In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

1. Hey, I am a web developer getting bored of the regular development work. I am interested in finance and the monetary system and due to the overlap of finance and engineering I feel down the Bitcoin rabbit hole and even spiked interest in crypto like Solana and Sui. I am pretty sure most of crypto is a FUD, delulu or straight up scam, yet the technology looks appealing and interesting to learn. So that said, I am still really interested in learning more about crypto and dabbling in the development space of that. Yet, I am hesitant because I fear that this could reflect negatively on me. What do you think? Is a bit of crypto okay or really that bad?

2. Hi Dave and Jamison

   After five years as an engineering manager, I want to return to coding. But I’m facing a few challenges:

   First, I worry about leaving my current team. It feels like I’m abandoning the people I’ve been supporting. Should I make this transition elsewhere to avoid this awkwardness?

   Second, I’m struggling to find time and energy to rebuild my technical skills. After a full day of management work, it’s hard to open the laptop again for coding practice.

   Finally, I’ve been humbled by how rusty my coding skills have become. Tasks that would take a practiced engineer minutes are taking me days, which is frustrating and denting my confidence.

   How have others successfully navigated this pendulum swing back to an IC role without burning bridges or burning out?

   Thanks, a rubber duck

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

1. A listener named Dakota asks,

   I’m a UX designer, and I’m constantly looking for growth opportunities. I’m having trouble finding mentors to help challenge me, as every time my boss/senior designer leaves the company, I assume their work and we don’t backfill their spot or my old position.

   This leads me towards podcasts like this as I’m trying up-skill and to learn how to be a better team member and support other roles.

   I’d love your perspective on working with product/ux designers. What have the challenges been? What makes you love working with a designer? Have there been times where you’re both arguing for the best user experience, but fail to agree on what experience is best?

2. Hey guys!

   It seems like lately, I only work in two modes:

   1. Stressed and tired
   2. Bored and disengaged

   I often get to own large, urgent initiatives. I spend weeks or months on them. This work is fascinating! I end up being stressed, tired, and counting days until my next vacation.

   When they finish, I go back to regular tickets - ones that take a day or two, maybe a week to complete.

   And its great! For a few days. Then the boredom sets in. I pick through the tickets, trying to find something interesting. I finish a ticket and realize there are another 4 hours before the end of the day. I start to miss the rush of working on a complex puzzle, even though it’s terrible for my work/life balance.

   A month or two pass, and a new complex and urgent initiative comes in. The cycle continues.

   So my question is: Is this a common feeling? Are there ways to find a “easy-work/hard-work” balance? Do you have any advice on not overworking when urgent tasks come in, and not dying from boredom when there is no interesting work?

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

1. I’m a manager on a Product team. I’ve been asked by upper management to measure “story points completed per developer per sprint” and display the results publicly each sprint to motivate lower-performing employees. I explained why, according to Scrum, I don’t think this is a good idea. But I think my explanations came across as me not wanting to make my team accountable for performance.

   For some context, I currently track productivity by reading daily updates, PRs, and tickets, from each developer.

   I worry that “story points” is easily game-able as a performance target, and will make the team want to modify the points after the fact to reflect actual time spent. Then story points will become a less useful tool for project planning.

   I’d like to satisfy the higher-up ask to measure productivity, but in a way that is good for the team, the company, and my career.

   Any thoughts on how to approach this?

2. A listener named Mike asks,

   I work for a company with 30 employees. Our CEO is trying to be our CTO by prompting all our issues to ChatGPT. This week we had a discussion about changes needed to comply with specific certifications requested by one of our customers. 15 minutes later I got an email containing a chatGPT conversation giving ‘advice’ that I debunked just 20 minutes beforehand. I have been vocal about my concerns of over-use of LLM’s before and think it’s dangerous for our CEO to keep sending large chunks of factually incorrect text across the org. He did finally stop talking about story point burn down because chatGPT told him it’s a bad metric though. So maybe this is salvageable?