Soft Skills Engineering

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: A listener named “Will angel answer my question?” asks, Hi, I recently joined a new company about 1.5 months ago. It is the technology arm of a family-owned business group that has existed for over 30 years, providing technology services to all the other companies in the group. After a one-week onboarding, I was assigned to a team. After 2–3 days, I still had no tasks, so I asked a coworker to pair program with me so I could learn more about the processes and continue learning. The task was easy, and we finished it in less than a day. For the next 2 days I did nothing, asked my boss for tasks but he just told me to wait. Two days later, we finally had a planning meeting, and they assigned me three tasks for the upcoming two weeks. I finished the first one in 25 minutes and other ones in not much more time. It has been like this ever since. I’m really enjoying all the free time, but I’m also feeling anxious that I may eventually be part of a layoff. Apparently, the company is doing well, and they’re hiring a lot of people. Should I ask my manager what’s going on? Maybe everyone on my team is pretending to work and going to the gym at 3 p.m.? What might be happening? What would you do? I’m a staff software engineer at a fully remote, 300-employee US SaaS startup. It was just announced that we are being acquired in an all-cash deal by a publicly traded tech company more than 10 times our size. I’ve been here for 8 years and absolutely love this job. Over my tenure, I’ve risen from a junior to a staff engineer, built critical customer-facing features, and developed internal tools used company-wide. I’ve also renegotiated my salary such that LinkedIn recruiters can rarely match it. While my stock options aren’t enough to let me retire early or fund Jamison’s yacht, I know I’m ludicrously lucky to be getting a six-figure payout. But what comes next? Leadership says we will operate as a standalone division for at least a few quarters, meaning no massive backend migrations immediately. However, I’ve never worked at a publicly traded company—only at consultancies and startups. My pessimistic expectation is that corporate bureaucracy will sanitize the culture I helped build. Should I lean in, try to hold on to some of the startup magic, and lead the inevitable integration work to ingratiate myself with the senior engineers at the parent company? Or should I take advantage of my golden handcuffs being unlocked and finally move on?

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Hi Dave & Jamison! I’ve been listening for almost a year now and have worked through nearly your entire back catalog in reverse. The podcast has genuinely helped me become a better engineer, so thank you! I’m two years into my software engineer career at a large infrastructure company. I was promoted to SWE II last year, and this year my manager told me she felt my work was promotion-worthy, but because I’d just been promoted and she had others on the team to consider, she wants to target me for next year’s cycle instead. She gave me a spot bonus and said she’d try to make up for it in my raise. I understand and appreciate the honesty, but I’m also a little disappointed because I’ve worked hard to hit every milestone on the roadmap she gave me, and career progression does matter to me. My question is: How should I navigate the next year? What should I focus my 1:1s on? Should I push for a mid-year promotion if that’s an option, or instead focus on building an undeniable case for next year? How would you approach this if you were in my shoes? Hey Dave and Jamison, Long time listener. First time question asker :). I recently joined a major tech company. Before this, I worked at a mid-sized company with about 200 engineers. In my old role, I built customer-facing products. The work was challenging and exciting, and I genuinely enjoyed it. I ended up moving to a new city to be closer to family and started looking for a job. The job search was brutal. Honestly, by the end of it, I would have accepted just about anything. Luckily, a major tech company extended an offer. The money was great, and I thought it would be a huge plus to have a major tech name on my resume. It is a fully remote role, but they did mention that they could go hybrid in the future. I knew ahead of time that the team built internal tools instead of customer-facing products. But after joining, I realized most of what we do is closer to operations than actual software engineering. I know I should have screened the team better. I was just so relieved to get a good offer from a top company that I accepted without thinking twice. I am not enjoying the work at all. I am not planning to quit immediately. However, I want to be ready to leave in about a year or earlier if they decide to lay us all off. I want to make sure I utilize my time here as best as possible. Do you have any suggestions on how I can best position myself for an internal transfer or an eventual external move? Also, I have been in this role for close to 2 months now. I did a 1-1 with the manager in my first week, but after that, have not had any 1-1s. He has not scheduled anything. I was thinking of scheduling it myself but not sure if that can be seen as too forward. Btw this is outside US, if that matters :) Thanks again for your advice and laughs.

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I work for a small software company on a team of about 7 or 8 engineers. I like working here. I like the people, the autonomy, the pay, my boss, and the stack among other things. I try to remind myself of this regularly so I don’t take it for granted. I’ve been here for about 2.5 years and would love to continue working here. Our CTO, like many, has become a big AI cowboy coder. Every few months, he vibe codes a new project and then decides to interrupt the full workloads that we have a limited number of engineers to do to hand his project off to be cleaned up, worked into the product, and solve all of the problems that remain once actually put into practice. This usually ends up going to a different engineer per project, who is then tied up with the CTO’s whims and is no longer available to do the work planned by product. Our EM knows this and knows the frustration and lost velocity, but what can he do? (rhetorical, not the question) Most recently, I was tasked with implementing some reporting dashboards he did into the product, but he specifically asked me to make it in such a way that he can continue to work on and add to because he can’t be bothered to run the actual product. This is very concerning to several of us. He has no clue what he’s writing or how bad it is. We’ve talked about perhaps making him do PRs, but a) who can make him, he’s the CTO, and b) he’ll have no clue what to do with PR pushback given that he has no clue what he wrote. And again, who can make him actually fix it if he asks us to rubber stamp it? (rhetorical, not the question) I’ve been listening to the show for years and I’ve talked to friends at other companies, so I know this is everywhere. Is it as everywhere as it seems? Is it worth finding a new place to work where the CTO isn’t running so rampant? As I stated before, I’d rather not leave, but if I talked about that as a concern, I don’t want it to sound like an ultimatum, even if maybe it is at some level. Is this just the new reality for us, or is there something that can be done? I am a senior software engineer at a big tech company. I live in central Europe but my team is in the US and I’m 9 hours ahead. I have 7:30 pm meetings and sometimes take an hour before and/or after this meeting to prep or follow up. Previously I slept in later and started later to deal with these meetings. However, now my daughter is starting kindergarten and I wake up early (5-6AM) to be with her, drop her off, etc. Now in the evening meetings my brain is fried and I can’t even articulate myself well. The next day I think about so many things I wish I had said in those meetings. I can’t quit as I make 160K right now and I would only be making 60-80K tops in my country and have some financial commitments. Relocation to the US is also not an option because I have kids and don’t want them to move. So far I have been skipping meetings and my manager has not expressed concern but I feel so detached from my team. I don’t even know what most of my peers are working on. It feels like I am out of ideas to make this better. Please share your space wisdom with me :)