Soft Skills Engineering

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Stefan Help! Most of the time people ask questions about issues that already happened. I however, would like to prevent one. I am a young Tech Lead and really love my responsibilities, team and especially my manager. With the help of your podcast I could even resolve my last issue regarding compensation. Of course I dutifully did my part and reallocated some of my payment increase to finance Jamisons yacht. My very awesome manager “Bob” is so great that he has to manage 4 teams. Naturally, because Bob and those 4 teams are doing great, Bob gets rewarded with even more work. In his “free time” Bob is a parent of two teenagers which is also not necessarily known for being a stress free environment. Lately I noticed that Bob is more stressed than usual. Bob told me that he wakes up in the middle of the night because he remembers missed TODOs in the job. I also see this change in his body language and general demeanour. Now that a very critical project is coming up, Bob, as the go to person for more work has to allocate a significant time of his day to support this project. I fear that Bob is on a path to burnout and this new project might be the last drop. I would really hate to get a different manager. Statistics claim it will probably be worse… Also I really wish for Bob to be well and health, too. ;) How can I help Bob in his situation? How do I address those concerns with him without looking condescending? We have a good and open but not close relationship, that I would not like to ruin by overstepping my bounds. Thank you very much. I love the podcast. You make me laugh and learn with every single episode. You rock! I am a very young senior engineer at a big tech company and I think nobody really knows how young I actually am. I just turned 24 and usually in prior jobs other developers started hating me once they found out that I am this young and already in a senior role. Here at the current place, I have the feeling that all of the engineers in levels below me are already a lot older and have more years of experience under their belt. Also, I think they do not know about my age, because I never shared that in the recruiting process, nor later on. Usually people assume I am in my early 30’s and have a baby face, but when I tell them that I am a baby face because I am actually young, they become envious and things go south from there. Should I keep this a secret or am I playing too much into this? PS: I am also already married and have kids, so that could make them assume that I am older.

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 to production issues, in-person code reviews, etc. He’s a nice guy, but he seems like he’s being pulled in too many directions at once. When he schedules a meeting, there’s a 50% chance it happens on that day and time, and when we do have meetings, if we bring up questions and high level issues we need feedback on he’s quick to “take ownership” and say he’ll do X and Y. Inevitably, X and Y slip down the priority list because production issues and who knows what else, and we’re stuck waiting weeks on end for something that if he’d just delegated the work to someone else, we’d have long since moved on. But we still need his input to shape our work. How can we as lower-level developers (with a manager who isn’t involved in this project at all) help mitigate these delays? I’ve recently accepted a new position after spending more than three years at my first job out of college. Currently, I’m a Senior Engineer at a large, corporate-like company (300+ people), but my new role will be at a much smaller startup (20-30 people). I’m excited about the change but also a bit nervous, as I know startups can be fast-paced, and I’ll need to get up to speed quickly. What advice do you have for setting myself up for success in this new role—both before I start and after I begin? I have a couple of weeks before my start date and want to use that time to prepare effectively.

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 dev at their company. I’ve used the tech stack before but I have a non-traditional background to say the least. I’m not worried about being qualified but I have never worked in a team and I have always been responsible for production. I work for a large retailer in a non-coding role. I’m also doing some freelancing on upwork/fiverr, but the pay is low and the jobs are not fulfilling. I was self-employed before I was incarcerated and I know how to beat the pavement and get small time work, but this is an opportunity to work at a real software house. I don’t even care if it’s a feature factory, I just have loved coding since I was 14. What do I do? I am confident in my skills and ability to deliver under pressure (in a place that has pressures you can’t imagine). I have a cover letter, but a bad resume and no open source projects from this millennium. I do have a reference - a Captain I worked for said he was willing. However, the opportunity was unexpected and I have not prepared anything. The dev who brought me the offer was a casual friend in IRC and he told me that my resume was mentioned in some meeting. I know you have suggested in previous shows that having someone get your foot in the door is the best way but I really think that feels gross to me. Anyways, longtime listener of your show and first time caller. In fact, when I was in prison, a few years before I was released we finally got tablets with an incredibly limited amount of content. Your show was one of a few on coding but I really enjoy your take on the soft skills because even though I worked in a non-traditional environment, teamwork was always the focus and I listened to everything from square one (took me a long time to get there). So thank you for your podcast you don’t know how many times I could sit in my cell listening to your show and disappear from my cage. Sincerely, Names have been change to protect the guilty Second time caller from NYC! I previously wrote in as an 18-year-old CS graduate (Episode 332). I’ve focused intensely on work for the past 4 years, consistently working 60+ hours per week. I always assumed that this approach to life would eventually bear fruit, but a couple months into turning 20, I’m realizing that I haven’t really done anything memorable besides work (which is a scary realization at 20). While I like working hard and want to ensure the success of the company I work for, I also want to feel like I am living. How have you struck the balance between work and non-work in your lives, and how has that related to the culture of the company you were working for at the time? I should also mention the company I work for (early stage, well funded) does have a culture where it’s expected to work everyday, and 60 hours is approximately the minimum expected.

