because i'm sick that i'll try not to let influence this uh but but

like for example you would not want to make a comment such as well you can only go up from here well i'd rather feel what i'm feeling now than write c sharp um well i think i just failed the thing i said i was gonna do you infected it c sharp is a fine language i don't like paying a lot of money for developer licenses but that's true that might be going away isn't it i have no idea okay well that's not why people listen to this show that's right that is right so let's let's like frame this as just a general i'm taking a technology that i'm experienced with and i'm saying goodbye to it and i'm moving to another technology what can i expect do i have

to start over on the salary scale no i don't think so um if you're starting over on the salary scale that means the experience is completely useless beyond pure technical api knowledge and syntax knowledge yeah i think that's untrue there's a ton of value in knowing a framework really well and and knowing all the pitfalls and knowing like the right tool to use for deploying it and knowing where to tweak it if stuff is going wrong but that's not i hope that's not the only value of experience. Cause if so, that sounds really boring. Um, but hopefully you've learned a lot more about, uh, working with teams and estimation and project planning and design. And I don't know a bunch of other stuff that is not specific to.net or any technology or framework and the universal

tool that will follow you to every job. Jira. Hopefully you got really good with Jira. Oh, well, even I mean, we talked about C sharp and Java being similar, right? I mean, there's there's even even if we are talking about the specific syntax level, C sharp is a pretty base level technology, which which means a lot of stuff looks a lot like it, I guess. So I would say even even at the specific language level, I think a lot of that stuff is pretty transferable. yeah probably probably like there's really only that meant only so many ways you can write an if statement yeah yeah or or like interfaces i don't know lots of things have interfaces and i hope c-sharp does or i sound real dumb right now um so i think a lot of your oh go ahead no

just i was just that was just a dumb thing to say you go ahead not you what i said oh geez i'm just gonna shut up now and 74 episodes and we finally know how dave feels all right you you just go ahead and say the smart stuff and i'll just do my job which is laugh at the good stuff and and agree with you okay um yeah so i i do not think you have to start over at the salary scale i think it's it's possible if you look for a while and you can't find anything, you might have to be willing to settle for a lower salary. But it's very possible you can get a raise and work with new technology that you haven't used before even. And that depends on finding a place that is hiring for skill and smarts instead of

experience in the technology they use already. Dave, I know you've talked a lot about how that was how you tried to hire at your last job, right? Yeah, and every job, frankly. So I totally agree with what you said. I think there are two kinds of hiring strategies. There's the simple-minded strategy of looking for the right laundry list of buzzwords that align with your company's current tool set, and then hire people who have the right number of years under their belt with each of those buzzwords. I think that is a terrible way to hire. And the harder but better way, in my opinion, is to find people with the right aptitude for solving engineering problems. And unfortunately, there are plenty of companies that do it the simple-minded way so i think it'll really depend

a lot on the kinds of companies you manage to get interviews with i i would step a little bit back from calling it simple-minded and like bad and wrong and the other way is good and right i feel like you need a balance i mean if if you somebody needs to know how like tcpip works at a hosting company right there are places where very specific technical knowledge is really valuable and you want to hire for that true so in other words specialization is needed in some some cases yeah yeah i actually do a lot of consulting work as a specialist in some front-end technologies and i am useful to people as a specialist in those technologies because they're they're looking for help in very specific technical things not in like just we need to get this product done

we need someone who can learn the right tools and use them it's like we have this issue with this front-end framework and we need help to untangle it and would you would you classify those as like a more of a short-term acute fix over the course of a few months or yeah for me for me they are for a consultant but i but i think the broader point is there are times where hiring for a specific skill set is useful but those aren't the only ways to get hired to work in a technology i I mean, if you could only get hired for working with stuff you already knew, it'd be hard to ever learn new stuff. Someone has to learn it on the job. Right, right.

