Hilary Stohs-Krause is the Co-Owner and VP at Ten Forward Consulting. Having already spoken at the RubyConf mini last November 2022 about "Salary Transparency", she returns to the show to further talk about it. She explains how they were able to implement it in their company and why it is important. Moreover, she shares their company's process on how to decide on their employees' salaries.  

 

 

 Hey, and welcome to another episode of the Ruby Rogues podcast. This week on our panel we have John Epperson.

 

Hello everyone.

 

Valentino's soul?

 

Hey now.

 

I'm Charles Max Wood from Top End Devs and we've got a special guest today that is Hilary Stowe's Krause. I hope I said that right.

 

You did and also I'm very used to it being said wrong.

 

All right. Well, thank you for being patient with us. Do you want to introduce yourself? Let us know who you are and why you're world famous.

 

I can try. So yeah, I'm Hilary Soscarazi. I'm a co-owner and VP at 10 Forward Consulting. We're a Ruby and Rails dev shop based in Madison, Wisconsin. And I'm one of those weirdo extroverts who loves talking to strangers. So I got into doing conference talks and just kind of have really kept going with that and really find it to be really rewarding.

 

Very cool. Well, you gave a talk at RubyConf Mini. You talked about, I can't talk, salary transparency. And, you know, it's an interesting topic. I don't know that we wanna rehash the talk, but I'm sure we will go over some of the things you talked about. Do you wanna just give us kind of the 10,000 foot view, what you talked about and some of the takeaways, and then we can expand on it from there?

 

Yeah, definitely. So the impetus for this talk was actually a different conference talk on salary transparency that I saw at Right to Be Code, I wanna say in 2017.

 

Uh

 

And

 

huh.

 

she kind of walked through how her company had instituted salary transparency, specifically wage transparency, and how it impacted salaries for different communities within the organization. So women, people of color, disabled folks, things like that. And the way that she talked about it made it seem like it would be really straightforward. And I thought, well, why aren't we doing this, right? We're a small company. We're primarily developers. We already have a lot of the infrastructure that was necessary. And I can talk about that later if we're interested. So we did. And overall, it went well. Definitely some growing pains, things I would do differently. And so, you know, as salary transparency is a topic has become a lot more like present in the world. I mean, thinking at the EU, you know, in 2021, they passed this EU transparency directive, which is going to address a whole bunch of different areas of salary transparency across the EU. I think there were three or four states in the US who passed, just this year, approved certain salary transparency regulations at the state level. So it's just, it's something where even if you don't have a particular interest in it, companies are going companies are going to have to start paying attention because it's going to be required by law. So it seemed like a good opportunity to dive into this topic and look at not just why are people interested in cellular transparency, why does it matter, and you know what are the different types of it, but also looking at our experience at TenForward, you know, what are some of the pitfalls and how can you preemptively address them to have an experience implementing cellular transparency that goes smoothly.

 

Gotcha. Yeah, it's, it's interesting because I've, I've seen this in a couple of different ways. Um, I've seen companies implode when they implemented it. I've seen companies, you know, where everybody kind of looked at each other and said, okay, we're going to figure this out. And they did. Right. Cause some people were making more than others and it was easier to justify some of it than others. Um, I also ran for school board and in the PR in the public sector, a lot of this stuff is public,

 

Mm-hmm.

 

right. That's another interesting take is to see how it works there. But yeah, I mean, it's fascinating too just from the standpoint of, I think I see a lot of people argue back and forth, do female programmers actually realistically make less than male programmers, or people who are of certain ethnic groups. It's interesting to look at from that standpoint because a lot of these numbers are unknowable. I've actually worked for companies that told me that my salary trade secret.

 

Yeah. Well, and there's interesting things too, because in the States, the federal regulations require, employees are allowed to talk about their salary with other employees if it's

 

Mm-hmm.

 

not on company time.

 

Right.

 

A, not a lot of people know that, and also there are folks who will try to get around that. So you mentioned yours being called like a trade secret. You know, I have

 

Hm.

 

a friend who does contract data analysis, and she's been told on freelance gigs, like, oh, you are not allowed about your salary with any other contractors, you know, like this, and they try to argue, oh, we're exempt from this regulation and I'm not a lawyer, so I don't know if that's true, but you know, it's never as cut and dry, I think, as we want things like this to be.

 

Yeah, makes sense. I'm kind of curious just what your story is as you implemented this, and then I think we can talk through maybe some of the other implications as they come up.

 

Yeah, yeah. So I think one of the main reasons that I wanted to do it were, so at the time, so now I'm a co-owner, but at the time I was just a developer. And so I think it's interesting looking at it too from sort of both sides. So the person whose salary would have been where it would have mostly impacted me to have my salary, you know, public versus

 

Mm-hmm.

 

like looking at it from a company perspective. So as a developer, one of the main reasons I wanted this was we already had. knew the range of salary for everyone else at the company because we have a sort of career progression doc that's super detailed and it has a range for each like rank within the company. So it didn't seem like that much bigger of a leap and looking at the data you know even then you know five six years ago before there had been a lot of this momentum that we've been thinking the sort of documented benefit to people knowing how much money they made in terms of retention, in terms of you know feeling like there's equity, like there could be equity, but if you don't know that that salaries are based on an equal sort of footing, you're just gonna wonder and I think especially for women and people of color who historically have been underpaid. And I have a lot of really interesting data about that too if we want to look at that at some point. But basically there's all this data that shows that people want to understand the number that is their salary comes from. And there's a lot of ways you can get at that. But again, being a small company, primarily being women and people of color, especially at that time, it just sort of seemed like, well, yeah, if having salary transparency has been shown to benefit women and people of color, and we're primarily women and people of color, why wouldn't we want this? And I brought the idea back to the then owners and pitched it, and I said, here's why I want this, it would entail, here's how we could do it. And after a few conversations, they were like, yeah, why not? Again, we already have the ranges, this doesn't seem like that big of a step. Well, it was and it wasn't. Looking back, it's interesting because there's sort of what seems like contradictory data, right? When they pull people about salary transparency. And a majority of people do want to have salaries shared and a majority don't want their salary to be shared. So

 

Ha ha ha

 

it's this sort of

 

I

 

classic battle we're fighting, right? And it's probably not surprising when we think about it that way, right? Like we wanna know that we're being paid fairly and we wanna keep our data private. And I think that's especially true in capitalist countries, but honestly, I've looked at studies and polls about this from all over the world and it's pretty consistent. by culture, right? Sometimes it's it's capitalist where a lot of like our sense of value in society is based on our job and how much money we make. Other places it's that you know you just don't talk about money or money is viewed as a collective thing within a family, you know. So the reasons why we're reticent to talk about it or have it be shared you know vary but we're all a little we'll feel some discomfort around that by and large. And I did expect some of What surprised me was where it came from. And really not where it came from, but why. So I assumed going into this, okay, well we are mostly developers. We do have a couple of support positions. And the people in those positions at the time were lower entry. So their salaries were just lower. They were the lowest paid on the team. And I expected that they would resist that because they wouldn't want to feel... Because they didn't make as much, right? And be like, oh, well

 

Mm-hmm.

 

great, so everyone's going to know, everyone makes more of me. person who resisted this it wasn't because they felt that they deserved more money you know because we'd been worried like here's the range right this is why where this number comes from this is how we calculate this whatever this is what the growth could look like in this in this job but it was because they felt everyone else who made more was going to lose respect for them when they saw how much money they made

 

Oh, interesting.

