In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I’ve recently started a new Gig as a Senior Developer/Tech Lead at a company where we are our own clients, using the software we develop in-house. I’m encountering a bit of a hiccup, though. Our product owner, is primarily focused on support and doesn’t provide formal Acceptance Criteria. This means I spend a lot of time sending follow-up emails to confirm our discussions, drafting these criteria myself, and handling the management of boards and work items. Another challenge is our product owner’s enthusiasm. He’s full of ideas and tends to expand the project scope during our meetings, perhaps not fully realizing the additional development work and the impact on our timelines. I sometimes think that if he wrote down his thoughts, it might give him a clearer picture of the challenges we face in development in keeping up with these changes. I’m in a bit of a quandary here. How can I gently nudge him to take on some of these tasks, or should I discuss with my boss how this is taking up about 1 to 1.5 days of my week? While I’m more than willing to handle it, especially with the prospect of moving into a management role, I also don’t want to set a precedent that creating Acceptance Criteria and managing Work Items are part of a developer’s job scope – at least not to this extent. Any thoughts? Sean asks: Hi Soft Skills Engineering, I love your podcast and I have a question for you. I have a very good memory and I can recall details from a long time ago. This sounds like a great skill, but it also causes me some problems at work. Often, I get asked questions by my colleagues or my boss that are not related to my current tasks or responsibilities. For example, they might ask me about the content of an email that they sent or received a year ago, or the outcome of a meeting that I attended (but also did they). They ask me because they know I probably remember, and they want to avoid searching for the information themselves. This annoys me because it interrupts my work and makes me feel like a human search engine. I want to be helpful, but I also want to focus on my actual work. I can’t redirect them to my boss, because he has a very bad memory himself. How can I deal with this situation without being rude or lying about my memory? How can I set boundaries and expectations with my colleagues and my boss? And without gaslighting them into thinking I already answered their questions, of course. Thank you for your advice.

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: 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”? 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: My team are about 4 months into transitioning from a scrum/kanban way of working to a more traditional scrum/sprint way of working. I feel like our scrum master is “weaponising” some of the scrum practices in order to show up weak points and failures in the team, rather than working with the team to ease us through the transition and make gradual improvements. In private conversations with me and some other trusted developers (lol jk I clearly shouldn’t be trusted as I’m writing in to Dave and Jamison) the scrum master speaks about how little refined work we have in our back log, and how they are looking forward to “exposing bottle necks” in the team. As they expect this will lead to pressure on our PO and Business Analyst and force them to step up their game. Whatever amount of work we bring into a sprint is law, and they forbid more tickets coming onto the board mid sprint (even if all the tickets are done half way through the sprint). If one single ticket is on the board they will try to block more tickets moving into ready for Dev as they believe we should all be focusing on getting the highest priority pieces of work into the done column. And they take no notice when I’ve expressed the issue with this too many cooks approach. They’re a nice enough person outside of a work context. But in work, it really feels like they’re setting us up to fail (and sort of releshing in it). Dissent is rising in the team, and everyone from all sides feels unhappy. Can you recommend any action I could take to prevent the failures that are inbound? For context, I am a junior developer working for a large company. Within my department we are split up into “SCRUM” teams made up of around 6 Developers, 2 testers, a scrum master, a Business Analyst and a Product Owner. The senior developers within the team have not taken any action other than to complain in secret about the SMs behaviour. Before the tech recession, I would recommend engineers stay at a job for 12 months before looking for a new job in order to avoid having the stigma of being a job hopper. But with the tech recession enabling employers to be more picky, is 12 months long enough? Or should engineers stay at a job for even longer than 12 months before looking for a new job?

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: 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. 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: 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? 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: Hey guys! I’m a young engineer in a specialized area of infrastructure. I’m pretty good at what I do, and I’ve been through some leadership development programs, so I’ve advanced to a “Staff” role quickly, just based on observing the age of my peers. Tech titles are completely mysterious to me, so I’m wondering - how much “up” is there from where I am? What’s the top of the IC ladder? Do ICs ever become executives? The idea of being a manager and sitting in 1:1s for hours sounds awful to me, so I’m not excited about that side, but I’ve heard, allegedly, that there is room on the IC side for promotion as well. I’m a goal setter, and I kinda feel like I’ve hit a ceiling, so I don’t know where to set my target anymore. I don’t even know that I care about titles that much, but I very much like the pay raises that accompany them. Thanks! Johnny Droptbales: How do I tell if my manager is a direct communicator or a jerk? Should I trust my gut on this (he’s a jerk)? I’ve been working with my manager for a year now. He’s fairly fluent in English, educated, and keeps up with broad knowledge of our team/domain. He often connects different aspects of our work to discover discrepancies, bugs, and interesting ideas. I’m trying to wrap my head around his communication style. Here are a few examples that stand out: I refused to take on a new small project because I was concerned about meeting the deadline on my high-priority solo project. He gave me feedback that I missed an opportunity to demonstrate context-switching skills, which would look good for a promotion. I responded with my own reasoning, but he wasn’t interested and just moved on to the next topic. He insisted on a new weekly requirement for our on-call pager rotation, which is to come up with one idea to improve the experience. When I asked why asking for help on a problem wouldn’t be enough, he answered that he expected his engineers to have been hired for their critical thinking and leadership skills, and they should be able to demonstrate those. Recently he’s been leading weekly meetings to improve the on-call experience. He tends to ask very direct questions – we’ll look at a bug ticket, and he asks, “What is the root cause?” “Why do we do this?” “What are your ideas to solve this?” When pressed, he insisted this was a brainstorming sort of conversation, as opposed to a Q&A.

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I’m a backend engineer at a large non-public company. I noticed a bunch of our emails and website riddled with typos. I can not claim that it is metrics impacting or impacting business, so I get that teams always deprioritize, but the overall feel just irks me. Many of these come from a CMS I don’t have access too, so it’s not like I could offer to help with code even if I wanted. When things like this are not in your space, any advice on how to up overall quality? Possibly Mute Senior Engineer asks, I’m currently a senior engineer in a really small startup, and I’ve been here just long enough that I’m deeply familiar with our flagship product in multiple areas - infrastructure, the guts of the business logic, our deployment patterns, our most common failure modes, etc. Unfortunately, I have to be involved in every project and pick the application up off the ground when it dies. As a result, I’ve become spread very thin, and I have to cut corners just to stay afloat (or I am specifically directed to cut corners to meet a deadline). Frequently (because of all the corner cutting), we run into two situations that really tick me off: I see bad thing on the horizon, talk to my team about it, am ignored, then bad thing happens and I get to have a crappy day fixing it I recommend a basic best practice, we don’t use it and do some coat hanger + duct tape thing instead, thing breaks, and I get to have a crappy day fixing it. I’m very tired of being on the wrong end of the consequences of our own actions. I pour so much into this job, but I feel like I need to go get my vocal cords inspected, because it’s like my teammates and my manager can’t hear me when I talk about the things we’re doing poorly that lead to bad outcomes. Quit my job? Or is there an easy way to deal with this situation that I’m just missing? I feel like I’m screaming into the void every time I have these discussions and get completely blown off with “oh that’s not important right now” or “oh that terrible thing could never happen”. Thanks in advance!

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: 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. 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: Hey guys, love the show. Not sure if its really a question or more of a confession. I’m an individual contributor at a software company with a few thousand employees. A lot of professional books/training courses I encountered over the years talk about the importance of positively acknowledging your employees/reports/team members when they do a good job. Most of them say that this sort of praise and other immaterial motivation is more important than material motivation (bonuses/raises). More and more, my higher ups had started trying to motivate us with public “pats on the back” for individuals and teams. They were never generous with the material motivation to begin with. Honestly, i find these pats on the back grating. I don’t need to be told “good job kiddo” to actually work hard. To be blunt, i want a raise and/or bonuses, not empty words. But material recognition is all red tape and budget constraints these days, so I dont actually expect much. The issue is that the immaterial motivation just reminds me of what is just out of reach, and thus just demotivates me. Is there any good way to express these frustrations to my manager without sounding like a materialistic greedy bastard? Which I suppose I am, but I’m tired of feeling like one. I’m a principal engineer working with two teams of developers who own a product domain that is being rewritten on an aggressive schedule. We’ve increased headcount over the past year but we’ve started having friction with some of the new hires. Its clear that they want more input into the patterns and coding styles used by the teams that were established prior to them joining. Unfortunately, this seems to come up in PRs rather than discussions and leads to push back from me and the tech leads on the teams. This has lead to our engineering manager commenting that they’re getting complaints about us being too restrictive and developer happiness being impacted. While I don’t want any of the developers to be unhappy, I worry that the EM is risking hurting the team as a whole by focusing on the happiness of one or two new hires. The Tech Leads are also starting to worry about what they are allowed to comment on in PRs. Help! How do I keep the devs from feeling underappreciated, the tech leads feeling empowered to lead, and ensure that the codebase stays consistent between repositories so all developers can move between services without feeling lost?

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Hello Dave and Jamison, I wanted to say thank you for your podcast. It’s been a great wealth of information and comic relief. Can we bring back the guitar intros? I work in the technology arm of a large corporation. There are no younger engineers. I am one of the youngest at just shy of 30 (my first tech job after going back to school). I receive praise for my eagerness to learn and grow and how much I try to engage with the org. I feel like if we hired more Junior engineers it would both increase the engagement of the org and give senior engineers more of a sense of purpose to pass the torch. One of my favorite engineers from whom I get the best advice has been here for over 20 years and they are awesome! I also get great advice from people on my team but some of them are cruising or in a “couple years till retirement” mode. Should I try to convince management to hire more junior engineers? Is there anything I can do to relate more to older org members? Hi Dave and Jamison! I’m an engineering manager tasked with getting the team back to an open office (hybrid). My team works very well remotely, with the occasional in-person meetup. I believe that in terms of productivity, work-life balance, engagement, and turnover, RTO will negatively impact the team. I’m torn between representing what I feel is good for the team and supporting the company’s decision. I’ve already expressed my concerns with management, and the overall sentiment seems to be that anyone who doesn’t like it can find a new job. Aside from this, I like my job, team and company and don’t want to quit over this. Any tips on finding a balance representing team needs and implementing higher-up direction?

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I feel like I’m stuck. I’m in a senior/lead position technically called an SRE, but I find myself doing all kinds of cleanup work that should instead be spread across teams. My suggestions for automating toil and cleaning up tech debt fall on deaf ears until some principal engineer decides a couple of months down the line some problem is worth solving (then it’s urgent!!1). I’ve experienced this at a few companies now and see some patterns, but I’m not sure what the way out is yet. It seems I need to find the most respected person (and fight them! just kidding), gain their trust, and play politics to get basic problems solved and work properly distributed. I am exhausted. If you want me to lead, then give me the power I need to lead. If you want me to be a cog, then make it a decent work environment and pay enough. I feel like I’m stuck in some sort of purgatory. I’m considering going for a management job, but I think I’d hate it. How can I find a 9-5 that isn’t soul sucking and run by a few people who have the ear of the C-level? As two people who lead engineering teams, have conducting tons of interviews for developers and hired many, what are your opinions on the prospects of career changing self-taught developers landing a decent job in 2023 forward? I have a career in Product Marketing, working very closely with Product, Engineering, and Sales teams. I believe I bring a lot of the “soft skills” to the table and am teaching myself the “hard skills”. My concerns are that it will be incredibly difficult to actually find a job and, if I do, it’ll be an entry level role that effectively resets my existing 9-year career back to the starting blocks. In your experiences, would you hire folks looking to make a career move in anything other than junior positions, or would you be wary of them in favor of other candidates?

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: 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? 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: 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? 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.

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I recently started the interviewing for a senior engineering manager role at a fairly prestigious, but not huge (maybe 30-50 engineers) tech company. The job description heavily emphasized the idea of leading as a peer as opposed to just relying on the EM title. I love this approach, but the lead interviewer then disclosed that they don’t want EMs writing production code. This seems like a contradiction. Am I naive in thinking so? I certainly understand that taking on a more managerial focus will result in less IC work. However, as a leader I find a ton of value in staying close to the trenches. It allows me to earn the respect of my reports, empathize with their day to day, and sniff out good/bad decisions quickly. As an engineer with good softskills, it feels like gravity wants to rip me away from writing code. How do I stop this? Can I? Should I resign myself to a work-life filled with never ending 1:1s? Hello Dave and Jamison, thank you for your podcast. I have listened to almost all episodes and they provide both educational and entertaining values, you rock! I would like to ask you for advice. I am struggling with a problem related to communicating and cooperating with people in general. I have over 10 years of professional experience. I was always a hardcore nerd, sitting alone in front of the computer and programming, focused only on pure technical skills, everything else was unimportant. Most of my career I spent in small companies where I could just spend time writing code and I wasn’t bothered by anything else. However, one year ago I started to work at FAANG and now I feel overwhelmed. Technical skills seem not so important anymore. Most of the problems are being solved by talking, negotiating and following up with other teams, participating in meetings and presenting results to management. It stresses and burns me out. I feel it like a waste of time and potential but also I was never a people person, so I am anxious every time I am in a new social situation. How could I convince myself that such non-technical skills are equally important as technical skills? What steps can I take to improve my attitude and skills? What would you advise if you had to work with a person like that?

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: There aren’t a lot of engineering management growth resources in my company. It’s a relatively small company with about 50 engineers. My manager doesn’t have time to properly mentor me. And I’m not sure I would want him to because I feel like his advice isn’t always the best. Where can I go for management mentorship or other learning resources? Is it worth exploring non-engineering managers on other teams? Or leaning more on my peers? Or should I be looking for outside advice? A recent episode mentioned awkward Zoom silences. My experience is the exact opposite. I recently switched teams at the same company. This new team has a Zoom room open for the entire work day. The first person to start their day begins the Zoom and the last to leave ends the meeting. They do “mob programming” using a command line tool that switches users every few minutes along with all the strict rules of Extreme Programming - a driver, navigator, etc. But they also do everything in groups: story refinement, diagrams, documentation, everything. Live collab, all day, every day. I’m one month into this transfer but worried that this isn’t a good fit and that I made a horrible mistake. ALL the other engineers here rave about how this is the greatest thing ever. Am I the weirdo for not liking it? I feel like I am of split-mind to only either speak or type (but not both) and have not yet rediscovered my coding flow. Mostly I just wanted to roll a perception check with you: Am I the weirdo for not liking all this collaboration and 100% Zooming, or would this workflow drive most other engineers mad as well? Any pep talk about sticking it out would be appreciated.

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: My company is doing performance reviews. While writing my self-review, I was shocked by how much I had accomplished in the last 6 months. I’d led our org to adopt multiple new technologies and supported other teams in adopting them, to great effect. But looking back, I wish I could trade half the accomplishments on my self-review for time spent taking better care of myself and my partner and kids. I’m not working crazy hours; I work a pretty regular 40hrs per week on a flexible schedule (with 3 young kids, this is, in fact, a crazy schedule). I’m on track for the promotion from senior to staff, maybe in this cycle, and I’m wondering: would it be crazy for me to propose that I stay in the senior pay band, and start working 4 days a week? I’ve also considered scheduling personal time during the day. But I know I’ll be fighting an internal work-time-clock forged by years of cortisol flow. What’s your advice for lightening up a lead foot? A listener named Aisha says, 6 months ago I quit my first job out of college. It was a very toxic and hostile workplace. I sucked it up for almost 3 years, but it got so bad that I had to quit my job without another lined up (yikes, I know). I was a great employee, and was always given excellent performance reviews. After giving my boss plenty of notice, I asked if I could use him as a reference and he said yes. It’s been a struggle finding another job. I’ve submitted hundreds of applications, reviewed my resume with mentors, and attended workshops for interviewing skills, but nothing helped. Out of sheer desperation, I had a friend pretend to be a future employer and call my boss asking for a reference. As I suspected, he was providing a bad reference that included outright lies about my work ethic and me as a person. I have no idea why he would do this. I am at a loss of what to do. The obvious thing to do it not include that job on my resume, but without it I basically have zero experience and a large gap between graduating and now. :( I have contacted some of my old team members if they could be a reference instead of my boss, but none have gotten back to me as of yet weeks later. Please help! What do I do?

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Listener Ashleigh asks, I’m a mid-level developer at a small company with a non-technical manager. After several months working on migrating our users from a legacy system to our new system, our non-technical business analyst discovered our current system re-uses lots of code from the legacy system. The BA immediately escalated their “concerns” about this to our manager. This quickly resulted in a group message from our manager to the BA, our senior engineer, me, and another developer. Without asking for more than a cursory explanation of how two sets of users who need the same functionality can use the same code base without breaking things for each other, our manager made the decision to fork the project and maintain two separate code bases. The developers tried to explain why this was a bad idea, but we were immediately shot down. This has already resulted in issues in pre-production environments. They were afraid that having changes in one unified code base would break things for both groups of users. We were given no opportunity to make further arguments. Two months later I find that my motivation at work has tanked. Despite being below market rate, I’ve stayed because it’s allowed me to advance my skills as a developer. But my trust in our BA and management is completely shattered. Is it worth staying in my current role? Is salvaging my current situation a hopeless cause that will likely just collapse again in the future? Or would I be wise to get out ASAP before things blow up and the blame is pushed on our development team? I feel like I already know the answer in my gut, but I’d like to hear your perspectives on this. Listener Damison Jance asks, I sometimes find myself struggling to describe how software issues will affect product designs to non-software engineers. It is hard for me to explain “this seemly tiny change in user experience you’ve asked for is actually driven by this backend functionality that is totally transparent to users and really no one besides backend engineers has any reason to know about it, but yeah anyway that small change is going to require six months of work and changes to multiple services.” I have found this approach quite ineffective, and I think it comes off as me sounding like “my way or the highway”. I’m wondering if you guys have any tips for explaining how systems work to people who aren’t software engineers and don’t necessarily have all the context you do. Show Notes Microservices video (keyword: Omegastar): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8OnoxKotPQ

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: “Hi! Love the show, long time listener. So an architect noticed an issue with credentials embedded into request body being logged. I had planned to resolve that, and someone already had done so for another instance. I took a day or two to figure out how to fix it globally, and even tied it into another filtering we did. That would mean one list of sensitive data patterns to maintain – that we already had, and don’t need to worry about which context keys to scan in. Scan them all, CPU time is free after all /s I opened this PR, and received no feedback for a day. Another engineer did mention an alternate approach that would resolve this particular case, but I was trying to fix it globally so we didn’t have to maintain a list of keys to scan on. Next day he mentioned he made some click ops change that resolved THIS PARTICULAR INSTANCE, meanwhile still not providing any feedback on the PR. This approach is IMO a maintenance burden: keep two different filtering in sync, proactively add keys to strip. High chance of mistakes slipping in over time. So I said OK works with some caveats, and rejected my PR. I can not explain why but this incident tilted me hard. For one thing he essentially grabbed my ticket with no communication and resolved it himself. Then he provided no feedback and went with a different approach without consulting anyone else. Worst of all, he ended up with an (IMO) markedly worse fix that I had already dismissed as being too brittle and likely to miss things in the future. What do? Am I unreasonable to feel undermined and disrespected?” Hi Dave and Jamison, long time listener love the show. I work on a team that is relatively small in size but we own a huge scope including multiple flavors of client-side app and a bunch of backend integrations. We recently launched our product and since then there have been constant fire due to various tech debt that we never fix. Our manager has attempted to ask the team to share the burden of solving these tech debts, but there are only very few that are actually doing it. I can think of many reason why they are not able/willing to take on the task, likely due to other priorities or unfamiliarity with the part of the codebase. Due to my familiarity with various component, I’m usually the one proposing the fix and actually fixing it. I have started to feel this is taking a toll on my own career development because I ended up not having bandwidth to work on those bigger projects/features that have high visibility and good for promotion. I do think solving the tech debt is important work and don’t mind doing them. How would you navigate this situation? Thanks for the awesome podcast!

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I’ve managed an ML team in a small company for ~2 years now. I created an 8 person team from scratch and I’m super proud of the team I’ve built. However, I miss being an engineer and wish I could spend more time coding. I was considering asking for a role change to IC, but out of nowhere my manager offered to me a promotion to head of platform engineering. I would have 3 engineering teams reporting to me - about 30 people altogether. I have trouble saying no to new opportunities but can I put the genie back in the bottle? If I get “Peter principled”, I feel like it would be challenging or embarrassing to return to IC work.

How can I stay close to the ML side while managing other teams? Would other teams feel dejected if they know I had a “favorite” team? Is it just me or do people also find silences over Zoom unbearable? I work in a team that is mostly remote, and I find myself deliberately logging into meetings late to avoid the silence or the stilted, awkward smalltalk. If i’m running the meeting, I kickoff at 1 minute past to avoid having to deal with that dead air. I also find myself too quick to fill pauses during meetings. I never have this problem in person meetings. I’ve been in the same team now for nearly a year and I still dread uncomfortable silences over Zoom. How do I get over this?

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: 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? 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: I applied and was hired for a 100% telecommute position. Recently, the company has mandated all employees near an office switch to a hybrid schedule. I’m looking at an hour or more round trip and the yearly cost of parking is several thousand dollars. The company also announced to their investors that massive layoffs will be coming due to the economy and redundancies due to a large merger. I’m relatively new to the company and left my previous company after only a couple of years. I like where I work and the company benefits. I do prefer working in office and don’t want to be seen as a perpetual job hopper. I’m just not thrilled about the commute time and commute paycut. We have been assured my product is invaluable but should I believe that? A friend referred me to a hybrid position biking distance from my house. Assuming I’m made an offer, should I take it? What if it’s slightly less than what I’m making now? Hi Jamison and Dave, another long time listener here. Thank you for all your advice and the good laughs you provide in the show! I’m in my early 40s and have been working since I was 19 with a few years spent in education at university. In all these years there have been ups and downs, financial crises, personal crises, layoffs, good laughs and friendships, great teams, projects and bosses, and not so great teams, projects and bosses. I have enjoyed some of the work I’ve been doing in my industry, and I’ve enjoyed making some good contributions to my field. I have been badly burned out two times in my career. Healing and recovering was hard but thankfully I was able to rejoin the workforce successfully (or that’s what I thought). Last year I identified I’m slowly burning out badly again. Since this will be my third time, I’m *very* seriously reconsidering a career change, to quit tech and software altogether. I’m passionate about the field I work in though it seems I can’t avoid getting sick badly from time to time in part because of the difficulties for finding a good team/project fit, having to deal with difficult people at work and a mental health condition I’ve been struggling with since my teens. I have friends in the industry that are very senior, and we all share common struggles and our complaints about the industry are getting worse and worse with time. Is that a symptom of becoming more experienced? Are we all becoming jaded? My current job pays well, but I’ve come to the realisation that it isn’t a good deal to trade great compensation for my health. I’m seriously considering downshifting and quitting tech to hopefully (and finally) bring sanity and peace to my life. This is something I’ve been also discussing with my therapist lately. So here’s my question: do you think it’s worth pursuing a long career in tech, or it’s just that the more experienced and senior you become the hardest the job becomes because your awareness raises? Do you have any other advice? Thanks for reading and congrats again on the podcast!

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: 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. 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: 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? 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: Love the show, you guys have saved my bacon more times than I can count! I interviewed at an organization for a Senior Engineering role, but the interview went so well, they actually offered me the option to accept a Staff role! I definitely didn’t feel ready for that, but I accepted as a way to stretch and challenge myself. The company has been through some internal churn and re-arranging for most of my time there, and I bounced between a lot of projects, which means I’ve now been at the company coming up on 2 years, but not really had the chance to grow into the role. Now, I’ve been here awhile, don’t have a lot of excuses, and am bad at being a Staff Engineer. My biggest failing, is that I lack a bigger vision for our project, beyond just meeting customer needs for today. I’m not even sure how to start building that bigger vision! In my current project, this is especially apparent, because we do need to meet internal customer needs, but the end goal is a larger platform. We need features that inspire new avenues of work as well as enable current ones. How the heck do I even begin to start imagining what this bigger vision could be? Moreover, once I have that vision, how do I get buy in for that vision? My inability to do this kind of forward thinking has been a boat anchor around my ankles my entire career, and I’m lost as to where to even start. Help me guys, I love my job, but I fear I’ve become the embodiment of the Peter Principle. Help me chew my ankles off to save my career Listener Trevor asks, ‌ I work as a data scientist at a small company. I joined the company specifically because of the positive work environment. I do mostly software development and until recently have only received positive reviews. Recently we had a heated meeting with the CTO and CFO where we demonstrated that a customer’s request wasn’t feasible. The CTO challenged and expressed disbelief in our numbers which we had thoroughly analyzed and confirmed as accurate. I felt like their reaction was due to our results conflicting with our business needs. After that, my manager began pushing me to prioritize data science tasks. He attributed the outcome of the meeting to my lack of attention to detail, even though the results were accurate. He also said this would affect my next performance review. We reached a resolution when I apologized and committed to improvement. I’ve only received positive feedback since, but I still feel the assessment was unfairly based on such a brief meeting. Now I view the company and my manager differently. Without the positive work relationships with management and colleagues, I’m not sure what is keeping me here. Our tech stack is outdated, and there’s reluctance to change practices. For example, we didn’t have a CICD pipeline until only a few months ago. Additionally, the performance review and promotion schedules are nebulous and irregular. I’m uncertain about my next steps. Should I address the perceived unfairness of the meeting feedback? Or would it be better to start exploring other job opportunities?

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I joined a startup at the peak of the tech bubble which sadly means that my equity was based on the company’s valuation which was very over-valued. To corroborate this, the company has not grown much in terms of users or revenue. The company also had a layoff just like many startups. As even public or unicorn tech companies are often devalued by 50-75%, I think it is reasonable to say that my equity grant is worth a lot less and I’m being underpaid. Most likely, I will leave the company anyway for some other reasons, but I was curious whether it would be reasonable to ask for significantly more equity. From a pure financial point of view, if a company is valued 75% less then asking for 2x does not seem too unreasonable to me, but I can see that it can be seen as too calculative and the company may be unwilling to grant more equity to that extent. What do you think? Assuming that asking for more equity grants is not unreasonable, I’m also curious how you would bring it up to your manager without looking to be too greedy. I have been a software engineer at a large finance firm for around 2 years out of school. My team works in a hybrid model but most of my meetings are still remote. At least once every couple weeks when I try to ask a question or otherwise participate on a group call or more rarely when I’m responding to a question about my own topic I get interrupted and completely cut off by more senior people on the call, such as my manager, product owner or architect. The other developers and technical people rarely interrupt each other. Some other details: I try to wait for pauses before speaking, and have tried reiterating after the new topic changes again but often it’s just too late. I also tried ignoring the interruption and continuing to speak but I really don’t enjoy having to do this in order to be heard and it feels disrespectful. I’ve noticed this also happens to other more junior members of the team, most of whom are much more reserved in meetings than I am. Another thing to mention is its not really a problem for me during in-person meetings. Am I being a special snowflake to find this annoying and humiliating or is it just par for the course of being a more junior member of the team?

