Soft Skills Engineering

Autor
- Jamison Dance and Dave Smith

0 Calificaciones: 0
Episodios: 500
Duración promedio: 33min
Idioma: Inglés
Formato
Categoría: Economía y negocios

It takes more than great code to be a great engineer. Soft Skills Engineering is a weekly advice podcast for software developers about the non-technical stuff that goes into being a great software developer.

Episodes

Episode 532: My new company is an absolute mess and should I get an English-speaking job as a Japanese engineer?In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: 1. Hi Dave and Jamison, 2. 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. 3. The team is a mess: 4. • A CTO who hasn’t coded in years and calls me directly to assign tasks, all labeled “highest priority.” • When I asked the CTO and CEO if we had QA, they literally laughed at me. • Prod releases are “tested” by the CTO before telling me to push immediately. 5. I’m at a crossroads: 6. 1. Stick it out for 6–12 months to gain AI experience, then quit? 2. Try to move into management, and rebuild this mess into a functioning engineering organization. 7. What should I do? 8. 9. Hey, Dave and Jamison. 10. 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. 11. 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. 12. 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. 13. I want to know as a non-native English-speaking engineer, what English level I need to get a senior engineer job using English. 14. What would you consider if you were the manager who is interviewing a non-native English speaker? 15. 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. 16.
533|31min
Episode 531: Shallow feedback and my coworker is a huge sloperatorIn this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: 1. Listener Jame ain’t no dance asks,! 2. Hey Space Therapists, I am a consultant that helps big companies to fix all kind of stuff. It’s ridiculous how many different hats I wear. One day I’m the interim PM, the other day I am telling SAP devs how to use a coding agent, next day I gather stakeholder requirements for a customer self service portal. I do all of these tasks on a fairly shallow level and all of that work is happening without much coordination from my company. I think I do a good, but it’s hard gathering feedback on my work, since no colleagues are involved and I can’t simply ask the customer without revealing insecurity. Send sophisticated tips and don’t make me quit. Cheers! 3. 4. Can I tell a coworker to stop using Claude? 5. 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! 6. And the code sucks! misleading docstrings, overly complicated functions, and weird places where the AI has convinced them that something needs to be backwards. 7. 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. 8. 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? 9.
532|33min
Episode 530: Product engineering and why does my team never challenge my ideas?In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: 1. Listener Myamax myamax says, 2. I just listened to episode 527 and could really use some advice on being good at interviews. 3. 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. 4. 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. 5. 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? 6. I’d be grateful for any thoughts and your general interview advice for the software folk! 7. 8. 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! 9. 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. 10. 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. 11. 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? 12. Thank you so much for the show! 13.
531|35min
Episode 529: Zoom calls on my open floor plan and laconic staff engineerIn this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: 1. 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. 2. 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. 3. 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. 4. 5. Listener bootersket says, 6. 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. 7. 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”. 8. 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? 9.
530|34min
Episode 528: Sleepy family software business and leaving after an acquisitionIn this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: 1. A listener named “Will angel answer my question?” asks, 2. Hi, I recently joined a new company about 1.5 months ago. It is the technology arm of a family-owned business group that has existed for over 30 years, providing technology services to all the other companies in the group. 3. After a one-week onboarding, I was assigned to a team. After 2–3 days, I still had no tasks, so I asked a coworker to pair program with me so I could learn more about the processes and continue learning. The task was easy, and we finished it in less than a day. For the next 2 days I did nothing, asked my boss for tasks but he just told me to wait. 4. Two days later, we finally had a planning meeting, and they assigned me three tasks for the upcoming two weeks. I finished the first one in 25 minutes and other ones in not much more time. It has been like this ever since. I’m really enjoying all the free time, but I’m also feeling anxious that I may eventually be part of a layoff. 5. Apparently, the company is doing well, and they’re hiring a lot of people. Should I ask my manager what’s going on? Maybe everyone on my team is pretending to work and going to the gym at 3 p.m.? What might be happening? What would you do? 6. 7. I’m a staff software engineer at a fully remote, 300-employee US SaaS startup. It was just announced that we are being acquired in an all-cash deal by a publicly traded tech company more than 10 times our size. 8. I’ve been here for 8 years and absolutely love this job. Over my tenure, I’ve risen from a junior to a staff engineer, built critical customer-facing features, and developed internal tools used company-wide. I’ve also renegotiated my salary such that LinkedIn recruiters can rarely match it. While my stock options aren’t enough to let me retire early or fund Jamison’s yacht, I know I’m ludicrously lucky to be getting a six-figure payout. 9. But what comes next? Leadership says we will operate as a standalone division for at least a few quarters, meaning no massive backend migrations immediately. However, I’ve never worked at a publicly traded company—only at consultancies and startups. My pessimistic expectation is that corporate bureaucracy will sanitize the culture I helped build. 10. Should I lean in, try to hold on to some of the startup magic, and lead the inevitable integration work to ingratiate myself with the senior engineers at the parent company? Or should I take advantage of my golden handcuffs being unlocked and finally move on? 11.
