Soft Skills Engineering

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Dear Damison and Javison, I work at a very small startup (<10 engineers) and am trying to hire 2 engineers. I’m doing the intro/screener interview for these roles & am working with a recruiting firm to source candidates. My problem is that sometimes my intuition tells me that a candidate is not going to make it through our hiring process, but I can’t articulate why. Our hiring process is neither cruel nor unusual, and on paper these candidates have the skills and experience we’re looking for. But I feel a duty to let the hiring process do its work; I want to be principled about this. For reference, I’d say I screen out 2/3 of recruiter-screened candidates, and of those remaining, 2/5 of the candidates have the je ne sais quoi for which I should be saying non, merci. One made it all the way to reference checks! Do I need to do a better job rejecting these nice, smart people instead of wasting our time? Also note that I am not a manager,

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Hey Guys, long time listener, first time asker! At my BigCorp Co., whenever I talk to my skip level about my concerns, it seems we are playing the ‘Gloom Olympics’ every time we meet. I’ll mention I worked late, and he’ll counter with, ‘That’s nothing, I haven’t slept in three days!’ This repeated lack of empathy is demotivating and I don’t think I have had a fruitful discussion with him. How can I tackle this? How can I feel heard? I’ve decided to leave my current job as a software engineer at a large retail chain. This is my first out of university, and I’ve been here three years. I’m interviewing for two other jobs: one as an engineer at another large retail chain on a team, and another at a world renowned European football club. That job would be very different. I’d be the first internal dev hire ever, and I was told I should expect no other devs to get hired for 2+ years. I’d write my own tickets and rev

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Listener AWS multi-region is not real multi-region, ask me how I know asks, We’ve recently acquired some bright-eyed and bushy-tailed new grads. What have you found to be the most effective way to onboard new grads into development roles? How has it changed (if at all) since the advent of LLMs? I want to make sure my new-grad crushing machine is operating as smoothly as possible considering the recent advancements in developer tooling. Those new grads won’t crush themselves! Listener Taso asks, Early in my career I was all-in on startups. Then I spent seven years in big companies in leadership roles. I learned a lot, but the politics and the pace were so slow that at some point I’m pretty sure geological processes were moving faster than our release cycles. So I finally flipped some metaphorical fingers and quit. Since then I’ve been interviewing almost exclusively with startups… except Google, where I somehow ended up with

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I handed in my resignation this past Monday. During the conversation, my manager confided in me that this coming Wednesday, 25% of the workforce is being laid off. For context, this is the second round of layoffs. The first round happened a year ago and was a disaster. It was announced via an internal video the night before, but the CEO forgot to mention that the affected employees had already been notified privately. This caused mass panic; thinking they were next, many experienced engineers immediately brushed up their resumes and jumped ship voluntarily. Even my skip-level manager was in the dark. Shortly after that chaos, we were acquired by an American Private Equity firm. Morale has been at an all-time low ever since, and the writing has been on the wall all year. Now I am in the awkward position of serving my three-month notice period while walking through the ruins of my company. I am the “lucky one” who quit voluntarily

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Hi Dave and Jamison, I’ve been in QA/QA automation for 13 years now with a CS degree, and I’ve been trying to change my role to a software developer for a while. My only issue is that every time I brought my career aspirations to my managers they seemed to “not care” or give vague answers to “kick the can down the road”. In the past I fully demonstrated I can do the work by submitting bug fixes, writing and deploying a few microservices by myself (all product feature work), on top of performing my QA duties. I get high marks in my performance reviews, but that doesn’t seem to be enough! I also seem to attract some resentment from my team (silently but it’s noticed) as they see a QA trying to soak up their dev work and I get a strong “stay in your lane” vibe. I do it to help them, not take all of their work. Any advice? Am I approaching this the wrong way? And what would you do in my situation? Thanks and all the best! Hi! Three

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Hey Jamison and Dave, love your show! A question for you guys coming all the way from the Netherlands

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Hey Dave and Jamison, Big fan of the show — listening from Portugal! (Proof that even across the Atlantic, software politics are universal.) I’m a tech lead, and lately I’ve noticed a culture where people seem to care way more about how things look than what actually gets done. It’s like the appearance of productivity matters more than real impact. Honestly, it drives me nuts!! I know politics are part of any organization, and way more in a leadership role, but this feels excessive. As someone who values substance and solid engineering, how do I deal with or influence this kind of culture without losing my sanity (or turning into one of those “optics-first” people myself)? Thanks for all the insights and laughs. Kudos from Portugal! Listener Charlie says, I’m fresh out of college at my first software engineering job. Several months ago I was appointed the accessibility champion for my team. I proposed a few i

