Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 86: Sharing Salaries and Offensive Words

Episode Date: December 7, 2017

This week Jamison and Dave answer these questions: Could you (Jamison and Dave) share some salary information publicly? It would help to know how much others make. My boss uses an offensive word in technical discussions. How do I ask him to stop?

It takes more than a great consensus algorithm to be a great software engineer. This is episode 86 of the Soft Skills Engineering podcast. I'm your host, Dave Smith. I'm your host, Jameson Dance. Soft Skills Engineering is a weekly advice show for software engineers and, as we've come to find out recently, other engineers who are interested, for whatever reason, in the banter and the fun and the wisdom that Jameson gives. I think it doesn't take more than a great consensus algorithm.

I disagree. you think a great consensus algorithm is the only requirement to being a great engineer that was a really bad joke about consensus i completely missed it oh i wonder if you could can you make a joke so bad that it underflows to a good joke that's what puns are basically right underflows to a good joke i think that's what puns are okay we do have a story from an aerospace engineer which i will read dear you guys i think that's the collective noun for for dave and jameson yeah do you guys i wanted to share a positive hr experience that i had i graduated

at the end of 2015 and interviewed for a manufacturing engineer position at a big aerospace company i walked away from this interview thinking that i was going to be creating manufacturing plans and writing production guides for fabrication not ideal but it was a paycheck at a respectable company. My first week there was really cool. The highlight of that week was a rocket blowing up outside my office and hoping no one was dead. Wow.

That's a weird definition of cool, but I'm glad no one was dead. From there on out, it was a slow descent into misery and darkness. By the end of my second week, I realized that I was not an engineer and I was not in an engineering department. I was a full-on technical writer. The people that I worked with were great, but I went to school to be an engineer and just felt a bit misled. I decided that I would stay for a year and then try to move somewhere else in the company.

And I told my manager. For months after that, I was basically given nothing to do. My mentor in another department gave me some CAD, which stands for computer-aided design assignments, which I loved. A little while later, my supervisor told me that the CAD assignments were not going to happen because I needed to be giving those hours to my manager's department to use their budget. My manager said that CAD was a useless toy. the finale of this tirade was was when it was implied that continuing to do these cat assignments would compromise my job security then i made an appointment with hr and fired up the old resume i didn't go to hr to throw anyone under the bus i just told the woman that the position was not a

good fit hr was really helpful and assured me that the cat assignments were encouraged i also went to talk to my mentor and let him know that i was applying for positions outside the company he was the only person who i told the full story to and he began pulling for me to come to his team Suddenly, I had all these people between my mentor, his manager, and HR being really helpful and checking in on me while I waited for a position to open up. It took a few months, but I finally switched teams with a raise. HR played a big part in setting this all up. As a result, I now have a pretty ball job as a design engineer in a really cool industry.

Well, look at that. HR saved the day. Awesome. I like that good HR story. It seems like everything worked out for the best. And you didn't have to quit your job. You got to stay at your... Well, I mean, you switched teams, but you didn't quit companies.

Yeah. That's cool. Good work. All right. Well, should I read our first question? Please do. Okay, this comes from listener Arthur, who says, Love the show, but, that's but with four U's,

but can you please explain why you guys promote salary and info sharing but did not share your own? Even if you shared your previous job salaries with location and position included, of course it would be very helpful to the many developers out there who are not informed on salaries my first job actually illegally told us that we can't share salary and it brainwashed many developers there i am so glad that a good couple years later dev shared their salary with me and i realized it should not be taboo the negotiation advice you give would mean a lot more if you said actual figures like i asked for a raise when i was making 80k and got an 8k raise as an example

all right arthur thanks for the question i think if but has that many years you pronounce it as boot right every you needs to be pronounced yes yeah this is a good question we have talked about sharing salary i share salaries privately i don't think i ever have publicly though no that's not something i've tweeted next time you leave your computer unintended i'm just gonna go tweet salary information from your account that would be awesome especially since you don't know my salary yeah it'll i'll guess though yeah i've shared it privately with with i don't know how many people maybe like 30 people over the course of my career that's a lot more than i would have

