Soft Skills Engineering (Jamison Dance and Dave Smith)

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

Questions

1. How do I incentivize people to maintain documentation?

   Getting anything done at this large enterprise company is a massive challenge because documentation is constantly out of date and people only have half the information needed. So much time gets wasted because people have contradicting knowledge about the status of projects, systems, or requirements.

   Should I just quit my job or can this be fixed?

2. Greetings! First off, great show - thanks for the countless episodes, most of which result in me getting weird looks as I chuckle to myself while running and listening. I have a passion for technology which lead me to a career in development. I am very often researching new languages and software that will help us do our jobs and/or lives better in my free time. I get excited about these things I find and want to share them with my co-workers but often get rebuffed by them, asking me why I spend my free time “working”. I know I can’t expect everyone to share my enthusiasm and passion for this stuff, but I am finding it discouraging being on a team where this curiosity is not celebrated/encouraged. I love the company I work for and don’t want to leave, but I find myself becoming more and more disconnected from my team because of this. Any suggestions on how I can share my passion with my co-workers is a way that is mutually beneficial to me and them? Thanks, keep up the great work!

Show notes

Gary Bernhardt’s WAT video from 2012: https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/wat

Jamison and Dave answer these questions:

1. I’m sometimes an informal lead on project teams. How do I help the team get stuff done as a peer?
2. How do I deal with burnout after an extended period of crunch time?

Jamison mentions the blog post by Jamis Buck called To Smile Again where he talks about his experiences with burnout.

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

1. A listener named Scot asks,

   A new architect was hired at my company 6 months ago. I’m an engineer one rung lower on the hierarchy and have been here for 3.5 years. He hasn’t done much to learn about any of us who have been here for a while, so he is constantly undermining my skills and suggestions and assuming he’s smarter than me. On our most recent project we had a lot of issues due to his design, which departed from our best practices. He’s still acting like he knows best and is getting under my skin. Our company usually hires more collaborative people so I’ve not had to deal with this before. How can I stay calm, professional, and confident in my skills while working with this guy?

2. Who is my boss? No, really. I need answers.

   I’m a Principal Developer with so many bosses, I’m starting to wonder if this is a multi-level marketing scheme. My team lead gives me work. His boss gives me work. Every project lead crashes into my inbox like the Kool-Aid Man screaming that their thing is the most urgent. My calendar is a cursed artifact, filled with 20+ hours of meetings a week, where I nod knowingly while my soul quietly exits my body.

   My team lead is a Designer and has no idea what I actually do or the expectations of a Principal Developer, which is convenient, because neither do I.

   When I asked his boss to help me prioritize, I was told, “It’s all important—just make sure mine is done first, and don’t tell the project leads.” Our product owner wants to be anything but a product owner, and our scrum master is treated like the office secretary, not a blocker remover.

   Top it off, I’m now being asked to weigh in on architecture decisions for our tech stack while not being invited to architecture meetings and being told to “just figure it out” when I asked how to structure the documents and diagrams they want. So now I’m behind on doing dev work, pretending to be an architect, and the team I’m meant to be mentoring never see me unless they’re in one of the same meetings I’m trapped in.

   How do I set boundaries and prioritize without causing a nuclear meltdown? Or should I just consult a Magic 8-Ball and let fate decide? Because honestly, I’m one email away from faking my own disappearance and leaving an out-of-office message that says, “No.”

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

1. 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?

2. 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.

Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

1. How do I deal with my new job that turns out to be crappy?
2. How do I know how hard to push back against more experienced engineers when suggesting a new idea?

Thank you to Algolia for sponsoring this episode. Check out their job posting at algolia.com/softskillsengineering.

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

1. This is my first time conducting technical interviews (most of which have been virtual), and I had one interview where I had a strong feeling that the candidate was cheating. They breezed through the short problems I gave them, and they were able to explain their reasoning. But during the live coding problem, they sat in silence for five minutes, and when I asked them what they were thinking, they didn’t respond. Then they started cranking out perfect code without explaining anything.

   How do you address cheating in interviews? What if it turns out to be just nerves? I don’t want to assume anything, but I also wouldn’t feel comfortable confronting them about it either.

2. I work as a team lead for a small group of 4 other devs. Our Product Owner is currently handling the requirements for new features to onboard a new large client. This involves them attending client meetings and generally isolating the development team from client shenanigans which is normally great, but it’s becoming INCREASINGLY obvious that someone on the client team has his number and he’s getting HORRIBLY out-negotiated. This has resulted in a bunch of missing requirements, changing requirements, last minute feature adds, and general confusion. I’m trying to push back, but the leadership team is coming back with “Well we promised…” and my entire team is stressing out. Note that this is AFTER we were already pressured to overcommit on capacity to get these “absolutely necessary” features developed for the client to go live.

   I like my PO, he’s a good guy and normally does good work, what can I do to help him stop from getting his butt kicked in these meetings?

   (Note: the POs are neither above nor below us in the org tree, our closest shared higher-up is the VP and I obviously don’t want to escalate it that far)

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

1. A listener Steve asks,

   How long is too long to wait to be paid?

   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.

   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.

   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.

   My question is still how long before I follow your age old advice?

2. Listener Jess asks,

   ‌

   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.

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

1. ‌About a year ago I joined what it seemed to be the best company ever.

   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.

   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.

   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.

   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.

   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.

   Have you been in this situation, or maybe the opposite one? Not sure what to do at this point.

   Thanks!

2. 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.

   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”.

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

1. I am a junior developer with a low salary but I’m happy with my job.

   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).

   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.

   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?

2. 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!

   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..

   Thanks for a great show btw, Regards from Runar in Norway

Hey, want to use Dropbox as your app’s production database? Well, check here.

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

1. 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?

2. Hello, guys! Thank you so much for the amazing content produced. I really enjoy the show. Thanks for the laughs and the knowledge.”

   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)

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

1. I’ve been an engineer for about 5 years and in the last two jobs, rock-star programmers have made my life very difficult. I define rock star programmers as ones with ability to produce lots of code and implement features at a pace that dwarfs my own. In my last job, the RSP would constantly rewrite core libraries and I would have to figure out his design and rewrite my code to adapt to the new design multiple times.

   In the current job, the RSP is very uncommunicative but with his sheer productivity steers the project into wild directions that are always coming as a surprise. Half the time my work then becomes throw-away because I was working based on the previous design. Am I a slowpoke and I’m seeing a normal programmer as a rock star or are these programmers just slightly above normal programmers but creating lots of work for everyone else?

   Managers are completely starry eyed at RSP and so talking to managers seems like a bad idea. What should I do?

2. How do you feel about sharing salaries amongst your co-workers? I’m about to have my yearly review and I get the sense that my raise (which has already been promised to me) will be underwhelming given how stingy the company has been previously. That is simply a hunch based on previous experience and the fact that our team budgets have tightened up in the past 6 months. Recently a co-worker let it slip what his salary is, and though I don’t like playing the comparison game, it made me feel underappreciated. I discovered that he was making the same salary I was, but for lower quality of work and less contributions to the team. I’ve heard some devs in other companies advocate for sharing salaries amongst their peers, but I’m not sure if it’s a good idea. Will sharing my salary and encouraging my co-workers to do the same, allow for myself and my co-workers to better understand our value and help us negotiate raises? Or will it simply foster resentment and division?

This week Jamison and Dave answer these questions:

1. Could you (Jamison and Dave) share some salary information publicly? It would help to know how much others make.
2. My boss uses an offensive word in technical discussions. How do I ask him to stop?

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

1. Listener Bobby ForgedRequest asks

   One of my coworker, who is the nicest, most humble person I’ve ever met, is about twice as productive as I am! They’re super-uber productive! They close about 2-3x as many tickets as I do during the same sprint. For reference, I’m a software eng II and they’re a senior dev. Their work is very solid too, and they’re not just selecting easy, 1 point tickets to pad their stats.

   How do you cope with a super star teammate like this? Do I direct more questions towards them to slow them down? Do I volunteer them for more design heavy projects? Jokes aside, I’m curious if this is something that you’ve seen in your career, and if you were a manager, would this make you feel like the other, not-super-uber-smart teammate, is just not doing enough? Is the answer as simple as “well, sometimes people are just very, very gifted”?

2. In my previous job of 5 years, I worked only 3 hours a day due to a low workload. Seeking a change for career growth, I switched jobs a few months ago, exposing myself to new technologies. Initially stressful, the pace has slowed down, and there’s no external pressure to learn. Despite getting praise and raises for minimal effort, I aspire to be a smarter software engineer.

   How do I motivate myself to learn and step out of my comfort zone when there’s no apparent reward, considering I’ve easily found new jobs and advanced in my career without exerting much effort?

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

Questions

1. Can you talk about making mistakes at work? How do you handle it, how do you frame it when you talk about it, do you try to minimize or be honest about it, how soon is it to pretend nothing went wrong and you’re doing great, etc. Thanks!

2. Hello there, Huge fan of the show here, I often laugh hysterically listening to it on long commutes and people think I am on drugs.

   I just finished grad school in a foreign country and i am in the middle of negotiating a job offer with a company whose field of expertise is my passion. All seem to be going well and i have a feeling that the company is hugely interested in me. HOWEVER when we arrived at the salary subject i found that WAN… WAN… they want to pay me a fresh graduate salary even though i have 3 years of part-time and 1 year of full-time development experience abroad; i know their decision is not based on my skills as i did not even have to do a technical test (we mainly talked about the tools i used in the past and the work i did related to that field and it was convincing enough).

   As i see the situation, I have 2 options of either take their offer and use it as a learning experience before switching to a well paying company or say No and go on Vettery?

   Let me know what you would do in my case. Merci

Show Notes

Patrick McKenzie’s article on salary negotiation: https://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/01/23/salary-negotiation/

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

Questions

1. 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.

   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?

2. Long time listener, first time caller asker.

   How do I tell my boss I can’t complete a task?

   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.

   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.

   What should I do next time?

