In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I recently started the interviewing for a senior engineering manager role at a fairly prestigious, but not huge (maybe 30-50 engineers) tech company. The job description heavily emphasized the idea of leading as a peer as opposed to just relying on the EM title. I love this approach, but the lead interviewer then disclosed that they don’t want EMs writing production code. This seems like a contradiction. Am I naive in...

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: There aren’t a lot of engineering management growth resources in my company. It’s a relatively small company with about 50 engineers. My manager doesn’t have time to properly mentor me. And I’m not sure I would want him to because I feel like his advice isn’t always the best. Where can I go for management mentorship or other learning resources? Is it worth exploring non-engineering managers on other teams? Or leaning more on...

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: My company is doing performance reviews. While writing my self-review, I was shocked by how much I had accomplished in the last 6 months. I’d led our org to adopt multiple new technologies and supported other teams in adopting them, to great effect. But looking back, I wish I could trade half the accomplishments on my self-review for time spent taking better care of myself and my partner and kids. I’m not working crazy hours;...

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Listener Ashleigh asks, I’m a mid-level developer at a small company with a non-technical manager. After several months working on migrating our users from a legacy system to our new system, our non-technical business analyst discovered our current system re-uses lots of code from the legacy system. The BA immediately escalated their “concerns” about this to our manager. This quickly resulted in a group message from our...

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: “Hi! Love the show, long time listener. So an architect noticed an issue with credentials embedded into request body being logged. I had planned to resolve that, and someone already had done so for another instance. I took a day or two to figure out how to fix it globally, and even tied it into another filtering we did. That would mean one list of sensitive data patterns to maintain – that we already had, and...

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I’ve managed an ML team in a small company for ~2 years now. I created an 8 person team from scratch and I’m super proud of the team I’ve built. However, I miss being an engineer and wish I could spend more time coding. I was considering asking for a role change to IC, but out of nowhere my manager offered to me a promotion to head of platform engineering. I would have 3 engineering teams reporting to me - about 30 people...

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Hi, I’m a senior software engineer at a big tech company, where I’ve been employed for precisely one year. So far, the feedback I’ve received has been overwhelmingly positive. My manager has even mentioned that her superiors are impressed with my performance, and my colleagues have shared their positive feedback as well. While I’ve been told that I’m doing exceptionally well and may be on track for a promotion in my...

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I applied and was hired for a 100% telecommute position. Recently, the company has mandated all employees near an office switch to a hybrid schedule. I’m looking at an hour or more round trip and the yearly cost of parking is several thousand dollars. The company also announced to their investors that massive layoffs will be coming due to the economy and redundancies due to a large merger. I’m relatively new to the...

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I work as a Software Engineering Manager at the European office of a US company. Recently, many of my colleagues successfully obtained US visas for an upcoming business trip. When it was my turn, everyone said it would be a piece of cake because our company is well-known. However, to my surprise, I was rejected during the visa interview. Now I won’t be able to join my colleagues (including my direct reports). I’m concerned...

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Morning! I will cut straight to the chase: I’m burned out and tired. At the same time, I’m aiming to get a promotion during the next cycle. My manager is aware of the latter, but not the former. Should I tell them? I suspect that I would get a lighter work load and less responsibilities, but it might also impact my chances at getting a promotion. The project I’m working is a “high stakes, tight deadlines” mess. I usually...

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Love the show, you guys have saved my bacon more times than I can count! I interviewed at an organization for a Senior Engineering role, but the interview went so well, they actually offered me the option to accept a Staff role! I definitely didn’t feel ready for that, but I accepted as a way to stretch and challenge myself. The company has been through some internal churn and re-arranging for most of my time there, and...

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I joined a startup at the peak of the tech bubble which sadly means that my equity was based on the company’s valuation which was very over-valued. To corroborate this, the company has not grown much in terms of users or revenue. The company also had a layoff just like many startups. As even public or unicorn tech companies are often devalued by 50-75%, I think it is reasonable to say that my equity grant is worth a lot...

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Kate asks, Hi Dave and Jamison! I’m in a situation where my predecessor, Jane, was a super helpful “Mary Poppins” type. She did anything and everything beyond her role for the sake of being a team player. I was told she even went as far as providing homemade snacks for meetings. I, on the other hand, am a one trick pony; I only do the tasks I’m paid for. I’m often indirectly compared to her and worry I’ll be...