In fact, for companies that adopt newer technologies, by definition, there is a much more limited pool of talent that has experience with those technologies just because they're so young. And so companies have gotten used to, I think, hiring people who don't have the exact laundry list of skills that they use. Yep. i i think you mentioned kind of buzzwords and years of experience and and even if a company is says that they'll hire for smarts and teach people they still are going to like someone if they have five years of whatever framework we use experience like you're not going to say no to those people um in my experience you you're just willing to look at people that don't have that specific list of buzzwords also right right like that might make them more attractive sure

yeah although at the risk of going off on a tangent here i should share that what i we would not want that that would be horrible i'm gonna do it anyway i've had a few instances where i've hired someone that had the right list of experience sorry the right list of technologies and on their resume that match up well with what we were using be it some framework or programming language. And a few times that's actually backfired because they actually brought bad experience. In other words, they had been using these technologies, but they've been using them in such a different, and in my in my personal opinion, unhelpful way, in some cases, that it actually caused us to have to untrain them on some of the things. So a really good example of

this is C++. And there are so many ways to write really bad C++. And in my opinion, you have to be a pretty disciplined engineer to write C++ effectively to avoid using some of the more esoteric features or, you know, what I call cobweb-filled corners that are, you know, hazards in the language. And we hired a few people a couple jobs ago who aced our interviews because they had some good C++ trivia under their belt that they could, you know, recite pretty effectively in an interview. And then we had to untrain them from these bad habits that they had picked up at previous companies because we had chosen to use a different subset of the language. Anyway, long story short um biasing toward people who have experience with your particular tools or

technologies can backfire yep i i think that just shows that interviews are hard and and they're not there isn't a perfect criteria some like if you if you try and hire for people that can learn new tech you might just get people that really struggle with the specific tech that you're that you're trying to teach them or the problem you described where past experience is more harmful than helpful i've seen that a lot on the op side in in the smaller startups i've worked with where people come from large companies with a lot of infrastructure and and a lot more process and kind of control and a need for a lot more stability because of the size of their company and they'll just struggle with the like we just have to get stuff done in a slightly crappy way

in the short term and fix it up later mentality that that some uh newer startups need yeah true so can we i know you didn't want to talk about dot net specifically but i think it's worth mentioning listen i've used dot net for two weeks so i have i have tons to say about it um i can hold forth on it with my vast experience i i don't know jameson if you've had this experience but i have seen among the not dot net community which i'd basically say are people running on linux you know unix like systems and using open source software as opposed to dot net microsoft everything like microsoft operating systems microsoft frameworks and tools and databases i have noticed actually that there is a pretty strong bias against dot net experience when you're hiring

someone to come into one of these like more open source oriented companies have you noticed that yeah it it looks uncool i think it's the old like those people wear suits and ties and they're so buttoned down and yeah they're the bad kind of nerd instead of the cool kind of nerd oh i feel like star wars but in a bad way instead of the good way they think guido shot first sure you know come on yeah i know all about that of course you do um yeah i have seen that i've noticed that that bias so i think that in this particular case you the listener may have trouble uh getting a job offer in a non-dot-net company i mean there's there's ways around it always and and like again falsifying your resume

no no i know lots of people that were dot net people and then became non-dot net people it is it is weird you like cross this barrier you have to like say goodbye to all your friends and you know sign all these affidavits and stuff right uh i thought it was more like um symbolic where you had to destroy a lot of material like books and things like burn your yeah your code complete book yeah i guess that's a good book i don't care what anybody says yeah um i forgot my point i don't know i've seen it done and also i think like most biases i think you can look at them as an employer and say there's an opportunity to

to get people who are undervalued by the market um if there's a bias against people that means are going to have a harder time getting a job so if you are able to look past that bias it'll be easier for you to find talented people because they'll be rejected despite their talent by by people that hold that bias yep so and i feel like i i have seen that i've seen amazing people who were dot net developers and and they just wanted to work in non-dot net stuff and and uh i was able to work with them because we didn't care that much about i don't know it's not like a black mark if you're smart cool all right well so short answer is no pay cut needed yeah you you can even get a raise i think i think if you have the expectation that you need to take a pay cut you'll end up with

a pay cut self-fulfilling prophecy yeah that kind of relates to our next question oh wow foreshadowing we are really sophisticated yeah look at that smooth transition do you want to do you want to read our next question i can't think of a better time to do it so yes okay it's cool okay uh from listener steve-o who writes long-time listener first-time caller hi steve-o i was hired as an analyst out of college and then offered to move to a technical role i was so excited i didn't ask for a pay raise i would take the opportunity again but after a year i still technically have the analyst title and salary although i have not been doing that work i'm looking to take the time honored soft skills advice and quit my job but how can i present the situation to an employer

so as not to be sold short on position title or salary you know i think i think i may have misinterpreted this question when i first read it i think steve is asking how do i go to my next job and get a good salary even though my title still says analyst i thought steve-o was asking how do i go back to my manager and say change my title and give me a raise i kind of want to answer both questions yeah steve-o could be quitting because they feel like uh that's the way to change the title and salary but if there are other alternatives that might fulfill the same goal if you quit your job and then print business cards you can change your title to consultant it's true um i've there's this weird thing where

