This episode is sposored by OneSchema, the best way to build CSV import into your product. Check OneSchema out at https://oneschema.co/softskills In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Hello Jave and Dames, Long time listener short time Dev. Big fan of the show, my confidence in my skills as a programmer has always been pretty low so having a podcast centered around the “soft skills” instead of more complex topics like “Covariance and Contravariance”, “Temporal Logic”, or “Bas...
Aug 21, 2023•36 min
This episode is sposored by OneSchema, the best way to build CSV import into your product. Check OneSchema out at https://oneschema.co/softskills In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: My employer offered a retention bonus after: The CTO left two weeks after I arrived Two weeks later 1/4 of the staff was laid off Two weeks after that the COO left Two weeks after that 2 board members resigned Three or Four weeks after that the Director of Engineering left What does that mean? W...
Aug 14, 2023•34 min
In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I am a senior engineer working in a team of 7. My team lead went through a pretty rough divorce in December. Since then he’s been quite distracted and disengaged at work. I decided to help him out by temporarily taking on some of his responsibilities. Over the months things seemed to have gotten worse. He shows up late for the 10am standup meeting almost every day. He never contributes anything in stakeholder meetings. I am effectively le...
Aug 07, 2023•37 min
In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: We’ve recently switched to mandatory 2 days of in-person work a week but my employee keeps working from home! Whenever I ask him to come in person he says sure but continues to work from home. When I confront him about not showing up in person he just says “sorry I wasn’t able to make it that day”. He’s a good employee so I don’t want to fire him, but I’m concerned about what upper management will say if/when they find out about this. Wha...
Jul 31, 2023•29 min
In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I’ve been working with this fintech company for the past year as the only FE developer in a team with other 6 BE developers, but recently, I’ve noticed that the product team has slowly stopped including frontend (FE) tasks in the sprints. Moreover, they seem to have deprioritized FE tasks in general, allocating me only one task that I can extend at most to three days within a two-week sprint. This scarcity of work has been bothering me an...
Jul 24, 2023•32 min
This is a rerun of episode 307. Enjoy! In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I work for a big bank. I recently found out I am severely underpaid. I have only received “exceeds expectations” ratings since joining over 5 years ago. I rage-interviewed at a bunch of FAANG companies, made it to the final rounds of all, but always came up short on the offer. Expectations at my current job are low. I’ve been putting all my extra energy and time into my own startup idea with a group ...
Jul 17, 2023•29 min
In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Do you think an EM should only be involved with management tasks, and let the members handle the technical stuff, or should they have some technical expertise to manage things like architecture reviews or handle urgent incidents? Hello! Love the show, thank you both for all the knowledge. I discovered this podcast when I was struggling as a newbie who was learning on the job at a tech firm two years ago. By applying your advice for fellow...
Jul 10, 2023•25 min
In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Listener Thor asks, Is there a chance the tech stack I choose throughout my career will hurt my chances to shift direction towards project leading/managing in the future? Say, I do mostly frontend, will this affect the way people see my broader understanding of projects etc. compared to people in roles such as architect? Listener Travis asks, My company is starting to expand across time zones. The majority of the company is based in one t...
Jul 03, 2023•26 min
In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Greetings from Germany! My job is creating a customized Windows installation image with PowerShell & C#. It takes about 2 hours to build and test an image. Sometimes I have to wait until the end to see if a change did actually work or not. During that time I usually browse the web / watch Youtube / read a book. This makes me feel like an impostor, because I am maybe working 10-25% of the time. Since I’ve only been with this company 1 ...
Jun 26, 2023•29 min
In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Listener Schtolteheim Reinbach III asks, Hey soft skills engineering, love you guys. I work at a company you wouldn’t hear much about, on a product that you wouldn’t think about as having much tech involved- suffice it to say, it makes me interesting at parties. I’m not a developer myself, but on my team, I’m having an issue with a developer who can’t seem to use GitHub properly. Fairly often, whenever he fixes or creates things, he doesn...
