In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:
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After a year of trying, I recently got promoted to staff engineer!
It’s great to receive recognition for my work, but i’m not actually very happy, because I only got a 4% raise! I spoke with a former coworker about how much a staff engineer in my role should expect, and he said that he would be insulted by less than . My comp is now slightly below !
In addition to this, times are tough for the business, so it seems unlikely that we’ll get annual bonuses, meaning I likely won’t even get to appreciate the larger target staff bonus! What a bummer!
How should I approach this? A year and a half ago after getting a below inflation raise, I was told I was at the top of my level’s pay band and would need to get promoted if I wanted to go much higher. Now that I’ve gotten promoted, it seems like that wasn’t true! I should be grateful that I still have a job and got promoted and got any increase, but I feel like I’m being short changed! How can I talk to my manager to see about getting more money?
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My company does not address complaints. Here are two examples.
On my first day, the lead engineer told me not to participate in the project. He was impossible to work with: He’d hold up PR’s for 3 months because of linting and prettier rules. Eventually, I figured out he was exceptionally insecure and wanted no feedback or anyone to expose his technical weaknesses. I conflicted with him a lot and got shuffled to another department.
My 2nd example comes from a trainee. I helped him out everyday after standup for 30 minutes. How he passed his interview, I don’t know. He didn’t know what a semicolon was after a 4 years bachelor in computer science and 6 months of being a trainee. I complained to a friend at work who had, I didn’t know, interviewed the trainee. My friend was surprised, and so we hopped on a call with the trainee who didn’t recognize my friend. After snooping around on social media, we found the guy who had done the interview, the trainee’s brother. I told HR & my department head. Nothing happened.
Here’s the question: Getting kicked out of a department ruined my confidence. I have a safe, secure job where there’s no pressure. But my firm doesn’t address complaints properly. Time and time again, people will complain about the linting/prettier guy or other issues like the trainee and nothing is done. Should I leave? I work on a greenfield project here. Switching to a (likely) legacy codebase I didn’t build and dealing with higher pay/expectations is very daunting.