 

Right, which in hindsight now I'm like, well yeah, of course, because again, our value is tied up in how much money we make, but it just hadn't really occurred to me, especially because I was on the developer track, right? I was in that higher salary echelon of the company. And so that was really the big thing. Some of the other parts that we kind of had to figure out as we went along were like, how do we keep track of all this, right? When someone gets a promotion, when someone gets a raise, like how do we make sure that data gets updated? the data, what kind of data do we include, right? Is it just their current pay? Is it their pay and their vacation? Because vacation is negotiable at our company.

 

Mm-hmm.

 

Is it, how do we handle it for salespeople who have like a commission based structure? So, and a lot of that is like, it's not the primary thing, but it is important and it's important for supporting and getting buy-in for having salary transparency. So some of that we're still figuring out as we go. The feedback overall though, because we've had this in place now for three or four years and current staff are all very supportive of it and like it and actually we've had, when we have new hires, we're always tell them at the beginning, like, hey, just so you know, we have internal seller transparency. Here's what that means. Here's what that looks like. This is why. And we also put that in our job postings that we have internal seller transparency as sort of like a company benefit. And people have mentioned many times in interviews that helped convince them to apply. They're like, I love that you have that. That makes me feel confident that, you know, I'm gonna be paid fairly. And so really it's turned into somewhat of a recruiting tool, which I also did not expect when we first did it.

 

Oh my gosh, I have like so many questions right now.

 

I know

 

So,

 

Ha

 

right?

 

so, and

 

ha ha.

 

I know I just heard Valentino click his button. So I know that Valentino has questions too.

 

Thanks for watching!

 

My first question, coming from the perspective, also, as a small consultancy owner, right?

 

Mm-hmm.

 

You know, we don't have this problem on our table at the moment because, you know, And so we're pretty transparent between the three of us, you know,

 

Mm-hmm.

 

I'm sorry We have a third person who is an employee and so like there's very little You know, we don't have to worry about this right now. We don't have multiple employees

 

Mm-hmm.

 

who are wondering how they're doing

 

Mm-hmm.

 

but it is a discussion that that my Partner and I have repeatedly had because for me like I recognize one of the things you said because one of the things that started me down this road in the very first place was when I was a developer and I was in with another developer. We basically worked on this huge project, and we were sitting in the room with the CEO. And he basically was like, well, why should I care what you have to say? He's like, you're only getting paid, I was getting paid like 80 then. And he was expecting developer salaries to be at 100. And up until this point in my career, I'd just been like, yeah, I'm just going to take whatever I need to live, right? That's it. And this was the first time that I'd ever considered the fact that somebody might disrespect me wasn't making enough money. And from then on, I went to my next job and they were like, well, how much did you make at your last job? I was like, I want to make market value. And I just insisted on it until, so I jumped straight to like 125, right? Because I was just like, I have to get up to the market now because apparently that's important, right? And between that and, sorry, I'm almost done with context, I swear. Between that and like, I don't remember who I was listening When it used to be called the Ruby freelancers podcast,

 

Thanks

 

it's

 

Mm-hmm.

 

now the

 

for watching.

 

freelancers podcast or whatever, but somebody on there They said something actually they might have been a review I don't remember I listened to a few podcasts this time, but they convinced me

 

Ha!

 

that it every single job

 

you

 

You should negotiate something even even if you're not negotiating salary Even if it's completely worthless just you start out from the very beginning negotiating something and I was like, okay I can do this and and I've done that ever since and I felt really good about it ever since right and so like I have ever since and I feel like my salary

 

Uh huh.

 

is up. So I feel I've come from there. So I understand that reasoning. But the thing that we kind of ran into when we were talking with our third person when we were like, hey, we're probably gonna do this. Like how you're feeling there, like, well, I don't wanna feel like there's too much pressure on me if I have too high of a salary, right? And somebody comes in and, you know. So it was kind of nebulous and it was an interesting perspective, but that was theirs. I guess I'm kind of curious because you expressed, hey, we only really had trouble with one person, their perspective, and everybody who's coming on seems to be self-selecting for, hey, I want to join a team that has this internal transparency issue. Do you feel like have you encountered new problems after? Or I mean, that was already surprising for you, but have you run into problems where, I guess from a business owner perspective, the thing that I feel like is most likely to be a problem for me is I'm hiring somebody on and so I'm going to have to pay them more, which means that my prices are automatically going to have to be higher, which isn't really that much of a problem,

 

Mm-hmm.

 

but it definitely, I feel like it means that I must go that direction. I can't go the cheaper side because I'm going to have open salaries and people are going to have higher salaries therefore.

 

Yeah, so there's, I have so many thoughts on this. It's interesting. So this is another one of those ones that seems like it might be contradictory, but I think it goes to the heart that, so they did this big study because so many people are looking to quit, right? I think it was like 75%. I'm looking to see if I can, if I have written down. Oh, 73% of US tech workers are considering quitting in the next 12 months. 73%.

 

I mean.

 

And so then the question obviously is like, well, why?

 

It's a rough industry.

 

Right, why are they

 

Sorry.

 

thinking of quitting?

 

Mm-hmm.

 

And there's a lot of reasons. You know, people mention childcare, wanting more flexibility, but the main reasons that people cited as their top reason. So if you had to pick one reason you're thinking of quitting, which one is the most important to you? They said low pay, lack of advancement opportunities, and feeling disrespected at work. And so if we're looking at the like

 

Oh

 

core,

 

sorry, I forgot to act shocked.

 

right, but I think a lot of people assume that it's, you know, there's so many companies that like, won't let them go remote and it's like well no that's one factor but it's not the factor right

 

It's the way you

 

or company

 

handled it.

 

it's what you handled it right and I and it's the

 

They

 

that it's a

 

wanted

 

transparency

 

to go remote because they were having trouble with something else in life too.

 

Yeah.

 

Go

 

Right,

 

ahead, sorry.

 

when you think about the benefits companies offer, like, oh yeah, well we give them lunch every day and it's like, okay, again, not what people

 

What

 

care

 

a benefit.

 

the most about, right? But then when

 

I don't

 

you look

 

know

 

at

 

if

 

what

 

it's

 

people

 

good

 

do

 

meat.

 

care about, I'm vegetarian, but

 

Okay.

 

if it's good food, if it's good food, period,

 

Yeah.

 

yeah.

 

Right.

 

But I do think it's interesting, so lower pay was one of the big ones, right?

 

Mm-hmm.

 

I mean, kind of a duh, right? We're working to make money. said they would be satisfied with lower pay if how that

 

Yep.

 

number was arrived at was communicated clearly. And we have found this to be the case. So for example, we hired a junior developer and it was his first professional job. He'd gone to a boot camp, had never worked in tech before, but had a lot of friends who were developers and was getting a lot of advice. Some of it was good, some of it was good for them, but not necessarily appropriate for him.

 

Yeah.

 

You know, one thing we do too is we always have the salary range posted with the job, which is another type of salary transparency that actually is starting to become more regulated. You can't post a job unless you have, this is true in Colorado. I think there are a couple of other places. So people applying for those jobs already know what their range is. So they can again self-select out at the beginning if they're like, no, I really want to make XYZ. You know, that's my baseline. Like this job just isn't for me. Great. You know. So we have the range posted. And one thing we always do before we make an offer letter is we have what I call a pre-negotiation meeting. So John, you were mentioning that you were told, always negotiate, always negotiate. And I do think generally that is great advice. Before I was in tech, I always did that too, always negotiate. The issue with that is that there are people who are never going to be good at that and

 

Yep.