Jun 19, 2023•28 min
In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: At work, I occasionally mix names of people in my team when I refer to them in meetings. My mother used to do this with my siblings when I was a child and I hated it. I guess I am getting older. Should I just accept the defeat? Any suggestions how to deal with this? How do I find areas to improve without critical feedback? I’ve had regular 1-on-1s with multiple people over the years (managers, mentors, tech leads), and asked for feedback ...
Jun 12, 2023•37 min
In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Hi Dave and Jamison! What do you do when one of your immediate teammates is constantly competing against you? I really don’t like competition. Ignoring the competitiveness + praising his value did not work. Some examples: Leaving code reviews comments showing off obvious knowledge which does not really add value to the PR Constantly harassing you to pair on trivial matters (I think because “pairing with someone less experienced” is a trai...
Jun 05, 2023•40 min
In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: During our next team meeting I jokingly gave a status report on the state of my desk and referenced the note. I believe this was the first time someone had publicly acknowledged the note writer, and it invoked a very passionate response from my teammates expressing their own annoyances with the anonymous writer. It began to escalate the following week. Copy cat writers began writing their own sarcastic notes, and junior devs were (jokin...
May 29, 2023•35 min
In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: A listener Steve asks, How long is too long to wait to be paid? I’ve worked for 4 early stage startups in my career. Two were successful. One failed. My current one is “limping along” but showing signs of taking off. At the startup that failed, we stopped getting paid and some of us stuck around for 2-3 months until the CEO closed the business. I ended up unpaid for nearly 3 months of work. At my current startup, we are 3 months behind, a...
May 22, 2023•29 min
In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I recently started listening to your podcast from the very start of the show! One of the largest differences I noticed (aside from the audio quality, lol), is how often you used filler words like “um”. How on earth did you manage to stop using them? In work presentations and demos, I often end up using the filler words, and listening to the recordings later is painful. The rehearsed parts of the presentation go smoothly, but as soon as I ...
May 15, 2023•29 min
In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: My architect is too busy with his kids! His kids have had a lot of school and medical issues over the last few months and he’s ended up flexing a lot to take care of them. This causes meetings to get rescheduled or scheduled far out in the future, which is contributing to timeline delays on some large projects that need more attention. I don’t want to be rude and insist that he put the company above his family, but he needs to be driving ...
May 08, 2023•26 min
In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I work at a startup that makes embedded devices and the software that runs on them. Everyone on the tech team does both. We recently hired someone to lead the tech team to give the CTO more time for other duties. My new boss is incredibly experienced with hardware design and embedded systems and has been in the industry for a long time (40+ years). However, they are not familiar with modern software practices like version control. They wi...
May 01, 2023•29 min
In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I work for a startup with a distributed team. Recently one of our clients experienced a production outage. As a small startup, we do not have an on-call rotation, and teams usually resolve issues during business hours. However, during this particular incident, most of my colleagues were on annual leave due to an Easter break, leaving only 10 out of 70 engineers available to assist. Although none of these 10 engineers were part of the team...
Apr 24, 2023•31 min
In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: My manager finally exploded. They screamed and insulted our whole team because one teammate had a 4 day delay on a 2 week task. Our manager Theo (fake name) was recently promoted and now on top of managing our team of 7 engineers, they also manage 2 other managers with 6 engineers each. I have noticed that Theo is under a lot of stress and as one of the two senior engineers in my team I tried to support him with planning and organization ...
Apr 17, 2023•32 min
In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I’m not a software engineer, so you can stop reading here if you like ;-). I listen to this show every week as the soft skills you discuss are just as applicable to my role as an electronics engineer. I have 5 years of experience and in my opinion, the right level of competency to step in to a senior role. I recently started a new job and I’ve been encouraged by my boss to be more proactive in taking on senior work so I can be considered ...
