Soft Skills Engineering

<p>This is a rerun of episode 307. Enjoy!</p> <p>In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:</p> <ol> <li> <p>I work for a big bank. I recently found out I am severely underpaid. I have only received “exceeds expectations” ratings since joining over 5 years ago. I rage-interviewed at a bunch of FAANG companies, made it to the final rounds of all, but always came up short on the offer.</p> <p>Expectations at my current job are low. I’ve been putting all my extra energy and time into my own startup idea with a group of small people, that shows a lot of promise.</p> <p>I so desperately want to leave my current job, but I can’t prep for interviews and work on my startup at the same time. I never interviewed since joining the bank over 5 years ago.</p> <p>I truly believe my startup can ultimately be my escape, but I’m just grappling with the fact that it may take years before I can quit vs. if I got a new job I’d have much better pay and not be depressed at my 9-5.</p> <p>P.S. are you hiring?</p> </li> <li> <p>I’ve recently been placed as tech lead for a small group of 3 people, myself included. One of my teammates seems to be having a hard time communicating in a timely manner when they are stuck on something or when their task will be late. I’ve spoken to that person a few times individually on the importance of communicating early and often, but it seems like that person is happy to just muddle on until the time runs out.</p> <p>I’ve had to jump on to finish some work that was time sensitive and I’ve gone to greater lengths to slack dm on how things are going. It’s getting old. I don’t want to be micro managing. Each time I bring it up with them, it seems to get through but never manifests in action. I’m not sure if this person realizes the impact that lack of communication has especially in a remote first setting. A sense of urgency might be helpful in some respects.</p> <p>At one of our 1on1 dm chats the topic of imposter syndrome came up and we shared our mutual struggles with it. I’ve tried to encourage that person that my dm’s are open and can help but I can’t keep checking in. There should be some ownership on their end to getting help from me. How do I get this person to communicate more, share blockers or confusion so we can finish our work on time and learn on the way?</p> <p>Love your show, long time listener, first time caller.</p> </li> </ol>

<p>In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:</p> <ol> <li> <p>Do you think an EM should only be involved with management tasks, and let the members handle the technical stuff, or should they have some technical expertise to manage things like architecture reviews or handle urgent incidents?</p> </li> <li> <p>Hello! Love the show, thank you both for all the knowledge. I discovered this podcast when I was struggling as a newbie who was learning on the job at a tech firm two years ago. By applying your advice for fellow listeners to my own situations, I now find myself a well-regarded senior frontend engineer in fintech. I’ve noticed that a big reason for this is my communication, organizational, and soft skills (English major and former operations manager). What really sets me apart is my effective and friendly collaboration with junior devs, tech leads, and product managers alike. As I work towards becoming a principal engineer, should I lean into extending and displaying these aforementioned skills, or are they actually “time sucks” since they are more fitting of a managerial track?</p> </li> </ol>

<p>In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:</p> <ol> <li> <p>Listener Thor asks,</p> <p>Is there a chance the tech stack I choose throughout my career will hurt my chances to shift direction towards project leading/managing in the future? Say, I do mostly frontend, will this affect the way people see my broader understanding of projects etc. compared to people in roles such as architect?</p> </li> <li> <p>Listener Travis asks,</p> <p>My company is starting to expand across time zones. The majority of the company is based in one time zone and a handful of employees are spread across others. I want to emphasize the importance of asynchronous communication. I have begun to feel like I need to respond ASAP to Slack messages instead of when it is convenient.</p> <p>If we were to say Slack is used for asynchronous communication, is asking the team to use Signal or even text appropriate for a quicker response?</p> <p>What is a good way to handle reaching out to team members in cases where a response is needed more immediately?</p> </li> </ol> <h2 id="show-notes">Show Notes</h2> <ul> <li><a href="https://m.signalvnoise.com/is-group-chat-making-you-sweat/" title="smartCard-inline">https://m.signalvnoise.com/is-group-chat-making-you-sweat/</a></li> </ul>

<p>In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:</p> <ol> <li> <p>Greetings from Germany! My job is creating a customized Windows installation image with PowerShell & C#. It takes about 2 hours to build and test an image. Sometimes I have to wait until the end to see if a change did actually work or not. During that time I usually browse the web / watch Youtube / read a book. This makes me feel like an impostor, because I am maybe working 10-25% of the time. Since I’ve only been with this company 1 year, 6 months, I don’t really have any other things to do in that time. Most of my colleagues have been with the company for upwards of 10 years and work in multiple projects at the same time, so they don’t have this issue.</p> <p>On the one hand, I don’t feel like I’m doing anything wrong. On the other hand, it feels like fraud. Should I feel guilt and if so, what should I do about this situation?</p> </li> <li> <p>I am a software engineer at a large tech company in middle America. I like my job, like my leadership, and am fairly compensated for my work. In fact, I’ve been told I’m about to be moved up a level! When (if 😅) I get the new job title, I believe the responsible thing to do is to update my resume and LinkedIn account so that if (when 😳) my management or role changes for the worse, I can take your advice and find a new job.</p> <p>However, I haven’t updated my LinkedIn profile since I graduated college. How can I update my LinkedIn without worrying or upsetting anyone? To complicate matters, my entire team moved on to better things in the last six months, so suspicions are already high.</p> </li> </ol>

<p>In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:</p> <ol> <li> <p>Listener Schtolteheim Reinbach III asks,</p> <p>Hey soft skills engineering, love you guys. I work at a company you wouldn’t hear much about, on a product that you wouldn’t think about as having much tech involved- suffice it to say, it makes me interesting at parties.</p> <p>I’m not a developer myself, but on my team, I’m having an issue with a developer who can’t seem to use GitHub properly. Fairly often, whenever he fixes or creates things, he doesn’t seem to check them in properly, and between releases, numerous times, this has caused people to end up reproducing work, for the developers, business team, and QA alike. He’s been at this company for several years, and people have only complained, but no one has made an effort to fix it.</p> <p>I don’t manage him, and I can’t see the processes that are in place on his end, how do I go about reducing the amount of regressions that are created due to a developer who can’t Git? I’m also interested to hear if you two have similar stories about devs who can’t Git, or if you’ve been that dev, and what happened.</p> </li> <li> <p>I quit my job and got a new one! What should I be doing during the initial ramp up period that shows I am a skilled engineer even though I do not know the main languages they use? Also any advice on the non-tech side of ramping up? What should I be doing besides learning the tech stack and fixing bugs? Thank you for all your help and feedback.</p> </li> </ol> <h2 id="show-notes">Show Notes</h2> <ul> <li><a href="https://xyproblem.info/" title="smartCard-inline">https://xyproblem.info/</a></li> </ul>

<p>In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:</p> <ol> <li> <p>At work, I occasionally mix names of people in my team when I refer to them in meetings. My mother used to do this with my siblings when I was a child and I hated it. I guess I am getting older. Should I just accept the defeat? Any suggestions how to deal with this?</p> </li> <li> <p>How do I find areas to improve without critical feedback? I’ve had regular 1-on-1s with multiple people over the years (managers, mentors, tech leads), and asked for feedback regularly. Yet, most, if not all of the feedback I received was positive. Even when I stress that I want to receive critical feedback as well, the other person tells me that they do give such feedback to other devs, they just don’t have anything to criticize!</p> <p>This sounds like a humble brag, but I’m concerned that I will stop growing and improving if this goes on. I’m also a bit worried that deep down, the managers/leads just keep quiet to keep me happy - either because we have a friendly relationship, or because I’m one of the only women on the team (not trying to accuse them of sexism, but lets be real - “locker room talks” are held back when I’m around, and it might cause some people to be less frank to avoid possible “‘drama”).</p> <p>Due to the lack of direction, I’m trying to look at my senior colleagues and what they do better than me - do they have more technical knowledge, do they communicate better, etc. - but it’s often hard to apply to myself due to specializing in different areas, having different personalities and so on.</p> </li> </ol>

<p>In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:</p> <ol> <li> <p>Hi Dave and Jamison!</p> <p>What do you do when one of your immediate teammates is constantly competing against you?</p> <p>I really don’t like competition. Ignoring the competitiveness + praising his value did not work.</p> <p>Some examples:</p> <ul> <li>Leaving code reviews comments showing off obvious knowledge which does not really add value to the PR</li> <li>Constantly harassing you to pair on trivial matters (I think because “pairing with someone less experienced” is a trait desirable in our engineer scoring framework)</li> <li>Picking up a bigger version of whatever ticket you just did</li> <li>Trying to be the first to “answer your question” in public without actually answering the question (this makes it difficult for me to actually get answer for question I ask because other would think it’s “resolved”)</li> </ul> <p>Part of me feels flattered that somebody who has more years in the job sees me as worthy of competing against, but at some point it became annoying and counterproductive.</p> <p>Appreciate your thoughts. Please don’t tell me quitting my job and saying goodbye once and for all is the solution😂</p> </li> <li> <p>I am graduating this year and have received two job offers. They are both very similar in terms of pay and benefits, the only difference is that one is fully remote and the other is hybrid (2x a week in person).</p> <p>I would normally jump on the chance to work remotely, mainly due to the fact I am a bit socially awkward and shy. However, I am conflicted if I should accept the hybrid offer as an opportunity to work on my social skills and experience working in an office sooner rather than later.</p> <p>‌</p> <p>Should I just accept that my personality isn’t suited for in-person? Have you ever had anyone on your team be socially awkward/shy? How did you feel about them?</p> <p>PS. Have you guys ever thought of releasing merch? I’d love to buy a “space lawyers tshirt”. Thanks!!!</p> </li> </ol>

