It takes more than great code
to be a great engineer.

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

1. Listener Random Listener asks,

   You guys talk a lot about externalities, which helped me understand a lot about how my manager works. He wants to do things fast, but he does not follow good and standardized processes, even the ones he tries to push onto us. This adds a lot of work for us because now his mess becomes our mess. How can I give him this feedback in way he will both understand and not feel resentment? Thanks

2. Hello. I am individual contributor and have been with this team for 2 years.

   About a year ago a manager and a lead joined the team to fill in the growing positions. They came in with their preferences for code design, architecture, and ideologies.

   But they were all different from how we worked before. Their ways are not bad, but they add unnecessary complexities, taking away energy from just doing my pick-up - code - ship way.

   I shared my concerns, but they never get accepted as they just want to exercise their manager and lead powers. My teammates share similar opinions as me.

   Is it a worthy fight showing resistance to these changes or should I just suck it up adapt to their preferences?

   Each time I show any bit of resistance, it is being taken by them personally to their ego and discussions go on for tens of minutes and ends with either of us pissed off.

   Won’t quit my job for these petty people. Should I just say yes, adapt my work for good or bad and blame them when things don’t work? Do I even need to care about these workflow and operational changes as an individual contributor? Would there be any benefit resisting bad decisions at the cost of my mental peace?

   Thanks. You guys make me look forward to Mondays.

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

1. Hi Soft Skills Engineering, I’m a senior software engineer with over 20 years of experience. I’m hoping you can help with with a problem where I’m dumb, weird and bad at my job!

   There is a recurring problem where, despite all my experience and graybearding, despite my big words, I sometimes just miss very important details, and ways that are very consequential and cause time and feature gaps.

   Sometimes I make a faulty assumption and gloss over initial errors, and later I get big errors that require big fixes. For example, sometimes I just miss random lines from a product spec or whole parts of the UI, like a blind spot, or like a Mandela situation where I could’ve sworn it was different where I read it. Sometimes, I read the docs on some library but didn’t really *read* the docs and missed the important line that I needed before things get broken.

   It’s a soft skill, sorta, because it’s about how I go about my work, and I don’t know what I can do about it. It’s almost an intrinsic trait, isn’t it? But I’d love any idea about how I can improve or how I can adjust how I can work to compensate. Or possibly here how this is normal and it’s a process issue - but I don’t need excuses and am willing to improve.

   Thanks for your great wisdom and advice!

2. So it has happened, a massive codebase written entirely by Claude via prompts from my non-technical PM.

   And now I’m tasked with “make it work, integrate it into all these other services and tools we have. Thanks!”

   How do I even begin approaching a massive codebase written entirely by AI with no actual software engineer validating/overlooking it at any point until it became this monster and now it’s my problem? I am also an L2 engineer that got prematurely promoted to L3 and now I just want to prove myself and work on a cool project (10000s of requests, many bottlenecks that need to be fixed, scaled, design docs put together… the whole shabang#)

   Help. Urgent. 911. I want to cry.

   Thank you, love the podcast!

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

1. Hey Dave and Jamison.

   I don’t know what to do with the amount of the AI slop I have to review and I’m getting close to burnout.

   I have a lot of context on my project, so my colleagues see me as a point of reference. Additionally, at a past job, I was a tech lead and could easily cover for TL if I wanted to (which I don’t) and I feel like the TL of my project and some of my teammates are taking advantage of this.

   Every day I receive a lot of low quality documents to review. For example, our TL creates sloppy project planning documents and tickets and sends them to me for comments. Since they contain so many errors, sometimes including obvious security or data compatibility issues, or just text that is unrelated to the project, I end up basically rewriting everything.

   The same thing happens with code reviews. Some code is obviously AI-generated slop with lots of duplication and errors, that in many cases misses acceptance criteria or has doc strings filled with buzzwords and adjectives. I usually add a lot of comments per PR and I know the author sends them directly to their LLM and then pastes back a verbose answer. As a result, I end up in endless conversation loops.

   I’ve tried talking to my colleagues one-on-one, explaining how much work they are delegating to me. I’ve asked them to review their own work first and explained how exhausted I am, hoping they would show some compassion. But nothing has changed, because everyone seems to be in survival mode in this era of layoffs and I feel like they have become comfortable with me doing their work. I’ve also tried talking about this in retrospectives and tech team meetings, but the TL and tech directors did not support me because AI usage is encouraged. Instead, they said that they really appreciate my feedback because I have so much experience and thanked me for doing such excellent code reviews.

   I also end up making most of the project’s tech decisions, I am the sole contributor to the project’s documentation and my vacation is mapped out in the roadmap as low delivery period. 😢

   I like the project and I’m terrified to switch jobs in these times. But every day, it gets harder and harder to comment on obvious slop written without care without sounding rude or sarcastic. Sometimes I find myself still angry after work.

   Is it too late to set the boundaries?