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: 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!! 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: Hello Jave and Dames, Long time listener short time Dev. Big fan of the show, my confidence in my skills as a programmer has always been pretty low so having a podcast centered around the “soft skills” instead of more complex topics like “Covariance and Contravariance”, “Temporal Logic”, or “Basic Addition” gives me the strength to press further on. Onto the question, how do you gain more confidence in yourself as a developer and not feel like a burden to your team? I’m a recent graduate with a bachelors in CS. During my time in University I struggled and took more time to grasp many of the concepts than my peers. After somehow graduating I was too scared to even look for a programming job for a full year. After being encouraged by some amazing people I finally applied and started a job as a Junior Dev for a software company and I’m now in a constant state of screaming internally. Everyone there is so much smarter, the training routine consists mostly of being given a project then having to stop another developer for help. And we program in an IDE and language that is so underused and underdocumented that I won’t name either for fear of doxxing the company. I actually like the job, my coworkers are super nice. My project manager is the same and cares about the team. I’ve finished the projects given to me on schedule so far and of course it’s pretty nice making more than minimum wage + tips. Any advice on how to gain confidence? I’m programming and learning in my off time but I’m still worried one day they will see me for the weak chain in the linked list I am and will delete me from existence and linkedin as I’m assuming is standard for firings in the tech world. P.S. If you tell me to quit my job I will simply find a second job to quit, Checkmate. Listener SuperSonny asks, My boss and myself have a difference of what is a value added activity to the company. Even when we agree that our end goal is the same our approaches are night and day different. We have discussed this many times and understand we are different people but can this relationship work? This has created a lot of tension in our work relationship. Can two people at different ends of the “thought process” spectrum work together?

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: My employer offered a retention bonus after: The CTO left two weeks after I arrived Two weeks later 1/4 of the staff was laid off Two weeks after that the COO left Two weeks after that 2 board members resigned Three or Four weeks after that the Director of Engineering left What does that mean? What do I look out for? I discovered your podcast just about 2 weeks ago and I love it, and I listen to them daily when driving to office, this make forced RTO feels a little bit better. I am currently a mid to senior SWE at FAANG. For the past 1.5 years I have been trying to interview for other opportunities at Staff level. I have good result with coding and design interview but I felt like I’m always falling short at behavioral questions. Example is “Tell me a time when you have a conflict”. How do I go about showing seniority in these type of questions? I led a few projects and powered through a lot of conflicts to deliver results at my company, at the same time I can’t think of a particular methodology I used to get through them. There were times I compromised, pushed back hard, meet halfway depends on situation. I dont want to show i’m a pushover at the same I don’t want to show i’m not easy to work with. What are the signals they are looking for for a Staff level engineer in behavoral style questions

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I am a senior engineer working in a team of 7. My team lead went through a pretty rough divorce in December. Since then he’s been quite distracted and disengaged at work. I decided to help him out by temporarily taking on some of his responsibilities. Over the months things seemed to have gotten worse. He shows up late for the 10am standup meeting almost every day. He never contributes anything in stakeholder meetings. I am effectively leading the team at this stage. Last week we had a one-on-one meeting to conduct my annual performance review. I wanted to discuss my situation and a potential promotion/raise. Instead he spent the entire hour crying about his life situation. He also shared with me that he has been heavily drinking and doing drugs for the past few months. He is clearly in a very dark place. I have experience with depression so I was able to empathize and offer some advice. I genuinely feel bad for him and I’m a quite worried that he might not be OK. But now I’m in a difficult situation. I’m sleep deprived while trying to do the job of de-facto team lead/manager as well as my regular senior/IC role. I don’t think anyone in HR or management is aware of what is going on. I don’t know what to do about this. I feel that if I tell HR about the situation that I will be betraying his trust. (and I might even get him fired depending on how much I divulge) On the other hand if I do nothing then I’m the one who has to keep shouldering the burden without compensation. It’s also negativity impacting the team as I have no management experience while simultaneously my code quality is suffering. This is putting me under a lot of stress during a time when I’d love to spend more time with my newborn. Sorry for the long and difficult question. Even if you don’t answer it at least I feel better for sharing this with someone :) Hi there! Long time listener, first time caller. I’ve been working at a small, seed stage startup for a little over a year as a senior IC and team lead. There are developers on another team who have been working at the company longer than me who have… questionable practices. For example, in production they set their log level to debug because they claim it is critical for them to find and fix bugs. However I’ve never seen or heard of an example of them actually using these logs to fix a problem, and this results in log spam and higher cloud costs. Whenever I try to open a dialogue about this or another one of their practices, they’re quick to deflect and insist on not changing anything. They don’t get defensive but just don’t want to do anything differently. Usually I give them my opinion and let them handle their own services but we’re seeing real financial costs to their decisions. I know our greatest costs are on people but I think we should still be responsible with our cloud spending. How can I get these other developers to Quit Their Job™ or otherwise be more open to new ideas for their practices?

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: We’ve recently switched to mandatory 2 days of in-person work a week but my employee keeps working from home! Whenever I ask him to come in person he says sure but continues to work from home. When I confront him about not showing up in person he just says “sorry I wasn’t able to make it that day”. He’s a good employee so I don’t want to fire him, but I’m concerned about what upper management will say if/when they find out about this. What should I do? Hi! I am a huge fan of the podcast and a longtime listener. I recently made a professional judgment call in a high-stress situation that, unfortunately, did not turn out well. It was an excellent learning opportunity for me. Both my team and mentors were very supportive and said they’ve all fumbled at one point in their career. I was understandably reprimanded in a private meeting with my manager. I embarrassingly started crying halfway through, which I’ve NEVER done before in a professional setting. I momentarily excused myself to regain my composure, but even after resuming I had to keep the the tissue box close by. It was awkward, and I could tell my manager was very uncomfortable despite being his kind demeanor. I am worried my reaction will call my reputation and professionalism into question. Please help! How do I recover from this?

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: 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. 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?

This is a rerun of episode 307. Enjoy! In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: 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? 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.

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

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Listener Thor asks, Is there a chance the tech stack I choose throughout my career will hurt my chances to shift direction towards project leading/managing in the future? Say, I do mostly frontend, will this affect the way people see my broader understanding of projects etc. compared to people in roles such as architect? Listener Travis asks, My company is starting to expand across time zones. The majority of the company is based in one time zone and a handful of employees are spread across others. I want to emphasize the importance of asynchronous communication. I have begun to feel like I need to respond ASAP to Slack messages instead of when it is convenient. 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 handle reaching out to team members in cases where a response is needed more immediately? Show Notes https://m.signalvnoise.com/is-group-chat-making-you-sweat/

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

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

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: 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? 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.

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

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: 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. 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?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: 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? 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?

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

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

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: 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. 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?

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

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Do you have any advice on how to give feedback to people who don’t take critical feedback well? There’s a person who joined my team with the same job title and level as me (senior product designer/L5) more than a year ago, and since then he has shown that he not only lacks a lot of skills to be considered senior but also lacks the self-awareness to see where he falls short and how he needs to improve. There have been multiple occasions in our 1:1s where he has alluded to critical feedback he’s gotten from people on our team (including our manager) and has written it off as irrelevant or untrue, will come up with excuses for his poor performance, and will make off-hand comments about the person as a way to discount their credibility. Overall I feel like this is part of a larger display of narcissist behavior; I’ve noticed that the only time he’ll listen to suggestions is if you make it not sound critical and sandwich them in between compliments. Up until now, I (hopefully) have avoided being on the receiving end of his negative comments, but since I’m trying to go for promotion, my manager wants me to give him more guidance and tell him directly the feedback that I’ve brought up to her. Seeing how he’s reacted in the past, I’m unsure how to just start giving him unsolicited feedback and am afraid of what he’ll think and say to others about me as someone with four less years of industry experience trying to give him advice. I’m also afraid that this will damage our working relationship as I’ve seen how despondent he becomes when things don’t go his way. I’ve told my manager these concerns and her response was that it isn’t on me if he reacts poorly to my feedback, but I feel like putting in the energy to give him feedback that he probably won’t even listen to is exhausting and isn’t worth the possibility of him becoming more adversarial towards me. What can I do? Any advice?? I recently joined a new company following the patented space law certified strategy of quit your job. I have a senior colleague who has been there maybe 8 months more than me. Whenever he has a problem, he likes to call me away from my desk and start explaining his entire problem to me. I have no knowledge of the real codebase yet and am not even an experienced programmer as I barely have 2 year of experience. I just stand there and nod and give various quips from time to time to pretend I’m listening. This can last up to 30 minutes and happens numerous times a day. If I say I’m busy he just waits 5 minutes before calling me over again. I cant get any work done because of this. How do I deal with this senior team mate that uses me as a rubber duck. Should I just buy him an actual rubber duck ?

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Hi! Love the podcast and have been listening for a while. I have a question about dealing with “that guy” on the team. I’ve been through several teams throughout my career, and every once in a while, I get on a team where there’s always a “that guy” that everyone seems to tiptoe around. They’re the type that would yell and scream to have everything go their way, and they’re typically very blunt to anyone, saying things in a really hurtful way. These people can either be technical or on the product side, but I’ve found it really difficult to work with people like this. After working long enough with “that guy”, it seems the common thing people do is just to say “Oh, that’s just so-and-so.” or “That’s just the way so-and-so is.”, which I feel is the only thing you can do, but that just doesn’t sit right with me because it’s incredibly toxic. I don’t think the solution is to just fire people like this, but it boggles my mind how so many teams just let this kind of behavior happen because the manager can’t or won’t take any action other than give them a talking to, which seems to just allow the behavior to continue because there are no consequences. Have you ever dealt with situations like this? And if so, how do you normally handle it without just ignoring it? I am a senior FE engineer and I have recurring 1-1s with my skip level manager (manager of my manager) who is the Head of Engineering at the unicorn I work for. I usually ask what is top of mind for them (usually hiring), give feedback about my manager, and get additional feedback on bigger picture things I’m working on (e.g. we’re currently working on metrics to measure impact and value of our design system and other internal tooling). What else would you ask them to make the best use of this time?

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: After six years at my first job out of college, I took the foolproof SSE advice and quit my job last year during the height of the pandemic. I landed at one of the Big Software Companies and learned that I negotiated very well for pay within my role (in large part, thanks to this podcast - yay!), but I am way overqualified compared to my peers and should have attempted to come in at the next software engineer level (oops). To get promoted I need signoff from my fairly new manager and the very tenured principal engineer (PE) who has historically run the team. My manager and the PE are frequently in disagreement, and send me one-off slacks to make requests that are directly at odds with each other. I’m squarely aligned with my manager’s prioritization which frequently puts me at odds with the senior PE. Yikes. The senior PE frequently overlooks technical complexity and business context, and gives far more technical opportunities to the men on the team. I don’t like his mode of leadership, and so do not want to mimic his style. Unfortunately, he’s very respected by the VP+ level so I worry that friction with him will swiftly crush my dreams of promotion. The parents are fighting. I’m caught in the middle and feel like I’m aligned with the side that is at a political disadvantage. Is there any hope of success for me unless they can magically start to get along? I joined a small team as a developer a few years ago, and was asked by management to help introduce some formal processes to the team to help us release a project that has been in the works for a number of years. With the team’s buy-in, I introduced SCRUM, and started playing the role of Scrum Master and Product Owner. I may also be the development team’s functional manager in the future. It seems that having the roles of 1) developer, 2) scrum master, 3) product owner, and 4) functional manager is too much for any one person to do well. With a primary role of functional manager, which of these other roles would make sense to hold onto? Which roles would be better to either hire replacements for or coach other team members to take over?

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I’m on a team of two. My manager/teammate is young (under 30, less than 5 years total work experience), minimally experienced with anything other than writing code, and has an inflated self-assessment of their own coding skills. They have a habit of either asking for (or simply changing on their own) every little thing to be their own way. This can be as unimportant as renaming all the variables to a different word with the same meaning (think $largeCar instead of $bigCar) or as bad as - after a discussion between two techniques for a feature in which their preferred method wasn’t chosen, - going in later and changing the code to how they wanted to do things. I’m feeling burnt out by the lack of control over my work and feeling like what I’m doing doesn’t make a difference.. Where and how should you draw lines in order to balance writing good software with showing respect for your team members? How do you deal with people who think their actions are justifiable because they are “improving” the code but really can only defend this by claiming it is “more readable” or some other subjective measure? I work at a well-funded startup and am likely going to be promoted (into another IC engineering role) in the next few months. I’m pretty clear on the leverage I have when negotiating salary before accepting a job offer, but I’m wondering how I should approach negotiation and raise expectations when it comes to receiving a promotion. Obviously, my company wants to retain me, otherwise I wouldn’t be getting promoted, but I don’t feel confident in negotiating when I’m already being given a raise and my only alternative to accepting it would be to leave and find another job. Additionally, I’m on great terms with my company and manager and I would not leave over a 5-10k difference in raise expectations. Just want to better prepare myself for the offer. My manager has also told me that when/if I receive a raise, I can negotiate (it’s not too late). That came up because I told him I assumed raises and promotions are long processes that need to be decided way in advance, but that is not the case at my company. Show Notes Tweet about engineers’ puzzle obsession: https://twitter.com/ryanflorence/status/1534951668214771721

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

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Hey guys! Love the show! I’ve worked for 8 years as a Software Engineer for a large aircraft company, and while I had a great time there, I left because I was tired of working with old tech and wanted to learn new stuff. I joined a medium-size company, working with lots of fun new tech, but after 8 months I got the opportunity to get my dream job as a Software Engineer at a specific Big Tech company. The problem is that after I started on my dream job, I “crashed” really hard. The people and org are great, but the job revolves around working with a large legacy product, using mostly old/basic tech, and overall I’ve been feeling really unmotivated since joining. After 4 months there, I was called by my previous fun job, and they offered me twice as much as I’m making at this Big Tech company to come back. I’m very tempted, but I’m afraid of screwing my resume by leaving so early. Should I toughen up and stick with my new fancy job, or go back and make more money and maybe be happier? Hello Dave & Jamison, First time, long time - I am 6 months into my first engineering job and loving it! (until recently…) my large team split into smaller teams. On my old team, we had lots of work to do and it was fun. My new team, however, is suffering from “spin-up time.” My tasks have shifted from clearly defined individual contributor type tasks, to amorphous research tasks on large architectural decisions. After about 3 months of this, it feels like this spin-up time is never going to end and we just don’t actually have much work coming our way. On the one hand, these are more senior engineering type tasks and I could probably learn a lot if I stay to see these through. On the other hand, I am certainly not at a senior engineer level and I miss spending my time coding. It was fun and I was learning a lot from that too. I fear that I may be atrophying as I haven’t done much coding for multiple months. On the third hand (I have three hands), I could definitely be making more money elsewhere. Should I stay and be patient, or is it time to take the magical SSE advice? is the economy crashing? I need help!!! Thanks, you guys are the best, Johnny Threehands Show Notes Architecture Astronaut: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/04/21/dont-let-architecture-astronauts-scare-you/

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I am working on a devops team building the shared services that our engineers depend on: log aggregation, CICD, Monitoring, K8s clusters, etc. The team is myself, my boss (lead devops engineer), and a handful of pretty junior people. I feel pulled in a bunch of directions. I’ve asked for written documentation from my boss to help establish expectations and processes. Think branching strategies, who owns what, what should be prioritized. I want to make it easier to train up the junior people on the team and enable us to push back when devs ask for stuff with no context of what it will take to finish. Nothing has been written. It’s starting to get to me because without that it’s very difficult for me to push back on requests from the developers on our various teams. How do I tell my boss that I feel like he’s letting me down and that I’m drowning because it seems he just can’t be bothered to write down some base information? I have been working with my manager for almost a year to be promoted. I have been making a lot of progress on my tasks and as a developer. My manager agreed that I would be promoted in the next month or so if I kept it up. Then he quit to go to a new company. I now have a new manager and I feel like I have to start from scratch. Not much has been translated over from the old manager to the new manager about my progress. The new manager is now telling me there is no way they would hire me as a mid-level dev. I feel like I wasted a lot of time with the old manager and that the new manager is not seeing my value to the company and all the work that I’ve done to this point. I’m not going to quit or anything but I just wanted to rant. thanks for listening. Show Notes Writing strategy and vision documents: https://lethain.com/strategies-visions/

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: 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? 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: 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? 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.

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: 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? 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: I recently told my boss I thought my comp was below market value and that, while I enjoy working here, I may have to start looking elsewhere for my next opportunity unless there was a way to adjust my salary. He actually agreed with me and said he would go to HR to see what he could do. A few days later, he came back to me and said they could do a market-rate adjustment of 20k per year. I was super happy. He said, “great I will let HR know that you accepted by EOD tomorrow and they will get the paperwork started.” At 10am the following day, he, along with a couple hundred other employees, were laid off. So my boss, my boss’s boss, my boss’s boss’s boss and the HR rep that my boss was talking to are no longer here. So my questions is, what’s the appropriate amount of time to wait before bringing this up to my new boss. With so many of my colleagues now out of work , it seems a bit insensitive to be so concerned with a raise, but also, I like more money. I am 8 months into my first job out of college in an entry level role and today the other new hire (4 months) got fired for poor performance. I have been assured that my performance is still satisfactory, but I have been unable to think about anything else since it happened. I know that I am probably fine, but I am still very shocked and on edge. Any advice on how to move past this without destroying my bloodpressure would be appreciated! Signed, your fellow high strung engineer

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I just hired someone as my direct report who is very, very smart, and has a great background. Ivy undergrad CS, Ivy grad school, and big tech experience. This is great! Except… he’s definitely much smarter than me. I slacked my way through a liberal arts degree, and have worked only for small startups my whole career. I’ve gotten by, but I’m no 10xer. How do I be a good manager for him considering all this? I want to help him grow in his career and be a good resource for him, but I don’t know what I have to offer. Should I just give him my key to the nonexistent middle manager cafeteria, and say, “I work for you now? Hi, I have a question about how to handle being confused in certain team meetings. It happens when the meeting is about discussing a certain problem to solve and most participants are much more up to speed with the issue being discussed. What ends up happening is that they discuss things fast, while I am hardly following and wondering if I should even be there. That is painful to me, because I’m aware that I’m not contributing much, while my time there is wasted and spent half trying to follow and half stressing out thinking what I should do. I guess that in order to contribute I would need to ask to be brought up to speed. Which I find a bit tricky because I’ll be asking myself: is it because I missed something? Or is it because of something I actually couldn’t possibly know? And secondly, should I have it clarified, which would disrupt the discussion and draw it out for others (especially if I need to go back to something that the group already went over)? Or should I address this completely differently, for example by requesting meeting agendas and preparing questions before the meetings? I’d love to hear your thoughts on how to tackle this, because it’s a pain every time it happens.

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: 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? 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: My boss keeps recommending bad movies. I watch most of them but I feel bad because they’re not good and I don’t want to disappoint my boss. They are ‘okay’ but are really mediocre. Do I just ignore my boss’s suggestions or should I keep watching these terrible action-heist movies even though I don’t like them? Does it matter if my emails are well written? I’m a software engineer. I asked my partner how I should word a part of my email. After reading my email they were appalled. They said that it was “abysmally written and lacked refinement”. I’ll admit that it wasn’t my best written email, but who cares? It was just an email letting a team member know that I had followed up on a ticket a while ago, so it wasn’t like this was going to a client or something. Plus I felt like the email conveyed the message that it needed to. In my mind as long as the email isn’t offensive or covered in grammatical errors and conveys the message, isn’t that good enough? My partner argued that I should write my emails more eloquently since my “terrible” emails will reflect poorly on me. I told other engineers care more about the content and less about how well-written any given email is, but they wouldn’t budge. In addition to that, some of the emails I’ve gotten from our senior and staff engineers seem like they were written with someone who has the English skills of a middle schooler and they seem to do fine for themselves. Thoughts? Show Notes This episode is sponsored by Compiler, and original podcast from Red Hat. Check it out Reference to the Dragon book on Wikipedia Robustness principle: Be liberal in what you accept and conservative in what you send

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Listener Casey asks, My team has built an internal framework for continuous delivery that enabled a key product release last year. The tooling has gained widespread adoption and popularity throughout the org, to the point that some leaders are requiring teams to use the framework for any new services. Things are generally going great, except that “my team” consists of only 2 people including myself, and we have so much work that the soonest we can look at new features is ~18 months from now. Some individuals, who are being required to use our framework, are frustrated and protesting loudly about how the framework doesn’t work exactly the way they think it should. How can I shelter my team from the outbursts of unhappy users? Or bolster their resolve so they don’t take on the anxiety of growing pains? P.S. We’re all remote so this happens 99% in chat channels and DMs. If something goes right, product takes credit. If something goes wrong, engineering takes the blame. How do you change that organizational dynamic? (Other than your usual answer.)

We are celebrating our 300th episode by publishing unique songs about the podcast. To get access to the songs, join Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/SoftSkillsEng In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Greetings! I have been with my current company for a number of years, and was recently promoted to Engineering Manager. I enjoy working here, and have a great manager and team. A job posting at another company recently piqued my interest (great salary, appealing company values, fully remote) and got me thinking, would it look terrible if I applied for, or switched jobs, so soon after a promotion to management? How can I figure out if communication problems with a team member are cultural or personal? My teammate immigrated to the states. We occasionally stumble over conversation and misunderstand each other. I think this is exacerbated by being remote. For example, they will ask a pointed and direct question that sounds like a challenge to my approach to a problem. When I attempt to answer, it’s clear we are nowhere near the same page and I need to back up and provide more detail. I am working and have worked with others who immigrated from the same country. I’ve had similar difficulties connecting before that I have not had with other teammates from other regions. However, this is not universally true of every teammate I’ve had from this area. If it is a cultural style, I would rather learn to adapt. I’m not interested in suggesting everyone need to conform to my cultural sensibilities. But if I can determine it’s a personal difficulty, we can work on it together.

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I’m a new team leader running a new project and when asked for a delivery date I gave my best guess (noob!). That date is at hand, our project is not. I gave a new delivery date and you guessed it, it’s later than the date I said way back when. I presented this new date to my boss, but he wants us to deploy what we have now… even though if we deployed what we have now the business’s cash flow would ignite tearing our collective hopes and dreams asunder. I told him this, in those words, and he said (with a knowing look) “ahhh, you’ve got to play the game, you have a reputation to protect”. I said I’d prefer a reputation of honesty, accuracy and improvement. He said he was talking about his reputation. His other teams consistently miss delivery dates, so I’d guess he has a reputation of missing delivery dates. I’d love to share my more accurate date, but that now feels like going behind his back, but if I don’t go behind his back - I’m going to get stabbed in my front. For now I’ve settled on putting my new date in confluence so I can use it as a shield when the inquisition comes. Dave, Jamison, what would you do and why? A parallel team has sold our VP on their internal framework, and has the VP convinced all other groups in his org should become dependent on it as a multi-app, multi-platform solution. Their framework is very buggy and they are very slow to acknowledge and fix bugs. They claim that due to the overwhelming amount of users/adopters of their framework, they can’t look at bugs, or that other projects take priority. This blocks our development. No one except them wanted to use their product, and somehow they used forced widespread adoption to avoid responsibility for missing their deadlines. This group has magnificent soft skills that have allowed them to evade being accountable for their issues. This team is a darling to the VP, so they are immune to accepting our feedback for the points I listed in the above question. How can we, who are multiple levels removed from this VP, improve our situation? Our group enjoys working together and on our product, so we don’t want to leave. We just want to find a way to become more tolerant of this other underperforming team. Show Notes https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/we-are-not-special/

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Earlier I decided I would quit my corporate engineering job in 2022. I’d stagnated, I wasn’t writing as much code as I wanted, and my company made me write our services in an internal domain specific language (DSL), which I don’t like. I’ve put off quitting due to anxiety reasons and not knowing exactly what I want to do next. I’ve even thought about taking a short gap to figure things out, but maybe that’s just me being a dramatic young person (I graduated university in May of 2020). However, now my company has done something terrible and promoted me to a second level engineer! And my manager has actually listened to my feedback! How could they? I still want to leave because the DSL ruins my coding skills and won’t transfer elsewhere. I work with great people. Also, I play an important role in the group because we’ve had so much turnover this past year. I don’t want to fall into the trap of thinking “the grass is always greener on the other side”, but I think leaving would be best for my career. How can I approach this without giving the impression that I’m flaky or ungrateful? And should I stop deliberating and quit my job sooner rather than later? I started a new position three months ago for a large pay increase, I am a fully remote software dev on a team of mostly local developers. My manager-to-be left the company a week before I started, and has not been replaced. The onboarding has been extremely lacking, I don’t have a mentor or buddy, I have very little l communication with my direct manager, and I have very little guidance on what to actually do, so I have been doing… nothing. Some days I do not even open my laptop. How do I start the conversation with my manager that I need something to do, without revealing openly that I have been doing nothing for the past three months?

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Liam asks, I was the second hire in my team and worked with one lead engineer who created the entire codebase from scratch. This engineer’s code was functional but not well architected and has many inconsistencies. They have since left the company and replaced with two new senior developers who are a lot stronger technically. We recognize issues with the current codebase but we’re finding it hard to make decisions on the best way of solving things. We’re all at the same seniority level and the managers above us do not have hands-on experience with our codebase or tech stack. Because we’re at the same seniority level I don’t want to start acting beyond my job title and make all the architectural decisions, but at the same time I don’t want to be a pushover. How should decisions be made in a team with a flat structure and no defined leader? My previous manager quit the company last year and we’ve been assigned a new one. While the previous manager knew technical side of the project really well, the new one seems to be clueless. He is not even showing any interest in learning about what we do. He is a good people manager, but lack of context makes him really bad project manager. What should I do? Should I talk to him to convince him to learn more or maybe it is normal and we were just really lucky with the previous manager?