<p>In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:</p> <ol> <li> <p>During our next team meeting I jokingly gave a status report on the state of my desk and referenced the note.</p> <p>I believe this was the first time someone had publicly acknowledged the note writer, and it invoked a very passionate response from my teammates expressing their own annoyances with the anonymous writer.</p> <p>‌</p> <p>It began to escalate the following week. Copy cat writers began writing their own sarcastic notes, and junior devs were (jokingly) doing handwriting analyses to find the culprit. I participated in none of this.</p> <p>However my manager pulled me aside to say he is now forced to address the situation due to someone filing an official complaint that I was “instigating workplace harassment” and that I created a “hostile, unsafe environment”. He informed me we will be having a meeting with HR regarding this incident.</p> <p>I have never had a meeting with HR before. I am very afraid of potentially losing my job due to this. I find this whole situation ridiculous and feel very frustrated. Please help me not make this a bigger mess than it already is.</p> </li> <li> <p>Aaron asks,</p> <p>Last week I listened to a show where Jamison announced that he was looking for work, and specifically looking for small to medium startups. I have only worked at larger tech companies, and currently enjoy my position within one of the largest. However, I’ve always wondered what it would be like to work at a startup. What makes startups appealing? Is it still reasonable to expect a good work/life balance, or do you go in expecting a big shift in how you dedicate your time?</p> </li> </ol>

<p>In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:</p> <ol> <li> <p>A listener Steve asks,</p> <p>How long is too long to wait to be paid?</p> <p>I’ve worked for 4 early stage startups in my career. Two were successful. One failed. My current one is “limping along” but showing signs of taking off.</p> <p>At the startup that failed, we stopped getting paid and some of us stuck around for 2-3 months until the CEO closed the business. I ended up unpaid for nearly 3 months of work.</p> <p>At my current startup, we are 3 months behind, and it has been this way for 6 months. The CEO is transparent about fund raising and clients slow in paying invoices.</p> <p>My question is still how long before I follow your age old advice?</p> </li> <li> <p>Listener Jess asks,</p> <p>‌</p> <p>How do I get past survivors guilt when my company does mass layoffs, but I am not one of the casualties? I’ve been at the company less than a year, and this is the second time they’ve fired THOUSANDS of people, including from my team; folks I work with at least weekly, and folks who have been at the company significantly longer than I have. I feel guilty that I, “The new guy”, am still employed, but the folks who’ve been there for years aren’t. How can I get past this and keep working to ensure I’m not caught up in the next round of layoffs? My manager says I’m doing good work, and the layoffs included complex inputs, but it that only helps a little bit.</p> </li> </ol>

<p>In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:</p> <ol> <li> <p>I recently started listening to your podcast from the very start of the show! One of the largest differences I noticed (aside from the audio quality, lol), is how often you used filler words like “um”. How on earth did you manage to stop using them? In work presentations and demos, I often end up using the filler words, and listening to the recordings later is painful. The rehearsed parts of the presentation go smoothly, but as soon as I go out of the “script”, I start depending on filler words. How do I get better at this?</p> </li> <li> <p>How exactly should spikes go? I’ve done some deep dives to understand the scope and steps of an upcoming effort, all with detailed write-ups, only to later realize during the implementation that I got some things wrong or missed out some important details. Isn’t that the point of a spike, to root out any unknowns or surprises? Short of just doing the actual implementation, which I’m pretty sure is also missing the point of a spike, What am I doing wrong and how can I properly present post-spike findings to my team?</p> </li> </ol>

<p>In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:</p> <ol> <li> <p>My architect is too busy with his kids! His kids have had a lot of school and medical issues over the last few months and he’s ended up flexing a lot to take care of them. This causes meetings to get rescheduled or scheduled far out in the future, which is contributing to timeline delays on some large projects that need more attention.</p> <p>I don’t want to be rude and insist that he put the company above his family, but he needs to be driving organizational alignment, not his kids! I’m stressed out by not knowing when he’ll be available and having to do extra work or take important meetings without having him as backup!</p> </li> <li> <p>‌</p> <p>Can you help me understand what happened here? I was put on a ‘performance improvement plan,’ and it became pretty clear to me from the negative feedback at my first review that I simply didn’t have the skill to perform at the level that was being asked for. Instead of immediately looking for a new position, I decided to take some personal time off to work on myself and my mental health, and to use the remainder of the performance improvement plan time to prepare myself emotionally and financially for that. I didn’t blow off work, but I also wasn’t invested in the performance improvement plan either. A few days before my final review, I quit instead of being terminated. Management seemed really confused and angry when I quit. Why would they be so upset if they were about to terminate me anyway? One in particular started backtracking and pretending like I wasn’t going to be terminated.</p> </li> </ol>

<p>In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:</p> <ol> <li> <p>I work at a startup that makes embedded devices and the software that runs on them. Everyone on the tech team does both. We recently hired someone to lead the tech team to give the CTO more time for other duties. My new boss is incredibly experienced with hardware design and embedded systems and has been in the industry for a long time (40+ years). However, they are not familiar with modern software practices like version control. They will frequently ask us to do things like delete all copies of a broken version of software. When we try to explain how git works they will ask us to make a new repo with the now working version of the software even if the fix was a 1 line change. How can I politely explain that they just don’t understand how this works and correct them without being rude?</p> </li> <li> <p>What’s a “normal” rate of performance firings on a team/engineering department? I recently got a new job at a growing startup, and it’s fairly uncomfortable seeing the ghosts, on messaging apps and docs, of like 6 people in the ~25-person department who’ve been fired in the last half year. With that said, the department is continuing to hire, so I don’t think this necessarily means I should be worried. But does that sound like an unusual amount of performance-based firings?</p> </li> </ol>

<p>In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:</p> <ol> <li> <p>I work for a startup with a distributed team. Recently one of our clients experienced a production outage. As a small startup, we do not have an on-call rotation, and teams usually resolve issues during business hours. However, during this particular incident, most of my colleagues were on annual leave due to an Easter break, leaving only 10 out of 70 engineers available to assist. Although none of these 10 engineers were part of the team responsible for the outage, I was familiar with their codebase and knew how to fix the problem. Additionally, I had admin access to our source control system which allowed me to merge the changes required to resolve the issue. This was the first time I had done this, but my changes were successful and the problem was resolved.</p> <p>Now that the break is over, the team responsible for the codebase is blaming me for breaking the process that requires each pull request to have at least one approval and for making changes to “their” codebase without their approval. They want to revoke admin access from everyone as a result. However, I disagree with their assessment. While it is true that I made changes to a codebase that was not directly under my responsibility, I was the only engineer available who could resolve the issue at the time. I believe that helping our clients should be the priority, even if it means bending the rules occasionally.</p> <p>Did I make a mistake by making changes to a codebase that was owned by another team without their approval? Should I have refrained from getting involved in the issue and adopted a “not my problem” attitude since the responsible team was not available?</p> <p>Thanks and I hope I’m not getting fired for helping a paying client!</p> </li> <li> <p>J Dot Dev asks,</p> <p>‌</p> <p>What’s the worst thing you’ve had to do as a software engineer with direction from your employer?</p> <p>Years ago at a webdev shop we had a client who didn’t want to pay for e-commerce set up.</p> <p>My boss’ solution was to implement a form that included name, address, and credit card information fields that we would read on form submission and then email all of that information to our client in plain text.</p> <p>“Is that really ok?” I asked my boss. “Why wouldn’t it be?” “Isn’t that insecure?” “Only if they have her password. Just make it work so we can be done with them.”</p> <p>To top it off, they also had me email the information to myself just in case the email didn’t go through to the client or in case they accidentally deleted it, so I’d have all of this information just hitting my inbox.</p> </li> </ol>

