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.
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Episode 353: Easter outage and unethical things
In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I work for a startup with a distributed team. Recently one of our clients experienced a production outage. As a small startup, we do not have an on-call rotation, and teams usually resolve issues during business hours. However, during this particular incident, most of my colleagues were on annual leave due to an Easter break, leaving only 10 out of 70 engineers available to assist. Although none of these 10 engineers were part of the team responsible for the outage, I was familiar with their codebase and knew how to fix the problem. Additionally, I had admin access to our source control system which allowed me to merge the changes required to resolve the issue. This was the first time I had done this, but my changes were successful and the problem was resolved. Now that the break is over, the team responsible for the codebase is blaming me for breaking the process that requires each pull request to have at least one approval and for making changes to “their” codebase without their approval. They want to revoke admin access from everyone as a result. However, I disagree with their assessment. While it is true that I made changes to a codebase that was not directly under my responsibility, I was the only engineer available who could resolve the issue at the time. I believe that helping our clients should be the priority, even if it means bending the rules occasionally. Did I make a mistake by making changes to a codebase that was owned by another team without their approval? Should I have refrained from getting involved in the issue and adopted a “not my problem” attitude since the responsible team was not available? Thanks and I hope I’m not getting fired for helping a paying client! J Dot Dev asks, What’s the worst thing you’ve had to do as a software engineer with direction from your employer? Years ago at a webdev shop we had a client who didn’t want to pay for e-commerce set up. My boss’ solution was to implement a form that included name, address, and credit card information fields that we would read on form submission and then email all of that information to our client in plain text. “Is that really ok?” I asked my boss. “Why wouldn’t it be?” “Isn’t that insecure?” “Only if they have her password. Just make it work so we can be done with them.” To top it off, they also had me email the information to myself just in case the email didn’t go through to the client or in case they accidentally deleted it, so I’d have all of this information just hitting my inbox.
Episode 352: Exploding manager and I hate computers
In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: My manager finally exploded. They screamed and insulted our whole team because one teammate had a 4 day delay on a 2 week task. Our manager Theo (fake name) was recently promoted and now on top of managing our team of 7 engineers, they also manage 2 other managers with 6 engineers each. I have noticed that Theo is under a lot of stress and as one of the two senior engineers in my team I tried to support him with planning and organization tasks. Sadly, it’s reached a point where if Theo doesn’t calm down, the whole team might implode. Last week, after one mid-level engineer in my team surfaced that the two-week project he was working on was going to be delayed by 1 week, Theo called the whole team up for an emergency meeting. There, Theo screamed at us for 15 minutes and insulted us as a team and our work in general. The gist of it was that we are not real professionals if our estimates can’t be trusted and that Theo has given us too much freedom. Theo said that if we keep on behaving like ‘[expletive] children’, then he will start to treat us as such and sit next to us while we do our homework. After their screaming monologue, Theo refused to hear any response and left the meeting. Chatting with my team members, no one felt very motivated by Theo’s rant. I would like to approach Theo with some constructive feedback, but I fear he might not be in a very stable state of mind. I’ve never had a boss treat me like this in my 12 years as a SWE. What should I do? Is this HR worthy? Should I document it in some way? Is talking to my skip level an option? Thanks At the age of 36 I am having what feels like a midlife crisis. After grad school, I fell into a well-paying job at a giant Fortune 100 tech company and have been doing well here. I’m a senior engineer on my team and have consistently good performance reviews, but, I have zero passion for the industry. I have never been that into computers and I just don’t care about making them run faster! My spouse and I have enough money saved that I could comfortably afford to not work for a year. I’d really love to take some time off but I’m paranoid that I’ll never be able to regain my earning power. I’m the primary wage-earner in my family and my spouse makes about a third of what I do, so if I never go back to work then it will be a severe lifestyle hit, like having to sell our house and stuff. What do you recommend? Possibly-relevant context is that we had our first child just a few months ago and so I now have much more angst about wasting hours on silly meetings when I could be with my daughter instead.
