Soft Skills Engineering

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,

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,

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

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

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

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 th

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

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 ne

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 bee

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

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

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 suppo

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,

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 h

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

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 messag

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 somethi

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

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

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 t