Soft Skills Engineering

<p>In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:</p> <h2 id="questions">Questions</h2> <ol> <li> <p>Listener Ryan asks,</p> <p>I am the only full-time software engineer at a relatively small company. There is also a contractor who has been with the company off and on for about 25 years.</p> <p>How do I manage playing multiple roles when the development team is so small? I take the role of software engineer, team lead, software architect, product owner, project manager, designer, QA, etc. Some of those roles are full time jobs. How do I still make progress on development (i.e. coding)?</p> </li> <li> <p>Hey guys, love the show. My question is this.</p> <p>I work in a small startup. About a year ago our team documented what our git workflow would look like. We agreed on things like rebasing instead of merging to master, and never squashing our commits into one, that sort of thing.</p> <p>One of our developers is now making a fuss about following these rules and constantly does their own thing. After speaking to them about it, they shut me down and said it is up to the individual developer to decide how they use these tools.</p> <p>There have been some heated discussion on merge requests with this person telling our senior devs that they don’t want to hear their opinions.</p> <p>This person started at the company 6 months before me, and I am only a junior engineer myself so I’m not sure if there is really anything I can do. I have been at the company for 2 years now.</p> <p>I have offered to help them learn how to use git the way our team agreed but was told “no thanks, I’ll do it my way”.</p> <p>What is the best way to navigate this situation? Is this something I should escalate to my manager, or should I just get over it?</p> <p>Thanks for the help, can’t wait to hear you rip this one apart :P</p> </li> </ol>

<p>In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:</p> <h2 id="questions">Questions</h2> <ol> <li> <p>We have just today been told that we may or may not have a job in 1 week. I feel lucky because I handed my notice in yesterday for a new job, but my colleagues are not in such a position. The company burned through all it’s money, and its only hope is that someone or some company who wants to buy the business in its current state.</p> <p>How would you approach a situation like this? Is it best to just jump ship right away? What would potential new employers think when you told them the situation? What about my co-workers?</p> </li> <li> <p>Long time listener, first time <del>caller</del> asker.</p> <p>How do I tell my boss I can’t complete a task?</p> <p>I’ve been with my current company for 6 months. In that time I’ve fixed a lot of problems that have blocked our current embedded system project because of my hardware design background. Sometimes I take a bit longer than projected, but I’ve been upfront about that and it’s all fine.</p> <p>I was trying to implement a new feature and it was meant to take around 3 days of work to do, but after 3 weeks I just couldn’t quite get it to work. I asked for help and pulled out every trick in my arsenal and just couldn’t figure it out. I ended up having to tell my boss that I was out of ideas and letting him tell me to shelve it, but I could tell this disappointed him.</p> <p>What should I do next time?</p> </li> </ol> <h2 id="show-notes">Show Notes</h2> <ul> <li>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D4tvZJGNIhM</li> <li>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnolia</li> </ul>

<p>In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:</p> <ol> <li> <p>My manager has left, so I have the task of interviewing candidates for my future boss’ position. I’m not doing it alone, one more engineering lead joins me for my tech round. After this round, the candidate gets to talk to upper management for the final decision. My question is, what are the lines you should never ever cross in an interview when interviewing your future boss.</p> </li> <li> <p>Our company was purchased by a private equity firm this year. Layoffs began immediately. While the company was gradually carved up, leadership continually violated every promise made. This week, during the most recent round of layoffs, I lost my job. I worked my butt off for years trying to contribute as much as I could to make a positive impact for both users and coworkers. Alas, despite all of my efforts, I was proven expendable. It feels like there was little point in doing as much as I did for this company, especially during the panicked response to COVID.</p> <p>How do I find and sustain a sense of security at the next company? How do I ensure that I can safely care about the company—the work done and the people helping to do it—finding that precarious balance between being invaluable and burning myself out?</p> </li> </ol>

<p>In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:</p> <ol> <li> <p>I’ve been working at a big software company for two years. Since joining, 10 people have left my team, which is more than 50% of my team. Usually it’s the experienced developers who leave either for a different team, a different role or a different company altogether.</p> <p>The latest departure of a peer who I’ve been looking up to as a brilliant developer has been affecting my mood quite strongly. On one hand, I should be glad that I’m becoming a more pivotal member of the team, having moved up in the “seniority chain”. On the other hand, I’ve always believed the saying: “If you’re the smartest person in the room, then you’re in the wrong room”.</p> <p>Should I be concerned about this turnover rate? Is it considered normal? Why am I feeling different about this last departure than all of the previous ones?</p> </li> <li> <p>I am the tech lead on a team at a large tech company. One of the developers on our team has consistently struggled to meet deadlines and project deliverables. He frequently seems to invent his way into impossibly complex software problems. Additionally, he also seems to lack the ability to focus on a single thread, and tries to tackle diverse kinds of work in parallel. I’ve tried to help mentor and coach him, advising him to stick to one problem at a time and try to raise his hand and has for help before he backs himself into a hermeneutically sealed NP-hard problem — but I haven’t had much success. I wanted to see if you guys had any advice. Thanks a million!!!</p> </li> </ol> <p>Actual study showing actual results that we actually linked in the show notes this episode: <a href="https://radford.aon.com/insights/infographics/2017/technology/q1-2017-turnover-rates-hiring-sentiment-by-industry-at-us-technology-companies">https://radford.aon.com/insights/infographics/2017/technology/q1-2017-turnover-rates-hiring-sentiment-by-industry-at-us-technology-companies</a></p>

<p>In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:</p> <ol> <li> <p>Hi there Dave and Jamison! I am a tech lead in a small team of 5 people. 4 of them start working at 10-11 AM and one of them likes to start working at 1-2 PM. This person is me. Due to my biorhythm I feel I am the most productive at this time, and I also like to do some of the non-work-related stuff in the morning.</p> <p>Nobody in my team has any objections but as a team lead I feel guilty because it often happens that I block someone with my work schedule. I’m trying to do as much as I can to unblock everyone - distributing tasks in the evening, making it clear everyone knows what to do - but that’s not always helpful so it usually turns out that I am stopping my morning tasks to have a call and explain something or have a text conversation. Tbh it irritates me very much :D</p> <p>Should I feel guilty? As a tech lead, am I responsible for working at the same time everyone does?</p> </li> <li> <p>Hey Dave and Jamison! I love the show, I’ve listened to every episode and your advice has helped me a TON!</p> <p>I started a new job in a different city a month ago and because of Covid-19 everyone went remote, so I didn’t physically move to that city then. Now there are talks of going back to the office, and one of the developers on my team is also looking for a place to live so we started talking about rooming together.</p> <p>It seemed fine to me but then I realized I’d be spending almost ALL of my time with this person who I have not even met in real life yet.</p> <p>Do you think this is a good idea with a lot of convenience or a recipe for disaster? Have you ever lived with a co-worker? Any advice would be great.</p> <p>Thanks!</p> </li> </ol>

<p>In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:</p> <ol> <li> <p>My question is regarding studying and learning new material. Before I got my job as a web developer, I was studying at least 2 hours per night, but now that I have the job (been in the job for 2 years), I want to come home and relax. How much time do you spend reading about new technology or working on new projects? Do you do it while at work or at home at your own time? I plan on getting a new job in the future and I feel I need to start studying again. I need to refresh my skills on different algorithm questions. My GitHub is empty because I haven’t worked on new projects since I got the job. Should I worry about that? How much studying should I do for future interviews? Do I need to listen to hard skill engineering podcasts to be up to date on new technology? If I’m not doing any of these already, does that mean I’m not passionate enough and I won’t do well in this career?</p> </li> <li> <p>I just had a 1:1 with a junior engineer I’m mentoring. He mentioned that he has difficulty compartmentalizing work from his personal life (for example, even when he’s not working, he can’t stop thinking about his code and edge cases and possible bugs missed). Got any life hacks to help him care less?</p> </li> </ol>

<p>In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:</p> <ol> <li> <p>Is a “glue person” valuable on a software team? Someone who isn’t the strongest developer but is liked by teammates and builds a cohesive team dynamic.</p> </li> <li> <p>A while ago I interviewed with a big company. Right after completing a code challenge, covid-19 got out of hand in my country and they sent me an email saying they are putting the process on hold.</p> <p>Weeks have passed and I came across a job opportunity posted recently by the company for the position I was applying to. I felt betrayed. I emailed the recruiter asking for follow-up and she said that they are sorry about the situation and that they wanted to schedule a meeting.</p> <p>The question is, should I let them know I was displeased by this or is this really a non-issue? Do I risk my chances by doing so? Am I acting like a jealous teenager? Thanks a lot and love the podcast, stay safe!!</p> </li> </ol>

