Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 456: Will I look bad on the job market if I'm a crypto developer and struggling to go from management back to dev work

Episode Date: April 14, 2025

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Hey, I am a web developer getting bored of the regular development work. I am interested in finance and the monetary system and due to the overlap of finance and engineering I feel down the Bitcoin rabbit hole and even spiked interest in crypto like Solana and Sui. I am pretty sure most of crypto is a FUD, delulu or straight up scam, yet the technology looks appealing and interesting to learn. So that said, I am still really interested in learning more about crypto and dabbling in the development space of that. Yet, I am hesitant because I fear that this could reflect negatively on me. What do you think? Is a bit of crypto okay or really that bad? Hi Dave and Jamison After five years as an engineering manager, I want to return to coding. But I’m facing a few challenges: First, I worry about leaving my current team. It feels like I’m abandoning the people I’ve been supporting. Should I make this transition elsewhere to avoid this awkwardness? Second, I’m struggling to find time and energy to rebuild my technical skills. After a full day of management work, it’s hard to open the laptop again for coding practice. Finally, I’ve been humbled by how rusty my coding skills have become. Tasks that would take a practiced engineer minutes are taking me days, which is frustrating and denting my confidence. How have others successfully navigated this pendulum swing back to an IC role without burning bridges or burning out? Thanks, a rubber duck

it takes more than going into your open office and asserting dominance by coding through voice dictation to be a great engineer this is episode 456 of the soft skills engineering podcast where i'm your host jameson dance i'm your host and voice dictator of pearl 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 how do you pronounce squiggly bracket versus square bracket versus angle bracket yeah open paren close paren are they braces or brackets i've never never known yeah dollar sign my right arrow but wait no you can't say right arrow because it's got to be dash and then dash greater than greater than or less than is it yeah you have to practice this

first because you will not assert dominance if you mumble exactly oh yeah you you're going into the open office to voice dictate some apl code someone asks you what you're doing you say straight symbols you've heard of the benevolent dictator for life i'm the voice dictator for life ah yes although i i mean i guess with ai now this is all you can just tell it what you want it to do in pros and then yeah you don't even have to say the syntax out loud you just say what you what do you want one of my favorite technical talks i ever saw was at deconstruct conf a few years ago and it was a software engineer who did this who coded out loud i think because she had some was it rsi i don't know some some kind of disability or physical issue that made typing

for long periods of time tricky and she had a pretty elaborate setup and lots of like macros and and customization but did have to sort of like say the code or or snippets that trans like i don't know expanded into the code and i wonder what her workflow is now it's it's got to be so much different oh yeah i mean there's at least there's more opportunities for options anyway i remember one of the high points was she said whale quench to quit vim because that was colon wq she said it so often that saying w was harder than saying whale i like that and yeah i noticed you said deconstruct conference and i just got to say gary bernhardt if you're listening please bring it back we love it i want it oh man want more of it

i hope he's not listening he's probably unimpressed by me but it was one of my favorite conferences by many people jameson so you would be a that's member of a very large club that's fair fair enough all right dave do you want to thank our patrons i do a big shout out to those that are contributing at the level where we say whatever they type into their patreon profile name field every single week they are noah labhart according to the project plan i made it'll take around three weeks starting now for my dad jokes cron job to hit production yes a couple of weeks ago a patron said dave laughed now but you didn't why alexander kuznetsov nick molino molino attribute error none type object has no attribute two

string javier gonzalez chewy ted timbrel i quit my job in 2025 i got a way cooler one as a software dev thanks sse podcast and i do the cha-cha like a sissy girl become a senior engineer.com is a newsletter you should read doing my part to make dave's heart swell but he should probably get that checked generating side projects with ai so jameson notices my resume dan from drone deploy chase w norton never is not just a crater on mars flamingo emoji i like chicken i like liver MeowMix, MeowMix, please deliver. TrashPanda, GitStatus, KyleBoss, Kent, C. Dodds, that guy

over there. Nevar is not just a planet in the Vulcan system. JennyKim, by the way, JennyKim is in all capital letters. I should probably yell that next time. Yeah. I'll remember. The Stochastic Parrot, Helicone.ai, best observability tool for AI. RedPanda is best panda.