 

never gonna feel comfortable with that, right? And so inherently you're building, a negotiation is a tactic, you're inherently going to have unequal pay structures. It's just going to happen.

 

This is the difference between advice that's good for you personally that you

 

Right?

 

should just

 

Uh huh.

 

do because it makes your life better and

 

Mm-hmm.

 

general advice that everyone out there should take.

 

To

 

I'm

 

everyone,

 

100 percent.

 

exactly.

 

Just to be clear, I'm not saying that we should all learn how to negotiate. I am saying that if you have the capability right now, the way the world works, it will make your life better and you

 

Oh

 

should

 

yeah,

 

do

 

well,

 

that.

 

and I do think negotiation generally is a good skill, even if it's not for salary, right? Like, we should

 

Well...

 

all be able

 

We...

 

to negotiate

 

But

 

in

 

we

 

life.

 

should be working to make the world a better place for tomorrow. I...

 

Right, exactly.

 

Right.

 

So

 

I'm

 

I think

 

with you

 

it's like

 

on

 

Well.

 

that.

 

negotiate now because that is currently the most effective tactic for most people. And

 

Well, and

 

to

 

I'm

 

try

 

not

 

and mitigate

 

entirely

 

that, go ahead.

 

uncomfortable with the idea that you negotiate and you do wind up with these slightly different pay scales for people, but typically if you're gonna negotiate, you have to make the case, right? You have to make the case why you deserve more than what they're offering, or

 

That's true. I also

 

understand

 

think...

 

where they're coming from. So

 

for sure.

 

it's not just, hey, I asked more forcefully or better than you did, but I

 

Well,

 

made

 

but

 

a better

 

it

 

case.

 

depends on the company. There are definitely places

 

That's

 

where

 

fair.

 

Squeaky Wheel's gonna get the cheese, so.

 

And the variance

 

Then

 

is probably

 

be the squeaky

 

too large

 

wheel.

 

and things

 

But

 

like

 

not everyone

 

that.

 

Yeah.

 

can be the squeaky-wo if we're looking, especially if you're like a, if you're a disabled woman of color, for example, you are inherently going to be viewed as combative. At again, speaking very broadly, right? Not every company, but speaking very broadly, the way that you're gonna be perceived, even if you said the exact same words with the exact same tone, as like a straight white gentleman, right? It's just not gonna get you the same outcome, broadly speaking. So keeping this in mind and thinking like, and I think part of it too is like, what are our company values, right? A, we want to make money because we are a company, right?

 

Mm-hmm.

 

That's probably good.

 

And we want to have happy, satisfying employees. And also part of that makes us money, right? Because having to hire people is super expensive. They say it's what, up to six months of the person's salary to replace them, depending on the role. It's a shit ton of money.

 

Yep.

 

I would rather pay someone a little more because it's going to be cheaper in the long run than if I have to rehire them because they decided to quit because they were unhappy with their salary. So, and I think that really starts at the beginning. And so we have this pre-negotiation meeting where we decide as a team, you know, like, or as leaders, like, okay, based on this candidate's experience and their skills and what they're bringing to the table, et cetera, like, what do we think is a fair wage? And then we talk to them. And I ask them first two things. I say, what is your ideal salary? So like, the one that would make you like ecstatic. You're like, yes, this is in an ideal world. with this much vacation. And then what is the minimum you're happy with? And I say, I ask those two for a reason because we'd love to give you your ideal. It's not always in the cards. But I don't want you to, I'm not asking like, what's the minimum you'll accept because I don't want you to accept a salary that's gonna make you feel resentful. So like, what's the minimum that you would actually be happy with? And if the minimum they're happy with is higher than we wanna pay them, then it's time to just end the negotiation, right? Cause it's just not, we're not gonna get anywhere. I take that information We can also ask, okay, how much do you want it? Here's our default vacation, here's our default sick time, do you want to tweak any of those and as part of your compensation package? Take all of that information, recalculate, and then come up with an offer letter. And then we present the offer letter at a meeting as well. And I say, hey, here's what our offer is, here's how we got to this number, like there's this range, these are the criteria, here's an area we think that you need to do some more growth before you can get to this level, or like this is a part that we're super excited about. Just being very transparent about like, and why we think it's a good offer. And when we do that, let's see, I don't know, I really have the stats, I don't know how many people we've hired in the last like four years since we've started doing this, but I think maybe one person ultimately did not accept the offer letter as was, and that was because they decided to move, I believe they were moving to Japan to be with their partner. So kind of a different reason, but when we do that, like every, and this was true with this junior that I mentioned, his, you know, friends were, him to commit at a much higher number than we thought was appropriate for the level of experience he had. And that was again based on, you know, they had college degrees, they've been working in tech, they were working for some

 

Mm-hmm.

 

of the bigger companies in Madison, Google, Zendesk, Epic. So we just sat down and I explained all of that, right? And I was like, look, here's where those numbers are coming from. You know, there's a lot of really high paying tech jobs in Madison. And if that's a job that you're super interested in, like, I'm happy to help you make connections. also like offer different benefits, like you're never gonna work more than 40 hours a week and you're gonna

 

Right.

 

get lots of mentoring and you're gonna you know. And through the course of that conversation he ended up being you know he basically was like oh that makes a lot of sense I totally understand what you're saying like thank you for explaining it and was happy with a number that was much lower than the one he was originally thinking of because he understood where it was coming from.

 

Right.

 

And we also had those structures in place do annual performance reviews, we do them quarterly, we have clear, you know, this document that shows exactly how you can get to the next level. You know, I could tell him I started as an intern once I became a junior dev full-time, my first raise was six months later, and then, you know, now I'm an owner,

 

Thanks for watching!

 

right? Like we have a clear history of like paying people what they're worth and having it be an ongoing conversation that's collaborative. And we've never had someone leave because they weren't making enough money. So I think that kind of speaks for itself.

 

Yep. So.

 

And it's

 

I-

 

not always easy. I mean, yeah, there's definitely, if it were easy, we'd all be doing it already, right? So.

 

Yeah, I think a lot of the upfront that you're talking about, the upfront work you're doing, that makes a lot of sense because somebody comes in and they know what to expect and you've got those clear guidelines. And I mean, that was one thing that I've seen people leave is yeah, it's like, well, you know, they haven't given me a raise in two years and I don't know if they ever will. And it's because they don't really have a way of managing that. In fact,

 

Mm-hmm.

 

I worked at a large company, a financial company, and they were promising raises and never quite got around to them. And people were bailing out, right? Because the communication on that was just awful.

 

Mm-hmm.

 

But I'm a little curious as you implement this, I think a lot of companies, they're going to get hung up on the, okay, well, if we open this up and let people see what people are making, now I've got to justify why John is making more than Jane, or Jane is making more than John.

 

Totally.

 

Just to give you an example here, way back, but I was managing the tech support team for a company that I was working for about what, 17 years ago. And, um, we'd hired these couple of guys and they had been doing terrific work, hired a whole bunch more people. But when we hired those whole bunch more people, um, they had basically hired somebody to be my boss and do a bunch of other stuff too, right. It wasn't just his job to manage me, but, um, he hired them and he set their pay.

 

Mm-hmm.

 

And it turned out that the people that he hired, if he liked them more, he gave them a higher pay rate. And

 

Mmm.

 

then these guys wound up finding the pay stub of one of these people who had not been there as long and really wasn't any more qualified than they were.

 

Mm-hmm.

 

And so it creates these issues, right? Now, he lied to them too and told them that he wasn't making more. And so that was another issue too. But at the end of the day, it's like, okay, you know, making at the top of the scale and I don't see you doing anything that I'm not doing then yeah how do you avoid

 

Yes,

 

those issues?