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Hi! long time listener first time caller. i am the CTO of an early startup with 15 employees (12 engineers). 3 months ago, we hired a new engineer whose output is quite low compared to other engineers on the team. i have brought this up with him many times and tried to coach him on his debugging skills, time management skills, etc. After months of this, I am not seeing any change in output and am growing frustrated. At this point, I suspect that the engineer is just spending very little time on their tasks compared to others on the team (who admittedly often work late into the night). I don’t want to fire the engineer or micromanage his schedule, but am concerned that their slowness will impact our culture and product. Do you have any ideas on how I could help this engineer improve? Howdy fellas, I started my first SWE job out of college at a startup in the bay area and work in a team of three. Myself, my technical manager, and one other developer who comes from an adjacent field. I came three years of interning as a developer at a very relaxed company with 3000+ employees. I’m finding I have a lot more ownership over my work now than ever before and I really enjoy that! What I don’t enjoy is watching my manager run around like a headless chicken. Between managing all our jira boards, creating POC’s for a complete redesign of our core services, interviewing candidates, planning features for our existing services, and doing regular sprint work they have too much to do and not nearly enough time for all of it. This results in many things that are critical getting scrambled, forgotten, miscommunicated, or just dropped for lack of time on their part. I’ve tried to take some of the small tasks from them that aren’t necessarily a manager’s job such as managing the jira board and help desk tickets. Unfortunately they insist that they don’t want me to take over small tasks like that because they can handle it, but the same issues from them being overloaded persist. I think the team over all would be a lot more effective if they were able to focus in on particular tasks, but since they won’t let me help what else can I do?

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Love the podcast, love the banter and jokes, keep up the great work! Now, for my predicament: Good news: I just got my first job at a FAANG! Bad news: I’m coming in at the lowest level of software engineering despite being in my mid-30’s and nearly 10 years of non-FAANG experience. Given that it is my first Big Tech™ company, I understand being down-leveled, but I did not expect to be downleveled THIS much. I’m glad to have finally “hit the big leagues”, but I’m not thrilled that I’m on equal footing with a fresh college graduate. Hurt feelings aside, what is the best Soft Skills advice on how to catch up to the mid-30’s engineers who joined a FAANG fresh out of college? My plan is to tell my aspirations to my manager once I start and see how they can help me perform as well as possible in order to promote quickly, but I can see how that might come off as greedy or entitled. What do you think? Should I do anything about a lazy tech lead? Since covid and working from home, my tech lead went from a frantic micromanager to a lazy coaster. They seem to do 1-2 hours of work per day. They set their slack status to ‘away’ so you can’t tell if they are at their desk or not. They’ve stopped coding completely, but we have an excellent PM so there isn’t much else for them to do. Sometimes during stand-up you can clearly hear them driving their car. Even asking them for help/advice on slack can mean several hours waiting for a response. Management hasn’t noticed because we are a large team who all work really hard, so the feature output is still high. My dilemma: do I count myself lucky that they are no longer micromanaging and keep my mouth shut? Better the devil you know etc. Or, do I gather some evidence and tell their boss? I could be learning so much more from an engaged tech lead, and the team might feel less toxic. Final doozy: due to some incredible stock market gains I have some heavy golden handcuffs so #1 priority is keeping my own job and not creating an enemy that gets me fired.

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I work in a squad that has been slow in delivering. Squad leadership (including myself) concluded we need a staff engineer (one level above senior engineer) to help guide tech directions and to support other engineers. Unfortunately we have received only a single applicant- senior engineer “Brett” who’s already on the team. Brett is a good engineer and has a lot of great qualities - but falls short of the “staff” level. Our tech lead “Chris” doesn’t think Brett is suitable due to bad technical decisions Brett has made in the past. Chris also thinks Brett should have been discouraged from applying in the first place. (Brett’s manager is outside the team so has less visibility on what’s happening inside the squad) We’re suddenly in a bind. If we give Brett the role we are in the same situation as before but having to pay him more. If we don’t give him the role we run the risk of losing him in this environment - which would be very bad as he is a good engineer! Should our decision be down to how Brett interviews? What could have been done differently? I recently did some extensive planning for a feature with a back-end engineer where we negotiated what the GraphQL api would look like. As I was finishing up my feature work, I realized that they departed from that plan and didn’t tell me. Now the feature is late. They’re having to make adjustments because the departure from the spec made it impossible for the front-end to handle the data. I’m having to do more work because they used a completely different architecture than what we discussed. What’s even more frustrating is that the end result on the backend is going to be exactly the design that I initially proposed (this is documented), which the backend engineer shot down when I proposed it. I feel angry that they dismissed my technical expertise. This has also eroded my faith in collaborating with this person. Retro’s coming up. How would you approach retro? What outcome do I even want here? I don’t think more process is going to be helpful (I spent 6-8 hours on the planning portion of this feature). I am starting to wonder if my perception as a primarily front-end engineer prevents the back-end engineers from lending me credibility.

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Is it possible to move too fast and do you believe in too much enthusiasm? I am one of the youngest member of the team and am always willing to start new projects and balance a few different things. Is there a point where this can start hurting my career? I’ve gotten bumped in compensation fairly, almost 25% raise since I first started. My career goal is to stay on the programming side but want to become a possible trainer for newer engineers/devs. Listener Michael asks, I’m a backend engineer in an engineering/coding role with a small bit of SRE type work. I love the work as I get to dig deep into tech we use and have become subject a matter expert on databases within the company. I really like my team and my manager in particular, and get to learn a lot every week. My manager is leaving my team to lead a new team within the company that is focused on the company’s SaaS offering and I’ve been given the option of joining this new team if I wish. I like their managerial style and how they have helped me with my career progression so far. However, I’d be doing Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) work. I’m not sure if I’m ready yet to commit to being an SRE and code less/focus more on ensuring the reliability of mission critical production systems. I don’t know how easy it would be to switch back to more of a coding role in a years time or if it would pigeonhole me into that type of role. Have you got any advice?

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I recently joined a new company that pays me much better and has much better engineering practices than my previous job. I referred a great engineer who was hired on a different team. Then, another engineer from my old job applied for MY team and is currently being interviewed for the role. This engineer is one of the reasons I left my former company! They have an impressive resume and interview well, but are unable to complete even the most basic tasks and have no interest in improving their skills. They asked me to put in a good word with my tech lead, but if anything, I want to encourage my tech lead NOT to hire them. I’m not a part of the interviewing process but I feel an obligation to let my tech lead know just how bad this developer is. Help? Thanks for thinking I’m neat! I think you are pretty neat too! In my most recent 121, my manager asked me to give some feedback on another colleague on whether I thought they would make a good Engineering Manager. My genuine thoughts about my colleague are that they’re pretty good technically, they have good communication skills, are friendly, and just generally a good team player. Outside of work, we’re pretty good friends and so I really want to see them succeed. However, I can’t shake the feeling that they wouldn’t necessarily be a good Engineering Manager and I can’t figure out why. What are some other (not so obvious) qualities that you think are important for EMs, since on paper, I would think they tick a lot of the boxes.

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Hi! Thanks so much for all the work you do to put this show out, it’s kept me sane the past year. To sum up my problem…I’m aware this is going to sound like a slightly bananas thing to complain about, but my team’s tech lead is superhumanly productive. About 8 months ago, we hired Sarah. I can’t overstate how awesome Sarah is, but, well, in some ways that’s the problem. My team already suffers from under-resourcing. Rather than pushing back on unrealistic requests, Sarah will churn out 90% of the work required by working crazy hours so that we make the deadline. She always shares the credit and plays up even the smallest contribution any of the rest of us made, so again, that’s not at all the issue. For context, my team doesn’t have a manager, and our leaders are super high up the org chart. The problem is that now leadership expects this velocity from the team all the time, not realizing that this it relies on Sarah’s definitely-unsustainable level of productivity. Many other teams in our org are struggling to deliver due to the same resource constraints we face, so now their work is being lumped on our team as well, because the perception is that we’re The Team That Can Handle It. We’ve already lost one team member this year due to burnout, and the pace just keeps increasing. Additionally, I feel like this undermines leadership’s trust in my opinions. Leadership sometimes asks me how long a given thing will take. I’ll give an honest answer, but then when Sarah delivers the thing much faster by working 14-hour days, it makes it look like I’ve been sandbagging my estimates. How do I approach this? I’ve thought about explaining my concerns to Sarah in a 1:1, but I feel like I’d just come across as lazy and whiny…for all I know, she thinks we all should work like she does, although she’d definitely be too polite to say so outright. Are there any other options, or is this a :partyquityourjob: situation? Hello Hosts! I love the podcast and its light and humorous tone on a not so light subject. Ours is a small team with just 2 engineers in a mid-sized company. I joined recently as a senior engineer. The other person was hired for the same role a few months after me. The problem is that this other engineer doesn’t seem to posses senior level skill-set. I often find them making obvious mistakes and struggling to understand user stories. On most occasions they aren’t even able to finish their work, let alone making technical design decisions. I tried to bring this up in a casual way with them, and they seemed to get a bit touchy and defensive about it and they also seem to have a difficult time in making honest conversations about issues. So I never brought this up again. This situation of them not being able to carry out their expected responsibilities is taxing me a lot as I have to pick up the things they mess up in addition to my job. If this was from a person at a much junior level, that would be understandable. But this doesn’t make any sense to me. I am not very comfortable with the idea of ratting them out to the manager and seeming like a non-team player, but I am also afraid that I cannot put up with them for long while also still maintaining my sanity. If you were in my situation, may I know what would you do differently and how would you deal with this person? Thanking you!

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I wanted to know if listing past offers (as a brand name signal) on your resume will help or hurt you during the resume screening and interview stages? I am an SQA engineer at one of the FAANGS, and I feel inadequate in my position; I get the gist QAs are not valued much. Essentially I got into this domain early in my career, and I find moving out of this role difficult. My long-term goal is to get into a PM role. Is that even possible, or should I first switch to the Dev role to build a better foundation? Help me. I am lost.

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Hey guys, a long time listener here, I love the show. I’ve recently joined an early-stage startup with a tiny engineering team. It’s like most startups at this stage, there’s some chaos and a lot to figure out. It’s exactly what I like about startups. In the past years, I’ve been working on the very same kind of software we’re building now. I have a ready answer for many questions we might have, I’ve seen some things go badly and others work great. I’m eager to help the team deliver. But I also don’t want to be seen as the know-it-all jerk that tells everyone how to do their job. I have respect for my team and want to contribute. How do I use my experience without annoying my colleagues? Thanks for sharing your wisdom (I hope for 101% of it). Listener Andy asks, I moved to company A and it’s been 6 months I am constantly getting interview requests, Gave an interview and got a 30% rise moved to Company B, Now within 6 months the same thing happened, Gave an interview at Company C and got the job with 30% raise. what should I do? will it affect my long term career growth

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: 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! 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

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Listener Sara asks, How can I deal with favoritism towards informal leaders in a group? The group is losing group intelligence because the informal leader’s reasoning and direction is favored. Example: when member A propose an argument is dismissed, but when the informal leader proposes the same argument it is cherished. How do I react to the question “why didn’t you do it this way” for features already in production? I am frustrated by being asked that. I got scolded for an idea that turned out to be bad after I implemented it (in production), although I asked the Lead for his opinion ahead of time. As soon as trouble came up a.k.a performance issue in production, he pointed the finger at me. Lost all kinds of respect for him.

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I keep hearing about Web3, DAOs and Smart Contracts. Part of me wants to get excited about these and other shiny things but I just don’t seem to care all that much any more. How long into your careers did y’all stop getting excited about shiny stuff and how do you keep learning when it is not all that exciting to you any more? Maybe it is time to be a manager? 😛 Every work day seems to start the same way. I check slack, then procrastinate for about 2 hours before feeling so guilty about getting nothing done that i actually start doing some work. Once i get started i don’t have any issues concentrating. I want to work, i like my job but i also can’t crack this habit. I am assuming this is not normal…any ideas that could help me out? PS: I think (might not be true) i use to be better at getting started before the WFH was the norm Show Notes Article by Dave on how to make your standups awesome: https://blog.standuply.com/are-your-standups-awesome-91fb124033be

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: 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! 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: I started working at a new company last month. I’m just under senior level (I-II-III-Sr) and I am working on a project with someone slightly more junior, who started there a few months earlier, to help them complete a project on time. Despite my best efforts, I can’t get on the same page with them. They ignore half of my suggestions, don’t give me straight answers to my questions, take forever to review pull requests, and are making very little progress each day without reaching out for help. I am not certain what to do, but I’m worried I’ll leave a bad impression with my new manager (who is actually pretty reasonable, I’m just paranoid) by missing the deadline, which is in checks watch 1 week. Any suggestions? Should I quit my job? (leave that option off the table for now) I hate my current job and cannot see myself working here for more than a few months. Is it better to find a new job before quitting? If I quit tomorrow with no offers from other companies, how does this affect salary negotiation for a new job while I’m currently unemployed? Finance-wise, I’m stable enough to not be working for months to a year but I am worried about not having current employment putting me at a disadvantage in my job search. Not working would definitely free up my time and energy (which is being steadily drained each day) to prepare for interviews. I recently got a raise and promotion to a senior role too. Does quitting shortly after look bad on a resume? I could coast for the next few months in my current job while I search for a new one but I feel like this would be in bad faith. It takes a long time to actually fire someone at my company for performance, even if I barely do any work. Thanks for reading my question. Love the show.

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Jealousy - as bad as it is, it still happens. I was the first employed programmer at a startup. Within the first year of my work there an colleague from my previous company I worked for asked me if it’s okay with me if he comes work for the same start-up as me. Since I strive to be a good person and friend I answered “yes”, but deep down I knew it is a bad idea and what I was thinking will happen, happened. So few years passed in the same company and my friend got promoted higher than me and into a position I wanted to move to eventually. The company is kind of small and there is no room for more positions like his (Tech Lead). So now I live with Jealousy. Each time I see his title I’m reminded of it and I don’t know what to do. I’m even thinking about just leaving the company and never work with friends again. I have been doing software development for around 7 years now and in recent times I have lost the enthusiasm to write code at work. I mostly feel bored and tired. I have no other marketable skill and talking to people usually exhaust me, so moving into a management path is not an option. Honestly, I feel like, these days I am at work just for the money; I love the money, no complaints about it, and I want to make more of it. How can I still be relevant and valuable even if I am completely bored and waking up to work feels like a work in itself, these days? P.S: I have already tried quitting my job and that didn’t help. Now I am at my new job. Six months in and I feel bored already.

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Listener Rafael asks, If you’ve already been working at a company for several months, how do you set boundaries with your employer as to when, time during the day, it’s acceptable for them to contact you? What can you say to your employer or colleagues if they expect you to respond to correspondence at all times, with a 30-min turn around? Can you adjust expectations after you’ve been working the role for several months, or is it too late? Hi, Do you see any benefits to being a junior developer? Any advice you would give to a junior, like “Hey, do this while you’re still a junior, once you’re a senior+ it might be harder to do or find time for it”?

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Questions Zach asks, A few weeks ago, I interviewed and recommended we hire a contractor candidate, who I will call “Bob”. We hired “Bob”. Today was the first time I saw “Bob” since the interview, only “Bob” was not the person I interviewed. It seems “Bob” had someone else pretend to be him to pass the interview. What should I do? Thank you for doing this show, it’s amazing and I look forward to listen to it every week. I’m a software engineer with 3.5 years of experience and in those years I’ve worked at 5 different companies consecutively, increasing my salary by around 50~70% every time I change jobs. At this point I’m afraid that it looks really bad in my resume since the longest that I’ve been at one company is 1 year and 3 months but at the same time it is really tempting to keep growing my salary and benefits that easily. Does changing jobs every ~1 year have a negative effect on my employability in the long run?

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Questions 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? 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.

This is a rerun of episode 220. In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Questions Hello, I know you said you don’t read the compliments on air most of the time but this podcast is great. I just found it a few weeks ago and I love the positive fun approach to question answering. It has really made me think about software engineering outside of the ““make code do thing”” box. Anyway, the question: I have been at the same company for 4 years. It is my first job out of college. I have ended up working in so many different languages and frameworks I don’t remember them all. I guess that’s just how things go. Recently I have been selected to take on a scrum master role and I feel I am quickly being groomed for management. That was never really my goal. I wanted to build a depth of knowledge and always have my hands on code. Will taking on these kind of roles hurt my chances at future technical roles? Am I dooming myself to managing spreadsheets and Jira tickets until I retire? Will I only communicate in Dilbert references? My teammate frequently gives status updates or fields follow up questions about work that was mostly done by someone else. I am pretty sure they do this to be helpful not to claim credit for all the work. I just wish I could speak up about the work I contributed primarily to before they do so on my behalf. I wish it didn’t bother me since we are one team and I would rather focus on the progress of the team rather than receiving credit. How should I respond to these situations in a way that allows me to not get bothered emotionally and also do what’s best for the team?

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Questions Many engineers want to go into product management, but I’m the reverse - a product manager who wants to move into engineering. What advice would you give to someone pursuing this path? How would you recommend I spend my time while jobfinding? What type of job should I be looking for? I have a computer science degree but I’ve worked as a PM for 10 years, so… it’s been a while. I’ve pursued various side projects over the years and have a basic working knowledge of lots of things (e.g. android, ios, react, python, computer vision, firebase/serverless functions, databases, algorithms/data structures) but not much depth in any area. I know one option is to convert at the company you’re already at. Take that off the table for a moment and say it has to be at a new company. I recently just quit my first tech job for higher pay at another company. Upon turning in my two weeks notice, my boss coxed me into agreeing to work as a contractor to finish a project I’ve been working on. His argument is that no one else on the team has been involved in my project, is familiar with the tech stack, and has any time to help anyway. I’m finding I don’t have time after the 40 hours I’m putting in at the new job but don’t quite know how to sever ties. I feel like I’m the bad guy. Family and friends all say that It’s not my problem and I should move on… being familiar with the project and company, I can’t help but feel differently. How can I sever ties and get over the feeling of being the bad guy, especially after kind of leading on my employer about contract work the last two weeks, or how can I convince family and friends that this is something I should do to avoid burning a professional bridge.

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Questions My company recently had a kerfuffle where some teams felt that reviewing a PR in less than 3 weeks was an unreasonable ask. As such, the company is trying to come up with guidelines for cross-team asks. The current proposal is for work of 1-2 hours they will commit to an SLA of 6 months. I feel this is a polite way of saying no to any request. Are there any ways we could come a more reasonable agreement on this? Hi, my laptop has died after upgrading to MacOS Monterrey and I’ve been given a 2017 Macbook with poor specs as a replacement due to no fault of my own. I’m at a startup of around 100 employees and I don’t think we’ve got a mature set up in terms of getting replacement machines. I’m a Senior Engineer and need a speedy laptop for my intense role. It’d be faster for me to use my personal MacBook than using the replacement, but I don’t think that would be allowed. How would you suggest I go about requesting a replacement MacBook with specs that fit my role? Do companies have budgets set aside for these expenses? Thanks

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Questions Hi guys, I’ve been listening for a few months now and am dissatisfied with my current work, where I’ve been for a year. I come from a research background, and now doing an engineering job at a B2B SaaS company is leaving me wanting a change. Moving between teams is not an option, so I plan to move companies early next year. My problem is that I don’t know whether to look for another large or mid-size company (I’m finishing final rounds at Facebook and Palantir), or go to a startup where it is likely to be more interesting (I have an offer to be the lead engineer at a very small startup, where there are already 5 developers). I have one year of industry experience. If I go to the startup, will it negatively impact my career in the future if/when I want to move elsewhere? Would it be easier to move elsewhere, and get a better offer or a higher position, if I work at Facebook or Palantir instead of this startup? Also, while I prefer research, I’m not in the position to go back to grad school and finish my PhD (I finished my MS and left to work) for monetary reasons, so I need to move to another engineering position. I’ve often heard of senior employees “negotiating their exit” instead of resigning/quitting, with rumors of large negotiated payouts. I assume that’s just a select group of people who can, but I’ve never seen much written on that. What is the situation where you can do this? How do you set yourself up for being able to get a payout like this?

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Questions I’m a developer responsible for hiring other developers for my company. I’m comfortable interviewing and I feel like I can get a good grasp on whether the interviewee is technically competent. My boss wants us to give a take-home technical test to people after the first interview if we’re happy with how they interviewed and want to proceed further. The current technical test is time-boxed and is designed to represent the work they would do at our company. I worry that we ask for too many requirements within the current time constraint of 2 hours, but asking for more time will put people off completely. What can we do to make sure the technical test is fair and a good experience for candidates? Hello Dave and Jamison, I am a team lead at a rapidly expanding company. We have been trying to fill open head counts (>4) for over a year now, and our team is also handed some very important and promising projects, and because of that, even more open reqs for our team. Recently in our 1:1, I was pressing my manager to fill the openings ASAP but he told me our company recruiters are so busy that our team don’t have any dedicated recruiters, and my manager have been sourcing candidates himself for almost a year now. I was surprised by that and offered to help. I had read some materials from the recruiting team, got the tools set up and ready to cold email people I found on LinkedIn. My question is, how do I approach them in an authentic manner? I am proud of my company and our products, but how do I reach out to them without letting them know my primary motivation is get more team members to do the work so I can get more sleep? On the other side of the table, I feel those recruiting emails are cold and a waste of my time. So looking at the funnel I built, I don’t know if I can bring myself to start spamming others’ inbox.

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Questions I’m a technical lead and I’m planning to take the usual advice and quit my job. The catch is, I have a not-yet-vested interest in staying until the new year. My manager mentioned in passing that he’s doing resource planning for my team for next year. Should I indicate that I’ll be looking for work in the new year? I feel like I have a guarded relationship with my manager, so I don’t feel like it’s a safe space to say just anything. But I know it would be helpful for him to know that I’m leaving. I work at a consulting company and I’ve been outsourced to one of the biggest banks to work on their iOS application. My problem is every time I propose a solution, it bounces back and is never accepted. In my opinion our way of doing things is wrong and I lost motivation and enthusiasm to work on the project. I shared my concerns and thoughts and always got the pat on my back but never found a solution. In these kind of situations, how do you motivate yourself to keep going? Should I look at it as improving my people management skills or should I quit? Thank you both of you. I don’t feel alone when I listen your podcast and I’m simply thankful your existence.

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Questions Listener Anonomomonous asks, How do you influence people and change minds? I work on a team where things often happen by inertia. I have a lot of ideas about how to improve our process, scope our work better, collaborate more effectively etc. I’m comfortable with sharing my concerns and suggestions with my manager and the rest of the team but the opinion of any single developer is usually politely noted and ignored. As an individual contributor, what’s the best way to influence the rest of your team and your manager without being the overly critical toxic person who tries to shut down every idea? For those who work in a “flat” hierarchy structure, is it unreasonable to ask for a 30~35% pay raise? Normally that would sound like an absurd ask. However, given the fact that everyone is considered an “engineer”, the higher compensation that comes with a promotion isn’t available any other way than explicitly asking for it (as far as I know). Not looking to jab an employer for more money, especially since I like my current one, but since what I’m doing on a daily basis sounds an awful lot like the senior engineer positions I hear about, I naturally would like my pay to reflect what I do. What do you suggest?

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Questions A few years ago my team chose a niche SPA framework (Aurelia) for the front-end of a large multi-year new product development. The team started a new product in the same family. I chose to continue using Aurelia. However, some of the developers on the team have suggested using React - newer framework, easier to hire/retain for, etc. I personally feel that focusing on solid foundational css/html/javascript skills is more important than the actual front-end framework used, but perhaps they have a good point when it comes to retention and hiring. What do you think?

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Questions Listener Lisa asks, Hi Dave and Jamison! How do you answer the statement “You’re very quiet. Like really quiet”? Me? I tend to give a small smile or recently, I said “I know.” I’m a software developer in a large defense company and I’m on my third and final year of my rotational program. I just rotated back to the same area as my first rotation, so I know a couple of folks. However, I’m not SUPER close to these people. My team is fairly new, but most of the members started at the same time, unlike me, who started just three weeks ago. I want to try to know people and get close to them, but at the same time I know my energy lowers after a couple interactions. I have always been known to be quiet, but I don’t want to be known as the odd developer out on my team. The team seems to already know and like each other. I still talk, but only when I have things to say. I tend to stick to doing actually work, while others walk around and talk to people. Especially in the environment I work in, I assumed that we should limit ourselves to mostly chargeable time because we would have to make up the time we spent talking about unrelated work topics. It also doesn’t help that most of my team sit around each other, while I’m in a separate area. I think it would just be awkward for me to stand over their area just to talk, then having to make up that time later on. Should I just accept that I’m mostly an introvert even though I want to belong/to be part of the team? I feel like I want to talk to everyone, but at the same time I sometimes can’t relate to what they’re talking about or I’m just not interested in some of their topics. Aside: I feel like there’s a lot of extroverted developers here and it’s different from what I’m used to. Hiya! I haven’t listened too all your episodes, but out of the ones I’ve heard, it seems like you both suggest quitting our jobs. How many jobs have you quit? My dad had told me a couple years ago (when I was looking for a job) is that if you quit too many times, potential employers would think that you aren’t committed or are only looking to get more money. Is this the case? Will companies think that if I quit multiple times?

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Questions 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)? 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: Questions How should I deal with the product I am building being called “the worst tool in the domain I’ve ever used”? The product I’m working on is quite old, has many customers, but by no means is a product everyone loves or even talks about. Most of the public feedback I see is negative, with very little praise or even good words about it. Lately, it’s been straining me and affecting my motivation to work on this product, even though otherwise I like working on it, with the great team, good tech stack and so on. Thanks! Hi! I miss going to the gym (because of lockdown) and listening to your podcast while I do cardio! My question: I’m a freelance developer working remotely in a team of other freelancers. This is my first full remote and freelance job setup. Recently, I’ve been feeling like the other developers are “just letting the meter run”, as it takes them a long time to complete tasks (without writing unit tests or documentation), the tickets they work on don’t pass initial QA, they log in late in the day and disappear in the afternoon usually without leaving a slack message or status. Is it understandable to think so negatively about them all the time should I just mind my own business and just manage my feelings? Help appreciated - I have been thinking of leaving this project because of them, which is unfortunate because the company and their product are interesting. Thanks!