Show Notes

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D4tvZJGNIhM
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnolia

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

1. I’m a junior software engineer who has been placed in charge of a handful of graduates and interns who have joined my team. The project is fairly technical.

   For the first two weeks, the new starters were pair programming. That went well, and after talking to each new starter they were eager to start working individually.

   We’re one month in and I’m concerned about the performance of one of the engineers, “Morgan” (fake name). Morgan has completed a degree from a good university we often hire from but appears to lack any knowledge of software development. As a result, Morgan seems to struggle with researching and working through problems beyond following tutorials. I got the impression that while pair programming Morgan didn’t contribute much.

   Is there anything I could do to give Morgan the boost needed to start rolling? I’m sure I could spoon feed Morgan, but it would monopolize my time when I’m already spending time with the other new starters on top of my own tasks.

   I want to give Morgan a shot, but I don’t know what to do. At what point do I tell my manager about my concerns?

   Things I’ve encountered:

   • When told to insert a colon to fix a syntax error, Morgan didn’t know what a colon was.
   • Morgan didn’t take any subjects at university on data structures or algorithms, which made it hard to explain the tree used for caching.
   • Morgan wanted to do some DevOps having done some at university. Morgan appears to have no understanding of Docker.
   • Morgan said they studied React at university but has demonstrated a lack of understanding to write React code.
   • The last issue Morgan worked on required them to read some source code of a library to verify its behavior. Even after explanation Morgan didn’t understand how to find the calling ancestor of a given function.
   • Morgan has never heard about concurrency.

   Even all these issues in aggregate would be fine with me, but the continual resemblance and behavior of a stunned mullet isn’t encouraging. After being told to research a concept, Morgan must be told the specific Google query to type in.

   Thanks, and apologies for the essay!

2. Listener Confused Cat asks,

   I spent just over four years on a team where technical growth was lacking. Recently, I transitioned to a new team within the same company, and I’m enjoying the atmosphere, the team dynamics, and the opportunity to engage in more challenging software development tasks. Fortunately, my motivation is beginning to resurface.

   However, I’ve noticed that my technical skills have become somewhat rusty. While I can still deliver systems and features, I feel like I’m falling behind compared to some of my peers. This self-awareness is causing me to doubt myself, despite receiving no negative feedback from my current team or supervisor. It’s not just imposter syndrome; I genuinely feel the need to upskill.

   How can I navigate this situation effectively? What strategies would you suggest for advancing my skills while holding a senior position and preventing feelings of inadequacy from affecting my performance?

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

1. I think the new hire on my team is juggling multiple jobs.

   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.

   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.

   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?

2. 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

In episode 12, Jamison, Dave, and special guest Ann Harter answer these questions:

How do I make friends at work? Should I?

I hear a lot about being a good manager but not much about being managed. How do I do that?

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

1. 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?

2. 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?

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

1. I have a question - I sit in a desk with 3 other people. One of those people does a great job of personal hygiene…the other two not so much. I have dropped a couple of hints about it (I mentioned it is a good idea not to wear the same pair shoes/trainers every day so you’re feet don’t start to smell). Some days, my stomach will churn from the smells that inevitably waft over. What should I do - I am worried if I tell my boss to talk to them, he will mark me as a troublemaker/overly sensitive.

   To make things worse, one of them sits opposite and puts his feet under my desk, so the, let’s be frank, absolutely awful stench is right under my nose! :?

   It’s not just feet by the way, we are talking the full BO experience.

2. I was at a interview recently. When being asked for expected salary. I mentioned a number lot more than what the company was expecting. It’s already been a week and I haven’t received a response from them. I really really love the company and the project they are working on. I would love to to contact the HR personal and tell that I am interested in the position even if it means less money. How do I approach the situation? I don’t want to mess it up more than I already have. 🙁

Vote for Soft Skills Engineering on the Hackernoon Noonies awards for best Dev Podcast!

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

1. How do I stop getting angry at other peoples’ code?

   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.

   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.

2. 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.

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

Questions

1. I work as an IC in a team which owns 3 very different and large parts of the system. Our team is 4 experienced engineers and 1 intern. Historically each person was assigned to a single part and, as you might expect, we have a bus factor problem. With this layout we’re making as much progress as possible and it helps us to compete on the market but creates a dangerous situation if someone would decide to leave (spoiler: I will).

   What would you do if you were IC, team lead or a manager in such a team? We’re already exceeding headcount so it’s not an option.

2. I am a developer with 1.5 years of experience, and was put on a greenfield project to rapidly develop a new application. We have a contractor that came onboard to help with the process. On the very first day of meeting this person I noticed their propensity to not allow anyone else to talk and interrupt.

   Fast forward several months and this person has really become a micromanager, they’re requesting the source files from our UI contractor, they got another person kicked off the project because they didn’t like the changes they were making interfering in their development process, they have constantly hoarded all the real dev work and work frequently until 9pm.

   I have voiced my concerns to the PM, mainly about the bus-factor, since layoffs are likely coming and this person likely won’t be converted.

   At this point I am just tuning out on this project. I do the scrap issues the contractor basically doesn’t want, but I am seeking learning opportunities elsewhere within the company and have nearly zero interest in the project which I see as a ticking time bomb.

   What would you recommend? I could potentially escalate the issue to the manager of our team but I basically see working with this individual as toxic and the PM as autopiloting to the finish line.

Show Notes

https://www.computerworld.com/article/2534312/the–640k–quote-won-t-go-away—-but-did-gates-really-say-it-.html - apparently the bill gates quote is apocryphal

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

1. How do I quit my first job if I’m working with a manager I love?

   I started my first full-time job about two years ago and I’m starting to think about looking for a new job, both because I am ready for new challenges and I’m ready to move to a new city.

   I have a great working relationship with my boss, so a part of me wants to tell her about my interest in finding a new job, both so that I could use her for a reference and also so that I can be honest with her about my intentions. She’s been a great boss and mentor to me, so there’s a part of me that doesn’t want to jeopardize our working relationship. But another part of me feels like I might be jeopardizing my presence in my current office if I make it clear that I am looking to move on, especially if my job hunt doesn’t go as smoothly as I hope.

2. How do you deal effectively with rapidly increasing work responsibilities?

   My technical lead was recently promoted to management. Being both ambitious and the only Sr. Engineer without retirement plans in the next 4 months, I immediately stepped into the power vacuum and inverted a binary tree faster than all my coworkers to establish my position as new tech lead. After a few months the other senior engineer on my team retired, and I’ve ended up holding the bag for my new job responsibilities, my old responsibilities as a Sr. Engineer, AND the departed Sr. Engineer’s responsibilities.

   I told my manager how much was on my plate and that I was afraid my work output would suffer, and her response was to throw money hand over fist at me and promise to backfill both Senior positions within the next 12 months.

   How do I get through the next 18 months without losing all my hair? Are there any strategies to make sure the team doesn’t go up in flames when I forget about a key deadline? Or at least position myself so that nobody can tell it is my fault until I can make a subtle getaway in the brand new Ferrari I’m going to buy?

In episode 3, Jamison and Dave answer two questions:

1. What should I look for in a dev team?

2. I don’t get enough done at work. I work on a small team that has aggressive plans for developing its product, but I don’t feel like I get enough work done or move fast enough for the company.

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

1. We are a team of under 10 people who provide technical services to other departments of our organization. We use a tool that is built by my boss to supplement our work but it is crucial for the team to do actual work. The boss maintains it all by themselves and nobody is familiar with its code.

   The boss is going to retire in a year or two, nobody wants to learn the code of that tool and the team can’t do much without the boss as we are more or less just individual contributors writing standalone code and delivering it to other teams who asked for it. Only the boss attends the leadership meetings and the developers are completely unaware of the remaining processes that happen in the background, i.e., communicating with other departments to bring in work, and all that business stuff. I am afraid the team would break apart once the boss retires because nobody knows anything on how our team operates beyond within team level except for the boss. Shall I just plan for the job switch?

2. It’s annual review season! When choosing reviewers, do I a) choose the reviewers that will make me look the best or 2) choose the reviewers who might actually give me actionable feedback?

   If it helps, I am on very good terms with my boss and his boss, as well as most of the C-Suite, and there is no way that I get either a promotion or fired in this review cycle. I have been a top performer in previous review cycles, but I expect that I won’t be reviewed so highly this time around.

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

1. In the past couple of years I transitioned from a freelancer, to a full-time software engineer, to a product owner, to a manager of a small product development team. Due to the relatively rapid changes, I feel I have not had enough time to go particularly deep in my knowledge and experience with any of these roles.

   I’m currently focusing on developing the soft skills needed to be a better manager. I have this nagging feeling though that I should still be developing my technical skills. But in the grand scheme of things, is it still useful for a manager to continue to develop technically in order to provide useful input/guidance on technical decisions? Or would it be better to leave the technical decision-making to the team and instead focus purely on building up the team, supporting members in reaching their career goals, and improving processes? Thanks in advance for your thoughts!

2. Hi! Love the show and recommend it to everyone, even if they’re just asked for directions…

   I’m the Front End Lead at a fast growing startup. I really want to start delegating more, so I decided I’m going to appoint a front end tech lead on each of our teams. I already have my tech leads picked out, but…..

   My problem is with one of the teams. The person most fitting for the job is a very talented, yet very junior developer. This team also includes a very senior developer, which I believe is not fit for the job at all. But the senior developer is looking for a promotion.

   I’ve consulted with my managers and they think passing over the senior dev is basically forcing them out of the company (or at the least, making them a very disgruntled employee).

   Right now i’m holding back my decision just because of this. Please help me!

   Thanks :-)

Show Notes

• https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/paperclip-maximizer
• https://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/
• https://charity.wtf/2019/01/04/engineering-management-the-pendulum-or-the-ladder/
• https://charity.wtf/2017/05/11/the-engineer-manager-pendulum/

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

1. “I’ve been assigned a ticket to “add more friction to the downgrade process” in order to decrease the amount of downgrades our app has.

   The proposed change has 4 modals pop up before the user can cancel their paid plan.

   I would like to push back on this change.

