Soft Skills Engineering

• Episode 461: How to do side projects with a family and demanding job and my company promised me a raise, but didn't give it

  In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Hey, long-time listener, listened to almost all episodes now and have been loving it since day 1!! I am a senior engineer at FAANG and work 45-50 hours a week and have a lot of cross-org responsibilities. I am lucky to have a beautiful wife and two wonderful young children. I guess, you can imagine how difficult it already is to manage work/life; especially because I am working remote from a different timezone with large dilation. I did lots of side projects before I had a family. But I was totally okay leaving all that behind for a great family life. Now, I have been struck by a really cool idea for an AI-based product that intersects with static analysis and my day-to-day work, which I cannot stop thinking about. I am sure that this project would be more than I could handle at the moment without cutting back on anything else. The question now really is, how do people with families and FAANG jobs do side projects? Or do they even? Do they have more than 24 hours in one day? Hello! Love the show, one-time contributor :p I’m in agony about my recent compensation change regarding my promotion and I am looking for some wise guidance (and if not that, some funny jokes will do). Context: I work at a big tech company. I got promoted to a senior engineer, but. I didn’t get a bump to my salary. Instead, the company “indicated” that the raise would happen in six months, at the next performance review, which happened last week. What did I end up getting? Nothing :) Why? Apparently they have not been giving salary bumps to people who get promoted, and it has enraged people. It hurts my pride. I consistently get good performance reviews & peer feedback. People go out of their way to say how good my work is. I have every evidence to say I am a strong performer. My manager is very supportive and tried escalating my case. But the company didn’t budge. They did say that “there’s a chance” to “make it right” in 6 months. On the one hand it feels petty to leave a company because I didn’t get the raise I wanted, especially when I do really enjoy working here. On the other hand…I am very disappointed. What do I do? Do I stick it out for another six months and see what happens? Are there options left other than start prepping myself for interviews? You are amazing people. Cheers.

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• Episode 460: Losing autonomy and I got skipped for a promotion even though I'm awesome

  In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I have managed a product for some months now. My previous manager split their team in to mini-teams of 2-3 people. They gave me a small team and plenty of autonomy to own the product and go crazy on it. I had the time of my life as the team lead. I learned a ton and was really developing management skills. My new manager is more hands-on. They want to do things my old manager left space for me to do, like project planning and quarterly planning. Now I feel micro managed when they get involved. I become territorial. It feels like he doesn’t recognize the independence of the mini team. I feel like I’m going backwards and and undoing all the management growth I’ve had, becoming just a software eng who should just keep their head down and work on a task. I don’t know what to do. How do I keep my independence and keep growing, but also get along with the new lead and learn from them in the process? I work as a senior engineer in a large team alongside a few other senior technical leaders. I’ve consistently received positive feedback from my manager about my impact — improving engineering quality, operational excellence, and team communication patterns. At the same time, there have been challenges in collaboration and teamwork between other senior leaders and the teams they work closely with. My manager has been highly supportive of the projects and changes I propose, and many improvements have been implemented based on my suggestions. However, during the recent promotion cycle, despite this positive feedback, I was not promoted, while another senior engineer — who is known to have collaboration challenges — was promoted instead. When I asked for feedback, I was told that while my contributions are appreciated and my time will come, they couldn’t explain the specific factors behind the promotion decision. I now feel a bit demotivated, as it seems engineering excellence and team impact may not be the primary factors considered for growth here. My question is: How should I think about my next steps? Should I keep investing in this team or start considering other opportunities?

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• Episode 459: Am I cutting edge and how to compliment someone who went from super jerk to super nice

