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

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

1. Hi Jamison and Dave, jesters of my daily commute. I’m a *mechanical* engineer at a megacorp, and since people are people, I find most of your advice transfers pretty well.

   I’m the tech lead within a small-ish org of about 25 people. We’re in-office, and split between two locations (in a similar time zone), and multiple different projects. This means that there are a lot of Zoom meetings between locations. Lately, I’ve been having an issue with engineers deciding to take these meetings from their desks in our open office plan rather than finding a phone or conference room. I find this practice to be maddening! It’s really distracting because there will often be background noise that makes it hard to clearly understand them, and it also means that my workplace is a cacophony of people yelling into their AirPods, competing to overcome the background noise of their colleagues’ yelling into their AirPods.

   How do I make this stop and get my coworkers to hop into a phone or conference room for their meetings?! Oh btw, my manager is one of the worst offenders.

2. Listener bootersket says,

   I have 3 years of experience, all at this same company and team. My team has one staff software engineer who really knows the codebase well. When I have questions about why such and such thing is the way it is, I ask him. I’ve noticed his answers are unhelpful. Often they are short, with very little detail. I can’t tell if thinks they’re sufficient, doesn’t know how to explain himself clearly, is mad at me, or if I am just don’t know enough to understand them.

   For example, once I asked about two different variables that seemed ambiguously named and to refer to the same thing. His response was short and sweet. Quote: “almost the same thing”.

   Am I the problem? Is he? When I get responses like that I don’t feel compelled to keep asking questions in different ways because it doesn’t feel like he cares about mentoring juniors with dumb questions like myself. What do I do?

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

1. A listener named “Will angel answer my question?” asks,

   Hi, I recently joined a new company about 1.5 months ago. It is the technology arm of a family-owned business group that has existed for over 30 years, providing technology services to all the other companies in the group.

   After a one-week onboarding, I was assigned to a team. After 2–3 days, I still had no tasks, so I asked a coworker to pair program with me so I could learn more about the processes and continue learning. The task was easy, and we finished it in less than a day. For the next 2 days I did nothing, asked my boss for tasks but he just told me to wait.

   Two days later, we finally had a planning meeting, and they assigned me three tasks for the upcoming two weeks. I finished the first one in 25 minutes and other ones in not much more time. It has been like this ever since. I’m really enjoying all the free time, but I’m also feeling anxious that I may eventually be part of a layoff.

   Apparently, the company is doing well, and they’re hiring a lot of people. Should I ask my manager what’s going on? Maybe everyone on my team is pretending to work and going to the gym at 3 p.m.? What might be happening? What would you do?

2. I’m a staff software engineer at a fully remote, 300-employee US SaaS startup. It was just announced that we are being acquired in an all-cash deal by a publicly traded tech company more than 10 times our size.

   I’ve been here for 8 years and absolutely love this job. Over my tenure, I’ve risen from a junior to a staff engineer, built critical customer-facing features, and developed internal tools used company-wide. I’ve also renegotiated my salary such that LinkedIn recruiters can rarely match it. While my stock options aren’t enough to let me retire early or fund Jamison’s yacht, I know I’m ludicrously lucky to be getting a six-figure payout.

   But what comes next? Leadership says we will operate as a standalone division for at least a few quarters, meaning no massive backend migrations immediately. However, I’ve never worked at a publicly traded company—only at consultancies and startups. My pessimistic expectation is that corporate bureaucracy will sanitize the culture I helped build.

   Should I lean in, try to hold on to some of the startup magic, and lead the inevitable integration work to ingratiate myself with the senior engineers at the parent company? Or should I take advantage of my golden handcuffs being unlocked and finally move on?

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

1. Hello Dave and Jamison!

   I’m a longtime listener going back to the early days of the podcast, and I’ve listened to every episode since. When I started listening, I was beginning my career as a software engineer. Your advice has truly helped shape how I think about work, engineering, leadership, and all the weird human stuff that comes with building software.

   Now I’m more than 10 years into my career, and I’ve run into a problem that I suspect many experienced engineers are dealing with right now.

   In episode 521, you talked about how brutal the current job market is, and the question asker from that episode had been unemployed for a year. I’m thankfully not there yet, but I recently lost my job in a large layoff, and the first couple of months of searching have been pretty discouraging.

   I’m applying to roughly 10–20 jobs a day. I tailor my resume to each role, ensuring it accurately reflects the skills and terminology in the job description. I usually include a cover letter too; AI gets the privilege of writing the mediocre first draft, and then I rewrite it into something I would actually say.

   Despite all of that, I’ve only made it past the resume screen three times so far, one of those was through a referral, and several other referral applications have gone nowhere.

   The strange part is that I’ve tried applying across the whole spectrum:

   1. Roles that would be a step up, where I think I could do the job but haven’t held that exact title before
   2. Roles at roughly my current level, where I can honestly check almost every box in the job description
   3. Roles that would technically be a step down, but that I’d happily take and feel extremely confident I could do well

   So my question is: How do you get companies to actually interview you when you’re an experienced engineer in a market overwhelmed with qualified candidates?

   At this point, I’m starting to wonder whether there’s such a thing as an awkward career middle age: too experienced for some jobs, not obviously senior enough for others, and competing with hundreds of people for everything in between.

   If you were in this situation, what would you change? More networking? Fewer but more focused applications? Different positioning? Showing up at the hiring manager’s house with a fruit basket and a printed copy of my GitHub profile?

   Would love to hear how you’d approach it from the other side of the hiring table.

2. Dave and Jamison,

   Hit me with your dumbest, funniest, most brutally honest advice because I need it.

   So here’s the deal: I’m a software engineer with 30+ year in the industry, a dinosaur who’s already reinvented himself like a half-dozen times, network, dev, infra consultant, back to dev. Now I’m having a midlife-ish (okay, late-life) crisis and I’ve fallen in love with security and compliance. Like, actually excited about compliance, which I’m told is a red flag in itself.

   Problem is: I’m less than 10 years from retirement and my brain doesn’t bounce back from “starting over” the way it used to when I was a spry young whippersnapper.

   So, am I an idiot for even considering torching my comfy expertise to go be a security newbie this close to the finish line? Or is this exactly the kind of chaotic energy I need before retirement?