Episode 390: Fixing typos and Cassandra

Jan 8, 2024

The podcast discusses various topics including addressing typos in emails and websites, recruiting and training engineers, the phrase 'knock on wood', presenting evidence, and the consequences of quitting a job due to frustration.

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Introduction

00:00 • 3min

Addressing Typos and Errors in Content Management Systems

03:23 • 11min

Recruiting and Training Engineers, Overwhelm in a Small Startup

14:33 • 2min

Knocking on Wood

16:39 • 4min

Presenting Evidence and the 'I Told You So' Spreadsheet

20:12 • 2min

The Consequences of Quitting a Job Due to Frustration

21:51 • 10min

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

I’m a backend engineer at a large non-public company. I noticed a bunch of our emails and website riddled with typos. I can not claim that it is metrics impacting or impacting business, so I get that teams always deprioritize, but the overall feel just irks me. Many of these come from a CMS I don’t have access too, so it’s not like I could offer to help with code even if I wanted. When things like this are not in your space, any advice on how to up overall quality?
Possibly Mute Senior Engineer asks,

I’m currently a senior engineer in a really small startup, and I’ve been here just long enough that I’m deeply familiar with our flagship product in multiple areas - infrastructure, the guts of the business logic, our deployment patterns, our most common failure modes, etc. Unfortunately, I have to be involved in every project and pick the application up off the ground when it dies. As a result, I’ve become spread very thin, and I have to cut corners just to stay afloat (or I am specifically directed to cut corners to meet a deadline). Frequently (because of all the corner cutting), we run into two situations that really tick me off:
- I see bad thing on the horizon, talk to my team about it, am ignored, then bad thing happens and I get to have a crappy day fixing it
- I recommend a basic best practice, we don’t use it and do some coat hanger + duct tape thing instead, thing breaks, and I get to have a crappy day fixing it.
I’m very tired of being on the wrong end of the consequences of our own actions. I pour so much into this job, but I feel like I need to go get my vocal cords inspected, because it’s like my teammates and my manager can’t hear me when I talk about the things we’re doing poorly that lead to bad outcomes.

Quit my job? Or is there an easy way to deal with this situation that I’m just missing? I feel like I’m screaming into the void every time I have these discussions and get completely blown off with “oh that’s not important right now” or “oh that terrible thing could never happen”. Thanks in advance!