In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I’m a junior software engineer who has been placed in charge of a handful of graduates and interns who have joined my team. The project is fairly technical. For the first two weeks, the new starters were pair programming. That went well, and after talking to each new starter they were eager to start working individually. We’re one month in and I’m concerned about the performance of one of the engineers, “Morgan” (fake name). Morgan has co...
Mar 18, 2024•32 min
In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Listener Jim asks, I am currently a senior software engineer in a well funded (but not profitable yet) startup. I am highly effective and well regarded, to the point where the tech lead also comes to me with questions and always takes my technical input onboard. I also get along very well with the rest of the team and with my manager. I am confident that I am in a good position to bargain for a decent pay bump, however there’s a chance I ...
Mar 11, 2024•31 min
In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: How do you mentor a junior-level contractor? My company has been hiring a lot of contractors lately. Sometimes they hire out a full team form the contracting shop to build a particular feature. Other times, it’s an individual developer, but with the same general mandate: implement some specific set of features from our backlog over x number of months, then move on to the next project somewhere else. Generally this happens when we have ext...
Mar 04, 2024•28 min
In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Listener Davide says, I have a lot of ideas for significantly improving manufacturing processes, but management wants us to focus on business “priorities”. These are fun tasks such as making sure part numbers are replicated in two disconnected systems that have no way of talking to each other. Makes getting Master’s degree feel like time very well spent. I end up setting aside some time and doing the legwork for my improvements in secret,...
Feb 26, 2024•26 min
In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I’ve recently started a new Gig as a Senior Developer/Tech Lead at a company where we are our own clients, using the software we develop in-house. I’m encountering a bit of a hiccup, though. Our product owner, is primarily focused on support and doesn’t provide formal Acceptance Criteria. This means I spend a lot of time sending follow-up emails to confirm our discussions, drafting these criteria myself, and handling the management of boa...
Feb 19, 2024•36 min
In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Listener Bobby ForgedRequest asks One of my coworker, who is the nicest, most humble person I’ve ever met, is about twice as productive as I am! They’re super-uber productive! They close about 2-3x as many tickets as I do during the same sprint. For reference, I’m a software eng II and they’re a senior dev. Their work is very solid too, and they’re not just selecting easy, 1 point tickets to pad their stats. How do you cope with a super s...
Feb 12, 2024•31 min
In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: My team are about 4 months into transitioning from a scrum/kanban way of working to a more traditional scrum/sprint way of working. I feel like our scrum master is “weaponising” some of the scrum practices in order to show up weak points and failures in the team, rather than working with the team to ease us through the transition and make gradual improvements. In private conversations with me and some other trusted developers (lol jk I cl...
Feb 05, 2024•29 min
In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: NK: Hi, I am starting a SWE internship at big tech company in a few weeks. Given the current state of the market, getting a return offer has gotten harder. I have a few software internships under my belt at this point but I am looking to excel in this internship. My goal is to get a full time offer with high pay from this internship. What are the soft skills that are specifically important for interns? This is probably applicable to junio...
Jan 29, 2024•27 min
In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: We are a team of under 10 people who provide technical services to other departments of our organization. We use a tool that is built by my boss to supplement our work but it is crucial for the team to do actual work. The boss maintains it all by themselves and nobody is familiar with its code. The boss is going to retire in a year or two, nobody wants to learn the code of that tool and the team can’t do much without the boss as we are mo...
Jan 22, 2024•27 min
In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Hey guys! I’m a young engineer in a specialized area of infrastructure. I’m pretty good at what I do, and I’ve been through some leadership development programs, so I’ve advanced to a “Staff” role quickly, just based on observing the age of my peers. Tech titles are completely mysterious to me, so I’m wondering - how much “up” is there from where I am? What’s the top of the IC ladder? Do ICs ever become executives? The idea of being a man...
Jan 15, 2024•39 min
In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I’m a backend engineer at a large non-public company. I noticed a bunch of our emails and website riddled with typos. I can not claim that it is metrics impacting or impacting business, so I get that teams always deprioritize, but the overall feel just irks me. Many of these come from a CMS I don’t have access too, so it’s not like I could offer to help with code even if I wanted. When things like this are not in your space, any advice on...
Jan 08, 2024•32 min
In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: The Sleepy Engineer says, Hey SSE, how do you deal with drowsiness? I notice that sometimes when I am very tired at my desk and end up eyes closed head drooped down as I work which I imagine is a bad look for anyone passing by. During this time, I would either get coffee or stand up and walk somewhere which is a temporary fix but ultimately I am still very tired. I know in very few really big company HQs there might be a sleeping quarters...
Jan 01, 2024•42 min
In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Hey guys, love the show. Not sure if its really a question or more of a confession. I’m an individual contributor at a software company with a few thousand employees. A lot of professional books/training courses I encountered over the years talk about the importance of positively acknowledging your employees/reports/team members when they do a good job. Most of them say that this sort of praise and other immaterial motivation is more impo...
Dec 25, 2023•33 min
In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Hello Dave and Jamison, I wanted to say thank you for your podcast. It’s been a great wealth of information and comic relief. Can we bring back the guitar intros? I work in the technology arm of a large corporation. There are no younger engineers. I am one of the youngest at just shy of 30 (my first tech job after going back to school). I receive praise for my eagerness to learn and grow and how much I try to engage with the org. I feel l...
Dec 18, 2023•32 min
In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I feel like I’m stuck. I’m in a senior/lead position technically called an SRE, but I find myself doing all kinds of cleanup work that should instead be spread across teams. My suggestions for automating toil and cleaning up tech debt fall on deaf ears until some principal engineer decides a couple of months down the line some problem is worth solving (then it’s urgent!!1). I’ve experienced this at a few companies now and see some pattern...
