Soft Skills Engineering

• Episode 458: Infinite tech debt hack and figuring out what is going on

  In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Nearly every time certain developers on the team want to address technical debt, they end up just adding more technical debt. Of course, after one round of addressing technical debt, the developers in question believe that yet another round of redesigning and refactoring is in order. This stresses me out for many reasons, as you can imagine, and has led to my productivity dropping to an abysmal rate. I spend a large chunk my time resolving merge conflicts and re-orienting myself in an ever-changing codebase. Do you have any suggestions for me? Hi! I’m a software engineer at a big tech company, and I’m starting to feel siloed in my IC role. I’m getting my work done, but I’m often lost when it comes to the bigger picture. I can’t keep up with what our internal customer teams are doing, what they need, or even what my own team’s priorities are. I’m feeling siloed, and it’s starting to worry me. I know that just being a good IC isn’t enough to advance my career here. To get promoted, I need to understand the impact of my work, be aligned with the team and customer goals, and show that I can contribute to the overall success of the company. But how can I do it? How do I stay informed about customer needs and team priorities and position myself for career growth without getting completely overwhelmed? Thank you for your precious advice!

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• Episode 457: How do I get off the on-call rotation and "big tech" == "big leagues"?

  In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I am a senior software engineer in a big tech/faang company and this week is my first ever on call rotation. My team is doing a lot of CI work, monitoring pipelines and support queues during on call. It is probably not as much of a hassle as on call for product teams, but for me personally on call was the nearest I have ever been to hell. Our on call is not the regular getting pinged when something goes wrong, instead we have to manually monitor a dashboard 12 hours constantly for 7 days as the alarming is quite fuzzy. I am the only EU remote worker that has to adopt to the on call PST timezone. That means, my on call shift goes from 3pm-3am in my timezone. It is day 5/7 and I am down 24 energy drinks already, cause this was the only way to stay wake. Knowingly, that this would be just a short-term tradeoff against health, I am now living through the most explosive diarrhea I have ever had. On top, I am sleep derived, dizzy and every body part hurts. That would already be terrible on its own, yet I additionally have a young family, with a 4 year old and a toddler. The on call week, has not only been though on me, but especially also on my children and wife. I don’t have time for the kids at all and my wife is doing 100% of everything at the moment, including waking up, breakfast, bringing our son to kindergarten, cooking, cleaning, playing, everything. She is also quite exhausted therefore. Besides On Call, my job has been great and a huge monetary opportunity that is very rare in the EU, therefore quitting just because of 4-5weeks/year is not an option I am considering. Yet, I am wondering if there could be any way of smuggling myself out of the on call rotation. I have seen, that a staff level engineer on our team is not participating in the rotation, but that might be because he got a lot going on with other teams as well. A listener named bebop asks, Is your average “Big Tech” dev “better” than a random dev selected from a large non-technology company? I can’t help but feel that if I want to level up my career, I’m going to have to either move into big tech or some unicorn startup.

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• Episode 456: Will I look bad on the job market if I'm a crypto developer and struggling to go from management back to dev work

  In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Hey, I am a web developer getting bored of the regular development work. I am interested in finance and the monetary system and due to the overlap of finance and engineering I feel down the Bitcoin rabbit hole and even spiked interest in crypto like Solana and Sui. I am pretty sure most of crypto is a FUD, delulu or straight up scam, yet the technology looks appealing and interesting to learn. So that said, I am still really interested in learning more about crypto and dabbling in the development space of that. Yet, I am hesitant because I fear that this could reflect negatively on me. What do you think? Is a bit of crypto okay or really that bad? Hi Dave and Jamison After five years as an engineering manager, I want to return to coding. But I’m facing a few challenges: First, I worry about leaving my current team. It feels like I’m abandoning the people I’ve been supporting. Should I make this transition elsewhere to avoid this awkwardness? Second, I’m struggling to find time and energy to rebuild my technical skills. After a full day of management work, it’s hard to open the laptop again for coding practice. Finally, I’ve been humbled by how rusty my coding skills have become. Tasks that would take a practiced engineer minutes are taking me days, which is frustrating and denting my confidence. How have others successfully navigated this pendulum swing back to an IC role without burning bridges or burning out? Thanks, a rubber duck

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• Episode 455: UX designer without a mentor and I get bored too easily and stressed too easily

  In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: A listener named Dakota asks, I’m a UX designer, and I’m constantly looking for growth opportunities. I’m having trouble finding mentors to help challenge me, as every time my boss/senior designer leaves the company, I assume their work and we don’t backfill their spot or my old position. This leads me towards podcasts like this as I’m trying up-skill and to learn how to be a better team member and support other roles. I’d love your perspective on working with product/ux designers. What have the challenges been? What makes you love working with a designer? Have there been times where you’re both arguing for the best user experience, but fail to agree on what experience is best? Hey guys! It seems like lately, I only work in two modes: Stressed and tired Bored and disengaged I often get to own large, urgent initiatives. I spend weeks or months on them. This work is fascinating! I end up being stressed, tired, and counting days until my next vacation. When they finish, I go back to regular tickets - ones that take a day or two, maybe a week to complete. And its great! For a few days. Then the boredom sets in. I pick through the tickets, trying to find something interesting. I finish a ticket and realize there are another 4 hours before the end of the day. I start to miss the rush of working on a complex puzzle, even though it’s terrible for my work/life balance. A month or two pass, and a new complex and urgent initiative comes in. The cycle continues. So my question is: Is this a common feeling? Are there ways to find a “easy-work/hard-work” balance? Do you have any advice on not overworking when urgent tasks come in, and not dying from boredom when there is no interesting work?

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• Episode 454: Tracking productivity? and my CTO is ChatGPT

  In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I’m a manager on a Product team. I’ve been asked by upper management to measure “story points completed per developer per sprint” and display the results publicly each sprint to motivate lower-performing employees. I explained why, according to Scrum, I don’t think this is a good idea. But I think my explanations came across as me not wanting to make my team accountable for performance. For some context, I currently track productivity by reading daily updates, PRs, and tickets, from each developer. I worry that “story points” is easily game-able as a performance target, and will make the team want to modify the points after the fact to reflect actual time spent. Then story points will become a less useful tool for project planning. I’d like to satisfy the higher-up ask to measure productivity, but in a way that is good for the team, the company, and my career. Any thoughts on how to approach this? A listener named Mike asks, I work for a company with 30 employees. Our CEO is trying to be our CTO by prompting all our issues to ChatGPT. This week we had a discussion about changes needed to comply with specific certifications requested by one of our customers. 15 minutes later I got an email containing a chatGPT conversation giving ‘advice’ that I debunked just 20 minutes beforehand. I have been vocal about my concerns of over-use of LLM’s before and think it’s dangerous for our CEO to keep sending large chunks of factually incorrect text across the org. He did finally stop talking about story point burn down because chatGPT told him it’s a bad metric though. So maybe this is salvageable?

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