Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 95: Paying For Help and Scared of Recruiters

Episode Date: February 8, 2018

This week Jamison and Dave answer these questions: When should asking a developer pal for help go from something that is free because you’re pals to something you should compensate them for in some way? I’ve never worked with recruiters before. I’ve always found jobs from friends and other connections. Is working with recruiters worth it? What should I watch out for? I finally found the creepy Jack and the Beanstalk video! It is still horrifying.

It takes more than a detailed understanding of the rope data structure to be a great software developer. This is episode 95 of the Soft Skills Engineering podcast. I'm your host, Jameson Dance. I'm your host, Dave Smith. I guess this is traditional. We have to muddle through an explanation of ropes. Something to do with strings. I don't know. I don't have a detailed understanding yet. Soft Skills Engineering is a weekly advice show where we answer all of your non-technical questions

about the technical field of software development. That is correct. We also have some Patreon people to thank. Do you want to do that, Dave? Yes. It's a new month. It's February. We'd like to thank the following people.

Michael Collier, Dustin Coates, Eric Parkinson, Sean Clayton all contributed at the level where you get called out on the show. Thanks, patrons. Thank you so much. Jason, if someone wants to support the show with real money, what should they do? They should go to Patreon.com slash SoftSkillsENG. You can contribute there and money that you contribute goes towards. equipment upgrades goes towards design towards editing towards the ever elusive ball pit fund the stretch goal we really appreciate your support it helps us continue making this show

so thank you thank you all right can i read our first question please do it this comes from aaron who says when should asking a software developer pal for help with your code go from something that is free because you're pals to something you should compensate them for in some way hugs food rent etc we'll code for rent i'm gonna try and pay my mortgage in hugs this month how do you fit them in an envelope though that's my question uh you got to do it in person i think it's hard though because at some point they just become bits somewhere and how do you transmit them you need someone at the other end who just reads them off it's kind of like a fax machine right you send it electronically but it turns real at the end that was like in willy wonka he could

probably do that yeah willy wonka and the chocolate factory that sounds accurate so how when okay when you ask someone for help with your code what is the etiquette what is the rule when should it be free and when should you pay in the form of hugs food or rent i don't think i've ever paid a friend to just kind of help with a quick question i've definitely posted on stack overflow or posted in slack or irc or on mailing lists and did you pay any of those people i paid them in eyeballs which is the unit of value in the modern web that's true i helped someone make advertising revenue a third party actually yeah yeah but i i personally have never directly hired someone to say help me with with this code problem that i'm stuck on yeah me neither yeah i've worked at companies

that have hired consultants but it hasn't even been like we're stuck on this thing it's been more like either some higher level training or lower level do this project for us so i don't know i i have helped friends a lot and i know a lot of people that help friends and none of those people have ever been paid to my knowledge we seem to in our industry we seem to have like an anti-payment culture you know like we expect developers to do a lot of things for free help each other out with their code give talks at conferences yeah run meetups yeah so i have a friend who has trained people from zero knowledge of software development to now being full-time employees working in software and i don't think they did it for pay wow and it was a

lot of work and it was something they were very passionate about but it wasn't really a paid arrangement i think towards the end maybe they they did some consulting work as subcontractors for this person so they maybe indirectly benefited financially from it but it certainly wasn't like that's the payoff right it was like i'll help you get into code because i think you'd be good at it and it will make your life better and i enjoy teaching people and and then as part of that like come work on this project and you'll get paid and we'll help this client and i'll make some chunk of money from it um that's i think that's probably the most individual effort i've seen by someone for free to help people to code i am much lazier than this friend i i have i have a couple

people that kind of ask me questions and and i'm happy to help out and if it ever became like hours a day every day i would say i can't do it this much i'm sorry i just don't have time to do it no you wouldn't i know exactly what you would do would i just disappear silently yep it hasn't gotten to the point where i've had to say anything yet um maybe i just subliminally transmit vibes people just back off no but i'm getting i'm getting the sense that jameson doesn't want to put in this time anymore oh yeah what gives you that sense well he keeps saying rtfm over and over at first he was helpful but