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Questions I have a question about ‘title inflation’, where you get promoted faster than your experience would normally suggest for that specific title. If I’ve been a ‘Senior Software Engineer’ for all of a year, and am now getting recruiting offers for Director and VP of Engineering jobs, is it worth interviewing and seeing where it goes? I don’t really see myself at that level, but I… might be able to level up to it quickly! Should I take a remote work offer or find a new job in a new place? I am moving to another country with my husband in 2 months. I am the only frontend developer in the team and my company has been having difficulty hiring people, so my boss asked me if I could work for the company as a remote employee. I am reluctant to the offer because my plan has always been to find a new job so that I can blend in with the local community. Not to mention the 12-hour time difference and lack of new challenges. Sadly, I find it difficult to reject him and leave my colleagues behind. What is a better action to take?

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Questions I work for an all-remote company and I’m about to get promoted. The company says they target a salary increase of 5-10%. Assuming they come to me with an offer on the low-end (5-6%), what’s the best way to go about negotiating a higher raise during promotion? I want to stay at the company and also want the shiny new SENIOR job title, so I feel like I don’t have much leverage in this situation. Any advice is appreciated! Rachel asks, Live coding makes me choke. As soon as someone else is watching, my brain immediately goes to mush and I’m like a chicken with my head cut off. Actually recently I learned it’s not just live coding – it extends to live spreadsheet-making and live cooking as well! I guess I’m not into performing? Anyway, this has come up because it’s impacting my career in real ways. For interviews I offer to do takehomes, which I’m great at, but sometimes I’m told live coding is the standard they apply to all applicants. What’s a non-live coder to do? Show Notes Consumer price index: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/cpi.nr0.htm @Channel Twitter account: https://twitter.com/Channel https://interviewing.io/

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Questions Should I change tech stacks every few years in order to not get pigeonholed? Is it a good idea to stick with a tech stack for as long as I can or should I follow the market trend and try to learn another promising tech and then try switching into that? Would you advise me to be more of a specialist or a generalist early in my career, and what about later when I’m more experienced? I’m a full-stack web developer who’s just starting out my first job (if that matters) I love this show so much, I’m even trying your goto advice - quitting my job! But not untill I’ve got another lined up so shhh about it already. In the mean time, I work for a huge agency as a senior(ish) developer and have recently started work with a new team. However, they have issues: no one turns on their camera for video calls, which I’m ok with, but it makes the next bit worse somehow - most say the absolute minimum in response to any questions and offer no opionions / thoughts / ideas. It makes things like sprint retro meetings very awkward. We have a scrum master running our meetings who is clearly struggling to engage the team, I try to hold off to let any of the others answer questions but I always seem to end up picking up the slack. I’ve even started timing how long I’ll let the slience endure before jumping in to answer, I’m now waiting 15 seconds. Have you come accross this before? How can I get people to engage more?

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Questions 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. 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 this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Questions Hi Mr.Smith and Mr.Dance, I’m a software engineer at a big software company. I recently learned to self-evaluate and found that I’m really bad at being finger pointed. I am normally an easy-going team player with an open mind. I accept that I can be flawed sometimes, and I would never blame anyone. But whenever someone points their finger at me and says “this bug is caused by YOU!” or more commonly “this bug is caused by YOUR systems!” (sometimes with facepalm emojis or this emoji 🤷), I suddenly become super defensive and frantically try to find counter evidence to prove that it is indeed THEIR system that is at fault, or at least some OTHER systems that is at fault, but definitely NOT MINE. After I cool down for a few days, I regain my composure and realize that what I have done was wrong and not useful to the discussion. This is specifically in the context of informal issue debugging between teams, not strictly a blameless postmortem meeting. I think blaming others is not a good behavior and makes the workplace toxic and unproductive. I would like to improve myself (and others). Any suggestions and recommendations? First of all I have to say a big THANK YOU to the work you’ve been developing, it’s helping me a lot to set my expectations and pave my career path. So, to the question… I’m currently working for a large Brazilian fintech and I’m starting to get a little bit annoyed by the lack of acknowledgement. I’ve already made it clear to my managers a couple of times and I always received great feedbacks and always performed “above the expectations” for my level. But in the last 1:1 we had I was a little bit more insistent about it and the explanation they gave me was “we know that our developers are above the average, we know that a Junior here can easily get Mid-level or even Senior in other companies, but we want to be a tech reference in the country and we don’t want to spoil the devs by promoting them a couple of times in the same year”. I understand this ambition but it got me a little bit frustrated. Of course I don’t want to be a mercenary nor a mediocre developer, but if this is the objective they’re aiming they should at least pay a competitive salary. This conversation really demotivated me, it seems to me they just want a high specialized work-force for a cheap price. I really appreciate everything I’m able to learn inside the company, for sure everyone is above average and being there is like being in school and it’s been really cool. But I’m starting to question if this “trade-off” of low pay and high learning makes sense once you’re already in the Mid-level corporate world. I’m pretty sure I can double my salary in the next month if I wanted to - a couple o recruiters contacted me in linkedin and I also made some interviews -, but this “tech reference and always learning” thing keeps bothering me and I wonder how much of it really makes a difference in the long run.

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Questions I’m feeling bored and disengaged with my job lately, but I’m pretty sure it’s one of the best jobs I can find: my manager and teammate are great, my compensation is very high for my area, worklife balance/benefits etc are excellent, and the mission and product the company make are awesome and help the world! On top of all that I think the work is technically interesting! But still I’m bored and disengaged :( I can’t tell if I’m just burned out from the pandemic and this is how it’s manifesting, or if I just have a serious case of “the grass is always greener” and now that I’ve been on this team for 2 years I’m ready just for a change of scenery. I want to fall back in love with this job, but how can I do that? Do you have any advice? Changing teams isn’t a great fit as this is a small office for the company in a ““satellite”” site, with only one other team that I’m not super interested in. I could of course take the patented advice and find a new job that might be equally great, but what else can I do? Listener Very Verbose asks, Love the show! I’m rapidly working my way through the backlog and dread the day that I reach the end and have to wait a whole week for the next one! :) Whenever I write a message to a coworker I tend to start with a huge wall of text, then revise it down to something smaller and hit send. I do this with emails, slack messages, code review feedback, you name it. Even this question I’ve re-written a few times! I feel like I’m over-thinking things, and trying to make sure there is no misunderstanding in what I’ve written. For example, a relatively small piece of feedback for a code review might be re-written many times, because I’m concerned that I will come across as overly negative or condescending if I just send through my first draft. Often, the feedback is positive and they agree with the points that I’ve raised. But they’re only seeing 2 points, when I probably started with 10 and deleted 8 of them that I later deemed to be ‘too nitpicky’ before sending it through! Naturally, all of this takes time and I’m often wasting more than 20 mins, only to end up sending 2-3 sentences at the end of it. Do you have any tips for helping me get to the point, so that I can be more productive and move on with other work? Do I just need to care less about what they think of me? Should I just skim over the code, say “LGTM”, and suppress the fear that I may have just approved a critical bug to go to production? Appreciate any advice you can give. Unfortunately, I don’t think inventing a time machine to go back 18 minutes after spending 20 minutes writing a message is a reasonable option :) It would take me several decades to be happy with the time machine before I turn it on!

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Questions Hello!! This is maybe the opposite of a problem, but I’ve found myself stuck - how do you navigate too much interest from outside parties? I work in a pretty niche subsection of software dev, so I field a lot of job offers/recruitment when people start to put together a new team. These are usually coming from managers/people I would be working with directly (and admire!) rather than recruiters. Generally the opportunities are something I could see myself doing one day, but I’m perfectly content in my role as-is for the time being. Where’s the line between expressing interest in future opportunities (emphasis on future) without stringing people along? How many “catch up” conversations are reasonable before it shifts from maintaining a relationship to active recruiting? Apologies if this comes across as a humble brag but I’m getting overwhelmed. Love the show, you rock 🤘 I recently started a new position at a startup after being recruited by one of their senior leaders. Being a startup the company has had its ups and downs, including some layoffs within the last year. I am really loving the company so far, the people, the culture. They really seem to care about correcting past mistakes and listening to feedback from everyone. There is still a good amount of turnover among engineers and engineering managers. I’m sure some turnover is normal especially at startup. But at what point does it really become something I need to be concerned about? What questions should/can I ask to help me get a better picture of what is going on? Is there anything specific I should look out for that might be my cue to start creating a backup plan?

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Questions Hello, I have been working as a software developer for 10+ years now and recently took a job at a non-technical company. I was recruited to craft a web app for this company and thought they had an idea of what it means and the changes it may require. I am the only developer on the project. I feel like, either I’m not communicating well/at all, or they just simply don’t care about the work they recruited me for. I don’t have a good work/life balance since I’m always anxious when I receive an email from the company fearing someone will complain about the quality of my software. I feel isolated and unable to show how my work positively impacts the company Since I know my work is not perfect, I feel like I should not complain at all and just make my software bug-free. I’m doubting my abilities and starting to think I actually don’t know anything about Software Engineering. Because the company is non-technical, do I have the right to say that my work is that essential? What should I do so I don’t feel like crap every morning before going to work? In your last episode, you brought up a listener question about a developer of eight years accepting a senior developer position. I’m in a similar boat, but with far less experience. How much less? Well I’ve worked as a developer only for THREE. This is by no means a flex, but I’m kind of worried that I’m in over my head. There was little due diligence on my new supervisor’s side, so my trepidation is that I’ll be two/three months into my new job and they’ll look at my perf and see “this kid is not a senior at all”. I know, the classic imposter syndrome. I’ve been straight forward with my new supervisor about my experience level—or lack thereof—and they seemed not too worried about it. Do you guys have any advice for me going into this? What can I do to maximise this opportunity I’ve been given this early in my career? Love the show!

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Questions Hey guys! I’m a long-time listener and like many of your other listeners have listened to each episode! Until now I didn’t have anything to ask, however, I have a story to tell and I was hoping for your opinions on this. Someone I know is a somewhat junior dev, they left their first job for a new job that had better pay. They were pretty good at negotiating a good salary, while still being transparent about their work history. But a few months ago management said they were underperforming compared to other coworkers and their pay would have to be cut. At first, they said at most it would be 10%. However, it ended up being 23%, which way less than even their prior job. Needless to say, they’re taking the softskills option and looking for a new job. My question is how commonly does this happen, and what are some telltale signs that this could potentially happen? Thanks for your time and a have great week! I’m 8 years into a career in software engineering and I just accepted a senior engineering position at a well respected tech company in Silicon Valley. While I believe I am qualified for the position, it will be a big step up for me in terms of the caliber of engineers I’ll be working with as well as the overall scale of the system compared to my previous jobs. The standards of engineering and general productivity will likely be higher than I am used to, though I’m excited to level up. I’m not looking for advice about my specific situation, but I’m curious: what are your guys’ priorities during your first days, weeks or months at a new but senior-level job, to ensure you hit the ground running and set yourself up for a successful tenure at the company? Anything you used to do that you don’t anymore? Any common mistakes you see engineers make when they join new teams?

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Questions This question came with a delightful ASCII-art diagram that I will now dictate as follows: “pipe space space space space” JK TLDR: I want to move up the ranks but I’m not sure what might await me… except meetings. What should I expect? And how do I get there? Too Small, Want MOAR! I work in a big enterprise as a Tech Lead in an ““agile team””. So day-to-day I focus on getting our team to build the current feature we’re meant to be building (eg by helping other devs, attending meetings, and sometimes writing code). The next step for my career would be what we call an “Engineering Lead” but I’m having a hard time figuring out what that role actually is and our “EL” is so slammed with meetings I’m afraid to take any of their time to ask… SO - Dave & Jamison, can you enlighten me? What might the goals and life be of someone at that level and how would someone who still codes every day(ish) start figuring out what to do to get there? P.S. It’s taken me about 4 years but I’ve finally managed to listen to every single SSE episode! (I have a kid, binging podcasts isn’t possible for me). P.P.S. In an interview recently I was asked ““What’s the most valuable piece of advice you were ever given?”” to which I replied ““To negotiate for better benefits in job interviews, got it from a podcast called ‘Soft Skills Engineering’””. The interviewer thought that was cool, subscribed to your podcast during the interview then REFUSED TO NEGOTIATE ON ANYTHING! >:( Living in a small town my options as a software engineer have been limited to working for one company straight out of uni for 7 years. Wanting to develop in my career, and knowing you have advised others in the past to move on from their first job out of uni. What is your opinion of seeking out and switching jobs into remote work? Will this provide the same development value found in a traditional job switch, especially after the impact COVID has had on the way companies see remote work.

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Questions Listener “Scrolly McScroll-Face” asks, Hi Team! Love the show. Keep up the great work and congrats on 256 episodes! I think I’m addicted to my phone? Every time my code goes to build, or something I know I need to wait on, I open my phone and start scrolling. 40 seconds later when the build is done, I’m still scrolling. In between thoughts, I also open youtube in new tab fairly regularly. It’s definitely gotten worse while working at home during these times. I’m surely not alone in this slipping of discipline…. I’ve tried to put my phone in the next room and that has some success, but I don’t always remember to do that. Do you have any tips? Anything you’ve seen while managing folks? I love my job and I love the work, so I dont think I’m not engaged enough, and I struggle to see how a different job would engage me more. Hi I am the under-leveled engineer from episode 240, and I want to provide an update and ask a follow up question. I was promoted in this cycle, and because of my shyness I used Jamison’s favorite problem solving technique of doing nothing prior to my review, my compensation in the new level is also underwhelming. Or is it? Comparing my pay with some data point on levels.fyi, my salary is slightly below average. As part of my promotion, I have another equity award, and that is also slightly below average compared to the data points on the site. However, I already have an existing equity award granted to me when I started at my previous level. It is unclear to me if the data points on the site have taken into account for an internal promotion vs an offer extended to an external candidate. If I add in the previous equity awards and my compensation in this new level, then my total seems too be way out of band, on the good side. Digging into it more, there are other sites and blog posts that talk about things like refreshers and bonuses. These are brand new concepts to me since my previous jobs only pay salary, event the tech jobs in middle America. Could you talk about how compensation is structured in the big leagues?

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Questions I’m currently in my first job as a software engineer. Before working full time, I worked at the company as an intern, and during the last few weeks of my internship the engineering manager asked ““We want to bring you on full time. What are your salary expectations?”” Naive me, not wanting to cause any trouble, responded with a very moderate number. They give an offer that was 10% less, but with ““really good benefits,”” so I accepted. Just over one year later, I feel like I’ve proven my value to be substantially more than what I asked for, and I know I’m making 10-30% less than my peers. A couple weeks ago, I had my salary review, and rather than the management being open to negotiation (which is what I had expected going in) they just told me ““You’ll be making 4% more this year.”” After the meeting, I mentioned to my manager that I felt that the raise wasn’t representative of the value that I would be giving the company. He responded that they pay ““Within expected ranges for my job title and experience.”” I was a little hurt by this, because I want to be paid based on the value that I provide, not based on my title or experience. I don’t think I should quit the job, because I get along well with the team, enjoy my work, and they are paying for my master’s tuition on the side. What should I do? Hear ye hear ye, Gods of podcasts, I have a question for thees! I think my salary is ok, £60k (UK) and I’ve brought up the subject of raises a couple of times with my boss (2 years ago and 1 year ago) - both times I was told I’m doing pretty well but they’ll look into it. So far no sign of a raise but I’m not annoyed, I really like my job and the people I work with are great. I’m now on paternity leave and have taken the time to do some interviewing to see what’s out there and keep my skills sharp. Turns out I could earn a lot more! Who knew!? I’m now caught between going back to my boss with these other offers to say ““actually no, turns out I’m not doing great, gimmi more money”” or quitting my job for more money but a potentially worse job… help! How do I say ““more money please or I leave”” but nicely?

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Questions Hiya, thank you for the show. It’s very insightful and both of you are pretty charismatic. Without getting too much into details I had a number of difficulties when I was younger which caused me to never finish my computer science degree. I took a job as a Business Intelligence analyst because I needed to move out. Fast forward a few years and I am now an Engineering Manager for one of the biggest companies in the UK - nearly 2000 engineers and around 100.000 employees overall. I consider myself incredibly successful for my age, just turned 30. I manage two teams(11 and 4 ppl) that are seen as the top performers in the Data Engineering department, and that is credited to my leadership. I’ve always been very self conscious of the degree situation. I’ve tried to finish it online a couple times but I simply can’t find how. I am now being asked to apply to my boss’ position as Senior Engineering Manager, which could mean being responsible of 6 teams of around 10 people average and a sizeable budget. I live in constant anxiety from the possibility of hitting a ceiling or being confronted about the degree situation. While I didn’t hide it on the interview process It’s not something I advertise at all but I got to a point where I just don’t know what to do about it. And so that would be my question: What would you advice for someone in my position? I’m working at a small company where we used to have 2 developers. Both of us had at least 10 years of professional experience and both of us are around 28 years old. A few months ago, our bosses decided to hire 3 new FE devs and all of them come from bootcamp. That wouldn’t be so unusual, but all of them are 35+ years old and have families and basically just 6 months of experience. This causes a lot of friction in our team. We’re trying to “mentor” them in best practices and experience we’ve gained over time, but sometimes they don’t accept it, because we’re just too young for them (in one case 10 years younger). Do you have any tips how to approach “mentorship” when it comes from younger to older dev? And how to overcome the 10 year barrier? Show Notes https://www.simscale.com/blog/2017/12/nasa-mars-climate-orbiter-metric/ https://money.cnn.com/2012/05/13/technology/yahoo-ceo-out/index.htm

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Questions Hey there! Thank you so much for the amazing podcast. In my current job I work with an incredible (and very strong technically) team, and I like working with my manager a lot. BUT, during all 1:1s, and annual reviews the feedback is always that I am doing a great job and there is never a negative nor constructive criticism. However, I have been waiting for a promotion for more than a year, I never get assigned to the shinier and more challenging tasks/projects, and for the merit review I was put in the “good” bucket (not great, not the best). So, if I am always doing a great job, what else can I do to get this promotion and be trust worthy of shining projects? Jon asks, I’m having a hard time at work. There is so much to do my team can barely spare the time to collaborate on anything. Even when I ask for help, the overwhelming stress usually results in a snarky response. I’ve been working here for a year under these conditions and I’ve learned a lot but we never talk to each other…I feel like I still don’t have the whole picture because I’ve basically never been onboarded. I want to collaborate with my team but either the organizational structure or sheer amount of work is keeping us in silos. Trying to break them down usually lands me in the dog house. What the heck do I do now? I feel like if I stay I’ll only ever get year 1 dev experience, but I also feel like I’ll be totally useless to any real development team.

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Questions 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! 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: Questions Thanks for the show, I absolutely love getting awkward glances from people when I LOL randomly in public places. I’ve been at my first job for 2 years, including an internship. The work I got to do as an intern was absolutely brilliant and I learned new things almost every day. Then I joined as a full-time employee, and things were good at first. For the past year, things have gone downhill. I barely get to write code and spend most of my time reviewing and writing documents in excel and word. I find this unsatisfying and can barely get the work assigned to me done due to lack of motivation and interest. However, I am fairly convinced that the compensation and other perks I get here, as well as the coworkers and management here are some of the best I could find. Should I follow the soft skills advice and quit, or should I stick around because of the other favourable conditions I mentioned? In other words, how should I decide between satisfying work vs the favourable conditions? Hi, I am a data scientist. I work on a team of about 30 other data scientists. It’s a new team and I have determined after talking to everyone for a few weeks, that about 1/3 of the team does not know Python, 2 even admitting to me privately they lied in the interview, and probably 50-60% have no idea what git is. I feel like they hired a bunch of excel, tableau, business-y people and assumed any experience with data qualified you to do data science. You may say “quit your job” but this is my first job out of college and I don’t think I could find another easily. Do I tell my manager about this? How do I teach them these things? I’ve already had to pick up a lot of slack on the team, luckily since I have no kids, no girlfriend, a ton of free time, and have been coding since middle school it’s been manageable, but I’m concerned about how to handle this going forward.

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Questions 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? 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

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Questions I’m not a developer, and have never worked with developers. I have four years of systems/IT experience (ansible, bash, python, windows, etc). I got hired in a devops role at a company with many developers. How can I make sure I’ll have meaningful discussions (and a good learing experience) with software developers in my upcoming devops role at a new company? Will they notice that I don’t know what an enterprise communication bus is if just don’t ask but instead scribble something in my notebook? I just watched “How to crash an airplane” by Nickolas Means. It is about how the flight crew of an airplane crashed in 1989 yet saved 189 lives. The learning is that there are no heroes and teams can succeed only with inputs from all members in the team. All opinions need to be heard. And he also emphasizes that the captain used “we” in all his speeches. When it comes to interviews, the expectation is to talk about your personal experience. Using “we” during interviews would look like negative, right? Especially in leadership interviews, this is difficult since leaders are successful only with their team. Can you give us some strategies to balance this the best?

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Questions 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)? 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: Questions I recently took over to manage development at a small company that has been around for a few decades. We just wrapped up a four year effort to move to a more modern web stack. The development style before my new position is best described as ‘Wild West’. My direct boss’s philosophy can be illustrated with the following phrases: “We are going to have to rewrite it, so just get it out fast.” “Just hardcode the sh*!@ out of it” “It just has to look like it works, but it doesn’t really have to work.” My boss is the co-founder of the company and ran development before me. I have made a concerted effort with my current team to introduce best practices, Unit Testing, PSR standards, APIs and so forth but engagement is really low. I’ve tried every way I know how to get them to care about quality code, tests, standards, etc but they just don’t respond. They are more concerned about getting things out fast which is nice but not my top priority. I’d rather have clean, predictable code that doesn’t break in production. How do I get my team to buy off on these principles? Hi Dave and Jamison How do I communicate all of the self-study that I’ve done to potential employers? I transitioned from a bachelor’s degree in the health sciences to the software industry and I have now worked as a data scientist for a couple of years. I spent a lot of time and effort taking free online classes in mathematics and computer science through Stanford and MIT. Over 3 years I’ve probably done the equivalent of half of a math degree and about a third of a full CS curriculum. And even though I’m employed now, I still keep working on more advanced classes in my spare time. How can I communicate this to potential employers considering that I’m not getting any academic credits for my effort? Should I just leave this off my resume? Is it okay to mention that I have audited those classes? Any other ideas? Thanks for the lovely podcast.

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Questions Our engineering manager keeps sneaking/creeping on our private slack channels. As an admin of the workspace he can join any private slack channel without being invited. I feel like this is an unacceptable behavior. What should I do? Should I just reach out to him and ask him not to abuse his admin privileges? Should I setup a discord server for me and my fellow developers? Or should I take the soft skills engineering advice and quit my job? Thank you guys for your awesome podcast. I have recently begun my foray into management with the reception of my first subordinate. I selected him due to his illustrious undergraduate project presentation and his ability to expound on the intricacies of said projects. But, I’m having a hard time managing my expectations. He is unable to complete the simplest of tasks, often going off on tangents that, despite being given the answer, result in spending hours in unrelated rabbit holes. Additionally, he asked for a high salary and was promised an increase scheduled ahead of review. As a first-time manager, I worry that I am inflicting unrealistic expectations especially since software is my passion. I enjoy learning learning new languages and technologies. What is the best way to let him know that he is not meeting expectations? How can I say this without my typical brashness which will ultimately result in me blurting out something to the tune of “you aren’t nearly as capable as you made yourself out to be”?

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Questions What is your opinion about estimates. Is it a good practice? Are they helpful or just a guess? Should we estimate in story points or hours? How can we improve our estimation skills to be more accurate? I really don’t like estimating. I don’t think it is a good practice because we almost never get it right. The teams that I have worked also almost always made wrong estimates, causing us to miss our sprints commitments frequently. Is it a problem with this practice, or there is a way to improve it? I heard about the Kanban method, that don’t use estimations, but metrics, to give predictability. What do you think? Hello Soft Skills Audio :) Love the show and the great advice, I look forward to the show every week. I just joined a company that embraces hotdesking and I’m having trouble feeling like I am part of the team. All the engineers report into the head of engineering but we work on different projects. I work with one other engineer who works remotely from another state, and take direction from the product owner who works from another. The culture of hotdesking across five floors of a multistory building means each morning I end up circling around hunting for a place to sit. Because anyone can sit anywhere, I could be sitting next to someone new from sales, marketing, finance, or engineering everyday. Everyone always looks hard at work with headphones on and our organization chart doesn’t feature profile photos. I’ve tried introducing myself to the people I find myself next to but it’s just small talk and I never see them again as everyone shuffles around. I’m sick of sitting alone at lunch and missing out on “watercooler” conversations. How do I make friends and figure out how I fit in with an office environment like this?

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Questions I listen to the show while I’m working out and wanted you to know I’ve almost dropped the weight on myself multiple times when one of you cracks a funny joke (which is often, I’m learning to be more careful)😂. I work for a growing startup as a dev manager. Hiring has proven to be one of our most difficult challenges. We had one candidate in particular that would qualify as a potentially “Risky” since they lacked experience in our industry. We ended up hiring them because their salary requirements were so low, they were half of what we pay other junior engineers. They quickly proved be miles above the Junior engineer position. They have strong technical skills, are proactive with resolving problems, and have raised the bar for the entire dev organization. They currently meet all the criteria for what we would qualify as a Senior engineer at our company. I’ve started feeling uncomfortable about how little we are paying this person. I’ve brought this concern up with management, but their take is that if they asked for the little amount that they did, then we should leave them at that for as long as they are comfortable there. The part that takes this to a whole new level of humanitarian concern for me is that, in passing, I found out that this person is trying to get approval for adoption and that is why they had to leave their consulting background and settle for a salary job. I’m familiar with the adoption process and if we were paying them what they were actually worth (or even 25% closer to what that number is) the entire process would be different for them. I want to take care of the company, but I also believe that we should pay people what they are worth. What should I do? I’ve recently joined a new company (hoorah!) and even more exciting, I’m engaged (double hoorah)! Previously, I’ve focused heavily on my career progression and decided what a good job for me was based on my selfish reasons (more pay). Now, my priorities are shifting towards family first and I’ve been looking into any parental benefits the company may offer (unfortunately none). Is it worth looking around for a company that will provide better parental leave benefits and child-care days?