every web developer has their own side consulting business and so they all say like president of like dave's cool computer company or whatever uh-huh um so i i feel like i've found that the the fancier title at your fake made up company the less i believe them like okay if it if it just i feel like you said consultant and if it just said consultant i'd be like okay they do consulting but if it says like arch i don't know captain of the universe or like strategic innovation alliance incorporated yeah yeah executive vice president of sales and products at dave's cool computer company like okay just rolling my eyes at you it kind of reminds me of uh elon musk's new company did you hear about this oh it's got

some boring name right that's exactly the name the boring company oh yeah because it's for boring holes yeah anyway i feel like the elon musk bubble is gonna pop he's everyone loves him too much like he's gonna he's reaching for the star like he's he's icarus he's flying too high his wings well yeah i don't know he's he's got to say something that makes everyone hate him or or it'll just be the standard cycle of like people like him too much so then people start to not like him or or they find out that he yells at people in his conference rooms or something like steve jobs i'm i'm pretty sure that's well understood okay um but he just does cool stuff with it so everyone but i bet he never had to negotiate a salary because his title failed

to change yeah he doesn't know how it is in the real world down here in the in the tunnels the trenches yeah in the tunnels that he's bored okay so uh first question start hang on i honestly have no idea but i think we should take us back yeah let's go back to the first question first you've got up the tunnel you changed your role in other words you're doing new work that you think deserves a pay raise and a title change but your manager never gave you the pay raise or the title change and it's been a year now what do you do um what do you do i mean you you if you're already ready to quit the opportunity cost is pretty low to having a very oh yeah direct conversation about it wait and if you're ready to quit you can try all kinds of zany experiments like print business

cards that say the title you want and just hand them to your manager yeah oh the business card title just says your job and then you hand it out to people and you're like i'm coming for you you could do anything yeah hang on what if yeah you got to do politics full time as your whole job don't do any work just just corporate politics 100 of the time all right give me an example um just write lots of memos about the strategic direction of the company talk about how you've been thinking about it and you have some new insight and ideas about things that would be a good go-forward plan and that you're excited to launch this new program yeah yeah and then just like name people on your team oh yeah like i'm excited about the team

that will be working under me uh yeah yeah and then just shout out a bunch of names dude this is this is golden yeah you have an opportunity here steve-o don't squander it so that was mostly a joke but not all the way i mean it sounds like from more of the details that we didn't read steve-o has tried to talk to people and has been rebuffed by lame excuses like it will get fixed soon or uh was in the other manager's court but they quit sorry um and these are all stupid like the person whose job it was to help you has quit which means no one else can sorry we're just my hands are tied prisoners of bureaucracy that is a lie that's totally not true that's called passing the buck ladies and gentlemen yeah i don't know someone has the

power to give raises uh and if the person whose power it was quit then it's someone else's job now um so you you can afford to be a little more blunt about it especially if you're ready to quit you can just tell them like hey i am going to quit because you're not going to do this but if you will do it then i will not quit and uh that'll be pretty you'll learn pretty quickly if they actually want to do it or not yep although i think most people would probably feel a little bit uh nervous to do something like that oh yeah it's very easy for me i would be terrified it's easy for me to give this like stern sounding advice it would be scary but if you're gonna quit anyways um and you're quitting because of the title and salary thing i don't

think it would burn bridges so yeah the worry isn't like you're gonna get fired the worry is you would burn bridges and then later on it would come back to hurt you yeah i don't feel like that would burn bridges if you did it without being a huge jerk yeah yeah i think you're just honest and pretty civil upfront about it. Yeah. We were joking before the show about how you say, they kind of said,

Steve-O says, I didn't really negotiate. And we joked that you did negotiate. You just used the worst negotiating tactic, which is to agree to whatever they tell you. Sorry, the worst negotiating tactic, which is what? To just agree with whatever they tell you.

