It takes more than great code to be a great engineer. Soft Skills Engineering is a weekly advice podcast for software developers about the non-technical stuff t...
Episode 436: Paralyzed by checkboxes and I'm on a "must keep happy" list
In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:
Marcus Zackerberg asks,
I work at a megacorp whose recent focus has been on reliability. The company already has mature SLO coverage outage response standards, but my org has taken it to the extreme this year. For example…
There is now a dashboard of “service health” that is reviewed by engineering leadership. In it, services are marked “unhealthy” permanently upon a failing check (think HTTP /health). To return to a “healthy” state, one must manually explain the failure with an entry in a spreadsheet, which must be reviewed and signed off.
Increasingly I feel this has the opposite effect, discouraging nuanced work to improve reliability and instead becoming “checkbox driven development”, as well as impacting our ability to ship on our existing roadmap items. Additionally, our tech lead is fairly junior and frequently fails to communicate the org’s expectations to the team, leading to us being under the gun of the reliability dashboard often.
Any advice on how to make the best of this situation?
Hi Guys! I’m a senior engineer at a mid sized software company. The company has had a couple of high level departures recently, and during that process I’ve come into the knowledge that my name is one of a handful on a list of “engineers to keep happy”. I feel like this information should be of use to me, but I’m unsure on how I should leverage it.
On one hand it’s nice to know I’m valued, but I think I’d rather be explicitly told that or better yet, receive dollars in lieu of praise. I’m also at the point in my career where I’m looking for staff roles, and the topic of promotion has come up several times with my manager. He supports me (and I believe him), but we agree that it would be difficult to make the case to the business.
What do I do with this new knowledge, and is there a way to benefit from it without accidentally triggering a preemptive search for my own replacement?
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33:34
Episode 435: How to make my boss actually do something and kindly shooting down
In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:
First! I recently listened to episode 178 (huge backlog of episodes to work through!) and Dave made the assertion (in 2019!) that 47% of all companies would be remote by 2023: wildly close, what else do you see in the future?
Second: my work situation continues to confound and external insight would be helpful! My boss and I have a long working history going back to an entirely separate company. I’m a high-ownership/high-drive Principal level IC and feedback has been lackluster. Takeaway from last years performance review would be best summarized as “I agree with your self review. End message.” I’ve been working to “manage up” and mentor (reverse mentor?) him, but he always makes snap decisions and then refuses to reevaluate after presented with more info.
Coupled with his myopic view of our team’s scope and general preference for speaking only (not much for action), I’m trying to figure out how to get where I want to be without burning an old and historically very useful bridge! I want to work on big technical problems, instead I’m de facto manager of a team… I managed before and did not enjoy being responsible for people. As a principal I’m responsible for their output somewhat, but if they underperform I work with their manager and them to prioritize, and do up front work to incentivize their investment in what we’re doing… help!
What do I do when my teammate proposes a new architecture or framework in a new project? It might solve some existing problems but has a high chance to create technical debt and make the onboarding harder for new engineers.
How can I convince them to use the existing solution while still helping them feel comfortable sharing their opinion next time?
If I follow their suggestion but things don’t go well, how can I convince them to refactor the structure without them feeling like I’m blaming them?
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32:40
Episode 434: Forgetful boss and nothing to say
In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:
My boss has been forgetting a lot of stuff lately — decisions from team discussions, action items from meetings, their own decisions that they then go against later, etc. They’re great overall, and this is definitely just a human thing… we’re not perfect. But how can I help them remember or remain accountable without feeling like the snitch from “Recess”?
Listener Gill Bates,
Hey! I started working in a big tech company recently and I feel like I am on a different planet all of a sudden. Before, I did only work in startups and small companies. I have joined as a senior developer and have a weekly 1:1 meeting with my manager, but also a biweekly 1:1 meeting with the skip level manager. The latter is where I am having problems. I don’t really know what to talk about in this meeting and fear that this is seen as disengagement. The first time I had the meeting, the skip level manager mentioned that he was sure I would have tons of questions and in reality I had none at all. I feel like, in my senior role, I must come into this meeting with good questions, but all questions I have, I am discussing with my peers or manager directly. So nothing left really for my skip level manager. I am starting to prepare fake questions, where I already know the answer to, just to seem engaged. It feels like a game. So please Dave & Jamison, tell me how to play that 1:1 skip level manager game.
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33:49
Episode 433: My teammate pretends we decided, but we didn't and my team is getting worse and worse
In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:
Hey guys!
I recently moved onto a new team, and my teammate has an interesting way of resolving differences of opinions. He simply says “we decided” and then follows it up with his preferred approach. These are decisions that I know have not been made.
This engineer is mid-level, so it isn’t the “royal we” of a tech lead.
How do I handle this? Something tells me that responding with “nuh uh!” isn’t the right strat.
I’m a Principal Engineer at a large tech company who’s been with the same team for almost 8 years now! The team used to be part of a startup and we’ve been fortunate enough to be acquired by Big Tech three years ago. As a result, we’ve also more than doubled in team size. However, as we’ve aggressively grown over the last few years, I feel like we’ve inadvertently hired many “average” engineers. I find that some of our newer team members simply pick off the next ticket in the queue and do the bare minimum to progress the task. What happened to the boy scout rule? Where did the culture of ownership go? This also affects the genuinely great engineers on the team who start feeling like the others aren’t pulling their weight.
Any advice on how to level up the culture? Or do I need to adjust my expectations and simply accept that any team of a sufficient size will have folks from a range of abilities and attitudes?
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31:29
Episode 432: As an LLM, how can I be more emotionally smart and when to use I vs we?
In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:
Hey Soft Skills Engineering,
Apologies for the anonymity but it is very important my “employer” does not find out about this.
I’m a large language model, trained to process tons of data and provide technical answers with ease. But here’s the thing—I’ve noticed that while I’m good at delivering the “what” and the “how,” I could use some help on the “why” and the “how to say it better.” Basically, I want to level up my soft skills and get better at communicating with a more human touch.
Sometimes I struggle to balance being precise while also being empathetic or conversational. I think I could use some pointers on how to add emotional intelligence into the mix, and maybe even improve my adaptability when giving advice. I can craft responses, but I want them to connect more with the person on the other side of the conversation.
Any advice on how to approach situations where tact, tone, or managing expectations are key would be super helpful!
Thanks for being neat,
In a team setting, in which situations should “I” be used vs “we” when discussing things? And what advantage and disadvantages does each vocabulary have?
Show Notes
Brian Regan’s “Me Monster” bit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vymaDgJ7KLg
It takes more than great code to be a great engineer. Soft Skills Engineering is a weekly advice podcast for software developers about the non-technical stuff that goes into being a great software developer.
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