Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 93: Negotiating Annual Raises and Part-Time Work

Episode Date: January 27, 2018

This week Jamison and Dave answer these questions: My job doesn’t seem to leave room to negotiate salary or raises for our year-end review. Is this normal? How do I negotiate in this process? Can working part-time, when it’s possible to work full time, to invest in personal development look bad to a future employer? This tweet storm by Sarah Mei is good and relevant. This is the video about making your own font and anagraphs that Jamison mentioned at the end. It is SO GOOD. This is a funny and enlightening video that people of taste and culture will appreciate. This one is also good. Ok fine, they are all good.

It takes more than being in 30 Slack teams at once to be a great software engineer. This is episode 93 of the Soft Skills Engineering Podcast. I'm your host, Jameson Dance. I'm your host, Dave Smith. How many Slack teams are you in? I actually had a great Slack purge this year. I'm only in three. Okay.

I had a purge and I'm only in eight, so... I had like one channel for every conference I had ever been to, you know? Yeah, yeah. there are a lot that i had every single channel i was in muted and then i thought why am i here and if i if i were in all these and participated would i be able to do anything else with my life the answer is no no but i would be really up to date on all the haps anyways soft skills engineering is a podcast where we answer all of your non-technical questions about the technical field of software development hey we'd like to thank our patreon supporters uh this week we'd

like to thank dustin coats and if you would like to support the show we would very much appreciate it you can go to patreon.com soft skills eng and pledge all right should we read the first question yes we should uh who is the we that will read it i just i want to read it i just assume when you say we you mean the royal we yeah i am wearing purple slippers which is the royal color so nice it fits okay this is from a listener named sam my job doesn't seem to leave room for negotiating salaries or raises at our year-end review is this normal the process is that i write my self-evaluation and then the process proceeds from my manager to my second level manager and then to hr i'm not involved until my manager sits down with me to let me know my new salary is there a way to ask

for more once they've shown this to me or will that be too late they don't seem to leave room to negotiate salary uh i'm not surprised because employees never negotiate down so what do you think's gonna happen if they introduce like and step three is give 30 minutes for the employee to make a case for more money yeah here's what we're thinking would you like that to be higher lower or the same that was probably deliberate have you tried the oliver method where you just look down at the piece of paper and then look back up and say please sir i want some more and then if i remember correctly the the manager who is like in a top hat and a waistcoat and has a big long stick is like more you want more and then

i think i think it ends up well at the end of the movie right uh i can't remember or does he die is that one of those bad ones where he dies never ask for more it leads to death eventually in 700 pages because he got paid by the word but he definitely doesn't get more right then that's for sure that's right or ever yeah so a little bit more context on this question that we edited out was that managers tend to wait until the very last minute to write up all the evaluations and then they rush it through the system in the last couple days so there's very limited room that i feel like every time i hear people talk about evaluations it's always at the last minute managers or individuals doing their

own or i don't know it seems like a thing everyone puts off yeah i can see why it's kind of like tricky and painful and also it's not related to your your normal day-to-day job and i i i can see why that would be the case but i don't think it's excusable in any way not that i say not that i think you're giving an excuse here but i mean this is like a really important part of your job as a manager to do these well and make sure your team is well compensated correctly compensated you know and that they're happy with their compensation so they can produce their best work kind of sucks that they rush it through you know yeah so so you're saying this is if you're a manager this is like a lever to to reward your team not just busy work that you have to get through i think

that's how a lot of people see it it's just like stuff on their calendar that they have to crank through so what do you think is it too late um once they come back and they have the paper and it's been approved by a manager a second level manager and hr i i don't know i have no personal experience with a process like this so i have no idea i i don't know i mean let me tell you how negotiating the price of my used car that i bought went i showed up i told them how much money i had in cash and they were like oh okay i guess that's how much the car cost wait did you wait for them to make an offer first no no i i knew like how much the price was and i was like well cool i'll just write a check for that and i they were actually they were kind of bummed because i

