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.
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In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I have been at a small startup company for 5 years now. It’s a very small technical team, 4 devs and a tech lead that contributes code & architecture. I am getting a small raise this week for my 5 years but it’s a smaller raise than I was expecting. We’re an all remote team across the globe but I had a dev co worker in the same city as me just leave the company. This has put more pressure on me as I’m the only dev in the primary time ...
In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Hey guys. This question comes all the way from New Zealand. Recently discovered your podcast about a month ago, and have been catching up with older episodes on morning walks ever since - you guys are awesome. Anyway - the question: Is it more beneficial to work for a company where the software itself is the product (SaaS etc) or does it no longer matter given the rise of the robots anyway? For context - I’ve been working for a telco/inte...
In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: My company follows scrum, with daily standups. We got a new scrum master. He is very formal and procedural and I struggle with our daily meetings. He goes through a long list of assigned tickets, asking each ticket owner about status and info on progress. We are all engineers with many years of experience but it feels like we are in the kindergarten. We don’t have deep expertise about each others work. It is important to know what each of...
In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Hi from a long-time listener and first-time caller. I need some advice on a toxic workplace situation. I’m currently unhappy with my job due to a difficult dynamic with a colleague. My manager put us on the same team, meaning we share responsibility for our output. Although this colleague is technically a level below me, they act as though they have seniority. This creates significant friction: they’re resistant to advice, insist they’re ...
In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: My parent organization has trust issues: we registered on a recent survey as one of the lowest across the bigger software org (thousands of employees). There are two groups: functional, trustworthy people who get stuff done, and people who are behind, stuck, or just not working. Those struggling say they need better emotional support, but there is consistent, documented evidence that they cannot keep up. I’m perpetually frustrated that th...
In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: How long until I am ethically obligated to let my company know I’m doing no work? There was a big re-org at the company I recently joined. It’s a huge financial company, so there’s a lot of bureaucracy. Somehow in this mess I was kicked off the first team I joined so that I was pending re-assignment. It’s been a month and I haven’t been re-assigned. Instead of being in between jobs not working, I am currently in between teams, but still g...
In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Should I declare my struggle with this AI world we live in here? Nah. I mean, I’d like the hype to die down, a lot, but we keep getting new tools and I get to experiment, so here we are. My real struggle, and this podcast is implicated in it, is around non-technical people contributing to production systems. Why are we so obsessed with this idea? COBOL tried it. Low-code and no-code tried it. BDD and Gherkin aspire to it. Yet time and aga...
In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I’m approaching 15 years of experience with the last 7 years at fang. About a year ago I was promoted to staff engineer (thanks to the podcast) and switched to an adjacent team under the same director. I have never actively pursued a management role but I’ve been starting to think about it more. A colleague of mine just announced they need to take extended medical leave (1-2 months) and I was asked to fill in as a temporary manager while ...
In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I work at a large remote company. We meet up once or twice a year. I don’t really know much about my engineering coworkers aside from the 5 people on my team, so the in person meet ups seem like a good place for me to get to know people from the other teams. I am a career switcher, and am currently a mid level IC (borderline junior) in my late 30s and a youthful appearance. At these meetups, my position and appearance (and honestly, possi...
In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I am a senior software engineer at big tech and need a career change. With the rise of AI, I no longer enjoy this profession and panic everyday just waiting for a huge round of layoffs. At this point I feel like I am on some assembly line hitting enter like a monkey. Therefore I have been thinking of changing lanes and would like to get into engineering management. On the one hand I have enjoyed mentoring, strategic planning and coordinat...
In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: How can I get our company to follow the law and stop sending SPAM without being regarded as negative? We’re sending out emails that don’t comply with CAN-SPAM, and I think we should comply due to the risks, but I don’t want to risk any blowback! People want the emails to look more ‘human’ sent, and putting your mailing address at the end of an email is not very human, so we’re not doing that… It’s a medium startup (500 people), but I’m cl...
In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Hey there, I started a new job in August at a large European retailer. There were ups & downs, but long story short, my weekly one-on-ones with my manager was either positive or neutral. This was my second job after graduating, so the firm factored in, I’d like to think, when setting expectations this was my first time switching codebases and tech stacks. On January 3rd, I was fired in the last month of my 6 month probation. This was ...
In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Hi Djavison, I’ve heard y’all say something along the lines of “this is the most exciting time to build software” in a few recent episodes. I’m glad that has been your experience and seems to be the experience of many others. But for me as someone 5 years into the career who is, thankfully, employed—I can’t help mourning a job that no longer exists. Obviously, there are still lots of us with the job title “software engineer” that create s...
In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I’m a senior software engineer at a remote company (~500–700 people), and over the last year a new HR org replaced our old people team. They’ve spent six months building a new goals/leveling framework. During a public meeting I asked in slack: “We’ve had goals before and then stopped using them. How will these be different?” Nobody answered directly. The next day I was pulled into a meeting. The new VP of HR had screenshotted my question ...
In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Hi Jamison and Dave. Eight years into my software engineering career, all of it at Series B and C startups, I’ve been craving two things: a recognizable brand name on my resume and the chance to work on real scale problems. After a long search, I finally got both. The catch? I got them in the wrong order. I accepted an offer at one of the hottest and fastest-growing AI companies in the application layer space. Exciting work, smart people,...
