Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 92: Career Death by Friction and New Job Woes

Episode Date: January 19, 2018

This week Jamison and Dave answer these questions: A previous job involved a coworker who, over time, became very difficult to get along with. I did my best to talk it through with him, but he would only ever say I needed to “fix my attitude”. I tried to deflect and avoid conflict, but he’d continually impose himself on the situation. (Assign himself to review my code, come into my cube and demand my help, etc.) I had good relationships with the rest of the team, and they all agreed that he was out of line. Yet management viewed the situation as simply friction between two devs, with no clear instigator. Being a source of team friction is career death, and I’m personally embarrassed that anyone got that impression of me. How can I (or other listeners) handle this situation so that I don’t get painted as “part of the problem?” I’ve started a new job. I’m enjoying the work and the culture slightly less, and I discovered my salary could have been much higher had I negotiated harder. Is it too late to negotiate for a higher salary after I’ve already joined? Dave mentions this article on salary negotiation. It’s good!

It takes more than great Levenstein distance algorithm skills to be a great software engineer. This is Soft Skills Engineering, episode 92. I'm your host, Dave Smith. I'm your host, Jameson Dance. Soft Skills Engineering is a weekly advice show for software developers. Why did you come up with Levenstein distance? Where did that come from? I used it at work this week.

Oh, wow. You're like the fabled 1% developer that uses computer science stuff. we i'm telling you i i read all these tweets about people who don't use computer science at work and i've been that developer i think a lot and i think it's very actually very common but i use it a lot at my current job so their interview strategy is probably pretty good for the work that they do then there's probably a bunch of developers here that don't but i certainly do and my team does and and it's still not like it's not like i spend all day perusing algorithms and computer science theory it's like you know oh another thing i need to sort better write quick

sort again wow we really need a better sorting algorithm dave dave you go work on that just implement quick sort for us real quick we ran out of the last one that you did and can you do it on a whiteboard because that's what we really need we need a picture of quick sort not the code all right uh i'd like to thank dustin coats for being a patreon donor he's donating at the tier where we thank him every week and we would do it anyways because we love him so much if you would like to donate uh you can go to patreon.com soft skills eng there's also a link on our website at soft skills.audio and money that we get uh via patreon goes towards equipment it goes towards equipment design editing um the gore-tex ball pit fund is a stretch goal for us

so we'll get there someday and if you enjoy the show if you've benefited from listening we would love your support yeah thank you all right jameson would you like to read our first question today i would love to this is from an anonymous listener a previous job involved a co-worker who over time became very difficult to get along with i did my best to talk through it with him but he would only ever say i needed to fix my attitude in air quotes i decided to deflect and avoid conflict but he would continually impose himself on the situation he would assign himself to review my code come into my cube and demand my help etc i have a good relationship with the rest of the team and they all agreed that he was out of line yet management viewed the situation as simply

friction between two devs with no clear instigator being a source of team friction is career death and i'm personally embarrassed that anyone got that impression of me how can i or other listeners handle the situation so i don't get painted as part of the problem oh ouch um well you're either part of the problem oh no you're either part of the solution or you're part of the precipitate that's the okay yeah that's the thing people have said before i don't know why that occurred to me i just love that joke it's oldie but a goodie right you also use your chemistry skills a lot it's weird that they asked you about titration in the in your interview but it has come up a lot computer science and chemistry yeah they go together like oil and water

how many kids do you have uh i have five kids i feel like you are an expert on the manager's view of this situation like two kids are just slapping each other and you're just like calm down back there i don't care who started it i'll end it probably in a nicer tone of voice so actually if you're going if you want to use that analogy i do think all my kids that are part of the problem like anyone who participates in the disagreement you're all part of the problem hmm and and you know what not a single time has any one of my kids after a disagreement come up to me and said dad you know i want to start being part of the solution what how would you advise me when i get poked in the eye over and over again in the car ride it makes me feel

