How to Talk to a Product Manager Without Offending Them

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

1. Listener Schtolteheim Reinbach III asks,

   Hey soft skills engineering, love you guys. I work at a company you wouldn’t hear much about, on a product that you wouldn’t think about as having much tech involved- suffice it to say, it makes me interesting at parties.

   I’m not a developer myself, but on my team, I’m having an issue with a developer who can’t seem to use GitHub properly. Fairly often, whenever he fixes or creates things, he doesn’t seem to check them in properly, and between releases, numerous times, this has caused people to end up reproducing work, for the developers, business team, and QA alike. He’s been at this company for several years, and people have only complained, but no one has made an effort to fix it.

   I don’t manage him, and I can’t see the processes that are in place on his end, how do I go about reducing the amount of regressions that are created due to a developer who can’t Git? I’m also interested to hear if you two have similar stories about devs who can’t Git, or if you’ve been that dev, and what happened.

2. I quit my job and got a new one! What should I be doing during the initial ramp up period that shows I am a skilled engineer even though I do not know the main languages they use? Also any advice on the non-tech side of ramping up? What should I be doing besides learning the tech stack and fixing bugs? Thank you for all your help and feedback.

Show Notes

• https://xyproblem.info/