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 quick, more spontaneous calls when necessary. Although wiping meetings from the calendar does clear up more time to code, as a more junior team member, I’m concerned that this will negatively impact my career growth. It feels like career progression just got a little bit harder. What’s the read here? Is this a red flag? Should I start looking elsewhere? How can I navigate this changing environment and still make sure that I am able to progress my career? A listener named Matt says, I’d really like to move to a single team-dedicated backlog, where we use kanban and have work in progress limits, rather that the heavy release planning fixed-scope current model. I feel we would be more effective as a team that way (I’m one of many team leads in the company). Currently we operate in an agile-ish fashion but ultimately inside a waterfall process, driven from outside the technology team. Although I believe it would be a good thing, I’ve not actually worked in that way. Is it all it’s cracked up to be? Are there any issues of going to that model that I’m not seeing?

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?

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?

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.

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?

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

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 screams frontend to me and it is not something I want to be good at. However, besides this, the product sounds interesting and I would definitely have a lot to learn. I also have this inferior feeling that I’m lacking skills because I didn’t study CS. Will I still be able to become a good engineer even if that’s in NodeJS? 😁 Listener Ben asks, Hiya! I’m a young developer with a broad range of experience (everything from hardware to full-stack web and mobile), and I’ve found myself quite useful at many startups. I just started a new position at a nice startup in my area, but I’m being recruited by one of my close friends from college. He’s the power-hungry type, currently working at a mega-tech corp but wants to make a startup and get rich. He’s very smart and charming, and while I am skeptical of his ability to make a great product I think he can certainly raise a bunch of investment capital without too much worry. My question is: would you ever consider joining a close friend’s startup, and if so what would you need (in terms of contract/equity/salary, runway, savings) to be confident about making that commitment? Thanks!

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 where I’m starting to feel incredibly depressed. My question is, what would you do in this situation? I keep thinking I should leave but it’s not like the work is stressful and not interesting. I also realize I have a pretty solid setup (6 mile no traffic commute, great coworkers, free ev charging, and job security seems solid) so I’m hesitant on giving that up. I also think even if I leave, would I just repeat the cycle again at a new job/company? I’m pretty stuck I’m a year into my first job at Mega Corp post-graduation. Due to high turnover, I’ve ended up taking on tasks that would have originally gone to more experienced developers. I’ve grown and received positive feedback from my manager and skip manager, who have both mentioned potential for promotion. However, in my 1:1s, I’ve expressed that I’m not looking for a promotion yet because I want to solidify my current role and improve my work-life balance. I still have many coding fundamentals to develop, and I’ve been stressed and working long hours to take on these responsibilities. I’m now worried that my honesty might have affected my chances of being promoted and that I might be seen as someone not interested in progressing (which is probably frowned upon in big tech). How should I navigate this situation? Is it okay that I’ve been candid, or should I reconsider my stance on promotion? Thanks!

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I have a job I mostly enjoy, with a super flexible schedule and the freedom to work from anywhere. I learn a lot, and the engineers here are top-notch. However… the pay is only ok, no bonuses, and the stock options feel like a bit of a scam. Asking for a raise isn’t really an option since the company doesn’t have much money. We’ve even cut back on perks, and our yearly kickoff was postponed due to financial issues. I don’t think we’ll go bankrupt, but things will be tight for a while. It’s an exciting, futuristic company, but… there are other exciting companies that pay more and toss in a free hoodie now and then. Should I start looking for a new job? Hey there! Love the podcast and the advice you give! After a year of managing of an engineering team, I asked to step back to IC. I was asked to continue working on the team I was previously managing, but this time as a senior engineer. I’m worried about the transition. I know a lot of how the leadership works for good and for ill, I hired some of my peers, and I know everyone’s comp and more. I want to be a peer on the team after having been their manager. What advice can you give to help me become their peer? Thanks in advance and keep up the incredible episodes with your extremely beautiful voices.