529|34min
Episode 527: I lost my job after 10 years and am I too old to switch to a security career?In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: 1. Hello Dave and Jamison! 2. I’m a longtime listener going back to the early days of the podcast, and I’ve listened to every episode since. When I started listening, I was beginning my career as a software engineer. Your advice has truly helped shape how I think about work, engineering, leadership, and all the weird human stuff that comes with building software. 3. Now I’m more than 10 years into my career, and I’ve run into a problem that I suspect many experienced engineers are dealing with right now. 4. In episode 521, you talked about how brutal the current job market is, and the question asker from that episode had been unemployed for a year. I’m thankfully not there yet, but I recently lost my job in a large layoff, and the first couple of months of searching have been pretty discouraging. 5. I’m applying to roughly 10–20 jobs a day. I tailor my resume to each role, ensuring it accurately reflects the skills and terminology in the job description. I usually include a cover letter too; AI gets the privilege of writing the mediocre first draft, and then I rewrite it into something I would actually say. 6. Despite all of that, I’ve only made it past the resume screen three times so far, one of those was through a referral, and several other referral applications have gone nowhere. 7. The strange part is that I’ve tried applying across the whole spectrum: 8. 1. Roles that would be a step up, where I think I could do the job but haven’t held that exact title before 2. Roles at roughly my current level, where I can honestly check almost every box in the job description 3. Roles that would technically be a step down, but that I’d happily take and feel extremely confident I could do well 9. So my question is: How do you get companies to actually interview you when you’re an experienced engineer in a market overwhelmed with qualified candidates? 10. At this point, I’m starting to wonder whether there’s such a thing as an awkward career middle age: too experienced for some jobs, not obviously senior enough for others, and competing with hundreds of people for everything in between. 11. If you were in this situation, what would you change? More networking? Fewer but more focused applications? Different positioning? Showing up at the hiring manager’s house with a fruit basket and a printed copy of my GitHub profile? 12. Would love to hear how you’d approach it from the other side of the hiring table. 13. 14. Dave and Jamison, 15. Hit me with your dumbest, funniest, most brutally honest advice because I need it. 16. So here’s the deal: I’m a software engineer with 30+ year in the industry, a dinosaur who’s already reinvented himself like a half-dozen times, network, dev, infra consultant, back to dev. Now I’m having a midlife-ish (okay, late-life) crisis and I’ve fallen in love with security and compliance. Like, actually excited about compliance, which I’m told is a red flag in itself. 17. Problem is: I’m less than 10 years from retirement and my brain doesn’t bounce back from “starting over” the way it used to when I was a spry young whippersnapper. 18. So, am I an idiot for even considering torching my comfy expertise to go be a security newbie this close to the finish line? Or is this exactly the kind of chaotic energy I need before retirement? 19.
