In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

1. Greetings from Germany! My job is creating a customized Windows installation image with PowerShell & C#. It takes about 2 hours to build and test an image. Sometimes I have to wait until the end to see if a change did actually work or not. During that time I usually browse the web / watch Youtube / read a book. This makes me feel like an impostor, because I am maybe working 10-25% of the time. Since I’ve only been with this company 1 year, 6 months, I don’t really have any other things to do in that time. Most of my colleagues have been with the company for upwards of 10 years and work in multiple projects at the same time, so they don’t have this issue.

   On the one hand, I don’t feel like I’m doing anything wrong. On the other hand, it feels like fraud. Should I feel guilt and if so, what should I do about this situation?

2. I am a software engineer at a large tech company in middle America. I like my job, like my leadership, and am fairly compensated for my work. In fact, I’ve been told I’m about to be moved up a level! When (if 😅) I get the new job title, I believe the responsible thing to do is to update my resume and LinkedIn account so that if (when 😳) my management or role changes for the worse, I can take your advice and find a new job.

   However, I haven’t updated my LinkedIn profile since I graduated college. How can I update my LinkedIn without worrying or upsetting anyone? To complicate matters, my entire team moved on to better things in the last six months, so suspicions are already high.

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

1. Listener Schtolteheim Reinbach III asks,

   Hey soft skills engineering, love you guys. I work at a company you wouldn’t hear much about, on a product that you wouldn’t think about as having much tech involved- suffice it to say, it makes me interesting at parties.

   I’m not a developer myself, but on my team, I’m having an issue with a developer who can’t seem to use GitHub properly. Fairly often, whenever he fixes or creates things, he doesn’t seem to check them in properly, and between releases, numerous times, this has caused people to end up reproducing work, for the developers, business team, and QA alike. He’s been at this company for several years, and people have only complained, but no one has made an effort to fix it.

   I don’t manage him, and I can’t see the processes that are in place on his end, how do I go about reducing the amount of regressions that are created due to a developer who can’t Git? I’m also interested to hear if you two have similar stories about devs who can’t Git, or if you’ve been that dev, and what happened.

2. I quit my job and got a new one! What should I be doing during the initial ramp up period that shows I am a skilled engineer even though I do not know the main languages they use? Also any advice on the non-tech side of ramping up? What should I be doing besides learning the tech stack and fixing bugs? Thank you for all your help and feedback.

Show Notes

• https://xyproblem.info/

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

1. At work, I occasionally mix names of people in my team when I refer to them in meetings. My mother used to do this with my siblings when I was a child and I hated it. I guess I am getting older. Should I just accept the defeat? Any suggestions how to deal with this?

2. How do I find areas to improve without critical feedback? I’ve had regular 1-on-1s with multiple people over the years (managers, mentors, tech leads), and asked for feedback regularly. Yet, most, if not all of the feedback I received was positive. Even when I stress that I want to receive critical feedback as well, the other person tells me that they do give such feedback to other devs, they just don’t have anything to criticize!

   This sounds like a humble brag, but I’m concerned that I will stop growing and improving if this goes on. I’m also a bit worried that deep down, the managers/leads just keep quiet to keep me happy - either because we have a friendly relationship, or because I’m one of the only women on the team (not trying to accuse them of sexism, but lets be real - “locker room talks” are held back when I’m around, and it might cause some people to be less frank to avoid possible “‘drama”).

   Due to the lack of direction, I’m trying to look at my senior colleagues and what they do better than me - do they have more technical knowledge, do they communicate better, etc. - but it’s often hard to apply to myself due to specializing in different areas, having different personalities and so on.