Soft Skills Engineering

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Middle Management in the Midwest says, I recently accepted a new position at work, bumping up into an Assistant Director role. At our company this means I’ll have at least two teams, ICs directly reporting at first, potentially managers later. I am in the process of working with an Earth Psychologist and Psychiatrist to figure out potential ADHD I’ve been living with. Previously I just thought I was a bad person and couldn’t focus. I want to succeed at this role and do what I can to overcome or work through the distraction, inability to start, and the lack of follow through I’ve been struggling with. I know you can only speak about Space ADHD with your Space Psychology and Psychiatry degrees, but I’m wondering if anything could transfer. What have you seen work for people? How would you suggest someone who has big ideas learn to follow through on those ideas? I’m been a software engineer at a tech scale-up (is that still a term?) for about 1.5 years. When I first joined, I felt buzzing energy, and one of the main selling points of working here was the “minimal organizational overhead”. We grew fast and got acquired end of last year by a large tech company. Since then, process has creeped its way slowly but surely, partly because of natural headcount growth, partly because of the acquisition. This has been especially apparent on my current project, in which I feel like we need to make a strong pivot. People largely agree, but it’s been difficult to actualize this. And I can’t help but think back to when I first joined - a pivot like this would’ve been a much easier endeavor. With that context to set the table, my question is: How can I fight this, to try to preserve the agility of the startup days of before? Even if it is a losing battle, how do I lose less badly? In these ever-changing crazy times, I feel agility is at a premium.

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Dave and Jamison, long time listener first time caller. I appreciate everything you do, I look forward to my Monday morning commute because of this podcast. I’ve been a software developer for about 4 years. I’m a career changer and graduated from a boot camp. I was fortunate enough to earn a junior developer position at a non software company and have been promoted during my tenure. I work on a small team and enjoy what I do and the level of impact I have. I am one of the most senior developers. My only concern is that I do not receive direct mentorship from more experienced developers. Am I limiting my future prospects by not job hopping? When is the right time to leave a company and seek new opportunities? Hello Mr. 💃 and Mr. Smith. I’ve been working in software ~6 years. In the same company (don’t judge). And about a year ago I advanced in the position of a team lead of 4 developers. I would actually like to attribute this advancement, at least partially, to listening to your podcast. Although luck was involved as well. ANYWAY. There were quite a few questions on how to keep your soul intact while working with Claude. And your advice was to focus on product side, and\or to focus on improving the processes. Now my question is - how can I help my teammates to not lose their soul? How can I help them to not turn into meat proxies? We work in the startup, so tasks are not defined in details. Which does give them some agency over whatever they are building. But I don’t think it’s enough anymore. I think one specific teammate leans toward copying the task description, throwing it at Claude and making a PR out of it. With very few iteration over the quality of the code. Can i blame them? Not really. But how can I help? It’s like the ownership of the code was taken from them. And from me, but at least i can do other stuff. For the context - I am reviewing the PRs manually. Please spam me with idea. Saying to the team - just don’t use AI is not an option, because the speed will go down. A lot. Plus we all are 100% addicted. PS Most of my developers have experience of +2 years in the field. One is completely fresh and started half a year ago. Maybe for him the approach should be different? He is pretty good at not generating complete slop. But I think for him it’s even harder to learn and to read all this code.

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: Hi Soft Skills Engineering, I’m a senior software engineer with over 20 years of experience. I’m hoping you can help with with a problem where I’m dumb, weird and bad at my job! There is a recurring problem where, despite all my experience and graybearding, despite my big words, I sometimes just miss very important details, and ways that are very consequential and cause time and feature gaps. Sometimes I make a faulty assumption and gloss over initial errors, and later I get big errors that require big fixes. For example, sometimes I just miss random lines from a product spec or whole parts of the UI, like a blind spot, or like a Mandela situation where I could’ve sworn it was different where I read it. Sometimes, I read the docs on some library but didn’t really *read* the docs and missed the important line that I needed before things get broken. It’s a soft skill, sorta, because it’s about how I go about my work, and I don’t know what I can do about it. It’s almost an intrinsic trait, isn’t it? But I’d love any idea about how I can improve or how I can adjust how I can work to compensate. Or possibly here how this is normal and it’s a process issue - but I don’t need excuses and am willing to improve. Thanks for your great wisdom and advice! So it has happened, a massive codebase written entirely by Claude via prompts from my non-technical PM. And now I’m tasked with “make it work, integrate it into all these other services and tools we have. Thanks!” How do I even begin approaching a massive codebase written entirely by AI with no actual software engineer validating/overlooking it at any point until it became this monster and now it’s my problem? I am also an L2 engineer that got prematurely promoted to L3 and now I just want to prove myself and work on a cool project (10000s of requests, many bottlenecks that need to be fixed, scaled, design docs put together… the whole shabang#) Help. Urgent. 911. I want to cry. Thank you, love the podcast!