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Listener Muszyn asks, I have been working as a SWE for almost two years. My team lead was recently fired leaving me as the most senior junior developer on the team of 4. I was given the option to be the interim team lead until we are able to fill the now open role. I was always indifferent on whether I would go the technical or managerial route in the future so this could be a really cool opportunity. On the other hand I could be setting myself up for failure in the future if my SWE skills diminish if the hunt for a new lead takes too long. Should I accept this opportunity knowing I won’t get the chance to gain this experience for quite some time, or continue to hone my engineering skills just to end up in meeting marathons in my later years? note: Team leads here are more like resource managers that interface with PMs/TPMs than engineers that happen to have direct reports. How do I demand a raise when a peer leaves? I’m one of two tech leads on a larger team (structured as two teams, each with a team of 4 devs of various levels plus 1 lead, but we all pretty much work as one large team). The company is a sinking ship and I have been half-actively interviewing but not having a ton of success; and for some personal reasons there’s an advantage to staying where I am vs. leaving right now. But this peer leaving means my workload is going to increase substantially. I might try talking to my manager and demanding a raise, but I’ve never really played this game before. What tips and tricks should I know to make the conversation go as favorably as possible? difficulty: The reason everybody is unhappy is because of budget cuts and hiring freezes to begin with, so the company probably sees this as an opportunity to save money by not backfilling this person. I don’t know if that’s good for me (even a hypothetical 50% raise for me would have the company ““saving”” the other 50%) or bad for me (the company will be less amenable to giving me the raise and will probably be happy to drive me away and ““save”” even more).

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Hi! I enjoy your podcast a lot, been listening to it almost since the beginning before I even started to work in tech :-) I’d like to keep this one anonymous, though. I’ve been working fully remote for a pretty small software company for a few years. The workload was very big in the beginning and I was learning a lot, but now I barely work a couple of hours every week and I’m mostly using what I already know. It’s fine, but boring. I have plenty of time to get another job as well, which is exactly what I’ve been looking out for recently. I’ve been approached by a startup. They use many tech stacks across different platforms, so it would probably be a good place to learn a lot of new things. And the pay is better. But, they have an entirely different work culture compared to what I’m used to. They require people working there to be in office all the time, and work like 10hrs/day sometimes. It’s my first time having the chance of working 2 jobs at the same time, so I was wondering could this actually work? What if the first company decided to take on another project soon and the workload increases again? If that happens should I tell them I have another job at the same time? I was wondering maybe you guys have had any similar experiences in the past you could share about… Thanks I am living in Europe and got an offer from a FAANG company. I am on the one hand really excited about the opportunity but also a bit scared of the timezoneshift of 9 hours. The hiring manager already assured me that the team will plan meetings to fit into a 5 hour slot that works best for me. Meaning that I will have to work 6-11PM for sure and the rest is up to me. I have two kids (0 and 4 years old) and am excited to have more time in the afternoons with the family but I am also not sure how to adapt my life to such a schedule effectively to prevent burnout. What do you think about this (and please don’t tell me to quit)?

