In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

1. Hey skillet nation, long time skilletee first time skilleter here. I started at a scale up about 6 months ago and recently, I was asked to help with a project that was greatly behind schedule. The folks responsible for the original system are no longer at the company, and the team currently attempting to get it over the finish line have struggled greatly. The codebase is full of performance issues and the infrastructure was not set up to scale. Basically things are bad.

   Since joining, I’ve helped draft a plan to fix most of the performance issues, and then incrementally improve the architecture. Things are going great, except for the fact that we’re 6 weeks out from our deadline with a burnt out dev team.

   To resolve this, our CTO hast started to rapidly hire contractors to “help out”. As one might expect, this has only slowed us down. But our CTO, lacking trust in the previous team, has found the promises of the contractors very alluring. I, on the other hand, don’t love the idea of building this greenfield system with temporary workers and then dropping it on an already burnt out team to maintain.

   Am I overreacting? How would yall handle this scenario? How can I convince our CTO that “the mythical man month” still applies here, regardless of what the contracting company says?

2. Listener k pop demon hunters asks,

   Hello! I’m a senior engineer in a big tech company. I recently got a bad annual review from my manager due to the fact that I caused a delay happened in my last project. It was a compliance process involving multiple stakeholders and one of them didn’t give me an immediate approval for the step they owned. I promptly updated my submission for review after I got the initial feedback, pinged them in a messenger and sent a reminder mail every day until I got an approval from them. I feel absurd that I got a bad review due to the delay of external process. What could I have done this better?

   Thanks for the great show. It’s making my commute more enjoyable. Keep it up!

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

1. Can you coach self-awareness? I manage someone who seems to believe their skill set is on par with their teammates, regardless of their constant PR feedback regarding the same issues over and over, the extra attention they are regularly given to help them overcome coding challenges, and the PIP they are currently on to address these issues (and others). What are some approaches I could take to help steer them to better understand their areas for growth when explicit measures don’t seem to get through?

2. I work at a small 10-person startup. The company has absolutely nothing to do with AI, but one of the founders has gone full evangelist. He genuinely believes AGI is arriving this year and that there isn’t a single job, task, or process where an LLM isn’t the obvious tool.

   Day in, day out, he’s posting links to random AI products with captions like “looks interesting 👀”. It’s like Clippy got a16z funding, moved to Shoreditch, and now spends his days flogging us apps we didn’t ask for. He also insists we “use AI more in development,” despite not understanding development in the slightest.

   The routine is always the same:

   1. He asks the engineering team how to achieve some goal (always involving an LLM).
   2. We give a sensible answer, weighing complexity, cost, feasibility.
   3. He comes back with a massive pasted transcript: “here’s what ChatGPT thinks.”
   4. We pick out what’s actually useful, quietly bin the nonsense.
   5. He takes our response, shoves it straight back into ChatGPT, and returns with another transcript: “here’s what ChatGPT thinks.”

   This has been going on for months. At this point, he’s basically a human middleware layer for ChatGPT — no analysis, no original thought, just endless copy-paste recursion. I’m genuinely worried he’s outsourcing his entire thinking process to a chatbot and slowly losing the ability to engage with ideas on his own.

   How do I tell him — politely but firmly — that this is both rude and a bit tragic? And, half-serious: is there a prompt injection I can use to jailbreak my founder back into being an actual founder rather than a ChatGPT relay bot?

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

1. Hey guys,

   I have been working for four months at my job and I already don’t like it.

   This is my first job out of college and I work as a C# backend engineer for a small B2B SaaS company. I really think this company is a dead end. There is a lot of technical debt and antipatterns and we have no automated testing whatsoever. Most of our time is spent manually debugging but no one wants to refactor.

   I’m already thinking about working somewhere else. However, it took me a while to get this job, and I don’t think the market has gotten any better since. I’m trying to decide whether I should focus on applying to jobs again or if I should work on a bunch of side projects and open source to stand out better. On one hand, I can learn new technologies on my own to make me stand out for my next job, but on the other hand, I feel like as long as I stay at this company I am wasting time, since I’m not learning from my job. I want to switch to more distributed backend engineering in Java anyways, but I’m not sure how to go about it.

2. Listener Ghani asks,

   “I’m a mid-level software engineer who has trouble communicating with my engineering manager and product manager when there is unclear or missing information about an assignment/story/project.

   They answer with hostile/dismissive tone/non-answer (e.g it’s on the jira-card, epic, etc). They course correct when they have the information later, harshly

   my impressions were

   • they don’t have the information at the time
   • they expect engineers to make decision
   • they expect engineers to know something they don’t (e.g architecture, infrastructure, past decision, plans, etc)

   I really want to look for where we can have a safe exchange of information. How can I do this?