Soft Skills Engineering

• Episode 487: My manager ignores me during 1:1's and I am required to work in an empty office

  In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: “My manager insists on a weekly 1:1 with me, but he rarely pays attention. He’s often on his laptop, texting, checking email — basically anything but listening. I’ve tried sending agendas, rescheduling, reducing frequency, waiting until he’s less busy — nothing helps. I’ve even started sitting in silence until he notices I’ve stopped talking, but that only works for a minute. This has caused real problems. For example, he almost had me cancel a million-dollar project because he misheard me say “Java” instead of “JavaScript.” When he finally realized I was right, he said, “Every time I heard Java I automatically tuned out.” How do I handle a 1:1 with a manager who won’t pay attention, without risking my work or my relationship with him?” “I’ve worked for a big retailer for 10 years now and I used to really enjoy it. I liked my team a lot, problems we worked on, technologies we used. Unfortunately the last few yours brought a few rounds of layoffs and my old team doesn’t exist anymore and the new team is pretty much awful. They’re all on the East Coast, while I’m on the West Coast. I’m required to work EST hours but also to commute to the office 5 days a week and sit there alone and talk to my team on zoom. I’m a staff software engineer and I haven’t been programming much for the past year. Most of my time is spent in calls, I start every day with the same 3 calls. I live 50 miles from the office and I take a company shuttle that leaves at 7am. I’m required to join the calls from my phone. I leave for work at 6:30am, I’m back at home at 6:30pm. A few times a week I need to do deployment at 10pm. I tried speaking to my manager and to my director. They don’t care. My every attempt to improve our processes is met with opposition. My manager is afraid of changes. I can’t believe this is where I am but I’m too tired to prepare for job hunting. I can’t afford to quit. I don’t know how to get myself on track and dust off my programming and interviewing skills. I’m praying they’ll lay me off so that I can use the severance to do all those things. But this isn’t really a plan, it’s wishful thinking, and I’m afraid that my career options are getting worse by the minute. Do you have any advice on how to get myself out of this hell hole?”

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• Episode 486: No one on my team talks and skip level meetings

  In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I work at a big tech company on a remote team of about 10 people, and most of them have been here for 5+ years. I’m in the “newer” half of the team with 4 years here. My problem is, in group meetings, absolutely NO ONE talks. I mean zero small talk, they have trouble responding to simple yes or no questions. Everyone participates thoroughly when it’s a technical discussion, but it’s clear no one has any interest in speaking more than necessary. We used to have one super talkative guy on our team, and even then it was mostly silence to his chats about his weekend. Is there anything I can do to get these people to speak at least a little bit? It feels insane how little I know about these people after 4 years. P.S. even in one on one chats, almost all of them shut down small talk A coworker told me that I should be having quarterly one-on-one’s with my skip to make sure they’re aware of all the good stuff I’ve been up to and my goal of promotion. This sounds correct, but feels weird when I think about setting this up. I haven’t had much direct communication with my skip, just a few responses to his questions during design meetings, but nothing else really. How do I feel less weird about this?

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• Episode 485: I'm terrible at hiring decisions and my coworker spams us with AI-generated memes

  In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: What signals do you look for when interviewing candidates? I’ve helped interview many people at this point and almost all of the engineers that I marked as “hire” that we brought on board ended up being low performers and were eventually managed out. I wasn’t the only one who approved them either, so not all the blame falls on me, but I’m really doubting my ability to assess talent. Is hiring inherently just this difficult? Is there anything I can do to improve my judgement or screening approach? Hi Dave and Jamison, A coworker on my team won’t stop creating AI generated memes. We’re a remote team and every meeting he shares memes in the chat whilst we’re trying to have productive conversations. He does this in any type of meeting, including all-hands meetings with C-level execs. On smaller calls he often hijacks it to share his screen and show us a meme he just created about something that was just said. It started off funny at first. But it’s now a constant distraction. I find it frustrating because I don’t see how he can be paying attention and contributing to discussions when he’s busy making memes. And, I also don’t appreciate seeing AI versions of my own face being shared into public Slack channels. How can I address this without sounding like I am anti-fun? Love the show, been listening for many years, keep up the good work!

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• Episode 484: How to get a raise after slacking off for YEARS and my PM won't stop DM'ing me

  In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Hi! Love your show and how casually you talk and make fun of everything! I started my career as a freelancer and then joined a mid-size software development company to learn how the sausage is really made, salary wasn’t that important back then. A few kids and a lot more expensive lifestyle later the compensation has become more motivating, but I’m not sure how to sell myself to my manager if I don’t feel like I deserve a high salary myself. (The manager decides the salaries for all our team members.) For years I’ve been focusing on my family and other life stuff, so I’ve spent a looot of working hours not working and basically doing the minimum progress acceptable. Slow progress has come up once with my manager, from which I wiggled out of with various excuses. I’ve realised that this way of working isn’t really fair for the company and my teammates and I’ve started to take this job and my career seriously in the last few months. The company and everyone working there are super supportive and it’s been a terrific experience for all of those years. I’ve gotten a raise multiple times with always me initiating that conversation. There aren’t any clear metrics to improve that directly ties to the salary: I’ve asked my manager about it and the answer was vague like “we have this local salary survey that we take as the base and work from there”. So long story short: how to ask for a raise while not feeling like a criminal since I feel like I haven’t earned the salary I had thus far? I’m a team lead who’s growing increasingly frustrated with my project manager. Every planning conversation ends up in my private DMs, no matter how many times I’ve asked him to move these discussions to the team chat. When he messages me one-on-one, my team loses visibility into decisions, questions don’t get addressed openly, and important context just evaporates. It’s not only slowing us down, it also makes me feel like the burden of relaying everything falls squarely on me. I’ve tried gently redirecting him back to the shared space, but he keeps defaulting to my DMs. How can I get him to respect the boundaries of team communication without damaging our working relationship? Sincerely, Lost in the PM’s DMs

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• Episode 483: My team hated me from day one and should I stack PTO before my resignation

  In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: How would you handle a situation where a team forms a negative opinion about you from day one — without any clear reason and without ever giving you a real chance to prove yourself? Even when you contribute technically, your suggestions are ignored… until someone else repeats the same thing and suddenly it’s considered valid. Is it possible to stay in that kind of environment without becoming bitter or burned out? Can you keep contributing professionally — or is it healthier to just walk away? You guys are awesome. Jamison, I interviewed with you and it was lots of fun and productive. Which is really rad. Now… I just landed a 12-month contract in big tech role. It’s perfectly aligned with my long-term career goals. My current fintech FTE is perfectly opposed to my long-term career goals. The question — how unethical / despicable would it be to start one week of PTO at my FTE on the same day as Day One at my contract role so that I can onboard without distractions and then put in my resignation upon returning to my FTE? What about two, three, or four weeks of PTO? Also… are two-week notices still the default still in 2025? Also also… I promise I’m not AI — I’ve been using em dashes since the 20th century.

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