no i haven't done that um but i i can tell you what i would do if i were that person asking a friend for a lot of help i would try and set very explicit expectations of like hey i'm using your time for free and if this ever becomes burdensome please tell me and i'm happy to back off i i don't know that i would say i'm happy to pay you because then it gets weird it's like oh yeah paying your family for making thanksgiving dinner there's a totally different approach to how you to to to situations where you're paying for it versus where it's a favor that you're doing for other people like if you went to your parents house for thanksgiving and you brought a ten dollar bill and you're like thanks for the dinner thanks for the turkey dad

um you know i'd be very at first i thought this was just a ten dollar turkey but after i ate it i thought it was a twelve dollar i'm tipping you extremely well this year these sweet potatoes are excellent that would be very insulting because it's it's saying like you're you're a restaurant kind of like this is a transactional relationship and i don't think that's why people help out most of the time so i think and also developers are expensive right to pay someone their rate is going to be a lot of money and people that are getting a lot of help are often new to the industry and they might not have the cash to pay someone hundreds of dollars an hour as a consultant to help like teach them javascript or whatever so i would feel weird about the paying part

especially because if someone paid me for help the help would have to actually be good yeah, it's a job, right? It's not a favor. Yeah. With a favor, it's like I can utterly fail and still succeed. Yeah. You're making a joke, but I think you're right. It's, it's, it's a totally different relationship and they have, they're an employer in some ways. So they have an expectation of like performance on your parts and it totally changes it. It's, and it, it becomes a thing that is hard to, this is why don't go into business with your family because it's, it changes your relationship now everything changes if you're paying in hugs though because you can't refund hugs yeah they're only additive they can be pretty negative i don't know i mean what i was gonna say

like let's say you pay me in 10 hugs okay great now i want my hugs back well i just have to give you 10 hugs that's how value is created in the economy now the whole world is 20 hugs ahead of where it was yeah i i think if you really want to pay someone i think you could do it you know in an unexpected way so don't say i will pay you to help me they help you and you just like give them something you slip them a chili's restaurant gift card yeah yeah because then it's not an explicit transaction you're just saying like this is really helpful to me i want to uh thank you for doing this as a friend i just want to help you out and and you can like do fun stuff i don't know i've heard of people shipping cookies or like doing random little things like

that if you really want to to show more appreciation than just saying thank you i felt like your help was worth eight chocolate chip cookies yeah does that sound about right maybe nine yeah i think the point of using these these like gift exchanges is that you don't it lets you avoid the problem of quantifying it exactly you know yeah yeah but you're doing more than just saying thank you if you really feel like you you owe it to them to help in some way yeah but i think i think setting expectations around how much time this takes if you're the person asking for help you should be really sensitive to taking advantage of someone that doesn't like to say no and becoming a burden on them no i am strong no one takes advantage of me dave

yeah so i think as long as you up front say hey i don't want this to take up more of your time then you'd like i'm happy to i don't know set a time limit a month or maybe we yeah actually i talked to somebody about mentoring once uh they had just done a lot of it and i was like how do you do it and they said i say we do it an hour a month at the beginning and if either of us wants to increase then we talk about it and we can or we just might leave it so they set like really explicit boundaries for for how much time they put into helping people just to make sure they can do all their other stuff and and help lots of different people i like that and i would say don't be afraid to ask for help because i think a lot of people really like to help with this kind

of thing and um there's usually no expectation of payment like jameson said um and uh i have nothing else to say sorry don't you hate it when you say and before you know what's going to come after the end i hate it and now i'm gonna say a different thing the local slack channel tech community slack channel that i hang out in has a specific help channel so lots of people ask in general and people are happy to help and there's also a channel dedicated to it and yeah there there are always people ready and willing that's what stack overflow is built on right like people want to help other people yep and then also if you attach internet points to it becomes a competition but even without that people still want to help other people so if you suspect that

you have a problem that's going to need more than you would feel comfortable more help than you would feel comfortable asking someone unpaid to help you with what are your options i mean you i guess you could hire a consultant specifically for that problem or convince your employer to hire a consultant yeah uh or you could break it down into a lot of smaller problems and attack those via the standard help channels uh i'm not sure what you mean by a problem that is too big to ask for help with are you saying like my problem is this product doesn't exist and i would like it to someone please help me by building it by building it and then signing this legal document that says i own it yeah my problem is i just just don't have quite enough