528|37min
Episode 526: Why can't I get promoted so quickly after my last promotion and I got hired as a software engineer but ended up doing opsIn this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: 1. Hi Dave & Jamison! I’ve been listening for almost a year now and have worked through nearly your entire back catalog in reverse. The podcast has genuinely helped me become a better engineer, so thank you! 2. I’m two years into my software engineer career at a large infrastructure company. I was promoted to SWE II last year, and this year my manager told me she felt my work was promotion-worthy, but because I’d just been promoted and she had others on the team to consider, she wants to target me for next year’s cycle instead. She gave me a spot bonus and said she’d try to make up for it in my raise. 3. I understand and appreciate the honesty, but I’m also a little disappointed because I’ve worked hard to hit every milestone on the roadmap she gave me, and career progression does matter to me. 4. My question is: How should I navigate the next year? What should I focus my 1:1s on? Should I push for a mid-year promotion if that’s an option, or instead focus on building an undeniable case for next year? How would you approach this if you were in my shoes? 5. 6. Hey Dave and Jamison, 7. Long time listener. First time question asker :). 8. I recently joined a major tech company. Before this, I worked at a mid-sized company with about 200 engineers. In my old role, I built customer-facing products. The work was challenging and exciting, and I genuinely enjoyed it. I ended up moving to a new city to be closer to family and started looking for a job. The job search was brutal. Honestly, by the end of it, I would have accepted just about anything. Luckily, a major tech company extended an offer. The money was great, and I thought it would be a huge plus to have a major tech name on my resume. It is a fully remote role, but they did mention that they could go hybrid in the future. 9. I knew ahead of time that the team built internal tools instead of customer-facing products. But after joining, I realized most of what we do is closer to operations than actual software engineering. I know I should have screened the team better. I was just so relieved to get a good offer from a top company that I accepted without thinking twice. I am not enjoying the work at all. 10. I am not planning to quit immediately. However, I want to be ready to leave in about a year or earlier if they decide to lay us all off. I want to make sure I utilize my time here as best as possible. Do you have any suggestions on how I can best position myself for an internal transfer or an eventual external move? 11. Also, I have been in this role for close to 2 months now. I did a 1-1 with the manager in my first week, but after that, have not had any 1-1s. He has not scheduled anything. I was thinking of scheduling it myself but not sure if that can be seen as too forward. 12. Btw this is outside US, if that matters :) 13. Thanks again for your advice and laughs. 14.
527|32min
Episode 525: How do I save my company of 500 people and my new company is insane with AIIn this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: 1. Hey Dave and Jamison, First, I love your show and it has now been part of my Monday evening routine for many years to listen to your podcast while cooking dinner. 2. I recently joined a mid-sized software company (500 people) as a senior data engineer. The salary is a significant bump from my previous job and I really like the team on a personal level. Three months after I joined, the company laid off half its employees and announced a strategic pivot away from their previous core business to become an “AI-first company” and develop new products in novel, more profitable sectors. The product that my team had been working on until that point was scrapped and there are no new projects coming from the business side. In subsequent communications, it was revealed why: Management has no concrete ideas for the future strategy, neither on what products to develop nor on which sectors to target. Instead, our team (among others) is now tasked with coming up with new product ideas to “save the company”. I’m a data engineer, not a business development manager, and while I have dealt with high ambiguity from the business side in previous roles, it was never this extreme. 3. I was looking forward to working on interesting technical challenges within a great, experienced team, but now I feel like I’m expected to become an “idea guy”, a role that doesn’t really match my personality. My question is: Should I be patient and try to turn this situation into “an opportunity for growth”, or should I start applying elsewhere? I’m a bit worried that the short length of stay at this company will leave a stain on my CV. 4. Many thanks to my favorite space lawyers, an anonymous listener. 5. 6. Hi! 7. My current job is at a 10k+ large risk-adverse company that currently has nil, none, nada, nichts ai tools available for coding. I of course did the only reasonable thing. I’ve gotten a new job at a middle-sized fintech company that’s going ”AI first”. 8. I’m really excited about finally using ai outside hobby projects. I worry however, that my future colleagues will go too quickly ahead while vibecoding, vibearchitecting, vibetesting… leaving a mountain of tech debt behind. A lazy colleague would actually be better than an intellectually lazy colleague in this scenario. (I sincerely hope that I won’t be that coworker) 9. Are my worries overblown or sane? Any gotch’as to avoid? Maybe you can give a brief survival guide to the brave new AI world? 10.
