In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

1. 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?

2. 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.

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

1. Hi Dave and Jamison,

   After fleeing a sinking ship of a startup, I became a solo developer at a medium sized college. This role has really allowed me to expand and grow in ways that I haven’t imagined, but I have encountered an interesting issue I didn’t have in the startup world: there isn’t much to do.

   At my one year mark, I was promoted into a management position, but with no direct report. I will soon have an employee under me doing data integrations. My manager has been reluctant to give me data integrations work despite knowing that I want to understand what my employee will be working with.

   I’ve found some of my own projects, but I’ve completed them all. I’m getting bored. I’m a competent developer, learn fast, and get things done quickly. Recently I’ve been planning an upgrade to some of our legacy code, but it will take probably a year or more to complete.

   Some former colleagues reached out about working with them for a substantial pay bump, but I don’t like the idea of leaving after just over a year and a half. Do I keep riding it out here, or is it time to start looking else where?

   Thank you both for this wonderful podcast. Its a joy to listen to on my walks. I’m sure I get stared at when I try to hide a laugh or grin from the amazing list of Patron names and your commentary.

2. I was recently terminated a few months before my 1 year vesting cliff as an IC2 for being days (not weeks) late on 3 or 4 stories. The late ones were defined incorrectly by management, or were for paying technical debt created by senior engineers, and my manager knew this. I had no IC2 or IC1 peers on my team for comparison. My performance review for the first half of 2025 was not released to me, I was fired when I would have seen it. This means the only reasoning that management has shared with me was my late work. In 1 on 1s before, my lateness has been something my manager has mentioned, but never a warning of termination (or a “pip” as some call it) and no indication that it’s anything more than an area to improve. The org has made poor decisions that left them tight on funds, and I feel the most financially responsible thing for them to do was fire me rather than give me a warning which would let me hit my cliff or lay me off where they’d give more on my way out.

   Had I been pipped or laid off, I would not be asking about this. Should I go with the confusing justification that my boss was truthful in his attribution of my firing without warning to my lateness (and can you help me understand why that’s professionally justified)? Should I go with the disheartening approach and brainstorm other shortcomings that would better justify an unwarned firing, possibly spurring professional growth or a career change? Or should I say I got instafired because of penny pinching and opaque management?

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

1. (follow-up from question 449)

   Hello. Return question asker here. You answered my question from episode 449 “my tech lead ignored my warnings”. I want to give a follow up. I sat by and did not say anything else, he shipped the broken feature, and it broke in production. Instead of fixing it he rose the threshold on the datadog alert so high no one would ever get alerted. Then he left the company. When talking to my manager about the bug we agreed it was part of that refactor and I said “I warned him” and they shrugged it off.

   I assume he is also a long time listener of this podcast and took the age old “leave your job” advice. Kudos.

   (question below)

   I am here for more than just an update though. I am starting to think I understand why he left. It sucks here. I am the lowest level engineer on my team and have not been promoted for the last 2 years because “there is no money”. Ok, fine, I understand that the economy is tough. However I have increased the revenue of my department by 4x, have lead the development of our flagship product this entire year, have been teaching engineers new technology and have been working 60 hour weeks. On a team of 6 I do 33% of the work. 2x what is expected of any one engineer. This last week I received a “meets expectations” performance review. And I am mad. In 1-1’s with my boss they explicitly tell me “I am not saying to sandbag but just do less work. Your teammates are getting compared to you and its making everyone look bad.”

   Don’t worry Dave and Jamison, I am going to quit this job so I don’t need that advice, however you can throw it in if you like, but I’m wondering how do I handle this? Do I confront my manager in the next 1-1 with the data and say I am underleveled and underpaid or do I just take the advice to do less and coast til I find another job? Do I share with HR in the eventual exit interview that this was the straw that broke the camels back?

2. I’m returning to work after a very long absence due to personal issues. How can I ramp back up quickly? It’s a weird situation because I’m not exactly joining a new job, but it’s been so long that it basically is. I haven’t even opened a code editor in months!