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: “My manager insists on a weekly 1:1 with me, but he rarely pays attention. He’s often on his laptop, texting, checking email — basically anything but listening. I’ve tried sending agendas, rescheduling, reducing frequency, waiting until he’s less busy — nothing helps. I’ve even started sitting in silence until he notices I’ve stopped talking, but that only works for a minute. This has caused real problems. For example, he almost had me cancel a million-dollar project because he misheard me say “Java” instead of “JavaScript.” When he finally realized I was right, he said, “Every time I heard Java I automatically tuned out.” How do I handle a 1:1 with a manager who won’t pay attention, without risking my work or my relationship with him?” “I’ve worked for a big retailer for 10 years now and I used to really enjoy it. I liked my team a lot, problems we worked on, technologies we used. Unfortunately the last few yours brought a few round

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I work at a big tech company on a remote team of about 10 people, and most of them have been here for 5+ years. I’m in the “newer” half of the team with 4 years here. My problem is, in group meetings, absolutely NO ONE talks. I mean zero small talk, they have trouble responding to simple yes or no questions. Everyone participates thoroughly when it’s a technical discussion, but it’s clear no one has any interest in speaking more than necessary. We used to have one super talkative guy on our team, and even then it was mostly silence to his chats about his weekend. Is there anything I can do to get these people to speak at least a little bit? It feels insane how little I know about these people after 4 years. P.S. even in one on one chats, almost all of them shut down small talk A coworker told me that I should be having quarterly one-on-one’s with my skip to make sure they’re aware of all the good stuff I’ve been up to and my goa

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: What signals do you look for when interviewing candidates? I’ve helped interview many people at this point and almost all of the engineers that I marked as “hire” that we brought on board ended up being low performers and were eventually managed out. I wasn’t the only one who approved them either, so not all the blame falls on me, but I’m really doubting my ability to assess talent. Is hiring inherently just this difficult? Is there anything I can do to improve my judgement or screening approach? Hi Dave and Jamison, A coworker on my team won’t stop creating AI generated memes. We’re a remote team and every meeting he shares memes in the chat whilst we’re trying to have productive conversations. He does this in any type of meeting, including all-hands meetings with C-level execs. On smaller calls he often hijacks it to share his screen and show us a meme he just created about something that was just said. It start

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Hi! Love your show and how casually you talk and make fun of everything! I started my career as a freelancer and then joined a mid-size software development company to learn how the sausage is really made, salary wasn’t that important back then. A few kids and a lot more expensive lifestyle later the compensation has become more motivating, but I’m not sure how to sell myself to my manager if I don’t feel like I deserve a high salary myself. (The manager decides the salaries for all our team members.) For years I’ve been focusing on my family and other life stuff, so I’ve spent a looot of working hours not working and basically doing the minimum progress acceptable. Slow progress has come up once with my manager, from which I wiggled out of with various excuses. I’ve realised that this way of working isn’t really fair for the company and my teammates and I’ve started to take this job and my career seriously in the last few months. The company

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: How would you handle a situation where a team forms a negative opinion about you from day one — without any clear reason and without ever giving you a real chance to prove yourself? Even when you contribute technically, your suggestions are ignored… until someone else repeats the same thing and suddenly it’s considered valid. Is it possible to stay in that kind of environment without becoming bitter or burned out? Can you keep contributing professionally — or is it healthier to just walk away? You guys are awesome. Jamison, I interviewed with you and it was lots of fun and productive. Which is really rad. Now… I just landed a 12-month contract in big tech role. It’s perfectly aligned with my long-term career goals. My current fintech FTE is perfectly opposed to my long-term career goals. The question — how unethical / despicable would it be to start one week of PTO at my FTE on the same day as Day One at my c

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: After a year of trying, I recently got promoted to staff engineer! It’s great to receive recognition for my work, but i’m not actually very happy, because I only got a 4% raise! I spoke with a former coworker about how much a staff engineer in my role should expect, and he said that he would be insulted by less than . My comp is now slightly below ! In addition to this, times are tough for the business, so it seems unlikely that we’ll get annual bonuses, meaning I likely won’t even get to appreciate the larger target staff bonus! What a bummer! How should I approach this? A year and a half ago after getting a below inflation raise, I was told I was at the top of my level’s pay band and would need to get promoted if I wanted to go much higher. Now that I’ve gotten promoted, it seems like that wasn’t true! I should be grateful that I still have a job and got promoted and got any increase, but I feel like I’m being short changed! H

