In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

1. Hi! Love your show and how casually you talk and make fun of everything! I started my career as a freelancer and then joined a mid-size software development company to learn how the sausage is really made, salary wasn’t that important back then. A few kids and a lot more expensive lifestyle later the compensation has become more motivating, but I’m not sure how to sell myself to my manager if I don’t feel like I deserve a high salary myself. (The manager decides the salaries for all our team members.) For years I’ve been focusing on my family and other life stuff, so I’ve spent a looot of working hours not working and basically doing the minimum progress acceptable. Slow progress has come up once with my manager, from which I wiggled out of with various excuses. I’ve realised that this way of working isn’t really fair for the company and my teammates and I’ve started to take this job and my career seriously in the last few months. The company and everyone working there are super supportive and it’s been a terrific experience for all of those years. I’ve gotten a raise multiple times with always me initiating that conversation. There aren’t any clear metrics to improve that directly ties to the salary: I’ve asked my manager about it and the answer was vague like “we have this local salary survey that we take as the base and work from there”. So long story short: how to ask for a raise while not feeling like a criminal since I feel like I haven’t earned the salary I had thus far?

2. I’m a team lead who’s growing increasingly frustrated with my project manager. Every planning conversation ends up in my private DMs, no matter how many times I’ve asked him to move these discussions to the team chat.

   When he messages me one-on-one, my team loses visibility into decisions, questions don’t get addressed openly, and important context just evaporates. It’s not only slowing us down, it also makes me feel like the burden of relaying everything falls squarely on me.

   I’ve tried gently redirecting him back to the shared space, but he keeps defaulting to my DMs. How can I get him to respect the boundaries of team communication without damaging our working relationship?

   Sincerely, Lost in the PM’s DMs

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

1. How would you handle a situation where a team forms a negative opinion about you from day one — without any clear reason and without ever giving you a real chance to prove yourself?

   Even when you contribute technically, your suggestions are ignored… until someone else repeats the same thing and suddenly it’s considered valid.

   Is it possible to stay in that kind of environment without becoming bitter or burned out?

   Can you keep contributing professionally — or is it healthier to just walk away?

2. You guys are awesome. Jamison, I interviewed with you and it was lots of fun and productive. Which is really rad.

   Now… I just landed a 12-month contract in big tech role. It’s perfectly aligned with my long-term career goals. My current fintech FTE is perfectly opposed to my long-term career goals.

   The question — how unethical / despicable would it be to start one week of PTO at my FTE on the same day as Day One at my contract role so that I can onboard without distractions and then put in my resignation upon returning to my FTE? What about two, three, or four weeks of PTO?

   Also… are two-week notices still the default still in 2025?

   Also also… I promise I’m not AI — I’ve been using em dashes since the 20th century.

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.