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: Hi Dave and Jamison, I’ve been a Java backend dev for over 10 years. After getting laid off from a job I loved, I spent 3 tough months job hunting. I eventually landed a full-stack role at a non-tech company where I am the entire front-end department. The team is a mess: A CTO who hasn’t coded in years and calls me directly to assign tasks, all labeled “highest priority.” When I asked the CTO and CEO if we had QA, they literally laughed at me. Prod releases are “tested” by the CTO before telling me to push immediately. I’m at a crossroads: Stick it out for 6–12 months to gain AI experience, then quit? Try to move into management, and rebuild this mess into a functioning engineering organization. What should I do? Hey, Dave and Jamison. I’m a non-native Japanese speaker working in Tokyo with about 6 years of experience in backend(3 years in Tokyo) and haven’t used English in work. I started listening to this podcast for learning English. And I soon found this podcast is very funny and I found a lot of problems actually exist around the world, like AI hype, why people hate HR, low-performing team members, useless product managers, etc. For some reason, I want to leave Japan and find a job using English. I think the best approach is to find an English job in Tokyo first. And then transfer to an English-speaking country. I want to know as a non-native English-speaking engineer, what English level I need to get a senior engineer job using English. What would you consider if you were the manager who is interviewing a non-native English speaker? Thank you guys, I love this podcast, I can learn English, get some answers to the questions I’m confused about too, and laugh every week.

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: Listener Myamax myamax says, I just listened to episode 527 and could really use some advice on being good at interviews. I was recently laid off with a decent severance package, so I have some breathing space. I’ve had several interviews, and I usually get past the initial screenings, but I don’t shine in technical rounds. I’m a career switcher, and most of my tech career has been in analytics at a big company. I’m good at distilling things, very good at debugging and navigating mazes of corporate legacy, but I haven’t really built things from scratch. I’m not a pure individual contributor, not a product manager but some technical-product hybrid, and it was a fun place to be. I stole good ideas from different teams and stitched them together adding common sense on top. I spent a lot of time with users and stakeholders to understand their data and their processes. Most of the time they needed common sense and decent data foundations. Only in rare cases it came to fancy algorithms. How can I sell myself better? Should I be looking for more product-oriented roles? Maybe spending my severance building tiny end-to-end systems to get better at take home assignments is a good idea? I’d be grateful for any thoughts and your general interview advice for the software folk! Hi, this is Mental Mario from Episode 395, where i was asking about being “the new hotshot in town”, as you put it. I took your advice, performed to the best of my abilities while trying to stump on my collegues work, and two years in think it worked out pretty well! I got my raises and will become the second in command after my boss. But wait- there is trouble in paradise! With more money obviously comes more responsibilities, but i can’t shake the feeling that recently I’m doing the majority of the work in my team of five. From refinements to troubleshooting, from code reviews to releases, tasks just come hurling to me. The team has a lot of confidence in me, but this leads to situations where they don’t challenge my ideas and approaches, which causes problems since obviously I make mistakes too- but I don’t have the teams safety net any more. This dynamic feels unhealthy to me. Is this feeling justified, or is this just the way it is when moving up the corporate ladder? Given that I’ll be the senior of the team, do i need to delegate more task and supervise them, when I’m feeling overwhelmed with tasks? Thank you so much for the show!

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: 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?