<p>In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:</p> <ol> <li> <p>Hi Dave and Jamison, my name is Bob Marley. I am a senior software engineer at a tech company. How do I deal with a chronic toe-stepper-onner?</p> <p>I have a coworker named Jimi Hendrix - also a senior software engineer - who has a habit of getting involved in and trying to manage my projects. He joins meetings and slack channels, uninvited, and starts asking people for status updates and questions them why things are done a certain way (and not the other), what’s taking so long on unfinished tasks, etc. Jimi basically feels that my projects are his to oversee and manage.</p> <p>So far, my response has only been passive aggressive - e.g. taking discussions to a different slack channel or thread, or meeting the team members offline when he is not around. This is obviously not working out and it is not sustainable so I’m looking for some advice on how to deal with it.</p> <p>It’s not hindering the project so I don’t have a strong reason to complain. Other than the fact that it drives me nuts when Jimi gets involved and asks for a status update on a project which I have fully under control.</p> <p>Should I just do nothing and wait for the problem to go away due to him getting moved to a different project? But how do I keep my sanity until then? And what if even then he finds a way to step on my toes? Have you guys experienced this kind of situation? Is there a permanent solution to it? And no, I don’t want to quit my job. Please help!</p> <p>Yours truly, Bob Marley</p> </li> <li> <p>Hi Dave and Jamison. Love the show. I have been gathering informal peer feedback from my team. I was told I am doing well, and I should be doing “more high leverage work”. I interpret that as coming up with design patterns, best practices, and mentoring other developers. I mentioned that to my manager, and while he agrees, he also said there is no additional head count for the coming year, and knowing that there is a backlog full of features, my concern is that I will be the primary person tasked with writing those features. How could I negotiate/convince my manager to let me do more tech lead work instead?</p> </li> </ol>

<p>In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:</p> <ol> <li> <p>I’m a senior software engineer at a fast growing software startup. In the past year and a half that I’ve been with the company I’ve gone through 5 reorgs and have had 5 different managers in 4 different teams. Each time I sit down to do a 1 on 1 with a new manager they ask about my career goals and aspirations.</p> <p>Initially, when I joined the company I was a weak and feeble non-senior software engineer. When I was asked this question then, my answer was “to learn and grow, and have more authority and autonomy over the systems that I build, and be considered a senior software engineer”. Over the past year and half I have proven my worth and paid my dues and got the title of senior software engineer, along with the pay raise that came with it.</p> <p>My career development horizon has not been very broad. I didn’t even know there were levels beyond senior software engineer for a long time.</p> <p>I feel like I’m missing out on growth opportunities by not having a clear answer to this question. Please help!</p> <p>Love your show, keep it up.</p> </li> <li> <p>I career switched via a coding bootcamp 3 years ago and have been at my current company ever since.</p> <p>The bugs created by my garbage code from the early days made me a big believer in clean code practices — I now feel strongly about using descriptive variable names, avoiding duplicate code, etc.</p> <p>However, my boss/CTO is on the opposite end of the spectrum. As long as the code works, he doesn’t care what it look like.</p> <p>I want to stay at this company because I strongly believe in the product and I love the flexibility of a small start-up, but my boss and I keep bumping heads.</p> <p>For example, we recently switched over to PRs, and each PR my boss has made included blatant violations of the coding standards document we created together (!). When I request changes on the PR, he says he’ll do it but it isn’t a good use of our time to rewrite it when the code works.</p> <p>My question is two-fold:</p> <p>(1) As the most senior engineer on the software team, how can I go about promoting a quality-driven approach when the CTO doesn’t see the value in it?</p> <p>(2) If all else fails, I’m open to quitting, but I don’t want to end up the same boat. During interviews, what questions can I ask to find out if the company truly values code quality?</p> </li> </ol>

<p>In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:</p> <ol> <li> <p>Due to corona virus, we had to work from home. But the manager, is checking up on us very frequently. We have to give the day’s plan at 10:00am sharp, otherwise he assumes that we are taking the day off. Also, we have to send an email listing the things we did at the end of the day. This is on top of using jira. I feel he is micromanaging a lot and because of this, the team isn’t able to work efficiently. P.S. Now he wants us to add our tasks to a Google sheet.</p> </li> <li> <p>Hi Dave + Jamison,</p> <p>First of all, thank you for putting on the show every week. It is definitely my favorite podcast by a wide margin, every Monday I just keep hitting refresh waiting to get my weekly fix.</p> <p>I started my job about 10 months ago in a late stage startup. In my last annually review, I was recognized for all my hard work and was made into a “Tech Lead”. I am not sure what this means. There is no “tech lead” title in the company wiki. Everyone title is just “software engineer” with a level. The salary adjustment definitely suggest this is not a promotion, and the all important company wiki says I need to wait to get promoted anyway. What is your advice? What should I start doing now, what does it mean for my career?</p> </li> </ol>

<p>In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:</p> <ol> <li> <p>Ever since I graduated from college, I’ve been working in a rising tech company for almost 5 years. I’ve been working on some project and different teams, and it has been more than 1 year on my current team. One day, someone mentioned me that their service is down because of my code from when I was on the previous team and I didn’t even touch that code for almost 2 years. I explained that I am in different team now, so I refer them to the current members of my old team. I also gave some suggestion on how to fix it, but that team didn’t respond fast enough and eventually other person fixed it. Somehow I feel really guilty that I didn’t do anything to fix it. My question is: Until when I responsible for the code I wrote? Is it as long as I’m on the team, or as long as I’m still working in the company? Please advise. Thank you.</p> </li> <li> <p>An external recruiter learned what would be on my technical screen from a previous candidate and shared that with me. Should I warn company X that their technical screen is compromised?</p> </li> </ol>

<p>In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:</p> <ol> <li> <p>My whole team recently transitioned to working from home. How do I handle this? The good news is I don’t have a fever.</p> </li> <li> <p>Working remotely, what should you do if either you ghost the company or the company ghosts you? (Ghosting as in the relationship)</p> </li> </ol>

<p>In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:</p> <ol> <li> <p>I am worried it is only a matter of time before the growing pandemic impacts the job market. I work for a young start up, and as of yet I am gainfully employed. But if this goes on as long as some folks say it will, I’m just not sure. I’ve heard there was a software job market crash after the dot com boom. What was that like ? What’s the best thing to do if you get laid off in a market downturn? Wait it out? Look for software jobs? Switch industries, temporarily?</p> </li> <li> <p>I’m a technical lead on a small team. Two of my teammates are constantly annoyed with each other and I need to know how to talk them down so we can be a better team. Let me introduce them:</p> <p>Alice (the names are made up), an experienced programmer, who is slower to catch on, keeps dragging old arguments and old ways of thinking in, works very slowly and in her own vacuum, and often comes across as difficult to work with. Alice constantly disagrees with the team on things like naming conventions and solutions to problems.</p> <p>In the other corner, Bob, a 2nd year coder, eager to follow leadership but still learning when to ask for help. He takes criticism constructively, but not from Alice because to him it sounds like fingernails on a chalkboard.</p> <p>Alice and Bob constantly bump heads. Yesterday, Bob rewrote Alice’s stored procedure because it was slow and he had some ideas with how to reuse some code. Today it was SQL formatting - Bob’s SQL is ugly, according to Alice, who wants to confront him on it. I suggested we create a style guide to settle that argument.</p> <p>This kind of thing has been going on since the team was formed. My question is, what can I do? They both look to me as the leader, and I don’t want to take sides, but we’ve had this problem for nearly two years.</p> </li> </ol>

<p>In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:</p> <ol> <li> <p>Hey Dave and Jamison. Due to a chronic joint problem, I find it uncomfortable to stand for more than a couple of minutes. How do I talk to my boss about sitting during standup meetings? If I change workplaces, when do I talk about it to a new boss? I look and walk just fine, so people usually don’t realize that there is something wrong with me. I’ve already been to the doctors, and there is not much they can do, so I need to soft skill engineer my workplaces.</p> </li> <li> <p>Hello! I love your show! I am an entry level engineer that had graduated college with a B.S. in Computer Science in May of last year. I was on my previous team for about six months doing mostly documentation and asked for more development work because I didn’t have a lot of experience in hardcore dev work in my past internships. My manager, some of my team members, and the lead systems engineer gave me high props that helped me get onto a new team.</p> <p>I’ve been on the new team for two months but I am having a hard time finishing my tasks. I try to do things on my own before I ask for help, but it seems that I’m always stuck or can’t get the code to work in a reasonable time. My team has a strict deadline at the end of March. I have multiple tickets in Jira assigned to me before then.</p> <p>When I ask for help, it seems like my team members just finish my tickets for me. I feel like a fraud and it really doesn’t seem like I am delivering. People had praised me for my work to get on this new team, I don’t have anything to show for that praise. How did I even graduate from college with a Computer Science degree? Do you have any advice on my situation?</p> </li> </ol>