<p>In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:</p> <ol> <li> <p>My manager finally exploded. They screamed and insulted our whole team because one teammate had a 4 day delay on a 2 week task.</p> <p>Our manager Theo (fake name) was recently promoted and now on top of managing our team of 7 engineers, they also manage 2 other managers with 6 engineers each. I have noticed that Theo is under a lot of stress and as one of the two senior engineers in my team I tried to support him with planning and organization tasks. Sadly, it’s reached a point where if Theo doesn’t calm down, the whole team might implode.</p> <p>Last week, after one mid-level engineer in my team surfaced that the two-week project he was working on was going to be delayed by 1 week, Theo called the whole team up for an emergency meeting. There, Theo screamed at us for 15 minutes and insulted us as a team and our work in general. The gist of it was that we are not real professionals if our estimates can’t be trusted and that Theo has given us too much freedom. Theo said that if we keep on behaving like ‘[expletive] children’, then he will start to treat us as such and sit next to us while we do our homework. After their screaming monologue, Theo refused to hear any response and left the meeting.</p> <p>Chatting with my team members, no one felt very motivated by Theo’s rant. I would like to approach Theo with some constructive feedback, but I fear he might not be in a very stable state of mind. I’ve never had a boss treat me like this in my 12 years as a SWE. What should I do? Is this HR worthy? Should I document it in some way? Is talking to my skip level an option?</p> <p>Thanks</p> </li> <li> <p>At the age of 36 I am having what feels like a midlife crisis. After grad school, I fell into a well-paying job at a giant Fortune 100 tech company and have been doing well here. I’m a senior engineer on my team and have consistently good performance reviews, but, I have zero passion for the industry. I have never been that into computers and I just don’t care about making them run faster! My spouse and I have enough money saved that I could comfortably afford to not work for a year. I’d really love to take some time off but I’m paranoid that I’ll never be able to regain my earning power. I’m the primary wage-earner in my family and my spouse makes about a third of what I do, so if I never go back to work then it will be a severe lifestyle hit, like having to sell our house and stuff. What do you recommend? Possibly-relevant context is that we had our first child just a few months ago and so I now have much more angst about wasting hours on silly meetings when I could be with my daughter instead.</p> </li> </ol>

<p>In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:</p> <ol> <li> <p>I’m not a software engineer, so you can stop reading here if you like ;-). I listen to this show every week as the soft skills you discuss are just as applicable to my role as an electronics engineer.</p> <p>I have 5 years of experience and in my opinion, the right level of competency to step in to a senior role. I recently started a new job and I’ve been encouraged by my boss to be more proactive in taking on senior work so I can be considered for a senior engineer promotion. The problem is, the existing senior engineers in my team are uninterested in sharing their workload with me. I will try to assist them with their senior-level tasks but it never lasts long as they will carry on with the work themselves after a short while. I’ve also been assigned senior-level tasks by my boss and when I’ve asked for small levels of assistance from the senior engineers they’ve taken it as an invitation to do the rest of the work for me.</p> <p>My boss is indifferent to my struggle as he only cares about the output of our team as a whole and not who does what. I know that I’m performing well as I was recently given a good performance review, so I don’t understand why I’m being denied these chances to step up.</p> <p>I don’t want to quit as I just started this job and the pay is good. But I also don’t want to just sit idly as a mid-level engineer while everyone I know gets promoted. What can I do?</p> </li> <li> <p>I am a junior dev and recently accepted a C2H position at a large enterprise company as a junior developer. I work closely with 3 or 4 other devs.</p> <p>Over the past couple of months, I have increasingly taken the lead on the project that I am working on, while the Lead Dev (also a C2H from a different agency) has taken a back seat and essentially stopped doing any work. The last time Lead Dev committed any code was over two months ago. Worse yet, Lead Dev is tracking time and marking tasks as “complete” in our work tracking software without actually doing those tasks. Lead Dev also approves all pull requests without reviewing the code, so I have become the de facto code reviewer for the other junior dev’s pull requests. I seem to be the main dev taking initiative on the project and trying to move work forward.</p> <p>Our manager is quite oblivious to this situation. They see that work is getting done, so have no reason to put our team under the microscope. I like Lead Dev personally, but I feel like my alacrity is being taken advantage of while Lead Dev kicks back and relaxes, and I feel like I have become a “Senior Junior” developer as a result.</p> <p>I think the “right” thing to do is to make our manager aware of the situation, but I don’t know if that’s necessarily the *correct* thing to do. If so, how I should go about doing so; if not, what else should I do? Help?</p> </li> </ol>

<p>In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:</p> <ol> <li> <p>Hi, have you ever been through a technical interview and bombed a question? I did, and it feels awful, especially when the question was easy but I couldn’t focus due to time pressure and stress. Do you have any tips for dealing with interview anxiety, and get rid of the bitter feeling if the interview goes bad?</p> <p>Thanks!</p> </li> <li> <p>A listener Dustin asks,</p> <p>‌</p> <p>Do tech companies or recruiters dig into our individual backgrounds during the hiring process? Also is there a bias towards part-time courses vs. Full-time? To keep it short, I’m 28 and from 18-22, I was homeless and involved with specific substances. Ultimately got on my feet around the age of 23 and now I’m currently attending university, part-time while working full-time. I have noticed a bias from full-time students towards part-time and I’m wondering if this happens as well in regards to employers?</p> </li> </ol>

<p>In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:</p> <ol> <li> <p>I am a senior engineer looking to make staff. Every week at my one on one I ask my manager what I can do to improve and always receive the answer “keep doing what you are doing”, but when I receive my performance review, I don’t receive top grade or promotion and there are listed areas of improvement. How should I feel about this and what should I do?</p> </li> <li> <p>I’m a software group manager for a medium sized applied research organization that deals with both software and integration onto hardware. I am fully remote while the rest of the company has returned to the office due to the integration work with hardware. I started managing just before the pandemic. What are some effective strategies to deal with this setup? What are some typical gaps or issues to look out for? How can I reassure team members that may be skeptical of this setup, as well as peers and my bosses? I do have full support from above as of now.</p> <p>My rough thoughts so far include: be candid about limitations of this setup, experiment and iterate quickly on communication and collaboration processes, solicit regular feedback, and use it as an opportunity to grow members of my team into seniors and tech leads by having them focus on mentoring juniors and managing integration with other teams.</p> </li> </ol>

<p>In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:</p> <ol> <li> <p>Hey Dave and Jamison, long time listener of the show. looking to get your advice on dealing with guilt at work. Lately, I’ve found myself in a lot of situations of having to deal with bugs/incompleteness after pushing out a feature. It’s not my intention to be careless and I do feel like I’m giving it my 100% but there seems to keep being thing after thing that I’m not catching. It’s impossible to sweep these things under the rug when you have to put up a follow-up pull request to fix something that was clearly your fault. I feel like every once in a while is okay but when it starts to become a pattern, I wonder how this may reflect on my performance review. My coworkers aren’t letting on about any frustrations they may have but every time this happens, I can’t help but feel shameful of myself and it’s causing my anxiety to hit the roof. I’m waking up for work each morning wondering what’s it gonna be this time and feeling pits in my stomach.</p> <p>Please help.</p> </li> <li> <p>What are your thoughts on low-code platforms? I feel they will end up like WordPress (small companies with the tools in a varying degree of spaghetti that pay a contractor to clean up)</p> <p>I found myself on a team that wants to use it, and I feel like it’s a detriment to my career. I feel like another employer won’t take me seriously in an interview as I try to explain my way around it.</p> <p>Is this something I should be concerned about being in too long? I’ve voiced my concerns, but it doesn’t seem like direction is changing. What would you do? How do you feel about low-code in general?</p> </li> </ol>

<p>In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:</p> <ol> <li> <p>Our small team where I work as a senior software engineer has a new engineering manager. They don’t trust me at all and verify simple technical things like how git rebase works, in the middle of meeting calls. I feel micro managed. Calling me on slack (slack huddle) without prior notice breaks me out of my flow. Recently they called an “Architecture meeting” and ended up talking about 2 spaces vs 4 spaces and other trivial stuff. I just felt like the facepalm emoji for the entire time of the call.</p> <p>They are technically good, but lack depth. For some reason they think know better than everyone else in the team. Unfortunately, they are my boss. How do I politely tell them, in a professional way, that they have to back down and trust the team? Any help would be highly appreciated. Thanks a lot.</p> </li> <li> <p>Federico asks,</p> <p>Hi! I’m a junior engineer. Our project managers are really crappy. I keep getting wrongly managed and “exploding” projects, where in the last days everything goes wrong with the client. Should I take a project management course so I can organize better my projects and discuss with project managers how to prevent this? I don’t know how to make them work like they should.</p> </li> </ol>

<p>In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:</p> <ol> <li> <p>I recently applied for a job for a great company. The interview went well until we talked compensation. I said I expected to get a pay raise for changing jobs, but it seems that they can only offer me as much as I already have. I have never negotiated salary before. With my current job (which was my first) I happily accepted what they offered and we have had regular bumps without negotiations.</p> <p>Although I am really interested in the job, I feel like it is a defeat not to get a pay raise when I’m changing jobs for the first time in my career. The benefits are also not as good.</p> <p>Do you have any advice? Should I lower my expectations for a non-consulting position and switch despite not getting a raise? Should I negotiate harder? Wait for something better?</p> </li> <li> <p>Hi Dave & Jamison,</p> <p>we recently started a new project with a new team of devs that never worked together before. The team consists of two experienced backend devs, two junior backend devs and a couple of frontend devs. One of the junior backend devs has a mindset of just jumping into tasks, doing things without any previous analysis, just writing code for the first thing that comes into his mind. I like him being proactive, but this is causing big trouble: bugs, technical debt and often absolutely useless code. We had several discussions in the team pointing out some of the problems, but he is not interesested in changing his behaviour. During the last discussion he didn’t react to any of our arguments, just insisted on doing things his way. After that discussion we realized he even made some commits on an issue that has not been in the sprint nor has been refined yet _while we were talking to him_.</p> <p>Our team has no dedicated lead nor a scrum master and we work remote only. The next organization level is our CEO. I love the company, i love the team, i love the project, i even like this dev on a personal level. If we talk to the CEO i suspect it might have a bad ending for the junior dev since he is still in probation period. I know that we must talk to our CEO if things do not change.</p> <p>Do you have any advice? How can we reach him?</p> <p>Thank you for your great show!</p> </li> </ol>

