Soft Skills Engineering – Détails, épisodes et analyse

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

1. Thank you hosting this show. This show has given me a lot of insight on nuisances of engineering that isn’t mentioned anywhere. Having some experience in industry for a while, I always find in this position where I want some autonomy but I am bounded by the deadline. What do you think should be the way to start a career that gives autonomy while having that sweet benefits from the industry?

2. I used to be a senior manager of an operations team for a fire fighting service in Australia. I managed all of our physical operational assets - for example radio towers, mobile communications e.g. 5g, 4g technologies, mobile data terminals e.g. laptops in fire fighting appliances “fire trucks ;) “, data centers, networking so on…

   A restructuring means my team has grown to include in-house software development. While i am excited for this opportunity and on board with the changes, it is a very big shift from the physical and electrical engineering side to software development.

   The C level staff thinks the team lacks focus and there are “problems” to address.

   I have been meeting the new team and working through the changes. They are very nervous and are skeptical about how I’ll understand their world, which is fair.

   How can I best support this team? What are cultural things I should be aware of? What are key metrics I can measure that will fairly represent their hard work to the executive team? Any thoughts on what things a manager or managers can do to be supportive as the new drop in from across the room from a entirely different engineering discipline? Coding in my world is scripting and hacking about to make things work (telecommunication engineer)

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

1. A listener named Maria says,

   Hey guys! I am a software engineer working in web development at a small/mid-sized SaaS company. I come from a non-traditional background (self-taught, no CS degree) and I currently have 6 years of experience under my belt, the last 2 years of which I have been tech lead of a small team.

   I want to move into big(ger) tech, but I’ve not worked on any large scale systems so far. The biggest thing I’ve worked far had a user base of ~100k users and traffic would typically max out at ~2k concurrent users at peak times. Due to the nature of the work I’ve been doing at smaller companies (and also thanks to this podcast!) my soft skills are strong - I am good at working with lots of different people, I can deliver broad/vague projects, and I’m comfortable tackling ambiguous problems. I think my technical skills are probably decent, I’ve spent time learning system design and best practices, and I’ve put in the work to study CS fundamentals. Thing is, I would have absolutely no clue how to maintain an API that needs to handle 100k requests per second. My hands-on experience of concurrency and threading is basically just simple ol’ async/await.

   Grinding Leetcode aside, what can I do to make myself a stronger candidate for breaking into big tech? How can I be competitive against folks who already have big tech experience? Are there any projects I could do that would sway you as a hiring manager? I know it’s terrible market timing, I am just planning ahead.

   Love the show, thank you for making me a better engineer! :)

2. Hi! I have been working at my fully remote company with around 100 people in the engineering department for over a year now. While I see a lot of really smart people here, the code quality is lacking. We’re moving from a monolith powered using an opinionated framework to small services powered by a lightweight library, so there are fewer guardrails.

   I have many ideas on how to structure the code, add layering, etc., so the code is easier to understand and maintain. However, the company is very hierarchical, and despite being at a senior level, I don’t talk much to anyone higher than my lead. There are no staff or principal roles. There are also hardly any meetings, and the only ones I attend are within my small team of five people. Most of slack channels for teams are private, and I don’t ever see company-wide ideas like that thrown in the “general” channel.

   I initially wanted to present this to my team first, but I am afraid that if they don’t like it for some reason, it will be awkward to take it to higher management afterward. How can I share my ideas with a wider audience and ideally get this approved as part of my work so I don’t have to work on it in my free time?

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

1. This is my first time conducting technical interviews (most of which have been virtual), and I had one interview where I had a strong feeling that the candidate was cheating. They breezed through the short problems I gave them, and they were able to explain their reasoning. But during the live coding problem, they sat in silence for five minutes, and when I asked them what they were thinking, they didn’t respond. Then they started cranking out perfect code without explaining anything.

   How do you address cheating in interviews? What if it turns out to be just nerves? I don’t want to assume anything, but I also wouldn’t feel comfortable confronting them about it either.

2. I work as a team lead for a small group of 4 other devs. Our Product Owner is currently handling the requirements for new features to onboard a new large client. This involves them attending client meetings and generally isolating the development team from client shenanigans which is normally great, but it’s becoming INCREASINGLY obvious that someone on the client team has his number and he’s getting HORRIBLY out-negotiated. This has resulted in a bunch of missing requirements, changing requirements, last minute feature adds, and general confusion. I’m trying to push back, but the leadership team is coming back with “Well we promised…” and my entire team is stressing out. Note that this is AFTER we were already pressured to overcommit on capacity to get these “absolutely necessary” features developed for the client to go live.

   I like my PO, he’s a good guy and normally does good work, what can I do to help him stop from getting his butt kicked in these meetings?

