Soft Skills Engineering

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

Thank you for this podcast it’s the only tech podcast I listen to these days, I think it’s more relevant than ever, and it has definitely helped me in my career.

I am a Staff Software Engineer in a multi-national software company based in Germany (Where I’m also based). I have been working on a very important project that’s pretty visible and has the potential to make a ton of money, I have been very happy working on it.

Recently however, I got into a politically weird situation, a recent restructuring moved this project under a new manager. I don’t really get a long with the new manager. This person is known for being toxic, a colleague heard him recently say that everyone working with him is stupid, but when talking to him I don’t exactly remember him saying anything bright tbh.

In my initial conversations with him, he told me that I don’t have a chance for any career progress working in his team, and that I wouldn’t have much freedom either, he would like to be the final word on pretty much anything.

So I decided to speak to his supervisor, who directly ignored my complains and offered me to move to a different team. I accepted the change since for me working with a bad manager is the worst thing that can happen. The new manager is good, but the product is quite niche and rarely get’s mentioned anywhere, and it has a very few customers

I’m concerned about where my career is heading, since what I’m working on seems quite unimportant, I’m afraid the company could decide to drop this product at any point and fire the team (that can also happen in Germany these days btw, it just costs them a bit more severance)

what would you do in my situation? would you try to seek a different opportunity internally, externally or just wait? Thank you in advance!

Infinite listener, zero time caller.

A year ago, I got promoted to staff engineer in our 25-person startup where I’ve been for 7 years. One month later, a re-org happened and my team dwindled to just me and one other person, reporting directly to the founder - who also went full Founder Mode and now run our tiny team pretty top-down.

The rest of the broader engineering org is focused on machine learning and data scientist thingies I don’t really understand or feel like I can contribute to.

I’m struggling to do actual staff-level work and I’m starting to wonder if pushing for that fancy title was even a good idea, especially if I cannot show up at a new place and tell them “I am worthy of many moneys because I did X, Y, Z”.

Help, should I quit and go elsewhere - and if yes, can I even aim for a staff-level role or do I have to go lower and take the (substantial in my area) pay cut? 🥲

Ooooor, would it hurt to stick around longer and see if things change? At least until my small kids are less small, and I have more time to read books about what a staff engineer is supposed to do so I can pretend in an interview that I do those things.

Love for the soft skillet nation and thanks for all the laughs over the years <3

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

Middle Management in the Midwest says,

I recently accepted a new position at work, bumping up into an Assistant Director role. At our company this means I’ll have at least two teams, ICs directly reporting at first, potentially managers later.

I am in the process of working with an Earth Psychologist and Psychiatrist to figure out potential ADHD I’ve been living with. Previously I just thought I was a bad person and couldn’t focus. I want to succeed at this role and do what I can to overcome or work through the distraction, inability to start, and the lack of follow through I’ve been struggling with.

I know you can only speak about Space ADHD with your Space Psychology and Psychiatry degrees, but I’m wondering if anything could transfer. What have you seen work for people? How would you suggest someone who has big ideas learn to follow through on those ideas?

I’m been a software engineer at a tech scale-up (is that still a term?) for about 1.5 years. When I first joined, I felt buzzing energy, and one of the main selling points of working here was the “minimal organizational overhead”. We grew fast and got acquired end of last year by a large tech company. Since then, process has creeped its way slowly but surely, partly because of natural headcount growth, partly because of the acquisition.

This has been especially apparent on my current project, in which I feel like we need to make a strong pivot. People largely agree, but it’s been difficult to actualize this. And I can’t help but think back to when I first joined - a pivot like this would’ve been a much easier endeavor.

With that context to set the table, my question is: How can I fight this, to try to preserve the agility of the startup days of before? Even if it is a losing battle, how do I lose less badly? In these ever-changing crazy times, I feel agility is at a premium.

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

Dave and Jamison, long time listener first time caller. I appreciate everything you do, I look forward to my Monday morning commute because of this podcast.

I’ve been a software developer for about 4 years. I’m a career changer and graduated from a boot camp. I was fortunate enough to earn a junior developer position at a non software company and have been promoted during my tenure. I work on a small team and enjoy what I do and the level of impact I have. I am one of the most senior developers. My only concern is that I do not receive direct mentorship from more experienced developers.

Am I limiting my future prospects by not job hopping? When is the right time to leave a company and seek new opportunities?

Hello Mr. 💃 and Mr. Smith.

PS

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

Listener Random Listener asks,

You guys talk a lot about externalities, which helped me understand a lot about how my manager works. He wants to do things fast, but he does not follow good and standardized processes, even the ones he tries to push onto us. This adds a lot of work for us because now his mess becomes our mess. How can I give him this feedback in way he will both understand and not feel resentment? Thanks

Hello. I am individual contributor and have been with this team for 2 years.

