Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 77: Boss Wants Me To Speak and The 2% Raise

Episode Date: October 4, 2017

This week Jamison and Dave answer these questions: My boss wants me to speak at conferences, but I’m very new to software. What should I do? How do I get more than a 2% raise? That is the company average. We talked about conferences a bit more way back in episode 6. We also talked more about playing the salary game in episode 23, which is a technique for sharing salary information with your co-workers.

It takes more than great code to be a great engineer. This is episode 77 of the Soft Skills Engineering Podcast, and I am your host, Jameson Dance. I'm your host, Dave Smith. Okay, I just had a crisis while I said that. What are we hosting? Why are we the hosts? I don't know.

That's just what everyone says. Here to this cargo cult. Come, partake. uh we should define dave what is cargo culting just so we make sure people get our amazing joke cargo culting is uh goes back to it was a world war ii i think it was i think so where you had these pacific island communities that have been isolated from the rest of the world and the united states air force was using these islands as places to drop off equipment and these cargo ships and planes would just like drop stuff i think they were like parachuted down

and these people like didn't know where they were coming from but they thought that if they could reproduce the actions that they were doing when at the time these things landed that they that more would come right yeah so they formed a whole like practice around this they built runways and and would have people up on the runways signaling that's what they saw people doing when the cargo was dropped oh right that's right yeah i think so so nowadays when you pattern match from someone without knowing why that's called cargo culting yep and we are prime examples of it um what kind of show is this dave besides cargo culting this is a question and answer show for engineers who want to ask about topics that are not technical such as should i quit my job

it seems to be the number one question we get asked if our show could be replaced by a magic eight ball then i think we need to up our game sources say yes all right do you want to read our first question yeah i'll read our first question this comes from listener named neil who says i started my first job as a developer two months ago my boss wants me to give talks at meetups and then later conferences i have no idea what i can talk about as i am still very much learning how do i find a topic to research and work on so that i can deliver value to people listening to my talk hmm wait you think you have to deliver value to the people listening to your talk uh just bring some stickers you've delivered value value delivered two i missed the two months

ago part when i was reading this question that is weird honestly yeah that's that's the one that's the part of this question that makes you know two months into first grade i too was ready to teach first grade um when my teacher asked me to start teaching first grade two months into my first grade so uh people who are new to software have valuable things to contribute to conferences and to to others uh often it's perspective of a new person filter through the lens of your previous experience both the lens of previous experience or the lens of no experience yeah yeah so so say you were yeah you you were a school teacher and you have these interesting insights you've uncovered that you think can apply to software or whatever um i think that

can be valuable but often it's not like here's the cutting edge thing that i have built that is going to change your life right i don't know um so so you can still deliver value it's just a different kind um but it is weird that that your boss is pushing you i have questions that have no answer like are you a are you in dev relations yeah like is this part of your job yeah are you are you out to kind of market your product or help recruit or get your company's name out there or does your boss just really like conferences do they have a great experience or if so you know if you are in deaf relations you should probably already have known that this was part of the job description yeah right so i'm gonna guess he's not in job relations

well you mentioned meetups and then conferences i think that's that's a a sensible order i have been a meetup organizer for a long time and i'm kind of like a lapsed one i think my name is still on it and i just don't help anymore so i'm a deadbeat meetup organizer but i can tell you meetup organizers are desperate for talks oh it's um after you do it for several years you've kind of like had all the people speak that you know and and talk to regularly and so you're kind of just searching around for more talks and the expectation of talk quality is much lower at a meetup you're like it's so like what are the what are the criteria i think the criteria is well it depends on the meetup some meetups are actually mini conferences and they're prestigious

they're usually in like new york um but for most local meetups the criteria is you are alive and you say i would like to speak at your meetup on this topic please fill out the following questionnaire place a check mark in the boxes that apply number one i am alive they're basically like the open access journals of software you can you can just come in and talk and people like good talks but i think people aren't like appalled if it's someone's first time giving a talk and maybe it's not as polished or as detailed as uh someone more experienced okay so you're saying maybe his boss is not insane for asking him to start out maybe this is part of a five-year plan okay yeah and and they're just laying it on you early

