In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Help! I have a co-worker who can’t get to the point. They keep rambling, throwing in useless jargon, with veiled bragging of their knowledge and accomplishments, and answering questions that weren’t asked; and all in a very monotone voice. My brain starts to zone out now every time they start in to “explain” something. They also somehow survived at the company for 8+ years and have recently become a team lead. Our paths don’t cross every day because we work on separate products, but I am interested in their team’s product and might want to join them in a year or so. What do I do? Listener Zezima asks, Hi! I’ve been at my current job for about a year and a half now. My boss says we should be getting more money and investors and will soon give everyone a raise. I’ve seen many people being hired and others given a raise but have not yet received one myself. I recently started applying to other jobs. I don’t want to leave but want to learn my market value and get a slight increase. I was demoing some work in a meeting, and sharing my screen to do so. As I went to upload an image…. my RESUME file is open. resume,coverletter,resumeadobe,resumeTesla. I mashed the cancel button and bounced in to panic mode but continued like nothing happened. I hear some typing shortly after closing. Did they see it? Are they talking about me…? Do they know I dont want to leave but just want some sort of compensation? These questions are going through my brain and I have no clue what to do. Should I call up the people in the demo and have a heart to heart?

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Hi, thank you for the great podcast! I work for a software consultancy as a senior product manager. For 5+ years, our team of 40 designers, developers and QA has designed, built, deployed, and operated a large SaaS platform. We are passionate about evolving the product, know the domain well and managed to improve a lot of processes in the client’s company. We go way beyond “just development”. The problem is that the client’s internal staff treats us poorly, especially when it comes to product decisions. As a product manager, I have all the responsibilities of a respective in-house specialist, but almost no power. When I refuse to prioritize a feature that does not make sense based on data and user research, the client’s customer success reps go crazy and escalate it to the CEO. I have seen email threads where internal employees call us “offshore resources”… How can I change this situation? I don’t want to leave this job because I really like the product I am working on, as well as the team. Thank you! Connor asks: “I recent round of layoffs at my company has me thinking about my future as a software engineer. Every layoff I’ve been through, the more tenured employees are the ones let go. I also, generally speaking, haven’t seen a lot of older software engineers (50+) in the companies I have worked for. I love programming, but can I reasonably expect to stay employable in this field for the next forty years?

We’re excited to have special guest Charity Majors on the show! Charity is the CTO and former CEO of Honeycomb. She has worked at Second Life, Parse, Facebook, and more. She blogs at charity.wtf. Dave, Jamison, and Charity answer these questions: I’ve had the role of tech lead informally for the past two years at a fast-growing tech startup. We were a team of 6 developers, and now we are 16. Recently, we had a department meeting in which the Software Development VP communicated that we have 3 teams and I was the tech lead of two of them. I was surprised. He hasn’t mentioned his decision of splitting the teams nor that I’ve been officially promoted to tech lead. I was expecting a one-on-one where he would “pop the question”: Will you be my tech lead? I asked him privately if that meant I would be officially promoted and would have my title changed. He said that he was going to have this conversation with the HR Manager and would get back to me, but potentially. He doesn’t spend time on one-on-ones, nor is he very good at managing people although he’s good technically. How weird is this situation? A manager tells his team that they now have a tech lead along some org changes. I haven’t been informed, haven’t had my title changed yet, and haven’t been offered a raise yet. Hi! I love your show and have been listening to it almost since day one. I was an engineer for about 10 years, and I’ve been a manager for about 1 year, and I love my team. They’re high performers, we have a high level of trust. I also like my boss! But the larger org has some issues, and in time-honored Soft Skills Engineering tradition, I plan to quit. I would like to stay in management. So I have these questions: 1) My employer is a very large public company. How much should I care about negative headlines and Wall Street’s opinion? 2) How long should I stay in my role as a manager before looking for a new job? 3) How do I message this to my team when I leave?

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Hey friends, thanks for such an entertaining show, I look forward to it every week. My question relates to ‘leveling up’ as a developer. I’ve been getting nice feedback for my work on projects and the blog post updates I’ve been writing along the way. This has been noticed by colleagues, managers and the local meetup organising committees in my city. I have now been asked to speak at a number of events internally and in the community. While I am very flattered they enjoy my writing I am not interested in hitting the local ‘speaking circuit’ and would prefer to focus on building, writing and mentoring without getting up on stage. Is it ‘ok’ to say no to speaking when it simply does not spin my wheels or is this a mandatory ‘thing’ I must get on board with to progress my career? I am a tech lead on a team where, for the most part, people are friendly, optimistic and professional. There is one engineer who is mostly upbeat and has shown real potential but in certain contexts, e,g, retros and the odd technical conversation becomes a crippling black hole of negativity. The person in question is quite young, relative to the rest of the team, has only ever worked at our company, they are well compensated and have great opportunities to work on exciting green field projects, every developers dream right? What could I be missing? I don’t want to lose this person but I can’t help but feel that they need to grow in maturity and somehow, despite pointed feedback, that’s not happening here. What do you think I should do to stop the chronic pessimism, which I’m afraid if not rectified soon will lead to more victims?