About a year ago a manager and a lead joined the team to fill in the growing positions. They came in with their preferences for code design, architecture, and ideologies.

But they were all different from how we worked before. Their ways are not bad, but they add unnecessary complexities, taking away energy from just doing my pick-up - code - ship way.

I shared my concerns, but they never get accepted as they just want to exercise their manager and lead powers. My teammates share similar opinions as me.

Is it a worthy fight showing resistance to these changes or should I just suck it up adapt to their preferences?

Each time I show any bit of resistance, it is being taken by them personally to their ego and discussions go on for tens of minutes and ends with either of us pissed off.

Won’t quit my job for these petty people. Should I just say yes, adapt my work for good or bad and blame them when things don’t work? Do I even need to care about these workflow and operational changes as an individual contributor? Would there be any benefit resisting bad decisions at the cost of my mental peace?

Thanks. You guys make me look forward to Mondays.

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

Hi Soft Skills Engineering, I’m a senior software engineer with over 20 years of experience. I’m hoping you can help with with a problem where I’m dumb, weird and bad at my job!

There is a recurring problem where, despite all my experience and graybearding, despite my big words, I sometimes just miss very important details, and ways that are very consequential and cause time and feature gaps.

Sometimes I make a faulty assumption and gloss over initial errors, and later I get big errors that require big fixes. For example, sometimes I just miss random lines from a product spec or whole parts of the UI, like a blind spot, or like a Mandela situation where I could’ve sworn it was different where I read it. Sometimes, I read the docs on some library but didn’t really *read* the docs and missed the important line that I needed before things get broken.

It’s a soft skill, sorta, because it’s about how I go about my work, and I don’t know what I can do about it. It’s almost an intrinsic trait, isn’t it? But I’d love any idea about how I can improve or how I can adjust how I can work to compensate. Or possibly here how this is normal and it’s a process issue - but I don’t need excuses and am willing to improve.

Thanks for your great wisdom and advice!

So it has happened, a massive codebase written entirely by Claude via prompts from my non-technical PM.

And now I’m tasked with “make it work, integrate it into all these other services and tools we have. Thanks!”

How do I even begin approaching a massive codebase written entirely by AI with no actual software engineer validating/overlooking it at any point until it became this monster and now it’s my problem? I am also an L2 engineer that got prematurely promoted to L3 and now I just want to prove myself and work on a cool project (10000s of requests, many bottlenecks that need to be fixed, scaled, design docs put together… the whole shabang#)

Help. Urgent. 911. I want to cry.

Thank you, love the podcast!

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

Hey Dave and Jamison.

I don’t know what to do with the amount of the AI slop I have to review and I’m getting close to burnout.

I have a lot of context on my project, so my colleagues see me as a point of reference. Additionally, at a past job, I was a tech lead and could easily cover for TL if I wanted to (which I don’t) and I feel like the TL of my project and some of my teammates are taking advantage of this.

Every day I receive a lot of low quality documents to review. For example, our TL creates sloppy project planning documents and tickets and sends them to me for comments. Since they contain so many errors, sometimes including obvious security or data compatibility issues, or just text that is unrelated to the project, I end up basically rewriting everything.

The same thing happens with code reviews. Some code is obviously AI-generated slop with lots of duplication and errors, that in many cases misses acceptance criteria or has doc strings filled with buzzwords and adjectives. I usually add a lot of comments per PR and I know the author sends them directly to their LLM and then pastes back a verbose answer. As a result, I end up in endless conversation loops.

I’ve tried talking to my colleagues one-on-one, explaining how much work they are delegating to me. I’ve asked them to review their own work first and explained how exhausted I am, hoping they would show some compassion. But nothing has changed, because everyone seems to be in survival mode in this era of layoffs and I feel like they have become comfortable with me doing their work. I’ve also tried talking about this in retrospectives and tech team meetings, but the TL and tech directors did not support me because AI usage is encouraged. Instead, they said that they really appreciate my feedback because I have so much experience and thanked me for doing such excellent code reviews.

I also end up making most of the project’s tech decisions, I am the sole contributor to the project’s documentation and my vacation is mapped out in the roadmap as low delivery period. 😢

I like the project and I’m terrified to switch jobs in these times. But every day, it gets harder and harder to comment on obvious slop written without care without sounding rude or sarcastic. Sometimes I find myself still angry after work.

Is it too late to set the boundaries?

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

Hi Dave and Jamison,

I’ve been a Java backend dev for over 10 years. After getting laid off from a job I loved, I spent 3 tough months job hunting. I eventually landed a full-stack role at a non-tech company where I am the entire front-end department.

The team is a mess:

I’m at a crossroads:

What should I do?

Hey, Dave and Jamison.

I’m a non-native Japanese speaker working in Tokyo with about 6 years of experience in backend(3 years in Tokyo) and haven’t used English in work.

