Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 444: Surrounded by apathetic coworkers and put it on my resume?

Episode Date: January 20, 2025

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: After a decade as a Senior front-end engineer in companies stuck in legacy ways of working—paying lip service to true agility while clinging to control-heavy, waterfall practices—I’m frustrated and exhausted by meetings and largely apathetic, outsourced teams who don’t match my enthusiasm for product-thinking or improving things. It seems allowed and normalised everywhere I go. How can I escape this cycle of big tech, unfulfilled as an engineer, and find a team with a strong product engineering culture where I can do high-impact work with similarly empowered teams? Thank you, and sorry if this is a bit verbose! Thanks guys. Martin ‌ How do you judge your competency in a technical skill and when should you include it on your resume? Should you include a skills that you haven’t used in a while, skills you’ve only used in personal projects, or skills that you feel you only have a basic understanding of? I’m a frontend developer and I’ve seen some job descriptions include requirements (not nice-to-haves) like backend experience, Java, CI/CD, and UI/UX design using tools like Figma and Photoshop. I could make designs or write the backend code for a basic CRUD app, but it would take me some time, especially if I’m building things from scratch. I’ve seen some resumes where the writer lists a bunch of programming languages and technical skills, and I often wonder if they truly are competent in all of those skills.

it takes more than a virtual stack of unread pdfs to be a great software engineer this is episode 444 of the soft skills engineering podcast where i'm your host jamison dance i'm your host dave smith soft skills engineering is a weekly advice show about all the non-technical things that go into the technical field of software development like if you're like me you have the physical stack of books and then i have my virtual stack of pdfs they're both are kind of like right only the stacks yes there's a push method but not a pop method is what you're saying yeah yeah surely someday i'll read attention is all you need yeah that's white okay that's like a foundational paper in in llms and yeah by the time it's been completely obsoleted that's when you'll

get around to that's when you'll throw it away it's like wanting to read like the paper about the double slit experiment or something just because it feels like, like, yeah, it's probably important, I guess. I don't know. Also, I probably wouldn't understand it because that one might be in German and attention is all you need

is probably in like math. It's in math, yeah. There's lots of epsilons in there. Oh, yeah. Many big, big sigmas. Yes. Seven sigmas, even more. Dave, do you want to thank our patrons?

Yes, I do. We have a one-time shoutout for one-time shoutout to one-time shoutout to one-time shoutout to one-time shoutout to one-time shoutout to me. Well said. And then weekly shoutouts to Toy Boat, Toy Boat, Toy Boat, Toy Boat, Toy Boat, Toy Boat, Toy Boat, Toy Boat, Toy Boat, Toy Boat, Toy Boat, Toy Boat, Toy. Gotcha. You did not get me. The tongue twister did not twist my tongue. Okay, next up, uncover the disturbing truth about Dave and Jameson on Soft Skills Conspiracy. SoftSkills-Conspiracy.com, this is definitely not a Rick Roll. We've got a listener update here. They say, still listening. Alexander Kuznetsov, the other creators I support must think my name is very weird.

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it just gets better man thank you so much everyone who supports the show at the level where we shot you out every week and who go farther to change your name on patreon to be something that just warms my heart it's so good shall i read our first question i was hoping you would okay this is from a listener named martin who says after a decade as a senior front-end engineer and company stuck in legacy ways of working paying lip service to true agility while clinging to control heavy waterfall practices i'm frustrated and exhausted by meetings and largely apathetic outsource teams who don't match my enthusiasm for product thinking or improving things it seems allowed and normalized everywhere i go how can i escape this cycle of big tech unfulfilled as an engineer and find a

team with strong with a strong product engineering culture where i can do high impact work with similarly empowered teams thank you and sorry if this is a bit verbose martin martin that wasn't verbose at all it was perfect it was the perfect level of verbose eloquent yes concise it's the kind of eloquence that you can tell comes from like seething rage you're like i'm gonna just slam i don't know you know how those those rage emails you write sometimes are just so flowery you mean like the ones that start with per my last email yeah i don't know if they're all per my last email but there's something it's almost like flamboyant you feel so mad you're like i'm gonna demonstrate it with with extra words yeah with with beautiful prose i wrote you this haiku

in rage yeah i have a dumb short answer which is join a startup because it will literally I was going to say live or die. It will definitely die on not having a strong product culture. It turns out a lot of other things can kill a startup too, but I feel like the incentives to have a really high quality product engineering culture are much stronger at a small startup that is still trying to find product market fit. Yes. And also it's just easier to do things at small numbers. It's hard to have 50,000 software engineers and an excellent product culture. it's just really hard for lots of reasons some of them technical some of them kind of personal or human related but my my pithy answer is it you might find this in big tech on the right team but