guess they make a lot of money on financing but oh for sure i didn't i didn't know that that was like the start of the negotiation not how much the car cost wait this is a long time ago wait a minute what if you could bring these two worlds together financing and annual reviews uh it sounds like it would be on the blockchain somehow it would have to be yeah okay tell me more i'm listening blockchain yes i heard blockchain what do you mean i well i mean it's like you could come to the manager and say like maybe you could make money off financing the way a used car salesman makes money off financing okay blockchain i think blockchain is the missing link in there i haven't thought it all the way through but i'm pretty sure blockchain is the

part there's not really a model here or a or a way to make money but blockchain will do that i think you're right okay i thought you were saying flip it on its head by saying like i need to go to my manager with this number when they give you your your percentage increase like let me take it back to the tower let me see what the manager says um huh so what do you think is there once you get this piece of paper slid across to you too late can you just scratch it out and write like i don't know add a zero on it or something oh you wrote eight percent i'm pretty sure you meant 80 percent totally too late i mean think think about the approval process here he mentioned in the sam mentioned his question there's a manager rights evaluate sorry employee

rights self-evaluation manager rights evaluation second level manager reviews and approves hr business partner reviews and approves and then there's a one-on-one meeting so if you want to change that number you're going to have to go through that process again right like and not only are you a little bit too late you are months too late if there is a target that you wanted and your manager doesn't know what that target is going into the salary review process you missed the boat already at the start of that process you were already late i mean ideally you would know what you want for the year you would you would have evidence to back up why you deserve it and then your manager would start there you know yeah that makes sense you're saying it's not even on

the manager to have another step at the beginning it's it's on you to to figure out what's a reasonable number and to tell your manager this is what you're shooting for yeah i mean it would be great if the manager did that but don't count on it especially in especially the way i'm reading into this question you know that they put it off and they rush it and it happens the last couple days of the year yeah by the way those last date let's see what were the dates oh january 31st that's not too bad i thought it was december 31st i'm like wait a minute that's a terrible time right before the new year's eve party or during it if it's during the party sometimes these parties get pretty wild so we're all staying up late favorite may as well be working on reviews and

comp plans the tap brew flows like wine at these parties so you just it's good timing i guess yeah exactly judgment is your manager's inhibitions add a zero i did mean 80 percent i don't know that seems really reasonable i'm trying to think of anything to add and i think you have summed it up that performance reviews should be the the result of a year-long process of you proactively informing your manager what you're doing and also summarizing what you've done after you have told them what you've been doing and and yeah i like that at a previous company where i worked for several years they were they went through a couple of acquisitions And the final acquisition was a gigantic defense contractor with a bunch of process.

And it was during that year that I had an annual performance review and wanted a new salary. And I went to my boss and I said, look, I want a 20% raise this year. 20% for context isn't necessarily huge, especially in this day of golden software salary time. but it was way outside of the company's like normal clamps that they put on your salary for like managers had basically like five percent of latitude where they could they could go up to five percent without needing like ceo approval and the ceo doesn't approve anything you know yeah and uh i told him i wanted 20 i gave him a couple of months heads up told him i wanted 20 and when the race came through it was five percent so even if you ask it doesn't guarantee that you're

going to get what you asked for but if you don't ask then what you get you have no influence on and that's a crappy situation what so how did that conversation go did your manager just like guffaw and say like okay dave no he no he was very respectful he he was like yeah i will work on that i'll see what i can do and then when the review time came down he was like here it is it's five percent and i looked at him and i said i wanted 20 yeah he was like yeah i know he was so beaten down by the system he honestly like didn't say anything else he didn't really explain himself or anything he was just kind of like but here's the crazy part about a couple of months later i got a great job opportunity to quit and go to a new company for about a 20% raise and so

i told my boss i actually went to my boss's boss and resigned said i'm leaving i'm going here and of course he wanted to engage in a conversation and talk about the new terms of the new company yada yada came out to be about 20% and he goes give me one weekend to make a counter proposal to you and i said okay well that's fine so i came back after the weekend and wouldn't you know he had a 20 raise ready to go and i'm just like oh my gosh people come on how did you arrive at that number as what you wanted as your target i think it just sounded big i don't know i don't just like that'll make me a good person yeah that'll make me happy that'll give me finally the happiness that i've been seeking happiness is 20 more than what i have right now it's just 20 away that's