How much wood could a much-woe wood could a woodchuck could? Jonathan King, zanai beautiful functional user documentation bethany dj tim and sasha love it that was like a four-parter four for one due to ai productivity gains williamangel.net no longer sells your data with love ragnar pat neil braden canes john grant britney ellick joe grossberg come to the slash new conference in newcastle australia may 28th and 29th moldy hard skills are safe to eat just cut one inch around the mold moldy soft skills should be discarded and last but not least cody

sale love you cody thank you so much to you who contribute every single month i don't even want your money anymore i just love the words that you write i will still take your money yeah thank you we appreciate it we appreciate the support it helps keep the show going and i was thinking about swelling hearts if you exercise a lot your muscles get bigger and that's that's great right you get huge quads sure if you're really unhealthy your heart gets bigger then you have a ripped heart yeah what's up with that and then if you're like a marathon runner does your heart get bigger then too it's just your body is smaller so it's fine i don't know or is it more like i'm sure this has an answer is it like a stretched out sock you know it's like

yeah maybe all right should i read our first question go for it this is from bored ape who says hey i am a web developer getting bored of the regular development work i'm interested in finance and the monetary system and due to the overlap of finance and engineering i fell down the bitcoin rabbit hole and even had spikes of interest in crypto like solana and suey i'm pretty sure that most of crypto is a f u d what is that fear uncertainty doubt delusion is that i'm pretty sure that means delusional delulu or straight up scam yet the technology looks appealing and interesting to learn so that said i am still really interested in learning more about crypto and dabbling in the development space yet i am hesitant because i fear that this could reflect

negatively on me what do you think is a bit of crypto okay or really that bad is it okay if i'm a closeted crypto developer i think is what we're asking here yeah yeah i just bet on the human the the kidnapped homeless person fighting ring occasionally i just dabble in it i have my own personal take on this which i guess is the only take you're going to get from me because i am my own person i think crypto is atrocious the technology is cool and interesting and it has just been utterly dominated by scammers and thieves and a shady bunch of people. And the cool part of the technology is not enough to make up for the fact that everyone that you deal with is going to be the kind of person I would least like to deal with

in the world. So would now be a bad time to let you know I'm launching a new cryptocurrency for our podcast yes it would it would always be a bad time to let me know that yeah even if the technology is cool in in practice the purpose of crypto is to steal money from people that is like the only i don't know the only purpose or speculation i guess that's the other purpose and then a tiny bit of it is like buy drugs on the internet but they kind of clamp down on that yeah that's a little quite a bit so it's mostly stealing or speculation one percent steam one percent buying illegal stuff yeah and then the rest of it is split evenly between speculation and stealing yeah i think so and it used to be maybe like 10 buying drugs on the internet and

that is all gotten cracked down on a lot yeah so i i actively discriminate against people with crypto on their resume you really which is fine because it's not a legally protected class right someone who's worked in crypto okay wow i i didn't it is a red flag for me i really didn't know you going to take it that far. No, I do. Yeah. I don't think I've ever... I mean, there's a million reasons to pass on someone. I think we had a person at one point in my career who worked in crypto that we made an offer to, and then they rejected us. You know how every time someone rejects you, you have to convince yourself, well, they're wrong. Of course. Good thing they rejected us. Yeah. Confirmation bias is an important... Yeah. We were like, well, they worked in crypto

anyways. Good riddance. Really? But I have definitely passed on a lot of people because of crypto backgrounds. Really? Okay. This is news to me. I thought I knew you pretty well, but wow, I just did not have this idea. Yeah. I'm very willing to be wrong. I'm sure I have been wrong a bunch and I don't know how normal that is, but it's definitely, it causes a raised eyebrow because I think it exhibits poor judgment, I guess. Really? Okay. Yeah. I'm going to give a counterpoint to this one. I would love it. I've probably only interviewed less than five people who have anything cryptocurrency related on their resume and every time i see it i just think oh you must be really smart i've never really associated anything negative with them morally i've just

