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Jamison Dance and Dave Smith

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.

Soft Skills Engineering

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

 1. 

Can you coach self-awareness? I manage someone who seems to believe their skill set is on par with their teammates, regardless of their constant PR feedback regarding the same issues over and over, the extra attention they are regularly given to help them overcome coding challenges, and the PIP they are currently on to address these issues (and others). What are some approaches I could take to help steer them to better understand their areas for growth when explicit measures don’t seem to get through?
 2. 

 3. 

I work at a small 10-person startup. The company has absolutely nothing to do with AI, but one of the founders has gone full evangelist. He genuinely believes AGI is arriving this year and that there isn’t a single job, task, or process where an LLM isn’t the obvious tool.
 4. 

Day in, day out, he’s posting links to random AI products with captions like “looks interesting 👀”. It’s like Clippy got a16z funding, moved to Shoreditch, and now spends his days flogging us apps we didn’t ask for. He also insists we “use AI more in development,” despite not understanding development in the slightest.
 5. 

The routine is always the same:
 6. 

 1. He asks the engineering team how to achieve some goal (always involving an LLM).

 2. We give a sensible answer, weighing complexity, cost, feasibility.

 3. He comes back with a massive pasted transcript: “here’s what ChatGPT thinks.”

 4. We pick out what’s actually useful, quietly bin the nonsense.

 5. He takes our response, shoves it straight back into ChatGPT, and returns with another transcript: “here’s what ChatGPT thinks.”

 7. 

This has been going on for months. At this point, he’s basically a human middleware layer for ChatGPT — no analysis, no original thought, just endless copy-paste recursion. I’m genuinely worried he’s outsourcing his entire thinking process to a chatbot and slowly losing the ability to engage with ideas on his own.
 8. 

How do I tell him — politely but firmly — that this is both rude and a bit tragic? And, half-serious: is there a prompt injection I can use to jailbreak my founder back into being an actual founder rather than a ChatGPT relay bot?
 9.

Episode 478: Can you coach self-awareness and my boss is an llm

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

 1. 

Hey guys,
 2. 

I have been working for four months at my job and I already don’t like it.
 3. 

This is my first job out of college and I work as a C# backend engineer for a small B2B SaaS company. I really think this company is a dead end. There is a lot of technical debt and antipatterns and we have no automated testing whatsoever. Most of our time is spent manually debugging but no one wants to refactor.
 4. 

I’m already thinking about working somewhere else. However, it took me a while to get this job, and I don’t think the market has gotten any better since. I’m trying to decide whether I should focus on applying to jobs again or if I should work on a bunch of side projects and open source to stand out better. On one hand, I can learn new technologies on my own to make me stand out for my next job, but on the other hand,
I feel like as long as I stay at this company I am wasting time, since I’m not learning from my job. I want to switch to more distributed backend engineering in Java anyways, but I’m not sure how to go about it.
 5. 

 6. 

Listener Ghani asks,
 7. 

“I’m a mid-level software engineer who has trouble communicating with my engineering manager and product manager when there is unclear or missing information about an assignment/story/project.
 8. 

They answer with hostile/dismissive tone/non-answer (e.g it’s on the jira-card, epic, etc). They course correct when they have the information later, harshly
 9. 

my impressions were
 10. 

 • they don’t have the information at the time

 • they expect engineers to make decision

 • they expect engineers to know something they don’t (e.g architecture, infrastructure, past decision, plans, etc)

 11. 

I really want to look for where we can have a safe exchange of information. How can I do this?
 12.

Episode 477: Four months and I already hate my job and grumpy and fuzzy

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

 1. 

Two junior engineers recently joined my team, and I’ve been tasked with onboarding them. This is the first time I’ve been responsible for junior devs, and I’m struggling with how to coach them up. For context, we’re a small engineering team where self-sufficiency is highly valued; processes/overhead is minimal, and we have a real bias for action. As such, when they ask me for help, my intuition is often to respond “Keep looking, figure it out!”; in my mind, walking them to the answer would be anthithetical to our culture and set the wrong expectation for how they should go about solving problems. This is especially the case when they throw their hands up and say “Help, I’m stuck, what do I do”. Though, I don’t want to be so unhelpful that it frustrates them or legitimately impedes their progress. I’ve also noticed them sometimes going “behind” me to ask others engineers for help, which makes me think that I am being too unhelpful. The number one question I ask myself is: How much help should I be giving them? How do I find the right balance here?
 2. 