   (Note: the POs are neither above nor below us in the org tree, our closest shared higher-up is the VP and I obviously don’t want to escalate it that far)

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

1. I’m planning to leave my job purely because of low compensation. I like my growth in my current company - but low compensation than what market is offering is quite a mental hiccup in my regular work (yep! I’m slowly becoming one of the quiet quitters). I’m thinking of going to my manager with my new offer and ask him to match it. Do retention offers actually work? As mangers yourselves, how would you want me to approach a retention discussion? I don’t want my manager to make my life hell under the pretense of “Oh he’ll leave in a year” if I do decide to stay after taking the matching offer. Love the show - pretty much my single source of wisdom for all my behavioural interviews xD

2. I was recently let go from a company. They said they would send me a shipping label so that I could return the hardware. I didn’t hear back from them for a week. A few days later a label came in for the laptop, but not for the dock or the two monitors they also sent.

   I did not enjoy my experience there and I’m feeling resentful at having to pester them so that I can get what I need to send them back their hardware.

   What is my due diligence on the score? I don’t even like the monitors.

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

1. Listener Olexander asks,

   I was a tech lead on some relatively known project since the beginning for more than a year. I made several trade-offs with technologies and wrong decisions. I participate in some generic Slack organisations and met several users of my product. I haven’t told them that I was connected to implementing the project but sometimes shared some insights on how the product is tested and asked opinions about some of features of the product in comparison to the competitors. Now there is a person who continuously critiques the product. Sometimes the criticism is valid but sometimes is’s just a rant. How can I influence that person without blowing my cover?

2. Listener Kieran asks,

   Hi guys! Loving the podcast from down under. I’m working part time as a dev while I complete my software engineering degree. It’s been fun, but there are almost no processes in place for development and not many other devs seem to care about improvement.

   Although I am the most inexperienced here I feel some of the devs do not care about the quality of the work as I often have to refactor some of their code due to it being buggy, slow and undocumented (still using var in javascript).

   I’ve talked to management about improving our standards. However, they brushed me off saying yeah some of the developers are stubborn. They are not brushing me off because I lack technicality as Ive been given an end user app as a solo project. How should I go about encouraging the team to improve our processes?

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

1. How do you politely tell a reviewer politely, “Your suggestion is stupid. I will not do it” when you get stupid review comments. If you don’t do it then the pull request can’t move forward because of unresolved issues. If you do it, then you’re compromising your design you’ve worked weeks on for some fly-by random comment.

2. A few months back, I volunteered as co-facilitator for my department’s NodeJS Guild meeting. At first, it was a struggle to get people to present. But I tried to lower the bar more and more until it was easy. I asked for 10-15m presentations, and eventually I realized people are happier “Kicking off a discussion” than they are “giving a presentation”. All the listeners are more engaged too, at least after the first 2 meetings doing this.

   Now I want people to share half-baked code, or problems they are struggling with, as part of our discussions. I want people to be able to be vulnerable. If we don’t collaborate on common problems until we feel they’re polished and won’t reflect badly on us, then we will all waste time solving the same problems.

   I also want this to scale across 15-25 small scrum teams. I think success could be my demise–if we have good discussions, then more people will come, but people won’t want to be as vulnerable with a larger group.

   In general, I think my own scrum team is very open and vulnerable to each other, but the remote work in the deparment has created distance. I want to help create more collaboration on similar problems and solutions.

   What would you do to keep this going, and improve it?

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

1. I seem to be very hot and cold about how I feel about my job. Some days I hate it and think about quitting, but other days, I feel it’s not that bad and can stick around a little longer. The reason for it seems to change depending on the day, but a lot of it seems to center around the people around me (i.e. developers who need me to Google for them, business people who don’t understand how to provide requirements), but sometimes I can’t tell whether it’s an attitude problem that will follow me anywhere or if it’s just time to leave. It’s a relatively small company, so I feel like I would be betraying my manager who has invested a lot in me if I decided to leave so suddenly. I’d like to give my manager a chance to address my concerns, but I’m afraid to sour our relationship if I come across as a complainer. I’m also not confident there’s any solutions to my current frustrations because it seems to be a company-wide issue. How do I make sense of all of what I’m feeling?

2. I really like my company but their project management is atrocious, ad hoc, and “old school.” They’re not giving me privileges to configure Jira in ways that allow me to get stuff done.

   Is there an effective way to convince my CTO that I’m not going to screw up our secure systems or do I just need to find a new job?

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

1. My company wants several complex applications rewritten. “Steve” wrote the original applications, and has been assigned to do the rewrite. There is very little documentation on the original applications, and the rewrite will take intimate understanding of the existing code and new requirements.