526|28min
Episode 524: My CTO AI-codes big piles of slop and early mornings, late meetingsIn this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: 1. I work for a small software company on a team of about 7 or 8 engineers. I like working here. I like the people, the autonomy, the pay, my boss, and the stack among other things. I try to remind myself of this regularly so I don’t take it for granted. I’ve been here for about 2.5 years and would love to continue working here. 2. Our CTO, like many, has become a big AI cowboy coder. Every few months, he vibe codes a new project and then decides to interrupt the full workloads that we have a limited number of engineers to do to hand his project off to be cleaned up, worked into the product, and solve all of the problems that remain once actually put into practice. This usually ends up going to a different engineer per project, who is then tied up with the CTO’s whims and is no longer available to do the work planned by product. Our EM knows this and knows the frustration and lost velocity, but what can he do? (rhetorical, not the question) 3. Most recently, I was tasked with implementing some reporting dashboards he did into the product, but he specifically asked me to make it in such a way that he can continue to work on and add to because he can’t be bothered to run the actual product. This is very concerning to several of us. He has no clue what he’s writing or how bad it is. We’ve talked about perhaps making him do PRs, but a) who can make him, he’s the CTO, and b) he’ll have no clue what to do with PR pushback given that he has no clue what he wrote. And again, who can make him actually fix it if he asks us to rubber stamp it? (rhetorical, not the question) 4. I’ve been listening to the show for years and I’ve talked to friends at other companies, so I know this is everywhere. Is it as everywhere as it seems? Is it worth finding a new place to work where the CTO isn’t running so rampant? As I stated before, I’d rather not leave, but if I talked about that as a concern, I don’t want it to sound like an ultimatum, even if maybe it is at some level. Is this just the new reality for us, or is there something that can be done? 5. 6. I am a senior software engineer at a big tech company. I live in central Europe but my team is in the US and I’m 9 hours ahead. I have 7:30 pm meetings and sometimes take an hour before and/or after this meeting to prep or follow up. Previously I slept in later and started later to deal with these meetings. However, now my daughter is starting kindergarten and I wake up early (5-6AM) to be with her, drop her off, etc. Now in the evening meetings my brain is fried and I can’t even articulate myself well. The next day I think about so many things I wish I had said in those meetings. 7. I can’t quit as I make 160K right now and I would only be making 60-80K tops in my country and have some financial commitments. Relocation to the US is also not an option because I have kids and don’t want them to move. 8. So far I have been skipping meetings and my manager has not expressed concern but I feel so detached from my team. I don’t even know what most of my peers are working on. 9. It feels like I am out of ideas to make this better. Please share your space wisdom with me :) 10.
525|32min
Episode 523: (Rerun of 331) Prickly ticket and title downgradeThis is a rerun of episode 331. In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: 1. Listener ninjamonkey says, 2. I am a new grad who is half a year into the role now at a very large company. Recently, a senior engineer on my team asked me to create a ticket for an infra team for a problem with a service. I provided logs and steps to reproduce the issue and did a health check before submitting. 3. Right after, the manager of the team put me into a group chat with their team, asked why I created the ticket and told me to start doing my job and they can’t debug for me. 4. From these interactions and comments on the ticket, it feels the infra team will likely not work on the tickets I report or de-prioritize them. This has left me discouraged and hesitant. 5. I will have to do lots of this kind of infrastructure work in the future. Additionally, one of the goals my manager set for me is to work with more external teams for the upcoming year. 6. What do I do here? Do I tell my manager about these interactions? Do I tell my team lead, staff/seniors to swap out for different kind of story? 7. 8. I work for a small startup. I was the first employee other than the 2 founders. 9. Being the first developer hired, naturally means I have the most knowledge about our application. I also have good organisational skills, which has led to me becoming and being referred to as the “Lead Developer”. 10. I have recruited 2 of the 3 new developers, and have trained both of them and got them up to speed. 11. At first I was pleased with the progression and was keen to grow into the position, and told the founders so. 12. Since then, I have changed my mind, I don’t want to be the lead - due to the following: 13. • The communication is absolutely pitiful. Any questions we ask of the founders we get about a 30% reply rate no matter the form of communication. • We get poorly defined tasks and requirements • The CTO will just blast through some of our features over the weekend and say here I fixed it for you 14. I don’t want to quit my job (just yet… its a comin though). 15. I have actually discussed the above points with them, but I know these 2 founders will never change their ways. 16. How do I tell them I just want to go back to being an Individual Contributor like my Employment contract states? 17.
524|33min

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