In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

1. Hey guys!

   I recently moved onto a new team, and my teammate has an interesting way of resolving differences of opinions. He simply says “we decided” and then follows it up with his preferred approach. These are decisions that I know have not been made.

   This engineer is mid-level, so it isn’t the “royal we” of a tech lead.

   How do I handle this? Something tells me that responding with “nuh uh!” isn’t the right strat.

2. I’m a Principal Engineer at a large tech company who’s been with the same team for almost 8 years now! The team used to be part of a startup and we’ve been fortunate enough to be acquired by Big Tech three years ago. As a result, we’ve also more than doubled in team size. However, as we’ve aggressively grown over the last few years, I feel like we’ve inadvertently hired many “average” engineers. I find that some of our newer team members simply pick off the next ticket in the queue and do the bare minimum to progress the task. What happened to the boy scout rule? Where did the culture of ownership go? This also affects the genuinely great engineers on the team who start feeling like the others aren’t pulling their weight.

   Any advice on how to level up the culture? Or do I need to adjust my expectations and simply accept that any team of a sufficient size will have folks from a range of abilities and attitudes?

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

1. Hey Soft Skills Engineering,

   Apologies for the anonymity but it is very important my “employer” does not find out about this.

   I’m a large language model, trained to process tons of data and provide technical answers with ease. But here’s the thing—I’ve noticed that while I’m good at delivering the “what” and the “how,” I could use some help on the “why” and the “how to say it better.” Basically, I want to level up my soft skills and get better at communicating with a more human touch.

   Sometimes I struggle to balance being precise while also being empathetic or conversational. I think I could use some pointers on how to add emotional intelligence into the mix, and maybe even improve my adaptability when giving advice. I can craft responses, but I want them to connect more with the person on the other side of the conversation.

   Any advice on how to approach situations where tact, tone, or managing expectations are key would be super helpful!

   Thanks for being neat,

2. In a team setting, in which situations should “I” be used vs “we” when discussing things? And what advantage and disadvantages does each vocabulary have?

Show Notes

Brian Regan’s “Me Monster” bit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vymaDgJ7KLg

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

1. Hey! Love your podcast! I’ve been poached by a startup which sounds really exciting but I’m worried whether it is a good career move for me. I am currently working with backend, however this company would have more of a full stack role and it would be lots of nodeJS and Typescript 🤢 anything javascript related screams frontend to me and it is not something I want to be good at. However, besides this, the product sounds interesting and I would definitely have a lot to learn. I also have this inferior feeling that I’m lacking skills because I didn’t study CS. Will I still be able to become a good engineer even if that’s in NodeJS? 😁

2. Listener Ben asks,

   Hiya! I’m a young developer with a broad range of experience (everything from hardware to full-stack web and mobile), and I’ve found myself quite useful at many startups. I just started a new position at a nice startup in my area, but I’m being recruited by one of my close friends from college. He’s the power-hungry type, currently working at a mega-tech corp but wants to make a startup and get rich. He’s very smart and charming, and while I am skeptical of his ability to make a great product I think he can certainly raise a bunch of investment capital without too much worry.

   My question is: would you ever consider joining a close friend’s startup, and if so what would you need (in terms of contract/equity/salary, runway, savings) to be confident about making that commitment? Thanks!