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.

Our on call is not the regular getting pinged when something goes wrong, instead we have to manually monitor a dashboard 12 hours constantly for 7 days as the alarming is quite fuzzy.

I am the only EU remote worker that has to adopt to the on call PST timezone. That means, my on call shift goes from 3pm-3am in my timezone. It is day 5/7 and I am down 24 energy drinks already, cause this was the only way to stay wake. Knowingly, that this would be just a short-term tradeoff against health, I am now living through the most explosive diarrhea I have ever had. On top, I am sleep derived, dizzy and every body part hurts.

That would already be terrible on its own, yet I additionally have a young family, with a 4 year old and a toddler. The on call week, has not only been though on me, but especially also on my children and wife. I don’t have time for the kids at all and my wife is doing 100% of everything at the moment, including waking up, breakfast, bringing our son to kindergarten, cooking, cleaning, playing, everything. She is also quite exhausted therefore.

Besides On Call, my job has been great and a huge monetary opportunity that is very rare in the EU, therefore quitting just because of 4-5weeks/year is not an option I am considering. Yet, I am wondering if there could be any way of smuggling myself out of the on call rotation. I have seen, that a staff level engineer on our team is not participating in the rotation, but that might be because he got a lot going on with other teams as well.

A listener named bebop asks,

Is your average “Big Tech” dev “better” than a random dev selected from a large non-technology company? I can’t help but feel that if I want to level up my career, I’m going to have to either move into big tech or some unicorn startup.

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 the technology looks appealing and interesting to learn. So that said, I am still really interested in learning more about crypto and dabbling in the development space of that. Yet, I am hesitant because I fear that this could reflect negatively on me. What do you think? Is a bit of crypto okay or really that bad?

Hi Dave and Jamison

After five years as an engineering manager, I want to return to coding. But I’m facing a few challenges:

First, I worry about leaving my current team. It feels like I’m abandoning the people I’ve been supporting. Should I make this transition elsewhere to avoid this awkwardness?

Second, I’m struggling to find time and energy to rebuild my technical skills. After a full day of management work, it’s hard to open the laptop again for coding practice.

Finally, I’ve been humbled by how rusty my coding skills have become. Tasks that would take a practiced engineer minutes are taking me days, which is frustrating and denting my confidence.

How have others successfully navigated this pendulum swing back to an IC role without burning bridges or burning out?

Thanks,

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 trying up-skill and to learn how to be a better team member and support other roles.

I’d love your perspective on working with product/ux designers. What have the challenges been? What makes you love working with a designer? Have there been times where you’re both arguing for the best user experience, but fail to agree on what experience is best?

Hey guys!

It seems like lately, I only work in two modes:

I often get to own large, urgent initiatives. I spend weeks or months on them. This work is fascinating! I end up being stressed, tired, and counting days until my next vacation.

When they finish, I go back to regular tickets - ones that take a day or two, maybe a week to complete.

And its great! For a few days. Then the boredom sets in. I pick through the tickets, trying to find something interesting. I finish a ticket and realize there are another 4 hours before the end of the day. I start to miss the rush of working on a complex puzzle, even though it’s terrible for my work/life balance.

A month or two pass, and a new complex and urgent initiative comes in. The cycle continues.

So my question is: Is this a common feeling? Are there ways to find a “easy-work/hard-work” balance? Do you have any advice on not overworking when urgent tasks come in, and not dying from boredom when there is no interesting work?

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 wanting to make my team accountable for performance.

For some context, I currently track productivity by reading daily updates, PRs, and tickets, from each developer.

I worry that “story points” is easily game-able as a performance target, and will make the team want to modify the points after the fact to reflect actual time spent. Then story points will become a less useful tool for project planning.

I’d like to satisfy the higher-up ask to measure productivity, but in a way that is good for the team, the company, and my career.

Any thoughts on how to approach this?