<p>In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:</p> <ol> <li> <p>I have around 14 years of experience and was recently promoted to a Head of Engineering role. I am now leading an engineering department of around 75 people. I’ve become increasingly ‘hands off’ with coding, and it’s been at least 2-3 years since I wrote code regularly. My role is completely hands off technically.</p> <p>I’m questioning whether this is the right role for me. I want be more hands on, but I worry my skills are now so rusty that I’d have to start over and spend all my spare time learning to code again.</p> <p>Do you think it’s realistic to get back to a hands on engineer role at this point? Have you seen it done successfully before? Does walking away from this leadership role make it harder to potentially take on other leadership roles like CTO in the future?</p> </li> <li> <p>Hypothetically speaking, let’s say that you were pretty sure layoffs were coming to your company even though they say they are cutting costs everywhere else that they can in order to avoid layoffs. Now let’s say that, hypothetically, in anticipation of this you took some interviews and received an offer from a company that you believe will ride out the upcoming economic downturn fairly well, and, hypothetically, you accepted the offer. Would you go to your manager and offer to take a voluntary severance, and in doing so, would you let them know you had something else lined up or would you leave that out and present it as just taking your chances while your severance checks were coming in?</p> <p>Thanks for doing what you do.</p> </li> </ol> <h2 id="show-notes">Show Notes</h2> <ul> <li><a href="https://charity.wtf/2019/01/04/engineering-management-the-pendulum-or-the-ladder/" title="smartCard-inline">https://charity.wtf/2019/01/04/engineering-management-the-pendulum-or-the-ladder/</a></li> </ul>

<p>In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:</p> <ol> <li> <p>I’m a senior front end engineer at a medium sized tech company.</p> <p>During the good times of limitless tech growth, a common way for engineers to grow our “impact” (an important criteria at many companies for promotion) was to find ways to lead/manage more people, whether this was becoming a manager and having more direct reports, or becoming a tech lead and mentoring more people, especially interns and junior engineers.</p> <p>Now, with many companies doing layoffs and hiring freezes (mine included), teams simply aren’t growing and there just aren’t as many people to “impact”. What are some other ways to have more “impact” and grow my leadership skills? Both for hitting promotion criteria, but also for my own growth as an engineer that would like to be a manager or staff engineer someday.</p> </li> <li> <p>I am a very senior engineer at my company. There is an engineer on the team less senior than me, but not under me on the management tree. This person is well regarded in the organization, but has a strong tendency to over-engineer things. Normally I don’t mind a little over-complexity if it means that the person leading the project is taking ownership/accountability of the feature. But with this individual, they tend to be put in a place to make sweeping decisions that broadly impact systems when it’s clear that they don’t really have a full picture of what’s going on. To make matters worse… when I raise these points directly, the person will usually offer to accommodate my concerns by further over-complicating their solution/architecture rather than stepping back and picking an approach more appropriate for the problem.</p> </li> </ol> <h2 id="show-notes">Show Notes</h2> <p>This episode is sponsored by the original podcast from Red Hat, Compiler. Listen to Compiler: <a href="https://link.chtbl.com/compiler?sid=podcast.softskillsengineering" title="‌">https://link.chtbl.com/compiler?sid=podcast.softskillsengineering</a></p>

<p>In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:</p> <ol> <li> <p>A listener named Mike asks,</p> <p>I’ve been offered an Engineering Management position at a company I previously worked for. The team is very small and composed of juniors and mid-level developers. The role is also completely new and because of the size and experience of the team there is some expectation that the manager will also have a fair amount of involvement in PR reviews and likely also writing some code. Is this common? Do you feel like a manager can also be a team lead from a technical perspective on a day to day basis? What should I be thinking about when considering this role?</p> </li> <li> <p>‌</p> <p>How do I keep up juniors’ morale regardless of bad code/ideas? I work in a team of 4-5 developers. We have one junior, one mid (me), one senior and our team lead. I think we mostly work well. However, sometimes the senior and team lead sort of talk down at the junior. For example, in a meeting talking about how to solve a problem the junior will propose an idea, but the senior and/or both team lead would respond by saying that no its not a good idea which is fine. However the tone of the voice often hints ‘oh you should know this it’s obvious you jamoke’.</p> <p>The junior has started to stay quiet and has told me he doesn’t feel comfortable asking the seniors for help. I’ve interjected in meetings to say I understand why the junior might have this idea but I don’t think it’s the best solution. What should I do? Should I talk to the senior/team lead? Do I just let it play out?</p> </li> </ol>

<p>In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:</p> <ol> <li> <p>Hello Dave and Jamison, thanks for your great work. Your podcast has the bizarre magical property of making me look forward to long drives. Keep it up!</p> <p>I have been feeling anxiety over losing my job to AI, especially after the all the ChatGPT stuff from a few months back. I know that it definitely isn’t flawless but I know that this technology will just keep improving as time goes on.</p> <p>I am a software engineer with 2 years of experience. I can’t help but feeling like I will lose this amazing career in the near future. I left my old line of work a couple years back and am in my mid 30s, so switcyhing careers again is a dreadful thought.</p> <p>Is there anything you can suggest to ease my anxiety? Will being more social with my coworkers, or aiming towards management help reduce my chances of being automated? Any advice will be great, thanks.</p> <p>PS: If someone tries to replace your podcast with an AI generated one I will boycott them and stick with you.</p> </li> <li> <p>It’s review season! I am an IC software engineer, and I am required to document my impact for the last year. However, I work on an auxiliary team/new business team that is always trying to find new use cases for the existing product platform. If you look at the numbers, the impact is very low compared to the core business. Also, my team was disproportionally impacted by layoffs late last year. Lot of folks with institutional knowledge and good relationships with the core team were let go which disrupted our team and contributed to missed deadlines. How do I write my review for this bad year, with little to show for it?</p> </li> </ol>

<p>In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:</p> <ol> <li> <p>I am an American student finishing my undergraduate degree in computer science in the Midwest this semester. I am concerned about the economic climate of the technology industry. I am doing my second internship at a major technology company this summer (Microsoft). After that I will go to graduate school and try to ride out the storm. I have applied nearly a dozen programs including one year and two year masters programs, and even a few PhD programs (MIT plz accept me). My biggest concern is having my offer rescinded. I thought there might be economic turbulence, so last summer I had my return offer place me in the most profitable and highest growth division of the company. How do lay-off decisions get made on the issue of rescinding offers versus laying off people? How can I reduce the risk of the offer getting pulled? I am working on finding another software engineering internship, but it’s extremely difficult to find any open roles.</p> </li> <li> <p>Listener Andre says,</p> <p>I need a gut check here. I have a senior engineer on my team that does not perform well. He keeps procrastinating on tasks that I know wouldn’t take much effort. I think it would be great for the team and the company to substitute this engineer for someone with more passion. One idea I have is to volunteer this person to my director to be laid off.</p> <p>It would be great for the engineer to feed on the potential 3-month severance package.</p> <p>Firing him doesn’t seem like an option because he does the bare minimum for his role.</p> <p>What would you do?</p> </li> </ol>

<p>In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:</p> <ol> <li> <p>A listener Daniel asks,</p> <p>How do I handle periods of time where I am just not productive as I used to be? I’m talking about periods of several weeks. For example, when your kids are ill all the time (daycare fun) or you are down because of XYZ.</p> </li> <li> <p>How do you turn not really constructive feedback into useful feedback?</p> <p>I have a difficult time dealing with PR reviews from a specific colleague. They have a way to push my buttons somehow, it’s like even when they are actually right, the way they approach the subject or how nit picky their comments are just make it hard to take the feedback or start a healthy discussion. It prompts me to become confrontational. I know it’s not good to react like this, but I don’t feel comfortable talking directly to them about it to try to smooth things out. I don’t think its personal as I’ve seen this kind of comments on other people’s PRs too.</p> <p>I am aware this might be me being overly sensitive, but its like every time he is the one reviewing my PR I get the feeling of “oh, not this guy again” and need to mentally prepare for his comments. I’d like to find a way to take the core of the feedback that might be useful and kind of ignore the rest that might feel dismissive or opinionated, and I thought you might have some tools for this.</p> <p>The main reason I care about it is that this reflected badly on my latest performance review, as I had stellar feedback in general and the only improvement areas were that I should learn how to deal with mistakes or negative feedback better. I am aware it can be a weak point on me , but I know that a big part of that comment from my manager comes from my interactions with this specific colleague.</p> </li> </ol>