upset and sometimes i overreact i would like to do better dad what would you advise oh my gosh anyone i tried calling my sister ugly and it didn't help it just made it worse oh oh man anyone anyone who's even seen a sitcom involving kids knows how absolutely improbable that is yeah so i can see like with that attitude i can see why this listener feels like they may have gotten lumped into the part of the problem group here yeah and that sucks right it sucks to be seen that way yeah yeah it definitely does have you tried to booby trap your cubicle i mean you could defend against all these avenues that you've exposed yourself to this person with so a pit not of spikes but of soft plastic balls

you i mean you'd probably have to put some malware onto his computer to interfere with his ability to review code or i mean no it's probably a web-based app you could just hack that instead yeah yeah um yeah you just got to close yourself off even more i was actually thinking that the real problem here is it's not that management sees your problems but rather that there's no bigger problem for them to see so if if if you could spread some false rumors about some other teammates and make them get into disagreements with each other that are really heated you know so it has to be pretty juicy stuff then management won't even notice your little problem anymore okay so discord among

the team so that you and grumpy gus look like you get along relatively well yeah relatively well okay you just have to be slightly quieter than the squeakiest wheel i feel like if i ever ran for office dave i would want you as my campaign manager this is this kind of crap actually works great i think for politicians um i'm just listening i'm so glad that hurricane hit so i can get away with this scandal yeah i'm listening to this podcast about watergate and apparently as part of the run-up to the 1970 whatever election nixon's campaign purposefully sabotaged the campaign of their toughest opponent on the other opposite party side so that the person who won the nomination would be way easier

to defeat in the general election they like provided them a free driver who worked as a volunteer for their campaign and they paid this driver a bunch of money every month to just copy all of their documents and like it was really shady and then did they cause a hurricane so that they wouldn't the news wouldn't launch onto them they probably tried there was some plot involving drugs and prostitution and kidnapping that oh my gosh it was a plan i don't think it ever was carried out but they were working on it so i guess there's a lot of room to escalate that's that's the point here and these skills will take you all the way to the white house yeah uh so at the very beginning of my software related career i was i was just a year into school

about and i worked as a qa and data entry person at this local software company that is just a dumpster fire it was then and it still is even though it limps along to this day and their head programmer was really hard to get along with he had been there for a long time he was just really abrasive and he didn't like me but every day at 4 45 he would just come into my office that i the one i shared with a bunch of people just like stand behind my desk and talk to me and it became this weird end of day ritual for him i think he was like done working but he couldn't go home yet so he's just like i'll just go terrify james and one time to try and get him off my back or make it less awkward i i tried to bring up this bug i found at work and the bug was

if you click this checkbox really fast in the web app it sometimes doesn't register clicks in this certain browser and he just grabbed my mouse and took it and put it over the checkbox and very deliberately and slowly clicked click click click click and it worked every time then he just sat there silently and looked at me it's like works for me idiot yeah oh and then uh i quit later because i hated it but that was that i don't know that wasn't quite the same but that's the closest i've come to like serious friction between someone on the team okay plot twist that engineer was me what just kidding i wasn't really sure he still works there so it can't be you or you were pulling off

some impressive feats of of cloning well no not that impressive because it's not a very good clone uh you've you've done some weird stuff though made some weird design choices yeah i gotta look at this person yep still there oh man that's a long time to work at one place holy cow how many years 13 years okay the same little company well you know he's built a little empire and he gets to rule the roost why would you leave that that is maybe kind of a joke but that's absolutely the truth think about how many hundreds of poor qa engineers he has terrorized deliberately or accidentally yes yeah well anyway so that won't help you it helped me to get it off my chest though yeah but you feel better now

yeah i feel a lot better we maybe we could do some role play uh work through how i would deal with that situation now are we really stretching this much to where we're like i don't have any directly applicable stories to this question here's something i just wanted to tell this story so i wonder if anyone else on the team has issues with this difficult to get along with co-worker oh i'm sure it was just you based on that interaction that was perfectly reasonable oh well in my situation it was he definitely had a reputation um but i feel like in our question asker situation oh i feel like we changed subjects back to the uh back to the Dave come on answer the question what are you doing getting off topic like that um yeah I feel