 

yeah, I think, and this might sound flippant, and it's not intended to, but I think the issue is not salary transparency, it's that he was using shitty math to pay people,

 

Yeah,

 

right?

 

fair.

 

And

 

That's a dishonesty.

 

in that example, yeah, in that example, they found out even without official salary transparency.

 

Yeah.

 

Right? And again, like in the States, and this actually thought that those would be more true other places, it's one of those things you assume everywhere. But I believe it's, is it Australia? There are definitely countries where like you are forbidden from talking about your pay. Whereas we

 

Thanks for watching!

 

have it, you are, it's legally protected to talk about your pay. And so even if you don't do it deliberately as a company policy, there is nothing to prevent people from finding out anyway.

 

Yeah.

 

And so I think the key there is, and we did this too, that our pay was equitable because again we had the ranges we had that you know

 

Mm-hmm.

 

some of these other systems already in place but I definitely recommend before companies do this they do a pay audit and you know one statistic that I read when I was researching for this talk is more than 80% of specifically US employers who undertook pay equity audits found equity gaps and those are people who likely you know some of them it was probably court mandated that they do this because of a lawsuit or something but a lot of these were And so this is people who are already concerned about it, who are doing shitty at it. So imagine how much worse it is for companies who aren't paying attention and don't care.

 

Mm-hmm.

 

And so I think the best way to prevent that kind of blowback when implementing salary transparency is to make sure that it is fair. And you can explain where those numbers came from. So that when someone does have a grievance, and you know, there are always people who are gonna think who don't have a good assessment of their own skills, be paid more and there's not a whole lot you can do about that other than say if you want to get to this next level here is exactly how you can do that.

 

Gotcha.

 

And that's the hard part, right? You know, again,

 

Yeah.

 

like, I don't want to make it seem like, oh, this is so easy, we should all be doing it, because it takes a lot of upfront work. And, you know, I think, and I made this argument in the talk I gave at RubyConfMini, and as there are more and more and more regulations around this, some of this inevitably we're gonna have to do anyway. So you can either do the work now and be ahead of the curve and be prepared for it, or you can wait until it's legislated, and then try to play catch-up.

 

Gotcha.

 

Yeah, you know,

 

So I'll go ahead.

 

I was gonna say, as an employee, the only person you're hurting is yourself when you're not talking about your salary with your coworkers. Because I mean, it's so easy to just be clueless and just accept whatever, especially early on in your career. But

 

Mm-hmm.

 

even as you grow, you're kind of setting your base expectations as you start, right? And unless you're talking and getting feedback around you, like you have nothing to compare against. And I mean, you can get all the data you want, but unless you have it in the context that you're working in, you're not going to really get a good sense for, you know, whether you're getting paid fairly or not. And, you know, as a white man, I definitely take, you know, I take it for granted that, you know, I probably don't have to worry as much as some other, you know, co workers about the And it's unfortunate, but like you said, you can look at the data and find that that's the fact. And

 

I didn't.

 

if you're not talking with your coworkers to find out whether or not that is true at your company, how do you know? Your company's only gonna give you a rhetoric of, okay, well, we've gotten the research. Typically, as a big company, they'll go to some third party and say, okay, here's how you compare across other industries. But like,

 

Mm-hmm.

 

how does it compare within your company is another, a whole other picture, right? So

 

Mm-hmm.

 

even if you get a baseline across the industry, like it's still not completely realistic, right?

 

Right. Especially in tech

 

Yep.

 

where like, you know, senior at one company is very different than senior at another

 

Right?

 

and there's just no way to do a direct comparison really. One, and I do want to stress too that like, I do think a lot of the discrepancies that we can see if we're looking especially at, you know, race or ethnicity or gender, you know, I do think most, I would argue

 

Mm-hmm.

 

Thank you for watching. I'll see you next time. And that's why I think having cellular transparency is so great because it does force you to, it doesn't let you get away accidentally or unintentionally or unknowingly with some of those biases, right? Because you have formulas, you have data, you're making decisions based on actual criteria instead of kind of like, you know, you were saying your former manager, like that he liked them better or was a gut feeling or whatever, you know? So I really just, you know, I, keeping which I think you know like I said we're still trying to figure out how to do some of that better. I really struggle to see a lot of downsides to it to be honest.

 

Right.

 

I am. Oh, good.

 

I just wanted to agree with you briefly. I think most of the salary decisions that you're seeing, if you're seeing a discrepancy, each of those salaries are set one by one as they hire people. Everybody gets kind of the same cost of living raise. Occasionally, somebody will really stand out and get a promotion or some kind of larger raise. But yeah, I don't think anybody, or most of the time, the vast majority of the time, I think that's If you see a salary discrepancy, it was just kind of the process and nobody really looked at it to say, hey, is this actually fair?

 

Mm-hmm, exactly, exactly.

 

I

 

But

 

mean.

 

we should be, you know, and think

 

Yeah.

 

that's the key, yeah.

 

At the end of the day, I think it's important to remember that as a company, your goal is to make money.

 

Mm-hmm.

 

One of the things that you are incentivized to do is reduce your labor costs. At the end

 

Yep.

 

of the day, a company will always... Even as a good intentioned company, you're still like, how am I going to make this math work? How am

 

Mm-hmm.

 

I going to make profit? love to just give people money, that's great. But at the end of the day, I also know that if we don't make profit, then we go out of business and then they won't be making any money next year.

 

Right.

 

Right? So

 

Yeah.

 

there's a balance to that and getting it right

 

for sure.

 

is harder for small companies than it is for very big companies because small differences in number impact smaller companies a lot more. Right?

 

Right, and you have fewer levels, which I think when you have like, okay, so we have,

 

Mm-hmm.

 

you know, just making this up, but like, developer one, two, and three. Great.

 

Sure

 

That's, you can set a structure on that when you have like one intern and one admin assistant and one senior, it's a lot harder to do that kind of structure.

 

Yeah. But the kind of point here is that at the end of the day, the company is incentivized to lower your, or keep your salary as low as it possibly can. Doing that in a fair and like, like making sure that the company, I mean, I feel like a company should posture itself so that it's making sure that it's paying you fairly while still like not trying to, you know, put itself out of business, but it's a balanced thing. a company is always going to try to keep your salary lower and you are, I mean, I agree that like the fairness thing, like, I'm sorry, I agree that like, equitability across the board is like a good thing for society at large, us individually, things like this. But I think it's also important to recognize that like, the company is going to try to keep that lower. And you know, it is what it is.

 

Well, I think there's a key thing you, oh, go ahead.

 

I was going to say, for me, I feel like the big problem isn't necessarily around negotiation. It's around the fact that the companies that are going to put up the most stink for this are going to be the companies that, for example, like Chuck was describing, have other problems going on, communication problems,

 

Thanks for watching!

 

dishonesty problems. Because in order to satisfy this sort of new order, now they've got to like... collect all that data, put it all out there, and that's gonna shine a light on all the crap that already has happened. That's a lot of extra work for all the managers who are the people who perpetuated all that bad stuff. No one wants to volunteer to go shine a light on their own bad shit.

 

Right. I mean, I think that's the reason that the federal government is involved in a lot of these companies that aren't doing that, right? Like Google, like there's a reason that it's at the federal level forcing this to happen because they're not going to do it themselves. I do want to touch on

 

those

 

one

 

large

 

thing you

 

ones

 

said.