<p>In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:</p> <ol> <li> <p>I think the new hire on my team is juggling multiple jobs.</p> <p>On several screen shares, I’ve seen them quickly close IDEs with third party code, browser windows with what look like a third party jira instance, etc. Maybe that’s some open source project, or a jira instance where they’re reporting a bug, but it seems fishy. In the latest instance, this person meant to post a link to the Jira issue they’re working on in our company Slack, but accidentally posted a link to a ticket on some other company’s Jira. I did some digging and this is definitely not a public-facing Jira instance. It’s internal for their employees only.</p> <p>Normally if somebody could do both jobs competently, I’d say good for them and they’ve earned both salaries. However, their performance hasn’t been great. We’re still in the onboarding phase and a lot of missteps could be excused by that, but I’m starting to worry that this person’s goal is to offer only mediocre performance at this job (and probably the other one as well) and we’re unlikely to see expected levels of improvement as they continue to get up to speed.</p> <p>Am I being paranoid? Should I raise my concerns with management or give it more time to shake out? Is there a clever trap I can set to *prove* my suspicions for sure?</p> </li> <li> <p>I recently joined a large software defined telecommunication company, only to be surprised that their internal blind space is very quiet and very few ppl are on blind if any, how do I change this ? how do I get ppl to use blind more? without giving away my blind account. quitting my job is not an option due to the economy</p> </li> </ol>

<p>In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:</p> <ol> <li> <p>Listener Mattoosh asks,‌</p> <p>I’m the last remaining support specialist on a really old, not actively maintained, but still lucrative SAAS product. I’m stuck. As a front end engineer I want to work on other projects within my organisation to gain contemporary framework skills, but nobody can backfill my workload. I know option A is “quit your job” but what other options do I have?</p> </li> <li> <p>‌</p> <p>I started my journey as an engineering manager at a startup. Over my stint, the company grew and so did the engineering team. Overall I received good feedback from the engineers but the founders didn’t recognize the value of this role and I felt that I wasn’t getting the required mentorship there to grow further. I ended up quitting. It’s been challenging to find another manager role. I get good feedback from the interviews but haven’t received an offer yet. I still am a good backend engineer but that is not what I want to keep pursuing. Appreciate any thoughts or suggestions on what I should do to bag one of these interviews as I don’t get that feedback from the panel. I don’t miss any of the podcasts and do enjoy the show.</p> </li> </ol>

<p>In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:</p> <ol> <li> <p>I am a mid-level engineer with ~5 years of experience (1 year at my current company). My team has recently hired a new principal engineer, and I’m wondering how I can help the principal engineer. There is, as always, some organization-specific context that I am familiar with, and the principal engineer is not. As a mid-level IC, I am not used to being a repository of knowledge for engineers that many roles above me, and have only ever been on a team that hired engineers at my skill level or below. Are there general tips on how to provide help for someone who has much more experience than I do?</p> </li> <li> <p>I have been in the industry for 5.5 years and have had 5 managers. My newest one (call them “S”) has been my manager for 4 months. Our communication is terrible. We do not understand each other and I am usually left feeling like I missed something or I am not interpreting his question correctly. I literally have told him “I am not sure what you want me to say” because that is better than “wtf”.</p> <p>I ended up crying in a meeting because I was so frustrated and confused. I know and trust my team mates. This is only the second time in my career where I just did not get along well with someone. The meeting was supposed to be some feedback for him and me, some career development, and some goals for 2023. It ended up with him giving lots of examples of technical deficiencies, the fact that I am unable to work independently (which is not true, I ask more senior engineers for help), the fact that I give him pushback (no duh why at this point). He even said I was careless because I made some silly copy paste errors in my code (which we all do and is human). [Sidenote: he does not code. He just sometimes asks questions on prs or gives nits.]</p> <p>I do not know what to do. His manager J used to be my manager. Should I talk to J about my issues since he knows both of us well? Do I go to my manager with ways that I would prefer our 1x1s go and how I personally like to get feedback? Do I ask for a new manager? I know he says he wants me to succeed, but nothing in the last 4 months have made me feel like that is true. I am a young woman in engineering, and I have never felt less trusted by a coworker. Especially the fact that I cried makes me feel like I may have lost more credibility to him. What do I do? Please help. I love my team. I just hate my manager.</p> </li> </ol>

<p>In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:</p> <ol> <li> <p>Dear Dave and Jamison,</p> <p>I work for a medium sized startup, and our planning process sucks!</p> <p>We used to do quarterly planning, and it seemed like the product managers had no idea what was going on at a higher level. The big focus seems to have changed every quarter that I’ve been here, and the whole planning process is a charade: 75% of the so called ‘road map’ gets thrown away after a few weeks.</p> <p>Normally, this wouldn’t bother me, but I end up spending a lot of time in meetings helping these product managers come up with plausible timelines and making sure that what the business wants to build is actually feasible, and it’s bad for my morale to see so much of my work wasted.</p> <p>The product management team heard some of this feedback from me and others, and started changing to ‘continuous planning’, but now there is even less structure for when they build the big spreadsheet roadmap for the quarter. They bought new tools, and don’t seem to be using them.</p> <p>Should I suck it up and just check out or try and get a license to use the patented soft skills advice and quit my job?</p> </li> <li> <p>Hi Dave and Jamison in no particular order.I have been listening to the podcast for a couple of months now. I have enjoyed every episode and and the advice you give.</p> <p>I am a junior software developer who has been working at a startup 9 months ago. I was offered a remote junior position and accepted even though the company is based in a neighbouring city. This made sense at the time because I would not have to worry about commuting to the office.</p> <p>3 months ago my manager suggested that I come to the office more often as this would benefit my development and give a me a chance to socialise with my co-workers. We agreed that I go in 3 times a week.</p> <p>Now the past few weeks there has been pressure to start coming to the office full time.</p> <p>I would be fine with this but the problem is that I currently do not own a car and have to rely on public transport to get to work. With public transport it takes almost 4 hours to get to and from work each day (I actually listen to multiple episodes of the podcast on each trip) There is about 40 minutes of walk time included in that because the nearest bus stop is not close to the office.</p> <p>As you can imagine that is physically draining and also affects my work life balance as I spend almost 15 hours of the day either travelling and working. My biggest concern now is that 9 months ago If I was offered this job but as full time on site I would not have even considered it.</p> <p>Do you have any advice with how to refuse going to the office more often without making it seem like I’m opting out of an option that is more beneficial to my career. Thanks in advance.</p> </li> </ol>

<p>In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:</p> <ol> <li> <p>Greetings Jamison and Dave, love the show and all your shenanigans! I’m a mid-level dev who has quit my job (TM) a few times. While I feel like I’ve absorbed some good experience from each company I’ve been at, I also feel like my training is not yet complete.</p> <p>At my last company, I hit my ceiling as a dev but I also felt the bar was really low. I had to do a lot of hand holding and fielded a lot of engineer questions that could have easily been Googled and it was really frustrating. But now I’m at a place where I feel everyone else is heads and shoulders above me. The tables have turned! I’m trying to learn as much as I can on my own but I’ve found there are limits to what I can do. I feel like I’m drowning but I’m timid to ask too many questions because I remember how annoying it was to get pinged every 10 minutes at my previous job.</p> <p>What are some tips you have to navigate the murky waters of being a mid-level dev wanting to learn as much as possible to become a seasoned dev without giving off an “intern smell”?</p> </li> <li> <p>Listener Charlie,</p> <p>Nearly all your answers presuppose a software engineer has a good manager and leadership. Why is this?</p> </li> </ol>

<p>In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:</p> <ol> <li> <p>Long time question asker, first time listener. I recently started to go back through the original episodes of this podcast where a few episodes were themed were around networking, open source work, and building your personal brand. I just wanted to share my “NETWORK=NETWORTH” story. About a month ago my CEO was terminated by our board of directors, a week after it was announced that we were having layoffs for the vast majority of the company. I had been with this company for around 4 years, a lot of my work had been doing open source projects and interacting with various other companies. Unfortunately I was one of the people who was let go as part of these layoffs. I immediately reached out to various folks in the open source world that I’ve interacted with, seeing if their companies had any openings. Within two weeks I was able to interview and get an offer without a technical interview. Building my “personal brand”, interacting with the open source community had turned a pretty stressful situation into one that was relatively a lot less stressful!</p> </li> <li> <p>Listener Stochastic Beaver asks,</p> <p>I’ve recently joined a big tech company remotely and my team is super AWKWARD. No one says anything non-work-related in team chat. My manager is the only one with a camera on in team-wide meetings. I barely saw anyone’s face. When I try to chitchat about their life during in 1:1s, somehow they don’t feel like interested in talking about themselves so I eventually stopped asking anymore. In meetings, my manager is most vocal person within the team and the other people barely speak. As a result, it’s always feels like my manager’s one man show trying to make a conversation and discussion and throwing a joke and the responses are usually some ‘lol’ in the chat.</p> <p>It’s not that the team members are not engaged to the team. Everyone is very passionate and I usually see their work related messages, code reviews, and emails coming back and forth after the evening, even in weekends. Is this normal that all the people are extremely shy in the same team? I like the work and the problem we’re solving but sometimes I find that the silence in the air is suffocating me and I also want to establish a good relationship with my coworkers. Am I asking too much for them in ‘work’? Thanks for listening.</p> </li> </ol>