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Questions Hello soft skills audio, love the show and your great advice. My question is how do I stop sweating the small stuff. I have one colleague who either can’t spell, or types so fast the words make no sense and doesn’t correct the mistakes. Emails, comments in code, comments in PRs, presentations to management, everything is a garbled mess and makes us look bad as a team. Another colleague just can’t stop talking in ‘business speak’. Every conversation is twice as long as it should be because they need to ‘touch base on what’s happening in this space and will circle back’ These are by no means ‘quit your job’ problems. How do I avoid eye rolling and getting frustrated over something so minor? I’ve been working at a software company for almost 10 years now. It’s an amazing company, 5 minutes from where I live, with a really good culture. I have an awesome role as a senior developer working with interesting new technologies, a lot of flexibility, responsibilities and a valued opinion on both technological and company-wide matters. However, this is still my first job. I’ve invested a lot of time and effort on career growth the last few years but I feel like there are only a few developers at my company who share the same level of enthusiasm and the need to grow as I do. I’ve been able to bring in new tech, introduce modern practices and share knowledge with my colleagues, but it feels like I’m the only one who’s actively pushing for this. Since this is my first job, I don’t know if this is the case in other places as well. I’ve done some freelance projects on the side to learn more about how things work somewhere else but mostly I’m the only senior dev on these projects. On the one hand I have a job that I love, on the other hand I don’t really know what’s out there. I feel like I might regret it later if I don’t try something else but based on other people’s experiences, I know it’s hard to find a company with such a good culture and understanding as where I am right now. Switching jobs would also give me a significant salary increase, but will require a longer commute. There are only a few software companies in my area. Can you help me figure out if I should take the blue pill or the red pill?

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Questions My coworker Alice reached out to me in confidence to say that another coworker, Blake, is leaving in about a month. Blake told Alice in confidence that they intend to put in their two-weeks notice next week. Making things better, Blake is our entire ops team (<3 bus factor of 1) and our startup was not planning on hiring anyone else into that team for three more months! Do I have an obligation to respect their twice-removed confidentiality? Or do I have an obligation to the company (and my remaining coworkers) to push to start hiring their replacement sooner? I’m concerned that if I do nothing, it’s a risk to the company because Blake plays such a critical role and we did not setup Blake in an HA configuration, but I’m also wary of doing something that seems like an ethical gray area. I’m not in management, so I have no ability to directly start hiring. But I’m a senior IC and pretty heavily vested in the success of this company. And bummed about my dear departing friend/colleague! And bummed that my workload is about to go up as all of us learn to be ops engineers, too! Help! I don’t want to have to take the soft skills patented advice of quitting my job when the startup crumbles under the ops team’s departure, so what do I do instead? Someone I worked closely with on a previous job has reached out to me, asking for a referral and recommendation to my current company. The problem is, I really didn’t enjoy working with this person. The experience was so bad it prompted me to leave that job for another one. I didn’t want to burn bridges, so when I left the job, I cited personal reasons and did not mention the real reason was that I hated the interpersonal dynamics there. It could be the case that their toxic behavior was partly due to the toxic organization we were in. It’s also possible that over the years they’ve matured, but I don’t know. On the other hand, each time I’ve asked someone for a referral, they’ve always done it, so I assume that there’s an expectation to refer previous coworkers? I can’t in good conscience recommend this person to my current company. If I provide my true opinions, I suppose they’d eventually find out. Can this person sue me for defamation if they don’t get hired?

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Questions Quite often my manager writes me in the morning: hey, can you help the team with this thing? And sometimes it happens so that I know no more than “the team” about the thing, and actually there’s no way in the world I can help them, but everyone assumes that I am some kind of expert in it. Where did they get that impression? This is so irritating! I absolutely love to be asked for help when what I’m asked for is kind of “my thing”. But in some cases, I can’t just say “hey, this is not really my specialty, I will be more of a burden here”, because everyone would think that I’m just lazy or unwilling to help. And then I sit and struggle through the process of everyone asking me questions I obviously don’t know answers to, and I try to guess or figure out these answers, and I suffer because I don’t meet everyone else’s expectations, and everyone else suffers because no one knows what to do, and it goes on and on and on… I don’t know about you - do you find yourself in such situations and what do you do if you do? My company just asked me if I’m interested in going to a conference that’s about a month away, but I’m currently in the process of job hunting and don’t know if I’m going to be around for much longer than a month. What do I do? It feels dishonest to go and then leave the company shortly after. But it also feels dishonest to say “Nope! Not interested!” because I actually would like to go. There’s also the benefit that people often are recruiting at conferences so it might be a great place to be for that.

It’s one more re-run before we are back with new stuff! Enjoy this episode from November 2018, back when Tiger King didn’t yet exist. In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Questions 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. 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. 🙁

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

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Questions I became a software engineer 4 years ago after graduating from a bootcamp. I then worked a few software jobs in middle America. About a year and a half ago, I got a job in a well know tech start up and moved to a big city with heavy software/tech presence. Before I moved, I suspected I was good at software engineering, and after working in this tech startup “in the big leagues”, I confirmed my suspicion by quickly becoming the go to engineer for the team. I just finished a project that delivered a major tech component of our core system, and received lots of kudos. Because of this I suspect I was mis-hired for my current level; this is the first job that I can compare myself with more than 10 software engineer peers, and evidently I am above average. I used to tell myself I was not that good because I didn’t work at a “real tech company.” I am pretty certain I will get promoted in the next cycle, but how can I land my compensation to be above average in the pay band as well? Should I share my feeling that I was mis-hired in my current position? How do I push back the work I do not really want to do while still being a team player? My manager assigned me a project that I do not really want to work on and when I try to push back, he said he finds me the best person that suits this. I ended up doing it since I want to be a team player, but I don’t believe it will benefit me in the long term in the team. How can I push back to my manager in other occasion in the future? Thanks for your podcast, it has been very amazing.

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Questions Really love the podcast. Keep it up! I’m in a senior role at a software company and have been here over 5 years. I have come up with a SaaS product idea after finding a problem in my company’s engineering process and started working on it. It solves a niche problem in general software development so it isn’t related to my company product. I would like to use this product at my current company both to help me manage the technical issues at my current company and to help validate and grow the idea. Should I have any concerns with what I’m doing? Can my company claim my idea as it’s own? What should I be doing now to protect myself? Any other things I should consider? Does it make sense to validate a new side hustle idea at a company while working full time at said company? Please help soft skills wizards: Junior eng at a huge conglomerate, quit mid-patent process (OK I HAD A PRODUCTIVE TUESDAY A MONTH AGO and I’m pretty good with mermaid.js). If they come back with a job offer post-departure, since I am the sole inventor on this patent, how do I properly handle this one? My manager was…. extremely toxic and every attempt that was made to move was botched either by CoViD-19 or my chain of command. I don’t think I could feasibly have a positive interaction with my former manager and working under him has had a significant impact on my mental health. But…. I loved my work. I loved some of the people I worked with. Sometimes it being a huge conglomerate had its upsides as well: I was able to bend the rules as long as the bureaucracy had prevented someone from implementing the visibility that would have demonstrated the rules were bent. If they give me an offer to return as a junior architect I would be very tempted to do so, but would be afraid of being anywhere near my former manager, director or VP.

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Questions A few years ago, my current company did a big no-no which turned into a scandal that made national headlines. When I was considering joining, I said it was important for me to feel ethically aligned with my work, and asked about how things had changed since The Incident. They told me they stopped doing bad things, and I accepted the offer. Well, during my time at the company, it has slowly been dawning on me that my team is THE TEAM in question. I finally gathered the courage to ask a coworker, and he confirmed that this was true, and that there’s more designs coming down the pipeline that he and other devs are uncomfortable building. He brought it up with our manager and he was basically told “business is business”. As devs, we don’t make the decisions. And our golden handcuffs are really shiny. Should I leave, stay and try to influence change from the inside, or stay and maybe be a whistleblower one day if need be? I think I made a horrible mistake. I gave up an undesirable job for a fairly large tech company, and joined a Drupal agency. These two weeks have been the longest year of my life. I haven’t written one line of code, and the Drupal admin is incomprehensible. Since it’s only been a (relatively) short time here, how do I get back in the job market without looking like a chump? Do I remove it from my resume? Do I own it like a hideous tattoo? What do I tell hiring managers; whether its a gap in my resume, or that I want to leave after only 2 weeks? Any and all help is appreciated. Thank you!

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Questions I am REALLY into music. I mostly get paid to listen to Spotify. With this in mind I decided to apply for a new job at a “globally leading audio technology company”. The job would be paying a lot more. About 30% more minimum based on the advertised salary range. However, I hate the stack being used! I have been given a homework assignment to complete, but it has not been an enjoyable experience. I enjoy my current job, however the company doesn’t seem as stable, and their are complications with tax/benefits which i won’t get into. So to summarize, should I take the classic SoftSkills engineering advice and quit my job for a sweet pay check and an interesting industry, to suffer the stack? Maybe I will learn to love it? Any advice? I’m at my first developer job at an ad agency, and on a regular basis I and my co-workers are working well in excess of the 40-50 hours a week (closer to 60+). On many occasions we work the weekends as well. I’ve worked on websites, a couple of apps within a proprietary system, banner ads, and html emails. I’ve learned as much as I’m going to at this job. There are no code reviews, no training, and no on-boarding. I no longer want to work at the agency, but I can’t afford to just quit my job. Given the perceivable lack of transferable skills(recruiters have said this to me, ie no product experience), what are some of my options? Mind you, I also don’t have a fancy CS or CS-related degree that I can leverage. Show Notes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knuth%27s_up-arrow_notation http://boston.conman.org/2003/12/02.3

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Questions 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! 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 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. 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: Questions 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 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

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Questions My (very large) company has an alternative definition of “unit testing”. Unit testing at this company refers to when a developer manually tests their code in whatever interface the code is associated with after they write it. An example usage would be a standup status update such as “I finished writing the code for ticket x I am just doing unit testing to make sure my code works”. My concern is that there is very little real unit testing at this company and the I think the misuse of this term makes it harder for real unit testing to become more prevalent. Is this worth speaking up about? Feeling Isolated and demotivated while working from home. With COVID 19 pandemic we have been working from for more than six months and looks like it will be another six months at least before we get back to work. We are already a geographically distributed team and with work from home the interactions within team have become harder. We do have once week team meeting but there are more than 20 people and it is usually a tech talk. Sometimes I go days without interacting with the team outside of slack/email. I have realized this tends to make me more distracted or demotivated. Interacting with team members and seniors within team gives big picture information, ongoing projects etc. that helps keep me motivated. I have tried proposing virtual happy hours or even meetings within small groups who working closely once a week or so. Understandably not everyone is enthused about virtual happy hours. Do you guys have any other suggestions? Show Notes https://www.martinfowler.com/bliki/UnitTest.html https://www.amazon.com/Art-Gathering-How-Meet-Matters/dp/1594634920 https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1304143989939949568.html

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Questions 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. 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: Questions 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! 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 Taylor asks, Is it frowned upon to not want to be promoted and get more responsibility? I want to keep a good work-life balance but feel that saying so will have my manager think less of me. Hi Dave and Jamison, love your show! The time has come to quit my job and I am wondering if I should keep a copy of the scripts I wrote for the project?

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Questions I have been working at a large tech company for two years now, after I graduated college. My job title is ““Software Engineer””, but I have barely written any code on my job in the past two years. I’m on a product team that doesn’t own any infrastructure, and when the product managers want us to build something, we find out which teams in the company own the infrastructure and stitch a product together. We often get push backs because usually the infrastructure we need to build a product belong to some entirely different team who do not have stakes in the product we’re building. I am worried that my coding skills are deteriorating, since most of my time at work are not spent on coding. For example, meetings where people hash out how to do something in a system none of us are familiar with, chasing down people in other teams to ask them to squeeze out time from their busy schedule to help my team, and completing process paperwork. On the rare occasions when I do make code changes, it’s been copy-and-pasting another section of the code/config and changing a few parameters. It seems to me that success on this job depends mostly on knowledge of the different internal systems, as well as the social capital of knowing people on different teams. Is this normal? Is this what software engineering is about? Hi there! Love the show and your fun but useful answers. I have a career question and would love to hear what you think. I’ve been an Engineer for several years now and was recently asked if I’d like to move into Product Management. At first this sounded great. I’d get to set the direction of the product, get involved with strategic planning and roadmap meetings, and generally have more input into my squads work. The thing is … that isn’t what it is at all. Most of the time I am fielding requests from marketing and sales people for sales collateral, sitting on customer calls, and digging through dashboards to find enough ‘evidence’ to prove why we should prioritize the backlog the way I have in mind, and I have even become the ‘bad guy’ when the squads ideas don’t line up with the Product team. Have I made a terrible mistake? Is Product Management really a good move for Engineers?

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Questions I’m a team lead right now, but I’m leaving the company. When I discussed with my manager, I recommended a team member to take over my position and suggested raising his salary. In the end, the manager asked that team member to take over as team lead, but refused to raise his salary or even give him the title. He said he needs to prove that he can take responsibility as a team lead. Then he will get the title and raise. But I feel they just want to procrastinate and save the money. What can I do to help my team member fight for the title and raise? Hi Dave and Jamison. You have a great show and I really enjoy listening. I am currently a software engineer at a small/medium sized tech company in the healthcare industry. I was recently asked to interview for a similar role at a pretty large hedge fund. I am wondering if there would be a big culture shift if I were to end up making that change. I am under the (possibly inaccurate) impression that for bankers something like an 80+ hour work week is common. I’m wondering if this impression is accurate, if it extends to the finance industry as a whole, and how much it extends to developers rather than bankers/traders if so. I also remember you guys mentioning in a previous episode that video game developers also typically work long hours. Are there other industries where this culture is typical?

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Questions 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)? 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: Questions How do you politely decline job offers that you never intended to accept in the first place? I’ve been trying to interview more often recently to keep my interviewing skills sharp and check how employable I am. I always struggle declining the offers politely. What usually happens is that I set high salary expectations hoping that the company refuses me, but sometimes they do match it and I end up in an even worst spot. Any tips? Should I come clear earlier in the process? I was recently hired as a Staff Engineer at a large tech company. After joining the company I was told I was the first outside Staff Engineer ever hired into the organization and the expectations for me were very high. After the first month I noticed that coworkers were acting strange around me and less responsive to my ideas. During a 1:1 one of my coworkers specifically stated that he and several others have been at the company for 5 years and were passed up for the promotion I got and were upset that an outsider was hired. Based on this they would be watching me closely. I’ve talked to management about the conversations and their feedback has been to try to “make friends”. I am the most Sr Engineer in a group of 15 engineers who work across 5 different teams. The situation is turning very toxic where the other engineers are trying to “one-up” me in effort to obtain the promotion for the next cycle. What do I do?

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Questions I have noticed the majority of the managers get stuck at a mid-management level and never move to C level. And, there are a few who experience astronomical growth. For example, I know a C-suite executive who has moved to his current role from a Web Developer role within 9 years and changed job only thrice. One more C-suite guy I know has gone to that position within 8 years in the same company. Unfortunately, I don’t have the rapport to ask either of these folks what I’m going to ask you, so here it goes. What makes some managers move very quickly up the management ladder, whereas the majority remain stuck in mid-management? Also, at the mid-management level, how detrimental is job-hopping to quick growth. Looking at my small sample size of 2, both have not hopped around much. Hi, love the show. I have a history of working as a Voice Engineer but since I got my last job I have migrated towards more Sysadmin/Devops type job. This was on purpose as I absolutely HATE the voice stuff. The problem is that I still have a bunch of people coming up and asking me to help with Voice related issues or projects. I have tried to very subtly express I am not interested but it doesn’t seem to work. I am probably also guilty because I am a yes man and want to be the nice guy so I don’t say no to these requests. So the question is, how do I get away from my past and stop people from coming up to me with questions about a domain I dread/hate? Show Notes https://lethain.com/career-narratives/

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Questions Hi Dave and Jamison, I’m in my mid twenties working at a large company with 1,000+ devs. My direct manager (let’s call him Bob) is probably in his late forties, is from a different country, and has a wife and two children who live in his home country. He currently manages ~20 devs in multiple scrums. Last month, I had my mid-year performance review with Bob. I am pretty sure that I’ve done a great job during the first half of the year. I made a few performance improvements, designed and partly implemented a few new systems, and even saved the company from a potential lawsuit. I think that I’m already delivering much more than the typical junior would already. Bob seems to disagree. He only gave me a mediocre review. When I pushed him for his reasoning, he seems to avoid the question and just told me to focus on the whole year review instead. Last week, I just came to know that Bob is filing a divorce. I would think that he is probably feeling quite depressed. Nonetheless, it bothers me to feel that my review score is somehow related to his personal affairs. He rushed all of his reviews on the last deadline though. I get the feeling that he is dispirited and didn’t focus on giving his team a thorough and honest review. I don’t want to bring this up to Bob’s manager as it would probably make him even more miserable. I also don’t think I can give him divorce advice. What would you do? Hi there. I just graduated from undergrad and will be starting my career in just a few days. A big question on my mind going in is whether software development is the right career for me. I landed here because my parents saw me tinkering with HTML as a kid and pushed me into a CS major and this job. Me personally, I had wildly varying attitudes towards programming in college. Some days I was so hungry that I threw myself into hackathons and side projects; other days I was ready to drop my CS major. All this left me unsure of where I really stand. I’m grateful to have ended up on this path, but as I think more long-term, I question whether I’m really here for the long haul. What signs could I look for to gauge my compatibility with the tech industry or help me decide whether this career is really for me? Either way, thanks so much for making this podcast - it’s been a great window into the world that I’m about to join.

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Questions Hello. Thanks for hosting such a great podcast. I recently finished binging all the previous episodes. I’ve recently noticed in conversations with my team, whether synchronous or asynchronous, after I propose an idea or stake out a position, I easily get defensive if a teammate tries to give feedback on my idea. I don’t mean to get angry, but I sometimes don’t notice until it’s too late. I think it has gotten to the point where my teammates might have caught on, and I don’t want this to lead to a state where they never disagree with me. Have you ever dealt with this, in yourself or others? How have you dealt with changing this mindset? My first software developer job lasted two years. I didn’t learn much. We deployed legacy Java apps with SCP We had no tests We didn’t have CI/CD We were using a beta version of an old framework which we never upgraded Our repos were not in sync with our production code A lot of commented out code, dead code over the place Using multiple languages across the board. We were using Java for something, Node for some, PHP for web/api, JS for client side. Basically the devs were cowboy coding to get the stuff out. I am three years into my current role & have already learned so much more than in my first role. I feel like my first job set me back. How do I overcome this?

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Questions Hey, long time fan of the show! Our current CTO came in as the result of a merger. For most of his life, he was a solo developer and owned his own company. The struggles we are facing now are: He is not responsive at all, neither via chat, nor email, nor any other communication tool. He often says “I’ll do it” but then takes weeks to finish He has thousands of unread emails in his inbox When he writes tickets, the details are unclear for others He codes way too much for a CTO, in my opinion, and his code is a bit messy compared to the other developers Since he is a really nice person, we all want to give him feedback that makes him understand his role better, and to avoid being a bottleneck. I know that changing another person is hard, but at the same time I know that he is motivated to become a good CTO. How do I help him?” Hi. I’ve only recently discovered your podcast this quarantine, and it’s been really helpful at work already. So when I was faced with this problem, I immediately thought of you! I have been a professional software developer for just over a year and have received great feedback from my manager and team. During my performance review, I asked what I would need to qualify for promotion. I got the news that I had already been recommended for a promotion! Meanwhile, a friend still in university got an entry-level job offer from my company that pays more than I would make if my promotion went through. Where I come from, there are no negotiations when companies recruit at universities, so it’s not a matter of them negotiating a better deal. If the promotion does not come through I have no qualms trying to negotiate. If the promotion does comes through, would I come off as ungrateful if I bring this up? Am I asking for too much by wanting to be paid more at a higher position than what a new grad would be paid at entry level? I know it’s not an ideal world and I feel greedy as I type this, but I just want to be compensated for what I think I’m worth. I also think that it also comes down to my ego at some point. SEND HALP

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Questions I’m in the process of quitting my job. I’ve been a developer here for a few years and made amazing friends. I love the people here but I am looking for a new challenge and a pay increase. I was discussing my references for the new role with my partner and she said I should ask my current manager. I stopped hard in my tracks and said “absolutely not.” She works in healthcare and said she wouldn’t get a job unless her old manager gave a good reference. I dismissed this as not applying to software engineering. But the thought has stayed with me. Would use your current manager as a reference? Am I wrong to not do this? At what point do you tell your current manager your looking to leave? My manager does not know anything yet and I thought it would be “mean” to tell him I’m leaving and also ask for a reference. I do believe he would give a good reference though. What are your thoughts? Hey guys, Should I stay at a job where I get paid to do nothing? I took a new job as a data scientist a few months ago and since COVID-19 blew up I have had absolutely nothing to do at my job. I’m supposed to be working remotely but our team doesn’t get a lot of business and we’re mostly keeping a facade of being busy with “internal projects” and “training”. This was nice for the first few weeks but at this point I’m concerned about my career development. Also, the job is more business-oriented than I expected while I would rather focus on building things. I would like my next job to be a machine learning engineer or a software developer role in some other domain. I’m worried that my “hard” engineering skills are deteriorating with every passing week. All of this is made more difficult by the disturbed job market at the moment and the fact that if I stay at my role for another 7 months, I will receive a sizeable retention payment. What should I do? I love the podcast. Keep up the great work.

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Questions Hello, I know you said you don’t read the compliments on air most of the time but this podcast is great. I just found it a few weeks ago and I love the positive fun approach to question answering. It has really made me think about software engineering outside of the ““make code do thing”” box. Anyway, the question: I have been at the same company for 4 years. It is my first job out of college. I have ended up working in so many different languages and frameworks I don’t remember them all. I guess that’s just how things go. Recently I have been selected to take on a scrum master role and I feel I am quickly being groomed for management. That was never really my goal. I wanted to build a depth of knowledge and always have my hands on code. Will taking on these kind of roles hurt my chances at future technical roles? Am I dooming myself to managing spreadsheets and Jira tickets until I retire? Will I only communicate in Dilbert references? My teammate frequently gives status updates or fields follow up questions about work that was mostly done by someone else. I am pretty sure they do this to be helpful not to claim credit for all the work. I just wish I could speak up about the work I contributed primarily to before they do so on my behalf. I wish it didn’t bother me since we are one team and I would rather focus on the progress of the team rather than receiving credit. How should I respond to these situations in a way that allows me to not get bothered emotionally and also do what’s best for the team?

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Questions I took the cult’s advice and quit my job at a start-up!! Now I’m at a big company and the pace of work is REAL different. In my previous life, if I asked a question, I would get an answer within the minute, or at the most, within the hour. At my new gig, the response time on Slack can be 6 hours, and pull request comments so far are never – after a day has passed, I just send a Slack to ask for a response to the PR comment. I’ve noticed that if I schedule a Zoom call I have the best chance of getting a hold of them, but a video call sometimes feels like overkill. I realize it’s due to my coworkers/manager being super busy, so I try to make my questions short, sweet and infrequent. Still, I’m now missing deadlines because I can’t get an answer. How can I get my coworkers’ attention so I can do my work and meet my deadlines? Engineering Managers support growth of their direct reports. Once you become a manager, it’s expected to own your own career development. How much should you expect your manager to support you in that?

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Questions Hey Dave and Jamison, really wish I found your podcast sooner as it has been a great insight into some of the challenges at work. Last year, a fairly close friend reached out asking for a referral for an entry level position to my work. Trying to help him out, I figured absolutely! What could go wrong? (Foreshadowing intensifies) About 3 months into his employment, my boss informally mentioned at a dinner how behind said friend was at a technical level. I brushed this off, and reassured him that he’ll catch up. 6 months into his employment said friend was written up a few times for a few different reasons: tardiness , performance (avoids taking tickets and calls), using phone too often during work hours, fell asleep at his desk. 7 months in brought in our yearly reviews, which he was denied a raise due to his performance history. He asked me if I thought this was correct, and I was brutally honest with him and agreed with that decision. He didn’t take this well, and resulted in an argument between us. At this point I was pretty frustrated with his performance, and it was definitely straining the relationship. 1 Year in (today), he was caught working on side-projects (paid) at work….. which resulted being put on a PIP / Final Warning. I got pulled aside by my boss and HR asking if I knew about it, I said I knew he had side work, but I wasn’t aware it was being done on company time. He’s on the verge of losing his job, but I can’t help but feel somewhat responsible for referring him. All of above events have really hurt the friendship, to the point where I don’t think I would call him a friend. I’ve pulled him aside more than a handful of times asking what’s going on, or if I can help him in anyway but either resulted in a small improvement or a stubborn response that he’s fine at work. Am I holding him to too high of a standard? I don’t think the friendship will heal anytime soon, which I am fine with, but am I responsible for referring them? Thanks for your time guys, love the podcast and advice! I’m currently a manager and applied for a manager role at another company. I heard back from the recruiter that the manager role was filled, but they were still hiring for tech leads. I really want to work at this company, so I asked to interview for a tech lead role. But I really want to be a manager. I’m tempted to ask if they’d be willing to then interview me as if I were a candidate for the manager position I originally applied for. Should I try to show them my readiness for a manager role (even though they no longer have a manager role available) just so I can be top of mind when a manager role opens up? Or should I just be happy falling back into the tech lead ranks and try to prove myself over time? I really don’t mind starting out in the tech lead role and moving back up to management when I’m settled in at the company and an opportunity presents itself, but I can’t help but wonder if I could have passed the bar for the manager role I originally applied for.