Episode 351: Senior hoarding and layabout lead dev
In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I’m not a software engineer, so you can stop reading here if you like ;-). I listen to this show every week as the soft skills you discuss are just as applicable to my role as an electronics engineer. I have 5 years of experience and in my opinion, the right level of competency to step in to a senior role. I recently started a new job and I’ve been encouraged by my boss to be more proactive in taking on senior work so I can be considered for a senior engineer promotion. The problem is, the existing senior engineers in my team are uninterested in sharing their workload with me. I will try to assist them with their senior-level tasks but it never lasts long as they will carry on with the work themselves after a short while. I’ve also been assigned senior-level tasks by my boss and when I’ve asked for small levels of assistance from the senior engineers they’ve taken it as an invitation to do the rest of the work for me. My boss is indifferent to my struggle as he only cares about the output of our team as a whole and not who does what. I know that I’m performing well as I was recently given a good performance review, so I don’t understand why I’m being denied these chances to step up. I don’t want to quit as I just started this job and the pay is good. But I also don’t want to just sit idly as a mid-level engineer while everyone I know gets promoted. What can I do? I am a junior dev and recently accepted a C2H position at a large enterprise company as a junior developer. I work closely with 3 or 4 other devs. Over the past couple of months, I have increasingly taken the lead on the project that I am working on, while the Lead Dev (also a C2H from a different agency) has taken a back seat and essentially stopped doing any work. The last time Lead Dev committed any code was over two months ago. Worse yet, Lead Dev is tracking time and marking tasks as “complete” in our work tracking software without actually doing those tasks. Lead Dev also approves all pull requests without reviewing the code, so I have become the de facto code reviewer for the other junior dev’s pull requests. I seem to be the main dev taking initiative on the project and trying to move work forward. Our manager is quite oblivious to this situation. They see that work is getting done, so have no reason to put our team under the microscope. I like Lead Dev personally, but I feel like my alacrity is being taken advantage of while Lead Dev kicks back and relaxes, and I feel like I have become a “Senior Junior” developer as a result. I think the “right” thing to do is to make our manager aware of the situation, but I don’t know if that’s necessarily the *correct* thing to do. If so, how I should go about doing so; if not, what else should I do? Help?
Episode 350: Bombing a technical interview and background vetting
In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Hi, have you ever been through a technical interview and bombed a question? I did, and it feels awful, especially when the question was easy but I couldn’t focus due to time pressure and stress. Do you have any tips for dealing with interview anxiety, and get rid of the bitter feeling if the interview goes bad? Thanks! A listener Dustin asks, Do tech companies or recruiters dig into our individual backgrounds during the hiring process? Also is there a bias towards part-time courses vs. Full-time? To keep it short, I’m 28 and from 18-22, I was homeless and involved with specific substances. Ultimately got on my feet around the age of 23 and now I’m currently attending university, part-time while working full-time. I have noticed a bias from full-time students towards part-time and I’m wondering if this happens as well in regards to employers?
Episode 349: Performance review dissonance and being a remote manager
In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I am a senior engineer looking to make staff. Every week at my one on one I ask my manager what I can do to improve and always receive the answer “keep doing what you are doing”, but when I receive my performance review, I don’t receive top grade or promotion and there are listed areas of improvement. How should I feel about this and what should I do? I’m a software group manager for a medium sized applied research organization that deals with both software and integration onto hardware. I am fully remote while the rest of the company has returned to the office due to the integration work with hardware. I started managing just before the pandemic. What are some effective strategies to deal with this setup? What are some typical gaps or issues to look out for? How can I reassure team members that may be skeptical of this setup, as well as peers and my bosses? I do have full support from above as of now. My rough thoughts so far include: be candid about limitations of this setup, experiment and iterate quickly on communication and collaboration processes, solicit regular feedback, and use it as an opportunity to grow members of my team into seniors and tech leads by having them focus on mentoring juniors and managing integration with other teams.
