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.
Episode 333: Unsure about management and I shall decline the offer
In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I have been at my job for 5 years since I graduated college. I love who I work with and what I do. My question is more about the future. I have a family now and I love my work/life balance and limited meetings as an IC. I used to confidently say “I want to be a manager and eventually a CTO.” Now I am less sure. I would love to help people achieve their goals, but I love coding and do not want to give that up. The thing I love the most outside of coding is bringing engineers together. I am in charge of a monthly meeting for BE engineers to share what they work on. I am good at getting engineers to show up to events. I have hosted other demos and events and potlucks that even the most quiet, introverted engineers show up and have fun. What options are there for engineers who love coding and want to have a bigger person impact, but are not 100% sold on being a people manager? I recently interviewed at a large tech company. I did three interviews at the remote “onsite” and did well in two of them but flunked the system design one. Since I was interviewing for a mid level position, I feel like I missed some things that are inexcusable. I’m a very growth and career oriented person so I’ve been doing my due diligence and have been heavily studying system design concepts since. I haven’t received a response yet but I expect a rejection and I do think it would be fair, given my SD performance. However, if they miraculously come back to me with an offer, I would decline it, because this would mean their hiring bar is low and that’s not the level of colleagues I’d like to work with. I know this sounds very self righteous and so I’d like to hear your thoughts on it, since you guys are always very insightful. Thanks! Show Notes https://thesystemsthinker.com/the-ladder-of-inference/
Episode 332: Layoff + baby survival and 18-year-old CS graduate
In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: My company recently had a big layoff - about 40% of engineers are gone. My job is safe (for now). About 6 months ago, I was promoted to a “Staff”-ish position that I’ve been really enjoying and looks great on my resume if I hold it for a good length of time. Besides just enjoying my job, I’ve just moved house and I have a baby on the way, so I’m highly motivated to have some stability (and get paid parental leave.) My gut says give it the 9 months to see how it all plays out - but my brain thinks my gut is an idiot. Interviewing while taking care of a newborn for the first time feels like an incredibly difficult thing to do and the job market may not be getting better. Do you have any advice for how to navigate this situation? Big fan of the pod! How should I approach being slightly younger than my peers at the workplace? I graduate in December with my bachelor’s in CS but just turned 18 a couple of months ago. I’m actively interviewing at big tech companies and plan to start working as soon as I graduate. Should I avoid the topic or would it be completely inconsequential for my peers to be aware of my age? I’m looking to move up the ranks quickly, and can imagine many developers wouldn’t love knowing their manager is in their early 20s. For what it’s worth as well, I haven’t been open about being slightly younger in my university setting, as early on I noticed professors didn’t respect my contributions as much when they were aware of my age. What’s your take?
Episode 331: Prickly ticket and title downgrade
In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Listener ninjamonkey says, 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. 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. 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. 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. 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? I work for a small startup. I was the first employee other than the 2 founders. 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”. I have recruited 2 of the 3 new developers, and have trained both of them and got them up to speed. At first I was pleased with the progression and was keen to grow into the position, and told the founders so. Since then, I have changed my mind, I don’t want to be the lead - due to the following: 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 I don’t want to quit my job (just yet… its a comin though). I have actually discussed the above points with them, but I know these 2 founders will never change their ways. How do I tell them I just want to go back to being an Individual Contributor like my Employment contract states?
Episode 330: Mixed signals and not ready for senior
In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Dan asks, Hey friends! How do you get ahead when your manager gives you mixed signals? I was told there would be lots of opportunities to work on exciting new projects when I interviewed for this role. After six months this hasn’t really happened and I’m beginning to get concerned it never will. Half the team is working on ‘new things’ while the rest of us are working on maintenance work. This is meant to be rotated but my colleagues tell me this isn’t the case. I’ve asked my manager in our one on ones if I can work on the next piece of new work but have got some odd responses. They told me if I want to work on better projects I should look in my managers calendar and invite myself to anything that looks good. This seems bizarre. Is it normal to lurk your managers calendar and just turn up at meetings that ‘look good’? I’ve worked at small but mature companies for about 3 years now, and I feel that I’m soon coming to the point where you would expect me to be a senior engineer given my years of experience (which I’m aiming for!). I’ve struggled a lot to come up with ideas to add value to the team outside of the standard sprint tickets. I know these things aren’t “required” in the job scope, but often with teams at smaller companies, I worry my manager might think I’m not ready for a senior role if I’m not actively thinking outside the box about the team’s goals beyond the tickets I’ve been assigned. I do have a lot of initiative and independence, but the thing is I’m just not very creative. As much as I love tech, it’s difficult for me to dream of non-trivial ideas that would actually make an impact. I feel that if I want to progress in my career, I’m going to have to get better at seeing the bigger picture. What tips might you have?