   Any tips on how to bring up the fact that this is potentially unethical / a dark pattern?”

2. I work for a mega corp software company as a senior engineer. My boss and I have been working on a promo for me to principal for the last year (I was passed on for the last cycle and so we are trying again in a cycle next year - aka still 8 months away). I previously was in the top 5 PR contributors in our org of 450 engineers, but we were reorged and I haven’t written a single line of code in 3 months. I enjoy doing architecture work and helping unblock teams with technical design solutions, but I’m not sure if not writing code is helping or hurting me. Is it just part of career growth that engineers at a certain level stop writing code and it’s a good sign for my seniority? Or is a big fat zero code contributions a red flag and I need to look for a role where I’m still shipping things myself?

We’re excited to have special guest Charity Majors on the show! Charity is the CTO and former CEO of Honeycomb. She has worked at Second Life, Parse, Facebook, and more. She blogs at charity.wtf.

Dave, Jamison, and Charity answer these questions:

1. 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?

   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.

   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.

2. 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:

   1) My employer is a very large public company. How much should I care about negative headlines and Wall Street’s opinion?

   2) How long should I stay in my role as a manager before looking for a new job?

   3) How do I message this to my team when I leave?

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

Questions

1. Hey Dave & Jamison,

   I have a problem with a more senior engineer in my project, I cannot really predict or follow his thought process.

   They introduced best practices about organizing code, Git branching, software versioning, etc. to the project. Which is great, because I like well-defined processes. And I followed those processes happily.

   Now, there are some occasions where the senior engineer violates one of the processes.

   When they do that I ask why, then they give me the reason and I nod because I think that make sense.

   Fast forward a little, and I also choose to violate the process the same way, for the same reasons. During the code review, the senior engineer rejects my approach because it “does not make sense”. SurprisedPikachu.jpg

   I tried a few times to challenge them in these situations but more often than not they either stood their ground or gave the “agree-to-disagree” nod which demoralizes me. So now, I’m inclined to just follow what they say if this situation happens.

   I understand that there is some nuance for a certain thing to go a certain way, but when this happens I am always left puzzled and spend time re-calibrating the idea/approach.

   What is the best way(s) to deal with these kind of people?

   Anyway, love the show and keep up with the good work!

2. Do you think that a job that helps you constantly grow is more important than a job that promises titles?

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

Questions

1. What should I expect from a junior develop, and how can I help them grow?

   A junior developer joined my team of 4 a few months ago. He has learned things at a reasonable speed but it is still hard for him to implement new features without any help or existing code to copy.

   In past jobs, I usually gave juniors simple, easy tasks, but we don’t have that simple tasks in my current job because we’re working on complicated internal systems.

   Also other junior developers spent lots of their private time learning. I don’t think this junior has spent any time learning in his private time.

   I don’t want to ask them to learn in their private time, but I just can’t help feel annoyed about the fact that he still cannot pick up a well-defined task in our backlog and complete it by himself. I think he really needs to take some time learning some basics like networking and some skills like keyboard shortcuts of text editors. I know there is lots to learn. However, sometimes I lose my patience when I have to repeat myself.

   In addition to lack of knowledge and skills, I feel that he always waits somebody to tell him what to do and explain everything to him. I tried to tell him the whole picture of the project before explain a specific task, but I couldn’t see any improvement.

   What could I do to help him (or make myself feel better)?

2. I’ve worked with 3 managers in the past 2 years at my first company and all of them seem to have trouble producing results from team meetings and one on ones. More specifically, my managers have mentioned things/events/changes they would plan to do with the team or me and several weeks/months go by and the idea is never mentioned again. At times it felt like maybe it was me that was unable to produce the outcomes of said ideas or that maybe I was some sort of a lost cause. However, my most recent manager doubled the ratio of ideas:results, so I don’t think it’s just me. For my one on ones, we have a long running list of things we talk about and even the trail there doesn’t seem to amount to anything.

   How do I hold my manager accountable for things they say or plan to do? How do I bring up these conversation on one-on-ones without making it seem like I’m the one managing them?

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

1. “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.

   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).

   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?

2. 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?

In this re-run of episode 79, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

1. It seems like my teams always miss their story point commitments. Is this normal? How do you change it?
2. How do you actually measure developer productivity?

The article comparing research on productivity in static and dynamic type systems is here. It is a great read.

Jamison also mentions Goodhart’s Law. Read more about it here.

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

1. NK:

   Hi, I am starting a SWE internship at big tech company in a few weeks. Given the current state of the market, getting a return offer has gotten harder. I have a few software internships under my belt at this point but I am looking to excel in this internship. My goal is to get a full time offer with high pay from this internship. What are the soft skills that are specifically important for interns? This is probably applicable to junior engineers as well.

2. Hello Soft Skills, I’m a junior engineer who transitioned from an intern to a full-time role at my company a year ago. I anticipated training in development, but I’m stuck in a low-value automated QA role without proper leadership or team integration. My efforts to improve processes and change teams haven’t been successful, and I’m concerned about being pigeonholed early in my career. I need advice on how to initiate change with limited authority and create a competitive job application despite my limited traditional development experience.

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

1. Hello,

   First of all, I love the show, thank you so much for the amazing work!

   I always think I’m going to be fired.

   I’m an extremely anxious person so I feel the need for constant feedback and for someone to tell me everything is alright. Minor problems send me into absolute despair. How can I deal with such anxiety?

   I frequently ask my manager during 1x1s if everything is alright and how I’m performing and he almost always says things are going well.

   In our 6-month performance reviews I get more detailed feedback on what I’m doing well and what I can improve. This makes me feel less anxious because I know exactly what my boss is thinking. Even if something has to be improved, at least I know it.

   Are there any indicators I can use to tell if I’m about to be fired or if my manager is happy with my work? I’ve told my manager about my anxiety and that I’d like constant feedback. That has helped, but I was hoping to get more detailed feedback. Preferably this feedback would make me able to tell, in a scale from 0 to 100, how well I’m performing.

   Thank you very much!

2. Hey Dave and Jamison, love the show your insight.

   I have been having a problem on my team that I hope you can help with.

   We are a team of engineers that have internal customers. It’s a bit of a back end of the back end role.

   The problem is NONE of the other engineers are customer focused. They don’t engage with the real needs of our customer teams. Tickets come in, they do what’s in the ticket as it reads exactly and we end up with requirements getting lost, tickets needing to be reopened and our reputation going down the tubes.

   I have taken it on myself to engage with the customer and help them out. BUT, now I have become a glorified customer service rep and I can’t do much of my own work because I’m passing messages back and forth between engineers who don’t like to talk to their customers.

   My manager says the team needs training and he is going to work on it with them, but this has been going on for months. Should I take the Soft Skills advice of ‘Quit your Job’, or continue being a middleman?”

This week Jamison and Dave answer these questions:

1. A developer on a team I lead doesn’t seem interested in growing. How do I help them engage more?
2. I gave two weeks notice, but was told part of the way through to not come in any more. I still had work left and this made me feel bad. Is this common? Did I do anything wrong?

Jamison talks about the Khan Academy engineering culture. He kinda misquoted it though. They don’t explicitly say they lay people off who don’t progress.

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

1. 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.

   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.

2. 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.

   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.

   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?

   Thanks so much and keep up the good work! Feelin’ Guilty

   P.S. Do you feel that this industry naturally rewards lack of loyalty and connection? What do you feel about that?

This episode is sposored by OneSchema, the best way to build CSV import into your product.

Check OneSchema out at https://oneschema.co/softskills

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

1. Morning! I will cut straight to the chase: I’m burned out and tired. At the same time, I’m aiming to get a promotion during the next cycle. My manager is aware of the latter, but not the former. Should I tell them? I suspect that I would get a lighter work load and less responsibilities, but it might also impact my chances at getting a promotion. The project I’m working is a “high stakes, tight deadlines” mess. I usually would just take a week or two of PTO, but the tight deadlines make it hard. Do I grin and bear it till promotion cycle (another 4-6 months) or just tell my manager and risk losing the rewards?

2. I’m about to get promoted to L6, what my company calls Lead Engineer, but I have to move to another team for it to happen. The other team already has a few people who are applying for that same promotion, and they got skipped over for my promo. They’ve also been devs longer than me. (4 years for me) So, I’m worried about tension on that team when I join.

   On top of that, I’ll be learning this role too! How can I make room for myself to have failures and make poor decisions, while also not undermining my expertise? How can I step into this lead role while not stepping on the toes of the engineers already on the team?

   Any tips for someone leading a team for the first time, while also joining that team?

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

1. Kate asks,

   Hi Dave and Jamison!

   I’m in a situation where my predecessor, Jane, was a super helpful “Mary Poppins” type. She did anything and everything beyond her role for the sake of being a team player. I was told she even went as far as providing homemade snacks for meetings.

   I, on the other hand, am a one trick pony; I only do the tasks I’m paid for. I’m often indirectly compared to her and worry I’ll be seen as an inadequate despite doing my duties well.

   Should I go with the “ol reliable”? Or wait to see if her legacy fades? Thank you so much!!

2. I’ve been involved in a project (architecture, design, code review) that has been ongoing for several months now, and I’ve put many hours and days supporting the project success, but only on the engineering side and not the PM. The obligatory announcement email blast came not too long ago, and my name was dropped from the pretty long list of people who have been involved with the different aspects of this project. On one hand, I feel that I should have been acknowledged for my contribution to the project success, especially when exposure to LT is at play here, but on the other hand I don’t want to play politics at work, I want to make great products for our customers while learning a lot and working with smart people.

   My question is should I care? I hate the fact that it’s even bothering me.

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

1. Listener Þór asks,

   Dear fellow binary smiths!

   I’m a Nordic software developer with about a decade in the industry under my belt who has recently returned back to the office, following a half a year long medical absence during which I helped my partner get through her second tough cancer treatment in as many years.

   I am now contemplating taking a sabbatical for some months to reset myself, as the ordeal has had a big impact on me in many ways.