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Long time listener, first time question asker. I love the show, thank you for all the advices :) I’ve been working in one of the FAANGs for around 3 years now. I joined the company at a lower level and for the past two years I received promotions that got me to a level I’m feeling good with. Having said that, my impact on the group and organization is higher than other people in my rank. Since I’m new to this rank, the chances of getting another promotion (the third in three years) is nearly impossible. I love my manager and I’ve raised it to him in a few meetings before but the answer was that I still don’t have the seniority in that level to get a promotion. This feels extremely frustrating as it feels like up until now I was aiming on getting to the rank I should’ve been recruited at and now when I feel like I can honestly make the leap, it’s not possible. I thought about moving to a different group within the company but since it’s really hard to find good managers and he already knows me and my contributions, it feels like opening a new page somewhere else in the company might even take me backwards on the journey to my next promotion. What do you think I should do? Thank you!! Hey guys, I am constantly fighting the irrational fear of being fired from my job or even the slightest hint of getting PIP’d. So far I have not gotten any indication that I’m underperforming and I’ve actually been told I’m doing well but in stressful seasons (when prod goes down or when I’m taking too long to finish a story), I start spiraling. This happens every other month. Therapy hasn’t worked. Being open with my manager hasn’t worked. So now I’m wondering if Jamison and Dave have the secret sauce. Part of it is knowing since day 1 that this company doesn’t hesitate to cut underperformers. Hearing the rumblings about the current market, I’m nervous that it would take me months to even a year to get a new job, and it has me freaking out. What can I do to just calm down?

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I was hired at a medium sized company as a staff level IC a few months back and a big reason I accepted the job was because I would be reporting directly to the CTO. I took a significant paycut in exchange for the opportunity to learn and grow directly under this leader, as this is a career path I am interested in. Three months later and without any heads up, I was reassigned to a different manger one rung lower in the org chart. One month after that, my new manager abruptly left the company. Still don’t know why. I was then reassigned to a leaf-node manager and I am now several hops removed from the CTO. So far I haven’t said much because rocking the boat too early in a new gig has gone poorly for me in the past. In hindsight this was probably a mistake but I’m afraid I missed the opportunity to say “hey now, wait a second…”. I don’t want to hurt this current manager’s feelings by telling them I don’t want to report to them, but also I am now both severely underpaid and reporting to someone who is technically at a lower career level than I am. What do? I’m a manager in a company which I joined after college. I’ve been here for 16 years. We have grown to 180 employees but still work like a startup in many senses, like talking multiple responsibilities. So although I manage a team I’m still hands in the code at least 50% of the time. I know most of tech stack and services but am jack of all master of none type. Recently, management has been pushing me to take more technical responsibility. I want to do that, but it is challenging and takes more time. My CTO is super fast and churns out CODE like a machine and I feel much slower than them. The work is pretty decent and challenging. I get to work on new stuff but have gotten comfortable here. When I think of looking for a change and look at the expectations from other companies they are technically challenging. I worry I have missed out on learning new things by staying so long at one place. What should I do, stay or move on? I haven’t interviewed for a new job in 11 years, so that’s another fear I have.

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Listener Billy Bob Taco asks, I work at a small-medium startup, as a member of a very small team (read: just me). I work on infrastructure and APIs that support every other team, such as mobile and web clients, as well as other services. I’m relatively junior, and had to work hard to prove myself in this role. I do 100% of the system design and maintenance as well as feature development. I’ve been told on job interviews that I came across as a “little egotistical” when describing the role and the impact its had, but I don’t really know how to soften it! It’s my experience that I’m talking about when trying to share my ability and potential to fill a role. Help? Listener TimeDisplacementBox says, Great show, your future episodes just keep getting better and better. I have a question about avoiding lay offs. In this timeline I recently joined a large company out of college. I worked hard and surpassed goals set by my manager, getting very positive feedback at review time. However, a few weeks ago I started hearing that the company was over budget in engineering, huge changes started happening in upper management, and less work started flowing to our team. The concern was grounded in reality as one morning the company disbanded the team and laid off some of the newer hires including me. Aside from additional time travel, are there any questions I can ask during interviews to help ensure I am getting into a team that is safe from lay offs? And on the job, can you directly ask your manager if lay offs are in the future, or do you just need to watch out for the signs? Show Notes https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/2347:_Dependency

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Thank you hosting this show. This show has given me a lot of insight on nuisances of engineering that isn’t mentioned anywhere. Having some experience in industry for a while, I always find in this position where I want some autonomy but I am bounded by the deadline. What do you think should be the way to start a career that gives autonomy while having that sweet benefits from the industry? I used to be a senior manager of an operations team for a fire fighting service in Australia. I managed all of our physical operational assets - for example radio towers, mobile communications e.g. 5g, 4g technologies, mobile data terminals e.g. laptops in fire fighting appliances “fire trucks ;) “, data centers, networking so on… A restructuring means my team has grown to include in-house software development. While i am excited for this opportunity and on board with the changes, it is a very big shift from the physical and electrical engineering side to software development. The C level staff thinks the team lacks focus and there are “problems” to address. I have been meeting the new team and working through the changes. They are very nervous and are skeptical about how I’ll understand their world, which is fair. How can I best support this team? What are cultural things I should be aware of? What are key metrics I can measure that will fairly represent their hard work to the executive team? Any thoughts on what things a manager or managers can do to be supportive as the new drop in from across the room from a entirely different engineering discipline? Coding in my world is scripting and hacking about to make things work (telecommunication engineer)