Apr 10, 2023•28 min
In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Hi, have you ever been through a technical interview and bombed a question? I did, and it feels awful, especially when the question was easy but I couldn’t focus due to time pressure and stress. Do you have any tips for dealing with interview anxiety, and get rid of the bitter feeling if the interview goes bad? Thanks! A listener Dustin asks, Do tech companies or recruiters dig into our individual backgrounds during the hiring process? ...
Apr 03, 2023•33 min
In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I am a senior engineer looking to make staff. Every week at my one on one I ask my manager what I can do to improve and always receive the answer “keep doing what you are doing”, but when I receive my performance review, I don’t receive top grade or promotion and there are listed areas of improvement. How should I feel about this and what should I do? I’m a software group manager for a medium sized applied research organization that deals...
Mar 27, 2023•30 min
In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Hey Dave and Jamison, long time listener of the show. looking to get your advice on dealing with guilt at work. Lately, I’ve found myself in a lot of situations of having to deal with bugs/incompleteness after pushing out a feature. It’s not my intention to be careless and I do feel like I’m giving it my 100% but there seems to keep being thing after thing that I’m not catching. It’s impossible to sweep these things under the rug when you...
Mar 20, 2023•24 min
In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Our small team where I work as a senior software engineer has a new engineering manager. They don’t trust me at all and verify simple technical things like how git rebase works, in the middle of meeting calls. I feel micro managed. Calling me on slack (slack huddle) without prior notice breaks me out of my flow. Recently they called an “Architecture meeting” and ended up talking about 2 spaces vs 4 spaces and other trivial stuff. I just f...
Mar 13, 2023•29 min
In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I recently applied for a job for a great company. The interview went well until we talked compensation. I said I expected to get a pay raise for changing jobs, but it seems that they can only offer me as much as I already have. I have never negotiated salary before. With my current job (which was my first) I happily accepted what they offered and we have had regular bumps without negotiations. Although I am really interested in the job, I...
Mar 06, 2023•28 min
In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I have around 14 years of experience and was recently promoted to a Head of Engineering role. I am now leading an engineering department of around 75 people. I’ve become increasingly ‘hands off’ with coding, and it’s been at least 2-3 years since I wrote code regularly. My role is completely hands off technically. I’m questioning whether this is the right role for me. I want be more hands on, but I worry my skills are now so rusty that I’...
Feb 27, 2023•27 min
In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I’m a senior front end engineer at a medium sized tech company. During the good times of limitless tech growth, a common way for engineers to grow our “impact” (an important criteria at many companies for promotion) was to find ways to lead/manage more people, whether this was becoming a manager and having more direct reports, or becoming a tech lead and mentoring more people, especially interns and junior engineers. Now, with many compan...
Feb 20, 2023•28 min
In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: A listener named Mike asks, I’ve been offered an Engineering Management position at a company I previously worked for. The team is very small and composed of juniors and mid-level developers. The role is also completely new and because of the size and experience of the team there is some expectation that the manager will also have a fair amount of involvement in PR reviews and likely also writing some code. Is this common? Do you feel lik...
Feb 13, 2023•19 min
In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Hello Dave and Jamison, thanks for your great work. Your podcast has the bizarre magical property of making me look forward to long drives. Keep it up! I have been feeling anxiety over losing my job to AI, especially after the all the ChatGPT stuff from a few months back. I know that it definitely isn’t flawless but I know that this technology will just keep improving as time goes on. I am a software engineer with 2 years of experience. I...
Feb 06, 2023•32 min
In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I am an American student finishing my undergraduate degree in computer science in the Midwest this semester. I am concerned about the economic climate of the technology industry. I am doing my second internship at a major technology company this summer (Microsoft). After that I will go to graduate school and try to ride out the storm. I have applied nearly a dozen programs including one year and two year masters programs, and even a few P...
Jan 30, 2023•28 min