 3. 

I’m seeing more and more AI slop in my org’s code base that I fear will have meaningful impact on the integrity and maintainability of the application we deliver to customers. Everyone talks the talk of “Ultimately, it’s the implementer’s responsibility to audit and understand the code they ship,” but few seem to walk the walk. How can I best work with my team to address this, especially in a context where leadership is prioritizing velocity?
 4.

Episode 476: How much help is too much help and guarding against slop

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

 1. 

Hi!
 2. 

I’m currently working for a big tech company and I’ve just accepted an internal transfer to another team. At the same time, an external company reached out, offering me a job for a role I’m interested in and twice my current compensation.
 3. 

I’m not sure what to do. The offer from the new company is very interesting and I wouldn’t think twice at accepting it if I still was in my old team. But now that I’ve accepted the internal transfer, I don’t know what’s best for my career: stay with my current company and lose out on a great offer, or go with the new company but likely burn bridges with my current manager, possibly closing off future opportunities to return to my current company (something that I’m open to in the future)?
 4. 

 5. 

How do I politely but firmly stop a project manager colleague, who has vast open plains in their calendar compared to my Tetris-stacked week as a senior software engineer, from parking themselves at my desk for 45-minute vent sessions about everything that’s frustrating them about our project? It’s never just the weather; it’s a full-blown TED Talk on their annoyances, which makes me feel defensive and frustrated in return. I’ve tried the headphones-on-and-look-intently-at-the-screen-approach, and sitting on the other side of the office, booking a smaller meeting room to hide, and carrying on working as they tell me about their troubles with both leadership and members of my team. Nothing seems to work. They find me every time. Is there a way to escape without faking my own death or staging an office fire drill? Thanks!
 6.

Episode 475: Am I too loyal to my big tech job and politely preserving time

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

 1. 

Hi Dave & Jamison,
 2. 

Long time listener, first time google-form filler outer!
 3. 

I work in a hybrid role as a lead developer and manager of a small team (less than 5). I’m new to management and most of ny experience so far has been with smart, motivated engineers. . .
 4. 

UNTIL! My new recruit is driving me crazy, they are clearly very capable, but just do not do the work. They are frequently late for work, frequently sign off early, and constantly evasive when I ask for updates. I have spoken to them about these issues a bunch, and everytime they are apologetic and say they “have some personal issues but are working on it” - and nothing changes. Urgh!
 5. 

I am pretty sure I will have to fire them, but I feel terrible about it! I know I can’t keep them on and pay them to do nothing, but what’s the best way to let somebody go? How do I break the news to the rest of the team? How do I avoid feeling bad for the rest of my life?
 6. 

Yours guiltily,
 7. 

Anon
 8. 

 9. 

A listener named “erm what the sigma” asks,
 10. 

Do you have any advice on how to reduce the ramp-up time when context switching? I’ve always felt like context switching comes at a high cost for me—it just takes so long for me to mentally shift between tasks. This wasn’t much of a problem before, but I’ve recently become a tech lead and now my calendar is cluttered with meetings (why did I ask for this again??). I’m struggling to complete my coding stories because just as I hit my stride, I get pinged by someone on my team to help them or have to jump into yet another meeting. pls send help
 11.

Episode 474: I hate the idea of firing a low performer and cheaper context switching

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

 1. 

Hi Jamison and Dave!
 2. 

I am not a developer, but my question is hopefully transferable. I sit in between lawyers and developers. I advise on technology that can be applied to legal processes and I support our teams in using a range of platforms and AI tools to be more efficient across their work.
 3. 

I have ADHD (late diagnosis at 22) and often have trouble with executive function, remembering details, progressing large projects with no deadlines, and remembering verbal instructions.
 4. 

Have either of you ever had a neurodivergent person on your team? If so, how did you support them? What environment helped them to work best? Also, what frustrations did you have and how could they have mitigated them?
 5. 

Any help would be appreciated to help me avoid driving my manager insane (I live in constant fear that one day she will snap and I’ll be fired even multiple years in). 😂
 6. 

 7. 

Hi Dave and Jamison,
you’ve made my runs very enjoyable over the last years, thank you so much for that - even though I doubt that laughing out all the time is great for my performance.
 8. 