   As sabbaticals are not a common occurrence in my parts of the world, I worry about what impact taking one could have on my future prospects once I start looking around for employment again.

   How does one frame having a “mental health” gap in the career when interviewing? Are they considered a “bad” signal by hiring managers?

2. For the first time in my career, I’ve been given the opportunity to lead a project at work. This was something I really wanted and my teammates supported me. We agreed on the technical design and I recently started implementing it.

   However, I’ve been thinking about finding another job for a long time. I’m demotivated. Each week, I feel bad about how little I get done at work. It negatively impacts my self esteem, a lot. I never acted upon the desire to find another job because I have a great manager and skip level. Recently, my manager and skip level both announced they’re leaving the company.

   I’d like to pursue an opportunity at another company that seems to be a great fit for me but I don’t want to leave my teammates holding the bag for the project I’ve been working on. I’m the only backend developer working on it and my teammates trusted me to take ownership of it. It doesn’t feel fair for me to complete the more glamorous responsibility of coming up with the technical design and then leave when it’s time to do the “grunt work”. On the other hand, there’s probably at least six months left of work on this project and the company I’m interested in joining may very well not be hiring in six months. What steps should I take to not betray my teammates or myself, taking into account that my manager and skip level leave within a month and probably won’t be replaced by then?

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

1. 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?

2. 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.

   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?

Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

1. I feel guilty about how slow I’m working. What should I do?
2. I’d like to find a job, but I don’t have any completed side projects or an interesting GitHub profile. How can I explain this?

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

1. Hey there.

   I don’t program I administrate in IT but you’re my favorite podcast, awesome job, never stop.

   I ran into a crazy situation that is WAY above my soft skills ability to deal with so I am seeking wisdom.

   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.

   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!

   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?

   Your faithful listener,

   Stefan

2. 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.

   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.

   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.

   How can I help alleviate the leader’s fears to protect another engineer’s independence and protect my precious precious remote time?

In episode 19, Jamison and Dave answer these questions:

Would you ever fire someone over a coding mistake? For example, should you empathize with ignorance and explain how SQL injection works or is the mistake so basic as to be intolerable. Would you change your answer if the mistake was found during a code review or found as the source of a data breach?

How do you positively represent the desire to be demoted? I am called a ‘senior engineer’, but I got that way because of null instead of actual skill. I would like to be a senior engineer at some point, but I would be a better one if I travel more where I have seniors to look up to, established processes etc rather than stressing about defining everything myself; but that’s a weird thing to say to a current or potential boss and is hard to do without also volunteering for a pay cut.

This episode is sponsored by Pluralsight. Pluralsight is hiring data scientists, machine learning engineers, and software engineers. Check out the jobs at https://pluralsight.com/softskills

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

1. I’m current doing nearly nothing at work (not by choice) and getting paid a king’s ransom for it, just to stay on the roster. I’ve never been in this situation before. Would I be foolish to give it all up just to not be miserably bored? I’m pretty sure this isn’t sustainable, and I’d get laid off in the next economic downturn before you guys might get to my question, but just curious what your insights are.

2. How to deal with teams that are run as “Agile”, but management who want timelines and deadlines to steer the business?

   I’m at my second large software development company that’s following the agile/scrum ceremonies with weekly sprints that entail grooming/planning/retro meetings. Management keeps track of progress to align the efforts of multiple teams spread across the organization. I’ve noticed over the past year an increased desire for estimated timelines for when each team will be done with their portion of the project. This forces the team to groom and size stories months out ahead. These estimates end up becoming deadlines that need justification to be pushed back, which is common since as you get into the work you find more stories need to be added.

   I had a very similar experience at my last company. Both have 5-10k employees.

   I understand the needs of the business to plan ahead. So saying “it’ll be ready when it’s done” is not a good answer. However, it feels like we’re constantly falling behind arbitrary deadlines and in a constant frenzy to catch up.

   So….what do?

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

1. How can a developer damage their credibility online?
2. How can I meet potential employers while I’m still in school?

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

1. Dear Dave and Jamison,

   I work for a medium sized startup, and our planning process sucks!

   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.

   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.

   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.

   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?

2. 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.

   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.

   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.

   Now the past few weeks there has been pressure to start coming to the office full time.

   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.

   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.

   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.

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

1. Thank you hosting this show. This show has given me a lot of insight on nuisances of engineering that isn’t mentioned anywhere. Having some experience in industry for a while, I always find in this position where I want some autonomy but I am bounded by the deadline. What do you think should be the way to start a career that gives autonomy while having that sweet benefits from the industry?

2. I used to be a senior manager of an operations team for a fire fighting service in Australia. I managed all of our physical operational assets - for example radio towers, mobile communications e.g. 5g, 4g technologies, mobile data terminals e.g. laptops in fire fighting appliances “fire trucks ;) “, data centers, networking so on…

   A restructuring means my team has grown to include in-house software development. While i am excited for this opportunity and on board with the changes, it is a very big shift from the physical and electrical engineering side to software development.

   The C level staff thinks the team lacks focus and there are “problems” to address.

   I have been meeting the new team and working through the changes. They are very nervous and are skeptical about how I’ll understand their world, which is fair.

   How can I best support this team? What are cultural things I should be aware of? What are key metrics I can measure that will fairly represent their hard work to the executive team? Any thoughts on what things a manager or managers can do to be supportive as the new drop in from across the room from a entirely different engineering discipline? Coding in my world is scripting and hacking about to make things work (telecommunication engineer)

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

1. 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.

   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!

2. ‌

   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.

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

1. I work as a Senior Software Engineer for a subsidiary owned by a mega corp. I am approaching 6 years at the company. In the last few years the company has had significant layoffs and I have been moved to a team by force with a new leadership chain and engineers I haven’t really worked with.

   Even though I was disgruntled when this happened, I gave this new team a chance. I have been successful in driving change within my engineering boundaries but I just don’t agree with many decisions made my leadership. I have concluded this team and company are no longer for me and I want to move on.

   Repeated layoffs, high bar for promotions, high stress( due to less people), no raises/bonuses have lead to fairly low morale across the org. Unfortunately, or fortunately the public stock price has gone up and many people are just resting and vesting. Even though I really want to leave it would be financially irresponsible. Are situations like this common in a software engineers careers? I am having trouble “resting”. Any advice on how to deal with the urge to perform yet you know it’s a bad decision?

2. My lunch break is sacred, how can I set boundaries as a new lead engineer joining a new company? I’ve discovered the agile process they use is far too exhaustive when compared with the size of the company. They have 3 hour meetings covering the whole lunch window (11:30-14:30) for backlog and sprint review on two consecutive days?! To me this is totally mad, however people seem to have just accepted it. How do I tell them I am not accepting this without rejecting their culture?

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

1. How do I inspire attention to detail in my co-workers?

   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.

   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?

2. 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?

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

1. I work as a Software Engineering Manager at the European office of a US company. Recently, many of my colleagues successfully obtained US visas for an upcoming business trip. When it was my turn, everyone said it would be a piece of cake because our company is well-known. However, to my surprise, I was rejected during the visa interview. Now I won’t be able to join my colleagues (including my direct reports). I’m concerned they might perceive me as less capable because of this. What would you think if your manager couldn’t travel with you? To make matters worse, I might soon be managing a few US-based employees remotely.

2. Hi guys, love the podcast. I never miss an episode!

   I have a co-worker, let’s call him “Bob”. Bob’s a lovely guy and very eager to learn.

   Here’s the thing. Bob never learns from his mistakes and needs to be continually asked to correct the same types of errors over and over again.

   The problem is that Bob doesn’t seem to have a developers mindset. I’d go so far as to say that if there’s a decision to be made then Bob is 95% guaranteed to do the opposite of what everybody else on the team would do.

   The end result of this is that whenever a pull request is opened up with Bobs name attached to it I can be sure that I will be spending more time reviewing it and inevitably the PR will need to go back and forth multiple times as Bob is asked to correct the same types of things that he was just asked to correct in the last review.

   The frustrating is that my manager is also nice and wants to encourage Bob to grow and improve and so regularly gives Bob some pretty complex tasks in order to encourage this growth. While I admire the managers attitude (and surely have benefitted from it on occasions :) ) my heart sinks just a bit more than normal when this happens as I know that the previously mentioned merry go round of reviews will inevitably be larger than usual. Sometimes it can get to the point where much (or all) of Bobs work ends up being discarded.

   I do precious little development work myself as my senior position in the team means that I’m the one ends up doing most of the peer reviewing. So each time I see Bob being given a piece of work that I would have enjoyed doing (and sometimes have even specced out) I get disheartened.

   Bob has been a developer in our field for about 6 years and still needs to be told on a regular basis about things that you would usually need to tell a fresh graduate.

   How do I broach the issue of Bob with the powers that be?

Show Notes

• https://www.rnz.co.nz/national/programmes/ninetonoon/audio/2018904948/from-space-junk-to-international-treaties-nz-s-only-specialised-space-lawyer

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

1. What advice would you give for working with an ineffective leader whose input is crucial to your work? I’m a senior developer for a mid-sized non-tech company with probably 60-80 devs, and in the past year I’ve been working more with a VP of software who seems to still be involved in code details, getting pulled in to production issues, in-person code reviews, etc.

   He’s a nice guy, but he seems like he’s being pulled in too many directions at once. When he schedules a meeting, there’s a 50% chance it happens on that day and time, and when we do have meetings, if we bring up questions and high level issues we need feedback on he’s quick to “take ownership” and say he’ll do X and Y. Inevitably, X and Y slip down the priority list because production issues and who knows what else, and we’re stuck waiting weeks on end for something that if he’d just delegated the work to someone else, we’d have long since moved on. But we still need his input to shape our work. How can we as lower-level developers (with a manager who isn’t involved in this project at all) help mitigate these delays?

2. I’ve recently accepted a new position after spending more than three years at my first job out of college. Currently, I’m a Senior Engineer at a large, corporate-like company (300+ people), but my new role will be at a much smaller startup (20-30 people).

