Soft Skills Engineering

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

1. Hey guys, love the show. Not sure if its really a question or more of a confession. I’m an individual contributor at a software company with a few thousand employees. A lot of professional books/training courses I encountered over the years talk about the importance of positively acknowledging your employees/reports/team members when they do a good job...

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

1. Hello Dave and Jamison, I wanted to say thank you for your podcast. It’s been a great wealth of information and comic relief. Can we bring back the guitar intros?

   I work in the technology arm of a large corporation. There are no younger engineers. I am one of the youngest at just shy of 30 (my first tech job after going back to school)...

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

1. I feel like I’m stuck. I’m in a senior/lead position technically called an SRE, but I find myself doing all kinds of cleanup work that should instead be spread across teams. My suggestions for automating toil and cleaning up tech debt fall on deaf ears until some principal engineer decides a couple of months down the line some problem is worth solving (then it’s urgent!!1)...

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

1. Hello! Thank you for your podcast, I definitely find the episodes to be helpful. Lately I’ve been struggling with attention to detail. I just forget to do simple things like run pre-commit hooks before I put in a PR or before merging a PR. I went through a pretty bad layoff when my old company went bankrupt a few months back and now I am at a new role where I really like everyone I work with...

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

1. A listener named Jay asks,

   Over the past eight years I’ve been promoted from Software Dev to Team Lead and then to Engineering Manager.

   After two years as an EM, it helped me a lot financially, I like what I do and I think I’m doing it really well. However, I have two concerns. First, I love programming and now I don’t have any time other than in my limited free time to do it...

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

1. I recently started the interviewing for a senior engineering manager role at a fairly prestigious, but not huge (maybe 30-50 engineers) tech company. The job description heavily emphasized the idea of leading as a peer as opposed to just relying on the EM title. I love this approach, but the lead interviewer then disclosed that they don’t want EMs writing production code. This seems like a contradiction...

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

1. There aren’t a lot of engineering management growth resources in my company. It’s a relatively small company with about 50 engineers. My manager doesn’t have time to properly mentor me. And I’m not sure I would want him to because I feel like his advice isn’t always the best...

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

1. My company is doing performance reviews. While writing my self-review, I was shocked by how much I had accomplished in the last 6 months. I’d led our org to adopt multiple new technologies and supported other teams in adopting them, to great effect. But looking back, I wish I could trade half the accomplishments on my self-review for time spent taking better care of myself and my partner and kids...

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

1. Listener Ashleigh asks,

   I’m a mid-level developer at a small company with a non-technical manager. After several months working on migrating our users from a legacy system to our new system, our non-technical business analyst discovered our current system re-uses lots of code from the legacy system. The BA immediately escalated their “concerns” about this to our manager...

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

1. “Hi! Love the show, long time listener.

   So an architect noticed an issue with credentials embedded into request body being logged. I had planned to resolve that, and someone already had done so for another instance.

   I took a day or two to figure out how to fix it globally, and even tied it into another filtering we did...