Soft Skills Engineering

The podcast discusses balancing personal innovation with business priorities, exploring challenges in aligning ideas with company objectives. It also covers a tech innovator's tragic tale, highlighting the importance of communicating engineering investments to stakeholders. The dilemma of seeking challenge in a relaxed work environment is also explored, offering strategies for growth and excitement.

Senior developer/Tech Lead faces challenges with enthusiastic scope creep from product owner, struggles with creating acceptance criteria and managing work items. Guest asks about memory abilities and asking questions online. Show explores balancing translation and coding in software development, embracing human search engine role, and discussing harmul ideas that need to be forgotten.

Discussion on strategies for dealing with a super star teammate who is more productive, the challenges of productivity comparison and self-doubt, and how to motivate oneself to learn without apparent reward. The hosts also reflect on their goal of becoming influential in the tech labor market and discuss being highly productive while working part-time.

Transitioning to traditional scrum, scrum master weaponizing practices, dissent in the team, benefits of joining slack community, success story of negotiating equity, team composition, scrum mastering, addressing performance problems, discussion of 'Compiler' podcast, ideal tenure in tech recession, minimum tenure debate in software industry

The podcast discusses the importance of soft skills for interns and junior engineers in the tech industry. It also explores the challenges faced by individuals in driving change within teams and organizations, as well as the difficulties and biases associated with transitioning from QA to software development roles. Additionally, the concept of buying time for brilliant ideas is discussed, along with the advantages of having experience in QA engineering for a junior software engineer role.

The podcast discusses the challenges of relying on a tool built by one person when that person is retiring soon. The team is worried about the lack of knowledge and potential breakdown once the boss leaves. They also explore the dilemma of choosing reviewers for annual reviews - opting for those who make you look good or those who provide actionable feedback. The hosts discuss the importance of seeking unfiltered feedback from peers and the dynamics of feedback from bosses.

The hosts discuss career growth possibilities as an individual contributor and the concept of a distinguished engineer. They explore the path to executive roles in mega tech companies and the importance of asking direct questions about bugs and incidents. They also touch on determining a manager's communication style and the significance of feedback for personal growth.

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.

The hosts discuss dealing with drowsiness at work and offer short-term solutions like coffee breaks. They talk about falling asleep at work and joke about a website with Latin names for symptoms. They explore how pair programming can prevent sleepiness and discuss the impact of bureaucracy on autonomy.

Topics discussed in this podcast include frustration with immaterial motivation and desire for material recognition, the importance of giving genuine compliments to team members, the role of principal engineers in maintaining code consistency, empowering tech leads and policy enforcement, and the significance of consistency across repositories for developer happiness.