Oh. To not negotiate. To just not show up to the table. yeah yeah so um i think dave you even mentioned that you could try and negotiate again right i think so i think if i were in your shoes and a year had gone by and i felt like i'd been promised this i would sit down with my manager and say um i switched jobs a year ago and i would like my title and salary to reflect that when can you make this happen and don't accept it'll get fixed soon or it was in the other manager's court i would say if they can't

give you a date by which it will happen tell them you want a date for a date which is actually a really cool thing that i've seen done a lot where you say look i need you to figure out by which date this can happen by a certain date does that make sense date for a date yeah you're like one level removed it's big o and squared of dates there's an inner date loop that's true that's uh okay no that's not true at all wait a minute but yeah that makes sense okay that's what i would do i talked to a friend several months ago who was in the situation that you thought this question was asking about which was uh they felt like they were underpaid under titled and were looking at getting a different job or kind of bumping their

salary and title at their current job and the answer they got back from work was we can't do it right now because of kind of corporate bureaucracy reasons like raises and promotions happen on this cycle and it's this many months away but we will make it happen when the time is right and i was kind of skeptical and told them like i don't know you should just look and see if there's anything better and if there is uh you should jump on that but um my friend ended up sticking around and they came through they actually did give them a raise and a promotion was it what he was hoping for yeah yeah fantastic yep it all worked out look someone didn't have to quit their job yeah yeah it's possible that it all works out huh we have one data point only though

well yeah 100 of the times i've heard about this it's worked out um no there have been lots of times where it hasn't worked out so it's tricky to know but there was a specific date in this instance, it was like, this is the month where we do this stuff. Um, and they stuck around until that month and it happened. So this is, this is less clear for sure. Okay. So let's move on to the second part of this question, which is now I want to go find a new job, but my official title of record at my current job says the wrong thing. That doesn't accurately describe what I'm doing. How do I navigate that at a, if I'm interviewing at a new company? you could just do it you can do what jameson did make up your own title well you did that

but i was thinking your linkedin profile with your your education oh yeah this is still it still says like i swear i'm gonna finish this up pretty soon here like on your resume you can just put the right title right like if you have a title that you think more accurately describes what you've been doing at your last job more accurately than, say, what your pay stub says, then put that. I don't think there's any harm there. And I think it's perfectly ethical.

Yeah, I mean, just because the HR department's records don't accurately describe what you've been working on doesn't mean that you have to represent yourself that way to other companies. Like, if you're a developer and not an analyst or you're a DBA and not this other thing, then write that. Huh.

I would feel scared. well i would feel like i was being dishonest in my application what if they called your company for references well i think you don't think those are two different questions so being that what's more dishonest saying the title that your hr department has on record or saying the title for the thing you actually do so i think once you get into an interview you can explain the situation fine sure okay um i'm i guess i'm worried about the situation so if you put your old title in you might not get interviews because they'll be like this person's an analyst we need a developer or whatever um but it still feels weird to put a title on there when they explicitly gave

you a different title well they didn't didn't they they didn't they explicitly forgot to update his title is what i'm saying as so you're worried that like someone might call and reference check the company well i'm worried that it will seem dishonest and then that will be a big negative i'm just trying to think what i would do as an employer in that situation if i if i saw someone and checked up on them and was like oh they said they were a developer but the company that they worked at said they were an analyst and i don't know i if i were making that call and doing that check i would probably it might raise my eyebrows a little and i would i might even call out the candidate and say why did why does it say you're an analyst and then

yeah you could have a chance to explain it but i don't know i mean hr departments are so dysfunctional sometimes that if it says analyst or developer or dba or whatever i wouldn't really i wouldn't trust it as like the source of truth huh interesting um i realize i'm saying this all as a person who has totally made up job titles on their linkedin but they're they're like uh farcically made up i'm gonna call your former employer and say was jameson really the archduke of computering yeah the hr department is actually like well yeah that's what his pay stub said those are so made up that it's clear that they're made up i see um so maybe you need to do that maybe that's a good good recommendation yeah just say you were the double ceo

the cceo the stunt double for the ceo when he needed to do the stunt double that sounds worse those people have less power true the job is to get shot at good point you're the board meeting ceo when the quarterly results are bad for three hours every quarter you're the ceo um okay well i i i'm worried about it but i feel like i could be convinced by your strong arguments and charismatic personality dave um so that handles the title portion of it what about the salary portion yeah so here's where you got to figure out am i actually underpaid for this for the title that i want and so there's a couple ways you can figure out if you're underpaid The first one is you can go do interviews and get job offers and see how they come in.