yeah we've had people that are new to software give talk plenty of talks at meetups oh yeah absolutely in fact i'd say i'd say a good 50 of the software development meetups i've gone to have had newbies giving talks uh-huh um how do you feel as an attendee at those talks i'm like i hope there's good pizza just kidding just kidding neil we love you you know i I once heard a speaker talking about how to be a good speaker as a developer. And he said, people love the story they already know. And I think sometimes as an experienced developer, even when I'm listening to a very new engineer

talk about some topic that I'm already familiar with, it can be just riveting and interesting to hear that story told from the perspective of someone new to the topic. you know if for no other reason i'm sitting there going okay let's see if you know if they've stumbled upon upon something that i am not already familiar with or you know just looking to see to calibrate like what does it look like when you've been working with a technology for two years versus two months yeah also i would say the the entertainment the experience people have in a talk is not strongly correlated to technical skill it's much more about presentation skills

meet up showmanship well yeah i mean it's it's a thing if you can tell an entertaining story you that's basically what you just said right no it's not at all what you just said it's what i want you to have said because then yeah it sounds smarter then that's what i said okay but if you can tell an entertaining story i think you have done a good job and if it teaches people about technology often how do i say this i think telling an entertaining story about a topic that people already understand well can shed new light on it even if that's not a thing you directly say yeah no i get it i get it i get what you're saying um there's something that happens in my own mind when i'm hearing a highly entertaining talk on a subject it i don't know what it is but it feels

different as the information comes in and it makes you think about things differently yeah the way that the information is presented it like makes the people makes the listeners use their brains more and then they come up with the smart stuff and you don't have to worry about it also i we should point out that this industry is growing so fast and the growth is happening it can only happen at one side of the industry which is the inexperienced side you know you can't people don't join the industry already experienced just by definition and so even after a few months there will still be people who have even less experience than you and even if they have more experience than you on paper they might not have experience with the subject that

you're talking about and both of these types of audiences can benefit from what you have to share yeah that's so true i i feel like i see a lot of things on twitter that i'm like well everybody already knows that and then they get like a thousand retweets and there's clearly an audience for things that i think everyone already knows um because i'm dumb and i i assume that everyone's brain is the same as my brain and if i know a thing i think there's like a subreddit for everything that jameson thinks you already know i'll just go make it right now it's probably too long of a name but so so i think i think you're right there i also think an evergreen talk topic is project experience where you just tell a story of here's what we did here's what worked out

here's what didn't work out and that doesn't require you to be a an expert or to have invented a new technology you're just giving people really valuable real world feedback about these things that you see argued about on medium all the time like you'll hear unit tests are the best unit tests slow you down and then if if your company does 100 unit tests then you can say here's what we did here's what went wrong here's what went well or vice versa if you do none you can say here's all the stuff that we regretted because of it and here's we we were able to go faster on these things or whatever there's there's just things you can mine out of your experience that are that are useful and valuable to people absolutely another another technique i've seen

used is um you you pick a narrative uh how do i let's see how do i explain this you pick like a like a guiding metaphor for your talk so um i've seen talks that are about like harry potter and javascript or something like that or it's just like some interesting thing that gets you excited that's kind of entertaining and then you structure a technical talk around that but you keep coming back to the central metaphor and and again there i think the burden of technical novelty or depth of expertise is lower because you're telling an interesting story oh interesting so you're saying meetups are basically toastmasters where the content isn't important it's your presentation style that matters no i'm saying i still appreciate just rocking technical presentations at meetups