  In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I work for a B2C fintech startup as a senior engineer. Our onboarding funnel has a lot of moving parts due to regulatory compliance and a litany of requirements from various parts of the business. As a startup, we also live and die by optimizing for and demonstrating growth, so we need to gather data from our product and pipe it to various analytics platforms. Finally, we need to offer customer support for high-touch edge cases. All of this is connected together in a very patchwork way between our own code and various secondary and tertiary systems (CRMs, CDPs, data warehouses, etc). I am torn between two ideas. One is that we may very well be doing something “state of the art” in terms of integrating all of this together. The other is that we are engaging in wheel reinvention on a massive and incredibly wasteful scale. I have no way of knowing though, because I am having such a hard time finding holistic accounts from anyone who has done something like this. My gut says that this is something dozens, if not hundreds of companies have had to build at some point, but I don’t know where to find people talking about it. How do I find documented, real-world case studies for how to build a complete package like this? Everything resource I can find online is a myopic, narrow slice of the entire pie focused on only one aspect of the problem. No one is talking about how you integrate e.g. a sane and scalable analytics stack with a fast evolving product. All they want to talk about is how to make a “webscale backend” or “do growth hacking” while assuming someone else is going to draw the rest of the owl. Where do I go to find these people or these resources? Maybe these constitute some form of “trade secrets” - does anyone even want to give this information up freely? If my higher-ups saw me go outside the company for resources, would _they_ think I’m leaking important secret sauce? Sorry that got so long. I love the show! Keep being awesome. I’ve been at my company for about four years, and I’m currently a senior engineer. When I first joined as a mid-level engineer, there was a certain tech lead who wasn’t exactly known for his warm personality. On my very first day, I joined a Zoom call and witnessed him verbally berating someone. This type of behavior was fairly common at the time and earned him quite the reputation as a jerk, though thankfully it became less frequent over the years. Fast forward to today, and he’s genuinely transformed. The intensity has dialed way down; he’s now approachable, supportive, and even recently earned a promotion to engineering manager. It’s honestly been impressive to watch. We have a friendly relationship, and I’d like to acknowledge his growth because I genuinely admire it. But here’s the catch: How do I, as someone junior to him, respectfully bring this up without accidentally implying, “Hey, congrats on no longer scaring everyone at work”?

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• Episode 458: Infinite tech debt hack and figuring out what is going on

  In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Nearly every time certain developers on the team want to address technical debt, they end up just adding more technical debt. Of course, after one round of addressing technical debt, the developers in question believe that yet another round of redesigning and refactoring is in order. This stresses me out for many reasons, as you can imagine, and has led to my productivity dropping to an abysmal rate. I spend a large chunk my time resolving merge conflicts and re-orienting myself in an ever-changing codebase. Do you have any suggestions for me? Hi! I’m a software engineer at a big tech company, and I’m starting to feel siloed in my IC role. I’m getting my work done, but I’m often lost when it comes to the bigger picture. I can’t keep up with what our internal customer teams are doing, what they need, or even what my own team’s priorities are. I’m feeling siloed, and it’s starting to worry me. I know that just being a good IC isn’t enough to advance my career here. To get promoted, I need to understand the impact of my work, be aligned with the team and customer goals, and show that I can contribute to the overall success of the company. But how can I do it? How do I stay informed about customer needs and team priorities and position myself for career growth without getting completely overwhelmed? Thank you for your precious advice!

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• Episode 457: How do I get off the on-call rotation and "big tech" == "big leagues"?

  In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I am a senior software engineer in a big tech/faang company and this week is my first ever on call rotation. My team is doing a lot of CI work, monitoring pipelines and support queues during on call. It is probably not as much of a hassle as on call for product teams, but for me personally on call was the nearest I have ever been to hell. Our on call is not the regular getting pinged when something goes wrong, instead we have to manually monitor a dashboard 12 hours constantly for 7 days as the alarming is quite fuzzy. I am the only EU remote worker that has to adopt to the on call PST timezone. That means, my on call shift goes from 3pm-3am in my timezone. It is day 5/7 and I am down 24 energy drinks already, cause this was the only way to stay wake. Knowingly, that this would be just a short-term tradeoff against health, I am now living through the most explosive diarrhea I have ever had. On top, I am sleep derived, dizzy and every body part hurts. That would already be terrible on its own, yet I additionally have a young family, with a 4 year old and a toddler. The on call week, has not only been though on me, but especially also on my children and wife. I don’t have time for the kids at all and my wife is doing 100% of everything at the moment, including waking up, breakfast, bringing our son to kindergarten, cooking, cleaning, playing, everything. She is also quite exhausted therefore. Besides On Call, my job has been great and a huge monetary opportunity that is very rare in the EU, therefore quitting just because of 4-5weeks/year is not an option I am considering. Yet, I am wondering if there could be any way of smuggling myself out of the on call rotation. I have seen, that a staff level engineer on our team is not participating in the rotation, but that might be because he got a lot going on with other teams as well. A listener named bebop asks, Is your average “Big Tech” dev “better” than a random dev selected from a large non-technology company? I can’t help but feel that if I want to level up my career, I’m going to have to either move into big tech or some unicorn startup.

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