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Questions 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. 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!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

🎉🎉🎉 Celebrating 200 episodes! 🎉🎉🎉 In this special episode, Dave and Jamison share crazy work stories contributed by listeners to celebrate 200 episodes of Soft Skills Engineering Right out of graduate school I was in the process of interviewing and got through two phone interviews to get the final in-person interview at a location-based startup. The office was mostly sales but also had a small dev team. The in-house recruiter gave me a rough itinerary two days before: get there at 8AM, have four hour-long interviews with the team, then possibly a coding “quiz.” I was skeptical of what the quiz was but all she said was that everyone who got through the other interviews wouldn’t have a problem, it was multiple-choice, and it would take less than half an hour. I get to the office 20 minutes early but have to wait 45 minutes more for my first round of interviews because an internal meeting went over; the recruiter apologizes and asks if I want breakfast, and I say I’ll take something small like a bagel; she says okay and disappears from the room never to return with food. I get through the culture interviews just fine, though I thought it was a bit odd that several of my interviewers (including a VP) brought in their catered breakfast/lunch into the room but never offered me to get some and I had to go find my recruiter so I could get a cup of water between interviews. The final interview was with who would have been my boss: the senior engineering lead. She proceeds to ask me the normal bank of engineering questions and then lets me ask anything. She starts sending me the vibe that the engineering team isn’t really respected and that as a junior I’d be expected to put in overtime and be on-call on weekends without comp-time and without being able to have a say in when I would be on-call. Then I get some seemingly weird questions: Do you work well with loud noises? How noise canceling are your headphones usually? Is it okay that I would develop on a Windows machine? The engineering lead takes me to the recruiter’s office so I can wrap up the day but the recruiter had left early and nobody knew where she had gone so I was escorted to the front door by a receptionist and left. I didn’t hear back for a week and got a call late in the evening saying they had moved on with other candidates. A few days later I got an email from the engineering lead apologizing for my experience and that they were revising their hiring process due to my experience. Hi Dave and Jamison, I have a crazy work story to share for your 200th show! In my first role as a developer I was working for a small agency building websites for clients. One day I was uploading a new site, which involved FTPing into the server and doing all the config myself. I didn’t really know what I was doing, all of this terminal stuff was pretty alien to me at the time. For some reason or another I needed to change the permissions on the files for this site, so I uploaded it to the server and ran a chmod, (which was a brand new concept to me - luckily Stack Overflow had my back. OR DID IT?) Anyway, when I ran the command, my terminal went crazy and way more files went flying up the screen than I had for my website, so I thought ““that doesn’t look right””, hit ctrl-c and went to lunch, thinking I’d fix it later. When I got back from lunch, everyone was rushing about like headless chickens. Everything was down. When I enquired, it turned out that for some reason everyone was locked out of the entire server. After several hours it turned out that all of the permissions for every file on the server had been changed and nobody had any access to anything. Also, every client site had been brought down in the process. To make matters slightly worse, when I enquired about backups, it turned out that the main server WAS the backup server, because the main server died a couple of years before and nobody had bothered to fix or replace it. Whoops! I didn’t fess up - I was too scared - but coincidentally, a few days later I was fired. Oddly, during the firing, no mention of this incident was made and to this day I have no idea if the two were related. At the time I was devastated, I thought my career was over and I shed tears over how I was going to be able to provide for my family. However, in less than two weeks I was in a new role with a 25% pay increase, and my career has bloomed ever since. So 👍🏻 I guess! And here ends my tale. I hope you enjoyed it - it was devastating at the time, but now I can look back on it with both amusement and bemusement. Thanks for all of your work bringing this podcast to us for 200 weeks, I hope you continue until you also accidentally lock everyone out of your own servers. This is a crazy interview story. It was with a healthcare tech startup. The building was across the street from the healthcare tech company where my wife worked. After meeting the 9 people on the team and doing some white boarding, I met with the CEO. When he asked why I was excited to work at his company, I mentioned in passing that my wife worked at the company across the street. CEO then says “Oh, wow. They just announced that they are going public.” At this point, the company had not announced that they were going public yet, but my wife already knew about it and told me that it wouldn’t happen for a few months. I demurred, but the CEO pressed more “Yeah, I saw it on the news this morning.” Yep. The CEO of a company that rivals my wife’s was asking for insider trading information. I actually had to rehash my conversation to my wife’s boss to make sure I didn’t give away anything important (which I fortunately did not). After that, I decided I would never work for any company in the same industry as where my wife works. About 7 years ago I was looking for a side income. A fellow engineer I worked with told me that the park he spends his weekends at was looking for someone to build them a website, run some wires and a bunch of other IT odd jobs. I was interested so I made the drive down to the park which further confirmed my suspections of my co worker: it was a nudist facility. I sat in my car for a few minutes to consider my options and walked in. It’s weird how being the only clothed person in the room made me feel so awkwardly naked. I spoke to the owner, shared my resume, and my co worker showed up (naked) to vouch for me. I got the job but only under the condition i ““wore the uniform””. I agreed and worked there over the summer weekends for a few months doing everything in the buff. Being near the beginning of my career I wanted to put this on my resume, but didn’t want to expose the private parts of this job. I ended up listing it as ‘contracter’ with just a note: references available on request. The company I work at is a privately owned B-to-C e-commerce shopping platform. Over the past two years the non technical management has been trying to position themselves to be bought out. Their strategy has been to create a new layer of director level management and hire in candidates directly from FAANG with the specific intent of injecting “FAANG” culture into the company. I guess the thought is - if you want to be acquired from a player like FAANG, then become a mini FAANG. Unfortunately, it hasn’t been working out so well. The 💩hit the fan. The new director have absolute power, and as it goes, ““absolute power corrupts absolutely””. The new Director of Engineering did a culling of senior engineers and managers that raised any questions to initiatives proposed by the director (you know, healthy project analysis probing to make sure potential risks are considered). One day, 15 devs were let go. These were senior engineers with years of domain knowledge. Not surprisingly, the platform started to have issues. Payment processing integrations started going down, checkout processes needed maintenance - but… the domain knowledge was gone. In the usual “throw more people at the problem” approach, everyone was assigned pager duty, even for systems they didn’t know. The system got so bad that the director resorted to shutting off one of the major payment processing integrations since it couldn’t be fixed. This had repercussions of course, and we started losing completed checkout conversions. The rest of the senior engineers were leaving voluntarily at this point. Now that the ship was pretty much on fire, and the engineering department pretty much destroyed, we found out that the director was applying to another job at the new Twilio office in the city 😂. We found out he got rejected because his reputation had preceded him and the recruiters at Twilio had actually heard about the mayhem he was causing at our company. But it gets better! One of my coworkers thought it would be a funny prank to put a Twilio sticker on the director’s office window. Nope, my colleague was promptly fired. We later found out that the director was so pissed that he ended up going through the CCTV surveillance recordings to see which employees had entered the building early to find out who put the sticker on his office window 🤦🏻‍♂️. Had a manager who had transitioned to IT help-desk work from teaching elementary school and then worked their way up to manager over a large development team. They never let go of the elementary teacher mentality. The highlights were: Requiring multiple forced-fun team activities a year, like cubicle decoration contests. Playground level nick-names for everyone on the team. (Think banana-fo-fana level rhyming). All team members got emoji stress balls, and were required to place the ball that reflected their daily mood on the wall of the entrance of their workstation.

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

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

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

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

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

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: 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! 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!

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

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: 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? 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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: 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? 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

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

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

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

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

Vote for Soft Skills Engineering on the Hackernoon Noonies awards for best Dev Podcast! In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: 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. 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.

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

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

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: 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? 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: 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? 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: 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! 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?”

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I recently joined a new team to help rewrite a batch job whose source code has long been lost. After taking some time to learn the tech stack and the business problem, I realized that the current approach will not let us meet our nightly deadline. Even a very generous back of the envelope estimate suggests that we’ll miss it by two orders of magnitude. I have some ideas on how to maybe fix this… buuuttt… I brought my concerns and calculations to the lead project engineer who dismissed them outright. They did not offer an explanation for why I was wrong, even when I asked for one. I started a proof of concept to illustrate my point, but there were some weird conversations that suggested that I should just drop the issue. I know how to make a technical argument about my concerns, but apparently that isn’t enough. How can I get fellow engineers to at least take my concerns seriously, not just for this project, but generally? I’m only 3.5 years into my career, so is it just a seniority thing? Hi! I’m a software engineer and I’m currently looking for my next job. It will be my second-ever job, so this means this will be my first time putting the Soft Skill Engineering advice (““quit your job””) in practice. Woo-hoo! Anyway… Browsing the job offerings I often check Glassdoor to see what people are saying about the given company, and I found a lot of negative reviews. I imagine sites like Glassdoor are negatively-biased, but these reviews left me wondering if there is any way I can investigate how good or bad working for the company would be. Maybe through some questions during the interviews? Any idea? By the way, I love the show, keep up the great work!

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: 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. 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 this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Hey guys, I’ve graduated with a CS degree 8 years ago, but due to circumstances I accepted a QA job because I wasn’t getting any other offers. Well 8 years later, I’m still stuck in QA and would love to move into development. I tried transferring within companies and applying to developer jobs, but the QA brand is holding me back. Any advice on how I can become a developer when I’m pigeon-holed in QA? Hi folks! I need your wisdom! Please help. TLDR: Senior as a Programmer, Junior as a Mobile developer. When I first came to my job as an intern, my manager asked me what I wanted to do more - backend stuff, testing, or mobile development. I went randomly and chose the latter. It became my profile and I’ve grown to really like it. Over the years, life has thrown me back and forth, I’ve been on multiple different projects not related to mobile, so now I can do… everything? Or rather, nothing. I know a little bit about .NET, a little about web development, writing Visual Studio extensions, IoT, machine learning, Unity game dev.. This is good because I can now quickly learn new things, know a lot of tricky stuff, know how to communicate with customers. I have a decent salary and good feedback. But the huge downside to that is that I stayed exactly at the same level of mobile development as I was 3 years ago. I know basic stuff, a little bit of advanced stuff, but I have zero experience in all the ““hot”” things like RxJava, Dagger, Kotlin. All the job vacancies I’ve seen require a strong knowledge of something particular: be it Android or iOS development, backend or frontend. I’m suffering from a huge imposter syndrom - yes, I have all the ““good”” programmer qualities, I’m smart, but I have no advanced or even medium knowledge in anything. What can you advise me? Huge thanks and… love the show! ❤

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Is it weird to have 1-1s but not with my ‘manager’? Management is planning to start holding ‘1-1s’ every 6-8 weeks for the development team. The purpose of these 1-1s: ~ ‘So you can talk about non-technical things, any issues with the team or things that are making you unhappy.’ But these 1-1s be with someone who is nominally ‘HR’, not our manager. Since it’s a tiny company, their responsibilities cover things like accounting and sales support. This person doesn’t have any people management or software product development experience, nor any experience in our product domain, and won’t really be our ‘manager’ going forward. Maybe I should just 🎶 quit my job 🎶 🕺. Then I’ll have new and unfamiliar problems to worry about 😅 Hello Jamison and Dave, I have a question on career progression, tech skills and moving into a new role. I’m a career switcher who has spent the last four years studying to move into a developer role. Over the last year I’ve been working on a technical project that has been delivered on time, under budget and ahead of schedule, a huge win for me and the team. However, now that it’s done my manager’s manager is looking at how the team is structured and who we need to hire. He has come to me and my manager to ask if I would like to move in to more of a Project Manager / Business Analyst role as I have done such a good job of the project roll out this year. I’m good at that kind of work, I do get a kick out of it, but if I don’t push forward to move into a developer role have I wasted the last four years retraining? Should I take the role and continue to push to be a full time developer on the team, or accept my fate but use the skills I’ve gained to be a better BA?

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I’m a hiring manager and sometimes have to say no to candidates who interview with us. How do I reject them kindly? In my current company, they only care about reputation of the company. They don’t care about their employees or values, they prefer to invest in other things. One time the CEO asked everyone in the company to create fake accounts in order to vote for the company for an Award. By the way, we received the award. But I don’t know how to feel about this company non-existing values.

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: I was unhappy at my job despite having a great manager, so I started interviewing around. Then my manager helped improve things considerably, but I ended up getting a job offer that was for a much higher amount than I’m currently paid. My company gave me a counter offer that I accepted, but now I feel like I somehow betrayed my manager and don’t know how to stop feeling guilty. How do I come back from a touchy salary negotiation incident like this and make things feel like they’re normal again? Compared to a smaller company which I used to work at, this new big company I’m working at seems to require more storytelling around the work that I do. I see people getting rewarded for exaggerating the effects of their work and being excused for their missed deadlines when they complain and blame the codebase. I hate to play this kind of game and would rather divert my energy on improving as an engineer and getting more code written. </rant> With all that said, I do understand the need for this and think it’s a valuable skill.

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: 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? 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?

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: Hey! I love your podcast, you have definitely helped me improve my soft skills in my career. I am a full stack web developer and I have been pretty much loving it. Web development was not my original career plan though, I graduated with a Bachelor’s in Computational Mathematics & Computer Science, and I knew I wanted to be a software dev since working with robotics in middle school. I kinda fell into Web Development from my IT work study job in college. I have been doing this for 4 years, and I am ready to transition over to applying for Software Engineering jobs. How do I get over this scary feeling of leaving my safety net? How can I encourage myself that I can make this new career transition? There will be jobs I see posted, and I just wanna go for it, but I always get scared at the thought of leaving since it’s just so intimidating, especially coding interviews and interacting with new people, new workplace, etc. What if I end up regretting my choice? Any advice is appreciated! Thanks guys! I always look forward to your episodes every week - I share your podcast with my fellow nerd friends! I work at a bureaucratic company where we move fairly slow. Recently, I’ve been getting more and more frustrated with our code review process, but I’m not sure if this has to do with my quality of code. It can take weeks for one of my pull requests to actually get merged. Someone will review my work, I will make some changes, then they will come back some days later with a new truckload of very nitpicky details that they want changed. This makes me long for the days of me working at a startup where we had no code review, and no testing process, and it’s making me sad. How do you draw the line over what is reasonable code review and what is too much?

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: 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? 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?

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: I keep getting asked to interview new candidates. But my interview feedback history is pretty bad. I’ve said yes to hiring: Someone who’s super smart, but drives me absolutely crazy with constant argument and may cause me to take the time-honored Soft Skills advice and quit my job. My boss at my former company, who DID drive me to quit my job. My first (and only) hire back when I was a people manager, who turned out to be terrible, but I was told I had to keep him around because “it would look bad” to fire my first hire. What should I do? Is it acceptable to just keep turning down interview requests? I’ve wandered into a tech lead position, so I suspect I can’t dodge them forever. But I don’t want to keep suggesting bad hires just for the sake of getting more interview practice. Thanks for all the advice and the laughs! I’ve been a regular listener for a couple years. How long do I need to wait before bailing on a new job I don’t like? More than a month? It’s not totally miserable: the people are nice and the company has good prospects. But the technical decisions of the team lead to daily frustrations for me.

This episode is a rerun of episode 71 from August 2017. In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I’m sometimes an informal lead on project teams. How do I help the team get stuff done as a peer? 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: 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!! 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: I have a lot of software developer colleagues who are 20 - 35 years old but none 50+. At what age does a software engineer’s career end? Hi Dave and Jamison, thanks for the great podcast. I recently started a new position on a small remote team. The co-founders are increasingly dismayed by my lack of Slack-question-asking, although I have reassured them that I’m not too shy and I will ask when I’m stuck. I have daily one-on-one meetings with one co-founder, where I do ask questions about the code base, story requirements, potential side effects of my solutions etc. It’s an open-source project with comprehensive and Googable developer docs, so between those and my debugger I can figure everything else out with a bit of research. A co-founder told me that he expects to see me asking one or two questions per hour, and strongly implied that I need to do this if I want to survive my probation period. I was actually let go from my last job at the end of my probation period due to “brisk communication style” and “not asking enough questions”, so I’m freaking out now. I don’t want to annoy my colleagues with a constant stream of inane RTFM-style questions, but I’m stumped on how else to hit my question target! Can you help me come up with ideas? Is there some big picture reason for this obsession with question-asking that I’m missing?

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I worked for four years doing web development for a company while I got my degree, and loved it. I eventually became the lead developer because I had been on the team the longest. I thought it was really cool. I worked with the team to make organizational tech decisions, trained new hires, held regular meetings to discuss projects. After about 6 months, though, imposter syndrome started sneaking in and I felt like I was making things worse, not better. I figured the team needed someone who actually had senior level experience, and the pressure was getting to me. So I bailed. I’ve since had a few people approach me and say they want me to join their early-stage startup in a technical leadership position. I haven’t outright declined, but I’m nervous about being put in a position where the stakes are even higher. My question is if the pressure of being responsible for everything ever lessens. Is it something that gets better as you get more experience? Is everyone in technical leadership feeling this pressure and doing a good job to hide it? What can I do to gain the confidence to eventually lead another team? How do you step into the meetup scene? I have not attended one before, but the idea of them is interesting. However, there is this feeling that I would not fit in due to inexperience.

Joining us this episode is special guest Nedda Amini! In this episode, Nedda, Dave, and Jamison answer these questions: My engineering career started out pretty promising. But along the way, I took a couple of unfortunate decisions and jobs, that instead of helping me grow as an engineer, were a big setback. When you career takes a few too many bad turns, how do you steer it back to where you want it to go? I work on product development with ~25 other developers, and management recently had us all embark on a journey to gain some level of CMMI appraisal. The goal is to deliver higher quality software at a more predictable pace. In practice this means that we got more processes to follow, more meetings to attend and more time-tracking fuss. I’m trying to keep an open mind because I, as a programmer, also have high standards for the product and it’s development. I’m scared that programmers are being turned in to factory workers stripped of any autonomy. These new processes don’t allow me to do anything without my product owner’s approval. I’m afraid that it will limit my creativity and ultimately cause my work and the product to suffer. In this kind of scenario, what’s your advice for a programmer who often gets inspired to remove tech debt, tinker with our dev environment, and otherwise make small improvements and refactorings that shouldn’t require management approval? What’s your opinion on the level of freedom that programmers should be provided in order to do their job well?

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: 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? 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?

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I work in a flat organization. There aren’t really any titles, and very few managers. There is no common “climbing the ladder” here. What are options for career growth that will help me feel confident that I am progressing in my career? How do references work? I’m starting to look for a new job which means potential employers are going to be asking me for references. I’m not ready to let my boss know I’m thinking of leaving and aside from my current coworkers I don’t know who would attest to my ability as an engineer. I work for a small company (under 50) in an even smaller firmware department (about half a dozen). What am I to do?

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Hi guys! I was faced with quite a dilemma recently. A few days ago one of my co-workers said he was sick and worked from home. But the next day he came to office, constantly sneezing and looking terrible, and for some reason finished the day in the office. The same happened the day after that. I didn’t want to be rude and I felt for this guy, but I didn’t want to get sick either cause I have some important tasks this week. What could have I done? I could not just tell him “go home you fool, you’re contagious!” I could say “Hey! I noticed you’re not feeling very well, why don’t you come to the manager and ask to work from home this week?” But I didn’t have the guts to do this. Besides, what if he couldn’t work from home for some reason? I solved this by lying to my manager that I’m ill too, and worked from home. What is the best solution here? Hi, I recently went through my company’s annual review process. The review went pretty much as expected, with things that I was doing well and things that I could improve on. However, I received some negative feedback which I disagreed with. I asked for additional detail and examples of this, but neither my manager, or his manager (our site lead) could give me any concrete examples. After some further discussion they agreed to remove the comment from my review, but I’m now left wondering why this feedback was added in the first place if there were no examples they could give me. Their explanation for this was that it was feedback for our team, am I wrong or is an annual performance review the wrong place for that kind of feedback? Should I be concerned that they actually do have feedback for me, but were unwilling to do so given my reaction? Is this enough of a red flag to maybe consider looking for a new job?

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: 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 🍿? 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!

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions along with special guest Jonathan Cutrell:: I’ve been job hunting while employed (gasp), and I have a number of opportunities that have advanced to the in-person interview. Most of the requests I’ve seen have said that they’ll be 4-5 hours in the office (which seems fairly typical). The problem is that I don’t have unlimited vacation, and I feel dishonest taking so many days off. How can I navigate new opportunities without disrespecting them, or completely failing in my current responsibilities? Hey guys, great show (though I think, as with all shows, it could probably use more discussion of badgers [yes, I said badgers!]). I’m about to start a new job (I took the time-honored and hallowed show advice, though I’m leaving on great terms with my old job) and will be coming in as that fanciest of newly-invented titles in software, Staff Software Engineer. This is the only third time I’ve started a new job [not counting odd jobs in high school and college], and I’ve never stepped into a leadership role before when starting. What are the most helpful things you’ve done or seen other engineers do when joining a team in a technical leadership role? Thanks! Follow Jonathan Cutrell on Twitter @jcutrell and subscribe to the Developer Tea podcast: https://spec.fm/podcasts/developer-tea.

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I have noticed one of my coworkers, a fellow senior software engineer, often interrupts people during their meetings with his comments and thoughts. While I’m not against voicing opinions during a meeting, he does it so often that he takes over meetings. Some of his points are off-topic. He’ll cut off the presenter or another colleague (who displayed good etiquette) mid-sentence, not letting them finish their thought and derailing the flow of the meeting. In our last meeting I tried to quickly respond to his interjections rather than let him finish so we can keep the meeting moving. I thought he would take the hint to think a little more before interrupting. Ineffective so far. I think next time I will recommend that all questions and concerns be held to the end so we can get through all the meaningful content before letting him speak. Any other suggestions on how to deal with people like this? Hi guys! I have a question about setting limits to your work. I hear that its a common practice among developers to set restrictions to their work like turning off slack notifications when at home, not staying late at work, etc. This seems like a healthy approach, and I like it. But I can’t bring myself to do it. I’m a successful developer, I love my job, and I love the work communication in our chat. I have no problems struggling through the workday, but I have problems not falling into work in my free time. I have a lot of friends, a lot of hobbies, I’m definitely not bored outside of work. But still I always have this inner desire to open and read the workchat when I have a free minute, or finish an interesting feature in the evening instead of reading an interesting book. I can’t say it makes me unhappy in some way or affects my private life - I still will go and see a friend if I’m invited and still will attend my yoga class on a normal schedule - but this ““desire”” distracts me sometimes and that’s not normal either. Am I right?

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: On Episode 66 you attempted to answer my question: ‘How bad can a Junior Front End Developer be?’ Well, I’m now 4 months into my new job as a Junior Front End Developer and it turns out, they can be pretty bad! I’m in this junior role I feel overqualified for. My peers rate me as a solid mid-level, and I’ve started to realize that I’m not really a “junior”. I think this can all be attributed to learning from really good devs at my last company. My best friend is a Senior JS Contractor (legend) and I talk to him about code and best practices everyday. Question: Would you ever hire someone at a mid-level role even if they only had 6 months of profressional experience? i.e. how much weight do you put on the CV? I love you guys, listened to every podcast! Thank you so much for the show, I’ve been binge listening to old episodes ever since a friend of mine suggested it. Your excellent, and often comedic, advice has been getting me through the work day and I really appreciate it! Onward to the question! One of the members on my team, who is more senior than me, often does poor work, and the rest of the team picks up the slack to redo the work, pushing out deadlines we would have otherwise met. I know better than to vent about this at work even though it is very frustrating, however now I’m in a bit of a predicament. Part of our annual review process requires us to provide feedback on each of the members of our team which is not anonymous. The feedback is used to make decisions about raises and promotions. This individual has mentioned that they expect a promotion to a team lead position in this upcoming review cycle, which makes me quite nervous. Should I be honest in my review and mention my concerns or should I take the much more comfortable route that will also protect relationships on my team of pretending everything is fine.

This is a re-broadcast of episode 73 from August 2017. We’ll be back next week with a new episode! In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: A developer on my team has been rewriting my code under the guise of “code cleanup” without saying anything to me. Is this normal? What should I do? How do you deal with co-workers who over-explain unimportant issues?

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Shan writes: “Awesome podcast! I’ve used your advice to better communicate with my employers which has been super helpful. I recently was working as an intern at a company where I did quite a bit of significant work. I left to pursue a Master’s in CS. I set the expectation that I would be available for questions, but not bug fixes during at least the beginning part of grad school. The company said that was totally fine and they would take any amount of work I could give them. I’ve noticed some bugs that have to do with what I was working on. I feel really bad for my team having to work on those bugs while I’m not. It is getting to the point that it is distracting me during the day as I see emails or Slack messages about them. I want to help them, but I just don’t have the time. I am also worried that the reputation I built up of being a solid engineer is damaged. Should I apologize to my teammates that have to work on my now legacy code? I have this feeling of having abandoned my team. Any thoughts on how to mitigate those feelings? I work as software engineer at a ~10 person software agency. During my last review my manager rejected my salary raise proposal arguing that I reached the top level for my current position. He said to get a raise, I would have to act as project manager to get commissions for new projects I acquire. I feel conflicted, since even though I like the idea of upping my game, I do not know much about handling this kind of situations with clients. What is your recommendation for developers getting out of the world of code and into the world of people? Bonus question: Ideas on how to get new projects from clients?

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: My boss is fairly new to management and has recently made some decisions which had a negative impact on my squad. While this was annoying, it didn’t cause any major problems - we worked around the issues and recovered and everyone including my boss learned from the experience. However, my squad has started criticising him pretty harshly in standups and retrospectives and it’s making me really uncomfortable. Often their criticisms are for things that he has very little influence over and it seems like they’re scapegoating him for the general dysfunction within the company. He’s a nice guy who is trying his best and I wouldn’t want him to think I’m taking part in these badmouthing sessions if word ever gets back to him. He doesn’t manage any of the other squad members. What should I do? I work at a big software company and sit in a room with about 20 people. Not all of them are on my project, and lots of them are REALLY loud. You know like in a stock market or something. I use headphones to listen to your podcast (well, not only yours to be honest) but usually that’s no help. I turn on music - still can hear every word. These guys somehow think it’s ok to discuss their work in our room instead of a meeting room (which we have plenty of), and do it loudly, while me and my team always go somewhere else to talk. I talked to these guys a couple of times about it. They laughed and said they would try to be a little bit more quiet, but forgot this promise 5 minutes later. How else can I handle this situation? I have good relationships with all of them (probably that’s why I had not been taken seriously), but I don’t want to lose them.