Jamison and Dave advise a new CTO from a software background taking over a robotics hardware team on earning respect and effective leadership in an unfamiliar domain, emphasizing transparency and trusting experts. They also tackle the widespread issue of product managers, including the CEO, contributing low-quality AI-generated code, causing engineer stress and workload. The hosts discuss technical guardrails, communicating bottlenecks to leadership, and adapting engineering processes to the evolving AI landscape.
In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Hi, thank you for the podcast, I am long time listener, first time asker. Something weird is going on at my company. A colleague of my always wanted to get promoted to management, he got the opportunity, but after multiple preparatory meeting for this new promotion, HE QUIT! He did not tell what happened there, only that “it was time for something new”. Now several months later my skip level declared that he wants to be a developer again....
In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: A listener named Derek asks, I am the CTO and cofounder of a startup. Now that vibecoding is a thing, our CEO has kind of gone rogue, and and he’s vibecoding a bunch of random stuff, one of which he bought a domain for and has pushed a potential customer to pay for, without talking to our team. I feel like this is fragmenting our focus, but I don’t want to ban our CEO from vibecoding and being creative. how should I handle this without da...
In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I have been with my current organization for 5+ years. I like the company and have generally had a good experience working here. However, the last several years I have not really gotten a raise except for the standard “merit raise”, which does not cover inflation, so effectively the last several years I have made less money than the year before. I brought this up to my EM who said there is no chance of the company increasing the merit rai...
In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I’m a new listener to the podcast and work as the sole developer for a sports team, which is the only company I’ve worked for since graduating from university 8 years ago. I listened to episode 493 while clenching my teeth as you told a listener to absolutely not take the job with the European football club as a solo developer. Yikes! While I feel I have continued to grow my skillset in my role, I’m now feeling vulnerable about having no ...
In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Hi Dave and Jamison, Internal dev asker from the second half of Episode 441 checking back in. Your “ask what scared the previous dev” advice in particular has paid off handsomely; I now carry around a little book of eldritch warnings and, somehow, people keep bringing me their unknowable monsters to interpret. It’s almost as though the previous dev knew these sorts of things would happen! I didn’t set out to acquire Lovecraftian knowled...
In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I’m a relatively new people manager and I really struggle when it comes time for performance reviews, or even regular praise or critical feedback in one-on-ones, because I can’t help feeling like an adult “talking down” to another adult, regardless of whether the feedback is generally positive or critical and instructive. Something about it all seems so patronizing to me. How can I approach this stuff with a different mindset? Hello D &am...
In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Listener Tom says, I’m a software developer with six years experience, mostly at small startups with engineering teams anywhere between 2 and 10 developers. Because these startups have been small, most of the interviews were really casual. I’d speak to either the CEO, or CTO about my past experience, and we would talk about the direction the company was heading, and whether I’d be interested in joining. They felt less like interviews, and...
In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Hello gentlemen, long-time listener here, and I’d love your take on something that’s been keeping me up at night. The high powered boss that I report to is someone I genuinely like and respect.This manager is smart, kind, honest, and overall great to work with. We have a solid relationship. I also come from big tech, so I sometimes feel I have better experience around managing projects and keeping teams organized. However she recently sha...
In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Dear Damison and Javison, I work at a very small startup (<10 engineers) and am trying to hire 2 engineers. I’m doing the intro/screener interview for these roles & am working with a recruiting firm to source candidates. My problem is that sometimes my intuition tells me that a candidate is not going to make it through our hiring process, but I can’t articulate why. Our hiring process is neither cruel nor unusual, and on paper thes...
In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Hey Guys, long time listener, first time asker! At my BigCorp Co., whenever I talk to my skip level about my concerns, it seems we are playing the ‘Gloom Olympics’ every time we meet. I’ll mention I worked late, and he’ll counter with, ‘That’s nothing, I haven’t slept in three days!’ This repeated lack of empathy is demotivating and I don’t think I have had a fruitful discussion with him. How can I tackle this? How can I feel heard? I’ve ...
In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Listener AWS multi-region is not real multi-region, ask me how I know asks, We’ve recently acquired some bright-eyed and bushy-tailed new grads. What have you found to be the most effective way to onboard new grads into development roles? How has it changed (if at all) since the advent of LLMs? I want to make sure my new-grad crushing machine is operating as smoothly as possible considering the recent advancements in developer tooling. Th...
The hosts advise a listener who quit before mass layoffs on how to navigate a 90-day notice period, interact with colleagues, and leverage their exit. They also tackle a listener's extremely bad manager, exploring options beyond HR like speaking to a skip-level manager or documenting misconduct, emphasizing HR's role as a company protector.
In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Hi Dave and Jamison, I’ve been in QA/QA automation for 13 years now with a CS degree, and I’ve been trying to change my role to a software developer for a while. My only issue is that every time I brought my career aspirations to my managers they seemed to “not care” or give vague answers to “kick the can down the road”. In the past I fully demonstrated I can do the work by submitting bug fixes, writing and deploying a few microservices b...
In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Hey Jamison and Dave, love your show! A question for you guys coming all the way from the Netherlands 🧀 I’ve started as a software engineer in a gambling company lately and the moral aspect of it bothers me a bit. And while listening to you talking about the importance of accessibility in the last episode (#488) I came up with this moral dilemma: should a developer push for making a gambling app more accessible for users with disabilitie...