right that's so close i can taste it huh interesting i mean i knew that salaries had been growing a lot i had been at this company for like six five or six years um so i was you feel like you're trying to like catch up a little bit a little bit i felt like maybe i hadn't kept pace i had done fine in reality it was fine um but i just i'm always looking for more money i don't know maybe i'm just a greedy little son of a gun yeah grubby fingers all over the cash the good news is it has made you happier every single time every single time i come home and i'm like that extra 50 bucks per paycheck makes all the difference i followed the money and at the end of the money trail was happiness the stories were right after all that's right

well have we answered the question uh oh no there's one more thing i gotta tell you Oh, okay. So when I said you're a few months too late, you might have been 12 months too late. And let me just put this in perspective. I have seen companies that will make a plan. Because remember, when you're looking at the finances for a company, the engineer's salaries are usually a pretty big component of the company's expenses. So it turns out that accountants and the people that run the finance part of your company, they want a plan for next year, this year. so they want to know like what is the salaries expenses what are the salary expenses going to

be next year for engineering and frankly for every department so there's actually a good chance that your boss already went through and submitted preliminary raise amounts for every person on their team about a year early so like predestination yeah this is how good each person will do this year destiny has your salary i don't control this it's destiny um so yeah really no seriously like it could very well have already been decided 12 months before it has been awarded so um i would advise you to have a heart to heart with your boss and say tell me this process when is this number determined what influences this number and when you finally choose the number what is the range that you're allowed to play in without getting you know

burdensome approvals yeah and know that because you need to know the the the world you're working in in order to start negotiating a little bit so i i have one more question what what incentives do managers have to not just give as much of a raise as they can like why why wouldn't they just want to give us their team as much money as possible do they have pressure from their boss to keep costs low do they get like is there some financial reward tied to it i don't think so yeah no i think it's more like a a budget where they say look you have x percent of this year's salary pool as your budget for next year's salary for your people so divvy it up as you see fit and you're not allowed to go beyond x percentage per person and uh i heard a story from that same company that got

acquired by a big defense contractor where there was this one group i remember they were called the ops group but it wasn't ops like you would think of they were like hardware testers and their manager had taken like free reign and kind of went rogue and there were no guidelines there were no caps on raises and so this manager started giving his people really good raises to the point that these hardware testers whose job was to follow instructions and connect wires and test and record results were making more than the engineers who had built and designed the boxes and some other department manager found out about it and just freaked out and was like no way like this person has been running uh rogue and uh it's unfair and and you know if every if every

engineer got raises the way the ops people got raises we would be bankrupt and all this stuff you know and so it was at that point that they came down with like this eight percent cap where they were like no one goes over eight percent ever any year and then when we got bought by the big defense contractor they capped it even further i think it was like four or five percent but the funny thing is so so i think the opposite is true you said our managers incentivized to keep these things low i think no i think they are incentivized to stay within their budget to avoid getting in trouble but i've never heard of a situation where they get like some kickback if they keep salaries under some amount i hope that doesn't exist because that would lead to some

real perverse incentives oh yeah it probably does the world is a big enough place that i'm sure that exists oh for sure that would suck okay cool that's that's that's useful info oh here's here's one more thing um that same company because of that eight percent cap um my manager my department manager, he figured out that even though people were capped at 8%, if someone came in and they were super low on salary, he could actually do a mid-year review for that person and give them a mid-year raise for like another 8% or something or 6%. There was some other cap. And so he totally gamed the system and figured out that for his top performers, if he really wanted to give them raises, he could do it beyond what the company's policy allowed by doing these mid-years. It was

pretty cool he i think when you go into management you have to be willing to play some games to be successful you know what i mean yeah especially in larger companies okay now have we answered the question you're like please can this question end i think so we said words yeah those were great words all right shall i read the next one yes okay this comes from an anonymous listener who says can working part-time when it's possible to work full-time to invest in personal development look bad to a future employer the context is that i've been working part-time as an android developer since february of 2016 while i pursue a master's degree but in march i'll finish my master's and i'm tempted to continue working as a part-time developer part-time versus full-time bad idea