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Hi Dave and Jamison, love the show and your advice, there’s no podcast quite like yours out there in the audiosphere. I’m a long time listener, first time question asker. “I’ve been doing a really good job lately. I’ve had feedback from my manager and my managers-manager that I’ve exceeded expectations and gone above and beyond over the last year. While the compliments are great to hear, I’d like to approach my manager about a raise to go along with it. Do I wait until performance review time in three months and hope that I get a what I’m hoping for, or bring it up now? How do I approach this conversation without sounding greedy, braggy and potentially asking for too much, leaving a bad impression when I’m on such a roll? I don’t feel like I can keep up at work, 😬, my team is super clever, young and all singles. They spend weekends, evenings and spare time learning. We are introducing a new tool or framework every couple weeks and it is exhausting. I am constantly learning a lot from them and the projects always go really well. 🤷‍♂️ - I’m not sure how to have a good conversation about it as they all love the learning culture. Any tips?

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: What’s the best approach to connecting with people who know about specific technologies that could help me if I have a question? And what’s the best way to cast a net via co-workers, friends, & family? The details of my situation are that I’m trying to build a PostgreSQL database from scratch, and I’m running into lots of problems. I spent 2 hours digging through the Postgres documentation, I asked questions on my University Slack channel, and even the PostgreSQL team Slack with no answers. I also reached out to my boss. But I still have no answers. In any case, I’m just happy I had the wherewithal to walk away after 2 hours instead of spiraling into an absolute rage and wasting my night cursing PostgreSQL. Should a team lead do technical work or restrict himself to people management? What are the pros and cons from each approach? HR in my company wants to change from a unified model of team and tech leads (single person performing both roles) to a split model (one team lead with multiple tech leads that hold no people management responsibilities) and I’m not sure what to think about this. I feel not having the team leads ““on the ground”” will make them less effective in the people management aspect.

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I am a software developer and as such, i get paid nicely. My family doesn’t think I work hard enough or deserve the money. Any advice? I am a software developer that was promoted earlier this year. I received a 10% raise with this promotion. Since working for this company for some time, this is the first substantial raise I have received. Previous raises ranged from nothing to sub-inflation raises. Today, my manager informed me that at my annual review I would not be receiving a raise. My manager said this has nothing to do with my performance but more with the fact that I was given a raise with my promotion earlier this year. I was caught off guard by this and did not really know how to feel about this information. Does this seem reasonable? Is this something worth following up on with my manager? If so, what are good questions to ask?

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I went to an internal company developer meetup recently. The speaker was really new at the topic they were presenting and shared some incorrect information. I didn’t want to correct the speaker in front of a bunch of people, but I also didn’t want everyone at the meetup to leave with incorrect information. How can I be respectful to the speaker while making sure attendees aren’t misinformed? Thanks for doing the podcast! I think it’s great! I recently joined a new company as a Product Manager, this is my first non-development role after 5 years of development. It took me a lot of time to get to this role. During the interview they said I would be involved in development at the beginning of my role to get to know the system and not implementing my own features. After ramping up a bit, I was able to define a bunch of features, but management kept telling me that they are finding it hard to find people and they want me to implement the features myself. I have no problem doing it for my first project but I feel this is going to continue and 6 months from now I will still be working a as developer again. I can leave and get another Dev role but I am really excited about product and I want to continue in this career transition.

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: 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. 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: How can I make my team be more proactive and go out of their comfort zone more? I recently started a new job as the team lead for a team of four developers. Each developer has their own pet things that they keep themselves busy with; one likes to configure linters, another has a long-running project they keeps to themselves, and so on. We have been tasked with a new, high-priority project which involves new technology and would require everyone to pitch in. So far, though, that has only happened when I’ve directly asked someone to do something. I absolutely do not want to end up in a position where I have to tell people what to do. How can I make them realize that this new thing should be their top priority, even if that means going out of their comfort zone? TLDR: My role and product are moving to a different country. I don’t want to relocate. I have to stick around at least another 3-4 months to get my redundancy package. In some ways this is great as I’m pretty unprepared for interviewing right now. On the other hand, this is terrible because I’m pretty unprepared for interviewing right now. How do I keep morale up, for me personally and the wider team during this period?

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Recently I was approached by a manager and informed that I needed to decide if I wanted to stay at the company or not. I initially said I would like to stay, and was told there was some negative feedback from coworkers I’d need to work on to do so. I agree that these were issues I need to work on to become a better engineer, so I’ve engaged in something like a performance plan with her over the last few weeks. But I’ve decided that I don’t want to stay after all, and I’ve started sending out applications. I don’t want to burn bridges when I do end up putting in notice, but I also would like to continue working with her on these issues, and I’m worried if I declare I am leaving that will end. So my question is: should I tell my manager I’ve changed my mind, or stay quiet? We used to have regular “tech talks” in the office - opportunities for people to share something they find interesting that doesn’t have to be work related but usually is tech/development focused. The talks were 30-45 minutes in length, and there used to be free food (at a place that doesn’t normally do that kind of thing) I wasn’t here at the time when it last fizzled out, but used to give similar talks at my last company and I’m interested in starting them up again here. People say they’re interested now but the novelty of free food eventually wears off - do you have any suggestions as to how to sustain people’s interest in attending giving talks? I might be able to convince a few people I work more closely with but there’s 60+ or so technical people in this office I’m still getting to know.

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: 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. 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. 🙁

This is a rerun of episode 87 from December 14, 2017. In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: ‘I’ve been working on a project for the past year with two other senior developers. One of them is the lead, and the other, is my peer. We all have a lot of respect for each others opinions and resolve our engineering disputes amicably. My problem is that sometimes my peer will just give up saying ““have it your way”” etc. I want to have it out with him and evaluate each solution on its merits. I’ve considered saying ““STAND AND FIGHT YOU MANGY CUR””, but then looked up ““Mangy Cur”” and decided against it. How do i get him to be more vocal about his opinions? (so that i can prove to him that i’m right) I like the idea of measuring things, but I also feel like work “metrics” are easy to game and hard to make indicative of actual quality work being done / product being produced. In particular I worry when the data collected leads people to choose work that will bump stats rather than lead to better end user experiences / product / maintainable code. What kind of data do you think is useful to collect in terms of developer activity? Can you share some examples of ways you’ve been able to assess your own and your coworkers productivity? I’m interested in this both on a team level and a personal one. How can I get better if I don’t have a way to track what “good” is for myself? Is trying to turn the complicated and messy thing that is what I actually do all day into a trackable, data driven domain a fool’s errand?

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I recently started working at a small dev shop. Somewhere along the way I may or may not have started seeing a coworker outside of work. It’s really been great but there are no clear examples of how the organization would react to something like this. We have fairly lateral positions and there are no written policies or anything in the handbook. Even so, we’ve been doing our best to act “business casual” when we run into each other during the day. We don’t work directly but it’s a smaller company so the chance is pretty good that we eventually will. It’s been fun to navigate so far but wondering what your take is on this/the pros and cons of telling trusted coworkers or management. Thanks!! I’ve been working as a software engineer for several years now. In my current job I have fortnightly one-to-one catchups with my manager. My problem is that I very rarely have anything to say. My work is going fine, I’m happy enough with my job, and I don’t feel like I really need help with anything. I feel as though not having much to say reflects poorly on me, giving the impression that I’m uninterested or that I don’t value my managers input. What is it we should be talking about?

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I’m working for minimum wage as a full Systems Administrator at a State University while I’m taking classes. I really like working here, but I need to make at LEAST 40K /year to justify this level of effort for much longer. I just got offered a job two hours away for 80 - 100K as a System Administrator at a smallish ISP. The same day my boss told me he got approval to hire me on at 45K in 3 - 4 months. If I wait and stay I’m not making what I feel I’m worth, but if I leave I’ll make WAY more money and probably won’t finish my bachelor’s degree. I already have 5 years of experience as a ““system admin”” but I want to move over to technical project management in the next 10 years. I think I should stay, make less money, continue growing my relationships in the Scholastic Network, and finish getting my Bachelor’s degree. That way I can get past HR checks to become a Project Manager somewhere else. What should I do? I’ve recently become the technical lead at my company. I need to build my team more but am struggling with one thing. How do I overcome the fear of hiring someone better than me who could potentially overtake me as the team lead? Is this a common fear among leaders? I want to build an effective team of high caliber developers. But I can’t do that if I let my ego and insecurity get in the way.

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Hey guys, I love the show! Thanks so much for keeping episodes coming every week. Some background: I work for a small, established company based in a small city with a growing tech scene. We have about 20 employees, 5 of which make up the engineering team and it’s been a great experience. My role is primarily being a full stack developer working on our web application, but since we’re a small company, I’ve been able to explore some other responsibilities like analyzing data for the marketing team and working with the sales staff to build custom solutions for select clients. I started working here as an intern while still in college almost 6 years ago. I feel my initial salary out of college started a bit low, but I’ve received an 8-10% raise each year I’ve been a full time employee (without having fight for them)–so I think I’m catching up. My question is, will I be stunting my career or making myself seem less hirable by staying here too long? I’ve clearly found a great place to work so leaving here would be difficult. I’m also concerned that I’m beginning to run out of skills to acquire here. It sounds easy to leave a job you hate, but how/when should you leave a job that’s this good to you? Hi Jamison and Dave, tl;dr: The role I was originally hired for is slowly being eroded - what should I do? Longer version: I have been working for my current company for a little over a year now. Things were going really well at first, I liked the team I was on, the work (backend) was interesting and I was learning a lot from my colleagues. Unfortunately, due to corporate machinations, my team was dissolved as part of a reorganization and scattered to seperate, mostly frontend focused, teams. Originally I was told that I would still be doing effectively the same type of work on my new team as on my old, and this has been mostly true. However, over the course of the last few weeks my new manager has gradually been announcing changes in the direction the team is taking as a whole and talking to me specifically about working more on frontend related tasks and upskilling, as I have almost no frontend experience. I have tried to make it clear that I have no interest in doing this but my manager is still pushing for it. I am currently still doing mostly backend work with a little frontend, but I feel like my days are numbered. There are other teams with a more backend focus, but I feel that my manager partly wants to keep me in the short term for some necessary backend work and in the long term is hoping I will acquiesce on doing more frontend work. How should I navigate this situation? It feels like I sinking in quicksand Thanks

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: 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? 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: Hey guys! Do you have any tips for making ““brain storming sessions”” more bearable? In my experience, I’ve found that it’s very hard to keep this type of meeting productive. I don’t think this is necessarily anyone’s fault, and I love the idea of making sure all sorts of folks have a path to contribute, but many times when I’ve seen these types of meetings organized, many participants don’t have enough context, or subject matter expertise to produce genuinely helpful ideas. I think it’s really powerful when cross-discipline teams collaborate well on a project or feature, so I guess I’m wondering if there are practical ways to generate the culture of trust and mutual respect that is needed for this to actually work. First time question asker, long time listener here. We have a Really Important Problem at work: in Slack, people tend to use @channel instead of @here. What are some strategies for educating everyone that they should be using @here and not @channel? I especially don’t want anyone to feel shamed or called-out in the moment. Thanks!

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I joined a new team that has a different way of working, which has exposed a lot of my shortcomings. On my previous team, collaboration was limited to discussions around architecture and strategy; after reaching consensus, we’d implement the components independently. I was very comfortable with this because I don’t have good intuition for how to interact with others. On the new team, we pair-program. Teammates have pointed out mistakes I’ve made while pairing, such as trying to control the mouse when they are in the middle of doing something or investigating something on my own computer without communicating what I’m doing. On this team, we are also expected to be much more engaged in group decision-making. As a result, I’ve made tons of mistakes in how or when I pose questions. Each time I make a mistake, it increases my self-loathing. I tried telling myself that I didn’t have bad intent when I made the mistake and the only way to grow is to make mistakes. I also told myself that this self-loathing doesn’t do anything for the team. I also do a personal post-mortem on each of my mistakes because I thought that would help me move on. These approaches didn’t work and my confidence has dropped substantially. I know it’s essential for me to learn how to work effectively with others instead of staying in my comfort zone of heads-down coding. Do you have suggestions for how to get through this learning process without letting it affect my self esteem and motivation? Hey Soft Skills Engineering, Love the podcast! You’ve helped me understand so much about the software engineering career field that I probably would have otherwise learned the hard way. I’ve been working at my current job for almost 4 years. The pay is very much below market (it’s a non-profit), the work is too easy, I can finish any task in a couple of hours, but we are given an automatic 1 week+ deadline to finish anything, and I’m much more technical than any of my co-workers, to the point where I can’t even have nerdy conversations with anyone at work. However, I’ve stuck around because the job is pretty much stress-free, I don’t have to think about work at all outside of work hours, and all the free time allows me to take on side-projects and learn new technologies, including every level of software development. With all this free time, I’ve started a company. In the last few months, I’ve managed developers, designed a system using blockchain tech, designed and implemented a database, learned the ins and outs of AWS management and server-less development, built a REST API from scratch, developed a full front-end in React/Redux, and learned a ton of other things. Since I’m in the prototype phase, my startup hasn’t gotten any revenue, and I’m aware it might take awhile to get any revenue if it ever does. I need to pay bills, and I need to start thinking about my financial stability. So I think it’s time to get a new job, even if it means not having as much freedom to work on the startup. I’m not sure on how to approach my next step. I want to continue working on the startup after I get a new job, but I’m aware that employers might not be fond of “CEO” on my resume when there’s no end-date on the position, because I might leave at any time if my company grows. If I don’t put anything about my company on my resume, then it seems like I have nothing to show for all the technical skills I claim I have (since all the learning, management and implementation has all been for my company). Do I put anything about the startup I’m working on in my resume? If not, then how would I showcase all the experience and skills I’ve gained by beginning this startup? Should I just keep getting by paycheck to paycheck while I build the company? Thanks

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Great podcast! Love what you guys are doing and very happy that you are doing this for such a long time! Here’s the question. I started to work in a Startup a year ago. When we were negotiating the salary we agreed on amount X, and CTO promised that after a year it will be increased. He did say the exact sum. So, the year has passed, I followed up CTO about the salary raise, and he delegated the task to the manager, who decided not to give me a raise. When I asked ‘why?’ he said that I am good at negotiating my salary and I’m getting what the market is offering. I don’t feel bad about not getting more money, but the fact that the CTO break his word concerns me. I don’t think I can trust this company when they are promising anything and I started to care less about what I’m doing here. Am I delusional that a programmers salary has to increase even by 2% on a yearly basis and how to find a way to trust company in the future? Or just drop this and take the default SSE case - look for another job? Thank you for your answer. Hi Dave and Jamison, Absolutely love the show. I share an office with a peer who works on my team. We are both early in our career and are lucky to work under a very hands off manager. However, I feel my peer is taking advantage of the situation and is slacking off. He is rarely in his office and often states that he is ““working”” from home. When he graces us with his appearance in the office, he asks the most basic questions. Granted, those questions are internal and specific (not easily Google-able), but still, I feel he should have known the answers after a year on the job. He intentionally exploits our monolith’s slow builds by running full builds all the time and complain that it is slow. Then plays video games in the office until the build is complete (about 4 hours). Then makes a minor change in his feature code and kicks off a full build again, even though he could build incrementally (about 2-3 minutes). What do you recommend me to do? Should I spend time and energy to answer his lifeless questions? Should I confront him?

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Is it just me or does systems like Jira and TFS get managers to go crazy on processes? We have TFS and management has created a convoluted mess of processes that takes forever to learn and gets changed on a whim to be replaced by an even more convoluted process. Every time I finish a large feature and need to merge it in, I have to run around asking ten people on what process changed since there are all sorts of permission denied and other strange error messages. In my previous job, same with Jira and Jenkins. As an engineer, do managers really need these crazy processes that get in the way or am I naive engineer who doesn’t really understand the value of these processes? Just wanted to preface by saying that I absolutely love your podcast. It’s definitely helped me mold into a better developer and team player! My company is having a tough time raising our next round. In light of this, I am actively looking for my next position. Financial stability and growth is my biggest concern as I am planning to get married, buy our own place, and have kids. My goal is to interview at multiple companies and get competing offers. From a hiring perspective, I can definitely see how companies and see this in a negative light. How do I navigate salary negotiations so that I can get the best deal (financially) without being stereotyped?

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I used to work totally remote, but found myself absolutely hating it. The lack of office culture and human interaction. The problem is that in my area there are few local development jobs that match my skill set. I work in a large but heathcare heavy town, and their tech does not blend with my skill set. All to say. When it comes time to find my next job I’ll probably be looking for remote again. How can I come to love remote jobs, or at least survive? Maybe my previous companies remote culture was terrible. Is there any advice you can give when evaluating a remote culture at a company? Love the show! I had a question on how to effectively manage of team of engineers who have only partial allocation to my project. I am a project & technical lead for a team of ““8 FTE””, which is composed of a rotating cast of engineers who are allocated to my project in small percentages (most commonly between 30-80% of their time). This has a lot of challenges which you can imagine, but the one I am most interested in your thoughts on is the struggle with other projects about ““whose deliverable for a given engineer has priority””. As an example an engineer with 50% time on my project and 50% on another project will give me feedback that his immediate tasking between projects is unclear, he knows he has to do both workloads but feels they are uneven, or he is under more pressure from one project than the other. My company stack ranks during performance reviews and competition between leaders of matrix organizations (such as myself) in particular is fierce, so discussions between projects on how to effectively tackle this problem does not yield constructive agreements (in my experience). I’m at times guilty of trying to ““squeeze”” more than my designated allocation out of engineers to deliver on agreements for timing, scope, etc. Any thoughts are appreciated!

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: How do managers make firing decision during company wide cuts? Recently our company went through spending cuts and x percentage of people were laid off as part of this exercise. On one fateful day, our manager informed us that he let go John Doe as he had to fire someone. Overall John Doe was a decent senior developer and was with the company for 10 plus years. My gut feeling is that he was let go because he simply didn’t (or couldn’t) move to management and was too old for a developer position. Does ageism play a role when a firing decision has to be made based on non-performance reasons? I’m in my early 30s, I have a spouse and a small child, and work remotely as a software engineer. One of my peers, let’s call him James, is about 10 years younger than me, works on-site, and is single. He’s a good developer and really friendly. The problem I have with him is that this job is his life. It isn’t uncommon for James to work 14 hour days (including weekends sometimes), submitting code for review at midnight, then back in to work bright and early the next day. This is not at all encouraged at my company. Most everyone comes in at 9 and leaves at 6. I feel a little bad for James because I get the sense that he’s lonely, and doesn’t have much going for him outside of work. However, it’s frustrating working with a peer who puts in way more time at work when my home life literally makes that level of dedication impossible. James receives a lot of praise for the hard problems he works on after-hours. I know my performance is fine and I don’t need the praise per se, but it’s frustrating to feel that I’m going to be compared to him informally by my co-workers in terms of what we get done, and formally, as promotion opportunities come up. I honestly wish someone in management would ask him not to work after-hours, but that’s probably not going to happen. Thoughts on how to handle this?

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I started my first job as a developer 2 months ago. My boss wants me to give talks at meetups and then later, conferences. I have no idea what I can talk about as I am still very much learning. How do I find a topic to research and work on so that I can deliver value to people listening to my talk? What are some things I can try to increase the scale of my annual raise or bonus? For example, if my company averages a 2% raise each year, but I really want a 3% raise this year, how might I go about it?

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: What is the right balance between asking for help and figuring things out on my own? How do I know when it’s time to ask questions or when it’s time to spend more time drilling down into the code? Been at my first job for a couple of years now, and I am very quiet in the workplace and still find it hard to open up, be assertive, and speak up in meetings. When I try to go out of my comfort zone (arguing about technical decisions, setting up and driving meetings), I don’t think my manager appreciates my efforts. I am told that I need to voice my opinions more and have more of a two-way conversation. I feel I’m not given concrete chances to improve, and it’s very demotivating. How should I deal in situations like this? Job pitch time! Are you interested in working at Walmart Labs? Email Jamison at jamison.dance@walmartlabas.com!

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Will working as a defense contractor hurt my future employability in private industry? I work as a full stack engineer for a small defense contractor with a security clearance. My company is awesome; All of my coworkers are super talented/motivated. On top of that we get to work with modern tech stacks (React, Elm, Go, Rust, Kafka, you name it, we can use it). I have heard rumors that it’s hard to move back to private industry after working in this world due to working with old/legacy tech and the view that defense contractors generally have less than stellar engineers. Is this true? I feel I’m in a bit of a unique situation due to how good I have it at my company and feel I could demonstrate that my technical chops are up to par with industry standards. We we just did a 360 performance evaluation where we provided “strong points” and “improvement suggestions” for two colleagues assigned by management. The completed reviews were sent to management and management forwarded it to the people under review. One of the reviews I received was very positive but the other one, from a senior teammate I work closely with, had a very harsh and exaggerated “improvement suggestions” section and very short and unconvincing “strong points” section. I’m not sure if he really considers me incompetent or he just wrote the suggestions, which do have some truth in them, without bothering to put things in perspective and without considering the impact it can have on my career and motivation. I feel a bit resentful towards the reviewer and am worried about the potential negative consequences of this review (I am relatively new to the company, joined 7 months ago). For now, I am trying to act as if nothing happened. I am hesitating whether I should talk to this person. On one hand, he can write what he wants in the way he wants. On the other hand, I feel the review is unfair and too negative. I would appreciate your input on this.

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I work at a growing start up, and while I was hired as a web dev, I have started working on unrelated but cutting-edge tech for the company during off hours. My boss has encouraged me to do this with monetary and office life bonuses, and he has reworked our business model to focus on it. The only problem is that our CEO overpromises and pushes me to my mental and physical limits for very short turnarounds. I still have to do my regular job. While I love the challenge, and love the company, I feel set up to fail. And the 40 hour coding sprints over the weekend are killing me. I feel like I’m setting a horrible precedent because somehow, defying all logic, I’ve met the deadline each time. How far is too far? Should I keep killing myself, or take the agony of defeat on a project. I’m currently working as a Senior Solutions Architect after a career progression that looks like this: Junior Developer, Intermediate Developer, Senior Developer, Junior Architect, Intermediate Architect, Senior Architect. In a recent one-on-one with my boss, we were discussing my future career options and concluded that the next step for me would be one of the following three positions: VP of Engineering, Chief Architect, or CTO. According to him, all three have similar levels of prestige, pay and influence, but vary in the nature of the job. Reflecting on this conversation, it dawned on me that I’m close to the final stage of my career. I’m currently 39 years old, so I’m now thinking to myself: Is that really it? One more promotion and I’ve successfully climbed the corporate ladder? End of the line. Time to retire. Nothing more to strive for (other than working on the most interesting projects). So, could you please talk about the software career progression, what to aspire to and how to measure one’s own progress once one has reached the top of the ladder?

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Let say you accepted an offer from another company and you turned in your 2 weeks notice. If your current employer ask you how much you will be making at your new place, should you tell them? Recently I was on a panel of people hiring for my company. We were hiring for several positions and were given a fixed headcount. When it came down to the last spot we interviewed two people, one of which was a referral from someone higher up in the company. This person did terribly on the interview and we as a panel decided that we would offer the position to the other person, who was the strongest of all the interviewees. And all was fine until several days later when we received an email from HR showing the full list of people to be hired, and lo and behold, the list contained all the people we chose, plus one extra person, the referral person. Somehow there was magically more headcount for this person and now he is being hired. I’m not really sure how to feel about this. Because now we have a new person that is going to enter the company and I feel if he doesn’t perform well it will reflect badly on me and the panel that were involved in hiring. Also I am confused at this clear example of nepotism happening in my company. Should I bring this up with someone in the company? I’m leaning towards no but I am also confused and annoyed at what happened.

In this re-run of episode 79, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: It seems like my teams always miss their story point commitments. Is this normal? How do you change it? 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: 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. 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 this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: 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! 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: Hello Jamison and Dave. 💕 your show! 👏 I have been a C# dev for 7 years. Last year, I learn Erlang. I fell in love with functional programming. After that I learned Elm and oh boy… I had never dreamed a compiler/computer could do so much work for me, preventing so many mistakes that would otherwise require an unholy number of “unit tests”. The thing is I can no longer find satisfaction with any job. I love to write software, but at some point I became almost dogmatic. I abhor more and more the discipline it takes, in certain languages, to make my code be as pure and testable as in an FP language. I had to do so much un-learning, that now I feel that I am refusing to un-un-learn all these different ideas and paradigms and just go back to making the tests happy. I seek your humorous words of wisdom on how to find contentment with my job again, without looking at a language and dreading it. I have a co-worker, who is pretty incompetent technically. Over the past few years that I’ve been here, he has proved time and again that he is incapable of learning and really grasping how things work. He is able to accomplish basic feature work, but not capable of making good architecture decisions, or why a given framework should be chosen, or how to solve harder problems (I’m not sure how to describe this. But for example, how to build a resilient API client). However this person is great at creating slides, and presentations, and JIRAs, so I think management thinks they are ok at their job. He’s also a nice guy. I’m not sure how to say, hey you suck at your job. Which is pretty harsh. Or to suggest to someone that he should be replaced.

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: How do I help foster team spirit in a newly created team? I work for small startup (fewer than 10 people). My boss wants to hire another developer and asked me to look around for people. I don’t feel particularly strongly about this team. I’ve been there for about a year, but I don’t imagine myself working there for another twelve months. I don’t want to refer my friends because I don’t want them to join a team I don’t feel good about. On the other hand, I want to work with great people. I see how other devs may enjoy working in such an environment, but it’s just not for me. In the long run, I obviously want to leave this job, but what would you recommend doing in short term? Is hiring under such circumstances really that different than hiring if I liked this team?

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I run a small dev team. One junior developer constantly openly challenges things that don’t meet this their preference. As a manager I don’t want to stifle innovation, but need to find a balance on being able to meet business goals on schedule. I want to add an automatic formatting tool to our code, but my co-worker is resistant to the idea. He started this project and I’m brand new to it. I don’t want to push it too much, but I would really love to use it. I’ve shared with him all the reasons that it would be good, and addressed most of his concerns. I’ve also submitted a PR to show him what it would look like. Also, he is in another timezone 9 hours away, so communication is all on GitHub, Slack, and the occasional video call (if I wake up early). He finally said if it really helps me, then I can go for it, but I don’t think he would like it if I did. Should I go for it? Try to convince him more? Or just drop it?