but i don't think that's my expectation i go there to meet people and hang out and if the talks are fantastic then cool and if not i'll just like read twitter or whatever but i but i won't be like what this person did a bad job and i am shocked and appalled like it my first talks were at meetups and they were real bad and i've seen great first talks at meetups too but but i don't think the pressure is there okay so um what do you think about this person's boss based on this one thing that you know do they run a conference and this is part of their five-year plan to get more conference speakers or meetups is it some kind of racket it's a long game are you gonna launder money for them or do they want you to speak in an

international conference and just bring this briefcase along that you can't you're not allowed to open make sure you speak at this specific conference in switzerland next to the swiss bank and a gentleman will approach you afterwards and congratulate you and take the and also take this off your hands so something that i edited down from this question that i suddenly realized is super relevant is neil used to be a high school physics teacher whoa that that is your your narrative oh my gosh you can you can you can uh you can fill up a balloon with hydrogen and then light it up yes is that or that's what chemistry teachers do the physics teachers take

the long take the the string with like the bowling ball on it and make a big pendulum they pull it all the way back and hold it up to their nose just do that and this is like javascript you see right now the pendulum is swinging this way yes or or if if you step off your game and move the wrong way then bam hitting the nose hitting the nose by functional programming yeah listen um if you were a high school physics teacher you have already dealt with the most difficult crowd in existence so developers are usually way friendlier than high school physics classes absolutely a better audience i here's what i think is going on your boss says new developer physics teacher background this guy is a gold mine of speaking material no seriously i think

he genuinely knows that you will shine in this role and he is pushing you toward that and i wrote down in my notes that either your boss is awesome or insane and i think i'm going to go on the awesome side right now because your boss is doing a great job of taking your unique background and encouraging you to spread your wings and fly in this industry by using that as a springboard. And that's awesome. By the way, you could use springboards as a cool physics analogy as well. Yeah, just a little physics tip for you there.

Have you thought about springs? Yes, Neil has thought about springs more than he would like. I wonder if this is actually Neil deGrasse Tyson. What? Physics teacher. well then his talks would just be like shaming everyone for believing in in dreams and metaphor you know that close to the metal isn't a thing right because node.js is several levels of the stack above the metal and it's not even metal it's silicon yeah thanks neil we get it we get

that you like science and that we're a bunch of idiots let us live uh so i i think this is going to be great for you neil i really do send physics assassins after us if it's the real who use ballistics calculations to assassinate you without firing again yeah listen i if i were your boss i would encourage you to do the same thing start with some meetups get a couple of talks in use your unique background and the skills that i'm sure you've developed as a teacher and teach use hybrid up your skills here and uh the sum will be greater than the parts wait did i say that right this i the sure the toe uh i'm trying to get the synergy without saying the word synergy because every time i do i drive a little bit

uh synergy is not empirical the whole is greater than the sum of the parts there you go i worded congratulations i i would also like to add does your boss want to give you time on it are you doing this for your job or is this them encouraging you to develop your career if it's for your job if it's i mean it can often be a recruiting thing right like come watch my talk and check out how cool i am and the company is cool by extension if it's related to work you should see if you can get time on the job to prepare because preparing a a really good well-crafted conference talk is a huge amount of work some people can just crank them out usually that means that their whole job is preparing for their conference talk other people i mean i know i take at least 100 hours to to prep

what i would consider a polished talk and i know people that do much more so it can be a lot of work did we even talk about why it's helpful should we care about that why what's helpful like why why should neil give toxic conferences besides the boss wants them to all right so he can get another job thanks boss yeah it kind of is thanks to your guidance i found a great job yeah if i mean if if someone enters the conference circuit and they give talks that people really like they will be bombarded with job offers because uh people confuse giving a good talk with being good at your job that's right so it's great for your career so i have just one more comment which is after you let's just say graduate from giving meetup

talks and you want to move on to giving a conference talk there's a couple of good resources that i would consult online to try to find the right conference for you and what you want to do is hit up like papercall.io which is a newish service that talks or that conference is used to solicit talks from people and lanyard.com that's l-a-n-y-r-d.com and both of these look for topic look for talks that seem to center around topics you're interested in and then once you find conferences that oh did i say look for talks i meant to say look for conferences that center around topics you're interested in and then once you find a couple try to see if you can narrow it down to a conference that has a beginner track because um sometimes many conferences will have