Episode 329: Falling behind and can't get a management job
In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I’m a few months into my first full time job, and the learning curve is immense. I feel like I’m falling behind and not keeping up with my work, as well as not understanding things that should be simple. I often feel I am wasting time on a lot of work that I do. How do I know if this is just an anxious feeling, or if I am legitimately falling behind? I am currently a staff engineer and have a career goal to move into management. I have been with my current employer for 15+ years and positions to promote into just don’t come up. The tech i work with is not very technical, there is no coding and its incredibly specialized. I have applied and interviewed for manager positions outside of my team/company and i get the same feedback that i am well qualified, but there is someone with previous manager experience that beats me. I see it being forever if not impossible to get a manager position due to people needing to retire etc. If i go to another engineering position i feel like i would need to start over in a junior spot. What other options do i have.
Episode 328: Fear of sudden firing and reducing the lottery factor
In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I’ve joined a team at a small startup and our team lead has mentioned in passing a few times about a developer they used to have but had to let go. Not in a malicious way but just as a matter of fact when it’s come up organically. Now it’s eating at me because I’m not sure if I’ll ever go down that path and I want to know what they did so I can avoid the same fate. I’ve always been a top performer at other companies but now I’m wondering if this would be the one place where standards are higher than what I’m used to. I really like it here and don’t want to lose my spot. Realistically my fear isn’t that I’d get fired in my first six months but more that I would fail to respond to constructive feedback over the course of a year and end up getting let go in the same manner. Do you have any advice? Hello! Long time lurker, first time question server. I am an intermediate software engineer and I work on a team that has a really tenured senior engineer. His attention is often required for a lot of things and the team can sometimes get blocked by him being pulled into many different directions. As someone that is trying to grow into a senior engineer myself, what are some ways to take some of the load off of him and improve the bus factor?
Episode 327: Remote with onsite team and undercover refactor
In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I have recently joined a team as a fully remote member, with majority of my team mates located in one city and meet in office every week. My manager wants me to work on earn trust and drive consensus, to keep me in track for promotion. Being remote, I am unable to get through my team mates effectively, when compared to my previous work settings where it was all on-site. Any tips for me? Hi Jamison and Dave! I’m a long time listener and I really enjoy the podcast. I have a small question for you two: My coworker recently asked for my opinion on how to write some code and then implemented it a different way. They knew I wasn’t a fan of their implementation and even went out of their way to not get it reviewed by me. Now we’re left with this shared code that stinks. Their code works but it’s clunkier then it should be and it’s bothering me. Should I fix it when they’re on leave and guise it as a refactoring that “needed to be done” or should I leave it alone and try to learn some lesson from this. The other option is to quit my job but other this small hiccup - it’s been going ok here. Show Notes This episode is sponsored by the Compiler podcast, from Red Hat: https://link.chtbl.com/compiler?sid=podcast.softskillsengineering
Episode 326: Good perks, bad code and paper shredder suggestion box
In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: About a year ago I joined what it seemed to be the best company ever. It’s a pretty big, pretty successful company which has been fully remote for decades. They have a great work culture where async written communication is the norm. There’s no scrum, no micro management, no crazy and absurd planning/guessing meetings, etc. Of course we also have some pressure to ship product, but nothing out of the ordinary. Salary is good, work life balance is awesome, I like my team a lot and overall people are awesome too, so this sounds like paradise to me. However, on the technical side, this is the worst careless outdated bug-ridden untested unmaintainable inscrutable ide-freezing mindblowing terrible wordpress codebase I’ve ever seen in my life. No linters, no formatters, the repository is so big you can’t even open the entire thing on your editor and you need to open just the folders you’re touching. The development environment is “scp files to a production server taken out of the load balancer”. Zero tests, manual QA by a team mate before merging, outdated tooling, outdated processes, css overriden 10 times because nobody wants to modify any existing rule, security incidents hidden under the rug every now and then and the worst part: any attempt to improve this gets rejected. My team laughed at me when I tried to write an acceptance test in my early days. Months later I can see how ridiculous it looks now I have a better grasp of the technical culture over here. I’m towards the second half of my career. So “learning” and “staying up to date” with the trends is not my priority. I really enjoy this company and love working here until the moment I open my code editor. I’m seriously thinking on starting to look for another job, but I have this feeling that wherever I go the code might be slightly better but the perks will be worse. Now I understand why we have these perks, otherwise nobody would be here I guess. Have you been in this situation, or maybe the opposite one? Not sure what to do at this point. Thanks! My team got a new manager about 6 months ago. While I’ve had managers all across the spectrum of weird quirks in my time as an engineer, this person has one that’s new for me, and I’m not sure how to handle it. He operates in a very top-down fashion, which isn’t unusual. What is unusual, however, is that he will insist that everyone on the team give him feedback on a given issue…and then inevitably just proceed with whatever he had decided beforehand. I take giving feedback very seriously, and spend a lot of time getting my thoughts in order when I’m asked to give input on something. Having someone request that and then immediately throw my input in the proverbial paper shredder is frustrating and a waste of my time, especially since the team and company are growing rapidly and there are a lot of these kinds of decisions that have to be made. How should I approach this? I don’t want to keep spending time and effort on feedback that’s going to be ignored, but I also don’t know a polite corporate-speak equivalent of “please don’t ask my opinion on this when we both know you’ve already made up your mind”.