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Hello Jave and Dames, Long time listener short time Dev. Big fan of the show, my confidence in my skills as a programmer has always been pretty low so having a podcast centered around the “soft skills” instead of more complex topics like “Covariance and Contravariance”, “Temporal Logic”, or “Basic Addition” gives me the strength to press further on. Onto the question, how do you gain more confidence in yourself as a...

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: My employer offered a retention bonus after: The CTO left two weeks after I arrived Two weeks later 1/4 of the staff was laid off Two weeks after that the COO left Two weeks after that 2 board members resigned Three or Four weeks after that the Director of Engineering left What does that mean? What do I look out for? I discovered your podcast just about 2 weeks ago and...

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I am a senior engineer working in a team of 7. My team lead went through a pretty rough divorce in December. Since then he’s been quite distracted and disengaged at work. I decided to help him out by temporarily taking on some of his responsibilities. Over the months things seemed to have gotten worse. He shows up late for the 10am standup meeting almost every day. He never contributes anything in stakeholder meetings....

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: We’ve recently switched to mandatory 2 days of in-person work a week but my employee keeps working from home! Whenever I ask him to come in person he says sure but continues to work from home. When I confront him about not showing up in person he just says “sorry I wasn’t able to make it that day”. He’s a good employee so I don’t want to fire him, but I’m concerned about what upper management will say if/when they find out...

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I’ve been working with this fintech company for the past year as the only FE developer in a team with other 6 BE developers, but recently, I’ve noticed that the product team has slowly stopped including frontend (FE) tasks in the sprints. Moreover, they seem to have deprioritized FE tasks in general, allocating me only one task that I can extend at most to three days within a two-week sprint. This scarcity of work has...

This is a rerun of episode 307. Enjoy! In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I work for a big bank. I recently found out I am severely underpaid. I have only received “exceeds expectations” ratings since joining over 5 years ago. I rage-interviewed at a bunch of FAANG companies, made it to the final rounds of all, but always came up short on the offer. Expectations at my current job are low. I’ve been putting all my extra energy and time into my own...

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Do you think an EM should only be involved with management tasks, and let the members handle the technical stuff, or should they have some technical expertise to manage things like architecture reviews or handle urgent incidents? Hello! Love the show, thank you both for all the knowledge. I discovered this podcast when I was struggling as a newbie who was learning on the job at a tech firm two years ago. By...

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Listener Thor asks, Is there a chance the tech stack I choose throughout my career will hurt my chances to shift direction towards project leading/managing in the future? Say, I do mostly frontend, will this affect the way people see my broader understanding of projects etc. compared to people in roles such as architect? Listener Travis asks, My company is starting to expand across time zones. The...

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Greetings from Germany! My job is creating a customized Windows installation image with PowerShell & C#. It takes about 2 hours to build and test an image. Sometimes I have to wait until the end to see if a change did actually work or not. During that time I usually browse the web / watch Youtube / read a book. This makes me feel like an impostor, because I am maybe working 10-25% of the time. Since I’ve only been with...

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Listener Schtolteheim Reinbach III asks, Hey soft skills engineering, love you guys. I work at a company you wouldn’t hear much about, on a product that you wouldn’t think about as having much tech involved- suffice it to say, it makes me interesting at parties. I’m not a developer myself, but on my team, I’m having an issue with a developer who can’t seem to use GitHub properly. Fairly often, whenever he fixes or...

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: At work, I occasionally mix names of people in my team when I refer to them in meetings. My mother used to do this with my siblings when I was a child and I hated it. I guess I am getting older. Should I just accept the defeat? Any suggestions how to deal with this? How do I find areas to improve without critical feedback? I’ve had regular 1-on-1s with multiple people over the years (managers, mentors, tech leads),...

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Hi Dave and Jamison! What do you do when one of your immediate teammates is constantly competing against you? I really don’t like competition. Ignoring the competitiveness + praising his value did not work. Some examples: Leaving code reviews comments showing off obvious knowledge which does not really add value to the PR Constantly harassing you to pair on trivial matters (I think because...