a beginner track where the expectation is that it'll be for new engineers by new engineers and that might be a place where you can get started so yeah but the bar is definitely higher much higher to get into a conference you know even a regional or national conference will be very very much more uh difficult than getting into a meetup yeah there's a lot of luck uh in getting accepted at conferences it is easier to speak at local conferences than national or international ones it's also easier there are lots of conferences that um do not pay for speaker travel which i think is wrong but sometimes that means they have a lot of tracks so they just have a lot of speakers which again means it's a little easier to get

in so if you're able or if your company is able to pay for your own travel and hotel that makes it easier to kind of open up the the number of conferences you can apply to we did a episode on this let's see um episode number six so go way back and uh someone asked about how do i get accepted to speak at conferences and how do i give a good talk once i'm there and you can go sample some of the things we said there jameson and i have experience both organizing and speaking at a lot of conferences i don't know if you summed up all the conferences that we've spoken at or organized it would probably be 20 30 conferences maybe maybe i've spoken at fewer than 10 conferences i'm not a prolific speaker but yeah okay i've spoken probably around 10 okay i think

i overstated that a little bit literally spoken at like hundreds yeah oh yeah listen neil degrasse tyson that was a joke and sometimes people say things that are not scientifically 100 true um because they're expressing human emotions that they have just like people like to enjoy things that aren't science sometimes and it's not like if they didn't do those things they would be doing science people just like to have fun sometimes neil let us have our fun tweet storm coming soon yeah the time you're spending having fun you should be doing physics like i can't do physics neil i'm gonna watch the super bowl because i i'm not gonna do physics let me have it please please neil this has been our neil degrasse tyson uh frenemy podcast

where we try and get him to notice us by making fun of him the great irony is i actually listened to a podcast this week where all they did for the whole show was uh comment on some tweets by neil degrasse tyson oh no it's played out we're just followers all right i will read the next question thanks this is from an anonymous listener neil we know it's you um just kidding what are some things i can do to try and increase the scale of my annual raise or bonus for example if my company averages a 2% raise each year, but I really want a 3% raise each year. How might I go about it? First of all, whoa there, that's a 50% increase. That's right. You're setting your sights a little bit high. Yeah. You're shooting for the moon. Yeah. 2.1. Let's be realistic. Yeah,

that's a 5% increase. That's all we have to say about that. Hopefully these numbers are stand-ins because those are below inflation generally you can just rewrite this question as my company gives a sub inflation raise each year but i'd like to be above inflation how do i do it just barely though just barely above inflation yeah yeah okay this is a thing we've said a lot but here it is 100 true if you would like a 15 raise then you just quit your job and you get a different one well you get a different one first there you go yeah you have to do that in the right order or else the the three weeks of lost revenue while you're searching for a job will offset any raise that's true but this is a i think this is a problem in the industry that leads to a lot of

people job hopping which is that raises at work are way lower than raises you get from switching jobs so people are smart and switch jobs yes they do that's not i mean if you if you're If you're not willing to do that, though, how do you navigate this company structure? Well, at this point, with a big company, I would say that you need to understand what the criteria are to get a raise. Now, you know, this listener just said... So we know it's a big company because the listener told us they work at a large company. Also, the fact that they have raised targets, that's kind of a bigger company thing.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, definitely. um and so i i think at this what you need to do is try to discover what are the parameters of the raise and if you want to get above the two percent mark for this year what is it that you need to do and sometimes that'll be things you have to accomplish on your job and sometimes it'll be a matter of getting the right bureaucracy stuff checked off the list to get you know for example to move into the next level uh according to hr to move into the next level you might need to do some bureaucratic stuff and then that will get you up to the three percent raise mark for this year so that that's the kind of conversation you need to have with your manager or with an hr