I’ve been in web development for 7 years now and a Lead Fullstack Engineer at a consulting firm. Being a “lead” currently only means that my team mates seek my opinion and guidance on topics, without me having any increased responsibility. In September, I’ll move countries (Europe to Australia) and will be on parental leave until mid ‘26 when I’ll have to look for a new job down under. I feel quite stressed by recent developments (AI), already have the feeling of not being able to keep up with all the new things (ask my 300 open tabs of articles I want to read), and fear that I could loose touch in my time off. How can I deal with this FOMO? And which topics would you look into in the upcoming months if you were in my place?
 9. 

Show Notes

 https://blog.jsbarretto.com/post/software-is-joy
 https://medium.com/@djsmith42/the-3-highest-roi-technical-skills-for-software-developers-21b412d79aff

Episode 473: Mental health support and overcoming FOMO of taking a break from work

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

 1. 

I’m the CTO of a small startup. We’re 3 devs including me and one of them is a junior developer. My current policy is to discourage the use of AI tools for the junior dev to make sure they build actual skills and don’t just prompt their way through tasks. However I’m more and more questioning my stance as AI skills will be in demand for jobs to come and I want to prepare this junior dev for a life after my startup. How would you do this? What’s the AI coding assistant policy in your companies. Is it the same for all seniority levels?
 2. 

 3. 

Hi everyone! Long-time listener here, and I really appreciate all the insights you share. Greetings from Brazil!
 4. 

I recently joined a large company (5,000 employees) that hired around 500 developers in a short time. It seems like they didn’t have enough projects aligned with everyone’s expertise, so many of us, myself included, were placed in roles that don’t match our skill sets.
 5. 

I’m a web developer with experience in Java and TypeScript, but I was assigned to a data-focused project involving Python and ETL pipelines, which is far from my area of interest or strength. I’ve already mentioned to my manager that I don’t have experience in this stack, but the response was that the priority is to place people in projects. He told me to “keep [him] in the loop if you don’t feel comfortable”, but I’m not sure that should I do.
 6. 

The company culture is chill, and I don’t want to come across as unwilling to work or ungrateful. But I also want to grow in the right direction for my career. How can I ask for a project change, ideally one that aligns with my web development background, without sounding negative or uncooperative? Maybe wait for like 3 months inside of this project and then ask for a change?
 7. 

Thanks so much for your thoughts!
 8.

Episode 472: Should my junior dev use AI and thrown in to ETL

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

 1. 

I’m a senior developer on a small team, and I’m feeling frustrated with a junior developer I work with. They’re smart and perfectly capable, but they stick very strictly to the confines of their assigned work. They’ll finish their tickets, but unless they’re directly asked, they don’t offer to help with other areas, pitch in on shared responsibilities, or step up when the team is trying to work cross functionally.
 2. 

This engineer seems content to stay in their lane and do “just enough.” I know they’re junior, so I don’t expect miracles, but I expect some initiative. This is most frustrating because it’s a small team and it often feels like we’re working with half of an engineer when they disappear into a corner and leave the pressing issues for the senior developers to handle.
 3. 

How can I encourage them (or maybe push them a bit) to see the bigger picture and contribute more to the team’s success without coming across as bossy or micromanaging? Is this really my responsibility to fix, and am I expecting too much of a junior?
 4. 

 5. 

I had my first day yesterday as a senior developer and dozed off at an hour meeting at the end of the day today. The meeting was about planning the next year on a zoom call with the leadership I was following in the beginning but at some point they started to talk in something I can‘t really understand(to excuse myself, I had had mant meetings throughout the day and still new to their product). I should’ve turned off my camera but I kept it on while I was definitely zoning out and got my eyes closed few times.
I am so embarrassed and don’t know what should I do and feel. I like this new workplace and people so far but should I already look for another job? Help!!!
 6.

Episode 471: Why does my junior engineer do so little and I fell asleep in a Zoom meeting

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

 1. 

I was on a meeting with a team generally regarded to be pretty annoying to deal with and not particularly useful. The meeting was pretty annoying and not particularly useful. I audibly said to myself after leaving “holy crap what a waste of time.” Turns out I hadn’t left and may not have been muted (?) but I’m really not sure. I left immediately without checking due to cringe overload, so I have no way of knowing.
 2. 

How do I even go about this? I have to meet with this team regularly. My spirit has left my body, this question was typed by the husk that remained.
 3. 

 4. 