money please help i mean some i guess some problems there they're so there are so many details they're so involved it's like such an arcane combination of your company's software stack and the code history and the random bugs in the random weird versions you're on for that stuff if it's a common enough problem there there are sometimes specific companies or people who consult around those problems i know there are multiple companies who make a living upgrading versions of rails or backporting security patches to old versions of rails and they don't take payment in the form of hugs you're pretty sure i mean yeah maybe maybe if you give them hug equity so that the hugs will be worth even more someday

hug quitty perhaps i don't know i don't have a great answer to your question just pay someone okay so how like can you measure the quality of your own friendship based on the kinds of programming problems people bring to you uh i don't know like i'm getting a lot of c++ segmentation fault problems but hardly anyone comes to me with css layout issues what does that say about my relationship with these people i think that means that you are an exceedingly patient human or you write a lot of c++ maybe your friends are all c++ developers maybe it says more about them than you sample bias yeah all right so i to me as as a helpful friend the questions that are hardest

for me to answer are when the question is when when the answer is like it go study this thing for a year like when when the the knowledge gap between the answer and and where they are is really large so it's hard for me to even explain an answer someone is like how do i make my how do i make a user talk to the server and what they what they really mean is like i want to do some ajax stuff but i don't know what ajax is and i don't really understand the difference between a browser and and a server and there's there's just a lot of gaps in there those are hard personally to answer because it's the underlying question is like can you tutor me in the ways of software exactly yeah and specific questions are much easier to answer yeah like i'm having this

crash and i want to figure it out like that's yeah stuff that doesn't require me to design a curriculum because i said well i've not done that before maybe that's the that's when the the uh tipping point happens is so to answer this to answer aaron's question you need to start paying someone when they should design a curriculum to answer your question yeah i love that heuristic okay i'm gonna go with it and everything else is free cool i think we've answered the question right good oh i think so i think we should get paid for answering that question yeah in hugs i'll give you a hug next time i see you oh that'll be my first i think i'll have to make a note of that in my journal first ever what uh first hug from you

no that's not true i dave i distinctly remember giving you a hug at utah jazz conference last year well apparently it was meaningless to me with a stalker like amount of detail it's etched in my mind yeah hugs you should ask for a different unit of reward then because a different unit of payment because it seems like you don't value okay that one very much dave instead of one hug i'll take five bitcoins okay uh i need to go hug a lot of people to earn that many bitcoins all right i think we've answered the question okay sounds good can you read our next one i can this is from a listener who has called himself mr scared of recruiters i have never worked with recruiters before i have always found jobs from friends and other connections

is working with recruiters worth it what should i watch out for huh so did you ever see that old looney tunes i knew you were gonna bring this up i'm just always talking about looney tunes okay i'm just gonna sit back and enjoy okay go ahead it's a jack and the beanstalk cartoon there it's like a a crossover jack and the beanstalk depression cartoon where they're all starving they have a couple little beans they're slicing them up paper thin and then i think daffy some duck looks at another character and their head just turns into a giant turkey dinner if you went to a recruiter and were like hey i would like to get a new job they're gonna look at your head and it's gonna turn into a stack of twenty to fifty thousand dollars and they will say

okay let me help you yeah their eyes turn into dollar signs yeah that's the dream usually their job is a lot of like spamming people and getting yelled at for spamming people because they're looking for people to help find a job so if if someone went up to them and said hey i want you to help me find a job what they hear is you're gonna make a lot of money and they will they will jump at the opportunity i am the walking turkey equivalent yeah porky the pig wait was it porky the pig whose head turned into a turkey i don't remember i was trying to find the specific episode and i couldn't find it before the show i was thinking in his case it might be better if it turned into a ham i actually i think you're right i think it turned into like the animal that they

were cooked oh yeah that's right yeah i think it was like a gross recollection of this of this episode yeah it was horrifying to me as a child it it totally did they're starving and they're going to resort to cannibalism although is it cannibalism if you're eating i mean no i mean this is another species eating a pig yeah that's not anyways they're gonna murder and cook and eat their friends that's right but only because they're delicious yeah so that part hopefully doesn't have a correlation with recruiting yeah i have literally hardly ever heard of a recruiter murdering and eating a candidate yeah yeah i mean you have to be very poorly on the interview process i think yeah well i'm not going to make my 20k off you but at least i can make turkey

dinner out of you so they would be they would be pretty interested in that arrangement have you done this ever one time uh one time i stumbled into a relationship with a recruiter because i applied for a job and it happened to be a job that was managed by an external agency for the company and we'll talk about this later the difference between the types of recruiters And I didn't get that job But the recruiter, because he was an agent Working outside of that company He had connections with lots of other companies