<p>In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:</p> <ol> <li> <p>I have been at my job for 5 years since I graduated college. I love who I work with and what I do. My question is more about the future. I have a family now and I love my work/life balance and limited meetings as an IC. I used to confidently say “I want to be a manager and eventually a CTO.” Now I am less sure.</p> <p>I would love to help people achieve their goals, but I love coding and do not want to give that up. The thing I love the most outside of coding is bringing engineers together. I am in charge of a monthly meeting for BE engineers to share what they work on. I am good at getting engineers to show up to events. I have hosted other demos and events and potlucks that even the most quiet, introverted engineers show up and have fun.</p> <p>What options are there for engineers who love coding and want to have a bigger person impact, but are not 100% sold on being a people manager?</p> </li> <li> <p>I recently interviewed at a large tech company. I did three interviews at the remote “onsite” and did well in two of them but flunked the system design one. Since I was interviewing for a mid level position, I feel like I missed some things that are inexcusable. I’m a very growth and career oriented person so I’ve been doing my due diligence and have been heavily studying system design concepts since. I haven’t received a response yet but I expect a rejection and I do think it would be fair, given my SD performance. However, if they miraculously come back to me with an offer, I would decline it, because this would mean their hiring bar is low and that’s not the level of colleagues I’d like to work with. I know this sounds very self righteous and so I’d like to hear your thoughts on it, since you guys are always very insightful.</p> <p>Thanks!</p> </li> </ol> <h2 id="show-notes">Show Notes</h2> <ul> <li><a href="https://thesystemsthinker.com/the-ladder-of-inference/" title="smartCard-inline">https://thesystemsthinker.com/the-ladder-of-inference/</a></li> </ul> <p>‌</p>

<p>In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:</p> <ol> <li> <p>My company recently had a big layoff - about 40% of engineers are gone. My job is safe (for now). About 6 months ago, I was promoted to a “Staff”-ish position that I’ve been really enjoying and looks great on my resume if I hold it for a good length of time.</p> <p>Besides just enjoying my job, I’ve just moved house and I have a baby on the way, so I’m highly motivated to have some stability (and get paid parental leave.)</p> <p>My gut says give it the 9 months to see how it all plays out - but my brain thinks my gut is an idiot. Interviewing while taking care of a newborn for the first time feels like an incredibly difficult thing to do and the job market may not be getting better.</p> <p>Do you have any advice for how to navigate this situation?</p> </li> <li> <p>Big fan of the pod! How should I approach being slightly younger than my peers at the workplace? I graduate in December with my bachelor’s in CS but just turned 18 a couple of months ago. I’m actively interviewing at big tech companies and plan to start working as soon as I graduate. Should I avoid the topic or would it be completely inconsequential for my peers to be aware of my age? I’m looking to move up the ranks quickly, and can imagine many developers wouldn’t love knowing their manager is in their early 20s. For what it’s worth as well, I haven’t been open about being slightly younger in my university setting, as early on I noticed professors didn’t respect my contributions as much when they were aware of my age. What’s your take?</p> </li> </ol>

<p>In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:</p> <ol> <li> <p>Listener ninjamonkey says,</p> <p>I am a new grad who is half a year into the role now at a very large company. Recently, a senior engineer on my team asked me to create a ticket for an infra team for a problem with a service. I provided logs and steps to reproduce the issue and did a health check before submitting.</p> <p>Right after, the manager of the team put me into a group chat with their team, asked why I created the ticket and told me to start doing my job and they can’t debug for me.</p> <p>From these interactions and comments on the ticket, it feels the infra team will likely not work on the tickets I report or de-prioritize them. This has left me discouraged and hesitant.</p> <p>I will have to do lots of this kind of infrastructure work in the future. Additionally, one of the goals my manager set for me is to work with more external teams for the upcoming year.</p> <p>What do I do here? Do I tell my manager about these interactions? Do I tell my team lead, staff/seniors to swap out for different kind of story?</p> </li> <li> <p>I work for a small startup. I was the first employee other than the 2 founders.</p> <p>Being the first developer hired, naturally means I have the most knowledge about our application. I also have good organisational skills, which has led to me becoming and being referred to as the “Lead Developer”.</p> <p>I have recruited 2 of the 3 new developers, and have trained both of them and got them up to speed.</p> <p>At first I was pleased with the progression and was keen to grow into the position, and told the founders so.</p> <p>Since then, I have changed my mind, I don’t want to be the lead - due to the following:</p> <ul> <li>The communication is absolutely pitiful. Any questions we ask of the founders we get about a 30% reply rate no matter the form of communication.</li> <li>We get poorly defined tasks and requirements</li> <li>The CTO will just blast through some of our features over the weekend and say here I fixed it for you</li> </ul> <p>I don’t want to quit my job (just yet… its a comin though).</p> <p>I have actually discussed the above points with them, but I know these 2 founders will never change their ways.</p> <p>How do I tell them I just want to go back to being an Individual Contributor like my Employment contract states?</p> </li> </ol>

<p>In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:</p> <ol> <li> <p>Dan asks,</p> <p>Hey friends! How do you get ahead when your manager gives you mixed signals? I was told there would be lots of opportunities to work on exciting new projects when I interviewed for this role. After six months this hasn’t really happened and I’m beginning to get concerned it never will. Half the team is working on ‘new things’ while the rest of us are working on maintenance work. This is meant to be rotated but my colleagues tell me this isn’t the case. I’ve asked my manager in our one on ones if I can work on the next piece of new work but have got some odd responses. They told me if I want to work on better projects I should look in my managers calendar and invite myself to anything that looks good. This seems bizarre. Is it normal to lurk your managers calendar and just turn up at meetings that ‘look good’?</p> </li> <li> <p>I’ve worked at small but mature companies for about 3 years now, and I feel that I’m soon coming to the point where you would expect me to be a senior engineer given my years of experience (which I’m aiming for!). I’ve struggled a lot to come up with ideas to add value to the team outside of the standard sprint tickets. I know these things aren’t “required” in the job scope, but often with teams at smaller companies, I worry my manager might think I’m not ready for a senior role if I’m not actively thinking outside the box about the team’s goals beyond the tickets I’ve been assigned.</p> <p>I do have a lot of initiative and independence, but the thing is I’m just not very creative. As much as I love tech, it’s difficult for me to dream of non-trivial ideas that would actually make an impact. I feel that if I want to progress in my career, I’m going to have to get better at seeing the bigger picture. What tips might you have?</p> </li> </ol>

<p>In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:</p> <ol> <li> <p>I’m a few months into my first full time job, and the learning curve is immense. I feel like I’m falling behind and not keeping up with my work, as well as not understanding things that should be simple. I often feel I am wasting time on a lot of work that I do. How do I know if this is just an anxious feeling, or if I am legitimately falling behind?</p> </li> <li> <p>I am currently a staff engineer and have a career goal to move into management. I have been with my current employer for 15+ years and positions to promote into just don’t come up. The tech i work with is not very technical, there is no coding and its incredibly specialized. I have applied and interviewed for manager positions outside of my team/company and i get the same feedback that i am well qualified, but there is someone with previous manager experience that beats me. I see it being forever if not impossible to get a manager position due to people needing to retire etc. If i go to another engineering position i feel like i would need to start over in a junior spot. What other options do i have.</p> </li> </ol>

<p>In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:</p> <ol> <li> <p>I’ve joined a team at a small startup and our team lead has mentioned in passing a few times about a developer they used to have but had to let go. Not in a malicious way but just as a matter of fact when it’s come up organically. Now it’s eating at me because I’m not sure if I’ll ever go down that path and I want to know what they did so I can avoid the same fate. I’ve always been a top performer at other companies but now I’m wondering if this would be the one place where standards are higher than what I’m used to. I really like it here and don’t want to lose my spot. Realistically my fear isn’t that I’d get fired in my first six months but more that I would fail to respond to constructive feedback over the course of a year and end up getting let go in the same manner. Do you have any advice?</p> </li> <li> <p>Hello! Long time lurker, first time question server.</p> <p>I am an intermediate software engineer and I work on a team that has a really tenured senior engineer. His attention is often required for a lot of things and the team can sometimes get blocked by him being pulled into many different directions.</p> <p>As someone that is trying to grow into a senior engineer myself, what are some ways to take some of the load off of him and improve the bus factor?</p> </li> </ol>