   I’m excited about the change but also a bit nervous, as I know startups can be fast-paced, and I’ll need to get up to speed quickly.

   What advice do you have for setting myself up for success in this new role—both before I start and after I begin? I have a couple of weeks before my start date and want to use that time to prepare effectively.

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

1. How do I deal with the manager on my team who is both not very technical and positions himself as the “boss” spending almost no time with the team (except dragging everyone into more and more meetings! 😡) .

   My manager upsets and demotivates the team but not upper management and is clearly trying to climb the career ladders as fast as possible.

   Obviously everyone wants the team to succeed but the friction is growing. Some team members already left with (maybe too subtle) hints at the problem.

   Should one stage a coup and take over? Silently manipulate people to go to into “the right” direction? Switch teams/jobs and see it burn from the sidelines 🍿?

2. While testing my system at work, I was shocked how little security there was. Two issues exposed the entire system’s data by just changing the query string. Also every API call had no backend check on the user making the call. These are just two examples of many.

   This is at a gigantic multi billion dollar institution handling hundreds of thousands of people’s data, some of it incredibly sensitive. This fact will be known on my resume.

   This leads to my question: I am looking for a new job now, and wondering how much detail about these security issues is appropriate to share on a resume? I feel this helps me stand out as a newer dev, but would this be frowned upon by prospective employers that may worry I might overshare their own security issues?

   Thanks for all your help!

This episode is sponsored by the O’Reilly Velocity conference. Register today and use discount code SKILLS for a 20% discount: http://velocityconf.com/skills.

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

1. I became a manager a year go. I took over someone as my direct report who was not performing well at the time. On my first day, I gave a motivational chat to welcome him again to the team and continued to motivate him. But after 1 year, he is not improving at all. I give him clear feedback and set expectations but he just doesn’t change. This got to a point where it is stressful for both of us. And since I spent so much time on just for this issue, I fear that it adds to the stress and may affect my decisions. What should I do?

2. I’ve just join the company as a Ruby/RoR developer. After half a year the architect presented new way of developing the product and said that from now all new features will be writen in Java/Spring Boot and we switch to micriservice architecture. But I don’t like Java, don’t want to switch (I have 6 year expirience with Ruby), what should I do?

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

1. 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.

   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.

   How should I deal with this situation?

   I tried speaking to him directly, but he is pretty stubborn and thinks that he is doing everything perfectly.

   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.

2. 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.

   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!

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

1. I’m a senior front end engineer at a medium sized tech company.

   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.

   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.

2. 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.

Show Notes

This episode is sponsored by the original podcast from Red Hat, Compiler. Listen to Compiler: https://link.chtbl.com/compiler?sid=podcast.softskillsengineering

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

1. 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”.

   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.

   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.

   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?

2. 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.

   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.

   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?

   Thanks for much for the help.

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

1. Hello! Thank you for your podcast, I definitely find the episodes to be helpful. Lately I’ve been struggling with attention to detail. I just forget to do simple things like run pre-commit hooks before I put in a PR or before merging a PR. I went through a pretty bad layoff when my old company went bankrupt a few months back and now I am at a new role where I really like everyone I work with. The engineers expect checked-in code to pass tests and typechecks and be generally high-quality. How I can be better about attention to detail as a software engineer? How do you keep track of remembering all the little things that need to be done?

2. Hey guys I’m around 8 years into my career as a software engineer, been at a few companies and have been promoted to senior during my time. I like my job and have done relatively well in my career, but I’m burned out. While I think this is the best industry for me, I’d just like to walk away from the corporate 9-5 for who knows how long.

   Fortunately, I’m in a position where my partner is able to be the breadwinner for the foreseeable future. We’ve talked about it, and she’s okay with it as long as I don’t sit on the couch doing nothing all day. I figured I’d take this time to watch the kids, learn some skills around the house, get involved in the community, etc. I don’t know if I’d ever want to get back in the software saddle, or if I do, perhaps I’d return in a different role or capacity.

   But my question is, if I leave this industry for several years and decide to ever come back, what would the landscape be like for me? Am I making a mistake by deciding to hang it up at such a young age?

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

1. I’ve been working with this fintech company for the past year as the only FE developer in a team with other 6 BE developers, but recently, I’ve noticed that the product team has slowly stopped including frontend (FE) tasks in the sprints. Moreover, they seem to have deprioritized FE tasks in general, allocating me only one task that I can extend at most to three days within a two-week sprint.

   This scarcity of work has been bothering me and has left me feeling unwanted in the team, which is particularly pronounced given there’s a significant amount of FE work that needs to be done, yet these tasks still don’t seem to make it into the sprints.

   During our one-on-one sessions, my line manager has given me good feedback, which leaves me even more confused about the situation.

   I’ve raised my concerns about the lack of work with my manager, who simply suggested that I discuss the issue with the product team or feel free to tackle a backend (BE) task. When I’ve tried to engage with the product team, they usually dismiss me with non-committal responses such as “we have some work coming.” and sometimes “we’re at max capacity as of the allowed story points in a sprint, try helping where you can”. Additionally, when I’ve attempted to take on some BE tasks, my colleagues often seem too busy to guide me through this new approach, leaving me in absolute frustration.

   Other FE developers from different teams seem to be shipping loads of features. Given these circumstances, am I genuinely unwanted on my team? What further actions should I attempt before quitting my job ? any advice is appreciated.

2. I suspect one of my colleagues is either not an actual dev or not as skilled a dev as they claim to be. During meetings, whenever they are asked a question, there is always a very long pause before they unmute, and sometimes when they do unmute, I hear the tail end of a different voice answering the question before they themselves answer the question. Should I bring this up to my manager?

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

1. A listener named Jay asks,

   Over the past eight years I’ve been promoted from Software Dev to Team Lead and then to Engineering Manager.

   After two years as an EM, it helped me a lot financially, I like what I do and I think I’m doing it really well. However, I have two concerns. First, I love programming and now I don’t have any time other than in my limited free time to do it. I can feel my coding skills atrophying.

   Second, I’m worried that I could only get EM jobs in the future, and there are fewer openings for EMs than for Senior Software Developers.

   Could I go back to a software developer role? Would they even take me?

2. I work for a staff augmentation company in an African country for a software company in New York. I’ve been with this client for the last five years and I have climbed up the ladder enough that I can access the company financials. I am paid based on my location, which is not much after the exchange rate to local currency. My pay hasn’t increased as I’ve become more effective. Since seeing that info, I don’t feel the need to go over and beyond for this client anymore. The client expects me to be a rockstar developer and ship out code faster they can think of more ways to make money but my enthusiasm has diminished over time and my manager has been notified about it. What steps would you take to ensure you get reasonable pay as a dev earning a location based pay? The staff augmentation company is ran by US citizens.

This is a rerun of episode 307. Enjoy!

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

1. 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.

   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.

   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.

   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.S. are you hiring?

2. 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.

   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.

   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?

   Love your show, long time listener, first time caller.

Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

1. I’ve been a software engineer for 13 years and would like to apply for a management role. I’ve never managed before. How do I apply for a job as a manager without managerial experience?
2. How do I deal with annoying noises around my desk? One neighbor listens to loud music. Another one pops the bubbles on his bubblewrap (to calm himself obviously but also infuriate me). Please help =)

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

1. Hi guys! Big fan of the show. Here’s a question: What to do if I hate working in pairs?

   I’m in a tricky situation. I work on a great project in a team of great people We try to implement all the good programming practices. Retrospectives, cross-review, working in pairs..

   I hate working in pairs. I am a typical introvert-programmer and the thing I like the most about programming is that you can sit all day digging around the code and NOT communicate with the people. Or at least not all day. But how can I say that to my teammates? “Hey, I would rather work alone than talk to you guys.. By the way, love y’all!”

   It seems impossible to communicate that to my co-workers without hurting them. And moreover, this is a good practice. Which makes me feel horrible because I feel super-tired after whole day of talking to people. Plus I also feel like somehow I take up their worst qualities: if the person is slower, I become slow too, or start making mistakes. Help!!

2. Hey guys, big fan of the show here. Thanks for your advice and time.

   The company that I work for provides “tech teams” for hire. In other words, American companies that want to outsource part or all of their tech team to a cheaper location can hire us and get developers and PMs at a fraction of what it costs in the US.

   I ended up working with an established fitness company based in NY. Their management insists that we are “regular” engineers in their tech team and we should participate in their technical discussions, agile meetings and so on. However, their engineers seem to be on a completely different page and treat us like monkeys that can write some code.

   For the most part, I can deal with their condescending treatment and everything else they might throw my way. The problem is that the company is currently in a very intense project and they are all “stressed” which seem to provide them license to be extra rude BUT ONLY TO CONTRACTORS. Their managers brush everything under the excuse of stress but I’m sure that wouldn’t fly if we were “regular” team members.

   How would you handle this situation? Any advice before I lose my temper? I’m also afraid that getting rid of a contractor is much much easier than firing an actual employee.

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

Questions

1. I’m a Tech Lead at a decent sized corporation. If I want to grow towards a promotion my options are a more people management track towards Engineering Lead (basically a TL who also manages 1-2 other TLs) or a more technical track towards Staff TL. Where I’m struggling is I don’t know how I would actually work towards the Staff level, seeing as most of my time is spent wrapped up in mentoring, coaching, planning meetings, and just generally large blocks of time spent on Zoom. Have you ever seen someone move down that path? I worry I would be letting my other responsibilities slip through the cracks by focusing on my own technical advancement. How should I balance what my team needs from me vs. what I need to focus on to get to a role like that? Is the best way to get there 1 step back (to being an individual contributor again) and then two steps forward (working towards Staff Engineer then Staff TL)?

2. Hello soft skills! Love the show and your great banter, keep the laughs coming.

   Do you have any tips for ‘active listening’? My manager is very, very chatty and our catch ups over zoom often last two hours or more. I find myself drifting in and out while he talks and then need to snap out of it when I hear something that might be useful.

   How do I keep focused in extra long meetings where we are one on one and the content is not particularly interesting?