like I mean sometimes there are personalities that just conflict but I feel like if someone is being what seems like deliberately obstructive or or I don't know what the word is what would the word be if they're deliberately seeking conflict I feel like they would have conflict with other people too yeah if they were going after it sure those people are pretty rare though okay um so you you think it is just like a case of these two people just do not mix at all well and they mix better with i don't it's hard to say but based on the question it says here i have good relationships with the rest of the team and they agreed that he was out of line but management viewed the situation differently so i would say this is probably um it could be a case of just

two personalities that that collide and it's limited to these two it's probably not but it could be but management doesn't see it that or management does see it that way and that's the problem we need to address i think is to get management to see this for what it is which is um the listener here is trying to smooth it over and make things right and and uh and he's not part of the problem or it doesn't at least it doesn't want to be yeah so what would you do i mean he's he's tried kind of avoiding the situation and it turns out if you work on the same team in the same building and you're not willing to like handcuff someone to their desk it's pretty hard to just completely prevent them if they want to from talking to you yeah posing themselves on the

situation for sure so what should he do well i i would i would probably do two things the first thing i would do is i would do some real soul searching and self-assessment here and try as hard as possible to objectively look at the situation and say what am i doing to contribute to the tension and this is actually in my experience this is hard to do it's hard to get an accurate answer out of yourself because your brain will trick you right like it it the survival instinct of i'm not doing anything wrong is so strong yeah you know but if you have a trusted coworker who has seen these situations unfold, I would go to them and say, look, I just want to know anything you think I'm doing wrong. Don't worry about hurting my feelings. Let me know what

you think I could do and just try to get out of them. By the way, even if you do that, you're still going to get a sugar-coated version because no one likes to give harsh feedback. It's really hard to give. But that's how you can start to approximate what your contribution to this tension might be and i would make sure that i fully explore that to see if maybe there is something that i can do to turn this around and sometimes it's just a matter of meeting someone in the middle like they've got a preference on how they like to interact with people and uh you've got a different set of preferences they're both perfectly reasonable preferences but the intersection is where they get into trouble they just don't overlap yeah or they're they

tend or they're opposed to each other you know like i like to do it this way he likes to do it that way uh when we come together it it collides i don't know that's but that's how i would start that was that was just step one what do you think about that i think that's great i can imagine you talk to your trusted co-worker they take a deep breath they look you in the eye and they say there is the smell that'd be great though i mean imagine if they give you a thing that you didn't know was an issue that is easily fixable with yeah like with the three dollar product from the grocery store yeah yeah i like that advice so far give me the next step before we go on to the next

step i will say be careful not to let this turn into a spiral where you know you dwell on it too much because at some point you need to stop and say okay let's stop the introspection i don't want to like swirl into this like you know black hole of well maybe it's this weird thing i do or maybe it's that weird thing yeah yeah you don't want to just like radically attempt to change your personality to be compatible with this person who you feel like is being unreasonable yeah that's definitely true so step two i bake them cookies every day bring them to their office that might i just do all their work for them no no let me take that bug for you but you can keep your name on an injera have a small sample of my salary ask your boss to route like 10 to their yeah

we're just trying to formalize the bully beating me up and taking my lunch money approach with hr we're just automating it though yeah saves everyone effort it's great okay so step two is where i would actually go to my manager for advice now i specifically said manager i want to go to the person who has the impression that i'm part of the problem and i want to ask them for advice and say like you know you've noticed that there's some tension between this co-worker and myself i want to make it right what would you do in my situation how can i contribute to this solution now here's the trick though here's the dave smith campaign manager twist

dude just i mean you just keep following this podcast and you will get to the white house you might not be able to stay there very long but you'll get there here's the twist when you go to your manager they may or may not give you good advice but just by asking the question you are showing them that you want to solve this problem and that you're being proactive about it and that you don't want to be part of the solution this is how you can help to dispel this false you do want to be part of the solution what did i say you said don't want to be part of the solution okay i meant the opposite i meant whatever the good thing is to say okay cool got it so you want to make sure they know that you don't want to be part of the problem

