Soft Skills Engineering

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I was on a meeting with a team generally regarded to be pretty annoying to deal with and not particularly useful. The meeting was pretty annoying and not particularly useful. I audibly said to myself after leaving “holy crap what a waste of time.” Turns out I hadn’t left and may not have been muted (?) but I’m really not sure. I left immedi...

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I’m a long time listener to the podcast. Thanks for reading and answering my question! I have over 20+ yrs experience as a manual QA and 6+ yrs experience as a SDET. I’m in a new role as a hybrid manual QA / SDET for a company that hasn’t had QA for a few years. After a couple of months a new hire was added to support a new project in non-d...

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Hi Dave and Jamison, Long-time listener, first-time question asker. Thank you both for the wisdom, perspective, and jokes you bring to the podcast. I recently received an inheritance of around $500,000. It’s not “quit your job and buy a yacht” money, but it is enough to reshape my life. I’m in my late 30s, currently working in a senior engi...

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I am a data scientist and was recently passed over for promotion to senior because my projects weren’t “senior level” enough, and I do too many ad hoc requests that delay delivery of my bigger projects. I am a go to for VP and C suite level execs in my company and am commonly asked to help with incidents, all of which are main reasons my pr...

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I had my performance review two months ago where I scored a “Does not meet expectations”, which I definitely understand, and my manager told me that some of my coworkers had been complaining about me. I’ve been working hard on improving ever since and my manager told me that they were really impressed with my progress and told me that some...

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: A listener named Mike says, To what degree do you think it’s appropriate to talk with your peer managers about people that have moved from their team to yours? How much weight do you give their criticisms of an IC that they used to manage that is working out just fine under your leadership? How do you know if it was mostly due to a conflict...

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Mr A. N. Onymous says, Hi Dave and Jamison, Long time listened, second time caller! I wrote a little while back with a common new-manager question about how to handle one of my reports who was at the lower end performance wise, but at the top end on the pay scale. I’d been trying to manage it by getting raises for the rest of the team in or...

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Albert Nonymous asks, I am the CTO at a small (5 engineers) tech start-up with non-technical founders. I was their first full-time employee and as such have been able to fully form this company the way I want. I’ve worked here for 9 years now and own 10% of the company. I enjoy the tech and the job itself. The pay is ok, not crazy Silicon V...

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: One of my employees is probably getting laid off, what do I do!?! I’m a tech lead / manager for a consultancy and a contract reduction means that one of the people I supervise is likely going to get laid off soon! We’ve found new roles for most of my people, but it’s likely that at least one will get laid off. I want to help this person out...

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Hey, long-time listener, listened to almost all episodes now and have been loving it since day 1!! I am a senior engineer at FAANG and work 45-50 hours a week and have a lot of cross-org responsibilities. I am lucky to have a beautiful wife and two wonderful young children. I guess, you can imagine how difficult it already is to manage work...

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I have managed a product for some months now. My previous manager split their team in to mini-teams of 2-3 people. They gave me a small team and plenty of autonomy to own the product and go crazy on it. I had the time of my life as the team lead. I learned a ton and was really developing management skills. My new manager is more hands-on. T...

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I work for a B2C fintech startup as a senior engineer. Our onboarding funnel has a lot of moving parts due to regulatory compliance and a litany of requirements from various parts of the business. As a startup, we also live and die by optimizing for and demonstrating growth, so we need to gather data from our product and pipe it to various...

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Nearly every time certain developers on the team want to address technical debt, they end up just adding more technical debt. Of course, after one round of addressing technical debt, the developers in question believe that yet another round of redesigning and refactoring is in order. This stresses me out for many reasons, as you can imagine...

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

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Hey, I am a web developer getting bored of the regular development work. I am interested in finance and the monetary system and due to the overlap of finance and engineering I feel down the Bitcoin rabbit hole and even spiked interest in crypto like Solana and Sui. I am pretty sure most of crypto is a FUD, delulu or straight up scam, yet th...

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: A listener named Dakota asks, I’m a UX designer, and I’m constantly looking for growth opportunities. I’m having trouble finding mentors to help challenge me, as every time my boss/senior designer leaves the company, I assume their work and we don’t backfill their spot or my old position. This leads me towards podcasts like this as I’m tryi...

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I’m a manager on a Product team. I’ve been asked by upper management to measure “story points completed per developer per sprint” and display the results publicly each sprint to motivate lower-performing employees. I explained why, according to Scrum, I don’t think this is a good idea. But I think my explanations came across as me not wanti...

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Greetings! I work at a research company with ~500 engineers and scientists. My company started promoting this new portal they setup that is like a private linkedin. You can fill up the profile they setup for you and apply for positions within the company. Why is my company doing this? They even offer meetings with Talent Acquisition team an...

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I’ve been a developer for about 1.5 years. I work for a large consultancy. we provide services to big clients. I’m working on a front-end codebase that has been through three consulting companies already. Tired of just moving tickets and fixing bugs, I decided to refactor the front end of the entire application we support. Touching the code...

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: A listener named Scot asks, A new architect was hired at my company 6 months ago. I’m an engineer one rung lower on the hierarchy and have been here for 3.5 years. He hasn’t done much to learn about any of us who have been here for a while, so he is constantly undermining my skills and suggestions and assuming he’s smarter than me. On our m...

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I struggle with behavioral interviews. I’ve gotten a little bit better as I’ve done more interviews, but it’s still a major pain point for me. I have some common behavioral question answers written out in a spreadsheet in SAR format, but I feel that not all of them are good examples for a mid-level developer. The main problem is that I can’...

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Hello, long time listener first time question asker. I work for a medium sized tech company and I recently moved teams. Right now my old team is attempting to refactor a bunch of code I wrote to use a library that’ll make life easier. I don’t blame them, I tried to do the same thing. It does not work. I asked the tech lead “did you run into...

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: A listener named Steven says, Long-time listener of the podcast here—it always brings me so much joy! Should I prioritize title over salary? I’m currently based in Europe, working as a Senior Engineer at a big company that pays really well. The problem is, there’s almost no chance for promotion due to the economy and budget constraints. Plu...

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I am a mid level engineer overleveled as a senior engineer in a FAANG company. I got super lucky landing this high paying remote job, but dang… I did underestimate the expectations for my senior level. I had no FAANG experience before, just working at startups, flat hierarchies, just doing the heavy lifting coding. Now it is all about impac...

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: A listener named Matthias (mah-TEA-as) asks, In episode 444 you’re talking about the problems when hiring in the age of AI. I’m a manager who’s trying to hire right now and frankly I’m at a loss. If feels like I’m wading through a sea of AI slop. What tips do you have to cut through the slop and reach actually good candidates? Where I work...