Soft Skills Engineering

Dec 16 2024 440 ep. 30 mins 17.5k
Soft Skills Engineering Podcast artwork

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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Episode 439: Harried VP of Eng and first startup job

Dec 16 2024 23 mins  
In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: What advice would you give for working with an ineffective leader whose input is crucial to your work? I’m a senior developer for a mid-sized non-tech company with probably 60-80 devs, and in the past year I’ve been working more with a VP of software who seems to still be involved in code details, getting pulled in

Episode 438: Software job after prison and working 60 hours per week at age 20 and feeling unfulfilled

Dec 09 2024 42 mins  
In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I am a first time caller and full time listener of your show. I was released from prison a year ago and I coded for 18 years straight on all sorts of stacks as part of my job requirements in the pen. Imagine the irony when I discovered what codepen was. A dev told me about an opening for full remote/full stack web d

Episode 437: My company canceled all one-on-ones and moving to a single backlog

Dec 02 2024 30 mins  
In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: My company recently eliminated 1:1 meetings between managers and their direct reports. Previously, most people had these meetings every other week, and they were an opportunity to talk about career growth among other engineering things besides current work. They’re claiming the recurring meetings can be replaced with

Episode 436: Paralyzed by checkboxes and I'm on a "must keep happy" list

Nov 25 2024 33 mins  
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.

Episode 435: How to make my boss actually do something and kindly shooting down

Nov 18 2024 32 mins  
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 bos

Episode 434: Forgetful boss and nothing to say

Nov 11 2024 33 mins  
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 wi

Episode 433: My teammate pretends we decided, but we didn't and my team is getting worse and worse

Nov 04 2024 31 mins  
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”

Episode 432: As an LLM, how can I be more emotionally smart and when to use I vs we?

Oct 28 2024 35 mins  
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 “w

Episode 431: Stinky.js and power hungry friend

Oct 21 2024 34 mins  
In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Hey! Love your podcast! I’ve been poached by a startup which sounds really exciting but I’m worried whether it is a good career move for me. I am currently working with backend, however this company would have more of a full stack role and it would be lots of nodeJS and Typescript 🤢 anything javascript related sc

Episode 430: Should I quit this job I'm underqualified for and honestly torpedoed my promo chances

Oct 14 2024 30 mins  
In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I work at a large tech company, been there for about two years at the time of writing this question. I got in by sheer luck since I’ve interviewed at many teams in this company before finally landing an offer and I’m starting to think I don’t belong. I constantly feel like I don’t do a good job to the point wher