yeah yeah and uh that's all you're doing here and so the advice they give it might turn out to be useful or it might not it doesn't matter this is just delivering a message and uh they'll get the message i think yeah i think especially if you have information from step one where you looked at your own behavior maybe you talked to some colleagues got their feedback tried these things and it didn't work i think that's pretty powerful too to say i tried to solve it this way and i'm still struggling um what do you think i can do yeah oh yeah that's great idea super good huh so what do you think the outcome is say you do this you your manager gives you some advice it's probably pretty useless it's probably vague and inspirational right just philosophical

theoretical whatever business book your manager last read yeah it's probably through that lens so what what'll happen is the next day you'll come to work and your co-worker will be packing his stuff into a cardboard box and you just glare at him and some house of cards music comes on in the background you've climbed one more step um i mean the practical outcomes of this so one of them is your manager thinks you're not part of the problem you're part of the solution but it's it's possible that it doesn't actually change anything about this difficult relationship with a co-worker yeah yeah so but at least it's not all your fault right that's that's right i mean to me that the big question here is that

this listener asked is how can i handle the situation so i don't get painted as part of the problem and that that's that's my answer to that question to actually fix your relationship with this co-worker i think is a is actually a harder thing to do than to fix the optics that you've got with your management yeah well we'll just paper it over then yeah exactly just put some wallpaper right up on the wall there cover up the mold and sign it with your name make sure yeah your colleague's name does not end up on that wallpaper that's right cool i think that's really good advice steve i do think this is a hard situation i've been in this situation two times that i can remember maybe three if i go back yeah i think maybe three times over the last

15 or so years um and in all three cases i tried to make it clear to my management that i i'm aware of the tension and i'm trying to work on solutions to solve it and in one case i even told the manager i said look i will do anything to make sure this team is successful and if this tension gets in the way of that i'll do whatever it takes i told him that and he had some ideas for me and they were good ideas and uh and it helped a lot and and it definitely painted a clear picture in my manager's mind of where my attitude was at and i ultimately went on to be very successful with that company and i definitely had the trust of management and i think that that that pivotal moment where i made it clear to my manager that through my words and actions i was willing to do

whatever it takes to have a productive working relationship uh with the with the whole team is a big part of why uh they trusted me so i think it's a good thing that's cool awesome all right well you've answered the question i sure you had a great listen i listened a very applicable story this is this is actually an opportunity i think um you have management's attention it's not positive attention but it can become that i think so don't squander it cool it's your time to shine okay dave do you want to read the next question yeah sure this one comes from an anonymous listener who says i've recently started a new job i really think i had all the information when considering the offer from former colleagues who had joined my new company recommended me and

they all genuinely enjoyed their new job and gave glowing recommendations. I might be slightly bitter about not negotiating for a higher salary. They were happy to give me the number I asked for, but I have since found out that another former colleague turned them down for much more. I'm assuming from another company. Still, it was a noticeable improvement for me, and I got to switch programming languages too, so I don't know exactly how I feel. I started the new job. I'm in the probationary three-month period common in the UK. I'm enjoying the work slightly less. The culture was a bit more clinical less community feeling and the problems being solved aren't necessarily impacting the world as much i feel more like a replaceable cog i currently feel if i was paid

more i wouldn't mind any of that stuff but i was wondering if you've been in a situation or have any advice i guess i could follow the usual advice and look for another job but do you think i could negotiate i could renegotiate at my current job will sticking around for one year plus regardless be the best thing to do here hmm so they got recruited to this company got an offer or made an offer that was accepted i guess for salary found out someone else could have potentially made way more and the work is a little bit less satisfying right but well like the culture is less satisfying let's see yeah yeah i guess he doesn't really say the work he Problems being solved aren't necessarily impacting the world as much.

Oh, okay. So, yeah. So, the work and the culture is not as great. But he's making more money. He got to switch programming languages. And he got exactly what he asked for. But it turns out what he asked for was too low. Yeah.