i think it's easier to find at a startup and it's also easier if it's not there to turn it into this yes exactly exactly i think the only way you'll find this at a big tech company is if you can find a small stealth mode startup project within the big tech company do you think it has to be a stealth mode thing that hasn't launched yet yeah because otherwise other people know i assume there has to be yeah and then they go and wreck it the problem is all these people well no i mean seriously the i love people don't get me wrong but people are the only reason bureaucracy and process exist and so just mathematically if you reduce the number of people working on a project you also reduce all the things or at least the proclivity for all the things that this

that martin here is complaining about like i i was i worked on a at a big tech company on a project that just two years prior had been a tiny little startup within a huge big tech company and by the time i got there there were 800 engineers working on it and i happened to talk to a couple of the originals who worked on it and like one of their projects was our one of their tasks on the project was that our project is so secret that we're even going to encrypt our log files. So nobody can accidentally see what it might be logging on some server somewhere. Okay. They did all kinds of fun stuff. I mean, it was like, Hey, we need someone to design the protocol. That's going to be used by millions of devices to communicate with our backend services. Like

someone's got to do that. And it's like, well, there's only like eight of us. So we don't have time to review your work. Just get to it, do a good job. You know, I don't know. Just really cool fun stuff you can get this by moving to a small startup you can also definitely not get it right you can just join somewhere where it's absolute chaos and and yolo throw everything into prod and and small startups can be dysfunctional in their own fun ways very different from giant megacorps but i do think it's a lot easier to find oh go ahead is that like a universal trade-off that must be made which is that if you sacrifice the apathy big organizational process that you must adopt chaos i don't know if you adopt chaos but i feel like

you are operating in a more chaotic environment yeah i guess less structure by definition probably yeah i i think i don't know if you have to adopt it but in i don't know microsoft is not going away anytime soon right there's not any they would like to make more money until they have all of the money that exists in the world universal yeah they they want to microsoft maximize instead of paperclip maximize every atom of the universe is microsoft just like every big tech company right but it's not an existential day-to-day threat of like oh my goodness we have to figure this thing out or this meeting with this investor is going to go wrong and then we won't get our funding and then we have two weeks of payroll left and then we're doomed and like i think a

lot of the chaos of startups comes from that existential threat that if you don't have anymore you're kind of like not a startup yeah and some good things come out of it and some bad things come out of it it can be very clarifying about what really matters though if you have that it can also not like you can happily what's that expression you you move chairs around on the deck while the ship is sinking or something like that yes rearranging rearranging chairs deck chairs on the titan yeah yeah that thing yeah you can certainly do that you can certainly like type system your way to running out of money or something but i think it's harder to do because the the the cold hard face of capitalism is is like staring directly at you like this will be

gone in less yeah you're not like seven degrees separated from that reality yeah so my point is some of the chaos is like holy crap we got to make this work and and that involves like trying a bunch of different stuff and and it just is more chaotic than like we will continue to do the thing that has made us a bunch of money and optimize and tweak it a little bit but also a lot of the chaos can be like i mean processes and bureaucracy get a bad rap and can be bad but they sure do offer a lot of stability and predictability yeah for sure depending on what you want to optimize for yeah and in the absence of all that you could be at the whim of i don't know someone who had a bad weekend and now like your company strategy is different for sure for sure there is another

advantage to working at a smaller company especially one that is growing which is that if you get in early to that company say you're one of a core cohort of like five engineers total for the whole company and you have some experience and here i'm listening to martin's question where he says after a decade so I'm saying okay you've got 10 years of experience under your belt what does that mean that means that if the company is growing you get to have a hand in choosing who you will hire and when you have that kind of control you can filter for people who match your level of excitement and dedication to the craft and filter out people who seem unmotivated apathetic and uninterested and so I've seen that at a lot of companies that I've

gone to where I joined small and grew the company, the engineering team. Like for example, I mean, I joined as the third in-person engineer to a startup a little over 10 years ago. And I think we grew it to about 50 engineers over time. And I kid you not, every single one of those 50 engineers that we hired was really great. I mean, there was almost zero apathy. Everyone was excited about software development. Everyone was excited to be part of the team. I'm not saying like everyone, every moment was walking around with a smile that was unrealistically big on their face. But by and large, everyone had those values aligned. And in my opinion, the only way to really get values adopted by a culture of people is to choose people who bring those values.

