Soft Skills Engineering

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

  In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I’m a long time listener to the podcast. Thanks for reading and answering my question! 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. 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. 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. 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? Hi Dave and Jamison (as a unit would you answer to Davison?). Long time listener, first time caller. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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’. 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?

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• Episode 468: Should I take a mini-retirement and doubling down on anachronisms

  In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Hi Dave and Jamison, Long-time listener, first-time question asker. Thank you both for the wisdom, perspective, and jokes you bring to the podcast. I recently received an inheritance of around $500,000. It’s not “quit your job and buy a yacht” money, but it is enough to reshape my life. I’m in my late 30s, currently working in a senior engineering role. I’ve had a solid run in the world of code, but I’m ready to walk away from it, zero regrets, just done. What’s pulling me now is UX and product design: more creative, human-centered, systems-aware work. I’ve applied for a one year master’s program in UX design, starting in 2026. I’m planning a sabbatical before that to travel, reset, and explore - think trains across Canada, a design conference in Vienna, a food tour in Greece. I’m also investing in short courses and portfolio work during that time. Financially, I’ve been careful: I paid off my mortgage, invested part of the inheritance, and set up a buffer. So I’m not winging it… but I am stepping away from a six-figure salary, a career my friends and family have supported me to build, and am will have no income for the next 18 months, and that’s a little scary. I want to use this opportunity well, not just coast, or panic-spend, or accidentally put myself in a worse position five years from now. How would you approach this kind of mid-career pivot with a windfall cushion? Any mental models, risk assessments, or “soft skills” wisdom to help me stay brave and smart? Thanks again for everything you put out into the world. Hi Soft Skills Engineering Team, I’m the oldest person on my team (by a respectable margin), and I’ve been taking great delight in gently baffling my younger colleagues with expressions like “I’ll get that done in two ticks,” “give me a bell if you need help,” and “stay on the line after stand-up” (even though we’re on Teams, not a landline). It has become a bit of a sport for me to see how many retro, obscure, or regionally-specific phrases I can sneak into our chats and meetings before someone finally asks, “What are you even saying?” My question is: What other delightfully old-school and vaguely professional expressions can I deploy to maintain my status as the team’s resident linguistic cryptid? Thanks for all the great advice you give, and for validating my mission to keep corporate life interesting! Warmest regards, Resident Old Person

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• Episode 467: I can't get promoted if I do my job and should I get a degree to get a job in this economy

  In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I am a data scientist and was recently passed over for promotion to senior because my projects weren’t “senior level” enough, and I do too many ad hoc requests that delay delivery of my bigger projects. I am a go to for VP and C suite level execs in my company and am commonly asked to help with incidents, all of which are main reasons my projects get delayed. At the same time, I am told by my manager that requests from these stakeholders/incidents are more important than my projects. Every time I try to push back and let stakeholders know that a project will be pushed back due to incidents, they all agree it’s the right prioritization. And yet, every single performance review I get the same feedback about too much as hoc work. I would really like to try again for promotion but I feel like I haven’t been able to change my balance of ad hoc work at all (this is actually getting worse), and support from my manager is lackluster - I don’t feel like it’s even worth trying again in a few months. What can I do to change this dynamic? (Besides quitting!) or is this a poor management/process problem that I cannot solve myself? A listener named Bob says, I want to transition into web development at the least. I have been teaching myself, but I also know that the dev world is more about connections than anything else. I have reached out to multiple people but really have not gotten far. I really want a career transition. I have found a Bachelor of Science degree in web development at Full Sail University. I would graduate in 2.5 years. Is it worth it to take this program or keep self-learning and building out projects? I would be taking this degree all while making time for my family.

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• Episode 466: Bad performance review and moving in to the caves

  In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I had my performance review two months ago where I scored a “Does not meet expectations”, which I definitely understand, and my manager told me that some of my coworkers had been complaining about me. I’ve been working hard on improving ever since and my manager told me that they were really impressed with my progress and told me that some of my coworkers had expressed similar sentiments. I have now gotten a really good job offer but I’m reluctant to take it. I’m still working on improving myself with the help of my manager and I don’t want to stop working on this. I would also like some more time to show my coworkers that I really have grown before leaving, feels like that would leave behind a more positive image of me. I’m fairly junior still so contacts seem good to have, and better performance does too, and a better job does too. What should I do? :D Listener Michael Q asks, ‌ Hello! I only recently discovered this podcast but it has quickly become a daily ritual in my commute to and from work. Although I am more of a mechanical and data focused engineer, I find the lessons extremely applicable! I work at a midsized biotech company. I have been in my current role for about three years as a product engineer. Because I’m on the commercial side, my contributions have been very visible to the higher ups and have gotten a lot of recognition, which has been great. I am now transitioning to the more hardcore engineering team. Although I admire this team and think they are the most innovative group on site, I think their work goes largely unrecognized as behind the scenes magic. I think they deserve more recognition and accolades for the work they do. How can I bring them into the spotlight? Or am I naive in assuming that just because I am motivated by recognition, everyone else would appreciate it too? Note: I do not want to quit my job.

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• Episode 465: Talking to your report's previous manager and how to replace a 30-year-old ticketing system

  In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: A listener named Mike says, To what degree do you think it’s appropriate to talk with your peer managers about people that have moved from their team to yours? How much weight do you give their criticisms of an IC that they used to manage that is working out just fine under your leadership? How do you know if it was mostly due to a conflict in their relationship, or if there’s a nugget of truth you need to look out for? Hi, thanks for a great show. I’ve listened to 400 episodes in a year - thanks for making my commute fun! I’ve been at my current job as a software developer for a year. It’s a great company overall, but we rely on a 30-year-old in-house ticket system that also doubles as a time reporting tool. It lacks many basic features, and project managers often resort to SQL and Excel just to get an overview. As you can imagine, things get forgotten and lost easily. Everyone dislikes it, but the old-timers are used to it. They want any replacement to be cheap and also handle time reporting, which really limits our options. I suggested to keep using the old system for time reporting only for now, but the reaction made me feel like I’d suggested going back to pen and paper. While the company is old and set in its ways in some areas, it has made big changes in others, so I’m not ready to give up hope just yet. How can I at least nudge the company toward adopting a more modern ticket system to improve visibility and planning? I’ve shown examples that save time and offer better overviews, but it hasn’t made much impact. Where should I focus my efforts—or do I just have to learn to live with it? Some more context: This is in Europe and the culture at the company is generally open to feedback and discussions from anyone. I have 10+ years experience and a relatively good influence. My manager is driving change successfully to make the company more modern but I suspect he might have given up on this one.

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