 

yeah

 

Yeah,

 

sure

 

I do want to touch on one thing you said. You said a company is incentivized to keep its salaries low. You also at one point said labor costs. And I do think those are distinct because I would argue

 

Okay.

 

that labor costs are more than salary. To me,

 

Mm.

 

labor costs

 

Mm-hmm.

 

includes

 

I agree.

 

the cost of hiring, the cost of replacing people, having more productive, more talented people who are going to then do a better product, make you more money, all of that. And so I think, yes, you're incentivized to keep your labor costs low, and I would argue that keeping salaries lower is not necessarily correlated with keeping labor costs low. Because you have these costs of replacing people, you lose the, you know, you're gonna lose out

 

Mm-hmm.

 

either correctly or incorrectly think their salary is not where it should be because there isn't transparency around it, around the process. And you know, we saw 82% of people are cool with a lower pay if they know where it came from. So we know that the most money is not the most important thing when it comes to salary. Again, broadly. There are some people who

 

Yeah.

 

are just like, no, I want to make more money, that's the only thing I care about, but they're an outlier.

 

So I was

 

Well,

 

not.

 

they're an outlier for six months and then they're miserable and they change their mind.

 

Yeah, we were edging on this and I was kind of trying not to peel back the scan all the way. And I do apologize because I use those terms interchangeably and I do think of those things distinctly, but I was totally just not doing that. Because one of the things that you mentioned earlier that I think is really important, that is not really very well talked about in general, in data and things like this is like how do you quantify for example the value of your your perks and things like this right and you

 

Mm-hmm.

 

know for example my partner and like my closest friend happens to be an accountant right and so like part of the reason why we went into business together

 

Mm-hmm.

 

but you know like one of the things that like long before we went into business together like I did with him is whenever I was thinking about accepting offers I would come back and we like what what all these perks were that I was you know comparing on the table right because you're comparing different salary rates and you know different amounts of vacation and your health care you know and all these all these and some of these things were like really hard to math like you know what really is the cost of me working from home you know versus being in office

 

Mm-hmm.

 

things like that so you know putting those into a number is you know you can come up with person specific right like different people are going to value for example working from home at a you know a different rate so

 

Yes. And

 

like

 

we did, oh, go ahead.

 

that makes it tough go ahead

 

Yeah, and we did think about this, because we thought, you know, we've had vacation be a negotiable benefit for a long time. So one of my first raises at the company just doubled my vacation, because we were a little low on funds at the time. I didn't know this at the time, of course. They didn't tell me that, but they

 

Mm-hmm.

 

were just like, hey, we think you're doing great and deserve a raise. How do you feel about more vacation? And I was like, excellent, I feel excellent about that.

 

I'm not sure if I'm gonna be able to do this. I'm not sure if I'm gonna be able to do this.

 

And,

 

Double Disneyland.

 

where I mean yeah and you know and we've talked about should we do unlimited vacation I have a lot I could do a whole podcast about how much I think that's a shitty idea um

 

that that's a complete

 

complete

 

sidetrack.

 

other one

 

Yeah.

 

but you know we

 

Nice.

 

and part but the main reason we

 

We're

 

didn't

 

in agreement

 

the reason

 

here.

 

I bring it up is the reason we didn't do that is because it to your point people value vacation differently so one of the other owners just has the default two weeks that we require everyone have at least two weeks they don't even use their two weeks. And so, you know, when you look at our transparency spreadsheet, our total package comes out to be roughly the same, it's within like $1,000 or something. But I have five weeks of vacation and he has two. And so his base salary is higher than mine because then when you, and we have the formula on that spreadsheet so anyone can see how we write the final numbers. So you can see that like we have created our packages differently but they come out to the same total value. So that's really the number that we work with when we're working with hiring or raises is like we're looking at that total compensation package value. We considered whether or not we should put things like healthcare in, right? We pay 75% of premiums. We do that whether you're single with a partner or family, save 75% for everybody. Obviously the total cost for like what the other owners has a family, like if his family was on the plan. if you look at the direct cost then for me as a single person.

 

It's extremely expensive,

 

It's extremely

 

family

 

Yep.

 

different,

 

plans.

 

right? Yeah. We ultimately decided not to because we didn't want people to feel disincentivized to getting health care because they thought they could pocket the money instead. And there's arguments to be made for sure. Like there are definitely reasonable arguments to be made for doing it one way or the other. You could say that the way we're doing it is kind of patronizing. Maybe it is. There's no perfect way. That's the way we decided to do it. And I think, again, just being very upfront about that. So we tell everyone, here all the benefits included, you know, you can choose to or to not use some of these or employ some of these, but that's just that's just not factored into your total compensation. If they want to factor that in, we can, you know, we're happy to provide these specific numbers. So if they're like, hey, I'm really trying to compare two jobs, could you give me information on what my premium would probably be? Yeah, we could do that, you know. It's, yeah, there's a there's a lot of ways to approach it and I think a big thing is figuring out like what's gonna make sense for your owner, your individual situation, what do your employees care about, you know, if we had, if

 

Thanks for watching!

 

all of our employees were suddenly like, hey, none of us are on, you know, they're all getting each spouse's or something, like none of us are using the family, you know, the company health insurance, like can we get a boost instead on our salaries? I don't know, we'd consider it at the very least. So I think really it's just having those open conversations so that people know where the numbers are coming from, how they were arrived at, and the why behind it. And I think that's really Why did we decide to do it this way?

 

I love this idea of an equation, right? And I remember seeing Buffer, the company,

 

Mm-hmm.

 

when they first made their salaries transparent, it was an equation, you know, and they gave you the equation and you could figure out pretty much anybody's salary if you put in all the inputs.

 

Mm-hmm.

 

And I've loved seeing kind of how this is taken. You know, even as an example, Shopify, you can, as an employee, Adjust how you get benefits. So if you want more stock you can give yourself more stock if you want More salary, you know then stock or something like that And you can kind of adjust kind of the pieces of the equation and it's kind of interesting to see how this plays out right like Because I love the idea of you know, the whole point of making it transparent is that you know, everybody You know what the expectations

 

Mm-hmm.

 

are right? Like it's not like you're just like, okay making enough money? You're like, well, let me figure it out. Like, I'm at least making what the equation says, you know, and so I feel like that is a step in the right direction. Right? Like, there's still the, you know, the market valuation problem, right, which I still don't think is anywhere near solved, right, because of geography and remote work. Like, you know, even if you factor in location, you know, and cost of living and all that, like the equation gets so big, how

 

Yeah.

 

do you distill it down to a point where okay like it's accurate?

 

Mm-hmm.

 

Alright

 

Uh huh.

 

What are some things as an example that you guys have thought about like for that specifically maybe where it's less so much of it as a problem? Have you found that certain things way more than others in your equation that people care about?

 

Yeah, you know, it's funny. So we were based in Madison, Wisconsin. We have an interesting tech scene, because it's pretty big, but it's like sort of, a lot of it is big companies with offices here. So we have like the biggest

 

Mm-hmm.

 

Zendesk office outside of their headquarters. We have a Google office that's always growing. We have Sony, we have Epic is the big healthcare software company. So you have this dichotomy between like these big companies pay their version of market, and then you have a ton of entrepreneurial tech companies which are gonna pay very different, and then you have consulting companies which are gonna pay different. And so, you know, someone will come in and be like, oh yeah, well I looked it up on Indeed, and I searched Junior Developer and Madison, and I'm like, great, and you probably saw a range from like, you know, 100 to 50, because

 

Mm-hmm.