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I’ve been recently looking for summer internships and I have had a couple of video interviews. I don’t consider myself an interview rookie since I’ve had my fair share but there is one question I can’t understand whether to answer honestly or not so here it goes: “Are you applying to other job opportunities?”. The question is kind of stupid since no one puts all of its eggs in one basket but on the other hand I’m afraid answering ‘yes’ will make it seem as if I don’t care about the company (spoiler alert: I don’t really care :)). How do I answer honestly to this question and at the same time make them feel like they are special? By the way, love the podcast! Hi guys! I just started listening to your show and I already have experienced a steep improvement from a puny 10x dev to 11x one. My question, if you’ll be kind enough to answer is: How do I convince my cheapskate boss to sponsor me flying across the pond to give a talk at a conference I was selected for. Should I sponsor it myself in case of a decline? Should I hint at a possible job quitting if I am declined (I am currently seeking a new job)? Should I go forward with the talk if I do quit and the content of the talk is largely about the job I did there in the last couple of years. Note, I am widely regarded as an excellent employee by my superiors and colleagues. I earn quite a bit less than my current value and I am currently back, looking for a job. That’s it from me, love you guys!

Hey, want to use Dropbox as your app’s production database? Well, check here. In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Hello Dave & Jamison, first of all thank you for the show! I recently moved to a tech lead position and as such I will be asked by many people to provide feedbacks for performance reviews and promotions. Do you have any tip on how to provide good feedbacks, especially in the cases where you don’t constantly work with the interested people? Hello, guys! Thank you so much for the amazing content produced. I really enjoy the show. Thanks for the laughs and the knowledge.” I am a backend software developer working on a multidisciplinary team. There’s this other developer that really gets on my nerves. To maintain my sanity I am asking to change teams, and people keep asking me why I want to change. Should I tell my manager the real reason or is it better to say that I want new challenges? Maybe my manager can solve the problem and no one else leaves the team (I am not the first one to leave for this reason)

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I’m an introverted person but am not afraid to present my work and have strong 1-1s. For the past few months, I’ve been working on a project with a coworker who is very extroverted and expressive compared to me. During meetings with higher ups to present our work and progress, he overpowers me in conversation unwittingly. Most of the time, I feel he does a good job but other times I notice that he makes claims without gathering all the data. I’m much more deliberate and will let people know if I’m uncertain about something; But he is willing to just say something outright then later apologize if he was incorrect. I want to make sure that in meetings, I don’t come across as weak. I’m pretty confident in my technical ability and am polite at work, but don’t think I come across as very approachable due to my lack of expressiveness. Is this something I should work on? Hey Jamison and Dave! I absolutely love your show and have listened to every episode. You guys keep me company on those commutes to work and keep me sane. Every quarter, we have an organization-wide demo. Usually, it’s one person demoing the feature - usually the person who has been working on it most recently. For some of the features, I put in a lot of hard work and time into the feature but was later moved off to another project after completing my part. Essentially, I wrote the foundation of the whole feature. However, everyone has long forgotten that I ever contributed to it and I only found out it was even being demoed on the day of. I feel really disappointed my efforts aren’t recognized, but is it too petty to care? From a career standpoint, I worry that the person demoing will get a lot more visibility from leadership and it will lead to faster career growth for them. What are your thoughts? Thanks!

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: My company is a startup and they’re super unorganized. I’m a junior-mid level engineer, and when I was onboarded, there was no documentation for how to run anything. I wrote a bunch of documentation and also made some PR templates to try and organize PRs. I’m super annoyed because things are constantly being messed with in our schema, and I don’t realize what we’ve changed until it correlates to a different issue that I’m trying to fix and then have to redo the fix because there’s this new change. What can I do to help my company? I’m a lead engineer at a small but growing startup. I work primarily on skunkworks projects. My teammate and I are feeling constantly underwhelmed by the performance of the rest of the engineering team, who are working on the core app. Their work causes limitation for us, makes the engineering team look ill-equipped, and we cant seem to make old dogs learn new tricks. How do we make it more apparent to the team, and the rest of the company, that it’s time to “level up” the engineering domain as a whole.

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Hi, I’m a software engineer who’s recently been promoted to a technical lead. I accomplished this mainly through work ethic, dedication to improving my skillset, a couple of large/notable projects, and some minor internal networking. After going through the promotion process, it’s become apparent how valuable it is to establish strong relationships with peers and seniors in your field. What advice or recommendations do you have for establishing these relationships within a company and how would you go about seeking a more senior engineer or leader to mentor you? Also, thanks for all your hard work - been listening to your episodes for the past 6 months and finding them very enlightening! I just got my annual performance review at work. The overall rating was “meets expectations”, but I worked really hard this year and thought I did great work. I was hoping for a higher rating than that. Maybe worse, this means I got a smaller raise than I expected. The review contained some suggestions for improvement. I feel pretty demotivated by the whole situation. How do I get out of this funk? You can get in touch with Jeff Leiken at https://www.evolutionmentoring.com/.

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I work in a charity as an iOS developer and there is so much drama in the office about anything. I am so scared to talk with my backend engineer about work that we created a non-company slack workspace. This is how we communicate, even though we sit right next to each other. Please send help. I work in a company that’s around 10 years old with 1800 employees that started implementing agile methodologies a few years ago. It was great and improved the work, but now all the agile coaches are pushing to have physical boards and doing things apparently just to justify their own existence. I agree we all should try new methodologies but shouldn’t it always be based on a problem we are trying to solve? And shouldn’t all the team be on board with the change instead of just doing it because the agile coach wants to?