thought you must be into math and really understand some cool stuff that i don't understand just a totally different reaction from you yeah i think i do have that reaction too of like well you you know a lot more about like merkle trees than i do and but also the fact that you are not disgusted by the pond that you have to swim in to do this stuff for money is i think that's the part wow that raises my eyebrow is like yeah but don't you look around at literally every person that is publicly affiliated with crypto okay and that's like the crowd you want to run in wow this is this is a hot take jameson yeah it is and i know many of those people are orders of magnitude richer than i will ever be well yeah that that you know sometimes

sometimes that's not a coincidence yeah that's fine i don't know so it also could just be like hating on i i've made zero dollars from crypto actually that's not true i think i bought like twenty dollars of dogecoin once and then sold it nice like twenty two dollars so maybe i've made two dollars on crypto so you so you're saying you you were willing to sell your soul for two bucks is what yeah i think so no i think my point is it it could be like this repressed like oh but if i only had gotten into it i would have ah i was hearing about i would have made so much money yes it's jealousy it's not a moral high ground maybe maybe it is yeah because if you had put a single dollar into bitcoin 10 years ago yep you have more than a single dollar you'd have

hundreds you'd have thousands of them anyway this is this is genuinely the first time in our time together where i've been like strongly surprised by your reaction and i i respect it like don't get me wrong like i actually don't have a compelling argument against it i'm just sitting here in kind of a state of like wow that's that is an interesting take and i and i love it like i mean i can't argue with it i don't think it's the norm though yeah i mean or at least the majority certainly i don't know there are probably other people that feel that way but i'm sure there people who do not care at all and i also think there's a way to to couch it if you're it can become kind of like a culty or religious in a negative way i guess of like you have to believe

in the magic of crypto yeah swear an oath and i guess if you're if you're if you're into it enough to feel that way then someone who hates crypto is never going to look at your resume and say well you but you said it in the right words so i don't hate it right but uh there are definitely ways if you're interested in the technology there are ways to play up that part and talk about like the cool distributed systems problems or i don't know the underlying math behind it or i can think of one person i know who's doing something crypto related in a way that does not fill you with horror okay it's like distributed storage systems okay and so the way that you mine their token is you you like rent out a chunk of your hard disk to they're building like a cloud

storage system and they split it across a bunch of different devices and encrypt it and back it up and stuff and you you you're basically like renting out chunks of your your hard drive for them to store data on and you get tokens for that okay so it's an incentive to participate in this cloud storage thing as like part of the storage but rather than paying you in in uh in a fiat currency which is what they others would call it yeah and then i think there is some way like you can use that to buy their service and then i assume there's some market where you could sell it for real money if you wanted to but it's that is an interesting approach for it is like we will give you this thing to incentivize you to to participate in this i also know someone who works

in distributed ledger technology which you could i think you could paint it with the crypto brush but it's for identity management it's like proving that you are someone who has done something or who has a credential you know yeah things like for public administration of stuff it's like a the government will publish something to a uh some distributed ledger that proves that you got some certification or that you haven't been arrested or something like that without necessarily revealing your full identity like you don't have to give over your social security number instead you can give like a key that unlocks certain data about you but not others and then it's provable that you have some relationship with some other organization that certifies you in some way

i'm literally shaking my head okay i was gonna say if someone showed up with that on their resume would you be like nope you're you're just a crypto scammer oh no no no i wouldn't think they're a scammer i just think crypto is like distributed ledger stuff is is like the world's crappiest slowest database that's like looking for problems yeah yeah there's there's there's nobody certainly nobody at scale has used crypto or distributed ledgers to solve a problem and and except one and the problem is how to steal a bunch of money yeah the problem is i don't have enough of other people's money yeah yeah i would like the incentives for hacking into systems to be orders of magnitude more stronger right problem solved distributed ledger yeah for stuff like

that like i think the argument around distributed ledgers is is yeah this this like trust and and verifiability and in practice there's so much real world stuff around all that that like i feel like the technical recording of of the facts or the verification that a ledger gives you is often not worth the trade-offs that you have to make to get it because there's so many other things outside of like trusting that the data is written down correctly that you still have to trust i don't know i'm getting i'm way over i'm i'm way outside of my area of expertise on this which is why i feel so strongly about it probably because if i knew more i'd probably be more nuanced no one is more of an expert on how you feel than you that is true i fear that

