Soft Skills Engineering

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Listener Random Listener asks, You guys talk a lot about externalities, which helped me understand a lot about how my manager works. He wants to do things fast, but he does not follow good and standardized processes, even the ones he tries to push onto us. This adds a lot of work for us because now his mess becomes our mess. How can I give him this feedback in way he will both understand and not feel resentment? Thanks Hello. I am individual contributor and have been with this team for 2 years. About a year ago a manager and a lead joined the team to fill in the growing positions. They came in with their preferences for code design, architecture, and ideologies. But they were all different from how we worked before. Their ways are not bad, but they add unnecessary complexities, taking away energy from just doing my pick-up - code - ship way. I shared my concerns, but they never get accepted as they just want to exercise their manager and lead powers. My teammates share similar opinions as me. Is it a worthy fight showing resistance to these changes or should I just suck it up adapt to their preferences? Each time I show any bit of resistance, it is being taken by them personally to their ego and discussions go on for tens of minutes and ends with either of us pissed off. Won’t quit my job for these petty people. Should I just say yes, adapt my work for good or bad and blame them when things don’t work? Do I even need to care about these workflow and operational changes as an individual contributor? Would there be any benefit resisting bad decisions at the cost of my mental peace? Thanks. You guys make me look forward to Mondays.

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Hey Dave and Jamison. I don’t know what to do with the amount of the AI slop I have to review and I’m getting close to burnout. I have a lot of context on my project, so my colleagues see me as a point of reference. Additionally, at a past job, I was a tech lead and could easily cover for TL if I wanted to (which I don’t) and I feel like the TL of my project and some of my teammates are taking advantage of this. Every day I receive a lot of low quality documents to review. For example, our TL creates sloppy project planning documents and tickets and sends them to me for comments. Since they contain so many errors, sometimes including obvious security or data compatibility issues, or just text that is unrelated to the project, I end up basically rewriting everything. The same thing happens with code reviews. Some code is obviously AI-generated slop with lots of duplication and errors, that in many cases misses acceptance criteria or has doc strings filled with buzzwords and adjectives. I usually add a lot of comments per PR and I know the author sends them directly to their LLM and then pastes back a verbose answer. As a result, I end up in endless conversation loops. I’ve tried talking to my colleagues one-on-one, explaining how much work they are delegating to me. I’ve asked them to review their own work first and explained how exhausted I am, hoping they would show some compassion. But nothing has changed, because everyone seems to be in survival mode in this era of layoffs and I feel like they have become comfortable with me doing their work. I’ve also tried talking about this in retrospectives and tech team meetings, but the TL and tech directors did not support me because AI usage is encouraged. Instead, they said that they really appreciate my feedback because I have so much experience and thanked me for doing such excellent code reviews. I also end up making most of the project’s tech decisions, I am the sole contributor to the project’s documentation and my vacation is mapped out in the roadmap as low delivery period. 😢 I like the project and I’m terrified to switch jobs in these times. But every day, it gets harder and harder to comment on obvious slop written without care without sounding rude or sarcastic. Sometimes I find myself still angry after work. Is it too late to set the boundaries?

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Listener Jame ain’t no dance asks,! 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! Can I tell a coworker to stop using Claude? 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! And the code sucks! misleading docstrings, overly complicated functions, and weird places where the AI has convinced them that something needs to be backwards. 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. 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?

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: 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. 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. 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. Listener bootersket says, 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. 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”. 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?

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Hello Dave and Jamison! 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. The strange part is that I’ve tried applying across the whole spectrum: Roles that would be a step up, where I think I could do the job but haven’t held that exact title before Roles at roughly my current level, where I can honestly check almost every box in the job description Roles that would technically be a step down, but that I’d happily take and feel extremely confident I could do well 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? 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. 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? Would love to hear how you’d approach it from the other side of the hiring table. Dave and Jamison, Hit me with your dumbest, funniest, most brutally honest advice because I need it. 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. 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. 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?

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: 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. 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. 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. Many thanks to my favorite space lawyers, an anonymous listener. Hi! 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”. 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) 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?

This is a rerun of episode 331. 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?