<p>In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:</p> <ol> <li> <p>I started a new job 6 months back and a lot has happened since then. I signed on as a junior dev and have since been given more and more responsibility. Including (but not limited to) deploying and releasing after hours, shared responsibility with the resident senior devs for reviewing pull requests, and aiding in the creation of new processes and overall advancement of our company’s software development process and culture. How soon is too soon to ask for a raise after starting a new job?</p> </li> <li> <p>Listener Andrew asks,</p> <p>As a military veteran of 8 years, I have the opportunity to enroll in a masters program for little to no cost, but I’m not sure what kind of program to choose. I’m a web developer and also serve as my team’s ”Agile Owner” (kind of like a Scrum Master) which I really enjoy. In fact, before I got my first dev job, I trained in Scrum to try to get a leadership role in the software industry and use my bachelor’s in engineering management. It seems logical to continue in that vein and choose an engineering management masters program, but I enjoy being a direct contributor and applying my Agile training without any real responsibility as a manager would have. I sometimes think I should go for a masters in computer science and double down as a technical knowledge worker, but I fear I’d be in way over my head since I don’t have an institutional computer science background. On the opposite end of the spectrum, part of me thinks I should get an MBA like some friends from college to hedge my bets for climbing corporate ladders in the future. On top of that, lately I’ve been very interested in learning more about design. I’m just not sure what to do, and I have a habit of making big decisions with my head instead of my heart which sometimes leads to 8 years in military service which I don’t much enjoy, so I’d love any advice I can get. Thanks! Soft Skills Eng is my absolute favorite software industry podcast.</p> </li> </ol>

<h2 id="-celebrating-200-episodes-">🎉🎉🎉 Celebrating 200 episodes! 🎉🎉🎉</h2> <p>In this special episode, Dave and Jamison share crazy work stories contributed by listeners to celebrate 200 episodes of Soft Skills Engineering</p> <ol> <li> <p>Right out of graduate school I was in the process of interviewing and got through two phone interviews to get the final in-person interview at a location-based startup. The office was mostly sales but also had a small dev team.</p> <p>The in-house recruiter gave me a rough itinerary two days before: get there at 8AM, have four hour-long interviews with the team, then possibly a coding “quiz.” I was skeptical of what the quiz was but all she said was that everyone who got through the other interviews wouldn’t have a problem, it was multiple-choice, and it would take less than half an hour. I get to the office 20 minutes early but have to wait 45 minutes more for my first round of interviews because an internal meeting went over; the recruiter apologizes and asks if I want breakfast, and I say I’ll take something small like a bagel; she says okay and disappears from the room never to return with food.</p> <p>I get through the culture interviews just fine, though I thought it was a bit odd that several of my interviewers (including a VP) brought in their catered breakfast/lunch into the room but never offered me to get some and I had to go find my recruiter so I could get a cup of water between interviews.</p> <p>The final interview was with who would have been my boss: the senior engineering lead. She proceeds to ask me the normal bank of engineering questions and then lets me ask anything. She starts sending me the vibe that the engineering team isn’t really respected and that as a junior I’d be expected to put in overtime and be on-call on weekends without comp-time and without being able to have a say in when I would be on-call. Then I get some seemingly weird questions: Do you work well with loud noises? How noise canceling are your headphones usually? Is it okay that I would develop on a Windows machine?</p> <p>The engineering lead takes me to the recruiter’s office so I can wrap up the day but the recruiter had left early and nobody knew where she had gone so I was escorted to the front door by a receptionist and left. I didn’t hear back for a week and got a call late in the evening saying they had moved on with other candidates. A few days later I got an email from the engineering lead apologizing for my experience and that they were revising their hiring process due to my experience.</p> </li> <li> <p>Hi Dave and Jamison,</p> <p>I have a crazy work story to share for your 200th show!</p> <p>In my first role as a developer I was working for a small agency building websites for clients. One day I was uploading a new site, which involved FTPing into the server and doing all the config myself. I didn’t really know what I was doing, all of this terminal stuff was pretty alien to me at the time. For some reason or another I needed to change the permissions on the files for this site, so I uploaded it to the server and ran a chmod, (which was a brand new concept to me - luckily Stack Overflow had my back. OR DID IT?) Anyway, when I ran the command, my terminal went crazy and way more files went flying up the screen than I had for my website, so I thought ““that doesn’t look right””, hit ctrl-c and went to lunch, thinking I’d fix it later.</p> <p>When I got back from lunch, everyone was rushing about like headless chickens. Everything was down. When I enquired, it turned out that for some reason everyone was locked out of the entire server. After several hours it turned out that all of the permissions for every file on the server had been changed and nobody had any access to anything. Also, every client site had been brought down in the process.</p> <p>To make matters slightly worse, when I enquired about backups, it turned out that the main server WAS the backup server, because the main server died a couple of years before and nobody had bothered to fix or replace it. Whoops!</p> <p>I didn’t fess up - I was too scared - but coincidentally, a few days later I was fired. Oddly, during the firing, no mention of this incident was made and to this day I have no idea if the two were related.</p> <p>At the time I was devastated, I thought my career was over and I shed tears over how I was going to be able to provide for my family. However, in less than two weeks I was in a new role with a 25% pay increase, and my career has bloomed ever since. So 👍🏻 I guess!</p> <p>And here ends my tale. I hope you enjoyed it - it was devastating at the time, but now I can look back on it with both amusement and bemusement. Thanks for all of your work bringing this podcast to us for 2

<p>In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:</p> <ol> <li> <p>I work at a large public company. Two years ago, they hired a new CEO who immediately started a development center in a different country. Much of the knowledge transfer is complete and this new team outnumbers us by 3 to 1. It feels that we have lost much of our influence. They turn out decent work and cost less than 1/10th to employ. I am ramping up a job search but in the mean time what steps can we take to keep influence and control? Also, is this the future for the industry in the US?</p> </li> <li> <p>Hi Jamison and Dave. Your voices have been bringing sanity into my head for the last 2 years. I’d like to get your thoughts about something that’s driving me a little crazy. I work for a company based in Europe, and work in the Asian office. The Asian office, and only the Asian office, has a fixed time schedule. To overlap with Europe, the Asian team has to be at the office from 2PM to 11PM. However, the European team comes in at 10AM and leaves at 7PM. When our team mates in Europe decide to do overtime, we have to stay later to work with them, often very late in the night but I tolerate it because I love software development. However, whenever we have company “fun” events, the Asian managers schedule it in the morning so that our regular work schedule won’t be consumed. So we’ll do badminton or wall-climbing from 9AM to 12 and then have to do the 2PM to 11PM shift. This is very tiring. The events usually happen every two weeks, but our schedule makes me dread them. It’s even worse if the “fun” events happen on the same day as the overtime. At the end of work, I feel like a zombie! Is this reasonable?</p> </li> </ol>

<p>In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:</p> <ol> <li> <p>My manager smells really bad! Sometimes so bad that I can’t bear to be in his proximity. I am not sure if it’s his breath, or body odour (probably both), but the smell is very foul on a daily basis. He has been with us for quite a few months now, but I am not sure if anybody has mentioned it to him, because the situation hasn’t gotten any better. I’ve also retrained from speaking about it with anyone else. He’s a good guy, and a very hard worker. I want to build a better relationship with him, but his smell is literally getting in the way. How can I help this situation? I can never tell him outright, but he’s the worst smelling person I’ve ever met, and have to work with. But I do want to work with him. Help.</p> </li> <li> <p>Hey friends, thanks for such an engaging and helpful show, it makes me happy to see every new episode pop up in my feed.</p> <p>My question relates to the politics and drama of a restructure and whether I should follow the time honoured tradition of ‘quit your job’ or stick this out.</p> <p>Six months ago our new VP of Engineering was hired to work remotely in a city across the country and decided that the first order of business was to restructure our three Engineering teams into one mega team with new management and a matrix structrure. This meant 15 Principals, Senior Engineers and Product Managers decided it was ‘time to move on to a new challenge’ and are now being replaced by the VPs ex-colleagues in the city across the country. All our processes are being thrown away to do things ‘their way’, new Jira boards, new Confluence pages, new file locations, new AWS accounts, new hiring processes, new everything. The new folks are getting the pick of the exciting and high profile projects while those of us who have been around for up to ten years and hold the institutional knowledge are left monitoring and maintaining the fragile work that could really do with some help from the Principals and Seniors.</p> <p>Is this all part of a standard restructure after six months? Should I carry on trying to put on a smile and fall in line or run away as fast as I can?</p> </li> </ol>