this could reflect that yeah if you put on your resume launched a meme coin lol rug pulled a bunch of losers like yeah that's dumb can you imagine made 50 yeah rug pulling a meme coin yeah pulled in six figures of revenue with an innovative funding model so well this is a good it's a really good data point jameson i do think like you said you are in the minority so if you're out there shopping your resume around and it says something like developed a cryptocurrency or you know i don't know did something with crypto worked at crypto company worked at coinbase whatever yeah probably like 80 of the time no one will care and then some small percentage of the time you'll have someone like jameson who will like

not even look at the rest of your resume i'm just thinking about i don't know how i feel like i never take strong stances on on this show this is definitely the strongest i will still look at the resume okay but it is i do have like the crypto bro stereotype in my head okay very interesting so i definitely am putting people i mean i don't know you have to put people in buckets on some axis to rank resumes or decide but yeah very interesting well i'm so glad to know this about you if you work at a startup that makes a game where nfts are like the currency and the point of the game like yeah that's that's a scam i don't know that's those never work they just steal people's money but i i think you could hopefully you don't work at one of those i know

someone i know someone who tried to make one of those work for a few years a lot of people did yeah it turns out having an on ledger proof that you own like a cosmetic in the game doesn't it's like no better than just a mysql table yeah i guess the the point is it's easier to resell or i i don't know whatever i just think it's amazing i actually love it i love when you get fired up and passionate about stuff like this about anything actually it's great yeah i think we've answered the question just good make sure you scrub that off your resume before you send it over to jameson for a job i guess yeah dave do you want to read our next question i will this comes from a rubber duck

who says, hi, Dave and Jameson. After five years as an engineering manager, I want to return to coding, but I'm facing a few challenges. First, I worry about leaving my current team. It feels like I'm abandoning the people I've been supporting. Should I make this transition elsewhere to avoid this awkwardness? Second, I'm struggling to find time and energy to rebuild my technical skills. After a full day of management work, it's hard to open the laptop again for coding practice. Finally, I've been humbled by how rusty my coding skills have become. Tasks that would take a practiced engineer minutes are taking me days,

which is frustrating and denting my confidence. How have others successfully navigated this pendulum swing back to an IC role without burning bridges or burning out? Thanks, a rubber duck. Hmm, as you were reading, I think I've seen, I've been working with three people as they have gone through this transition.

And I know of a couple more. Yeah, avoid this awkwardness. I think you're probably overestimating the awkwardness if you go somewhere else that's i don't know either either of those have some amount of awkwardness if you quit your job then their manager left that's kind of a bummer if you do it at the same place then they still need to get a new manager that's can be a bummer maybe they're cheering though maybe that's gonna be awkward it's like as you see how much happier they are with someone else but the folks i have seen do this all stayed at the same company and

around the same team and it was fine they liked working with this person they still worked with them just in a different role didn't feel awkward to them i think they all kind of knew that the their manager wanted to write code and so in a way they were happy that they were happier doing other stuff yeah maybe that's a good question to answer those like well what if you were just on the team could you work productively with these people as a as a peer individual contributor oh that's an interesting idea like somehow that doesn't feel quite right somehow it doesn't feel quite doable like i was your manager i know how much all of you make and now i'm going to be your peer in one case it literally was that it was the exact same team they just stepped from a management

role to an ic on the team we just all try not to think about the fact that this person read all of our performance reviews last year i think that's basically it yeah but my reaction to the second point is also common among all these cases is they were the kind of manager that you had to like push to stop coding. And they were often doing too much individual contributor work and writing too much code and kind of doing less of the enablement and kind of support work. So for them, I don't know how it felt personally, but from my perspective, their technical skills were all very strong still. It was like you had to try to stop them from building stuff so that they could go help their team build stuff. Well, that's a good idea is that maybe in order to ease this

transition a little bit, as the team manager, you should start picking up some engineering tasks to do on the team. And you can couch this in terms that make it seem innocent, like, oh, I'm not trying to quit and go get another job. These tasks don't exist just for me to practice for my coding interviews that I inevitably will face here soon. But instead, you could say, as your manager, it's important for me to stay connected to the details and firsthand experience with how we work with our processes and tools will help me be a better leader of this team and frankly i think this is a good thing for all engineering managers to do anyway so that might just be a magic bullet that will help you not only become a better manager but also keep one foot in the uh what's