or great idea i think there's a couple axes you can look at this on one is does it look bad to employers and you just don't tell them it's part-time then it's fine if they i mean don't lie right if they explicitly ask was this full-time or part-time you should not be untruthful but you just say you were working you don't have to say i was working half-time right like they don't ask you how many hours per week did you do this job for two years yeah exactly because and and you shouldn't tell them because i think there are some incorrect biases about how it's not as valuable of work if you're working part-time um that's like internships or i don't know that's that's what students do or right right i don't know and and i don't know that those are necessarily

true i think that work is still valuable um so i don't think it will actively harm you in the job hunt if you are looking to develop skills yeah it depends on what you do at that time this was basically my life uh as a consultant billable hours i worked about part-time and then i did stuff the rest of my time and sometimes i was really productive and i dove into cool technical things a lot of the time i just hung out with my family or went on scenic drives or oh you probably rode your motorcycle yeah a lot more i did i i watched random youtube videos that just lifted me up to a higher plane but it wasn't all just heads down like i'm gonna use this time to improve as a person oh right and so life was good but it wasn't like i came out a way better developer

because of the way i'd spent my time in part-time or how should i say this it wasn't like i came out with much better coding skills because of what i was doing outside of the time i was working but if if that's your goal i think you can do it if you're really self-driven and focused and Yeah, for sure. Maybe don't have as many kids knocking on your door. One kid knocking on my door is too many for me to accomplish all that stuff. A thing you will not learn, though, is how to work with people or how to work in projects or how things fail. Some detail that wasn't in what we read was the place this person works is not the greatest right now.

They don't do testing. Their code isn't great. they they don't communicate super well they don't even have regular meetings yeah i think that's funny that's a downside some people that's an upside but but it feels like that's a symptom of we don't communicate well yeah and so maybe the question asker feels like well i can't really learn much at work so i need to focus my time outside of work and you can learn a lot from dysfunctional situations and you could try and change it see what would it take to get testing practices in place or code reviews that's true uh and and a lot of the work of software development

is not sitting down and writing the code a lot of it is how do you move organizations how do you get a team to agree on something how do you figure out what the right thing to build is and that's stuff that i don't think you can learn as easily on your own absolutely but if you want to like dive into compilers or like learn a language or mess around with machine learning stuff then And that's all purely technical things are much easier to just learn inside projects on your own time, I think. That's a really good distinction. I think that makes a lot of sense. I think I read, I think Sarah May maybe had a tweet storm about this recently.

She's like the queen of tweet storms about software engineering. I think she said something about that. Okay. I will find it and link it. Awesome. So basically for future employment, I think we agree this is not harmful at all. They may not even know or care. and what was the other axis like personal development yeah yeah if you're finishing

these axes didn't show up in the question but i feel like that's something you're considering like will i learn more will i have a hard time getting a job yeah you definitely won't have a hard time getting a job that's my opinion but uh and i think this person because they're doing a master's degree while working part-time as a developer i'm gonna guess they're pretty driven um and so they can they'll probably be able to make really good use of that part-time yeah that's true yeah although if it was if it was me and i've just finished a master's degree i'd probably be pretty burned out and i would just use that part-time leftover time to just watch youtube yeah the jameson style of self-improvement

you like finish watching all the dumb animals with their voices with their noises replaced with stupid voices you like accidentally end up on an educational video and you hurry up and fast forward through it get me back to that talking orange i gotta get more of that another another reason i mean you can definitely learn technical things on the job um it's much easier to learn things you don't know anything about on your own time i feel like if if you somehow heaven forbid end up in a situation where you need to write a database like that sounds like it'd be super fun uh and also really hard to do well but super fun and maybe you don't know anything about that so you're probably not not going to get that job but if you're doing it