And he was a good recruiter And he connected me with one of the other companies He was working with And he said to me, he said, based on what I know about you And based on what I know about this company I think you would be a great match And it was a great match That's how I got my previous job

Where I was for five years Which I absolutely loved It was just one of my favorite jobs of all time And he did a great job matching me up that's so cool a success story i think he probably made 20 grand off of that but you know in his defense he probably spent about four or five hours so you know um i've never i've never worked with a recruiter like that i've been on the other end where i've worked with a recruiter at a company trying to hire people but that's a pretty different

experience yeah and more common frankly especially at big companies yeah i know i just said more common that was totally wrong i think it's more common at big companies and less common for small companies yeah i have worked with individual recruiters for specific positions but it's never pivoted to like they never turned into my job realtor where they're shopping me around to different jobs and then i love that job really oh it sounds kind of nice yeah i don't know why a recruiter that picks you up in an suv drives you around to different companies lets you meet them gives you infinite bottled water as much bottled water as you want our realtor gave us so much bottled water you guys thirsty no i have to pee though please no well you got all these bottles

it works both ways i don't have any bathrooms but uh are you thirsty this house has zero bathrooms okay i hate to go on a tangent but i i have been in a situation where i was looking at a house that had been like vacant for a while and the water wasn't running but i really had to go to the bathroom have you ever been in that kind of a situation no okay well i'll just leave it at that you should probably use the bathroom before you go visit a house that's been vacant okay uh did you find out before or after it was too late that the water wasn't running oh well if it was before i don't think this would be as interesting of a story

okay you just left the bathroom told the recruiter i'm sorry it's haunted we have to go and we can never come back and he's like okay are you thirsty actually i am now okay anyway sorry yes wouldn't it be greater if recruiters drove you around from company to company and just that would be so awesome that would be cool but they don't really do that and and frankly um it's pretty uncommon but i have heard of a couple of people who will actually approach a recruiter and just say hey i'm looking for a job find a place for me and they'll reach out to their contacts of their companies that are currently hiring that they know of and they'll

pitch you and uh i guess it works it's worked for me once but i i don't hear about that very often most of the time people just reach out to companies directly or like mr scared of recruiter says through their friends we've talked about this on the show before and i have i remember saying it'd be kind of nice and then in my last job search i didn't do this and i think it's because i just trusted my own network a little more than the recruiter well you say you trusted your own network but like does that mean that the recruiter i mean the recruiter could still have opportunities that um you don't have connections to but i guess you're just saying that maybe you think that it would be a waste of time potentially i think potentially so okay leaning on the realtor

analogy a good realtor takes you to a bunch of different houses and uses it to narrow down the kind of house that you like and then takes you to only the kind of house that you might like i don't know if you can go through job opportunities fast enough for that to happen that's true because you have to interview and it takes forever and then yeah and are you gonna do like 30 interviews maybe not yeah that costs you so much time if you're employed you probably aren't anymore if you're not employed that's all lost income from just getting a job faster so i i guess i didn't trust them to i didn't trust that we would understand each other enough for them to just only have the

kind of thing i would be interested in i think if i were moving to a different part of the country or like maybe entering a different industry i don't know maybe that would be helpful it seems nice but also it seems like a lot of work yep definitely is working with recruiters worth it maybe yeah they could probably get you opportunities you wouldn't get another way i don't know if they would be better or not yeah if you've exhausted your network then it's definitely a place to turn yeah like uh i think it i think that's the key is it depends on what your network is yielding you so let's say you've just moved to a new city and uh you're trying to find work you may not have a

good network of people that you know yeah so but the recruiter almost definitely does but that's that's the other hard challenge is now it's kind of a wild card like you pick up with the recruiter and who knows what they know you don't know we had to switch realtors because we had a bad experience but that was i mean it wasn't horrible but we just spent a couple hours with them like it just doesn't seem like we get each other but that was a lot more iterations than a typical i I mean, we went to like five or six houses and that would be... In a couple of hours. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, exactly. I will say this. If you latch onto a recruiter and then that recruiter shows up with you at some random company cold, there's a good chance the company will say, no, thank you. We do not want to pay your fee to find this candidate. And I have seen that actually at my old job. We had candidates coming in that were applying for development positions at our company. And literally some of them had recruiters that were coming with them.