   Thanks!

Show Notes

https://mediocre.dev/it-takes-more

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

1. Listener ninjamonkey says,

   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.

   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.

   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.

   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.

   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?

2. I work for a small startup. I was the first employee other than the 2 founders.

   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”.

   I have recruited 2 of the 3 new developers, and have trained both of them and got them up to speed.

   At first I was pleased with the progression and was keen to grow into the position, and told the founders so.

   Since then, I have changed my mind, I don’t want to be the lead - due to the following:

   • 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.
   • We get poorly defined tasks and requirements
   • The CTO will just blast through some of our features over the weekend and say here I fixed it for you

   I don’t want to quit my job (just yet… its a comin though).

   I have actually discussed the above points with them, but I know these 2 founders will never change their ways.

   How do I tell them I just want to go back to being an Individual Contributor like my Employment contract states?

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

Questions

1. Starting to work on a team that is split across time zones. With a majority of the company based in one time zone and a handful spread in others. I want to emphasis the importance of asynchronous communication. I have found Slack to begin to feel like I need to respond ASAP instead of when it is convenient.

   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?

   What is a good way to reach out to team members in cases where a response is needed more immediately?

2. After about 1 year at my developer job, I was moved to work for a client company helping them launch a new product. This other client had different plans, it turns out, and now I’m just testing their API for them. That’s fine but I never get questions answered and I hate my job with my client and hate my job with this company that sells me like a cheap piece of meat. I want to quit, I will quit, but I have a lot to say about why I’m quitting. How can I NOT be nice about quitting and the reasons I’m quitting, and still feel comfortable showing my face in the industry again?

   I haven’t quit a job before, and this is my first job in the tech industry. Searching how to quit a job always comes with “remain light and positive.

In episode 13, Jamison and Dave answer these questions:

What should you do about a boss, or in my case ‘solution architect’, who won’t push back to the client and just keeps sacrificing quality of the product to push more features out?

What’s the difference between contract and permanent positions?

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

1. 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.

   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.

   I’d appreciate any advice to help get me busy again!

2. Hey Dave and Jamison, love the show. Quit my job twice since I started listening so I’m a super fan.

   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.

   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)

   Do I look at something very different like embedded dev or games dev? (No JSON there!)

   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.

   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.

   I’d love to hear any of your thoughts on this! Thanks :D Keep up the great work.

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

1. Hi, I’m a senior software engineer at a big tech company, where I’ve been employed for precisely one year. So far, the feedback I’ve received has been overwhelmingly positive. My manager has even mentioned that her superiors are impressed with my performance, and my colleagues have shared their positive feedback as well.

   While I’ve been told that I’m doing exceptionally well and may be on track for a promotion in my upcoming year-end review, there’s a slight concern. Given that I’ll have been with the company for just over a year at that point, my relatively short tenure might affect my chances. During my mid-year review, my manager advised me to tackle more complex problems and take on larger tasks that have an impact on multiple teams to bolster my promotion prospects.

   I don’t really know what to do with this advice since I don’t know what else to do besides passively wait and hope that these famous ‘complex problems’ come my way. I feel like whether or not I get to prove myself in a big way to secure the promotion will come down to luck, is there anything I can do to reduce this luck factor?

2. I recently started a new remote job as a lead engineer at a startup. Previously, I was working for an agency and was almost constantly busy. Additionally, I was held extremely accountable for the time I spent working through submission of daily timesheets.

   Now that I’m at a startup, I’m struggling to not feel guilty when I feel like I have nothing to do. My area of the product moves much slower than everyone else’s, so while everyone else is constantly busy, I feel like I’m making much less impact. My manager, the CTO, is fully aware of my lighter workload and is fine with it.

   My question isn’t necessarily about how I can make more impact. It’s about how to make peace with the idea that I’m not being productive for 8 hours every day. When you’re in an office, you feel like you’re working even when you’re not, because you’re physically there. When working remotely, I tend to feel guilty when I’m not physically sitting at my desk writing code, even when there isn’t really any code to write. Do I need to just get over myself and feel more grateful for all my free time? Or is there another way of looking at this that I’m missing?

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

Questions

1. I have a weekly one-on-one with my manager. What should I talk about in them? Things like feedback and career goals become old and repetitive real soon, and I end up discussing current work items. I understand that a one-on-one is my time to ask questions and don’t want it to be a longer daily-standup.

2. My front-end team mates are in a power struggle with my back-end team mates and my design team mates. They’re intentionally making technical decisions that artificially constrain the choices of other teams.

   For example, design wants a certain interaction for a new feature, and my team says “nope, it can’t work that way, cause the components we built don’t allow that”. Or, they make tickets for the back-end team as in “endpoints have to work this or that way, because our components assume that structure”. This often seems detrimental and confusing to other teams.

   When I push back against my team they are angry. When I defend my team other people are angry. When I try to strike a compromise I feel gross because I usually think my team is wrong. I’ve tried talking with other teams and managers about the problem. I feel gross about that too because I don’t want to point fingers or throw my team mates under the bus. Where should I even start?

In episode 8, Jamison and Dave answer these questions:

How do you achieve work life balance? Do you have any strategies that work for you? Any bad examples from your own lives?

How do you on-board new engineers?

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

1. 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!

2. 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.

   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.

   That’s it from me, love you guys!

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

Questions

1. Hi I just listened to your most recent podcast and you mentioned having gone to hand therapy for what I assume is something like repetitive strain injury. It would be great if you could talk about this, I assume lots of engineers have issues with aching arms and hands. Or, to phrase it as a question “my hands often ache after coding for hours. I can no longer work in bed on a laptop or my hands ache for a few days. what did you find out at hand therapy?”

   Cheers!

2. I am at a large (non FAANG) tech company. We have salary levels/bands. My entire team was laid off, and I was offered a job that is three bands higher with another team. They said usually they would not hire someone of my level, but since they had worked with me before and I was a heavy individual contributor they were willing to interview me for this senior position. By the end of the process they decided I was the most qualified candidate and offered me the job. They don’t want to increase my level at all. This is displeasing to me. I was the most qualified candidate, why not offer me the higher level as well? If an external candidate was the most qualified, they would have offered that person the higher level. Unfortunately, I believe that since I did not negotiate on my initial offer when entering the company my perceived worth is tied to my compensation and low seniority level. How do I broach that I think this is unfair (or that they should increase my salary)?

   As additional information, I was given a raise by the previous team’s manager of 20k in January as I found out I was the least compensated on the team by 30k and I got upset at my boss because only about half the team had ever made a commit to any repo and most have no understanding of OOP. Perhaps this is why the team was cut. I feel my company might find it weird to see my salary increase twice in one year and reject for that reason.

   I feel you’re going to tell me to quit and find another job, but I have worked with the new team and can attest that they are kind, smart, have good engineering practices, and are given a lot of attention because they do AI, so it’s not an opportunity I want to miss out on.

   Thanks, love your show, it’s like car talk for the 21st century.

Show Notes

Voice Driven Development: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YKuRkGkf5HU

Patrick McKenzie’s article on salary negotiation: https://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/01/23/salary-negotiation/

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

1. One of my friends recently was hired at a salary 20k more than my own, even though we are at the same level. This caused me to re-think whether or not my company is paying me fairly and planted seeds for making me leave for something better.

   So the question is: how does one gauge “average salary” (other than at say for example glass door.com) for one’s city and should I interview for a higher salary and come back and ask for a counter offer? How will I be viewed if I did such a thing?

2. I’ve been an engineer in the video game industry for 10 years. I’ve worked for 4 large game studios and at each one the story has been the same. Once it comes time to release our game, the crunch time kicks in.

   Often the need to work overtime is implied, but on my current project the company president directly spelled out that ALL engineers would be working a minimum of 60 hours per week for AT LEAST six months. In the past I’ve chosen to jump ship before it gets that bad, but I really wanna see this project through to the end.

   We’re all salaried employees and so far we’ve received no compensation for our overtime hours. No comp time or anything. The only carrot that has been dangled is that ““it will be taken into consideration during bonus time””.

   How much is reasonable to expect as a bonus for this much overtime? 10% of my annual salary? 50%? A firm handshake and a swift layoff?

   Thanks guys for any advice you can give!

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

Questions

1. How can I stay at a job for a long period of time?

   I’m on my second job after graduating and as I’m approaching my first year at this company I’m already thinking of moving somewhere else. A similar thing happened at my previous job where I stayed for around 15 months.

   I feel that by switching companies so often I’m hurting both my personal development and future employability. At the same time the easiest way to get a better role or a raise is to switch jobs.

   What should I do? Have I just not been lucky enough to find a company that offers better career progression which would give me a reason to stay? Is the problem with me? How did you deal with this in your own careers? How about when you’re making hiring decisions - are you wary of hiring frequent job switchers?

   Great podcast btw, keep it up

2. Is firing the new counteroffer?

   A junior dev on my team confronted us with an offer he got from another company. He is already paid at the limit of his range, his upcoming performance review is “not great, not horrible”. The amount offered to him would put him in our lower senior range and there is no justification for that at all.

   He made it clear he is in a complicated financial situation (got his bank account emptied and credits maxed out).

   I don’t see a path to him getting close to the salary he got offered in the next year or even longer. We are not a company that fires people if they do not grow at a certain rate, but given his situation he is probably not going to stick around for long.

   He also made it clear he would like to stay if not for the salary, but now I am thinking it might be the best for the company to fire him, maybe even for him. Is that cruel, which other options am I missing?

   Given your eternal backlog of questions your advice is probably coming late, I would still be interested in it.

   Thanks for all the other advice, it’s both entertaining and very helpful.

   Best from Colombia

This week Jamison and Dave answer these questions:

1. How do I deal with co-workers who constantly cite the decisions of engineers who don’t work here anymore?
2. My employment makes it sound like the company owns my past work and side-projects. Is this true? Is this normal?

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

1. Is it common for developers to take an interview without real interest in a job?

   Is it common for a company to reject a candidate because they think candidate is not interested in a job?