I am almost 2 years into my software development career. A few months ago, I was moved to a team where I was the only frontend developer. My team responsible for maintaining a large, legacy angular project and building a new internal in React tool to support the ML engineers at our organization. Our organization hired some contractors to help with building the new tool, all of which have the same or less dev experience as me.
 5. 

Our project manager is not engaged in our project. He is on multiple teams. I have to communicate with our customer, gather requirements, create user stories, and QA the contractors’ work. This is not the type of work I am particularly good at or enjoy. This is on top of me being the de-facto frontend tech lead. I am STRUGGLING to keep up. I can only do a little bit of work on our project each iteration and doing required maintenance of the legacy application has become very difficult to do because of how little attention I am able to give it.
 6. 

I don’t want to do all the other stuff, I just want to write code. What should I do?
 7.

Episode 470: I said something stupid in a meeting and just want to code

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

 1. 

I’m a long time listener to the podcast. Thanks for reading and answering my question!
 2. 

I have over 20+ yrs experience as a manual QA and 6+ yrs experience as a SDET. I’m in a new role as a hybrid manual QA / SDET for a company that hasn’t had QA for a few years. After a couple of months a new hire was added to support a new project in non-development or QA tasks. While waiting for the launch of the new project, senior leadership decided to have this new hire to help me with QA. They have no experience in QA or coding. I spent a considerable amount of time training them, and found it difficult.
 3. 

After a few months my manager told me the hire will transition to lead QA. They will NOT be my supervisor or manager. I will be answering directly to the manager as before. I feel sidelined since I didn’t get hired on as a Sr. or Lead role. I’ve already been left out of numerous meetings catered to team leads only.
 4. 

The new hire is very vocal in meetings. They repeat my ideas as their own, and speak for me when I don’t agree. It’s exhausting to hold back ideas from the new hire or correct them and add context to the rest of the team when I disagree.
 5. 

I’m worried I’m training this new QA lead to be my replacement. What are your thoughts? I feel like the company culture is chaotic for the long term. Any thoughts what I should do in the short term and long term?
 6. 

 7. 

Hi Dave and Jamison (as a unit would you answer to Davison?). Long time listener, first time caller.
 8. 

I recently joined a data-engineering team at chill 90s multi-national tech company. My boss and I are based in the UK, and two more junior engineers who do the bulk of the IC work are based in India. These two engineers seem to work hard, have far more domain knowledge and technical ability than me, and generally seem to do most of the work. There’s also a senior engineer who’s kind of absent.
 9. 

My boss is a ‘red personality’ who’s been at the org for at least a decade, who doesn’t seem as close to the technical detail. He cares about the destination and wants to get there yesterday, but discussions about ‘ways of working’ or the specifics of achieving the output seem to bore him. He characterizes such talk as risk-aversion.
 10. 

I’m shocked by some of the technical details. Tooling chosen specifically to bypass version control, editing Jupyter Notebooks to deploy changes to ‘production’, dashboards that seem to have totally wrong data, etc.
 11. 

It seems like they will do the minimum required to make things ‘work’ and then move on. Scalability or making things interpret-able for others just doesn’t seem to weigh on their mind. It’s then me as the new-joiner navigating their hacky code who inevitably wanders into all the pitfalls and gotchas.
 12. 

I’ve tried to advocate for better practices and lead by example. They nod along, but ultimately seem resistant to change. I need their help and experience with the codebase, but I also have this creeping sense that their working style is too sloppy and unprofessional. They don’t report to me, and our mutual boss seems happy with the work. I feel a bit like the guy in Twilight Zone: I can see a gremlin wrecking the plane, but nobody else can see it, and my attempts to address the situation just seem a bit hysterical.
 13. 

What’s worse, my gentle attempts at flagging the issues with my boss haven’t gone down well. In my first performance review my boss mentioned something about a ‘us versus them attitude’ and ‘assuming good intent’.
 14. 

What do you make of this situation? Am I the a-hole? Have you faced this sort of thing in the past? Is it time to consider old-reliable? Is 4 months too soon to quit a job?
 15.

Episode 469: Passed over for lead role and perhaps I'm the jerk

This week Jamison and Dave answer these questions:

 1. My peers give up and say “have it your way” whenever we have technical discussions. How do I get them to be more vocal about their opinions?

 2. I like the idea of measuring things, but metrics seem easy to game. How do I effectively measure team and personal productivity?

Jamison cites this tweet and this blog post about examining your own productivity.

Episode 87: Pushover Coworkers and Productivity Metrics

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