Or the second one is, and again, this might also be borderline unethical, but you could break into the HR department and steal the salary spreadsheet for your current company. I was so ready for a real suggestion. First, murder the HR person. Oh, okay. There's usually two guards posted at the door. You'll have to kill them both. the hr guards are the most elite unit at the company guarding the most valuable information

and they do not go down easily there's like this salary spreadsheet like inside encased in glass with like a lasers shining on it it's okay they died doing what they loved protecting the spreadsheet there's no higher purpose i'm just hearing the mission impossible theme music right now doing like cartwheels through the laser room yeah you shout analyze this as you karate chop someone to the neck okay so that's all i got one salary uh one chunk of salary advice you hear over and over again is do not tell the employer what your previous salary was and i have that down twice in my notes once in lowercase and once in all caps because it's super important um you don't have to tell them what your previous salary was and if they force you to uh you can do a couple

different things one is just straight up like make up a number because one million dollars yeah or or another one is you you tell them my previous salary doesn't matter here's what i would like to make i like the second one better because it's not lying yeah uh but but you don't have to tell them what your previous salary was the reason they ask that is so they can anchor their their offer to you and for the most part so they know this person made x and they usually get a little raise we'll bump them a little bit above that yep they're trying to figure out how much they can offer you to dislodge you from your current employer yeah if you made well below what a developer would make or whatever this new role you're looking to get hired for would make

then you would probably go in still making below that if you tell them what you're if you anchor your salary based on your previous salary and that is a hundred percent true i've watched this go down where a candidate comes in and says well i want to make in this range and the manager's like wow well he doesn't say this to the candidate but um we would have paid you like another ten thousand dollars but we'll go to the top of your range that's fine yeah yeah exactly i've literally seen it be i have literally i've seen candidates leave ten thousand dollars on the table per year because they because they anchored the the conversation yeah and it can feel scary when i went to my last full-time job i had heard this advice a bunch and tried it and applied it and i

felt like i had never asked for too much money so the last negotiation i did for a full-time salary I just asked for what seemed to be a ridiculous number. And my boss was like, you would make by far the most money out of anyone at this company a lot more than me. We're not going to do that. And then, but he just said a different number. And I was like, okay, cool. So that was like the scary bad thing that happened when I asked for too much money.

So it was no big deal, right? Yeah. I'm sure worse things could happen. You could probably lose an offer if you ask for too much money, but it wasn't, I don't know. yeah i think you'd have to be pretty crazy to the offer would have to be or sorry the amount would have to be insane for them to just say no i refuse to negotiate with you further you know yeah if you're like i want five hundred thousand dollars i think that if a candidate said

that to me i'd probably be like no you're joking right like let's bring this back to reality but i probably wouldn't say get out of my office yeah you know yeah and and my even my outrageously large it wasn't that far off honestly of of the salary range it wasn't like twice as much money as as as i ended up making um okay so don't don't worry that much about it yeah unless the market gets worse and then this advice is out of date so in the meantime you're going to want to work on your stealth skills and maybe some karate chops and uh and then i think you should be in good shape yeah for sure cool question we answered steve's question oh this question was so answered this question was answered the moment we said mission impossible i think the moment you

mentioned attacking people all right what should people do if they have questions that they would like answered go to our website at softskills.audio and click ask a question thanks very much fill those that fill out that form you can be anonymous you can be anonymous you can write as much detail or as little detail as you want and we love reading your questions thank you so much to everyone who's done that yep thank you what can people do to share the show jameson they can tweet about it um they can rate it on itunes and leave a review that helps in the itunes rankings and then if you get high enough in those i think it's kind of self-sustaining people just find you because you're high in the rate in the rankings beyond that i don't know

uh if you listen to this and know stuff about marketing let us know because we don't if people put in enough high rankings then no matter what search term you type in we will be the first result that's true hard skills soft skills type in like yeah i don't know uh phd level math in with physics and quantum theory and then it'll be like soft skills engineering we recommend soft skills engineering for this topic oh the you want to you want the new game of thrones recap podcast well soft skills engineering is the number one result for that search it is the universal podcast all events i wish we could gain the system like that wouldn't that be amazing if we could somehow

figure out how the algorithm works and then just tell our listeners to do just the right thing to to take it over i just don't know what to do i don't know what to tell them i think step one is to get every person on earth to be a listener okay and then a new person is born and then they'll be recommended soft skills engineering what if they break into the offices of apple and steal the podcast ranking spreadsheet steal the secret spreadsheet well it'd probably be like a link to a google doc i assume i mean icloud isn't great so they probably use google docs internally uh and the link is unprotected because the link is the protection so once you have the link you just go in and edit it you can't guess the link right so no no have you

seen how many letters those things happen oh yeah it's like 20 30 yeah dozens of letters yeah that's more letters than i could guess for sure all right i think that means we're done we will catch you next week farewell