representative or someone who manages the the leveling at your company i don't think i've worked at a company large enough to have these formal structures around raises yeah i've only seen them at bigger companies yeah the hope is that they have targets set up that you can hit that motivate people to work harder do more effective things i don't know i feel like there's got to be a lot of informal stuff going on behind the scenes though like does your manager like you i don't know did you get assigned to the fancy project how do you how do you navigate all that stuff oh man it's so hard because the typically companies like this will go to great extent to keep that whole thing secret and once you enter into a certain level of management

you'll your eyes will be opened to this crazy world of how raises are actually managed at bigger companies and and yet when you're not in the that inner sanctum it is just this like closely guarded secret and i don't know i really don't know how to find out about it well we're done here i think we're going to get to the juicy stuff here in a minute but before we do one of the things you need to find out is at my current level in big company x what is my salary range where what is the maximum that you'll pay someone in this level and what is the minimum yeah and that's the kind of question you can ask your boss or your boss's boss and sometimes they

just won't tell you they'll flat out say it is our policy not to disclose the salary ranges but what you can do is you can carefully read your boss's body language and say you throw out a number like let's say you're making you know some dollars a year right now and then you add 10 to that and then throw out that number and say would this be within my range and just watch his eyes and watch his you know watch his hands and then and then throw out another one that's 10 higher would this be in my range and at some point a bead of sweat will form on the forehead of your boss and that's where you know that uh you're getting close to the edge okay how i we've talked before about asking your your colleagues about how much money

they make um i'll find the link to the episode where we talk about that yes but that's a that's a potentially more truthful way if i don't know i hope the boss wouldn't just lie about the range but well it's not lying it's that the hr person told your boss you can't disclose the range no no i'm saying uh say they give you a range but you want more info you could ask your colleagues and uh and verify yeah so maybe that's the range but this is what the actual range is and it could be higher or lower um because it's it's the real world right right that's a good idea now that can get you in trouble although in in many states it's not legal to discriminate against someone for disclosing their salary information to their peers yeah it's also legal to fire someone for no

reason so keep that in mind all you have to say is the reason was not because you disclosed that's right i don't know do you think someone would get fired for that uh it depends on how dysfunctional and huge the company is yeah and how uh how much of a puppet your manager is yeah i guess at a big enough company you can find anything in a small pocket let's get to the juicy stuff these numbers are freaking insanely low two to three percent give me a break the market right now is so good for software engineers two to three percent is just incredibly low um now if you've if maybe last year you got a 40 percent raise two percent would be fine but if last year you got a two percent and the previous year you got a two percent

you are way behind market almost definitely yeah and and the longer you're there the more behind the market you will be yes you're racing against time and time is winning yeah yeah i don't know if it's a large company i don't know that you lowly developer can change that culture i could see maybe a someone with managerial authority they could establish a pocket in the company that changes that culture but if you just have to work within it then you need you can work without it there are things you can do you can you can work extra hard you can bring cookies you can work on the best projects you can make the company tons of money and if that makes them twice as happy and they give you a four percent raise like i don't know it doesn't doesn't seem

worth it before the show dave you mentioned um promotion might be a way to yeah yeah yeah i was kind of hinting at that with my last comment about the range but maybe you need to find out what the range is for the next level and you need to move up into that range in order to get a bigger bump i worked at a company that was a defense contractor and pretty large um my little office had been acquired as a independent company previously and so that what that meant was we were now subject to the raise policy for the overall company which was very similar to this i think they said like anything over four percent for a raise in a given year requires like ceo approval and which is impossible to get right because it's like a hundred thousand employees like there's no

way you're going to get any time with the c yeah it's just going to go in a garbage can somewhere yeah exactly so my managers started setting up mid-year compensation changes so they would say all right we're going to give you four percent at the end of the year we're going to give you another four percent in the middle of the year and then we're going to do a little bonus here and there and they basically made it right so that we could match market rates without violating the letter of the policy but then one year they did actually uh give me a promotion to the next level which at the time i had no idea what that even meant and frankly to this day i really don't know um but the promotion came through and they were able to break out of that four percent