Episode 348: Making too many mistakes and low code career risk
In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Hey Dave and Jamison, long time listener of the show. looking to get your advice on dealing with guilt at work. Lately, I’ve found myself in a lot of situations of having to deal with bugs/incompleteness after pushing out a feature. It’s not my intention to be careless and I do feel like I’m giving it my 100% but there seems to keep being thing after thing that I’m not catching. It’s impossible to sweep these things under the rug when you have to put up a follow-up pull request to fix something that was clearly your fault. I feel like every once in a while is okay but when it starts to become a pattern, I wonder how this may reflect on my performance review. My coworkers aren’t letting on about any frustrations they may have but every time this happens, I can’t help but feel shameful of myself and it’s causing my anxiety to hit the roof. I’m waking up for work each morning wondering what’s it gonna be this time and feeling pits in my stomach. Please help. What are your thoughts on low-code platforms? I feel they will end up like WordPress (small companies with the tools in a varying degree of spaghetti that pay a contractor to clean up) I found myself on a team that wants to use it, and I feel like it’s a detriment to my career. I feel like another employer won’t take me seriously in an interview as I try to explain my way around it. Is this something I should be concerned about being in too long? I’ve voiced my concerns, but it doesn’t seem like direction is changing. What would you do? How do you feel about low-code in general?
Episode 347: New untrusting manager and crappy project management
In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Our small team where I work as a senior software engineer has a new engineering manager. They don’t trust me at all and verify simple technical things like how git rebase works, in the middle of meeting calls. I feel micro managed. Calling me on slack (slack huddle) without prior notice breaks me out of my flow. Recently they called an “Architecture meeting” and ended up talking about 2 spaces vs 4 spaces and other trivial stuff. I just felt like the facepalm emoji for the entire time of the call. They are technically good, but lack depth. For some reason they think know better than everyone else in the team. Unfortunately, they are my boss. How do I politely tell them, in a professional way, that they have to back down and trust the team? Any help would be highly appreciated. Thanks a lot. Federico asks, Hi! I’m a junior engineer. Our project managers are really crappy. I keep getting wrongly managed and “exploding” projects, where in the last days everything goes wrong with the client. Should I take a project management course so I can organize better my projects and discuss with project managers how to prevent this? I don’t know how to make them work like they should.
Episode 346: Changing jobs with no raise and wrangling a cowboy coder
In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I recently applied for a job for a great company. The interview went well until we talked compensation. I said I expected to get a pay raise for changing jobs, but it seems that they can only offer me as much as I already have. I have never negotiated salary before. With my current job (which was my first) I happily accepted what they offered and we have had regular bumps without negotiations. Although I am really interested in the job, I feel like it is a defeat not to get a pay raise when I’m changing jobs for the first time in my career. The benefits are also not as good. Do you have any advice? Should I lower my expectations for a non-consulting position and switch despite not getting a raise? Should I negotiate harder? Wait for something better? Hi Dave & Jamison, we recently started a new project with a new team of devs that never worked together before. The team consists of two experienced backend devs, two junior backend devs and a couple of frontend devs. One of the junior backend devs has a mindset of just jumping into tasks, doing things without any previous analysis, just writing code for the first thing that comes into his mind. I like him being proactive, but this is causing big trouble: bugs, technical debt and often absolutely useless code. We had several discussions in the team pointing out some of the problems, but he is not interesested in changing his behaviour. During the last discussion he didn’t react to any of our arguments, just insisted on doing things his way. After that discussion we realized he even made some commits on an issue that has not been in the sprint nor has been refined yet _while we were talking to him_. Our team has no dedicated lead nor a scrum master and we work remote only. The next organization level is our CEO. I love the company, i love the team, i love the project, i even like this dev on a personal level. If we talk to the CEO i suspect it might have a bad ending for the junior dev since he is still in probation period. I know that we must talk to our CEO if things do not change. Do you have any advice? How can we reach him? Thank you for your great show!