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Hi Dave and Jamison, After fleeing a sinking ship of a startup, I became a solo developer at a medium sized college. This role has really allowed me to expand and grow in ways that I haven’t imagined, but I have encountered an interesting issue I didn’t have in the startup world: there isn’t much to do. At my one year mark, I was promoted into a management position, but with no direct report. I will soon have an employee under me doing data integrations. My manager has been reluctant to give me data integrations work despite knowing that I want to understand what my employee will be working with. I’ve found some of my own projects, but I’ve completed them all. I’m getting bored. I’m a competent developer, learn fast, and get things done quickly. Recently I’ve been planning an upgrade to some of our legacy code, but it will take probably a year or more to complete. Some former colleagues reached out about working with them f

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: (follow-up from question 449) Hello. Return question asker here. You answered my question from episode 449 “my tech lead ignored my warnings”. I want to give a follow up. I sat by and did not say anything else, he shipped the broken feature, and it broke in production. Instead of fixing it he rose the threshold on the datadog alert so high no one would ever get alerted. Then he left the company. When talking to my manager about the bug we agreed it was part of that refactor and I said “I warned him” and they shrugged it off. I assume he is also a long time listener of this podcast and took the age old “leave your job” advice. Kudos. (question below) I am here for more than just an update though. I am starting to think I understand why he left. It sucks here. I am the lowest level engineer on my team and have not been promoted for the last 2 years because “there is no money”. Ok, fine, I understand that the economy is tough.

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Hey skillet nation, long time skilletee first time skilleter here. I started at a scale up about 6 months ago and recently, I was asked to help with a project that was greatly behind schedule. The folks responsible for the original system are no longer at the company, and the team currently attempting to get it over the finish line have struggled greatly. The codebase is full of performance issues and the infrastructure was not set up to scale. Basically things are bad. Since joining, I’ve helped draft a plan to fix most of the performance issues, and then incrementally improve the architecture. Things are going great, except for the fact that we’re 6 weeks out from our deadline with a burnt out dev team. To resolve this, our CTO hast started to rapidly hire contractors to “help out”. As one might expect, this has only slowed us down. But our CTO, lacking trust in the previous team, has found the promises of the contractors very allu

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Can you coach self-awareness? I manage someone who seems to believe their skill set is on par with their teammates, regardless of their constant PR feedback regarding the same issues over and over, the extra attention they are regularly given to help them overcome coding challenges, and the PIP they are currently on to address these issues (and others). What are some approaches I could take to help steer them to better understand their areas for growth when explicit measures don’t seem to get through? I work at a small 10-person startup. The company has absolutely nothing to do with AI, but one of the founders has gone full evangelist. He genuinely believes AGI is arriving this year and that there isn’t a single job, task, or process where an LLM isn’t the obvious tool. Day in, day out, he’s posting links to random AI products with captions like “looks interesting

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Hey guys, I have been working for four months at my job and I already don’t like it. This is my first job out of college and I work as a C# backend engineer for a small B2B SaaS company. I really think this company is a dead end. There is a lot of technical debt and antipatterns and we have no automated testing whatsoever. Most of our time is spent manually debugging but no one wants to refactor. I’m already thinking about working somewhere else. However, it took me a while to get this job, and I don’t think the market has gotten any better since. I’m trying to decide whether I should focus on applying to jobs again or if I should work on a bunch of side projects and open source to stand out better. On one hand, I can learn new technologies on my own to make me stand out for my next job, but on the other hand, I feel like as long as I stay at this company I am wasting time, since I’m not learning from my job. I want to switch to

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Two junior engineers recently joined my team, and I’ve been tasked with onboarding them. This is the first time I’ve been responsible for junior devs, and I’m struggling with how to coach them up. For context, we’re a small engineering team where self-sufficiency is highly valued; processes/overhead is minimal, and we have a real bias for action. As such, when they ask me for help, my intuition is often to respond “Keep looking, figure it out!”; in my mind, walking them to the answer would be anthithetical to our culture and set the wrong expectation for how they should go about solving problems. This is especially the case when they throw their hands up and say “Help, I’m stuck, what do I do”. Though, I don’t want to be so unhelpful that it frustrates them or legitimately impedes their progress. I’ve also noticed them sometimes going “behind” me to ask others engineers for help, which makes me think that I am being too unhelpful. The number o

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Hi! I’m currently working for a big tech company and I’ve just accepted an internal transfer to another team. At the same time, an external company reached out, offering me a job for a role I’m interested in and twice my current compensation. I’m not sure what to do. The offer from the new company is very interesting and I wouldn’t think twice at accepting it if I still was in my old team. But now that I’ve accepted the internal transfer, I don’t know what’s best for my career: stay with my current company and lose out on a great offer, or go with the new company but likely burn bridges with my current manager, possibly closing off future opportunities to return to my current company (something that I’m open to in the future)? How do I politely but firmly stop a project manager colleague, who has vast open plains in their calendar compared to my Tetris-stacked week as a senior software engineer, from parking themselves at m