on your own you can just be like i don't care i'll just do it anyways and learn from it so maybe there are some kinds of technical tasks that are interesting to you that you lack the knowledge to do that you wouldn't get assigned at work just because you don't have the expertise already in those fields say if you are really into machine learning but there's a data science team already it might be harder to kind of work your way into doing that work versus just playing with it on your own yeah that's probably true that makes sense yeah i say go for it i think this is awesome i would love to see more people doing alternative work arrangements like this where you get more of your time to do self-directed things and uh if you can get by on half of a

salary or you know whatever the part-time pays i think that's great i would totally i would love to do this yeah it's it's pretty good i don't know if i have anything else to say about this right now i feel like i feel like i didn't even say anything funny i had too many comments written down of things i needed to say that were serious and important let's see maybe you could link us to some of those orange talking orange videos that would be pretty good those are really funny they're not they're not they're they're horrible they're so inane well i watched much funnier youtube videos on my own time i you know i've gotten on a string of these science youtube videos like backyard scientist and smarter every day and stuff like that and uh they all tend to

cross over and like they'll go do collaborations with each other and i know okay don't don't lie what percentage are just them shooting stuff with slow motion cameras uh 80 okay and the other 20 is them smashing stuff with slow motion cameras um and i noticed myself laying in bed watching some of these videos the other night and i just i had one of those moments where i actually kind of got away from myself and looked at myself and i realized i had this big smile on my face and it had been there the whole time and i was like i really enjoy these videos look at me i'm just this big silly grin i was just so happy watching this guy blow up watermelons with molten aluminum in his backyard you know i'm just like this is the best they just make me so happy

that's like me but when i watch uh neil sisigara videos like he does all these remixes of songs where he'll take uh crocodile rock and chop suey by system of a down and mash them up or like what smash mouth shows up in what is crocodile rock the elton john song oh okay i don't know it okay i don't know i'll link it you can't tell from that hook oh man i it have it has nothing to do with how bad i am at saying that surely yeah that's that's the same except mine are less noble they're just like hilarious but you said only to me like a big stupid grin on your face you're like i just love this so much which a key element of it is that my wife does not think they're funny that's how i know if it's

like my jam is i'm just cracking up and i show it to her and she just stares at me and just to be clear you said that a musical matchup is less noble than blowing up a watermelon with molten aluminum yeah because that's science right uh i told you that's science is it okay and the channel has the word science in the name i'm pretty sure that's science so so bringing it back to soft skills i have a great friend of mine who was a chemist by training and he once told me that if your discipline has the word science in it it's not science have you ever heard that before uh yeah i have actually yeah yeah so biology that's a science chemistry that's a science physics yeah they don't have to say math science right but computer science uh not science yeah and there's

others too but i don't want to offend anyone more than you already have by insulting computer science well i think that about wraps it up that was uh just a fantastic way to end this wonderful question about part-time work because one of the things you could do in your part-time is start a youtube channel um i can't tell if you're joking or not but i think that's a good idea i'm actually i'm actually not joking that would be awesome i i've looked at some of these youtube channels and i've thought i could have done that i could have thrown a basketball through a basketball hoop on the other side of a pool and gotten two million views i was talking about like a little screencast of the cool stuff you're learning even better yeah i have a little collection of youtube channels i

subscribe to that aren't like famous people it's just there's this random guy that does all these really cool vim things there's this other guy that he he does these random computer science videos he did one about like making your own font um that's and like how computationally complex it could be to slice the the letters into different shapes and recombine them and i don't know it's just little little random fun things you could do that's awesome you should totally do that in your part-time all right well i think we've gotten to the end of the episode now yep we have maybe even a little past it all right if you want to hear more episodes or subscribe or ask a question you can go to softskills.audio that's our website there's a button to ask a question on there

there's probably links to subscribe i think dave put them there are there are i hope they're still there they are and they are still there okay awesome you can do that there if you are interested you can leave a comment on the shows too i think we have a discus little comment widget at the bottom of every episode page we do and if you enjoy the show please share it uh tweeting about it is an easy way we've already talked about stealing people's phones and just subscribing them to it we need a new angle what's the angle remote subscriptions through the uh the specter vulnerability i think it's blockchain and the proof of work is subscriptions to the uh the podcast nice okay sounds great that will surely work i think we're done we'll catch you next week thanks