<p>In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:</p> <ol> <li> <p>I have recently joined a team as a fully remote member, with majority of my team mates located in one city and meet in office every week. My manager wants me to work on earn trust and drive consensus, to keep me in track for promotion. Being remote, I am unable to get through my team mates effectively, when compared to my previous work settings where it was all on-site. Any tips for me?</p> </li> <li> <p>Hi Jamison and Dave!</p> <p>I’m a long time listener and I really enjoy the podcast. I have a small question for you two:</p> <p>My coworker recently asked for my opinion on how to write some code and then implemented it a different way. They knew I wasn’t a fan of their implementation and even went out of their way to not get it reviewed by me. Now we’re left with this shared code that stinks.</p> <p>Their code works but it’s clunkier then it should be and it’s bothering me. Should I fix it when they’re on leave and guise it as a refactoring that “needed to be done” or should I leave it alone and try to learn some lesson from this.</p> <p>The other option is to quit my job but other this small hiccup - it’s been going ok here.</p> </li> </ol> <h2 id="show-notes">Show Notes</h2> <p>This episode is sponsored by the Compiler podcast, from Red Hat: https://link.chtbl.com/compiler?sid=podcast.softskillsengineering</p>

<p>In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:</p> <ol> <li> <p>‌About a year ago I joined what it seemed to be the best company ever.</p> <p>It’s a pretty big, pretty successful company which has been fully remote for decades. They have a great work culture where async written communication is the norm. There’s no scrum, no micro management, no crazy and absurd planning/guessing meetings, etc. Of course we also have some pressure to ship product, but nothing out of the ordinary. Salary is good, work life balance is awesome, I like my team a lot and overall people are awesome too, so this sounds like paradise to me.</p> <p>However, on the technical side, this is the worst careless outdated bug-ridden untested unmaintainable inscrutable ide-freezing mindblowing terrible wordpress codebase I’ve ever seen in my life.</p> <p>No linters, no formatters, the repository is so big you can’t even open the entire thing on your editor and you need to open just the folders you’re touching. The development environment is “scp files to a production server taken out of the load balancer”. Zero tests, manual QA by a team mate before merging, outdated tooling, outdated processes, css overriden 10 times because nobody wants to modify any existing rule, security incidents hidden under the rug every now and then and the worst part: any attempt to improve this gets rejected. My team laughed at me when I tried to write an acceptance test in my early days. Months later I can see how ridiculous it looks now I have a better grasp of the technical culture over here.</p> <p>I’m towards the second half of my career. So “learning” and “staying up to date” with the trends is not my priority. I really enjoy this company and love working here until the moment I open my code editor.</p> <p>I’m seriously thinking on starting to look for another job, but I have this feeling that wherever I go the code might be slightly better but the perks will be worse. Now I understand why we have these perks, otherwise nobody would be here I guess.</p> <p>Have you been in this situation, or maybe the opposite one? Not sure what to do at this point.</p> <p>Thanks!</p> </li> <li> <p>My team got a new manager about 6 months ago. While I’ve had managers all across the spectrum of weird quirks in my time as an engineer, this person has one that’s new for me, and I’m not sure how to handle it. He operates in a very top-down fashion, which isn’t unusual. What is unusual, however, is that he will insist that everyone on the team give him feedback on a given issue…and then inevitably just proceed with whatever he had decided beforehand.</p> <p>I take giving feedback very seriously, and spend a lot of time getting my thoughts in order when I’m asked to give input on something. Having someone request that and then immediately throw my input in the proverbial paper shredder is frustrating and a waste of my time, especially since the team and company are growing rapidly and there are a lot of these kinds of decisions that have to be made. How should I approach this? I don’t want to keep spending time and effort on feedback that’s going to be ignored, but I also don’t know a polite corporate-speak equivalent of “please don’t ask my opinion on this when we both know you’ve already made up your mind”.</p> </li> </ol>

<p>In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:</p> <ol> <li> <p>‌</p> <p>I had a boss once who I was intimidated by. I did not know I was poor performing until I got a performance improvement plan. It was such a bad experience, I still feel anxiety from that day. Instead of pointing out how I can grow from my mistakes, all they did was point out my mistakes and the things I apparently was not able to deliver. And then they proceeded with reading from a pre-written list of steps to take in order to improve, right from the paper and not looking at me. It did not even feel like a two-way conversation. I felt mistreated and disrespected.</p> <p>I’m glad I grew from it though. I wasn’t really the person to quit when it comes to facing tough situations. I ended up staying for another year and getting almost promoted before I quit to move on to a higher paying job. It was a very redeeming process I suppose.</p> </li> <li> <p>I have been at a small startup for 3 years. We are still in startup mode, underpaid and long hours. We have two developer teams: Team A and Team B. Team A slowly quit one by one. Team B is still here, including me. After my team lead resigned I was promoted to team lead. But… one week later someone from management shared with me, I believe by accident, a file with both teams’ salaries. I was shocked, really shocked. My team, Team B, has been paid less than Team A from the beginning even though we deliver more value. Also they didn’t even try to match my salary to the previous team lead. What should I do now? Go and ask for more money? Tell them I know? Talk to the rest of the team? I cannot unsee this. I don’t want to leave because I like the project and want to observe how well our technical decisions work out after several years.</p> </li> </ol>

<p>In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:</p> <ol> <li> <p>I’m currently a junior engineer. I often struggle to understand speakers with accents. I became aware of this when I listened to a coworker in a meeting and barely understanding anything, but when I asked my other colleagues, it seems they got it completely.</p> <p>I know how to handle this in relaxed situations, but how do I handle it when the stakes are higher? (i.e. talking to higher levels and not wanting to ask too many questions based on my inability to hear them, interviews, …). How should I prepare to respond to these situations productively?</p> </li> <li> <p>Hey fellas,</p> <p>As a backend dev of 3 YOE, I have what I would describe as average technical skills and much stronger than average soft skills. This has been reflected in my feedback across all of my jobs and while the feedback has always been very positive, almost all of it relates to my interpersonal and communication skills, as opposed to my technical chops.</p> <p>I’m wondering what’s the long term outlook for this is? I frequently receive more accolades and recognition from leadership than my colleagues whose technical skills and code output are objectively far superior to mine, simply because I communicate better and am more charismatic</p> <p>Given management’s favorable view of me, I have been ascending the ranks quicker than is warranted, beating out those that are much more qualified from a technical perspective. While I am able to complete the work that’s asked of me, I can’t help but wonder when I will stall as a dev and no longer be able to meet expectations, nor is it really fair to anyone involved.</p> <p>At this point, I can’t help but feel that I would be able to contribute more in a position that utilize my skillset more favorably, but I’m unsure what roles would be a good fit for someone like myself.</p> <p>Thanks guys!</p> </li> </ol>

<p>In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:</p> <ol> <li> <p>I’m planning to leave my job purely because of low compensation. I like my growth in my current company - but low compensation than what market is offering is quite a mental hiccup in my regular work (yep! I’m slowly becoming one of the quiet quitters). I’m thinking of going to my manager with my new offer and ask him to match it. Do retention offers actually work? As mangers yourselves, how would you want me to approach a retention discussion? I don’t want my manager to make my life hell under the pretense of “Oh he’ll leave in a year” if I do decide to stay after taking the matching offer. Love the show - pretty much my single source of wisdom for all my behavioural interviews xD</p> </li> <li> <p>I was recently let go from a company. They said they would send me a shipping label so that I could return the hardware. I didn’t hear back from them for a week. A few days later a label came in for the laptop, but not for the dock or the two monitors they also sent.</p> <p>I did not enjoy my experience there and I’m feeling resentful at having to pester them so that I can get what I need to send them back their hardware.</p> <p>What is my due diligence on the score? I don’t even like the monitors.</p> </li> </ol>

<p>In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:</p> <ol> <li> <p>Listener Olexander asks,</p> <p>I was a tech lead on some relatively known project since the beginning for more than a year. I made several trade-offs with technologies and wrong decisions. I participate in some generic Slack organisations and met several users of my product. I haven’t told them that I was connected to implementing the project but sometimes shared some insights on how the product is tested and asked opinions about some of features of the product in comparison to the competitors. Now there is a person who continuously critiques the product. Sometimes the criticism is valid but sometimes is’s just a rant. How can I influence that person without blowing my cover?</p> </li> <li> <p>Listener Kieran asks,</p> <p>Hi guys! Loving the podcast from down under. I’m working part time as a dev while I complete my software engineering degree. It’s been fun, but there are almost no processes in place for development and not many other devs seem to care about improvement.</p> <p>Although I am the most inexperienced here I feel some of the devs do not care about the quality of the work as I often have to refactor some of their code due to it being buggy, slow and undocumented (still using var in javascript).</p> <p>I’ve talked to management about improving our standards. However, they brushed me off saying yeah some of the developers are stubborn. They are not brushing me off because I lack technicality as Ive been given an end user app as a solo project. How should I go about encouraging the team to improve our processes?</p> </li> </ol>