Because it's just so hard to change someone who's like, look, my whole purpose in working is to punch this clock, get the paycheck. I'm apathetic about the company. I'm not excited about the crafts. I'm just here to work my hours and get my pay. It's really hard to take someone like that and say, no, I want you to be excited about this. You know, like think about how fun it'll be to work on my meeting agenda and follow this process. It's just probably not going to happen. Yeah. I think there's probably a selection effect where if you join a startup, you are more likely to join a group of people that are excited because I think those people seek out the startup, if that makes sense. Yeah. I feel like all the advice we've given so far has been quit your big

tech company job, join a startup. I do think you can carve out some space within your current team to have, I don't know, easier product iterations. So when I worked at a giant megacorp, we had one product that was pretty mature, had a ton of stakeholders, ton of dependencies. You couldn't just go try stuff on it very easily because it was very settled in place. And that would be likely to break someone. It would break them emotionally as you crippled their service by adding what you thought was a cool new feature. But we had another project that was a lot more freeform and experimental because it didn't exist yet. We were going to try and build a new thing. I don't know if you have a ton of freedom to define new projects, but it's definitely easier to carve out

a subset, kind of a small area and say, in this area, we're going to work in an agile way, work the way i would like to work then if that's successful you get to turn that into a nightmare waterfall top down command and control slog yes your reward you become that which you hate but you are at the top so you it the problem wasn't top down the problem was you were at the bottom yeah and now you're at the top of the pain pyramid. It was never about the apathy. It was just where you were. Yeah. Oh my goodness. Apathy. Yeah. I mean, I've worked at some of these big tech companies too. I agree with your assessment, although it can be very challenging to do that in that world, you know, to kind of buck the trends

and say, no, we're doing things our own way here. And I'll say that working with a bunch of people in that kind of bigger environment, I don't know what's worse, working with a bunch of people who are apathetic and uninterested in the project or working with people who are apathetic uninterested in the project but because of promotion incentives they pretend to be excited and interested in the project oh no yeah every every problem has a new service shaped solution exactly that we're all very excited about surely this time we will avoid all the mistakes we've made in the past there's also a there's also a possibility given that martin has said that he's been bouncing from between multiple jobs where he keeps running into the same culture of apathy. I think this is

probably because Martin has found himself in this interesting referral network of companies that tend to have people move between them that all share the same culture. And I think it's time, maybe he's been captured by the gravity of that culture. And maybe it's time to look for alternative paths to go find a different company. So rather than following the same patterns or following a coworker who went to some other company, like when I worked at Amazon, it was very common for people to go work at Microsoft and then follow their co-workers who went to Microsoft and vice versa. It's like, oh yeah, we worked together at Microsoft. We worked together at Facebook. It's just like all these people that kind of just travel together. Maybe it's time to

break out of that reference network and go find a company that looks nothing like what you've been looking for before. Yeah. Yeah. It could also be you're optimizing for something, right? Big tech typically pays really well sometimes they have really high scale problems that are interesting to work on maybe the promotion i don't know pathway or the the programming languages i don't know maybe there's something that that has led you to take these jobs but now you might need to optimize for something else and it might require some trade-offs maybe you take a pay cut or or a smaller pay bump than you get from switching jobs yeah and and optimize for an excellent product team one that you will love with all your heart yes one that will be agile where agile means

do what i what i think is right exactly do uh do you think we've answered the question yes i do good luck martin best of luck dave will you read our next question you bet i will this comes from an anonymous listener who says how do you judge your competency in a technical skill and when should you include it on your resume? Should you include a skill that you haven't used in a while or skills you've only used in personal projects or skills that you feel you only have a basic understanding of?

I'm a front-end developer and I've seen some job descriptions include requirements not nice to have like backend experience, Java, CICD and UI UX design tools like Figma and Photoshop. I could make designs or write the backend code for a basic crud app, but it would take me some time, especially if I'm building things from scratch. I've seen some resumes where the writer

lists a bunch of programming languages and technical skills and i often wonder if they truly are competent in all of those skills i'm trying to find i think rob pike was on google or on sorry on linkedin at one point maybe maybe that was a meme anyways rob pike is uh he's the creator of utf-8 he's the creator of one of the co-creators of go his resume is like xerox park 18 years google 10 years distinguished engineer and then he had like he took the linkedin skills assessment for go the language that he created to prove i know go how'd he do he passed according to what i saw maybe it was just a meme maybe someone made up a fake linkedin page for him but i think that means the answer to my question is whenever you can pass the linkedin skills