Episode 345: Head of Engineering vs writing code and Voluntary Severance
In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I have around 14 years of experience and was recently promoted to a Head of Engineering role. I am now leading an engineering department of around 75 people. I’ve become increasingly ‘hands off’ with coding, and it’s been at least 2-3 years since I wrote code regularly. My role is completely hands off technically. I’m questioning whether this is the right role for me. I want be more hands on, but I worry my skills are now so rusty that I’d have to start over and spend all my spare time learning to code again. Do you think it’s realistic to get back to a hands on engineer role at this point? Have you seen it done successfully before? Does walking away from this leadership role make it harder to potentially take on other leadership roles like CTO in the future? Hypothetically speaking, let’s say that you were pretty sure layoffs were coming to your company even though they say they are cutting costs everywhere else that they can in order to avoid layoffs. Now let’s say that, hypothetically, in anticipation of this you took some interviews and received an offer from a company that you believe will ride out the upcoming economic downturn fairly well, and, hypothetically, you accepted the offer. Would you go to your manager and offer to take a voluntary severance, and in doing so, would you let them know you had something else lined up or would you leave that out and present it as just taking your chances while your severance checks were coming in? Thanks for doing what you do. Show Notes https://charity.wtf/2019/01/04/engineering-management-the-pendulum-or-the-ladder/
Episode 344: Showing impact without hiring and over over over engineering
In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I’m a senior front end engineer at a medium sized tech company. During the good times of limitless tech growth, a common way for engineers to grow our “impact” (an important criteria at many companies for promotion) was to find ways to lead/manage more people, whether this was becoming a manager and having more direct reports, or becoming a tech lead and mentoring more people, especially interns and junior engineers. Now, with many companies doing layoffs and hiring freezes (mine included), teams simply aren’t growing and there just aren’t as many people to “impact”. What are some other ways to have more “impact” and grow my leadership skills? Both for hitting promotion criteria, but also for my own growth as an engineer that would like to be a manager or staff engineer someday. I am a very senior engineer at my company. There is an engineer on the team less senior than me, but not under me on the management tree. This person is well regarded in the organization, but has a strong tendency to over-engineer things. Normally I don’t mind a little over-complexity if it means that the person leading the project is taking ownership/accountability of the feature. But with this individual, they tend to be put in a place to make sweeping decisions that broadly impact systems when it’s clear that they don’t really have a full picture of what’s going on. To make matters worse… when I raise these points directly, the person will usually offer to accommodate my concerns by further over-complicating their solution/architecture rather than stepping back and picking an approach more appropriate for the problem. Show Notes This episode is sponsored by the original podcast from Red Hat, Compiler. Listen to Compiler: https://link.chtbl.com/compiler?sid=podcast.softskillsengineering
Episode 343: Tech lead/manager and discouraging seniors
In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: A listener named Mike asks, I’ve been offered an Engineering Management position at a company I previously worked for. The team is very small and composed of juniors and mid-level developers. The role is also completely new and because of the size and experience of the team there is some expectation that the manager will also have a fair amount of involvement in PR reviews and likely also writing some code. Is this common? Do you feel like a manager can also be a team lead from a technical perspective on a day to day basis? What should I be thinking about when considering this role? How do I keep up juniors’ morale regardless of bad code/ideas? I work in a team of 4-5 developers. We have one junior, one mid (me), one senior and our team lead. I think we mostly work well. However, sometimes the senior and team lead sort of talk down at the junior. For example, in a meeting talking about how to solve a problem the junior will propose an idea, but the senior and/or both team lead would respond by saying that no its not a good idea which is fine. However the tone of the voice often hints ‘oh you should know this it’s obvious you jamoke’. The junior has started to stay quiet and has told me he doesn’t feel comfortable asking the seniors for help. I’ve interjected in meetings to say I understand why the junior might have this idea but I don’t think it’s the best solution. What should I do? Should I talk to the senior/team lead? Do I just let it play out?
Episode 342: Losing my job to AI and bad review season
In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Hello Dave and Jamison, thanks for your great work. Your podcast has the bizarre magical property of making me look forward to long drives. Keep it up! I have been feeling anxiety over losing my job to AI, especially after the all the ChatGPT stuff from a few months back. I know that it definitely isn’t flawless but I know that this technology will just keep improving as time goes on. I am a software engineer with 2 years of experience. I can’t help but feeling like I will lose this amazing career in the near future. I left my old line of work a couple years back and am in my mid 30s, so switcyhing careers again is a dreadful thought. Is there anything you can suggest to ease my anxiety? Will being more social with my coworkers, or aiming towards management help reduce my chances of being automated? Any advice will be great, thanks. PS: If someone tries to replace your podcast with an AI generated one I will boycott them and stick with you. It’s review season! I am an IC software engineer, and I am required to document my impact for the last year. However, I work on an auxiliary team/new business team that is always trying to find new use cases for the existing product platform. If you look at the numbers, the impact is very low compared to the core business. Also, my team was disproportionally impacted by layoffs late last year. Lot of folks with institutional knowledge and good relationships with the core team were let go which disrupted our team and contributed to missed deadlines. How do I write my review for this bad year, with little to show for it?