<p>In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:</p> <ol> <li> <p>Help! I have a co-worker who can’t get to the point. They keep rambling, throwing in useless jargon, with veiled bragging of their knowledge and accomplishments, and answering questions that weren’t asked; and all in a <em>very</em> monotone voice. My brain starts to zone out now every time they start in to “explain” something.</p> <p>They also somehow survived at the company for 8+ years and have recently become a team lead. Our paths don’t cross every day because we work on separate products, but I am interested in their team’s product and might want to join them in a year or so.</p> <p>What do I do?</p> </li> <li> <p>Listener Zezima asks,</p> <p>Hi! I’ve been at my current job for about a year and a half now. My boss says we should be getting more money and investors and will soon give everyone a raise. I’ve seen many people being hired and others given a raise but have not yet received one myself. I recently started applying to other jobs. I don’t want to leave but want to learn my market value and get a slight increase. I was demoing some work in a meeting, and sharing my screen to do so. As I went to upload an image…. my RESUME file is open. <code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">resume,coverletter,resumeadobe,resumeTesla</code>. I mashed the cancel button and bounced in to panic mode but continued like nothing happened. I hear some typing shortly after closing. Did they see it? Are they talking about me…? Do they know I dont want to leave but just want some sort of compensation? These questions are going through my brain and I have no clue what to do. Should I call up the people in the demo and have a heart to heart?</p> </li> </ol>

<p>In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:</p> <ol> <li> <p>Hi, thank you for the great podcast!</p> <p>I work for a software consultancy as a senior product manager. For 5+ years, our team of 40 designers, developers and QA has designed, built, deployed, and operated a large SaaS platform. We are passionate about evolving the product, know the domain well and managed to improve a lot of processes in the client’s company. We go way beyond “just development”.</p> <p>The problem is that the client’s internal staff treats us poorly, especially when it comes to product decisions. As a product manager, I have all the responsibilities of a respective in-house specialist, but almost no power. When I refuse to prioritize a feature that does not make sense based on data and user research, the client’s customer success reps go crazy and escalate it to the CEO. I have seen email threads where internal employees call us “offshore resources”…</p> <p>How can I change this situation? I don’t want to leave this job because I really like the product I am working on, as well as the team.</p> <p>Thank you!</p> </li> <li> <p>Connor asks: “I recent round of layoffs at my company has me thinking about my future as a software engineer. Every layoff I’ve been through, the more tenured employees are the ones let go. I also, generally speaking, haven’t seen a lot of older software engineers (50+) in the companies I have worked for. I love programming, but can I reasonably expect to stay employable in this field for the next forty years?</p> </li> </ol>

<p>We’re excited to have special guest <a href="https://twitter.com/mipsytipsy">Charity Majors</a> on the show! Charity is the CTO and former CEO of <a href="https://www.honeycomb.io">Honeycomb</a>. She has worked at Second Life, Parse, Facebook, and more. She blogs at <a href="https://charity.wtf/">charity.wtf</a>.</p> <p>Dave, Jamison, and Charity answer these questions:</p> <ol> <li> <p>I’ve had the role of tech lead informally for the past two years at a fast-growing tech startup. We were a team of 6 developers, and now we are 16. Recently, we had a department meeting in which the Software Development VP communicated that we have 3 teams and I was the tech lead of two of them. I was surprised. He hasn’t mentioned his decision of splitting the teams nor that I’ve been officially promoted to tech lead. I was expecting a one-on-one where he would “pop the question”: Will you be my tech lead?</p> <p>I asked him privately if that meant I would be officially promoted and would have my title changed. He said that he was going to have this conversation with the HR Manager and would get back to me, but potentially.</p> <p>He doesn’t spend time on one-on-ones, nor is he very good at managing people although he’s good technically. How weird is this situation? A manager tells his team that they now have a tech lead along some org changes. I haven’t been informed, haven’t had my title changed yet, and haven’t been offered a raise yet.</p> </li> <li> <p>Hi! I love your show and have been listening to it almost since day one. I was an engineer for about 10 years, and I’ve been a manager for about 1 year, and I love my team. They’re high performers, we have a high level of trust. I also like my boss! But the larger org has some issues, and in time-honored Soft Skills Engineering tradition, I plan to quit. I would like to stay in management. So I have these questions:</p> <p>1) My employer is a very large public company. How much should I care about negative headlines and Wall Street’s opinion?</p> <p>2) How long should I stay in my role as a manager before looking for a new job?</p> <p>3) How do I message this to my team when I leave?</p> </li> </ol>

<p>In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:</p> <ol> <li> <p>Hey friends, thanks for such an entertaining show, I look forward to it every week.</p> <p>My question relates to ‘leveling up’ as a developer. I’ve been getting nice feedback for my work on projects and the blog post updates I’ve been writing along the way. This has been noticed by colleagues, managers and the local meetup organising committees in my city. I have now been asked to speak at a number of events internally and in the community. While I am very flattered they enjoy my writing I am not interested in hitting the local ‘speaking circuit’ and would prefer to focus on building, writing and mentoring without getting up on stage.</p> <p>Is it ‘ok’ to say no to speaking when it simply does not spin my wheels or is this a mandatory ‘thing’ I must get on board with to progress my career?</p> </li> <li> <p>I am a tech lead on a team where, for the most part, people are friendly, optimistic and professional. There is one engineer who is mostly upbeat and has shown real potential but in certain contexts, e,g, retros and the odd technical conversation becomes a crippling black hole of negativity. The person in question is quite young, relative to the rest of the team, has only ever worked at our company, they are well compensated and have great opportunities to work on exciting green field projects, every developers dream right?</p> <p>What could I be missing? I don’t want to lose this person but I can’t help but feel that they need to grow in maturity and somehow, despite pointed feedback, that’s not happening here.</p> <p>What do you think I should do to stop the chronic pessimism, which I’m afraid if not rectified soon will lead to more victims?</p> </li> </ol>

<p>In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:</p> <ol> <li> <p>I’ve been recently looking for summer internships and I have had a couple of video interviews. I don’t consider myself an interview rookie since I’ve had my fair share but there is one question I can’t understand whether to answer honestly or not so here it goes: “Are you applying to other job opportunities?”. The question is kind of stupid since no one puts all of its eggs in one basket but on the other hand I’m afraid answering ‘yes’ will make it seem as if I don’t care about the company (spoiler alert: I don’t really care :)). How do I answer honestly to this question and at the same time make them feel like they are special? By the way, love the podcast!</p> </li> <li> <p>Hi guys! I just started listening to your show and I already have experienced a steep improvement from a puny 10x dev to 11x one. My question, if you’ll be kind enough to answer is: How do I convince my cheapskate boss to sponsor me flying across the pond to give a talk at a conference I was selected for. Should I sponsor it myself in case of a decline? Should I hint at a possible job quitting if I am declined (I am currently seeking a new job)? Should I go forward with the talk if I do quit and the content of the talk is largely about the job I did there in the last couple of years.</p> <p>Note, I am widely regarded as an excellent employee by my superiors and colleagues. I earn quite a bit less than my current value and I am currently back, looking for a job.</p> <p>That’s it from me, love you guys!</p> </li> </ol>

<p>Hey, want to use Dropbox as your app’s production database? Well, <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/eaphr8/a_dropbox_account_gave_me_stomach_ulcers/">check here</a>.</p> <p>In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:</p> <ol> <li> <p>Hello Dave & Jamison, first of all thank you for the show! I recently moved to a tech lead position and as such I will be asked by many people to provide feedbacks for performance reviews and promotions. Do you have any tip on how to provide good feedbacks, especially in the cases where you don’t constantly work with the interested people?</p> </li> <li> <p>Hello, guys! Thank you so much for the amazing content produced. I really enjoy the show. Thanks for the laughs and the knowledge.”</p> <p>I am a backend software developer working on a multidisciplinary team. There’s this other developer that really gets on my nerves. To maintain my sanity I am asking to change teams, and people keep asking me why I want to change. Should I tell my manager the real reason or is it better to say that I want new challenges? Maybe my manager can solve the problem and no one else leaves the team (I am not the first one to leave for this reason)</p> </li> </ol>