assessment for it right obviously the true test of knowledge the whole yes it's like the bar exam of software development yeah or at least the lsat lsat is that the one yeah that's the one where you get into law school but the bar exam lets you practice law i mean whatever the hardest test is that's what the linkedin skills assessment clearly is i think the hardest test is the marshmallow test they give to little kids right that's right i could never resist yeah i think the story of my adult life has been continuously failing the marshmallow test which is a problem because you can buy as many marshmallows as you want as a grown-up i know it's like i'm an adult and the price tag per marshmallow is really low yeah one of these days i will pass it though

i think the answer obviously is on your resume if you've ever heard of a technology you should write it on your resume are you being tongue-in-cheek is your tongue in your cheek that's what it seemed this is what i seem to observe in every resume i've read it does seem to be the standard you just spam a bunch of keywords or sometimes you spam the i don't know you look at the job description and then you put the text that is in the job description yeah or these days goodness gracious there are ai tools that will actually generate custom resumes for a given job description and they'll do it at scale so you can generate like hundreds of these resumes one per job we talked about this on the podcast i don't think we have but i've been on the receiving

end of some of these resumes and it is making things hard yeah we we are both hiring right i don't know if you're still hiring i just finished and it was a laborious process thanks in part to AI. Yeah. I'm hiring right now and the sheer volume of fraud, not just like, I mean, the volume of everything is higher, but the volume of people just lying and making stuff up on their resume seems a lot higher than it was last time I was hiring a year ago. So I feel like AI has something to do with that. I mean, I blame all my problems on AI. So that one's going to go on the i did not get a good night's sleep last night and i did spend time sitting on my phone scrolling and doing nothing and i'm gonna assume that ai is behind the addictive dopamine algorithm stuff

for sure made me sit there and scroll for sure i mean we're talking about this tongue in cheek but i think the real answer is like sure put it on if you're reasonably competent if you can be expected to answer questions about it but if you're you are in a bad spot if you are counting on the specific keywords in your resume to bubble up to a recruiter that has no knowledge of you because the volume is just so high right now yeah that's true partly because of ai partly because of just a weaker tech hiring weaker weaker job market i don't know more people for fewer spots honestly I just ignore the section of resumes that show a list of technologies or languages or frameworks or tools. I'm like, yeah, I don't care that you said you know Git. All right, everyone knows Git.

It's like saying I know how to use a keyboard or I'm really good with word processors. It's like, okay, of course you are. You know how to use a computer. But back in the day, so I'll tell you, about 20 years ago, I was at a company where we did C++. And if ever there was a language where you don't want to claim proficiency in. It's C++. And we used to joke because we would ask people, hey, on a scale of one to 10, like this is candidates, you know, on a scale of one to 10, how would you rank your C++ proficiency? And as interviewers over years of interviewing candidates and learning the language more, we would all rank ourselves lower every year because we discovered... Your ranking was degrading.

Yes. Like when I joined the company, I thought I was probably a seven. And three years in, I was probably like a four. And it was like the denominator increased in this language because there's just so much like, oh, template metaprogramming. Okay. All right. You know, or, oh, the unfavorable diamond inheritance problem. Oh, okay. You know, it's just like, oh my goodness. It was just every time I turned around, there was some crazy C++ feature that I didn't know about. And so I'm like, well, I guess my proficiency is lower than I thought. So anyway, as a result, whenever we interviewed a candidate and they said something like eight or higher, we were like, okay, we got an eight. So we would start asking C++ trivia questions like idiots. And of course, they didn't know any of the answers. I don't know. We just had this smug, self-satisfied, disgusting approach to that. But it was really funny because I'm like, look, if you're going to write I'm an eight out of 10 on C++, we felt like you better be prepared to back that up or else reality is going to smack you. Yeah. But I think if you feel like you could competently work with the technology, I think it's fine to put on the resume. I wouldn't put like, I'm an expert in this thing if you've used it as a side project or something. yeah probably if you're just listing like stuff i know i don't know sure throw it on there what ideally your resume gives a an idea of the shape of developer you are kind of where your strengths are so maybe if you if you're a really strong front-end developer but you you're i don't know you dabble in the back end you've done some sequel if i can come away from your resume knowing that i feel like it is successful yeah and how would you know though because that's the problem is

people use the words like i have intermediate skill with sql and i'm like i have no idea what you mean by intermediate that's that feels like a c++ skill level type of problem where yes it is so deep yeah that if you say you are an expert unless i've heard your name and like could buy your book yeah you might not be exactly so this is why i instead of listing uh technologies and languages, I would rather that candidates describe what they did with those technologies. It's like, it's one thing to say I'm proficient with Java. It's another thing to say I built a spring application that serves up blog posts for, you know, 10,000 users or whatever. I don't know, you know, describe the project and then I'll be the judge of how proficient I think you are based

on the depth of experience that I can perceive you've used. I think it also depends on what type of role you are applying for. If you are a front-end developer, but you're trying to get into back-end roles more, it's probably different than if you are a front-end developer applying for front-end roles and you want to emphasize, but I'm also pretty well-rounded. Look at all this other stuff I can do. I have deep expertise in the thing that you're looking for. And maybe you say that instead of just saying, I'm well-rounded, you say something like, I have a goal to learn a new technology or framework every quarter for the last four years. Something like that. No, whether I've achieved it or not.