 

it really depends. And so I think something that we stress a lot when we're doing hiring, when we're in our job listings, when we're actually doing the hiring is one of the big things that we offer is an active role in the community and also work-life balance. And what we mean by that is we've had multiple, multiple people come from Epic, which pays very, very well and works you very, very hard. And like, I have thoughts about Epic, but one good thing is it brings a lot of talented people to Madison. So they'll work at Epic for a few years, and get burned out and they will be, they're like genuinely happy to take pay cuts to work at Ten Forward because they only work 40 hours a week

 

Mm-hmm.

 

and they can take mental health days and no one's gonna question that and they can schedule their day how they want and they don't have to commute all the way to Verona and that, you know, and so really that's, I think part of it is figuring out what employees value most and then part of it is figuring out what you as a company or as company owners, like what do you value most? a company that can support that, that people will then self-select in as long as you're open about these are what we view as the trade-offs we're working here in terms of benefits and maybe you know less beneficial things.

 

Right.

 

So you know I think we're very open about the fact that, sorry I was gonna say we're open about the fact that like we can't pay the same type of salary that some other tech companies in Madison can, but we offer a lot of other things that they can't. And so it's just what is going to be best for you as an individual.

 

Yeah,

 

Yeah,

 

now.

 

I just wanted to add on to the range

 

NNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN

 

discrepancies. I think that portion of transparency in salaries is the worst thing that could possibly happen. Because I know at companies, my wife has worked for, that it'll be like $50,000 or $200,000. And you're just like, well, for the same title. And you're kind of just

 

Oh!

 

like, well, how does that make any sense? How bad for somebody who's making $50,000 go in and be like, well, who's making $200,000? And why

 

Right?

 

am I not getting anywhere near that, right?

 

Right?

 

And so I feel like maybe part of this is titles are not accurately being

 

Mm-hmm.

 

assessed,

 

Thanks for watching!

 

which is also a part of the problem. But I think more so

 

Mm-hmm.

 

the range is being disclosed. If you have that big of a discrepancy, I would just leave it out, right?

 

Right, yeah, I think our ranges,

 

Yeah.

 

I'd have to look at our document, but I want to say it's maybe 20k is the biggest difference between like biggest range amount for any individual role. And I think also our roles, you know, we do have in there a general years of experience, but it overlaps for all the ranges. So it's like one to three years, two to, you know, six years, four to eight or something like that, because

 

Right.

 

doesn't necessarily mean anything.

 

Oh, I've had that

 

Yeah.

 

fight.

 

Hahaha

 

I mean,

 

One, one,

 

I...

 

oh, go ahead, John.

 

Although I was going to say continue on this, I honestly think that one of the things that we really should be working as developers, as a general overarching society of developers thing, I think that one of the things we really, really should be spending time on and working on is deciding what we're going to call things, specifically our job titles. Because there are the, for example, we pointed out earlier, senior developer means so many different things. And when you're, it doesn't, It affects salaries. It definitely causes issues when you're talking about salary ranges and things like this, but it also spills over and it's tons of other things that we do care about, which is like, hey, I'm hiring somebody, they come in, we hire them on as a senior developer. It turns out, oh, well, you know, they just got that title at some company, right? And they're like really junior in it. Could they grow into it? Maybe, yes, and I'm not saying anything against that, but your expectations aren't necessarily matched, right? And, or you, you know, job hop title somewhere so that you can go get a job somewhere that makes a lot of money. Like, you know what? I'm not going to beat up on people that do this, but it's a flaw in our system that causes issues,

 

Mm-hmm.

 

right?

 

Mm-hmm.

 

And that as well as you talked earlier about not having a clear path forward for people's careers, right? And not having titles that help people see the demarcations and their

 

Mm-hmm.

 

own personal growth through their careers. something that like I know that it affected me personally, made

 

Mm-hmm.

 

it hard for me to see what my future would be like. And I'm sure that I know that I've talked to other people that have had this problem. So

 

Oh yeah,

 

I

 

definitely.

 

feel like it's gotta be a common thing.

 

That's a huge one. Yeah, I mean,

 

So.

 

I was talking with someone at, I don't know, a conference like three or four years ago who worked for a British company, she was based in London. And she was talking about the same issue, just kind of like, oh yeah, you know, I just started a new company and I have no idea how I get to the next level. I asked my manager and they were like, oh, I don't actually know, it just happens.

 

are probably like, work harder.

 

Right,

 

If that's

 

you know,

 

your

 

and

 

answer

 

I.

 

and you're a manager, you have a problem.

 

Right, but this is, to

 

all of

 

John's

 

my managers.

 

point, it's a common problem.

 

Yes,

 

Yeah,

 

yes

 

and this is actually one of the things that's gonna be in that new EU Pay Transparency Directive is you have to have information about how to get to the next level for all the titles at your company, which is so brilliant and everyone should do

 

Yeah.

 

that. And like, so we do that at Ten Forward and for a long time we were primarily developers. And so it was easy, we just had one. It was like, okay, here's how you get from junior level to senior, here's some senior to whatever. As we've grown and taken on more developer adjacent roles, we're realizing that like that original document, we're trying to cram too many types of people into it. And so now we're really trying to figure out, okay, do we make one for each type of role? Like does admin assistant have their own document? Or do we have like a non-technical role document? And we're still figuring that out, because again, it's not easy. But I think one thing we really tell people we don't want you to take a job here, we want to feel like you can grow your career here. Like we would rather, you know, and we're small and we're consulting, so we have the ability to be very flexible in letting people craft the kind of career that works for them. And I think that's shown clearly by the fact that I started as an intern and seven years later I'm still there and I'm an owner, right? But you can't do that without some kind of document that clearly delineates this is what that growth looks like. at our company we added a historical document. So it showed the for every person currently at the team when they you know any promotion that they got when that happened how much it was whether it was just financial promotion or whether it was a rank promotion so that you can if you come on as a new person you know as a junior you can see like oh okay so two of the seniors here I can see how they went from junior to senior and about how long it was in between raises how long it was in between promotions how big did the raises tend to be and we prescribe any of that because we do want to be able to keep that flexibility but this is a good guide to see like this is actually something we practice not just something we preach.

 

This is what we've

 

Yep.

 

done at least.

 

Mm-hmm.

 

Yeah. Now, we're kind of getting toward the end of our time, so I'm just going to ask a couple of things because a lot of people are probably listening to this and trying to figure out how to take action. One thing that if I can just kind of summarize some of the points that you've made or that Valentino or John have made or we've all agreed on,

 

Ha ha.

 

one of them is it seems like this. It facilitates communication and it helps people kind of understand what path they're on and what they forward, and that's one of the big benefits. And then it seems like communication is kind of the key to this whole thing, right?

 

Mm-hmm.

 

So my question is, is let's say that we have a company, you know, so we have somebody in a position to actually start moving the ball forward with this at the company they work at, right? They own it, they, you know, upper management, something like that, right? And they get buy-in. How do they actually start? transparency without stepping on any of the landmines that are out there.

 

That's a great question. And I definitely want to answer that. I also want to say, even if you're not in that position, because most of the people at RubyConf don't own their own companies, right?

 

That was my second question.

 

Yeah, okay, so I'll, okay, great. Then we're on the same page,

 

I'll

 

I'll get

 

come

 

to that

 

back

 

one

 

to

 

next.

 

that. Yes,

 

All

 

yeah.

 

right, perfect. So if you are in a position to immediately affect change, I think getting buy-in from anyone who could have the potential to thwart it is really important to do beforehand.

 

Right.

