提升一下 soft skills —— Soft Skills Engineering podcast notes

随手记录下有意思的 podcast 点滴，欢迎一起讨论，原 podcast 可以 google 'Soft Skills Engineering'，俩 host 大佬都是 15+yoe 的 director 聊些 non-tech real life bq topic
Ep 303, Q1:

I’ve been a Staff Software Engineer at my company for 1 1/2 years. We have about 120 engineers company-wide. I’ve had 4 different bosses during the last year and our team has moved around a few times on the org chart.


I lead a team of 2 engineers. My boss told me I shouldn’t be doing any of the coding but should spending my time working with the product manager, doing research for upcoming features, doing code reviews, managing the Jira board, mastering jellyfish metrics, reviewing architecture documents, setting up measurement in our logging tool and coordinating deployments of our features.

Because my team is small and our product roadmap is pretty well defined, these tasks do not take 40 hours per week. I feel like I have nothing to do. I’ve tried to improve the velocity of the team by doing some coding and triaging on bugs. I miss doing the technical work and feel like I could do more but I also want the other 2 engineers on the team to own most of the big, bulky tasks.

What do you suggest I do? Should I enjoy my light load or should I be looking for other ways to add value?

- low expectation situation

- 2 valid questions, "what does your boss know that you don't know?" or "what do you know that your boss doesn't know?"
- DO NOT siliently do all the work, w/o visibility/credit
- convey workload in numbers to the boss
- 1:1, "Look, I believe I can do all stuffs and pick up dev tasks throughout spints"
- 2 schools of tech leadership, 1. u own the critical path code for the system, 2. u create the runway for team to own the meaty part of the system
- repeatable solution let the team to do it

I am the lead developer on a few projects with developers that have 20+ years of experience compared to my eight years. I have been made lead of the projects, but I’ve never actually had management tell the team that I am the lead or that I have any control whatsoever on the members of the team (typical ‘all of the responsibility, none of the power’ scenario). One of my teammates is tough. He writes unreadable but working spaghetti code. He also works in the field and will often times push to master and then leave to perform fieldwork, leaving the team in the lurch for several days before he can come back and fix his broken code. He habitually fails to push code, often holding the source on his own computer for months before pushing. I have mandated using pre-commit hooks to guard against breaking the build, but as IT has control over the repositories, these become “optional” and appear to be disregarded. I have brought this up with management, to no avail; the behavior continues. I have also expressed my concerns with management, and provided data on the impact this has to the project via tickets and time spent between the remaining team members.

How do I rein in this unwieldy developer? What else can I do?

- craftmanship, code quality issue
- document the impact, put in guardrails
- 1:1, talk to the perpetrator
- craft the question for the person
- red flag for management, signal to quit the job
- lack of informantion on the team, 'I'm happy to do the job, why u haven't told anyone else?'
- possible mis-allignment with the management

ep 302, 这期的问题比较水。。。随便听听就好。。。

Q1,

My boss keeps recommending bad movies. I watch most of them but I feel bad because they’re not good and I don’t want to disappoint my boss. They are ‘okay’ but are really mediocre. Do I just ignore my boss’s suggestions or should I keep watching these terrible action-heist movies even though I don’t like them?

- instead of sharing personal opinion, predict the alignment of taste
- do thumbs up or nothing (doge)
- study machine learning, train a model for the bad recommendations (doge)

Q2,

Does it matter if my emails are well written?
I’m a software engineer. I asked my partner how I should word a part of my email. After reading my email they were appalled. They said that it was “abysmally written and lacked refinement”. I’ll admit that it wasn’t my best written email, but who cares? It was just an email letting a team member know that I had followed up on a ticket a while ago, so it wasn’t like this was going to a client or something. Plus I felt like the email conveyed the message that it needed to.
In my mind as long as the email isn’t offensive or covered in grammatical errors and conveys the message, isn’t that good enough? My partner argued that I should write my emails more eloquently since my “terrible” emails will reflect poorly on me. I told other engineers care more about the content and less about how well-written any given email is, but they wouldn’t budge. In addition to that, some of the emails I’ve gotten from our senior and staff engineers seem like they were written with someone who has the English skills of a middle schooler and they seem to do fine for themselves.

谢谢分享