<p>In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:</p> <ol> <li> <p>I’m an introverted person but am not afraid to present my work and have strong 1-1s. For the past few months, I’ve been working on a project with a coworker who is very extroverted and expressive compared to me. During meetings with higher ups to present our work and progress, he overpowers me in conversation unwittingly. Most of the time, I feel he does a good job but other times I notice that he makes claims without gathering all the data. I’m much more deliberate and will let people know if I’m uncertain about something; But he is willing to just say something outright then later apologize if he was incorrect. I want to make sure that in meetings, I don’t come across as weak. I’m pretty confident in my technical ability and am polite at work, but don’t think I come across as very approachable due to my lack of expressiveness. Is this something I should work on?</p> </li> <li> <p>Hey Jamison and Dave! I absolutely love your show and have listened to every episode. You guys keep me company on those commutes to work and keep me sane. Every quarter, we have an organization-wide demo. Usually, it’s one person demoing the feature - usually the person who has been working on it most recently. For some of the features, I put in a lot of hard work and time into the feature but was later moved off to another project after completing my part. Essentially, I wrote the foundation of the whole feature. However, everyone has long forgotten that I ever contributed to it and I only found out it was even being demoed on the day of. I feel really disappointed my efforts aren’t recognized, but is it too petty to care? From a career standpoint, I worry that the person demoing will get a lot more visibility from leadership and it will lead to faster career growth for them. What are your thoughts? Thanks!</p> </li> </ol>

<p>In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:</p> <ol> <li> <p>My company is a startup and they’re super unorganized. I’m a junior-mid level engineer, and when I was onboarded, there was no documentation for how to run anything. I wrote a bunch of documentation and also made some PR templates to try and organize PRs. I’m super annoyed because things are constantly being messed with in our schema, and I don’t realize what we’ve changed until it correlates to a different issue that I’m trying to fix and then have to redo the fix because there’s this new change. What can I do to help my company?</p> </li> <li> <p>I’m a lead engineer at a small but growing startup. I work primarily on skunkworks projects. My teammate and I are feeling constantly underwhelmed by the performance of the rest of the engineering team, who are working on the core app. Their work causes limitation for us, makes the engineering team look ill-equipped, and we cant seem to make old dogs learn new tricks. How do we make it more apparent to the team, and the rest of the company, that it’s time to “level up” the engineering domain as a whole.</p> </li> </ol>

<p>In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:</p> <ol> <li> <p>Hi, I’m a software engineer who’s recently been promoted to a technical lead. I accomplished this mainly through work ethic, dedication to improving my skillset, a couple of large/notable projects, and some minor internal networking. After going through the promotion process, it’s become apparent how valuable it is to establish strong relationships with peers and seniors in your field.</p> <p>What advice or recommendations do you have for establishing these relationships within a company and how would you go about seeking a more senior engineer or leader to mentor you? Also, thanks for all your hard work - been listening to your episodes for the past 6 months and finding them very enlightening!</p> </li> <li> <p>I just got my annual performance review at work. The overall rating was “meets expectations”, but I worked really hard this year and thought I did great work. I was hoping for a higher rating than that. Maybe worse, this means I got a smaller raise than I expected. The review contained some suggestions for improvement. I feel pretty demotivated by the whole situation. How do I get out of this funk?</p> </li> </ol> <p>You can get in touch with Jeff Leiken at <a href="https://www.evolutionmentoring.com/">https://www.evolutionmentoring.com/</a>.</p>

<p>In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:</p> <ol> <li> <p>I work in a charity as an iOS developer and there is so much drama in the office about anything. I am so scared to talk with my backend engineer about work that we created a non-company slack workspace. This is how we communicate, even though we sit right next to each other. Please send help.</p> </li> <li> <p>I work in a company that’s around 10 years old with 1800 employees that started implementing agile methodologies a few years ago. It was great and improved the work, but now all the agile coaches are pushing to have physical boards and doing things apparently just to justify their own existence. I agree we all should try new methodologies but shouldn’t it always be based on a problem we are trying to solve? And shouldn’t all the team be on board with the change instead of just doing it because the agile coach wants to?</p> </li> </ol>

<p>In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:</p> <ol> <li> <p>Hello there!</p> <p>To say things pretty directly, I hate the recruiting process in software engineering, especially coding tests on whiteboard during interviews. It makes me very nervous and I already missed a job opportunity because I could not handle my stress correctly. Plus I think that the problems asked in those interviews are irrelevant to the day-to-day job, which means that I need to study again sorting algorithms and tree balancing every time I want a new job. How do you deal with those interviews? Do you do heavy preparation? Do you think that the interview process is stupid too? Should the permanent access to StackOverflow be stated as an elementary dev’s right :D ?</p> <p>Thank you very much, keep on the excellent job :)</p> </li> <li> <p>I’m in my mid 30s and have been coding for about 20 years, I have a non-technical bachelor’s degree and have had a fairly varied career. I did freelance web development work throughout college, and then after college had a couple of different jobs as the sole in-house web developer for two different small media companies. After that I spent some time running my own web dev/design business with some partners, freelanced some more, and then finally decided to get on the career track about 4 years ago. At that point, I ended up taking a remote developer job at a small company of about 8 people with no real hierarchy or management structure and worked there for 3 years.</p> <p>About 6 months ago, I moved on from there to what now feels like my first “real” job at a tech focused company (still remote), and while I’m happy with the work and compensation, I’m realizing that I’m at the bottom of the software developer hierarchy and there are many people above me who are a fair bit younger and, I assume, less experienced than I am. I don’t mind being subordinate to younger devs, but I do feel like my career is a good 5 or 10 years behind where it should be because until now I haven’t worked in an environment where it has been possible to earn a senior, lead, or management title. I’ve been coding for a long time and am very interested in moving up the ladder, leading a team and working more at the product level. Do you have any advice for how I can accomplish this quickly and make up for lost time - especially considering I’ve only been here for 6 months?</p> </li> </ol>

<p>In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:</p> <ol> <li> <p>Hi! I am 29 years old and a couple of years ago I decided to turn my career around by going from teaching history to frontend development. After 2 years of education I am now doing my first internship in small but established company. I have the feeling I will soon be offered a full-time position.</p> <p>How can I ask for the best job offer (salary-wise) accordingly to my age but few experiences? I don’t want to be perceived as ungrateful, nor be exploited and get underpaid.</p> </li> <li> <p>How do you know that you are a senior engineer? Not just the title you are given, but when do you really feel like one? Some people relate this to experience, but you can be coding or doing crappy stuff for 10 years so for me this is not the answer.</p> </li> </ol>

<p>In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:</p> <ol> <li> <p>Hello! I am the only principal architect in my department. In addition to technical and delivery obligations, I am also responsible for mentoring of engineers. Recently, I reviewed some very lackluster customer facing presentation materials drafted by a junior engineer (for which I provided templates and talking points) and informed them this would need to be worked again from scratch. I received verbal confirmation that the effort was indeed lacking, and that they would take a different approach. Imagine my surprise when I was pulled into an HR meeting by my manager, telling me a formal complaint was filed for my being ‘belligerent’. Also mentioned to me was that this engineer would be leaving the company because they couldn’t possibly continue to work with me. Now might be a good time to mention we are a completely remote team and this is the first negative feedback this engineer received from me (due to having only been on the team for 2 weeks at that time). This individual has moved into a different group which I work with often, but now I’m concerned about having someone on the team who cannot handle direct (but professional) criticism. How do I handle this professional relationship going forward? P.S. this engineer is nearly 40 and we are consultants in 100% customer facing roles.</p> </li> <li> <p>Hi Soft Skills Advisors, I think I may have been ““soft demoted”” at the start-up I work at. I used to be part of the senior management of the company as the most senior technical member of the staff. However, due to a series of unfortunate mistakes on my part (both technical and managerial), I seem to be no longer trusted or included in any discussions or decisions. I feel like I’m demoted from my position in everything but official title. And yet, everyone in the senior management reassures me that they still very much value all my contributions.</p> <p>Is it time to take the time-honored soft skills advice and “quit my job”, or am I just being unnecessarily emotional and paranoid here and it will just take some time to rebuild trust?</p> <p>(I’m paid a good salary and still have my stock options, etc.)</p> </li> </ol>