expected it actually happened a lot more once i became a contractor and people wanted to know how much i charged of course well you have to share it at that point well no i mean i mean other developers not clients oh my bad okay so um so you don't tell my clients how much i charge i just i just send them a bill yeah and it's obfuscated so they can't even tell how many hours you worked uh actually we're laughing but that's that's how a lot of consultants work oh my goodness no i tell them how much i charge uh but but people who wanted to get into consulting talk to me a lot about it um and and some of them i know pretty well some of them i don't know that well but i know all of them in some context and it's always been private i have contributed to

a couple anonymous salary surveys as well but i've never just told the world i am jameson dance and i work here and i make this much and i approve this message yeah i have uh i think i've shared my salary with i can think of five people in the last 15 years really yeah it's a very it's a lot smaller yeah it's a select group how many people have you shared your salary with outside of your consulting rate uh it's probably like 15 it's definitely more than five okay you've been quite open with compared to me yeah i think part of it is i i worry that some people are getting taken advantage of so i'll kind of approach them and tell them we should we should do the salary game and swap information um and and to build trust i feel like i need to share oh right information so it's kind

of more of an altruistic outreach for you than it is trying to and that makes me sound insufferable really dave everything i do is altruistic hey buddy i have a sense that maybe you're severely underpaid let me tell you how much i'm making yeah let me descend from the heights of my golden throne show you peons how it could be i i think i've done it more out of feeling like someone is disadvantaged than out of wondering if I am making less than I should, but it's like one-third to two-thirds. So I definitely have talked to people who I think like,

you seem like you make a lot of money. How much should I make? It's not all been me trying to save these poor underpaid souls. Well, having said that, should we get to the nitty-gritty? What's the nitty-gritty? The numbers. Oh, the numbers? The brass tacks.

You can share numbers. i don't know if i want to publicly okay i'll tell you what i will go back to the beginning of my profession as a full-time software engineer and i'll give some details that might help set completely irrelevant yet specific information so i graduated with a cs degree in 2003 my starting salary out of college was 49 000 in salt lake city utah so jameson's feverishly making notes i'm i'm looking up the inflation calculator i'm trying to find out how many 2017 dollars that is good idea that is 66 oh really thousand five hundred and eighteen dollars oh 66 okay that's very interesting very interesting so um at the time

just for a little context this was right on the heels of the dot-com bust which some of our younger audience may not have heard of it has come to my attention recently that people under the age of say 28 don't remember the dot-com bust because they were like 11 when it happened and uh but yeah it was actually very hard to find a job as a software engineer back then when i got my first job out of college i was one of three people that were hired for a position and there were 200 people who interviewed for the position nowadays you uh it's like the opposite right like there will be 200 open positions and only three people interviewing yeah but anyway that gives you a little sense for why maybe that number seems low to you um also i was a terrible interviewer

so actually that's not true i think i was a pretty okayish interviewer i brought a little uh plushy no a little like uh what's that what are those um chew toys or like squeezy toys called i thought you were gonna say an anime body pillow to my first interview i brought a little i brought my waifu a little uh linux penguin tux to my first interview because the job description said linux skills were needed and i was just my plan was to whip out that linux penguin to be like look i'm totally into linux i'm a fan you can see that my interviewing skills were impressive yes well you were memorable i'm sure i didn't i didn't pull out the penguin i left it in the

pocket oh that maybe that was more awkward because then someone saw like this large i i don't know like does he have like an apple in his pocket or what's going on so uh fast forward or sorry even weirder if they saw a penguin in your pocket like why does this guy just have a penguin i wore a suit coat and i put it in my breast pocket too so it was like right at you know it wasn't even hidden under the desk it was like right there so it was probably a little weird yeah well you stuck out yep literally okay anyway so uh fast forward 2005 uh still in salt lake city utah making about 60 000 at this point and then fast forward to 2010 uh still in salt lake city utah making about um a hundred