I really think I had all the information when considering the offer. Did you? That lesson learned. You never have all the information when you're considering an offer. Yeah. You said you had all the information. and then you list a bunch of stuff you didn't know when considering the offer the culture the problems being solved the salary difference between you and a potential other colleague that

didn't end up working there i've never before my my current job i've never made a very deliberate effort to find out a lot about the company i've always been pretty cavalier about the job search process yes you have a little bit more so than anyone i know i haven't died yet guess it's fine um yeah that's a product of the times not yes how awesome i am it's a product of both come on be honest okay well i'll take it uh but anyways i i have been much more deliberate about this job search and i know way more about the company and the culture and the team before joining than I ever have before. And even then, there's still things I've found out

since accepting the offer that it would have been nice to know beforehand. I don't know. It's hard to know. Yeah. You spent like weeks researching this job, right? Yeah, yeah. I mean, it wasn't full-time weeks,

but the total job search was probably like six weeks from when I first started interviewing to when I accepted the offer I ended up accepting. And you had like lots of emails back and forth, lots of questions. Yeah, with this specific job I ended up taking, I think there was a standard interview process. And then I did a bunch more. I talked a lot more with the recruiter and I talked a lot more with my boss. And it was really helpful.

I feel like it answered a lot of questions. But even then, I still have a lot of things I found out after accepting. But none of them have changed the overall feeling. I'm still excited about it. I think the point of this rambling is, you know, now that you didn't have all the information, and you might have done things differently. What could you have asked or done, knowing what you knew at the time to find out before accepting? Because it's kind of unfair to say, like, I already work here. So obviously, I would have asked about this, I don't know, problem employee or this project that I started on that got canceled. You wouldn't have known that. but there's there's stuff that you could have known when you accepted that you could have asked about i mean the culture it can be hard to get a good feel for it but you can get some feel over it the problems being solved aren't necessarily impacting the world as much that's

kind of core to what the company is doing i feel like you you should know that before you work there he probably did he probably did know that okay so maybe it was like but it won't matter because i'm working with this cool team this cool technology i'm gonna guess here that the real thing he didn't know was that the number the salary number he was asking for was actually lower than they would have given him yeah and that's the thing that's really getting his goat yeah yeah i think you're right it feels like the core of this is maybe a little bit of of feeling a little bit hurt that yeah yeah you don't feel as valued by them as this friend or colleague so they negotiated for as low a salary as they possibly could you negotiated for as high a salary as you

thought reasonable and now you're dissatisfied yeah companies always have more information in the salary negotiation phase they know how much they're paying all the other team members all your peers and probably even more teams and so when you come to the table and you're like how about x they go back and they go let's compare that to our gigantic corpus of salary data that we have personally amassed with our own employees and see how that falls oh look it's low okay great you know yeah sounds awesome yeah i'm not gonna give you more at uh my last full-time job at kawali the person that was building the team actually counter offered with a higher number to one of my colleagues they asked for x and he was like that's a little low how about x plus

10 000 or something like that i don't know what the numbers were so the company actually came back and said that's too low yeah the company he negotiated his employee up that's really cool that was like a really strong cultural value he wanted people to be paid fairly and paid well and it's much easier to do when it's your own company that you are starting and you control everything yeah that's a value hold but that's i understand why that's not common in industry yeah so you have all these colleagues i wonder if did you talk to them about salary i guess it can be kind of uncomfortable if you're going to work together to say how much do you make then maybe they'll all be mad at each other but but they have pretty

strong salary information about how the company pays that's a pretty good source of information you talked about the dave you mentioned the the information imbalance there and if you have all these friends there then that's a good source i mean we've talked about like glassdoor and all those things and how yeah they're hard to read relatively unreliable they are but people that work there are a great source yeah and you don't even have to you don't even have to say how much you make you could just say i'm negotiating salary what what do you think is reasonable yeah what should i ask for yeah and then that gives them a that gives them a way to divorce it from saying how much they make and then you say well that seems low i'll ask for this and

That's good. That's great. You could get a nice sanity check. That's a good idea. Okay, so now that he's hired. I had one. One on the podcast. One good idea.