And we would generally discount those candidates quite a bit because we knew that we were going to have to pay such a premium to get them to come in. And we already had our own internal recruiter. So it's like so which means we had a good enough pipeline of candidates coming without this extra 20, 30, 40 percent baggage. Yeah. So it can hurt you. It can. Yeah, I didn't think about that. I guess if they're independent recruiters, do they have connections with a bunch of different companies set up already?

Yeah. Yeah, that's how it worked out with me with my last job, which was that I stumbled into this recruiter who had like four or five open contracts looking for candidates for certain companies. And so he just looked through his group of companies that happened to be active at the time I came in and he matched me to one of them and it worked out. But that's a very different situation from picking up a recruiter who acts like a realtor and just cold calls companies on your behalf and tries to place you.

Well, the houses are already for sale. Exactly. Hopefully they're not cold calling. They just like knock a neighborhood with you and like, hey, can we tour your house? We might want to buy it. While you were talking, instead of listening with my whole brain,

I had a thought, which was that I think part of why I haven't reached out to recruiters in the job search is that when recruiters reach out to me, the opportunities are generally so vastly different from what i'm interested in and the the difference is easily discernible from 30 seconds of looking if they found my email on github they can take 30 seconds and look and see like huh you know he hasn't done any.net so maybe he's not interested maybe that's not going to motivate him to quit

jobs yeah so i i think that's the other reason why i haven't done it is like that's that's part of why i don't trust them because the cold calling experiences i've had have all been that it's just not at all related to my experience or my interests yep yeah i'm in the same boat i uh that reputation kind of precedes them right yeah to be fair i don't think all recruiters are like that wait no wait yes they are i'm pretty sure they are i think they i think they actually have to be like that because let's say you're working for an agency that's how they get that's how they get candidates yeah i mean it's definitely a numbers game yeah and the recruiters i've talked to they said look it absolutely is a numbers game you have to reach out to a sufficiently large

number of people in order to get the one who will be a match for your role and so you know and the pipeline is so or the funnel is so wide at the top could be hundreds of people yeah and then you know maybe five or ten they get to that round of interviews to maybe get one that actually gets the job yeah if you have to email 50 000 people then taking 30 seconds to read all their github profiles is not it's not worthwhile for you so i understand why they do it but at the same time like then would they would they be able to help me yeah like do they do they apply that same reasoning to companies are they just yeah exactly 50 000 companies yeah i don't know well you should try and tell me how it went so i can get more information about this because i've never done it

yep i don't know i mean they're they're joking titles mr scared of recruiters i don't know that you have to be scared they're not gonna like harm you no the worst thing could happen is they might say try this exciting job opportunity and they'll try and make it sound really good because they'll make a lot of money if you take it but if they say it's in these languages yeah because they're not going to just straight up i i hope that they're not just going to lie to you about the job because you'll go through the interview process and quickly discover it was a huge waste of time and not work with them anymore yep yeah i haven't had that issue yeah i mean recruiters are just like realtors they're interested in one thing which is placing you at a job where you'll

stay and a lot of times they won't get paid unless you stay there for 90 days you know so if it's just a disastrous matchup then i thought it was like a year i don't know i'm trying to think about i don't think so i don't think it's that long it could be like they'll pay you after some number of days but then you'll get refunded if they quit before a year or something like that you know what i mean yeah i could see that being an arrangement who can wait a year to get a commission on a sale and that's crazy yeah that makes sense okay well we've answered the question clearly right nailed it as usual okay uh what should people do if they want their own questions answered go to softskills.audio and click ask a question fill out our simple form and please keep it brief

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those that have written in yep all right i think we're done we'll catch you next week bye