thousand so which was which is a pretty typical trajectory for engineers these days uh yeah you know you know seven or eight years salary doubled but also the industry recovered from a massive technology tech sector recession so don't forget that so that that growth you know seven years doubling is probably unusual today because the tech sector is already growing massively but then again maybe not because the growth has just been a non-stop you know train ride just accelerating more and more it seems oh you're saying you're saying you wouldn't expect the salary to double because it would already be higher at the beginning yeah that that's what i was thinking but then again like as i was saying it i was second guessing myself because the

industry has just improved and improved and improved so much um that maybe i'm wrong about that you know i started on a low point and by 2010 the industry had more than recovered and was going at a fever pace but now it hasn't really slowed down so yeah so i don't even know yeah there you go interesting okay so my career is a lot younger than yours uh i noticed you have not shared any salary information for the last seven years that's right which is the the length of my professional career um i call those the dark ages where no information shall be disclosed the dark ages before jameson joined and brought the light i was thinking maybe you brought the dark but that's okay oh wait yeah you're right that is yeah why why don't you share more recent

salary information well i just i'm just not comfortable with it and i don't really know uh i don't know why exactly but i'm not i'm not either and i don't know why either i'm trying to figure it out i think we talked a little bit about it before the show and dave asked is it because you're worried it will anchor future salary and that's a classic i mean that's why employers ask you how much you make um because they want to know is is it if it's lower than what they want to pay then they can adjust their their range down and that's part of it part of it i think is like i don't know maybe i'm worried that people will think i don't deserve it somehow or yeah i don't know and some of it is just um not not wanting to sound like i'm showing off i guess

i mean i don't think i make an enormous amount of money but i i don't know my i grew up in a home that didn't talk very much about money for not wanting to appear snooty oh yeah yeah and i feel like i've kind of i've kind of taken that i'm carrying that baggage still yeah and you're not ready to set that baggage down that's okay it's okay i like it that baggage it's comfortable what i will do is share all the private information everyone gave me publicly just kidding um i don't know if i have anything else to say about that it makes me uncomfortable to share publicly but i would share privately with people that i knew who were interested in it no desire to help at all i feel like it could help i mean i yeah it could help more people

if it were public, but I would have less control over it. And I don't want to make that trade-off. I see. You're very deliberate in how you think about these things. I'm very deliberate in how I talk about them. So let's talk just for a moment about why it might be a good idea not to disclose your salary, especially when you're negotiating for a new job. What do you think about that? sure and the reason i want to mention this is i recently had an experience where i was coaching someone who was negotiating uh through a new job and um they asked me like hey should i tell my new salary at the beginning of the whole process or like they asked for a salary history should i

give it and i said you know i would avoid that i would push that off as far as i can or you know during the interview process and they did pushed it off and then at the end this person realized they had signed a non-disclosure agreement of their salary with their company um and i don't know how that came about or what but they literally were not allowed to share their salary with the prospective employer and it worked great for them because the the new employer did not have an anchor reference and i'm telling you as an employer the way that i pick salaries a lot of times to try to get someone to join my company is i will take their current salary and i will increase it by the amount that i think i need to in order to get them to come join my company

and you know it's a very private thing and it's it's one-on-one an individual and everybody has their own number um but if i don't have that anchor point i just have to pay them what i think is a strong compelling market rate which actually i think is a better system but um you can you know you don't have to do that so anyway this person got a phenomenal raise i mean i don't know the exact numbers but i think it was on the order of 50 or 60 percent increase to be able to join this new company um and i believe that it was in big part because they didn't have to disclose their salary up front sure i mean i think the the reason you do it is because you feel uncomfortable someone's asking you a question and in an interview your job is to answer questions really

well and then they kind of like switch up what kind of question they're asking really quick i'm sitting here traversing this binary search tree and suddenly we're talking about salary history now just insert your salary into the tree and then rebalance it real quick here's yeah it's got a range of values put yours in there you can just sneak up on them like that yeah i have only once seen a bad outcome from someone asking for too much money personally it might have happened more in a new in a new job offer situation yeah so there was a candidate who was kind of um they were on the fence about whether the company wanted to hire them or not and they got the company decided to end up making them an