<p>In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:</p> <ol> <li> <p>How do you quit when you’re indispensable to the team?</p> <p>I am the lead developer at a startup. I have a small team of 3 developers under me. I am essentially the “person who wrote all the code”. I have an offer from another startup for more money and more percentages of the company and they want me over there asap.</p> <p>I’m afraid to quit this startup as I fear that it’s not yet at a place where it could survive without me. I realize that sounds super egotistical but unfortunately I don’t have a successor ATM and none of the other developers are at a level where I could potentially train them to be my successor in the time frame I have with the other offer.</p> <p>The other sticky thing is that the current startup probably doesn’t have enough money to hire someone at my level for what they’d actually be worth. I, and the rest of the team, are severely underpaid, as this is a bootstrapped startup. Love your show, would love to hear your guys’ take on this.</p> </li> <li> <p>I recently interned at a local factory to help clean up some broken 20 year old databases. After remaking them, I quickly became a rising star and word spread fast of my aptitude. I was offered a full time salary position, in which I was able to negotiate for some special privileges and a cool title: software engineer.</p> <p>I am having an awesome time building little tools for various departments while learning different languages. I’ve been very fulfilled with the projects and recognition I’ve been getting, there’s just one problem: the IT department absolutely despises me. They see my sole existence as an affront to their entire structure. I am a part of the engineering team and work very closely with product and process engineers, which is apparently hurtful to their ego.</p> <p>Lately, IT has been actively obstructing every project I work on and refusing many requests, sometimes with obviously false excuses. I do not have admin privileges, I have limited internet access, I’m not even allowed to have my email password. It’s at a point where I start getting serious anxiety when I need to see IT (e.g. to install a framework or IDE extension).</p> <p>How can I navigate these awful encounters without letting it harm my view on the rest of the job? I am feeling like I need to wage war but I want to retain my golden boy status.</p> </li> </ol>

<p>In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:</p> <ol> <li> <p>I work in a small team under 10 people on a new project that should be shipping soon. I have a manager who is leading this project, and I’m the most senior developer on the team.</p> <p>My manager tries to help with the project by writing code, but does it rather poorly. When he wants to implement new functionality, he creates a new branch and brews his code in this branch for 2-3 months, constantly complaining how hard it is to write code in our codebase. After he is done, the resulting code is unreadable, unmaintainable and untestable. He doesn’t write unit tests himself (which is weird, considering he was working as a QA before for several years) and usually breaks good portion of already written ones. I always have to go to his branch and refactor his code so it’s at least testable, fix broken unit tests and write new ones for his functionality. He always makes it look like our codebase is hard to work with, though the rest of the team doesn’t have this problem.</p> <p>How should I deal with this situation?</p> <p>I tried speaking to him directly, but he is pretty stubborn and thinks that he is doing everything perfectly.</p> <p>I can’t talk to his manager, since we have a pretty flat company and his manager is the CEO who I don’t have a direct access to.</p> </li> <li> <p>I work in a digital agency as part of team of 5 front end developers with varying levels of experience. We don’t have a senior / lead / director, it’s pretty flat. I have been told by management that we need to work on peer to peer mentor-ship because each of us have been guilty at some point of spinning our wheels on some problem when we should have reached out. The problem is we all work on different projects, there’s never 2 ““fed””s building the same site, and each site kind of feels like it’s own unique bowl of spaghetti.</p> <p>If you have any pointers about breaking out our code bubbles that would be amazing! Love the show, I hadn’t given non technical skills much thought but you’ve opened my brain! Thank you!</p> </li> </ol>

<p>In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:</p> <ol> <li> <p>My team often goes out to lunch; I almost always bring a lunch from home. They invite me to come with them, but it feels weird, since I won’t be purchasing a meal from the restaurant. Should I swallow (pun intended) my pride and go with them anyway, or decline their offer? I would bring lunch less frequently, but it’s difficult to predict what days they are going out together.</p> </li> <li> <p>I’ve been a software engineer for 7 years and it recently occurred to me that product management would be an interesting and fulfilling field that I’d like to give a shot. Is this something I should discuss with my engineering manager or director, or other product managers at my company?</p> <p>While I think it’s possible these people might be able to help me, my anxious mind can think of many ways that advertising I want help transitioning out of my current role could go badly. I also happen to be fully remote, so I don’t have many opportunities to bring these things up in more casual settings. I doubt I’d be able to get hired as a PM at another company without prior experience, so getting help from co-workers or management at my current company seems pretty important. Do either of you know anyone who’s made this jump? Any tips on getting help without pushing too hard or creating problems for myself?</p> </li> </ol>

<p>In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:</p> <ol> <li> <p>I recently took a job at a start-up as the only front-end developer. The distinction of front-end and back-end is new to me as all of my previous experience has been full stack development.</p> <p>Most of my work can only be started once a back end developer has done their part. There is only one back end developer who just so happens to be one of the co-founders of the company. Because he can’t exclusively dedicate his time to back-end work due to his other roles with the company, I am left sitting at my desk writing to you guys trying to figure out what to do with all this free time I suddenly have. I’d like to stay busy and not just look busy.</p> <p>I’d appreciate any advice to help get me busy again!</p> </li> <li> <p>Hey Dave and Jamison, love the show. Quit my job twice since I started listening so I’m a super fan.</p> <p>Long story short, I think I’m bored with coding(?). I just see everything as moving JSON around. Putting it in databases or putting it in queues or on a screen. I’ve done mobile, I’ve done backend, I’ve done front end, and it all just starts to look the same after a while. As an industry I feel we’ve solved the hard problems and now its degraded to this.</p> <p>What do I do next? Do I find a software product where the JSON moving around excites me (for example, a social good or cutting edge product)</p> <p>Do I look at something very different like embedded dev or games dev? (No JSON there!)</p> <p>Or do I look to tech leadership or people leadership? These options appeal but I’m just five years into my career and 26 years old and of course no one takes me seriously, naturally.</p> <p>However, I have been very deliberate and been very intense about my career, but now I’m feeling a bit done with coding. Team velocity problems interest me more than JSON APIs. People interests me more than code.</p> <p>I’d love to hear any of your thoughts on this! Thanks :D Keep up the great work.</p> </li> </ol>

<p>In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:</p> <ol> <li> <p>How do I inspire attention to detail in my co-workers?</p> <p>I’ve been frustrated with another developer on my team who pays a lot less attention to detail and it results in many bugs that I end up fixing, and sloppy commit history which makes debugging issues more difficult. I received a suggestion from a mentor to reframe my thinking from: I failed to enforce good practices, to, I failed to inspire good practices.</p> <p>Having approached the zen master, I’m hopeful for your additional advice / humour, what are some actions that I can take to help me on this path of inspiring vs enforcing?</p> </li> <li> <p>I am planning to move to a new city for my significant other to get another job, and will likely need to leave my current job to do so. Should I tell my manager up front when we start looking for new jobs or wait until we are actually moving?</p> </li> </ol>

<p>In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:</p> <ol> <li> <p>Hello! I love listening to your show. I often relisten to old episodes. I’m a Front End Developer at an IT consulting company. I will be reaching my 1 year anniversary at the company in March (it’s September right now). How do I talk to my manager about a promotion? I would like to become a Sr front end Developer. I have never had to have this conversation because I have always changed jobs before reaching 1 year with the company. I need help on how to start the conversation. Thank you!</p> </li> <li> <p>A member of my team asked for a promotion; we discussed and it was decided that if we worked on a set of core skills we could push for the promotion in a few months time. Since this conversion they have lacked motivation and productivity has dropped. What should I do now?</p> </li> </ol>

<p>In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:</p> <ol> <li> <p>One of my co-workers never does their job in time and always postpones things. We are both leaders in the company. Especially when we depend on each other, it becomes really difficult.</p> <p>I tried many things like taking over their tasks, reminding them (in person, in Slack), escalating to their manager etc. None of these worked.</p> <p>As a different strategy, I organized a workshop with leaders to brainstorm how to collaborate and work together. That was really positive. We talked about each other’s responsibilities. This person was active in the workshop. Contributed and also agreed on many things. I felt really positive after this. :)</p> <p>But then shortly after, I ended up with frustration again. Nothing actually changed. Agreeing is easy but taking actions is not.</p> <p>Please give me recommendations other than quitting my job or waiting this person to quit. 😅</p> </li> <li> <p>I work remotely for an on-site company. How do you manage that relationship?</p> </li> </ol>

<p>In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:</p> <ol> <li> <p>I started working at a big fintech company doing cutting edge work. I was given a ton of responsibility (owned a major component, built it from scratch, manage external relationships with vendors, had a team of 3 engineers, filed a few patents). I was extremely successful at this role but I was working 60 hours a week. Even though I was successful, I felt like I didn’t have good work life balance.</p> <p>I left and joined a well established tech company with 600 engineers. I’ve been here almost 1 year now and looking back I’ve only worked on menial feature work and software maintenance. Now I work 30 hours a week and have great work life balance. I feel like I gave up a great opportunity with my old role. How do I make the most of this role? How should I tell my manager I’m not happy? should I just look for a new job?</p> </li> <li> <p>How and when do you ask about or gauge work life balance in a job interview? I recently got to round 4 of an interview and a developer told me that a person wouldn’t do well at this company unless you put in a lot more than 8 hours per day and the CEO rewarded those who stay late at night. This indicated a bad work life balance to me so I didn’t proceed any further.</p> <p>Does it look bad to bluntly ask an interviewer “what’s the work life balance like” or ask about this in round 1? Do you think I am lazy?</p> </li> </ol>