uh annual raise cap by doing that that on paper promotion so there's a chance your boss could do that for you if you if you know what to ask for yeah that's true i like the the advice of finding alternatives alternative ways to give you money besides raises if there are bureaucratic things in place that people just are unable or unwilling to work around you could get better benefits you could get better 401k matching they might have stock options and you can have the raise would be a bigger bump in your option grant or something like that okay um you could have i don't know you could you could work fewer hours for the same amount of money and then it's kind of like a raise maybe more maybe give you some vacation credit or something yeah yeah there might be some ways

to dance around it if if if this is if the person who's deciding wants to give you a raise but is prevented from doing so by rules like that yes um and i mean they could always get around it but they're not willing to like get fired to give you a 10 ways although i will say that of all the things you just listed like vacation time 401ks options and all that stuff um those in my experience have been the most rigidly controlled compensation elements in my experience and the least likely to be flexible um i think spot bonuses are oftentimes more flexible and you're actually your salary is oftentimes more flexible but like benefits no never i've never seen a company say well because you did a good job we're going to give you lower health insurance premiums i have seen a company

um offer to pay more of the premium than they generally pay wow like on an individual basis yeah holy cow i've never seen that yeah but i i guess you're right like they're not going to switch plans that that'll take like months of work um in a big company for lots of people so that's true but maybe the ceo can just add you as a dependent also i'm gonna pay your taxes yeah yeah yeah that would be hilarious is there anything else we should say on this topic i don't think so but um two to three percent is low that's i think the takeaway here in this yeah i hope those are stand-ins for for other numbers and the broader point of how do i get a raise is helpful but if if those are the numbers then well if i've kind

of fixated on those numbers so if they are stand-ins and there is one more thing i would say that if you want to get x but you're only going to get y um i would go to your manager and put a plan in place to say let's say you've got some number in mind for your salary and say to your boss? What do I need to do to get paid this much money at this company? And I've had people come to me with that question as a manager, and it was great. It does make more work for you as a manager because now you have to actually think really hard about a plan for that person and lay out basically acceptance criteria, just like you would a story and say, you know, if you can achieve X, Y, and Z by the end of the year, I will give you this raise. And I've done that on two occasions,

i think where people actually came to me and said i want to make this much what do i need to do to make that happen and uh it worked out great for them both of them uh they were able to achieve it and so i think in your case you should come to that come to your boss with that and in a big company you will not be the first person to have done that and i'm sure they have an answer to that kind of question i like that that feels like the smartest advice the rest of the stuff i said was dumb i like that okay make a plan that always sounds like sound advice i can hear my dad saying that just make a plan okay all right i think we've helped this person okay all right well where can people go if they'd like to ask their own question they can go to softskills.audio that is our

website there is a button on the very top that says ask a question fill out a little form give us as much or as little details you like and we will get to your question thank you so much to the people who have asked them we really appreciate it there it's kind of laying a lot out about yourself to two strangers and i recognize that that can be uncomfortable and take effort so thank you for that effort yeah try to be respectful of of that what can people do if they would like to support the show you can send a 1998 lamborghini testarossa wait did i is that ferrari testarossa two i've never heard that box one you've never heard testarossa no okay hold on that is i am correct that is a ferrari model of car okay see i haven't hit that level in my career yet where i

care about ferraris they stopped making them in 1996 which i think was when you were in diapers oh uh no i was not i was nine years old dave come on well when i was a kid ferrari testarossa was all the rage okay that's all people talked about literally nothing else super bowl no so how does that relate well so you can send us one if you want to support send us one okay yeah that'd be great i can't really think of anything else you can do tweeting about it would be great just sharing it with other people um if you if you like it tell people about it and they will hopefully start to listen asking questions is a good way to support the show too that's that is the fuel that feeds the engine that is

soft skills engineering inside the metaphorical ferrari testarossa we'll catch you next week