offer the candidate countered with a much higher number like as a percentage what what percentage roughly oh i don't know it was like 30 or something 30 higher than the original offer yeah it was it was a lot that's substantial and and the answer was like well we don't want you anymore oh so so the offer was rescinded but i say that because that's i feel like that's an uncommon case like that's always the fear that i have when i'm negotiating if i say it too high of a number then they'll just reject me completely but i don't think it happens that often and it's never happened to me personally and i've only seen it happen and by the time the offer comes to you in paper form it negotiation is done like you missed the opportunity to negotiate you need to

work that out verbally well before that hits the paper i think so because at that point it's gone through approvals and now you're gonna make if you're gonna if you try to counter with something higher you're gonna make that manager have to go back to the chain of approvals that they had to get the first time and get a new higher offer and that makes the manager not look good so what if you just don't talk salary until they give you an offer then you miss the opportunity to negotiate in what if you because you don't want to say your salary you don't want to anchor their estimate so so they ask you how much you want and you say you need to come up with a number tell me no you need to come up with a number at that point like you can't not say any numbers at all that's not

negotiating but then just wait for them to come up with a number yeah because then they get to anchor it now if you can anchor it where you want it i think that's a much better way to start it So you anchor it with a number you want and that you think is reasonable. And you can do a little groundwork to figure out what a reasonable range is. Like ask us what our salaries are in public. Or try to figure out there's Glassdoor and there's other stuff. But yeah, start there. Verbally work out a number that makes sense for you and them and then get the paper offer.

But if you wait to the paper offer, it makes it much harder to negotiate. Yeah. For the manager. It's a pain and they're going to resist a little harder. Interesting. well i feel like we've we've talked about salaries in an interesting way i feel like we've wandered a field from the question yeah a little bit i feel uncomfortable so i don't want to say my numbers publicly i think i don't have i don't have another answer and just like jameson

i'm not willing to share any numbers more recent than seven years ago either so and uh i think we are victims of the same system that has made it taboo in the first place to talk about what do you mean i mean the very reason that so few people talk about their salaries we are victims of that same reason right even though we can't put our finger on it exactly what it is it's just not comfortable yeah i was a i was a research assistant and i made 13 an hour on campus probably a pretty good on-campus job yeah that was that was one of the higher paying on-campus jobs that's more than i'm large in my on-campus job well we gotta adjust it for inflation i think i made like 10 bucks an hour on my on-campus job oh man you made way more than i did then

oh really inflation adjusted yeah oh huh okay well have we answered the question as much as we are comfortable answering it if you're really interested um you can send me a message and we can talk more but yeah i don't think i want to do it publicly that's cool cool question answered all right i will read our next question uh just a warning this question is about using offensive language at work so it has an offensive word in it we'll just say it when reading the question and then, and then refer to it afterwards. Okay. Long-time listener, first-time caller, love the show. I work as an engineer at a small startup of nine people. Occasionally a word I find really offensive, retarded in a derogatory usage gets thrown around most often by my boss,

the CTO. As you can imagine, he's the person that I have my weekly one-on-ones with. I've tried ignoring it, but it gets really under my skin. And I think it makes for a less welcoming work environment. I'm not sure how to address the problem without a really awkward conversation without being perceived as the pc police any suggestions oh tough one yeah i do have one suggestion though which is uh i have curated a list of shakespearean offensive words that you can use uh that are no longer that are no longer offensive but that you could suggest your boss use these instead so i'm just going to run down this list all right yeah okay elf skin huh dried neats tongue okay bulls pizzle okay that's the first one i think i know what it means

i have no i actually don't know but i'm not sure stockfish i like that one dang this stock fish software what were you gonna say oh nothing i was gonna say nothing i want i'm waiting with bated breath to see what you come up with next it's just a typical lily livered response from you okay that one i definitely know what it means that's the first one i know for sure it's it's just like coward i think when you hook because your liver is white i'm assuming lily refers to white yeah