 

So whether that, you know, maybe you have an HR team and you anticipate they might have concerns. Talk to them first, right before doing anything. I think doing, if you have any concerns, any concerns at all, that your existing pay structure is not equitable, do an audit. Because it's so much better to be like, hey, we did an audit, we found out the QA team is grossly underpaid, they're all getting raises, there's a few other people who are underpaid, they're getting raises. we're gonna move into salary transparency to prevent this from happening in the future. That is a much easier sell to folks

 

Oh yeah.

 

than trying to correct those problems afterwards. And,

 

We care and we're trying to make it better. That's

 

right,

 

the message.

 

exactly, exactly. Because like you said, it's communication. So if you're communicating, hey, we suspected things weren't great, so we checked with data and they aren't, and now we're taking steps to make it better. That goes such a long way with building trust and credibility with your team. And then I think the other part is, you know, really stressing the why. Like how is this better for you? Because a lot of times there's a tendency, especially a bigger company, where you assume that if there's some initiative coming from the top, it's to better the company. It's not necessarily gonna make your life better. So really stressing like, hey, obviously there are benefits to us as a company, retention, hiring, whatever, avoiding lawsuits, but this also is going to specifically help every employee in these ways and showing that you've kind of done ahead of time, which is where I think we miss an opportunity, was we just kind of thought, oh, this is a great idea. This is obviously a great idea. Everyone will think this is a great idea. You can't make that assumption. And like we did. And so really laying out, this is why we're doing it. These are the conversations we've had. These are the steps going forward. Giving people time to process is also really big because some people might have that sort of reactionary sense of like, I don't want my information being out there. But then if they think about it for a little bit, people will kind of come around. And I think also deciding the level of detail that you wanna share. So we're a really small company, there's like 10 of us. So we just share literal salaries for everyone because if you try to do averages across roles, it would be kind of useless data.

 

Yeah.

 

But at a bigger company, you know, you probably can get the same spirit with just doing, you know, developer twos in the cats department, on average, make this much salary, right? So I think really putting, time and ahead of time to make sure that the infrastructure is there to support the action and that you can feel confident in the numbers when they're released. Those are I think the two biggest things.

 

Makes sense. And yeah, it kind of all folds back into a lot of the stuff we already talked about. So yeah, the other question is, is let's say that you are seeing some issues that you think could be alleviated at the company you're at, but you're just kind of rank and file developer, maybe you're team leader, middle management, and you don't have the clout to make this happen, right? You can't just go in and say, hey, I need buy-in from these handful of people and I'm done.

 

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

 

you don't even know maybe if they'll listen to you how do you make the case for this in a way that they'll actually think about it or hopefully think about

 

Yeah, definitely. So it depends, the caveat is that there are a lot of actions you can take and which ones are right for you depend on the amount of privilege you have at the company and I don't

 

That's

 

just

 

fair.

 

mean white privilege or whatever, I mean like does your manager back you up and everything and have your ear? Those kinds of things.

 

Mm-hmm.

 

And so possible actions you can take, again, depending on all of that, it's legal to talk about. So like if you've got a company Slack, create a channel. ask people if they're willing to add anonymously to a spreadsheet.

 

Thanks for watching!

 

You could compile a presentation on it if your company does any kind of like in-house learning. You could volunteer to do a brown bag on like here's what I learned about Siler transparency isn't that interesting. You could look at what the current regulations are in your area and see if they're being enforced and if they're not that's a great way to get some traction right. Oh I noticed that like technically according to the new law that Colorado passed we're supposed to be doing but I don't think we are, you know, are you concerned about that?" And they'll be like, oh yeah, we have a plan, we're, yeah, but that's in the works. So there's a lot of things you can do. I think really like the, if there's enough employees who really want it and you can back that up with statistics for the industry at large, that's gonna go a long ways towards making traction.

 

And yeah, I still think it's a hard case to make just because, you know, typically they elevate the people whose opinions they really value. But yeah, if you can start having the conversations and, you know, raising awareness of it, it does go a long way and may bubble up in some of the conversations that matter in this kind of a decision. So I like where you're coming from there. I don't know that there's anything else we really need to tackle on this topic unless we left something out.

 

I was going to leave an open-ended thought, but I'm looking forward to the day where AI can just take over this whole negotiation and your company gives you the formula and you give it a formula and they just settle everything out and everybody knows that it's fair.

 

I don't know that I would ever trust an algorithm written by people to be completely

 

Yeah.

 

fair with no oversight.

 

I was like, if you're giving

 

Right.

 

it a formula, is it AI at that point?

 

I'm sorry.

 

Well, you know, you give it the data sources. So like,

 

Yeah. You train it.

 

say the government gives out

 

I'm scared. Just

 

salary

 

saying.

 

information.

 

Thanks for watching!

 

Yeah, we like

 

You

 

everyone

 

know.

 

but Chuck so when you're negotiating for him Forget

 

Just let

 

it

 

it be based on the census, right?

 

I mean,

 

I

 

it's

 

mean...

 

definitely complicated, which is

 

Yeah.

 

why so many people aren't happy with it, right? So

 

Yeah.

 

I think

 

this.

 

the key thing for me is like, we can do n plus 1 better than we are now, but who knows how big n goes.

 

Yeah, well, and

 

I mean

 

that

 

I

 

I

 

would-

 

think is the deal, right? Is you don't have to get it perfect, right? You can figure

 

Mm-hmm.

 

out what the next right thing is.

 

Mm-hmm.

 

I think we're all agreeing right now that we should at least, you know, let's walk a step forward, even if maybe I'm not excited about Valentino's tenth step in the list. I can at least take step

 

Ha!

 

one. I think we agree on step one. So

 

Stop there.

 

let's start there.

 

Yeah, I don't know how I feel about Watson telling me I should be a millionaire. So we'll just hold off.

 

I mean, I mean as long, yeah exactly, as long as the AI says that I should be the richest then I'm fine with

 

Yeah.

 

that.

 

All right, well,

 

I just

 

I'm

 

don't

 

gonna,

 

see it happening.

 

yeah. Well, I'm gonna push us over to the next segment of the show. Now this, I'm adding a segment to the shows. I've been doing this for like 12 years, or no, I've been podcasting for 16 years, and I'm adding a new segment to the show. So how do you like that? So we'll go around the horn on this, but one of my co-hosts on one of the other shows said that he wished, because I was doing self-promotional picks, and there was stuff that he wanted to talk about. really quickly if there's anything that you want to mention that you're working on that you'd like to, you know, this is the self promotion and then we'll do the picks, which is the promotion promotion of other stuff. So, you know, if you own a consultancy, for example, or you have a project you're working on, you want people to know about, you know, things like that, then definitely share. I'm going to have John go first.

 

Well, I was completely unprepared for this segment, but sure. I mean, I own Rock Agile Consulting, Rock Agile LLC, whatever. And I have to talk to the people that are assisting me in doing marketing in order to know what to say, other than,

 

Ha ha

 

you know,

 

ha

 

we're just a small consulting shop. We do a variety of things anywhere from taking care of your really ancient old apps to helping you build new mobile apps. So, yep. do, hit me up. I will figure out what information I need to do for future, but yeah, you can always, you know, john.epersent or rockagile.io is probably the best way for now, or rockagile.io is our website, so, yep.

 

Good deal. Valentino, how about you?

 

Uh, I work on this command line tool called get reflow. And it saves me tons of time automating our entire Git workflow and creating like Jira stories and transitioning things automatically as I'm working and creating pull requests. I use it every single day and yeah, that's what I work on. And it makes my life just so much easier. So if you haven't heard of it, out.