A listener named Mike asks,

I work for a company with 30 employees. Our CEO is trying to be our CTO by prompting all our issues to ChatGPT. This week we had a discussion about changes needed to comply with specific certifications requested by one of our customers. 15 minutes later I got an email containing a chatGPT conversation giving ‘advice’ that I debunked just 20 minutes beforehand. I have been vocal about my concerns of over-use of LLM’s before and think it’s dangerous for our CEO to keep sending large chunks of factually incorrect text across the org. He did finally stop talking about story point burn down because chatGPT told him it’s a bad metric though. So maybe this is salvageable?

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 and they give you feed back on your resume etc. Thank you!

As someone who’s been a developer for a while, how can I ensure that I’m continually be exposed to and learning topics outside my purview? The further I get from school, the more laser-focused my knowledge seems to become. It’s easy to concentrate solely on my day-to-day tech stack and the architecture I work with, but how can I make sure I stay up to date with recent advancements in the field? Is there an RSS feed that I can stream directly into my frontal cortex to keep me up to date?

Also, I understand this query may not be ‘soft’ enough, so if it must be cast into the void, banished to the land of unanswered questions – I accept my fate

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 codebase to add features gave me a pit in my stomach. No integration tests, no staging environment, huge functions with tons of parameters, etc.

The client provided technical guidelines that were pretty solid, but the code just didn’t follow them at all. In the time left on the contract, I refactored the codebase to fix the biggest problems to align with the client’s technical guidelines. I did all this without my manager/PO/PM asking me to.

But now, how do I communicate what I’ve done to the client and my manager? Can I get any recognition for it?

A listener named Mike asks,

I’ve been in my role for about 1.5 years in a dev team of 7. I really like the job, it has a good culture and I’m learning. Sometimes I channel my desire to learn into improving our projects with small, self directed changes on my own time. I these changes are useful but aren’t high enough priority to make it into planned sprint work. I don’t inundate the team with these requests, it happens maybe 1-2 times a month.

We make a point of working in small steps, usually submitting several PRs per day each. I really like this approach, and I also keep my occasional self-directed bits of work small in scale. However, I’ve noticed these PRs receive more scrutiny and more “whataboutism” that our regular on-the-books PRs.

For example, for regular sprint tickets there’s an understanding that we’re making progressive improvements or building small pieces of features that exist within the constraints of our systems. We might flag broader improvements to consider, but there’s no expectation to re-boil the ocean every time we want to merge code.

When I submit a self initiated piece of work there can be a long back and forth of suggestions that can involve changing other dependent code, changing internal APIs which may have side- effects, and generally a level of defensiveness in the code that we never normally expect. I understand that by submitting off the books PRs I am requiring some work-time from reviewers, but there is more pushback than I’d expect. It feels like because I get the ball rolling on my own time the normal cost-benefit constraints go out the window, and the code purists come out to play.

Could I be annoying the team with these submissions? Have you experienced team members doing the same thing? Is there a way I can scratch my own itch by learning against our systems without creating this resistance?

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 most recent project we had a lot of issues due to his design, which departed from our best practices. He’s still acting like he knows best and is getting under my skin. Our company usually hires more collaborative people so I’ve not had to deal with this before. How can I stay calm, professional, and confident in my skills while working with this guy?

Who is my boss? No, really. I need answers.

I’m a Principal Developer with so many bosses, I’m starting to wonder if this is a multi-level marketing scheme. My team lead gives me work. His boss gives me work. Every project lead crashes into my inbox like the Kool-Aid Man screaming that their thing is the most urgent. My calendar is a cursed artifact, filled with 20+ hours of meetings a week, where I nod knowingly while my soul quietly exits my body.

My team lead is a Designer and has no idea what I actually do or the expectations of a Principal Developer, which is convenient, because neither do I.

When I asked his boss to help me prioritize, I was told, “It’s all important—just make sure mine is done first, and don’t tell the project leads.” Our product owner wants to be anything but a product owner, and our scrum master is treated like the office secretary, not a blocker remover.