i guess or maybe it's made of flowers this was probably super offensive like 500 years ago yeah and the last one is no sorry the last two thine face is not worth sun burning okay and poisonous bunchback toad which i really like that one the bunchback yeah is that a species of toad or just like an aesthetic of toad i'm gonna go with aesthetic and definitely applicable to software yeah for sure so elf skin elves are are like beautiful and graceful in modern day just i mean you say elf and all i think of is orlando bloom right and he's got good skin but maybe that didn't used to be the case maybe there's been some advances in skincare technology for elves they are immortal so they eventually learn how

to take care of it yeah that's true once you get old enough you stop getting zits someday i'll get there huh okay yeah i can just see you stand up and say like you bulls pizzle this is the most lily livered idea i've ever heard oh man so first of all i think you are in the right i think this is a term that has no place in the workplace there there are some terms that people find offensive that have historical meaning in tech a thing i think of a lot is used to talk about master and slave databases and then people realized like people were slaves and it might not make them feel great to talk about that um so people talk about primary and secondary now but at least you used to say this

without thinking it was bad and it meant something technically and i think well-meaning people decide you know what it's not worth it we can change the term to something that means the same that won't offend people but this word doesn't there's not a real technical use for it doesn't enrich the technical discussion in any way right it's basically only the the only upside to using it is this person doesn't have to change which word they use right that's a low bar yeah yeah so i i think your argument is pretty strong in favor of changing plus i think that society is on your side here and even celebrities have made little videos that you can find on youtube that say this word is bad to use in this context okay and if if your boss doesn't believe celebrities

then you know all hope is lost how do you win any technical arguments if your boss doesn't believe celebrities i know how do you appeal to authority that's right listen i saw tom cruise hack into that computer in mission impossible 2 well what what should this okay so we've agreed not good what should this person do about it well have you ever been in a situation where you uh wanted someone to stop using a word i have actually i've been in a very similar situation different word um but similar in all the other ways it was my boss uh he used it it didn't add anything technically it just just a word he used that made me uncomfortable um so i've talked before about these heart-to-heart group retrospectives we had at my last job where the whole team sits

in a circle and gives feedback on everybody it's very open and kind of raw and vulnerable and i chose that form to tell my boss that this word he used made me uncomfortable and i'd like him to stop and because he's awesome and and very kind and and uh good at receiving feedback he received it well but that's probably not the best way to do it so was that like an audience yeah like totally awkward city when you're like oh it was so awkward so first yeah question asker says i don't want an awkward conversation too bad this is an awkward conversation it's way more awkward in front of a group of other people who all conveniently look down

and fiddle with their pens and make weird grunts. Yeah. Very awkward. It turned out well in this case because of the kind of person my boss is, but there are much better ways to do it. Which are what?

Even bigger audience or what? Yeah, that's true. Call them out on Twitter. That usually works. Yeah, yeah. Start the mob. An engineer called out his boss on using a sensitive word. You'll never guess what happened next.

Yeah, he got fired by his boss. So I think the right approach is to recognize that someone is probably going to get defensive when you bring this up and you need to defuse that as much as possible. So storming in and attacking them and saying, you use this word, which is bad. so you are bad and i don't want to work for a bad person and just just that there's a lot of feelings that could get caught up in this that you want to avoid bringing up in your boss um as much as possible you want to let them save face you want to let them have an easy out you you want to make it clear that this will make the team better you're not attacking them you're just

trying to make things work more smoothly um and and just diffuse the situation as much as much as possible so i just i was just as you were telling that advice which i think is great as usual i had this visual of star trek and bear with me for just a moment but you know the enterprise is flying along minding its own business and yeah a klingon bird of prey swoops in what's the first thing that the captain does he yells red alert shields up right and yes that's that's you got to make sure you're not the klingon bird of prey when you come into these situations you need to be you need to be the unarmed science vessel where the enterprise captain is like let's let's send a team to help you know like no shields there's no red alert there's no phasers being warmed up

um because that's what happens on the other side of these conversations yeah yeah yeah if you can connect with your boss over this instead of attack him that's that's the key i really like that metaphor no no klingon war vessel attacking that's right um that i mean that can be a valid approach in some situations but not usually these one-on-one interpersonal things exactly but i do agree that you should do this one-on-one i think hopefully you already thought of that unlike yeah unlike jameson yeah um and how do you start a conversation like this without it becoming aggressive i'm just thinking about awkward conversations i have with my wife and the ones that go better are ones where i talk about my feelings i feel this way when this happens not okay you do this wrong so i i think my