the right way to say this on in the in the room in the on the one side of the fence i don't know the metaphor here in the bucket of slime one foot in the manager bucket of slime and one foot in the individual contributor bucket of slime yeah yeah i yeah i think that could work i think there's we've talked a bunch other people have too about manager coding there's the stuff that doesn't block the team that isn't in the critical path bug fixes or things that improve the quality of life or workflow changes that stuff is all a great fit for managers to do because they get interrupted and then have to run away and go do something else and you don't want to block someone else on some core dependency of a feature

while you have to go deal with a fire somewhere else. Exactly. But that's the kind of work that you are going to do as an IC. So you can certainly dive more into the code, but I think it is hard if you are feeling rusty to justify taking on a big technical project,

which is the kind of thing I feel like you would be the rustiest at. For sure, for sure. You might have the easier way into it. Do you just say, well, we'll just do it anyways? No, I mean, I think just pick tasks that are easier to dive into and work your way up until your skills come back yeah you could have a whole project that is it's big enough to exercise those muscles but it isn't a critical path thing

like maybe it's a feature your team wants to get to someday that's important that just isn't on the roadmap and it's your like work side project or something yeah i think it's a great idea and now i want to address just head on the first concern i worry about leaving my team it feels like I'm abandoning the people I've been supporting. So many people I have talked to have felt this way, whether they're leaving their team as an individual contributor or a manager or as the head of the department. And let me just say a little dose of humility will help you not only avoid this feeling, but also have closer contact with reality. You're just not that important none of us are like we we all think we are but the fact is i've left a lot of companies

even ones where i thought i am a pivotal part of this company and they've all been fine yeah i like that you can have very close relationships with people you work with and they can still be fine working with someone else yep yeah and in no cases has my team felt like i stabbed them in the back or was some kind of traitor. And in all cases, I've maintained friendly relationships with at least some of the people on the team. You know, I don't have like a perfect relationship

with everyone I've ever met or an ongoing relationship with everyone I've ever met or worked with. But I've never felt like, oh, those guys hate me now because I left that team. Yeah, because I left them in dire circumstances. There is one exception.

Oh, I want to hear it. One time, I went a little farther than just leaving the team. I started recruiting my former teammates to my new company and actually two times i've done this and this is a pattern yeah it's a little bit of a pattern and in the first case they got pissed there were curse words said about my name at this company i heard secondhand from people that were in the meetings and the second time i actually got a letter from the company lawyer saying stop it which is awesome because i had

already been away from the company for four years, well beyond the one-year do not non-solicit agreement scope. Oh, well, this shows, I guess, something about me. I just assumed you were ruthlessly breaking your non-solicitation agreement. So you were totally fine legally. They were just grumpy at you. Yeah, I think legally I didn't break any agreements or laws. That would make more sense given what I know about you. I should have assumed that. Well, let's see. The first time, yeah, you know what? I think I did wait the year in both cases yeah i know i waited the year in the second case in the first case i think i went right up to the 12 month mark and then started making phone calls i mean what's okay yeah it

seems fine why would they be was there like a a hope that and dave loves us so much that surely he would never surely it would be uncouth of him to try to recruit us after the agreement is over i mean here's the thing just because you have assigned agreement doesn't mean that it's not painful to lose your best talent and when they go one after the other month after month after month like five people in a row you know that tends to put a strain on on the team a little bit yeah i only recruited the best people too so you know imagine if you have a team of i don't know like 30 or 40 engineers and my five favorite engineers are the ones i go after yeah it's not great yeah but that's not just quitting and yeah exactly like no one no one was unhappy with me

until i took that extra step and then people got a little unhappy with me but even them in fact even the person who cursed my name publicly in a meeting i actually met that person and had a lovely lunch with them just a few months ago and no hard feelings all water under the bridge and i think everyone understands like it's just it's just not that big of a deal at the end of the day yeah i wonder if you have a management style where you every every one-on-one you swear solemnly to them that i will never leave you and then you're like i've already submitted my two weeks to my boss yeah yeah probably not something that extreme but it's possible that i don't know you've just been very friendly and on a personal level with these people and and i don't know

promise them things career development or support or something that you're worried about not being in a position to deliver if you leave but again i think that's fine i think there is a tendency to assume that your boss will be there forever especially more kind of earlier in your career if you have not had bosses leave but I don't know everyone gets over it it'll be fine I think as long as you have a narrative

why you're doing it you don't even have to tell them but if you do care and they do say well but why why would you betray us in this way you can say well here's why