   Recently I had an interview and I was rejected even though I though it went really well. From internal channels in that company I learned that the interviewer thought I wasn’t really searching for a new job and was just doing interviews for fun or to improve my skills. That was really frustrating. And also, well, flattering. But still, I don’t understand what signals I may have given. I asked questions about the company, processes, etc. I prepared really well. And I asked for a salary that’s quite significant for our market.

   The only reason I see is that I always worked remotely and this is position in an office.

   By the way, LOVE your show!

2. What happens when a wave of engineers leaves your company?

   I work for a startup that went through a brutal round of layoffs, before stabilizing. We’re building the engineering team back up, but the core team members that built our platform are gone.

   How do we approach maintaining things, adding new things, technology decisions, etc?

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

1. “Hello, Is it considered ok to be a bit funny during an interview? To give more context: In a recent interview, I progressed up to the final cultural-fit round after clearing all technical rounds at a well-known company. One of my interviewer asked how I would deal with conflicts with a peer. In a effort to lighten the mood, I jokingly said I would snitch on them to my manager. I saw the faces go pale on the zoom call. So I backed-up and explained I was just joking and gave them an example of an instance where I had to deal with a conflict. The story didn’t help much to make my case, as there was some “snitching” involved in it. But in all seriousness, if I had a conflict in the past and have reached out to my manager to help diffuse the conflict, is it considered a bad thing. How do I make it sound like a good thing during culture-fit interviews? By the way I didn’t get an offer from them. Can’t help but think I goofed-up the culture interview. Thanks for your time and help.”

2. I recently started my first full-time job out of college. I earned an engineering degree but took a job with a company in a more management/ business development/ leadership track. Now I’m the only person in a department with an engineering degree.I’ll be here for a couple of years before they move me into the next role in my track.

   In a casual conversation about going back to school, one of my coworkers jokingly mentioned they would get free school at a local university because they made less than X dollars. This threw me off, as I (having started less than 3 weeks ago), make more than X dollars despite us having the same position and them having worked in the department for almost a year.

   Should I say anything, or just assume that the difference in pay is due to the fact that I have a technical degree and am on a leadership track while they are in neither? I’ve been told it’s mutually beneficial to discuss salary with your coworkers, but I’m afraid to shake things up at my very traditionally run company in my first month here. My pay corresponds directly to the starting pay that an engineer in a design role in my company would be making and I think I was given this pay so not to discourage me from taking a role in the company in favor of an engineering job with engineering pay elsewhere.

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

Questions

1. Hi

   Over time I have heard many different terms that all seem to equate to “I no longer have a job”. Some examples are quit, fired, laid off and terminated. What is the difference between these (and others) and what is best (both from benefits and emotionally) for the employee and the employer?

   Note I am not planning to quit my job or fire someone, but I am curious to hear your views.

2. Hey guys, I love your podcast and find it super helpful for me as I start my career in tech. I am in a conundrum. I am a student and I took the opportunity Covid presented me to take up two internships instead of one. Both are at top companies. My question is I am feeling like I am drowning in work, how do I navigate through this and what are your general thoughts. Thank you in advance!

This week Jamison and Dave answer these questions:

1. I know that teaching others is important when working on a team so that the team can grow and get better. But what happens when one member of the team, despite being the friendliest person in the world, is missing so many required skills for his job that it becomes impossible for me to do anything besides teach him?
2. I recently heard the concept of “known unknowns” and “unknown unknowns”. It’s the unknown unknowns that get me. Sometimes I ask a question of a seasoned developer and they seem annoyed because it’s something that I could have looked up. They knew it but I didn’t. Sometimes I ask a question and they are eager to help because the question is interesting and they know it will be good for me to learn. I struggle because I don’t want to waste my time or theirs, but I want to work through things and learn. How do I do this well?

Wikipedia has a whole article on the origin of the phrase “unknown unknowns”.

Also, Gary Bernhardt has a fantastic talk called Ideology about “unknown knowns” - things we believe in software without even realizing we believe them.

Hoobastank.

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

1. Listener Olexander asks,

   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?

2. Listener Kieran asks,

   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.

   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).

   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?

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

1. I am working at my first job as a software engineer for 2 1/2 years now. I really enjoy working as a programmer and I’m super excited about the tech industry in general.

   However, sometimes I feel like I’m too excited about everything. I spent a lot of time reading blog posts, watching tutorials or taking online courses. I think about what books to read and what languages to learn all the time. Not everything but a big part of it happens during my working hours. While I know that “loving to learn” in general is considered a positive trait, I feel like I might take it a bit too far and I should focus more on the actual tasks I have - especially, because I think my coworkers spend much less time keeping up to date with everything.

   What is a reasonable amount of time to spent on these things during working hours and beyond? How do I know I spend too much time not working on my actual tasks? How can I make sure I learn the right things that are useful to my career?

   Love the show and wish you the best. Thanks for your advice!

2. I landed a new job that nearly tripled my salary realative to the job I’m about to leave (yes, I was horribly underpaid)! The stories and tips from this podcast really helped me out but I also landed this job through Hired.com (the podcast sponsor).

   Any good tips regarding leaving a job when you know your boss will be furious that you’re leaving? Also, should I tell my boss which company I’m going to when he asks (he definitely will)?

Show Notes

• Tom7, the most amazing YouTuber of all time: https://www.youtube.com/c/suckerpinch
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qTBAW-Eh0tM - anagraphs

This week Jamison and Dave answer these questions:

1. My peers give up and say “have it your way” whenever we have technical discussions. How do I get them to be more vocal about their opinions?
2. I like the idea of measuring things, but metrics seem easy to game. How do I effectively measure team and personal productivity?

Jamison cites this tweet and this blog post about examining your own productivity.

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

1. 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?

2. 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!

   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”).

   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.

1. I’ve been pushed in to doing management tasks I really don’t enjoy. What do I do?
2. How do I handle a co-worker who I really struggle to get along with?

Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

1. I recently joined a startup. After joining I realized most of the engineers are gamers. They play games during the lunch hour, and if we end up having lunch together, everyone is talking about the game that they are playing or some news in the gaming circle.

   As a non-gamer and introvert, I find it different to join in their conversation. How can I join in, or bring the talk back to something else?

2. I’ve been working as an Android Engineer for 7 years from the beginning of my career. I loved my profession but things started to go not so well with reaching of the senior level.

   Coding tasks became boring because I knew how to solve them before starting. Most of the time I was helping less senior engineers but it didn’t give me satisfaction.

   I tried to solve the problem by quitting my job. I joined a company with a team of only senior engineers hoping that it meant more challenging tasks.

   Things did not improve. Tasks are still boring and I don’t learn anything new from my colleagues because they are around the same tech level as me.

   I don’t think I’m burned out because I still enjoy programming when I need to use my brain for solving a problem.

   I don’t want to move to management because I like coding more than people.

   I don’t want to switch to another tech stack because it means a pay cut and I think that I’ll get bored again in a year or so.

   Is it some kind of quarter-career crisis? Is there a way to be an expert at the field and still like your job?

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

Questions

1. First I want to say thank you and I really love the show and all your helpful advice. I think it has made be become a better developer.

   I am a current junior in high school and the lead developer (intern) of the small non profit with approximately 10 college and graduate interns on it. School has recently started to push me away from the project (not enough time in the day) but I still want to be a source of help. I wrote a very significant portion of the code for the current application, however the founder wanted this to be shipped as quickly as possible and this led in a sense to a bit of a cobbled together mess of microservices and no documentation. My main problem is that although I feel I have the technical skills to lead the team, I really do not have much experience in terms of team management, especially in the case of leading a development team. During the main development of the application, it mainly consisted of me and this other developer writing the code. However now that they are gone, I am the only person (along with someone else who kind of has an understanding) with knowledge and familiarity of the code base. Sorry this is long, but I guess what I am asking is how can I (i) create a team structure that will not only prepare interns for real world development as well as making sure that the application remains after I move on and (ii) help build processes and structure that will allow people to meaningfully contribute to the code base.

   Also, just for more information, I have not yet added unit tests or code reviews. Most of this just usually became just as me.

2. I work in AI startup and planning to change my job. My contract is full of NDAs about pretty much everything. How do I talk with companies and recruiters about things I do when I’m not allowed to disclose project details like technologies or libraries used, algorithms for data manipulation, or even where we take data from, bought or downloaded. I can’t say anything more than “I work on AI and we do music manipulation in a programming language”. What do I say?

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

1. After a decade as a Senior front-end engineer in companies stuck in legacy ways of working—paying lip service to true agility while clinging to control-heavy, waterfall practices—I’m frustrated and exhausted by meetings and largely apathetic, outsourced teams who don’t match my enthusiasm for product-thinking or improving things. It seems allowed and normalised everywhere I go.

   How can I escape this cycle of big tech, unfulfilled as an engineer, and find a team with a strong product engineering culture where I can do high-impact work with similarly empowered teams? Thank you, and sorry if this is a bit verbose! Thanks guys. Martin

2. ‌

   How do you judge your competency in a technical skill and when should you include it on your resume? Should you include a skills that you haven’t used in a while, skills you’ve only used in personal projects, or skills that you feel you only have a basic understanding of?

   I’m a frontend developer and I’ve seen some job descriptions include requirements (not nice-to-haves) like backend experience, Java, CI/CD, and UI/UX design using tools like Figma and Photoshop. I could make designs or write the backend code for a basic CRUD app, but it would take me some time, especially if I’m building things from scratch. I’ve seen some resumes where the writer lists a bunch of programming languages and technical skills, and I often wonder if they truly are competent in all of those skills.

This episode is sponsored by the O’Reilly Velocity conference. Register today and use discount code SKILLS for a 20% discount: http://velocityconf.com/skills.

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

1. Hello! Thank you for the show!

   What do you think about employee monitoring software? I received a message from a company about a job position and they use such software. It seems weird for me to make screenshots on my computer and to see what software I’ve use and what websites I’ve open. How do you feel about it?

