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Salary discussions are some of the most critical discussions to happen between managers and employees – but often the constraints are already set in company wide budget meetings.
Managers who know how to advocate for their team members are better set up to navigate these budget conversations. A solid budget can make or break how satisfied your new hires and existing team members are with their compensation. To make matters even more complicated, salary is an individual experience that should be tackled on a case-by-case basis.
Should you match a counter offer? Should team members with similar roles earn the same? Making mistakes when it comes to salary can be really painful and can cost you high performing team members in the long run.
In this event, we’ll deep dive into these challenges to set you up to win in salary conversations with your tech team.
Join the conversation with fellow tech leaders to delve into:
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What does opera have to do with engineering leadership? More than you’d think.
After 10 years as a professional opera singer in Germany, Anna McDougall found her way into tech through a free coding course — what she describes as “the clouds parting.”
Today, she’s bringing lessons from the stage into how she leads: embracing feedback, leaving ego at the door, and helping engineers work through their gaps. In this AMA, Anna gets candid about imposter syndrome, being “the bad guy”, and why she thinks technical interviews are fundamentally broken.
– Anna McDougall, Field CTO at IBM HashiCorp
🔑 Opera destroyed her ego and that turned out to be a leadership advantage: Constant, blunt correction as a professional singer left Anna with almost no fear of admitting what she doesn't know. Her theory: imposter syndrome comes from ego, not humility — from believing you should already know something.
🔑 Sometimes leadership means being the bad guy, in both directions: Anna deliberately takes the blame upward with her CTO ("that's on me") and absorbs friction downward from developers who are struggling to push back on other teams. Her framing: a goal only goes in because ten other people let the ball through — she's the coach, not the goalkeeper.
🔑 Silence from a junior isn't confidence, it's a red flag for managers: Anna tells her junior engineers directly: when you hide a struggle to "look confident," it actually makes your manager more anxious, not less. Coming forward with a problem settles things; going quiet doesn't.
View our hub for practical lessons, honest conversations, and actionable resources to help you lead stronger engineering teams, navigate AI, and grow as a tech leader.
Anna Jean McDougall is an Australian leader in the field of software engineering, driving teams by empowering engineers to do their best work with a pragmatic and humanistic approach.
She is author of Amazon Career Guides Bestseller "You Belong in Tech", winner of Software Engineering Leader of the Year 2024 for the WomenTech Global Awards, TEDx speaker for the Technical University of Berlin, and creator of the McDougall Method for Technical Interview Structure.
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