I had this great opportunity I wanted to move back to an IC role and so that's what I'm doing yep and then they may say something like why didn't you give us a chance to do that yeah and you could say

make me an offer I can't refuse right now here's your chance yeah well maybe you shouldn't have been so nitpicky on those prs i opened while i was your manager exactly you lost your chance there are two more things i want to say one is my first job out of college and i probably told this story again but you know we put out 456 episodes so i think you maybe you get to repeat yourself okay good first time first time repeating myself my very first job out of college i left after 18 months and i do remember it felt like the leader of that team, it was a team of about 15 people, took it pretty personally, as if I was betraying the trust of the group. And this is a group of people that had worked together for

decades. And they brought in a few new grad, college new grads. And after 18 months, my pay was just not what I wanted it to be. And my software that I was building got shelved a couple of times. I thought, I'm going to go find something else where I can be productive and make some more money. And I did. And I could tell they were betrayed. They felt betrayed, you know. But over time, the worry that that gave me has greatly reduced because I'm like, look, guys, you didn't pay me very well. After 18 months, you gave me a 3% raise while everyone else, the industry was growing by leaps and bounds higher than that. And everything I built for you got shelved by our customer, never even got used. So yeah, I moved on. And I didn't say it like that. I was

actually super diplomatic, overly diplomatic, in fact, because I was so nervous to leave my first job. But I could tell that the leader of the team didn't even talk to me during my two-week period. and I tried to go into his office and say goodbye and he just kind of like pretended like he was busy and couldn't talk. So I'm like, yep, hard feelings here, but oh well. This was the team of like wise old gray beards, right? Yeah.

I think I remember you talking about this before and they were very close. They were all friends with each other and followed each other around to jobs and stuff. Yeah, they were probably on their fourth job together or something at this point, you know? Yeah, so it seems like they kind of saw you as the protege of like,

we finally opened up the club to new members and we brought Dave into the inner circle. and then boom he pooped all over it sounds like their club was an underpaid club yeah maybe maybe or maybe they only underpaid the protégés anyway the second thing i want to i want to address the rusty coding skills question i'm thinking look you're a manager you've been a manager for five years i'm going to assume you have some experience as an individual contributor before that you've seen some stuff you have experience you've seen good decisions you've seen bad decisions you've seen architectural decisions that go good and bad. You know what a good product looks like. You know

some core fundamental software engineering principles. You are in an absolutely perfect position to take advantage of generative AI in your coding. I mean, you say that it's taking you days to do something that a practiced engineer could do in minutes, but I'm thinking to myself, you need to get really good at AI coding companions. This has saved my bacon many, many times because I'm also a little rusty. I've been in management now for four years straight and it's great like it kind of depends like what kind of code base i'm working in but generally speaking i know the algorithms i know the data modeling i kind of know how i want the system to behave and having a a tool that can crank out example code for me it has just made any concerns

of rustiness go out the window like i can jump in and go and it's great and yeah of course it'll make mistakes but i can spot them because i've got eyes that have been doing software development for 20 years now. So this is probably the best time in the technological landscape to transition from management back into engineering because of all the help you get

from AI coding assistants. Yeah, I love that. Good timing. Nice work, Rubber Duck. All right. Well, have we answered the question? I think we have. What can people do

if they would like their own questions answered? Go to softskills.audio and click the ask a question button where you will yourself, without using AI, write your question. Or if you want to use AI,

that's fine too, whatever. And we will read it without AI, or maybe not. Maybe we'll use AI to read it. I don't know. I'm not going to sit here and pretend like we don't use AI, but we really don't. We just read them because I like reading them. I'm building up the training corpus, and soon you will all be replaced. They're not just coming for our coding jobs.

They're coming for the question-asker jobs. No, we appreciate the questions. We promise to not use them to train your replacements. Right. And we read them and love them and learn stuff from them and make a show out of them. so thank you keep them coming we will catch you

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