<p>In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:</p> <ol> <li> <p>I am a junior developer with a low salary but I’m happy with my job.</p> <p>Recently, a personal/family problem occurred I needed more money to pay for it. I am three months away from my EOC (end of contract).</p> <p>I’ve found a job referral from my dear friend with higher salary and more benefits and I’m planning to apply. But after told my manager about my plans on leaving they told me they wanted to assign me to a top priority project they thought I could handle. I am so worried to disappoint them.</p> <p>They’re offering a raise but it’s not close to the other job. I’m afraid to ask for more because I don’t feel confident with my skills and I believe other people deserving it more. What are your thoughts?</p> </li> <li> <p>Hi guys, I am starting up a company in a few weeks together with a friend of mine. I’ll be the only developer in our new firm (for now!), while he’s got the domain knowledge. I’m not so worried about getting the tech stuff up and running. I get no constraints when it comes to the tech stack I choose, which is fantastic!</p> <p>What worries me is how to get into this brand new domain as quickly as possible, so I am able to deliver some value (MVP). Do you have any tips for how to go about this? I know I am not going to be an expert in the field, so at some point I just have to accept that and start coding. Anyways, I’ll learn more on the way..</p> <p>Thanks for a great show btw, Regards from Runar in Norway</p> </li> </ol>

<p>In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:</p> <ol> <li> <p>Hi Dave and Jamison, thanks for the awesome show.</p> <p>How should I conduct myself at software conferences when my dev community heroes are in the midst?</p> <p>I recently attended a conference where one of my developer heroes was in attendance and I was really looking forward to meeting them. I couldn’t muster up the courage to introduce myself. What do you do in these situations to break the ice and not come off as a creeper or a nuisance? It’s a weird feeling to hear someone’s voice on a podcast every week or read their blog posts and feel like you are best friends with them while knowing that the other person has no idea who you are. Am I overthinking this?</p> </li> <li> <p>Recent new listener here and I must say that I love the show and to keep up the good work. My question can possibly be answered with the standard soft skills answer BUT I have my reservations about quitting my job. I work at a consultancy doing work in a niche web development framework that interfaces with an old monolith ERP system that I’m just not excited by but I am very good at creating web applications in.</p> <p>I know eventually these skills will become obsolete, and I had a new job opportunity recently that I decided not to take. Am I being stupid?</p> <p>Should I stay in the niche and hope I can get a newer job in the future where they just accept I can learn new tools?</p> </li> </ol>

<p>In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:</p> <ol> <li> <p>“I’m into my second job of leading a team of software engineers and want to level up my coaching skills. In my first role I accidentally fell into the deep end of management “fun” by taking on a team of 10 people. One of the big problems I faced was being the “go to” or “sign off” person for a lot of different things, and I perpetuated this problem by showering people with my incredible answers (based on my obviously incredible know-it-all-ness) and thus reinforcing my goto factor. I was aware of coaching as a concept then, but didn’t incorporate it into my leadership style, which I believe contributed to my eventual burn out in the role.</p> <p>Over the last year in my current team lead role I’ve been much more deliberate about various aspects of leadership, but my coaching prowess is still struggling. When I’m asked questions by my team, my default response is to jump to a specific answer based on my own opinion, and it’s only afterwards that I slap my forward and yell out “missed coaching opportunity!” (as people near me back away slowly with concerned looks on their faces).</p> <p>What are some effective techniques to try and build a habit of using coaching as a primary means to help my team work through problems?</p> </li> <li> <p>I just became a technical lead for a team at my company. I’ve never held a leadership role like this before. Do you have any advice for how to do a good job?</p> </li> </ol>

<p>In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:</p> <ol> <li> <p>Hello! Love the show ❤️</p> <p>I’m 6 months into my career as a software engineer at a very large company.</p> <p>As a new engineer, I’m often lost and confused, especially since my team is working on a green field project. My mentor is very helpful and patient with me despite all of my questions. I’ve thanked him countless times and publicly called out his support at standup and in front of management basically everyday. But I still feel like this isn’t enough. He’d never say it, but I know I’m such a burden to him and slow down the team.</p> <p>Other than quitting my job to alleviate him from my near-constant “Please help” messages, how can I:</p> <p>1) show him how much his support has meant to me and get him the recognition he deserves</p> <p>2) stop being such a drain on his productivity/life</p> <p>Thank you!!</p> </li> <li> <p>I’m a Senior Software Engineer, and I played the salary game with a recently promoted Mid-Level engineer on my team, who, in a gross violation of the rules, not only volunteered his own salary, but one of another Mid-Level engineer. In retrospect he was a bad one to play the game with.</p> <p>Anyway, it turns out they’re both really close to me now, and are both making a good deal more than I was 5 years ago when I was promoted to Senior. This is mostly (maybe entirely) because I was a horrid negotiator when I first started at the company. It was my first ““real”” job, and it turns out I really lowballed the company during salary negotiations. I’m pretty ready to leave the company (for reasons both personal and professional), but I’ve submitted a talk proposal for an industry conference that takes place 6 months from now. In order to give the talk I’d need to still be employed by the company, so rather than ordering the Soft Skills Engineering Special and quitting my job, I’m going to give it a shot and ask for a 25% raise.</p> <p>My question is what advice do you have for this conversation? I’ve read all the usual ““state your value, don’t make it personal, etc”” stuff, but do you guys have anything else that’s been effective in your experience on either side of this?</p> </li> </ol>

<p>In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:</p> <ol> <li> <p>I’m a Full Stack Developer. I feel undervalued at my current job and I am looking at other opportunities. Many recruiters approach me on LinkedIn with contract-to-hire positions. Usually this means the benefits are not as good as direct hire positions and that the company can just dispose of me when the contract is done (after 6 or 12 months, generally). Salaries seem to be higher when contracting, though. Have you ever worked as a contractor for a large company? Would you recommend it? How likely is it that companies use this type of employment as a way to temporarily hire somebody for a specific project and then get rid of them once it’s done? What signs should I look for to avoid such companies? Does contracting actually make a difference? I live in Oregon, where employment is at-will anyway, so I can get fired at any time without any warning.</p> </li> <li> <p>Hello, I’m a mechanical engineer from Brazil. I really love your podcast. As a mechanical engineer I don’t develop software but I believe the soft skills are important to everyone. I work in an American multinational company and I often talk or send e-mails to the engineers there. However, our culture is different so I don’t know how to behave or how straightforward, informal or political I must be. I’m always afraid of offending someone. What kind of things I never should say or do when dealing with Americans? We Brazilians become friendly and intimate very fast. Do you guys notice these kind of different behavior from different cultures?</p> </li> </ol>

<p>In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:</p> <ol> <li> <p>Hey guys, love the show. I’m starting to realize that our QA engineer lacks some skills required to do their job effectively. It’s now starting to affect my work and I can only see it getting worse. I’ve tried approaching them about their work and given them some pointers on how they can improve. I’ve done several pair programming sessions as well. They are a bit stubborn though and I don’t think they will change until things get a lot worse when they realize their mistakes first hand. We are a small team and I’m the only other member of the team with automated testing experience.</p> <p>Should I be having a discussion with my manager about this? The company is pushing for more automated testing and if the problems are addressed now it would be easier going forward. I’m hesitant to say anything in case I open up a can of hate worms though or get them fired as they are a nice person.</p> <p>P.S. I’ve only been here a couple of months so moving jobs won’t be an answer for me on this one ;D</p> </li> <li> <p>Greetings from Germany,</p> <p>I am coming from the Infrastructure side of things, and we are a team of engineers with 0-3 years of experience getting into DevOps (tm). Often we encounter new tech-stacks that involve a lot of concepts to learn (like AWS, Elastic, CI/CD, System Provisioning). The way we approach these topics leads to some conflicts. Most of my colleagues like to jump into the water and set up production systems based on a mix of trial & error and copy pasting examples form StackOverflow. I on the other hand try to do things a bit slower by learning the basic concepts and applying them together with examples to get a deeper understanding of the system.</p> <p>My approach is slower but often leads to more robust and thought out systems. However it leads to my boss and my colleagues often eyerolling me for seemingly “overthinking” it. But I also see the appeal of the other approach, since it allows for fast results and pleases the stakeholders. But I see a lot of issues and often time consuming restructuring projects coming from that.</p> <p>Should I just give in and swim with the stream while i suppress my inner nerd cracking down on things?</p> <p>Loving your Podcast btw and recommend it to all my fellow tech nerds. :)</p> </li> </ol>