We’ve got another re-run this week, as Jamison and Dave both recover from being sick. We’ll be back with a new episode next week. In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: How can I attract talent? How do I quit without burning bridges? This episode originally aired on November 15th, 2016.

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: What do I do about an insecure teammate whose insecurity causes them to lash out at others? I’d like to change teams within my company, but I’ve had some negative performance reviews in the past. How early should I disclose this to my prospective manager? Jamison talks about the Khan Academy Engineering Principles, which are great and which you should read.

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: How can I encourage my team to be more visible in the office? How do I learn new technologies without going through a noob phase?

Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I recently interviewed for a role I was very interested in. I didn’t get the job,and despite several attempts, didn’t receive any feedback on what I could have done differently. I still really want to work there at some point in the future, but have I taken it too far? Have I accidentally burned all of the bridges before I set foot on them? I am a lowly SSE that recently started a tech newsletter at my company. One of the senior VPs (let’s call them “E”) sent out an email to the org asking people to reply to a newsletter survey so that their team can be featured. A senior manager (“K”), was upset his team wasn’t featured but I informed him that he didn’t reply to the original survey. I explained to “K” that he can still send me information for the next issue. “K” then replied back with something very condescending and has now made the newsletter a political device. How should I proceed from here?

Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Since working remotely I’ve noticed a trend to do things like not leaving the house, growing my beard out to above average length, or not wearing (real) pants. What should I do to keep from losing any/all interpersonal skills? Is there such a thing as meetup etiquette? When I attend meetups and attempt to initiate conversion with people, I’m hesitant to interrupt people who are in discussion with others. Should I wait, try to join the discussion or just barge in on the conversion?

Dave and Jamison answer these questions: 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? 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 =)

Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I went through the interview process, and as last step I had an interview with the VP of engineering. At the end of interview he asked if I had any questions for him. I didn’t know what to ask. What do you ask? I’m a front-end web developer on a SCRUM team. Our Product Owner is also our tester, but she has a very busy schedule and she hardly has any time to test anymore. My team thinks we need a second product owner, but I think we should hire a dedicated tester to help the PO. How do I convince my team and my manager to hire a tester instead of a second product owner? We don’t work with scripted test plans or anything, so I think a dedicated tester would be a huge benefit to our team and our deliverables.

A listener named Dan talks about ThanksBot, an internal tool at Facebook to support gratitude. Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I became an engineer because I loved my programming assignments and CS degree. However, at work I’m struggling to contribute beyond competing the tasks assigned to me. How do I participate more in broader technical solutions, process, etc? I recently started a new job, and a lot of the existing code is really bad. How can I raise this concern, or make improvements to the code, without offending my teammates who wrote it? Thanks!

Dave and Jamison answer these questions: A teammate is a great developer but English isn’t their first language. Sometimes this results in bad grammar or spelling mistakes in code comments, variables, and method names. Often I correct it in code review, but I sometimes feel like I’m nit-picking, although I really do want it changed to be correct. It slows down code reviews. And of course, I don’t wish to appear racist or discriminatory. Any ideas for solving this? This is my first job out of college. Been there for 2.5 years. It feels like my manager is always firefighting and not able to be proactive, trapped by the tyranny of the urgent. It feels like our group is always behind on deadlines trying to catch up and we’ve accrued large amounts of technical debt with little to no time spent on improving our processes or tools. The result is that we produce a worse product and documentation than we should. This causes additional support required down the road further loading down the group. What can I or my manager do to improve this situation? Is this more common than I think? Read more about the hairy arm principle and the fun memory tricks that game developers pull.

Dave and Jamison answer these questions: A fellow developer submitted a pull request for me to review. The logic was totally fine, but the spacing drove me nuts. We use a linter to enforce some coding style but because this wasn’t a rule in the linter, I wasn’t sure if it was fair game to call him out on it. Was I being petty? I knew if this got into our code I would end up fixing it later myself. I told him I would approve the PR but thought that spacing should be more readable and consistent with the rest of the codebase. What is the proper etiquette here? Mention it and add the rules to the linter later? Don’t care about spacing if the code gets the job done? How do you express gratitude to your immediate supervisor? My immediate boss, who is lead engineer for our team, does an amazing job. Occasionally I get to peek into his world and see how much work he does. I am amazed at all he does for the team; shielding us from company politics, keeping us updated on relevant info, dealing really well with team drama and even makes time to contribute to code. How do I show gratitude besides building meaningful software? I recently read a paper on coding style and how it survives even through compilation and optimization!

Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Do you have any recommendations for maintaining physical health in a software developer role? For example, strategies to maintain good posture, reduce eye strain, etc. Is the practice of asking interviewing developers to regurgitate 20 year old algorithms on a whiteboard a recent trend or is this something new? Can you make sense of this madness? This is a pretty good summary of some of the health effects of sitting. Here is the tweet Jamison talked about.

Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I’ve been pushed in to doing management tasks I really don’t enjoy. What do I do? How do I handle a co-worker who I really struggle to get along with?

This week Jamison and Dave answer these questions: We have a great intern, who is smart and has good ideas but is also very quiet. She’s got a great deal of potential, and I want to tell her that being more vocal and assertive can help her greatly, both in her career and in life. How can I give her this feedback, without it sounding like a criticism of her personality, or her introverted tendencies?” Recently a team member was let go. I am the team lead so I played a role in their termination. While they weren’t a good fit for the team, I’d still like to be in touch and help them improve their skills. Should I steer clear of this? My gut says yes but my heart says no.

This week Jamison and Dave answer these questions: 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? 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.

This week Jamison and Dave answer these questions: When should asking a developer pal for help go from something that is free because you’re pals to something you should compensate them for in some way? I’ve never worked with recruiters before. I’ve always found jobs from friends and other connections. Is working with recruiters worth it? What should I watch out for? I finally found the creepy Jack and the Beanstalk video! It is still horrifying.

This week Jamison and Dave answer these questions: As a “less than ideal” engineer was leaving our team, he asked if he could use me as a job reference. How should I tell them no? What are your thoughts on having full sleeve tattoos (ie, tattoos that cover the entire arm) within engineering?

This week Jamison and Dave answer these questions: My job doesn’t seem to leave room to negotiate salary or raises for our year-end review. Is this normal? How do I negotiate in this process? Can working part-time, when it’s possible to work full time, to invest in personal development look bad to a future employer? This tweet storm by Sarah Mei is good and relevant. This is the video about making your own font and anagraphs that Jamison mentioned at the end. It is SO GOOD. This is a funny and enlightening video that people of taste and culture will appreciate. This one is also good. Ok fine, they are all good.

This week Jamison and Dave answer these questions: 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?” 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!

This week Jamison and Dave answer these questions: 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? 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?

This week Jamison and Dave answer these questions: Upper management has a negative impression of me because of an early manager. How do I manage and improve my reputation with mid and upper level management, who I interact with very rarely? I have a job offer I feel unqualified for. Should I decline this offer I honestly don’t deserve, or face a massive amount of impostor syndrome and risk not delivering?

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

This week Jamison and Dave answer these questions: How do you dress for interviews? Full on informal beach bum? Smart casual? Formal suit tie? I’m a new developer and have been asked to interview incoming developers. How do I learn how to interview? This is the NoRedInk interview process. This is the blog post Jamison likes on getting data out of the technical portion of the interview. This is a slightly pessimistic look at pitfalls in the standard interview process. Google wrote a great article about structured interviewing that might also be helpful.

This week Jamison and Dave answer these questions: 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? 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.

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

This week Jamison and Dave answer these questions: One of my co-workers is a know-it-all, which is pretty annoying. How do I work with them? A former employer still has my photo on their team website eight years after I left. How do I get them to take it down?

This week Jamison and Dave answer these questions: I work with a very shy and anxious remote developer. How do I work effectively with them? Our manager is outsourcing the core architecture of our next products to an offshore team. How do I tell him I think this is a bad idea?

This week Jamison and Dave answer these questions: I think I’ve saved enough money to get out of the rat race. If something goes wrong and I need to get a job again, how do I explain a long gap in my resume? I like writing code but I’m interested in moving to a more business-focused role. How can I test this without burning bridges? Do I need to take a pay cut?

This week Jamison and Dave answer these questions: How do I smooth things over after a blow-up between team members? A team mate admits he writes bad code on purpose for job security. What do I do?

This week Jamison and Dave answer these questions: A developer on a team I lead doesn’t seem interested in growing. How do I help them engage more? 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.

This week Jamison and Dave answer these questions: How do I keep up with new tech as a team lead? I manage a team. A manager from a different team wants me to run everything I do in my team by him. What do I do? Jamison mentions this by Charity Majors on the pendulum between technical and people leadership. Jamison also mentions this HBR article on employee happiness.

This week Jamison and Dave answer these questions: It seems like my teams always miss their story point commitments. Is this normal? How do you change it? 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.

This week Jamison and Dave answer these questions: We’ve re-written the project I’m on 10 times without launching. What should I do? I worked hard to hit a deadline, only to find out the deadline was moved. How do I avoid this in the future? We talked a bit about the value of deadlines way back in episode nine if you want to hear some positive things about deadlines.

This week Jamison and Dave answer these questions: My boss wants me to speak at conferences, but I’m very new to software. What should I do? How do I get more than a 2% raise? That is the company average. We talked about conferences a bit more way back in episode 6. We also talked more about playing the salary game in episode 23, which is a technique for sharing salary information with your co-workers.

This week Jamison and Dave answer these questions: My organization requires me to set goals for myself. What advice do you have for writing good technical and non-technical goals? My managers openly joke about firing people all the time. What should I do?

This week Jamison and Dave answer these questions: What are some good ways for people who aren’t good at self-promotion to promote themselves? I’m moving to Europe in a year. How much notice should I give my company that I’m leaving? Way back in episode 26 we talked a little bit about self-promotion as well.

Jamison and Dave will be at the UtahJS Conference on September 18th. See conf.utahjs.com for more info and to buy tickets. Come say hi! This week Jamison and Dave answer these questions: Do I need to take a pay cut when switching languages? I was promoted at work but didn’t get a raise or a title change. What do I do?

Jamison and Dave will be at the UtahJS Conference on September 18th. See conf.utahjs.com for more info and to buy tickets. Come say hi! This week Jamison and Dave answer these questions: A developer on my team has been rewriting my code under the guise of “code cleanup” without saying anything to me. Is this normal? What should I do? How do you deal with co-workers who over-explain unimportant issues?

Jamison and Dave answer these questions: My CEO is micromanaging the developers. What do I do? I’m about to take a job as the only developer at a company. How do I handle working without technical coworkers?

Jamison and Dave answer these questions: I’m sometimes an informal lead on project teams. How do I help the team get stuff done as a peer? 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.

Jamison and Dave answer these questions: I’m a new team lead with a team member who is very appraisal-driven. How do I deal with them? Have you ever experienced meeting-creep? What do you do about it? Jamison mentions the 37 signals blog post on the downsides of group chat.

Jamison and Dave answer these questions: My supervisor is a know-it-all who needs to be the smartest person in the room. How do I deal with it? I want to move to another city and work remotely. How do I convince my boss to let me?

Jamison and Dave answer these questions: It’s been a year and I still haven’t touched the codebase. What should I do? All my hobbies revolve around computers. How do I develop other interests? Jamison mentioned Dan Luu’s article on how bad teams are always hiring. Here it is. Rich Hickey’s Hammock-Driven Development talk was also mentioned.

Jamison and Dave answer these questions: Should I get a Masters in Computer Science? How do I ask good questions?

Jamison and Dave talk about these questions: My cousin is a manager at my employer. How do I avoid nepotism? I’d like to become a developer. What are the minimum requirements for a junior developer? When will I be “good enough” to get a job as a junior dev?

Jamison and Dave talk about these questions: I have a great, comfortable job that doesn’t push me very hard. How do I deal with worrying about being left in the dust? How do I deal with imposter syndrome?

Jamison and Dave talk about these questions: How direct should I be in a peer review of a coworker who I really dislike? How do I convince developers to go on call?

Jamison and Dave were out this week, so here is a DEEP CUT from the archives. This originally aired as episode 41. How do I deal with someone who says their job (management) is so much harder than my job (engineering)? How do I deal with a two-boss situation where I am one of the bosses?

Jamison and Dave answer these two questions: I’m in too many meetings. How do I guard my own productivity? How do I make sure I’m not sidelined when my company acquires another company?

We answer these two questions: What should developers know about product management? I have TOO MANY notifications interrupting me all the time. What do I do?

We answer these two questions: What is the best seating arrangements for software developers? How do I disarm my CTO who is emotionally attached to his code?

Thanks to all the people who pointed us to the Single Level of Abstraction Principle which we obliquely referred to in episode 57. We answer these two questions: How can I convince management to pay for developer training? Should I mention unrelated experience on an application?

Dave and Jamison were out this week, so we have a re-run of a DEEP CUT for you. This originally aired as episode 18. We answer these two questions: I have a part-time job as a developer while I’m still in school. Should I drop out and just work full time? How do I prepare for a job interview?

I’ve been pushed in to doing management tasks I really don’t enjoy. What do I do? How do I handle a co-worker who I really struggle to get along with? Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

How do I keep meetings on track? I work in an agency with a designer-centric culture. How do I make myself heard? Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

It’s a special ng-conf live episode! Dave and Jamison answer these questions in front of a live audience: When you go freelancing, do your coding skills atrophy? What is something you wish you knew about freelancing before you started? I met all my aggressive career goals. What next? Here is the Khan Academy Engineering Ladder Jamison mentioned towards the end of the show.

Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Our codebase is really bad, and management hired a contractor behind our backs to rewrite it. What should I do? How important are job titles when looking for a new job? Here is the Khan Academy Engineering Ladder Jamison mentioned towards the end of the show.

Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I was hired for one thing, but ended up doing something very different that I don’t enjoy. What do I do? How do I tell my manager that I’m moving into management on another team?

Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I feel guilty about how slow I’m working. What should I do? 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?

Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I’m a junior developer on a team of seniors, and I’m also the Scrum Master. Our team has lots of problems. What do I do? Jamison openly talks about not finishing his degree. How did he put it on his resume or explain it to potential employers? In question two Jamison discovers he has been lying on his LinkedIn profile for half a decade, and freaks out a little bit. The mistake is corrected, but can the damage ever be undone? Tune in next week on SOFT SKILLS ENGINEERING.

Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I didn’t quit my job. Did I mess up? I was hired to manage a team, but it is actually just me. What do I do?

Dave and Jamison answer these questions: What do I do if I suspect my co-worker plagiarized my homework assignment in their own interview? My employer is making me provide my own laptop. Is this normal? We mention The Joel Test. Also remember to tweet about the show for endorsements from Dave and Jamison for completely serious and relevant skills like doomsday-bunker-building and yodeling.

Dave and Jamison answer these questions: When and how do you quit a company that is on a death march? How do I find out if I’m underpaid?

Dave and Jamison answer these questions: How soon into a new job is it appropriate to raise concerns? What do you do when issues in your personal life affect your work? Thank you to Algolia for sponsoring this episode. Check out their job posting at algolia.com/softskillsengineering. Also thanks to Battlefield: Bad Company 2, which I spent 310 hours playing.

Dave and Jamison answer these questions: How do I deal with my new job that turns out to be crappy? 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.

It’s our first RAPID FIRE episode, where we answer a bunch of questions rapid-ish-ly. Why do I get passed up for developer jobs? Should I take this high-paying job even though it’s a scary change? Should I quit my first job after five years? We also answer a longer question: How do I deal with a micromanaging project manager? Thank you to Algolia for sponsoring this episode. Check out their job posting at algolia.com/softskillsengineering.

Dave and Jamison answer these questions: When I let someone go, should I tell them the reason why? How do I write a good job description? We mention Julia Evans’ blog post A litmus test for job descriptions in the second question.

Dave and Jamison answer these questions: What do internships cost companies? How do you feel about asking hard technical computer science questions in interviews? The second question was prompted by this tweet: In 20 years of engineering I've never said, "thank goodness we hired someone who can reverse a b tree on a whiteboard while strangers watch"— Samantha 🐝 Quiñones (@ieatkillerbees) December 14, 2016

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Should I switch jobs to my fourth job within two years of graduating from a bootcamp? What non-technical practices and cultural attributes improve software reliability?

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: How do I deal with someone who says their job (management) is so much harder than my job (engineering)? How do I deal with a two-boss situation where I am one of the bosses?

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: How can I encourage my team to be more visible in the office? How do I learn new technologies without going through a noob phase?

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: How do I deal with engineers who are skilled technically but rude and demeaning? What should I talk about in one on ones with my manager or reports? We also cite Questions for our first 1:1, a blog post by Lara Hogan.

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: When is it appropriate to go over someone’s head? Should I fire the new engineer that we just hired (and who relocated to take the job)?

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: How does venture capital work, and how does it affect me? How do I give great presentations at work?

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: What do you think of unlimited vacation policies? How do I enforce coding best practices? Show notes, because Jamison is feeling ambitious: The Netflix culture slides we mentioned pylint, the linter Dave talked about

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: How can I attract talent? How do I quit without burning bridges?

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Do certifications help me? How can I solve an avoidance problem?

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: How can a developer damage their credibility online? How can I meet potential employers while I’m still in school?

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer this question: Why would a developer leave a full time job to do consulting or contracting? It just so happens that Jamison did this a few months ago, and he shares his experience in making the transition.

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Should I go in to management? How do you know if a job is worth applying to?

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: How should you reach consensus on a team? Should you always have consensus? What is the etiquette around editing code in a shared repository?

Literally the only episode that the advice “quit your job and get a better one” doesn’t apply. Dave and Jamison answer the question: What should I do when starting a new job?

In episode 28, Jamison and Dave answer these questions: How long should I stay before I quit my job? Two to three years seems fairly normal. Dave sees people with less than 12 months regularly. Staying at a job means you experience things you wouldn’t if you hopped around a lot. It is much easier to see the hype cycle play out if you stick around. You get to see the outcome of your own decisions. Quitting usually == raise. Chronic job hopping might result in a reputation of not sticking with things. Dave thinks you should quit your first job after 18 months because of the Monty Hall problem How do you encourage junior developers to improve? We assume that these junior developers really want to improve. Make it clear that people get stuck and struggle, and that is normal. Make it clear that you don’t want them to get too stuck. Make it OK to ask questions. People generally live up or down to your expectations, so help them feel trusted and that you expect they will be great. Make the outcome of their work clear.

In episode 27, Jamison and Dave answer these questions: How do I write a great resume? Do you really need a resume these days? How important is formatting and good design? What content should be on your resume? Should I push back on non-engineering tasks like PowerPoint presentations? From listener samspot: I am a Sr. Developer and I am often asked to spend time on PowerPoint presentations for funding and other business stuff. I want to ask why the managers, analysts, etc can’t handle these tasks. I find them to be a frequent distraction from my actual responsibilities, especially because these are so frequently “emergency” requests. Should I push back on this work, or is it better to be a team player?

In episode 26, Jamison and Dave answer these question: How do you make sure people know about your good work? See Matt Zabriskie’s great post for background on this. We also mentioned Do Things, Write About It. How do you get your point across effectively so you don’t have to say “I told you so” later?

In episode 25, Jamison and Dave answer these question: How do I understand the business side better? Analysis of tabs vs spaces How does your business make money? Just ask your CEO/manager Kill the myth of the pointy-haired boss Smaller companies expose you to this more Just ask questions: What was our revenue last month? How much did we spend last month? Who are our biggest customers? How does the sales process work? The Dave Smith Method® for learning business jargon. Be kind and have empathy when you learn. Can I be a good technical manager without a technical background? Technical leadership vs management. Management means empathy and understanding. Can you get that without “coming up through the ranks”? What are the skills of a good manager? Does being a developer give you those skills? Dave is a Night Elf Code Mage. How do you handle technical concerns as a non-technical person? Don’t fake technical knowledge. Leading a team when you don’t directly see the effect of your actions. Managing Nerds by Rands. Jamison’s former boss’s technical expertise

In episode 24, Jamison and Dave answer this question: As a software developer, should I be a generalist or a specialist? This was inspired by a Twitter conversation here: https://twitter.com/iam_preethi/status/766758679743954944

In episode 23, Jamison and Dave answer these questions: You are asked to be a CTO of a start-up. What questions would you ask in order to decide whether to join, and what things would you give most attention to, if you do join? I REALLY want and deserve a raise so I hope you two discuss how a nerdy introvert gets the CFO of a small privately owned business to want to give her more money when she’s already happily donating an additional 10-20 hours a week.

In episode 21, Jamison and Dave answer these questions: What’s up with all this health insurance jargon? How do I get started contributing to open source?

In episode 21, Jamison and Dave answer these questions: What kind of work should interns be given? How do you handle developers who are dead weight?

In episode 20, Jamison and Dave share some stories from people who have been fired. We also answer this question: How do I make code reviews more effective? It feels like reviewers fit into 2 categories: either they are too quick and superficial, or they get bogged down in nit picks.

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.

In episode 18, Jamison and Dave answer these questions: I’m a computer science major who still has a couple years of school left. I also have a part time job doing web development. I love what I’m learning and doing at work to the point that I question if it’s worth investing two more years into school. How would you counsel someone in my position? From listener Antonio: How do I prepare for an interview?

In episode 17, Jamison and Dave answer these questions: From listener Greg Harrison: I want to build a side-project, but my lack of coming up with a good idea saps my motivation. Do you guys have any tips? Have you ever been fired? What happened? How do you bounce back?

In episode 16, Jamison and Dave answer these questions: From listener David Renne: What’s the best way to talk to random LinkedIn recruiters, recruiter calls and emails? I prefer the reverse lookup apps to determine if an unrecognized phone number looks like a recruiter it goes straight to voice mail during business hours. As a mid-level dev, i sometimes get frustrated when i try learning new things. how can i be more comfortable as a beginner? Sometimes i get frustrated with myself when i don’t immediately grasp something that i perceive to be very simple. It makes me less motivated to try new things and take risks on new technology, and really feeds my impostor syndrome.

In episode 15, Jamison and Dave join Brad Green, engineering director at Google and Angular team manager, to answer these questions: How do I deal with non-technical people at work? I often get questions that put me into a position where I have to explain really basic concepts to non-technical people like sales and marketing. They seem to rely on me like a crutch, and it gets tiring to have to explain things over and over. How do I strike the right balance of being helpful, but not so helpful that they become dependent on me? I want to be helpful, but I don’t want to spend 90% of my time acting as tech support. How do I keep up with new technology but avoid being sucked in by hype?

In episode 14, Jamison and Dave answer these questions: Since I am primarily a web developer, I often find there is a bit of developer prejudice, against web developers from software engineers of other categories. Often I find they think I am not capable of anything other than jquery dom manipulations, and talk down at me like I wouldn’t understand their expertly setup mysql queries. As it turns out, I too have my CS degree, and start new projects in all kinds of programming languages just to learn them. Any tips for breaking the web dev stereotypes? How to deal with legacy code and legacy coders? The code was probably good once, but it is impossible to maintain and doesn’t work on new hardware. You know the best approach is to scrap it and start from scratch but the original coder is resistant and wants to find a way to “make it work”. What do you do? In my situation, this legacy coder is a peer, and the only person above us doesn’t want to take a side on the argument, so we are left at a stale-mate.

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 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 episode 11, Jamison and Dave answer these questions: I’m looking for a new job. How do I negotiate to get a better offer? How do you deal constructively with a boss who is well-intentioned, reasonably nice and intelligent, but incompetent, oblivious, and who has minimal to no oversight on their work performance?

In episode 10, Jamison and Dave answer these questions: How about an episode about mentoring? Why is it important, how do we do it, and how do we find the right mentor for us? How do stock options work? How can I tell whether an offer with stock options is any good?

In episode 9, Jamison, Dave, and special guest Layne Mosely answer these questions: As a software developer, is it better to put an aggressive deadline on myself? Or should I let it be open ended? What are the effects of these two approaches on me and my team? What do all these titles mean? Technical lead. Senior software engineer. Director of engineering. VP of engineering. CTO.

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 episode 7, Jamison and Dave answer these questions: How do I quit my job? What’s the process? How do I avoid burning bridges? What will my employer expect from me? How do benefits work? I’m worried my job is not meaningful? Am I just cranking out code for “the man”? What can I do to get more meaning out of my job?

In episode 6, Jamison and Dave answer this question: I’d like to do some public speaking. How do I get accepted to speak at conferences? How do I give good talks once I’m there?

In episode 5, Jamison and Dave answer this question: What are common ways developers are compensated? Do developers usually get a bonus? Stock options?

In episode 4, Jamison and Dave answer this question: I have heard a lot about “marketing myself” and my “personal brand”. For example, some people say I should be writing a blog post every week or creating lots of YouTube content. They talk about being a “thought leader”. I love building stuff as an engineer, and obviously I want to have a great job, so how important is this stuff?

In episode 3, Jamison and Dave answer two questions: What should I look for in a dev team? 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 episode 2, Jamison and Dave answer two questions: I work on a team, and I am not the team lead. I have lots of ideas for how to do things better. How can I influence my team without being the team lead, or without stepping on his or her shoes? How do you deal with anger at work, both on the receiving and giving end?

Welcome to Soft Skills Engineering, where we answer your questions about non-technical topics in software engineering. Come get some wisdom, or at least some wise cracks. In episode 1, Dave and Jamison answer two questions: I’m a developer who gets approached from time to time to work on new software ideas. While I find working on something new and intriguing I have no experience with business. How do I determine how legitimate these opportunities are? At my current job, our codebase is a few years old and we use an “older” javascript framework. In my spare time I’ve really really enjoyed using one of the newer paradigms and technical stacks and I wish I had more opportunity to get experience with these technologies. I don’t see a rewrite or even a migration any time soon for our codebase at this company and have been considering taking a job where I’d have opportunity to work with these newer technologies. This despite enjoying my coworkers, and lacking any major complaints at this company. On a scale from 1 to 10 how crazy am I for considering a job change?