   Management assigned me to work with Steve. They warned me that since we have started working remotely after covid, Steve has been hard to get a hold of and not meeting deadlines. My job is to keep Steve on task.

   When I ask Steve a question he will respond “I’ll work on it tomorrow” or “I’ll have to look in to that.” Then I never hear from him again. If I tell management I haven’t been able to get a hold of him, they will contact him, then he will contact me asking “What can I help you with?” Again, all his answers will be “I’ll have to look into that.”

   Occasionally Steve will report to me that he has finished a task. But because he did it without me, I am even more confused about what needs done or how to do it.

   I feel like my job has turned in to tattling on Steve. I am afraid I’m going to be labeled a whiner and that this project will harm my career growth.

   Over the last 2 weeks my solution has been to just ignore the project. Management hasn’t checked in with me, but I’m sitting on a ticking time bomb.

   What should I do?

2. How to keep our sanity in times of uncertainty? I’ve recently changed jobs and despite the facts shows that I shouldn’t be worried, I can see my judgement is blurred by the fear of getting laid off even there’s no sign of it and I fear I would fulfill the prophecy!

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

1. Listener Albert Camus asks,

   Hello Team. I am a long time listener of the show, and I really enjoy it. I’m a senior engineer and want to get to the next level in my career. I talked to my manager about this. I told them I preferred the technical side and staff engineer was the next level up. He responded positively, although he didn’t give me a timeline, not even a vague estimate. In a subsequent meeting they told me it wasn’t a linear progression at the company and there’s quite an overlap in the salary range between senior and staff engineer. I was also told that the company only had a few staff level engineers and they were considered experts at a particular sub-section of a technology. This makes me feel like I am being stalled. I have seen this a few years ago, at a previous workplace, where I tried for a promotion, and the manager at that place kept giving excuses to buy time. I am afraid that could be the case here as well. I am technically strong and have good soft-skills. I have designed, developed and documented multiple features for the company. Whenever there’s a complex bug, the product manager always turns towards me for help. I also handle inter-team discussions at times, always a part of the interview panel while hiring new team members and at most times the only person representing my team from the tech perspective during alignment meetings with the sales and marketing teams. I could also say with confidence that I bring more value to the table and have data to back it up. But I am not sure how I could use all this information without seeming desperate, to really push for that promotion and a raise. I could quit and get a new job, most probably with a promotion, but I have put in a lot of effort here and I intend to stay at the current company for at least the next couple of years to reap the rewards. What can I do to get that promotion in the coming year?

2. We know that the salary is high in our area, and I don’t need all this money. So, what is your opinion on part time job and how can I get one?

   I’m a senior frontend with more than 15 years of experience and just want to live a little.

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

1. I work at a small company that has recently grown from a couple of engineers to 40+ due to some great new project opportunities. As part of this transition, many new policies are being implemented. The policies concerning the engineering department primarily revolve around task tracking and reporting time. Gone are the days when an engineer can charge eight hours to “fixing stuff” and earn a paycheck. Most of us are on board, but there are three engineers in particular who have been around for quite some time and vary between subtly passive aggressive to downright combative when it comes to creating JIRA tasks and logging their hours.

   The problem? They serve an absolutely critical role in our company. They are nigh irreplaceable in an extremely niche market. How should a manager strike the perfect balance between forcing an engineer to do something that they don’t want to do and not forcing them out? If this was a more common skillset, there wouldn’t be an issue with telling them “You don’t like it, go find another job”. But when there are a handful of people in the world that do this kind of thing and it closely involves hardware and these three just happen to be local… well, you get the idea. Losing these individuals would be a staggering blow the company. Making them redundant isn’t economically feasible. Time to ramp up for this position would be close to a year.

2. So I’ve recently followed the first rule of Soft Skills Engineering and quit my job. All right! I believe in the new role and I think it’ll be a good change to me.

   Despite this, I’m feeling guilty about leaving my team behind. When my managers asked me how I was feeling in the last few quarters, I’ve mostly said I’m fine! I never told them my reservations about how the codebase I’m working on has no oversight, that they need to hire another dev because I don’t trust being the sole keeper, that it seems like product has forgotten this feature. I even indulged them when they asked me to make a long-term career plan when I was certain I would leave by early next year at the latest.

   So, what’s your take on how disgruntled employees often have to hide their true feelings? Maybe I could’ve been open, but it really seemed like the odds were against us, it’s just that upper leadership was neglecting this feature and there was no urgency to improve things. But I still feel like I wasn’t being fully honest. What do you guys think?

   Thanks so much and keep up the good work! Feelin’ Guilty

   P.S. Do you feel that this industry naturally rewards lack of loyalty and connection? What do you feel about that?