I started listening to this podcast for learning English. And I soon found this podcast is very funny and I found a lot of problems actually exist around the world, like AI hype, why people hate HR, low-performing team members, useless product managers, etc.

For some reason, I want to leave Japan and find a job using English. I think the best approach is to find an English job in Tokyo first. And then transfer to an English-speaking country.

I want to know as a non-native English-speaking engineer, what English level I need to get a senior engineer job using English.

What would you consider if you were the manager who is interviewing a non-native English speaker?

Thank you guys, I love this podcast, I can learn English, get some answers to the questions I’m confused about too, and laugh every week.

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

Listener Jame ain’t no dance asks,!

Hey Space Therapists,

Can I tell a coworker to stop using Claude?

I work on a small team at a midsized company, and a coworker keeps dropping overly verbose pull requests that are full of AI jargon. These are increasingly hard to understand, and then when I ask for design intent clarification I often get sent a long document that is even harder to understand!

And the code sucks! misleading docstrings, overly complicated functions, and weird places where the AI has convinced them that something needs to be backwards.

And often times I end up having to fix failing tests (that my coworker probably didn’t run), or report back later that their changes have degraded something in prod or is causing a lot of logging noise.

I worry that I’m doing the same thing and just not noticing. Code is starting to pile up in review and I don’t want to be rude and comment “ai slop” on 50% of the code! What can i do?

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

Listener Myamax myamax says,

I just listened to episode 527 and could really use some advice on being good at interviews.

I was recently laid off with a decent severance package, so I have some breathing space. I’ve had several interviews, and I usually get past the initial screenings, but I don’t shine in technical rounds.

I’m a career switcher, and most of my tech career has been in analytics at a big company. I’m good at distilling things, very good at debugging and navigating mazes of corporate legacy, but I haven’t really built things from scratch. I’m not a pure individual contributor, not a product manager but some technical-product hybrid, and it was a fun place to be. I stole good ideas from different teams and stitched them together adding common sense on top. I spent a lot of time with users and stakeholders to understand their data and their processes. Most of the time they needed common sense and decent data foundations. Only in rare cases it came to fancy algorithms.

How can I sell myself better? Should I be looking for more product-oriented roles? Maybe spending my severance building tiny end-to-end systems to get better at take home assignments is a good idea?

I’d be grateful for any thoughts and your general interview advice for the software folk!

Hi, this is Mental Mario from Episode 395, where i was asking about being “the new hotshot in town”, as you put it. I took your advice, performed to the best of my abilities while trying to stump on my collegues work, and two years in think it worked out pretty well! I got my raises and will become the second in command after my boss. But wait- there is trouble in paradise!

With more money obviously comes more responsibilities, but i can’t shake the feeling that recently I’m doing the majority of the work in my team of five. From refinements to troubleshooting, from code reviews to releases, tasks just come hurling to me.

The team has a lot of confidence in me, but this leads to situations where they don’t challenge my ideas and approaches, which causes problems since obviously I make mistakes too- but I don’t have the teams safety net any more.

This dynamic feels unhealthy to me. Is this feeling justified, or is this just the way it is when moving up the corporate ladder? Given that I’ll be the senior of the team, do i need to delegate more task and supervise them, when I’m feeling overwhelmed with tasks?

Thank you so much for the show!

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

Hi Jamison and Dave, jesters of my daily commute. I’m a *mechanical* engineer at a megacorp, and since people are people, I find most of your advice transfers pretty well.

I’m the tech lead within a small-ish org of about 25 people. We’re in-office, and split between two locations (in a similar time zone), and multiple different projects. This means that there are a lot of Zoom meetings between locations. Lately, I’ve been having an issue with engineers deciding to take these meetings from their desks in our open office plan rather than finding a phone or conference room. I find this practice to be maddening! It’s really distracting because there will often be background noise that makes it hard to clearly understand them, and it also means that my workplace is a cacophony of people yelling into their AirPods, competing to overcome the background noise of their colleagues’ yelling into their AirPods.

How do I make this stop and get my coworkers to hop into a phone or conference room for their meetings?! Oh btw, my manager is one of the worst offenders.

Listener bootersket says,

I have 3 years of experience, all at this same company and team. My team has one staff software engineer who really knows the codebase well. When I have questions about why such and such thing is the way it is, I ask him. I’ve noticed his answers are unhelpful. Often they are short, with very little detail. I can’t tell if thinks they’re sufficient, doesn’t know how to explain himself clearly, is mad at me, or if I am just don’t know enough to understand them.

For example, once I asked about two different variables that seemed ambiguously named and to refer to the same thing. His response was short and sweet. Quote: “almost the same thing”.

Am I the problem? Is he? When I get responses like that I don’t feel compelled to keep asking questions in different ways because it doesn’t feel like he cares about mentoring juniors with dumb questions like myself. What do I do?