So now that he's hired, what are his options? Can he go back and say, you know, the culture here sucks. The work's not that great. But if you pay me 10% more, I would be happy. I need a quality of life bonus. Like a hardship bonus or something. Is that even on the table, you think? My internal politeness and etiquette meter is like exploding at the thought of that.

But I don't, I don't actually know. I just feel like it would be so rude to ask, you know, that I assume they just laugh it off. So needless to say, you've never done this. Oh, heck no. No, I've never been like, you know, I don't like it as much as I thought I would. It's like a protection racket. Like, it'd be a shame if I quit because I don't like it. And also I got paid.

not enough money yeah i've never i've never heard or seen this uh myself either yeah it feels it feels weird it feels like you would have to adjust it in the regular raise or promotion cycle yeah i think but i don't know i don't know why besides just like that just seems weird yeah i don't think there's any yeah i i don't know why either but i think if you're going to make the adjustment you need to get your boss as early as possible and say hey at the next race cycle i want to be making x so get me on track for that what do i need to do yeah um but i don't think you can go back after just a couple months and say yeah you know what i negotiated poorly give me 10 unless you really came in really low and then they might actually feel guilty and they might be like oh i'm

so glad you asked i felt terrible yeah maybe i feel that is unlikely yeah me too i i think especially if part of the case is your pay is out of line with your peers that's that's a much stronger case to say i'm doing good work and i think i'm worth x and i'm also out of line with with what i feel like this role is paid at at the company um so i think it's still valuable to talk to your colleagues about salary it could be that this co-worker or this this potential colleague who turned down a much higher offer was some wild outlier maybe they had incredibly specialized knowledge or maybe they were like dating the ceo's child or i don't know there there could be some more information there that that makes that an unreasonable number to shoot for so i

still think it's it's useful to find out more salary information if everyone around you is making close to you then i think you can still definitely ask for more money but it's a different discussion then i'm quite underpaid compared to my peers and also i'm doing good work so i think yeah i think no matter what it's worth it to talk to your colleagues about salary interesting i think there was a recent law or a bill in one of the u.s states that said california yeah what was the deal there oh they have a couple one of them is you can't be forced to tell your previous salaries oh during during negotiation and interviewing yeah and then there's another one about um it's it's illegal for a company to forbid you from discussing your salaries ah yes right i don't know

if that's california only or u.s as space lawyers we really look at it from a higher level at a more planetary or even solar system level and yeah these arbitrary boundaries of states and countries are yeah we don't see those yeah humans somewhere have this law yeah that's what we see yeah i feel bad saying this though it's kind of we're kind of saying you missed the boat but i mean it's kind of true the point where you have by far the most leverage over a company is where they want you to work there and you do not yet work there yeah once you work there the the cost for you to quit that's like the ultimate threat do this or i quit that's kind

of like the implied threat behind all negotiations even if it's not really on the table and it it's really annoying to quit you might have to move your life your family if you have one you have to go get a different job it's expensive so it's a lot harder to say you want me to be here and i'm not here yet that's the opposite what i want to say i think i'm just done i think i'm gonna end there we should share a link to patrick mckinsey's excellent article on the topic of salary negotiation for engineers sure i know you've read that one uh years ago um i think you said that that article has made you a hundred thousand dollars over the course of your career probably i i should like sit down and calculate it but that before i read that article i didn't know that you could just ask for

more money sometimes in salary negotiations and sometimes they would say yes right so i think if you if you just tracked like here's what i would have gotten if i didn't negotiate at every job it it'd be quite a lot i don't know what the exact number is but somewhere around that order and then you carry that year over year right yeah exactly yeah because at if you make 5 000 more at your first job that means your second job your base will be 5 000 higher and then you probably we get another raise and yeah which is a percentage of the five thousand so it's just out of control compounding so yeah we should definitely show that article i didn't read it until this year so unlike how horrible your life has been i know i've probably lost a hundred thousand dollars i

