In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

1. I work as a Software Engineering Manager at the European office of a US company. Recently, many of my colleagues successfully obtained US visas for an upcoming business trip. When it was my turn, everyone said it would be a piece of cake because our company is well-known. However, to my surprise, I was rejected during the visa interview. Now I won’t be able to join my colleagues (including my direct reports). I’m concerned they might perceive me as less capable because of this. What would you think if your manager couldn’t travel with you? To make matters worse, I might soon be managing a few US-based employees remotely.

2. Hi guys, love the podcast. I never miss an episode!

   I have a co-worker, let’s call him “Bob”. Bob’s a lovely guy and very eager to learn.

   Here’s the thing. Bob never learns from his mistakes and needs to be continually asked to correct the same types of errors over and over again.

   The problem is that Bob doesn’t seem to have a developers mindset. I’d go so far as to say that if there’s a decision to be made then Bob is 95% guaranteed to do the opposite of what everybody else on the team would do.

   The end result of this is that whenever a pull request is opened up with Bobs name attached to it I can be sure that I will be spending more time reviewing it and inevitably the PR will need to go back and forth multiple times as Bob is asked to correct the same types of things that he was just asked to correct in the last review.

   The frustrating is that my manager is also nice and wants to encourage Bob to grow and improve and so regularly gives Bob some pretty complex tasks in order to encourage this growth. While I admire the managers attitude (and surely have benefitted from it on occasions :) ) my heart sinks just a bit more than normal when this happens as I know that the previously mentioned merry go round of reviews will inevitably be larger than usual. Sometimes it can get to the point where much (or all) of Bobs work ends up being discarded.

   I do precious little development work myself as my senior position in the team means that I’m the one ends up doing most of the peer reviewing. So each time I see Bob being given a piece of work that I would have enjoyed doing (and sometimes have even specced out) I get disheartened.

   Bob has been a developer in our field for about 6 years and still needs to be told on a regular basis about things that you would usually need to tell a fresh graduate.

   How do I broach the issue of Bob with the powers that be?

Show Notes

• https://www.rnz.co.nz/national/programmes/ninetonoon/audio/2018904948/from-space-junk-to-international-treaties-nz-s-only-specialised-space-lawyer

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In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

1. Morning! I will cut straight to the chase: I’m burned out and tired. At the same time, I’m aiming to get a promotion during the next cycle. My manager is aware of the latter, but not the former. Should I tell them? I suspect that I would get a lighter work load and less responsibilities, but it might also impact my chances at getting a promotion. The project I’m working is a “high stakes, tight deadlines” mess. I usually would just take a week or two of PTO, but the tight deadlines make it hard. Do I grin and bear it till promotion cycle (another 4-6 months) or just tell my manager and risk losing the rewards?

2. I’m about to get promoted to L6, what my company calls Lead Engineer, but I have to move to another team for it to happen. The other team already has a few people who are applying for that same promotion, and they got skipped over for my promo. They’ve also been devs longer than me. (4 years for me) So, I’m worried about tension on that team when I join.

   On top of that, I’ll be learning this role too! How can I make room for myself to have failures and make poor decisions, while also not undermining my expertise? How can I step into this lead role while not stepping on the toes of the engineers already on the team?

   Any tips for someone leading a team for the first time, while also joining that team?

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

1. Love the show, you guys have saved my bacon more times than I can count!

   I interviewed at an organization for a Senior Engineering role, but the interview went so well, they actually offered me the option to accept a Staff role! I definitely didn’t feel ready for that, but I accepted as a way to stretch and challenge myself. The company has been through some internal churn and re-arranging for most of my time there, and I bounced between a lot of projects, which means I’ve now been at the company coming up on 2 years, but not really had the chance to grow into the role. Now, I’ve been here awhile, don’t have a lot of excuses, and am bad at being a Staff Engineer. My biggest failing, is that I lack a bigger vision for our project, beyond just meeting customer needs for today. I’m not even sure how to start building that bigger vision! In my current project, this is especially apparent, because we do need to meet internal customer needs, but the end goal is a larger platform. We need features that inspire new avenues of work as well as enable current ones. How the heck do I even begin to start imagining what this bigger vision could be? Moreover, once I have that vision, how do I get buy in for that vision? My inability to do this kind of forward thinking has been a boat anchor around my ankles my entire career, and I’m lost as to where to even start.

   Help me guys, I love my job, but I fear I’ve become the embodiment of the Peter Principle. Help me chew my ankles off to save my career

2. Listener Trevor asks,

   ‌

   I work as a data scientist at a small company. I joined the company specifically because of the positive work environment. I do mostly software development and until recently have only received positive reviews.

   Recently we had a heated meeting with the CTO and CFO where we demonstrated that a customer’s request wasn’t feasible. The CTO challenged and expressed disbelief in our numbers which we had thoroughly analyzed and confirmed as accurate. I felt like their reaction was due to our results conflicting with our business needs.

   After that, my manager began pushing me to prioritize data science tasks. He attributed the outcome of the meeting to my lack of attention to detail, even though the results were accurate. He also said this would affect my next performance review. We reached a resolution when I apologized and committed to improvement. I’ve only received positive feedback since, but I still feel the assessment was unfairly based on such a brief meeting.

   Now I view the company and my manager differently. Without the positive work relationships with management and colleagues, I’m not sure what is keeping me here. Our tech stack is outdated, and there’s reluctance to change practices. For example, we didn’t have a CICD pipeline until only a few months ago. Additionally, the performance review and promotion schedules are nebulous and irregular.

   I’m uncertain about my next steps. Should I address the perceived unfairness of the meeting feedback? Or would it be better to start exploring other job opportunities?