2. I’m a software engineer with about 2 years of professional experience. When I started working, I was motivated to learn all the things. I consumed technical blogs and podcasts in my personal time and proactively identified and solved problems for the team.

   Things recently changed. I can’t bring myself to care about work anymore. Curiosity used to come naturally to me but I can no longer summon curiosity about anything related to software development. A few things lead to this. 1) I got a lower than expected rating on my performance review due to an issue with my soft skills. I thought the feedback was valuable but didn’t think such a rating was warranted, considering my overall contributions. 2) Our team has spent the past few months writing code that didn’t ship. 3) I took the Soft Skills Engineering advice and got a new job. In order to do that, I spent many mornings and weekends preparing for technical interviews. After accepting the offer, I felt totally burned out.

   I very much want to be back to my previous, curious self by the time I start my new job. Unfortunately, I can’t take a long break before the start date. How can I get to a place where I feel motivated again?

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

1. How can I attract talent?
2. How do I quit without burning bridges?

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

1. ‌

   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.

   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.

2. 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.

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

1. I’ve been a Staff Software Engineer at my company for 1 1/2 years. We have about 120 engineers company-wide. I’ve had 4 different bosses during the last year and our team has moved around a few times on the org chart.

   I lead a team of 2 engineers. My boss told me I shouldn’t be doing any of the coding but should spending my time working with the product manager, doing research for upcoming features, doing code reviews, managing the Jira board, mastering jellyfish metrics, reviewing architecture documents, setting up measurement in our logging tool and coordinating deployments of our features.

   Because my team is small and our product roadmap is pretty well defined, these tasks do not take 40 hours per week. I feel like I have nothing to do. I’ve tried to improve the velocity of the team by doing some coding and triaging on bugs. I miss doing the technical work and feel like I could do more but I also want the other 2 engineers on the team to own most of the big, bulky tasks.

   What do you suggest I do? Should I enjoy my light load or should I be looking for other ways to add value?

2. I am the lead developer on a few projects with developers that have 20+ years of experience compared to my eight years. I have been made lead of the projects, but I’ve never actually had management tell the team that I am the lead or that I have any control whatsoever on the members of the team (typical ‘all of the responsibility, none of the power’ scenario). One of my teammates is tough. He writes unreadable but working spaghetti code. He also works in the field and will often times push to master and then leave to perform fieldwork, leaving the team in the lurch for several days before he can come back and fix his broken code. He habitually fails to push code, often holding the source on his own computer for months before pushing. I have mandated using pre-commit hooks to guard against breaking the build, but as IT has control over the repositories, these become “optional” and appear to be disregarded. I have brought this up with management, to no avail; the behavior continues. I have also expressed my concerns with management, and provided data on the impact this has to the project via tickets and time spent between the remaining team members.

   How do I rein in this unwieldy developer? What else can I do?

Show Notes

• https://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/4111/dirty_coding_tricks.php?page=4

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

1. First! I recently listened to episode 178 (huge backlog of episodes to work through!) and Dave made the assertion (in 2019!) that 47% of all companies would be remote by 2023: wildly close, what else do you see in the future?

   Second: my work situation continues to confound and external insight would be helpful! My boss and I have a long working history going back to an entirely separate company. I’m a high-ownership/high-drive Principal level IC and feedback has been lackluster. Takeaway from last years performance review would be best summarized as “I agree with your self review. End message.” I’ve been working to “manage up” and mentor (reverse mentor?) him, but he always makes snap decisions and then refuses to reevaluate after presented with more info. Coupled with his myopic view of our team’s scope and general preference for speaking only (not much for action), I’m trying to figure out how to get where I want to be without burning an old and historically very useful bridge! I want to work on big technical problems, instead I’m de facto manager of a team… I managed before and did not enjoy being responsible for people. As a principal I’m responsible for their output somewhat, but if they underperform I work with their manager and them to prioritize, and do up front work to incentivize their investment in what we’re doing… help!

2. What do I do when my teammate proposes a new architecture or framework in a new project? It might solve some existing problems but has a high chance to create technical debt and make the onboarding harder for new engineers.

   How can I convince them to use the existing solution while still helping them feel comfortable sharing their opinion next time?

   If I follow their suggestion but things don’t go well, how can I convince them to refactor the structure without them feeling like I’m blaming them?

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

1. I’m currently working at a FAANG in Europe, and seriously underpaid. I recently got an offer from a US startup (Series C funded) to work remotely. Two big pluses: I’m gonna get a 2 times pay bump, and I can finally work remotely (and travel across Europe since they support work from anywhere, now that COVID restrictions are relaxed, something I wanted to do for years). Two problems: Their tech stack is Ruby on Rails, something that no “big” companies use so I may not be considered seriously because of last X years of working on a not-so-famous tech, and current tech environment screams of a recession, so I’m safer at a big company than some startup. Do you think 2.5 years in a FAANG provides enough of credibility to take care of both of these problems if things go south? Any other factors I should consider when moving from FAANG to a remote startup job?

2. So I’ve been working at this big-tech company for around 4 years and working as a mid-level engineer. I recently got approached by a Google recruiter for L5 or Senior engineer position. I’ve led a few projects in my current company, but I don’t consider myself a “senior” level. That and the fact that I’ve worked majorly in Frontend and the role I’m gonna be getting interviewed for is Full-stack (interview rounds seem to be focused on Distributed systems mostly).

   I’ve two questions:

   • Is this some dirty trick in recruitment I gotta be aware of? I hear about downlevel a lot, but never “uplevel”.
   • If say I do prepare like crazy and pass the interviews, do you think I may not have any luck with the team matching Google does? Like no team may wanna hire a “junior” senior?

   Love the show! Keep it up.

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

1. I am a senior software engineer in a big tech/faang company and this week is my first ever on call rotation. My team is doing a lot of CI work, monitoring pipelines and support queues during on call. It is probably not as much of a hassle as on call for product teams, but for me personally on call was the nearest I have ever been to hell.

   Our on call is not the regular getting pinged when something goes wrong, instead we have to manually monitor a dashboard 12 hours constantly for 7 days as the alarming is quite fuzzy.

   I am the only EU remote worker that has to adopt to the on call PST timezone. That means, my on call shift goes from 3pm-3am in my timezone. It is day 5/7 and I am down 24 energy drinks already, cause this was the only way to stay wake. Knowingly, that this would be just a short-term tradeoff against health, I am now living through the most explosive diarrhea I have ever had. On top, I am sleep derived, dizzy and every body part hurts.

   That would already be terrible on its own, yet I additionally have a young family, with a 4 year old and a toddler. The on call week, has not only been though on me, but especially also on my children and wife. I don’t have time for the kids at all and my wife is doing 100% of everything at the moment, including waking up, breakfast, bringing our son to kindergarten, cooking, cleaning, playing, everything. She is also quite exhausted therefore.

   Besides On Call, my job has been great and a huge monetary opportunity that is very rare in the EU, therefore quitting just because of 4-5weeks/year is not an option I am considering. Yet, I am wondering if there could be any way of smuggling myself out of the on call rotation. I have seen, that a staff level engineer on our team is not participating in the rotation, but that might be because he got a lot going on with other teams as well.

2. A listener named bebop asks,

   Is your average “Big Tech” dev “better” than a random dev selected from a large non-technology company? I can’t help but feel that if I want to level up my career, I’m going to have to either move into big tech or some unicorn startup.

This week Jamison and Dave answer these questions:

1. A previous job involved a coworker who, over time, became very difficult to get along with.

   I did my best to talk it through with him, but he would only ever say I needed to “fix my attitude”. I tried to deflect and avoid conflict, but he’d continually impose himself on the situation. (Assign himself to review my code, come into my cube and demand my help, etc.)

   I had good relationships with the rest of the team, and they all agreed that he was out of line. Yet management viewed the situation as simply friction between two devs, with no clear instigator.

   Being a source of team friction is career death, and I’m personally embarrassed that anyone got that impression of me.

   How can I (or other listeners) handle this situation so that I don’t get painted as “part of the problem?”

2. I’ve started a new job. I’m enjoying the work and the culture slightly less, and I discovered my salary could have been much higher had I negotiated harder. Is it too late to negotiate for a higher salary after I’ve already joined?

   Dave mentions this article on salary negotiation. It’s good!

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

1. The Sleepy Engineer says,

   Hey SSE, how do you deal with drowsiness? I notice that sometimes when I am very tired at my desk and end up eyes closed head drooped down as I work which I imagine is a bad look for anyone passing by. During this time, I would either get coffee or stand up and walk somewhere which is a temporary fix but ultimately I am still very tired. I know in very few really big company HQs there might be a sleeping quarters if you plan to stay the night but my company is certainly ain’t one of them. Any advice on how to get through the day? Thanks for the great show.

2. After seeing a hyper growth in 2021-2022, our company has become a bureaucratic hell hole. RFCs, PRDs, ADRs, reports. My manager (director of engineering) would request these documents but never read them. When someone doesn’t like the solution proposed, they have the option to say no and the project is blocked. But nobody (including the manager of the team) have the autonomy to say yes and move forward. How do you deal with this? Or is it time to give up and listened to the patented advice to quit my job?

Show Notes

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f84n5oFoZBc - hammock-driven-development

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

1. 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.

   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.

   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?

   Thanks and I hope I’m not getting fired for helping a paying client!

2. J Dot Dev asks,

   ‌

   What’s the worst thing you’ve had to do as a software engineer with direction from your employer?

   Years ago at a webdev shop we had a client who didn’t want to pay for e-commerce set up.

   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.

   “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.”

   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.

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

1. During our next team meeting I jokingly gave a status report on the state of my desk and referenced the note.

   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.

   ‌

   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.

   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.

   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.

2. Aaron asks,

   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?

This week Jamison and Dave answer these questions:

1. How often do candidates get hired who don’t match the requirements listed in a job posting? Is it a waste for me to apply to all jobs I come across even though I only have about 1/3 of what they want?
2. I’ve been moved to a newly formed team. I suspect the team consists of people nobody really wants to work with. What are my options in a situation like this?