I wrote down a goal. I'll let you be the judge. I'm kind of nihilistic about this question because I've just gone through so many. Oh, man. It's amazing. You're in a bad place right now, I'm sure. Yeah. So weigh my mood on this with having spent days going through hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of just blind applications from LinkedIn.

But they just all blur together. I know. It's so true. it's so true and whether you put java or or not unless it's specifically hiring i'm hiring a java developer then i hope your resume better say java somewhere on it yeah and that's good enough for you whether it says java or not yeah like that you got you probably have some filter that you're trying to get rid of as many of these resumes as possible no i can tell you my filter i don't know if this is a good filter yet because we haven't finished hiring but with yeah many hundreds of

applicants a resume that lists experience in the tech that we use is not good enough because there are like all of them 500 of those we're not gonna we're not gonna interview 500 people so my filter was is there literally anything that sticks out beyond yes i've worked as a developer with the technology you've chosen do you have a blog that you write eloquently about technical stuff because we value communication skills really highly. Bam, you are probably through the first screen. Got it. Do you have, some of it is like, I don't know, vetting.

Do I know someone who works somewhere that you worked or are you a referral that's obviously useful or, but do you have something besides I have worked as a developer because so have the other 500 people or probably not actually, probably some of them have not worked as a developer, but boy, did they make a resume that indicates I've worked as a developer.

Oh yeah, like all these projects that are like actually just student projects that had no users but it kind of looks like or just straight up like i literally invented this person on the resume right right right this person is not real yeah we have found at least one of those so far one that you detected yeah exactly yeah yeah it's a it is a crazy time so i mean resume advice is oh boy i don't even know what to what advice to give people anymore because it's such a mess right now if if you're in the blind resume pool you have to how do i put it the conversion rate i guess of people who just yolo applied to getting an in-person interview is like one percent i think for a hiring process versus referrals are much higher than that

yeah still not super high but i do feel like when it comes to listing your technologies and your level of familiarity i do want to suggest that like let's let's just say you've passed the screening phase where you've gotten past the 500 interviews that are in your same pool of applicants. And now someone is actually considering your resume, reading it over. Maybe they're preparing for an interview in person with you or something. Now, what should your resume say? And I have some suggestions on this when it comes to which things you should list, languages, technologies, et cetera. And I would say in that scenario, it's really good to come up with a narrative story that describes your proficiency in indirect terms by describing

what you accomplished with the technology, language, or tool. So just as a kind of an orthogonal example to this in a different industry, one of my all-time favorite people on this planet Earth is one of my daughters. And she was applying for college some years ago. And one of the things she wanted to highlight about herself is that she's a big reader. And one way to say that in like a college essay, or in this case, a resume, is to say, I'm a big reader. But I thought to myself, if you tell me I'm a big reader, I'm like that could mean a lot of different things to different people it could mean I read every Calvin and Hobbes book yeah exactly and so she was gonna write like I'm a big reader on the

college application or on the college essays and I thought you know that's that's good but I don't think the reader will have a good like whoever's evaluating this essay I don't think we'll have a really good vision of what that is and so it turns out she had actually kept a list of all the books she had ever read from a very young age and she went back and backfilled a couple years that she was trying to remember. Anyway, she counted them up and it was thousands. And so, I said, why don't you write the actual number of books you've read in the essay? And it was like, I don't remember the number, but it was four digits. And it was like, I've read 1,785 books. And it's like, now you state a fact from your life and the reader goes, oh, this is a big reader.

It's like, okay, great. Now, the resume reader made the conclusion rather than you giving it them and i think those kinds of conclusions a they're more accurate and and and b they're stickier and i think people believe them more rather than saying i'm a c++ expert you could say things like i built the world's first 2048 game using nothing but c++ template metaprogramming it's like boom you are a c++ expert yeah well have we answered this question i sure hope so because we said a lot of words good luck good luck well hope you find a job that values you using tech that you know and put on your resume in a way that communicated that.

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