Episode 325: Surprise PIP and salary leak
In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I had a boss once who I was intimidated by. I did not know I was poor performing until I got a performance improvement plan. It was such a bad experience, I still feel anxiety from that day. Instead of pointing out how I can grow from my mistakes, all they did was point out my mistakes and the things I apparently was not able to deliver. And then they proceeded with reading from a pre-written list of steps to take in order to improve, right from the paper and not looking at me. It did not even feel like a two-way conversation. I felt mistreated and disrespected. I’m glad I grew from it though. I wasn’t really the person to quit when it comes to facing tough situations. I ended up staying for another year and getting almost promoted before I quit to move on to a higher paying job. It was a very redeeming process I suppose. I have been at a small startup for 3 years. We are still in startup mode, underpaid and long hours. We have two developer teams: Team A and Team B. Team A slowly quit one by one. Team B is still here, including me. After my team lead resigned I was promoted to team lead. But… one week later someone from management shared with me, I believe by accident, a file with both teams’ salaries. I was shocked, really shocked. My team, Team B, has been paid less than Team A from the beginning even though we deliver more value. Also they didn’t even try to match my salary to the previous team lead. What should I do now? Go and ask for more money? Tell them I know? Talk to the rest of the team? I cannot unsee this. I don’t want to leave because I like the project and want to observe how well our technical decisions work out after several years.
Episode 324: Understanding accents and mega soft skills
In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I’m currently a junior engineer. I often struggle to understand speakers with accents. I became aware of this when I listened to a coworker in a meeting and barely understanding anything, but when I asked my other colleagues, it seems they got it completely. I know how to handle this in relaxed situations, but how do I handle it when the stakes are higher? (i.e. talking to higher levels and not wanting to ask too many questions based on my inability to hear them, interviews, …). How should I prepare to respond to these situations productively? Hey fellas, As a backend dev of 3 YOE, I have what I would describe as average technical skills and much stronger than average soft skills. This has been reflected in my feedback across all of my jobs and while the feedback has always been very positive, almost all of it relates to my interpersonal and communication skills, as opposed to my technical chops. I’m wondering what’s the long term outlook for this is? I frequently receive more accolades and recognition from leadership than my colleagues whose technical skills and code output are objectively far superior to mine, simply because I communicate better and am more charismatic Given management’s favorable view of me, I have been ascending the ranks quicker than is warranted, beating out those that are much more qualified from a technical perspective. While I am able to complete the work that’s asked of me, I can’t help but wonder when I will stall as a dev and no longer be able to meet expectations, nor is it really fair to anyone involved. At this point, I can’t help but feel that I would be able to contribute more in a position that utilize my skillset more favorably, but I’m unsure what roles would be a good fit for someone like myself. Thanks guys!
Episode 323: Shopping offers and returning equipment
In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I’m planning to leave my job purely because of low compensation. I like my growth in my current company - but low compensation than what market is offering is quite a mental hiccup in my regular work (yep! I’m slowly becoming one of the quiet quitters). I’m thinking of going to my manager with my new offer and ask him to match it. Do retention offers actually work? As mangers yourselves, how would you want me to approach a retention discussion? I don’t want my manager to make my life hell under the pretense of “Oh he’ll leave in a year” if I do decide to stay after taking the matching offer. Love the show - pretty much my single source of wisdom for all my behavioural interviews xD I was recently let go from a company. They said they would send me a shipping label so that I could return the hardware. I didn’t hear back from them for a week. A few days later a label came in for the laptop, but not for the dock or the two monitors they also sent. I did not enjoy my experience there and I’m feeling resentful at having to pester them so that I can get what I need to send them back their hardware. What is my due diligence on the score? I don’t even like the monitors.
