Soft Skills Engineering

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

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 bos

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

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 h

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 th

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

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 re

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.

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 c

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 exchan

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 J

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. B

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?

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 chan

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 bu

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 t

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.

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 a

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 B

This episode is sposored by OneSchema, the best way to build CSV import into your product. Check OneSchema out at https://oneschema.co/softskills In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: 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 f