Episode 341: Offer rescinded and layoff stuff
In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I am an American student finishing my undergraduate degree in computer science in the Midwest this semester. I am concerned about the economic climate of the technology industry. I am doing my second internship at a major technology company this summer (Microsoft). After that I will go to graduate school and try to ride out the storm. I have applied nearly a dozen programs including one year and two year masters programs, and even a few PhD programs (MIT plz accept me). My biggest concern is having my offer rescinded. I thought there might be economic turbulence, so last summer I had my return offer place me in the most profitable and highest growth division of the company. How do lay-off decisions get made on the issue of rescinding offers versus laying off people? How can I reduce the risk of the offer getting pulled? I am working on finding another software engineering internship, but it’s extremely difficult to find any open roles. Listener Andre says, I need a gut check here. I have a senior engineer on my team that does not perform well. He keeps procrastinating on tasks that I know wouldn’t take much effort. I think it would be great for the team and the company to substitute this engineer for someone with more passion. One idea I have is to volunteer this person to my director to be laid off. It would be great for the engineer to feed on the potential 3-month severance package. Firing him doesn’t seem like an option because he does the bare minimum for his role. What would you do?
Episode 340: Productivity lulls and code review showdown
In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: A listener Daniel asks, How do I handle periods of time where I am just not productive as I used to be? I’m talking about periods of several weeks. For example, when your kids are ill all the time (daycare fun) or you are down because of XYZ. How do you turn not really constructive feedback into useful feedback? I have a difficult time dealing with PR reviews from a specific colleague. They have a way to push my buttons somehow, it’s like even when they are actually right, the way they approach the subject or how nit picky their comments are just make it hard to take the feedback or start a healthy discussion. It prompts me to become confrontational. I know it’s not good to react like this, but I don’t feel comfortable talking directly to them about it to try to smooth things out. I don’t think its personal as I’ve seen this kind of comments on other people’s PRs too. I am aware this might be me being overly sensitive, but its like every time he is the one reviewing my PR I get the feeling of “oh, not this guy again” and need to mentally prepare for his comments. I’d like to find a way to take the core of the feedback that might be useful and kind of ignore the rest that might feel dismissive or opinionated, and I thought you might have some tools for this. The main reason I care about it is that this reflected badly on my latest performance review, as I had stellar feedback in general and the only improvement areas were that I should learn how to deal with mistakes or negative feedback better. I am aware it can be a weak point on me , but I know that a big part of that comment from my manager comes from my interactions with this specific colleague.
Episode 339: Coworker double-dipping and building toxic community
In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I think the new hire on my team is juggling multiple jobs. On several screen shares, I’ve seen them quickly close IDEs with third party code, browser windows with what look like a third party jira instance, etc. Maybe that’s some open source project, or a jira instance where they’re reporting a bug, but it seems fishy. In the latest instance, this person meant to post a link to the Jira issue they’re working on in our company Slack, but accidentally posted a link to a ticket on some other company’s Jira. I did some digging and this is definitely not a public-facing Jira instance. It’s internal for their employees only. Normally if somebody could do both jobs competently, I’d say good for them and they’ve earned both salaries. However, their performance hasn’t been great. We’re still in the onboarding phase and a lot of missteps could be excused by that, but I’m starting to worry that this person’s goal is to offer only mediocre performance at this job (and probably the other one as well) and we’re unlikely to see expected levels of improvement as they continue to get up to speed. Am I being paranoid? Should I raise my concerns with management or give it more time to shake out? Is there a clever trap I can set to *prove* my suspicions for sure? I recently joined a large software defined telecommunication company, only to be surprised that their internal blind space is very quiet and very few ppl are on blind if any, how do I change this ? how do I get ppl to use blind more? without giving away my blind account. quitting my job is not an option due to the economy