Top it off, I’m now being asked to weigh in on architecture decisions for our tech stack while not being invited to architecture meetings and being told to “just figure it out” when I asked how to structure the documents and diagrams they want. So now I’m behind on doing dev work, pretending to be an architect, and the team I’m meant to be mentoring never see me unless they’re in one of the same meetings I’m trapped in.

How do I set boundaries and prioritize without causing a nuclear meltdown? Or should I just consult a Magic 8-Ball and let fate decide? Because honestly, I’m one email away from faking my own disappearance and leaving an out-of-office message that says, “No.”

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’t remember in detail all the things I’ve done at work in the past few years. For example, I can think of one time I had a small conflict with a coworker, but I can’t remember the details of what happened. I have a work diary of sorts, but unfortunately, I haven’t been regularly writing things down. Also, I usually just write down accomplishments and notable things that happened. Should I start writing down experiences that match up with these types of behavioral questions?? Do you have any advice on how I can jog my memory and reflect on all the things I’ve done during my career to craft good answers to behavioral questions?

I also freeze up when I’m asked a “tell me about a time when…” question that I’ve never experienced. I’ve heard advice like “come up with a hypothetical scenario and explain what you would do” or “just lie and make up a story”. I’m the type of person who has a very hard time lying and making stuff up on the fly.

I am one year into being promoted to a team lead at my company. We are made up of 4 devs, 2 QA, and a product owner. One challenge for our team has been differing time zones. Our 2 QA engineers are east coast while the rest of the team is on the west coast. Currently one of them signs off at 5pm EST and the other at 4pm EST. This means that if there’s any communication that needs to happen between dev and QA it has to happen in the morning since by 1pm PST they are headed out the door. This also constrains the times that I’m able to schedule meetings that involve QA.

I’ve been thinking for awhile establishing a set of core hours from 9am-2pm PST but have been afraid of the pushback from our QA. I feel like making this adjustment is reasonable and other people I’ve asked have echoed that sentiment but my desire to people please and be looked at favorably is preventing me from making a change. In all honesty we can get by with the current set up, but I find myself getting bitter about not being able to schedule meetings in the afternoon and stories getting held up because QA is off the clock so early. What do?

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 the same framework bug I did when I tried this refactor”… “nope” he said. So out of curiosity I pulled down the branch and guess what I saw, the same bug when I tried this refactor 3 months ago. Now I am in a weird position. Do I tell the tech lead again (he was the tech lead when I tried this same refactor) that this does not work or do I ignore it because I am no longer on that team? I don’t want to overstep my bounds but I also know its a lot of work to refactor all this code, so much work they’d need to stop delivering features and add this to their roadmap.

I have been interviewing for leadership roles and I keep getting asked “What is your Leadership Style”? I am honestly not quite sure how to answer this as I don’t really understand what they are asking. I have searched the internet for a clean, 5th normal form database that lists the available styles to no avail with no definitive tables. It seems this is truly a soft skill. From your experience, what is the interviewer really asking in this case, how can I better identify common styles, and what can I do to grow my skills in this area?

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. Plus, because of the organizational structure, I’m stuck solving small problems that don’t have a big impact. It’s frustrating—but again, the pay is great.

Recently, I got an offer for a Staff Engineer position at another company. The catch is, the pay isn’t as good (30%+ cut), and I’m not sure about their culture or structure yet. However, the title could potentially open more doors for me in the future.

Should I take the offer, accept the pay cut, and hope it’s a step forward for my career?

Hello! Long time listener, first-time caller :-) I’m on the final stretch of classes to finish my BS in computer science at WGU, most of which I’ve done while working. I’m now 40, and I have had 3 previous occupations and employers: aircraft mechanic for 5 years at a small shop, figure skater with Disney on Ice for 6 years, and most recently a partner at an environmental remediation/heavy construction firm for 10 years where my primary responsibilities were field crew management and technical writing for ecology reports. I would love your advice on how I could use these experiences to stand out on a resume or in a job interview. How can I indicate that I’m a hard worker and that I know just enough to know that I know nothing and am ready to learn? Thank you for your time, keep up the good work!