<h2> Vote for Soft Skills Engineering on the Hackernoon Noonies awards for <a href="https://noonies.hackernoon.com/award/cjxrat2ogn51d0b429e2zwy52">best Dev Podcast</a>! </h2> <p>In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:</p> <ol> <li> <p>How do I stop getting angry at other peoples’ code?</p> <p>Often when solving a complicated problem or implementing a feature, I have to modify or at least use systems designed by someone else. Often I find myself thinking ““Why did they do it like this??? This is so dumb!”” and literally getting mad in my chair. This happens no matter who wrote the code, and occasionally I discover that the author of the code was in fact Past Me.</p> <p>I know logically that everyone codes the best way they know at the time. So how do I avoid such a visceral reaction? Is this a common problem? Is this why many programmers seem to be Grumpy? My frustration often derails my focus and makes problems take longer to solve than they need to.</p> </li> <li> <p>What is the right etiquette for a code review for a pull request? I recently had an amazing code review. The reviewer pulled my branch, make a branch for changes he suggested and those changes all led to better and cleaner code. I felt the reviewer really tried to understand my design and test every suggestion before he wrote it. I felt that my code really got respect from the reviewer. However, a lot of my code reviews are just passive aggressive nitpicking like the comment formats are not right, the variable names aren’t clear enough. The worst was when I got a comment saying “this is already implemented” which after hours of figuring out what it meant was a different thing that would not work in my case. It seems like people have different ideas of what code reviews are and the etiquette and the expectations for it. As a reviewer and a reviewee, what should ideally happen in a code review process? Right now most code reviews are exhausting and infuriating experiences.</p> </li> </ol>

<h2> Vote for Soft Skills Engineering on the Hackernoon Noonies awards for <a href="https://noonies.hackernoon.com/award/cjxrat2ogn51d0b429e2zwy52">best Dev Podcast</a>! </h2> <p>In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:</p> <ol> <li> <p>One of my co-workers at the software company I currently work on has an ‘uncommon’ set of beliefs that include, among many other things, a strong mistrust of mainstream science. He is currently very concerned about the effect that Wi-Fi signals have on our health and wants the company to make some changes to our Wi-Fi hubs and our devices’ wireless connection usage. I’ve found in the past that it’s not easy to have a conversation with him about this type of topic. How can I be respectful to him and not undermine our work relationship while not giving in to connectivity inconvenience based on fringe-science beliefs?</p> </li> <li> <p>Hello! I love the show! The humor interjected into real advice (or real advice injected into humor?) makes thinking of boring and scary things like coworker relations or quitting your job sound fun! Everyone should resolve conflict and/or quit!</p> <p>I just started a new gig and I’m running into a situation I haven’t before. We have flexible work hours, but, unlike at previous jobs, people actually use them! I am meant to be pairing with another dev who is working quite different hours than me. I have a couple questions.</p> <p>1) How do we communicate about this clearly? I tried to set expectations at the onset, but it seems we missed the boat. I asked when he works, told him when I work, and it didn’t seem this far off. But on a day we’re supposed to pair, he’s here an hour and a half after me, which means I’ll leave an hour and a half before him.</p> <p>2) How do we make the time together the most effective? How can we turn about six hours of work into something meaningful, given normal distractions of meetings, bathroom breaks, etc?</p> </li> </ol>

<p>In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:</p> <ol> <li> <p>Hey there.</p> <p>I don’t program I administrate in IT but you’re my favorite podcast, awesome job, never stop.</p> <p>I ran into a crazy situation that is WAY above my soft skills ability to deal with so I am seeking wisdom.</p> <p>I was working with someone from HR on a OneNote syncing problem. I asked someone to log in and let me look at the notebook in question that was causing an issue. I saw what I needed and then randomly clicked on another notebook so the problem notebook wasn’t open as I was trying to fix it.</p> <p>Later I approached the HR person to show me how they do something in OneNote. They opened OneNote and the page that opened up was MY employee records! OneNote syncs which page was opened last, which means the page I randomly clicked on when they were logged in on my computer was my employee record, and they knew it!</p> <p>They confronted me about it (not making too huge a deal about it). I tried to explain how I just clicked randomly and I wasn’t snooping, but it felt like everything I said only dug me deeper. I’m having trouble staying in the same room with them because of the shame (entirely internal) and I’m worried if I ever need to look at their PC again they will want full visibility to make sure I’m not snooping (not ideal). I want to make this right, but all I can come up with is honor based suicide rituals. What do I do?</p> <p>Your faithful listener,</p> <p>Stefan</p> </li> <li> <p>I’m an engineer in a small start-up. I work half of each week remotely, half in-person, as do the other engys. One of the other engineers is exceptionally skilled and experienced, way more so than I, but they are not very communicative when working remotely. The leader (understandably) becomes quite nervous as a result, especially since minor health issues have kept this engineer from working full throttle for a couple of weeks.</p> <p>What, if anything, can I do to help the leader trust this engy who doesn’t like to chatter on slack? I think they whole-heartedly deserve trust, and their work is already the backbone of this product.</p> <p>Part of the reason this matters to me is that the leader has expressed wanting to reduce work from home days to alleviate this issue. I love my wfh days, and I have been told that I communicate plenty well when working remote.</p> <p>How can I help alleviate the leader’s fears to protect another engineer’s independence and protect my precious precious remote time?</p> </li> </ol>

<p>In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:</p> <ol> <li> <p>We’ve all been on that tour of that local startup that is showing you around their office pointing out all of the amenities. “Over there? That’s our foosball table!” You notice no one is playing it and the table and players all look very new and haven’t seen much action. You get down to the interview and at the end they ask you if you have any questions for them. “What is the company culture like?” to which they respond: “Did Derek show you our foosball table?”</p> <p>My question is what are the ways to ask this question without actually asking it? No one will respond to a direct inquiry saying: “Culture? Our culture is pretty garbage. You actually probably don’t want to work here at all, if I’m honest…” I’ve yet to find a good way to ask this question and wondering if you have any suggestions here. Love the show - keep up the good work!</p> </li> <li> <p>I have been lucky to have leadership opportunities in the past where I was responsible for the career growth, engagement, mentoring of a handful of team members. I recently started a new job where I am outranked by a recently promoted employee who is brilliant, but lacks some leadership qualities. To make things more awkward, this person does not take feedback well. However, I think I may be able to provide some feedback to help this person grow as a leader. Have you ever been in a similar situation? How would you approach this?</p> </li> </ol>

<p>In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:</p> <ol> <li> <p>I’m so glad I discovered your podcast last week! You guys are hilarious (I laugh to myself in the car) and you talk about issues that I have thought about since coming into the “adult world”.</p> <p>I’m a new CS grad and have started as a new hire at the company I interned with last summer. I’m on my third week of full-time employment but I still feel like an intern. One of my supervisors even jokes and calls me an intern. I know it is a joke, but I feel degraded. I’m the youngest (at 22) and the only woman on my team surrounded by people who have been on the program for 5+ years. The people around me are VERY technical.</p> <p>I have slowly been getting information about what the program does, but it still isn’t clicking as fast as I want it to (compared to what I had experienced in my time at university). I have no experience in and have not learned any of the concepts they have been talking about. I feel that my CS degree does not matter and I feel that I am not competent enough and don’t deserve my place at this company; I’m not as technical as the other employees.</p> <p>I feel that since I have said I have my degree in CS, people expect me to learn fast and be “technical”. Am I setting myself up with unreasonable expectations? How can I prove to myself and to others that I deserve to be a part of the team and the program as a full-time employee?</p> </li> <li> <p>My team works closely with another team, and the manager of that team is…difficult. Most of my interactions with him have resulted in him getting defensive and frustrated, and nearly become arguments. I try pretty hard to remain polite, but we usually don’t accomplish anything.</p> <p>I’m not sure that I want to mention this to my manager, or to his, because I’m worried that word will reach him that I ““tattled””, which will just make things worse. He’s also more senior than me and has been at the company longer, so if this conflict does escalate, I feel the company would probably take his side.</p> <p>I otherwise really like this job, so the age old advice of quitting is not an option here. Besides just trying to avoid any interactions with him, what can I do?</p> <p>Thanks for much for the help.</p> </li> </ol>