could be driving a tesla with that money oh man you can have one of mine dave as an article reader i know you have a spring tesla and a winter tesla because the colors can't be the same so i'll take yeah there's no white after labor day so my my spring tesla is black oh man i'll tell you what that sucks it sucks that we expect candidates to make such an impactful decision with such limited information when they're negotiating you know yep you just don't have all the facts and and i think this is actually why a lot of people are scared to quit their job and get a new job because you're walking into a big field of unknowns yeah and uh yeah the whole thing is just stressful but you know like anything you got to practice it to get better at it so uh

this was a good practice run i think for this listener who learned the hard way that there is money to be made for people who are willing to do a few jump through a few extra hoops during salary negotiation if they ask the right questions and have the right information and uh maybe you'll learn for next time but i think you're out of luck until the next race cycle at your current company just because of etiquette and no other reason yeah if someone has done that let me know because i would love to hear yeah i'd love to hear how it went yeah me too i'm surely someone has done this i mean it's not like written in stone or anything i mean yeah yeah you could very well go ask for more money and they could say yeah we'll do it but it's got

to be at a six month boundary or something i mean there's going to be some policy probably you know yeah yeah good luck to you uh i had a thing i was gonna say i think it's gone i bet it was going to be awesome yeah i'll just find some inspirational gandhi quote and paste it in here what was it it's i think it was something about like salary not being the most important contributor to happiness oh yeah okay i bet i know what you're going to say because i had a similar thought and we usually you say it and if it's good i'll claim it okay it was my thought i was gonna say let's just for a thought exercise let's just say that

you were underpaid by 10 at this company and you're suddenly they turned around and said you know what we want to give you a 10 raise would that actually fix all of your concerns and say ah yes my life is back in balance now i'm slightly dissatisfied with my team and the product but 10 more money did the trick and now i'm happy like yeah i kind of doubt that and by the way i made up 10 i don't know if that's the real number but i kind of doubt that any reasonable amount of you know raise in that ballpark would actually make a big impact in your life make you feel better i think it is more about feeling valued i think that's the core of it because i think you're right 10 after taxes and everything over spread out over however many paychecks you get

in a year it's not much it is a lot of money but it's it's not going to radically change your life i think it would i think it is much more about feeling like the company values me at this amount yeah and they're they're showing that through the way that companies communicate which is money and that would maybe affect your perspective on the rest of the work that maybe there's less of a community feel in the way our team interacts but they really take care of me financially and that's how i feel a community with them or something like that yeah salary is an interesting thing it i feel like when i first start thinking about it it seems very cold and calculating and and almost clinical and then it gets into all these fuzzy human feelings too

it's it's numbers but it's also much more about how we feel as people it's a salary is a language it's a language that business speaks to you and it's how one of the things they express with that language is how much they value you and that's that's feels yeah right in the feels yeah so if you are a company or a manager that wants to value people and you can't just pay them more money i mean try that but if you can't there there might be other ways to make people feel valued to to make up for not having the budget to just give everyone a 10 raise give everyone a 10 corporate hug yep well good luck to you good luck this will be good i think it'll be a good lesson and um you know worst case scenario wait best case scenario you make a ton more money and then

you can drive a winter tesla finally all right uh well where should people go jameson if they want to get their own questions answered they should go to softskills.audio there's a button on there called ask a question um the question volume has slowed down a little bit maybe over the holiday break people just felt like they were more interested in food than questions about software related soft skills oh man but keep them coming i don't know why you'd make such a poor decision i'm more interested in food than soft skills just so you know oh dave i'm hurt this podcast nourishes me i go without food to do it um yeah send us your questions actually that's true you do eat literally every single time we record before we start yeah i do it in that order um yeah

if you like the podcast can you leave a rating on your podcast app it really helps other people find the show and a whole bunch of people have left a lot of ratings five stars even i would really really reached for the stars there you did it thank you accomplished it you grasped all the stars that you can grasp on your podcast app sometimes sometimes people ask how they can support the show jamison what do you tell them i tell them to check out our patreon i tell them to just tweet about it and share it with people and i tell them to do what you said to leave ratings cool all right well thanks everybody yep see you next week