<p>In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:</p> <ol> <li> <p>How do you politely tell a reviewer politely, “Your suggestion is stupid. I will not do it” when you get stupid review comments. If you don’t do it then the pull request can’t move forward because of unresolved issues. If you do it, then you’re compromising your design you’ve worked weeks on for some fly-by random comment.</p> </li> <li> <p>A few months back, I volunteered as co-facilitator for my department’s NodeJS Guild meeting. At first, it was a struggle to get people to present. But I tried to lower the bar more and more until it was easy. I asked for 10-15m presentations, and eventually I realized people are happier “Kicking off a discussion” than they are “giving a presentation”. All the listeners are more engaged too, at least after the first 2 meetings doing this.</p> <p>Now I want people to share half-baked code, or problems they are struggling with, as part of our discussions. I want people to be able to be vulnerable. If we don’t collaborate on common problems until we feel they’re polished and won’t reflect badly on us, then we will all waste time solving the same problems.</p> <p>I also want this to scale across 15-25 small scrum teams. I think success could be my demise–if we have good discussions, then more people will come, but people won’t want to be as vulnerable with a larger group.</p> <p>In general, I think my own scrum team is very open and vulnerable to each other, but the remote work in the deparment has created distance. I want to help create more collaboration on similar problems and solutions.</p> <p>What would you do to keep this going, and improve it?</p> </li> </ol>

<p>In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:</p> <ol> <li> <p>I seem to be very hot and cold about how I feel about my job. Some days I hate it and think about quitting, but other days, I feel it’s not that bad and can stick around a little longer. The reason for it seems to change depending on the day, but a lot of it seems to center around the people around me (i.e. developers who need me to Google for them, business people who don’t understand how to provide requirements), but sometimes I can’t tell whether it’s an attitude problem that will follow me anywhere or if it’s just time to leave. It’s a relatively small company, so I feel like I would be betraying my manager who has invested a lot in me if I decided to leave so suddenly. I’d like to give my manager a chance to address my concerns, but I’m afraid to sour our relationship if I come across as a complainer. I’m also not confident there’s any solutions to my current frustrations because it seems to be a company-wide issue. How do I make sense of all of what I’m feeling?</p> </li> <li> <p>I really like my company but their project management is atrocious, ad hoc, and “old school.” They’re not giving me privileges to configure Jira in ways that allow me to get stuff done.</p> <p>Is there an effective way to convince my CTO that I’m not going to screw up our secure systems or do I just need to find a new job?</p> </li> </ol>

<p>In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:</p> <ol> <li> <p>My company wants several complex applications rewritten. “Steve” wrote the original applications, and has been assigned to do the rewrite. There is very little documentation on the original applications, and the rewrite will take intimate understanding of the existing code and new requirements.</p> <p>Management assigned me to work with Steve. They warned me that since we have started working remotely after covid, Steve has been hard to get a hold of and not meeting deadlines. My job is to keep Steve on task.</p> <p>When I ask Steve a question he will respond “I’ll work on it tomorrow” or “I’ll have to look in to that.” Then I never hear from him again. If I tell management I haven’t been able to get a hold of him, they will contact him, then he will contact me asking “What can I help you with?” Again, all his answers will be “I’ll have to look into that.”</p> <p>Occasionally Steve will report to me that he has finished a task. But because he did it without me, I am even more confused about what needs done or how to do it.</p> <p>I feel like my job has turned in to tattling on Steve. I am afraid I’m going to be labeled a whiner and that this project will harm my career growth.</p> <p>Over the last 2 weeks my solution has been to just ignore the project. Management hasn’t checked in with me, but I’m sitting on a ticking time bomb.</p> <p>What should I do?</p> </li> <li> <p>How to keep our sanity in times of uncertainty? I’ve recently changed jobs and despite the facts shows that I shouldn’t be worried, I can see my judgement is blurred by the fear of getting laid off even there’s no sign of it and I fear I would fulfill the prophecy!</p> </li> </ol>

<p>In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:</p> <ol> <li> <p>Listener Albert Camus asks,</p> <p>Hello Team. I am a long time listener of the show, and I really enjoy it. I’m a senior engineer and want to get to the next level in my career. I talked to my manager about this. I told them I preferred the technical side and staff engineer was the next level up. He responded positively, although he didn’t give me a timeline, not even a vague estimate. In a subsequent meeting they told me it wasn’t a linear progression at the company and there’s quite an overlap in the salary range between senior and staff engineer. I was also told that the company only had a few staff level engineers and they were considered experts at a particular sub-section of a technology. This makes me feel like I am being stalled. I have seen this a few years ago, at a previous workplace, where I tried for a promotion, and the manager at that place kept giving excuses to buy time. I am afraid that could be the case here as well. I am technically strong and have good soft-skills. I have designed, developed and documented multiple features for the company. Whenever there’s a complex bug, the product manager always turns towards me for help. I also handle inter-team discussions at times, always a part of the interview panel while hiring new team members and at most times the only person representing my team from the tech perspective during alignment meetings with the sales and marketing teams. I could also say with confidence that I bring more value to the table and have data to back it up. But I am not sure how I could use all this information without seeming desperate, to really push for that promotion and a raise. I could quit and get a new job, most probably with a promotion, but I have put in a lot of effort here and I intend to stay at the current company for at least the next couple of years to reap the rewards. What can I do to get that promotion in the coming year?</p> </li> <li> <p>We know that the salary is high in our area, and I don’t need all this money. So, what is your opinion on part time job and how can I get one?</p> <p>I’m a senior frontend with more than 15 years of experience and just want to live a little.</p> </li> </ol>

<p>In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:</p> <ol> <li> <p>I work at a small company that has recently grown from a couple of engineers to 40+ due to some great new project opportunities. As part of this transition, many new policies are being implemented. The policies concerning the engineering department primarily revolve around task tracking and reporting time. Gone are the days when an engineer can charge eight hours to “fixing stuff” and earn a paycheck. Most of us are on board, but there are three engineers in particular who have been around for quite some time and vary between subtly passive aggressive to downright combative when it comes to creating JIRA tasks and logging their hours.</p> <p>The problem? They serve an absolutely critical role in our company. They are nigh irreplaceable in an extremely niche market. How should a manager strike the perfect balance between forcing an engineer to do something that they don’t want to do and not forcing them out? If this was a more common skillset, there wouldn’t be an issue with telling them “You don’t like it, go find another job”. But when there are a handful of people in the world that do this kind of thing and it closely involves hardware and these three just happen to be local… well, you get the idea. Losing these individuals would be a staggering blow the company. Making them redundant isn’t economically feasible. Time to ramp up for this position would be close to a year.</p> </li> <li> <p>So I’ve recently followed the first rule of Soft Skills Engineering and quit my job. All right! I believe in the new role and I think it’ll be a good change to me.</p> <p>Despite this, I’m feeling guilty about leaving my team behind. When my managers asked me how I was feeling in the last few quarters, I’ve mostly said I’m fine! I never told them my reservations about how the codebase I’m working on has no oversight, that they need to hire another dev because I don’t trust being the sole keeper, that it seems like product has forgotten this feature. I even indulged them when they asked me to make a long-term career plan when I was certain I would leave by early next year at the latest.</p> <p>So, what’s your take on how disgruntled employees often have to hide their true feelings? Maybe I could’ve been open, but it really seemed like the odds were against us, it’s just that upper leadership was neglecting this feature and there was no urgency to improve things. But I still feel like I wasn’t being fully honest. What do you guys think?</p> <p>Thanks so much and keep up the good work! Feelin’ Guilty</p> <p>P.S. Do you feel that this industry naturally rewards lack of loyalty and connection? What do you feel about that?</p> </li> </ol>

<p>In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:</p> <ol> <li> <p>Hi! I have been a software engineer at a very small company for 10 years. We write desktop products and single server products - I don’t have experience with scaling systems or the latest & greatest Javascript frameworks. I would like to move to a company where I can learn and grow, using a more modern stack. My coding skills are great, but it seems like I just don’t have the experience many companies are looking for. With 15 years total experience I am too junior for senior positions, and too senior for junior positions. I’m feeling stuck and am tempted to quit my job so I can focus on side projects using the latest and greatest tools. Or is there a better way to get unstuck?</p> </li> <li> <p>Listener James asks,</p> <p>How do you know when it’s the right time to move on from an almost perfect job?</p> <p>I’ve been a frontend developer for 6 years and spent the last 2 years at a really great company. I have lot’s of autonomy, a competitive salary, excellent stock options, and great job security. But, so far my entire career has been working with the same technologies, and there’s no scope to learn new languages at my current job.</p> <p>I was recently contacted by a recruiter, which resulted in an interview and offer for a full-stack role with a stack that would be completely new to me but really excites me.</p> <p>I’m worried that never holding development job for more than 2 years would look bad, but at the same time I don’t want to be stagnant and not learning.</p> <p>Should I stay at my current job where I’m comfortable, or take a risk and jump into the unknown to develop my career.</p> </li> </ol>