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: A listener named Maria says, Hey guys! I am a software engineer working in web development at a small/mid-sized SaaS company. I come from a non-traditional background (self-taught, no CS degree) and I currently have 6 years of experience under my belt, the last 2 years of which I have been tech lead of a small team. I want to move into big(ger) tech, but I’ve not worked on any large scale systems so far. The biggest thing I’ve worked far had a user base of ~100k users and traffic would typically max out at ~2k concurrent users at peak times. Due to the nature of the work I’ve been doing at smaller companies (and also thanks to this podcast!) my soft skills are strong - I am good at working with lots of different people, I can deliver broad/vague projects, and I’m comfortable tackling ambiguous problems. I think my technical skills are probably decent, I’ve spent time learning system design and best practices, and I’ve put in the work to study CS fundamentals. Thing is, I would have absolutely no clue how to maintain an API that needs to handle 100k requests per second. My hands-on experience of concurrency and threading is basically just simple ol’ async/await. Grinding Leetcode aside, what can I do to make myself a stronger candidate for breaking into big tech? How can I be competitive against folks who already have big tech experience? Are there any projects I could do that would sway you as a hiring manager? I know it’s terrible market timing, I am just planning ahead. Love the show, thank you for making me a better engineer! :) Hi! I have been working at my fully remote company with around 100 people in the engineering department for over a year now. While I see a lot of really smart people here, the code quality is lacking. We’re moving from a monolith powered using an opinionated framework to small services powered by a lightweight library, so there are fewer guardrails. I have many ideas on how to structure the code, add layering, etc., so the code is easier to understand and maintain. However, the company is very hierarchical, and despite being at a senior level, I don’t talk much to anyone higher than my lead. There are no staff or principal roles. There are also hardly any meetings, and the only ones I attend are within my small team of five people. Most of slack channels for teams are private, and I don’t ever see company-wide ideas like that thrown in the “general” channel. I initially wanted to present this to my team first, but I am afraid that if they don’t like it for some reason, it will be awkward to take it to higher management afterward. How can I share my ideas with a wider audience and ideally get this approved as part of my work so I don’t have to work on it in my free time?

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I’ve been wondering what kind of career conversations happen between managers and the “max-level” engineers on the team. We’ve all been on a team with those really good staff/principal engineers who are super nice, have great people skills, and seem to have an answer for every technical problem. When I’m asked to peer review some of these people, I basically have nothing to say because they seem perfect. Yet even as individual contributors, they have the same manager and still have the same 1 on 1s with them. What exactly do they talk about? How are their career conversations held? I’m always curious what exactly the landscape looks like for these engineers and what exactly is “next” for them since they seem to have reached the level cap. Hello peeps, I’m an engineering leader in a midsized company. I oversee a couple of teams and things in general have been going well. However: One of the teams tackles an extremely complex problem space and is usually up to the task, delivering things that almost seem like magic if you take a closer look. Now, due to the nature of this team’s work the value is not perceived as such by upper management, being questioned (almost pestered) if this is the right thing to do and even doubting if the resources should be allocated to it at all. The way that I see it is, that since this team has been quietly delivering greatness (delivering quality, meeting deadlines, not breaking things), there are not perceived as hero’s (like other teams would when then put out their, sometimes, auto inflicted fires). What can the team do to rise awareness about the criticality and impact of their work? This is important so that the team can have resources and doesn’t get pulled away from their current work. Also, is this a good time to quit my job while we are waiting for the AI bubble to burst? (Disclaimer, I’ve found an approach and am currently enacting it, but wanted to hear your thoughts on the matter) Optional: Shoutouts to S, a long time listener and early Patreon of the show.