Episode 322: Cover blown and no one cares
In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Listener Olexander asks, I was a tech lead on some relatively known project since the beginning for more than a year. I made several trade-offs with technologies and wrong decisions. I participate in some generic Slack organisations and met several users of my product. I haven’t told them that I was connected to implementing the project but sometimes shared some insights on how the product is tested and asked opinions about some of features of the product in comparison to the competitors. Now there is a person who continuously critiques the product. Sometimes the criticism is valid but sometimes is’s just a rant. How can I influence that person without blowing my cover? Listener Kieran asks, Hi guys! Loving the podcast from down under. I’m working part time as a dev while I complete my software engineering degree. It’s been fun, but there are almost no processes in place for development and not many other devs seem to care about improvement. Although I am the most inexperienced here I feel some of the devs do not care about the quality of the work as I often have to refactor some of their code due to it being buggy, slow and undocumented (still using var in javascript). I’ve talked to management about improving our standards. However, they brushed me off saying yeah some of the developers are stubborn. They are not brushing me off because I lack technicality as Ive been given an end user app as a solo project. How should I go about encouraging the team to improve our processes?
Episode 321: Politely, no and participation at scale
In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: How do you politely tell a reviewer politely, “Your suggestion is stupid. I will not do it” when you get stupid review comments. If you don’t do it then the pull request can’t move forward because of unresolved issues. If you do it, then you’re compromising your design you’ve worked weeks on for some fly-by random comment. A few months back, I volunteered as co-facilitator for my department’s NodeJS Guild meeting. At first, it was a struggle to get people to present. But I tried to lower the bar more and more until it was easy. I asked for 10-15m presentations, and eventually I realized people are happier “Kicking off a discussion” than they are “giving a presentation”. All the listeners are more engaged too, at least after the first 2 meetings doing this. Now I want people to share half-baked code, or problems they are struggling with, as part of our discussions. I want people to be able to be vulnerable. If we don’t collaborate on common problems until we feel they’re polished and won’t reflect badly on us, then we will all waste time solving the same problems. I also want this to scale across 15-25 small scrum teams. I think success could be my demise–if we have good discussions, then more people will come, but people won’t want to be as vulnerable with a larger group. In general, I think my own scrum team is very open and vulnerable to each other, but the remote work in the deparment has created distance. I want to help create more collaboration on similar problems and solutions. What would you do to keep this going, and improve it?
Episode 320: Hot and less hot and no privileges
In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I seem to be very hot and cold about how I feel about my job. Some days I hate it and think about quitting, but other days, I feel it’s not that bad and can stick around a little longer. The reason for it seems to change depending on the day, but a lot of it seems to center around the people around me (i.e. developers who need me to Google for them, business people who don’t understand how to provide requirements), but sometimes I can’t tell whether it’s an attitude problem that will follow me anywhere or if it’s just time to leave. It’s a relatively small company, so I feel like I would be betraying my manager who has invested a lot in me if I decided to leave so suddenly. I’d like to give my manager a chance to address my concerns, but I’m afraid to sour our relationship if I come across as a complainer. I’m also not confident there’s any solutions to my current frustrations because it seems to be a company-wide issue. How do I make sense of all of what I’m feeling? I really like my company but their project management is atrocious, ad hoc, and “old school.” They’re not giving me privileges to configure Jira in ways that allow me to get stuff done. Is there an effective way to convince my CTO that I’m not going to screw up our secure systems or do I just need to find a new job?
Episode 319: Steve's babysitter and these uncertain times
In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: My company wants several complex applications rewritten. “Steve” wrote the original applications, and has been assigned to do the rewrite. There is very little documentation on the original applications, and the rewrite will take intimate understanding of the existing code and new requirements. Management assigned me to work with Steve. They warned me that since we have started working remotely after covid, Steve has been hard to get a hold of and not meeting deadlines. My job is to keep Steve on task. When I ask Steve a question he will respond “I’ll work on it tomorrow” or “I’ll have to look in to that.” Then I never hear from him again. If I tell management I haven’t been able to get a hold of him, they will contact him, then he will contact me asking “What can I help you with?” Again, all his answers will be “I’ll have to look into that.” Occasionally Steve will report to me that he has finished a task. But because he did it without me, I am even more confused about what needs done or how to do it. I feel like my job has turned in to tattling on Steve. I am afraid I’m going to be labeled a whiner and that this project will harm my career growth. Over the last 2 weeks my solution has been to just ignore the project. Management hasn’t checked in with me, but I’m sitting on a ticking time bomb. What should I do? How to keep our sanity in times of uncertainty? I’ve recently changed jobs and despite the facts shows that I shouldn’t be worried, I can see my judgement is blurred by the fear of getting laid off even there’s no sign of it and I fear I would fulfill the prophecy!