instinct would be to say when you use this word it's i don't know it makes me feel uncomfortable because yeah i think that's great and no one can no one can argue with you about the way you feel when they say things i mean some people will try to make you feel like your feelings response is yeah yeah you shouldn't feel that way but it's much harder to argue about how you feel than it is to argue about whether something is right or wrong so rather than making a like an absolute statement about the rightness or wrongness of this of using this term instead just describe how you feel and i think if you have a narrative here that would be great especially if this is a particularly meaningful word to you because you have someone you care about in your life who is

would be the brunt of this word in other contexts. You know, maybe you had a friend or a sibling or someone who has been called this word before. You know, you can call that narrative out with your boss and I think that will go a really good, I think it will go really well smoothly and it's just something you can't argue with, right? It's not going to put your boss on the defensive.

Yeah, I'm trying to think of it from your boss's perspective and and it can feel challenging sometimes to to hear that this thing that you thought was no big deal right is considered wrong now and right and an instinct can be to fight back against that and just think i can say whatever i want and it's your fault for thinking it's bad like i don't think it's bad so i'm gonna keep saying it um and and that's i think that's the path you go down if someone gets defensive if if you come on as the klingon attack vessel and be prepared to walk away as well if you can see that your boss is going like no no i absolutely am going to keep saying this and it's not wrong you know at that point you might want to say well all right it's

not worth having this fight depending on how strongly you feel about this right like are you willing to say quit this job over this or not um you might just want to be like all right you know different strokes different folks whatever and and off you go yeah so i would make that decision before you enter the room yeah you know how you're going to respond before it happens i think even if it goes pretty well there will be some lingering awkwardness for a little while maybe maybe your boss slips up after you talk about it and then he looks over at you and and like what do you do then or i don't know like just be sure to have your disappointed face ready at all moments or an air horn if sales can sound off the air horn when they make a sale you can sound it off when your

boss says a word you don't like like deadline um but i i think to me this this change makes for a more respectful workplace and that is a workplace that i would feel more comfortable in so i think it's worth a little bit of discomfort yeah to make a change for the better even if there might be a little bit of a rocky transition period yeah also one one more thing to think about we didn't get a lot of info about who the question asker is. A lot of people in software, though, are white males who are traditionally not very discriminated against. And if you are this kind of person, it's a lot easier for you to bring up these kind of things than someone who looks different from you. I think you have a little bit more power to change things and maybe a little bit more

responsibility to because the likelihood for negative repercussions is a little bit smaller for you hmm interesting it doesn't make it any easier necessarily but but bad things are less likely to happen to you okay anything else you want to talk about with this question uh just make sure your your boss isn't a uh poisonous bunchback toad before you go in there because if he is you might walk out with prepared if if things go bad so you you can start off by offering this list of alternatives you can also use them offensively if things go real bad and oh if you convince him that these are offensive enough maybe he will just use these instead if the goal is to be offensive to be unpolitically correct then yeah just gotta

convince him get other people in on it you you let one of these phrases slip and everyone else gasps yeah and then i was gonna say you get hr to talk to you but you're a startup so you don't have hr yeah okay well clearly this will help oh yeah how could it not yeah anything else you want to say about this question nope i think the question has been answered where could people go if they want to ask a question and have a curated list of shakespearean insults provided the response they unless they are elf skinned bulls pizzles can go to soft skills.audio it's our website there's a button on there ask a question you just click that and uh throw us either a question or your best ancient insult you could spill the bounds of english as well

it doesn't have to be in english for sure for sure we wouldn't understand it but actually i play video games online so i know a lot of russian swear words but besides that i'll learn new words great uh yeah please send us your questions we'd be happy to happy to hear them yep thanks very much if you like the podcast please rate it and tell your friends and enemies to subscribe yes tell even that lily livered poisonous bunchback toad all right something for them to catch you next week bye