Dec 11, 2023•27 min
In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Hello! Thank you for your podcast, I definitely find the episodes to be helpful. Lately I’ve been struggling with attention to detail. I just forget to do simple things like run pre-commit hooks before I put in a PR or before merging a PR. I went through a pretty bad layoff when my old company went bankrupt a few months back and now I am at a new role where I really like everyone I work with. The engineers expect checked-in code to pass t...
Dec 04, 2023•28 min
In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: A listener named Jay asks, Over the past eight years I’ve been promoted from Software Dev to Team Lead and then to Engineering Manager. After two years as an EM, it helped me a lot financially, I like what I do and I think I’m doing it really well. However, I have two concerns. First, I love programming and now I don’t have any time other than in my limited free time to do it. I can feel my coding skills atrophying. Second, I’m worried th...
Nov 27, 2023•26 min
In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I recently started the interviewing for a senior engineering manager role at a fairly prestigious, but not huge (maybe 30-50 engineers) tech company. The job description heavily emphasized the idea of leading as a peer as opposed to just relying on the EM title. I love this approach, but the lead interviewer then disclosed that they don’t want EMs writing production code. This seems like a contradiction. Am I naive in thinking so? I certa...
Nov 20, 2023•37 min
In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: There aren’t a lot of engineering management growth resources in my company. It’s a relatively small company with about 50 engineers. My manager doesn’t have time to properly mentor me. And I’m not sure I would want him to because I feel like his advice isn’t always the best. Where can I go for management mentorship or other learning resources? Is it worth exploring non-engineering managers on other teams? Or leaning more on my peers? Or ...
Nov 13, 2023•32 min
In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: My company is doing performance reviews. While writing my self-review, I was shocked by how much I had accomplished in the last 6 months. I’d led our org to adopt multiple new technologies and supported other teams in adopting them, to great effect. But looking back, I wish I could trade half the accomplishments on my self-review for time spent taking better care of myself and my partner and kids. I’m not working crazy hours; I work a pre...
Nov 06, 2023•33 min
In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Listener Ashleigh asks, I’m a mid-level developer at a small company with a non-technical manager. After several months working on migrating our users from a legacy system to our new system, our non-technical business analyst discovered our current system re-uses lots of code from the legacy system. The BA immediately escalated their “concerns” about this to our manager. This quickly resulted in a group message from our manager to the BA,...
Oct 30, 2023•38 min
In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: “Hi! Love the show, long time listener. So an architect noticed an issue with credentials embedded into request body being logged. I had planned to resolve that, and someone already had done so for another instance. I took a day or two to figure out how to fix it globally, and even tied it into another filtering we did. That would mean one list of sensitive data patterns to maintain – that we already had, and don’t need to worry about whi...
Oct 23, 2023•36 min
In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I’ve managed an ML team in a small company for ~2 years now. I created an 8 person team from scratch and I’m super proud of the team I’ve built. However, I miss being an engineer and wish I could spend more time coding. I was considering asking for a role change to IC, but out of nowhere my manager offered to me a promotion to head of platform engineering. I would have 3 engineering teams reporting to me - about 30 people altogether. I ha...
Oct 16, 2023•30 min
In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Hi, I’m a senior software engineer at a big tech company, where I’ve been employed for precisely one year. So far, the feedback I’ve received has been overwhelmingly positive. My manager has even mentioned that her superiors are impressed with my performance, and my colleagues have shared their positive feedback as well. While I’ve been told that I’m doing exceptionally well and may be on track for a promotion in my upcoming year-end revi...
Oct 09, 2023•29 min
In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I applied and was hired for a 100% telecommute position. Recently, the company has mandated all employees near an office switch to a hybrid schedule. I’m looking at an hour or more round trip and the yearly cost of parking is several thousand dollars. The company also announced to their investors that massive layoffs will be coming due to the economy and redundancies due to a large merger. I’m relatively new to the company and left my pre...
Oct 02, 2023•36 min
In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I work as a Software Engineering Manager at the European office of a US company. Recently, many of my colleagues successfully obtained US visas for an upcoming business trip. When it was my turn, everyone said it would be a piece of cake because our company is well-known. However, to my surprise, I was rejected during the visa interview. Now I won’t be able to join my colleagues (including my direct reports). I’m concerned they might perc...
Sep 25, 2023•34 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: Morning! I will cut straight to the chase: I’m burned out and tired. At the same time, I’m aiming to get a promotion during the next cycle. My manager is aware of the latter, but not the former. Should I tell them? I suspect that I would get a lighter work load and less responsibilities, but it ...
Sep 18, 2023•30 min
In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Love the show, you guys have saved my bacon more times than I can count! I interviewed at an organization for a Senior Engineering role, but the interview went so well, they actually offered me the option to accept a Staff role! I definitely didn’t feel ready for that, but I accepted as a way to stretch and challenge myself. The company has been through some internal churn and re-arranging for most of my time there, and I bounced between ...
Sep 11, 2023•41 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: I joined a startup at the peak of the tech bubble which sadly means that my equity was based on the company’s valuation which was very over-valued. To corroborate this, the company has not grown much in terms of users or revenue. The company also had a layoff just like many startups. As even pub...
Sep 04, 2023•37 min
In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Kate asks, Hi Dave and Jamison! I’m in a situation where my predecessor, Jane, was a super helpful “Mary Poppins” type. She did anything and everything beyond her role for the sake of being a team player. I was told she even went as far as providing homemade snacks for meetings. I, on the other hand, am a one trick pony; I only do the tasks I’m paid for. I’m often indirectly compared to her and worry I’ll be seen as an inadequate despite ...
Aug 28, 2023•34 min