 

Awesome. All right, I'm gonna throw out mine and then we'll let Hillary have the last word on this segment. So I've started the Developer Book Club. You can join for $17 a month. We do a call every week. Right now we're reading Clean Architecture by Robert C. Martin, Uncle Bob. And he actually came to the first one, the one that was yesterday. He didn't make it too, but yeah, we're doing it through the end of January and then we're discussing what book I've gotten a few requests for the domain-driven designs, so that might be where we go. It kind of depends on if I can get the author to come to them or not, but that's one exciting thing. Then we're doing other weekly calls, so two other weekly calls if you want to sign up for Top End Devs membership. We talk about building your personal brand, how to use tools, salary negotiation might be a thing, or maybe salary transparency. Maybe we'll have Hillary come and talk about some of it. It's kind of a blend of a presentation and a Q&A. You can chime in and ask a question whenever and we just talk through it, but we try and get experts to come in and be part of that conversation. That's what we're working on right now. I just raised prices, so come join in before I do it again because I am planning on doing it again. Hillary, what kind of self-promotion do you want to do?

 

I guess I'll just do 10 forward since

 

Mm-hmm.

 

I've been talking about them the whole time. So 10 forward consulting, we're named for the bar and the enterprise if there are any Star Trek fans.

 

Mm-hmm.

 

We're based in Madison, Wisconsin and we're a RubyRail shop. We do custom web and mobile applications for everything from startups to global corporations and we believe in creating inevitable success for our clients, our employees and our communities.

 

Good deal. Is there a website you can find 10

 

10

 

Forward

 

forward

 

at?

 

dot consulting.

 

All right, we'll make sure that goes into the show notes too. All right, now we're gonna do picks. John, do you have some picks?

 

Yeah, I'm actually Did this I mean we had two episodes what two weeks ago or whatever and I was pretty excited by By my sweet new phone and I am like even more excited so I'm going I'm gonna pick it again one last time but I got the pixel 7 Pro and it's like freaking awesome and like it's it's the first time in a while that I've gotten a new phone that's actually like that I didn't feel like was slow, basically. Like already like sort of behind and, you know, like the hardware just wasn't quite good enough or whatever. So I don't know if that's just because I picked like the wrong gen of phones to buy or whatever.

 

Mm-hmm.

 

But like it's been a while since I picked like a phone and out of the gate, I felt like, oh, my hardware is better than the software that's going on it right now. So that's nice about it. And I definitely I mean, I bought it knowing that I had a good camera. I'm definitely very, pleased with the camera. It's actually legit. It's a good camera.

 

Nice. All right, Valentino, what are your picks?

 

My first pick is an article on Doximity's blog. I work for Doximity and somebody from our data team wrote a great article on how we design and structure all of our data platform and teams and how that all works and as a data-driven company, it's kind of great insight to you know how it can be beneficial for your company to You know met if you're measuring first to everybody, especially your end users, and to know what to build. So I recommend checking that out. Yeah, that's it. I'm still playing my galactic unicorn, so hopefully I'll have an article up soon with using Ruby on it. I'm getting closer.

 

Awesome. I'm going to throw out a few picks. One of them, I usually pick a board game or a card game. I'm going to pick one. I don't remember if I picked this one before, so I apologize if I haven't. But the game I'm picking is Antidote. It's a card game. I think it initially came out on Kickstarter. Board Game Geek has a weight on it of 1.6 something. So it's a fairly easy game to pick up. It's not that complicated. is you pull one formula or poison out of the deck and you put it face down and then you pass out the rest and then you deal out, you also get syringe cards which are kind of like, they allow you to steal cards from other players is effectively how they work. And then you take turns, you deal out the rest of the cards and you're trying to get the highest number of the correct potions antidote, right? typically have a card or two in your hand that tell you that, Hey, you know, it's not the face down one because it's in my hand. And then you can either pass cards to the left, to the right. You can trade cards with players. You decide what you do on your turn. Right. And so if, if you pass to the left, everyone passes the left, every pass to the right. Um, or you can discard and when you're down to your last card, you reveal, and you've either won or lost takes about 20 minutes with, with five or six players. So it's a fun game. It's a thinking game. but it's not that complicated a thinking game. It's one of those games where it's like, yeah, the gameplay is really simple, but the strategy isn't always obvious. And so, yeah, and you're looking at what people are discarding or you use the syringe to steal a card that they discarded, because if you discard a formula, you put it face down, otherwise you put it face up, right? So if it's an antidote, it's face up. And so you can see, oh, he's gotten rid of all of his, you know, green circle vile cards. And so it's probably not that, right? And she's got, you know, she's kind of discarded one of everything. What's she holding on to, right? And so use the syringe and steal her card. Maybe you got the right antidote. Anyway, so it's fun. It's a lot of fun and it's not so complicated that you can't play with kids, which is more and more of a thing, right? My youngest is seven. My next youngest is 11. And so yeah, occasionally we'll play games that she just can't quite pick up. She can pick up enough to This is one that I don't think she'd get the, I don't think she'd be able to win it, but I think she would enjoy playing it. So my seven year old. So anyway, that's my game pick. And then yeah, still digging the world cup. I haven't been able to stay current with the semi-final game. So I don't know who's won them yet, but looking forward to watching that tonight. And then the local meetup here in Utah, the Ruby users group, they actually had to get together last night. And so my father-in-law called me up and he's like, you wanna go get dinner? Cause yesterday was my birthday. I was like, no, I'm hanging out with my Ruby people. So anyway, we're starting to do get togethers and we're gonna start streaming our meetups. So keep an eye out for that. I'm pretty excited about that. I miss a lot of the people that I got to know through that. And if you're looking for meetups, I found them meetup.com. So I'll pick that too, is a great place to find them. So I have something else coming along you find them too but that's for another day. Hillary, what are your picks?

 

say that my pick, so I think a lot of us develop new hobbies over the pandemic. For me it was plants. I became a little obsessed. We also moved offices during the pandemic because they tore down our old building to build luxury condos. Anyway, so there's a plant app, like a plant management app that I use called Greg, G-R-E-G, and I like it so much that I have like a list of but it lets you put in every plant, it tells you when you need to water it and how much you need to water it. So when I go out to town, I can just screenshot it and send it to friends who are plant sitting for me. And it also unfortunately tells you how many plants you have and I have 123 between work and home, so.

 

Wow. I have like five and they're dying. I've had some of them for years and I just lost track of watering them right.

 

I was clapping in the background, my mic

 

Ha

 

is

 

ha

 

muted.

 

ha.

 

That's impressive.

 

Yeah, got

 

Yeah,

 

really into plants.

 

Hillary lives with super clean air.

 

Yeah, my partner actually told me, well they ask, whenever I tell this story they're like oh you make it sound like you have to get my permission for things, but I essentially have to get his permission before I bring home new plants.

 

Yeah, but it just followed me home.

 

Hahaha

 

If people wanna follow you in particular online, Twitter, GitHub, LinkedIn, whatever, where do they find you?

 

Um, I mean I'm on all of those. I created a Macedon at RubyConfMini, but I haven't really started using it yet. But I'm on there, I believe it's HillarySK.

 

Okay.

 

I think I'm in whatever the main Ruby one is.

 

Ruby.social.

 

Yes.

 

Good deal.

 

So clearly I've not been using it a lot yet, but that's...

 

Yeah, make sure you do this easy to find though. All right, well thanks for coming and talking through this with us. I know this is a conversation that's happening in some places, and hopefully we got some folks some clarity here. And yeah, we'll wrap up. Till next time, max out everybody.

 

Take care.

 

Thanks.