Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 470: I said something stupid in a meeting and just want to code

Episode Date: July 21, 2025

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I was on a meeting with a team generally regarded to be pretty annoying to deal with and not particularly useful. The meeting was pretty annoying and not particularly useful. I audibly said to myself after leaving “holy crap what a waste of time.” Turns out I hadn’t left and may not have been muted (?) but I’m really not sure. I left immediately without checking due to cringe overload, so I have no way of knowing. How do I even go about this? I have to meet with this team regularly. My spirit has left my body, this question was typed by the husk that remained. I am almost 2 years into my software development career. A few months ago, I was moved to a team where I was the only frontend developer. My team responsible for maintaining a large, legacy angular project and building a new internal in React tool to support the ML engineers at our organization. Our organization hired some contractors to help with building the new tool, all of which have the same or less dev experience as me. Our project manager is not engaged in our project. He is on multiple teams. I have to communicate with our customer, gather requirements, create user stories, and QA the contractors’ work. This is not the type of work I am particularly good at or enjoy. This is on top of me being the de-facto frontend tech lead. I am STRUGGLING to keep up. I can only do a little bit of work on our project each iteration and doing required maintenance of the legacy application has become very difficult to do because of how little attention I am able to give it. I don’t want to do all the other stuff, I just want to write code. What should I do?

it takes more than a to-do list that ends the day larger than it started to be a great software engineer this is episode 470 of the soft skills engineering podcast where i am your host jameson 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 how to make a number go up how to work all day and not check off any of the things you started needing to check off and ending up with a lot more things to do yep i may or may not be in the middle of working on a sock to audit so lots of lots of checklists going up right now yes i was talking to my boss about how i think i was just feeling bitter about all the you have to do a lot of busy

work and hoop jumping for sock 2 i was feeling bitter about it but i think we did uncover some actual changes that have made our system and our business more secure it's just like i just discount them and then focus on all the box checking you have to do it's a lot of box checking yeah but it feels so good when the list starts to shrink it does feel good when you check those boxes off it's also interesting how much of sock 2 depends on checking other companies sock 2 oh man like this is a pretty nice business model that everyone has to it spiders out across everything and network effects it's like a social yes network of 2010 except everyone has forced to do it a social network for auditors yes yeah that's not what this show is about either but

dave do you want to thank our patrons yes i do a big thanks to those that are contributing on patreon at a level that they get a weekly shout out they are matthias feist my actual name on LinkedIn is yammy, debugging in the dark canny. The mobile development ordinaire, first of his name. Quote, or one equals one, drop table meow mix, Jacob Shandling, Bjorn. Where's my stapler? Let's not get Dave and Jameson involved in this silly feud. Also, your mom called.

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yes yeah thank you all right should i read our first question go for it this is from an anonymous listener who says i was on a meeting with a team generally regarded to be pretty annoying to deal with and not particularly useful the meeting was pretty annoying and not particularly useful i audibly said to myself after leaving holy crap what a waste of time it turns out i hadn't left and may not have been muted but i'm really not sure i left immediately without checking due to cringe overload so i have no way of knowing how do i even go about this i have to meet with this team regularly my spirit has left my body this question was typed by the husk that

ah well i have i have good news about really embarrassing things which is that it'll just keep recurring in your mind randomly and wake you up in the middle of the night and you'll say oh my gosh i can't believe i did that for years and years and years oh so i'm just my mind immediately goes to changing your identity moving to a new country learning a new language trying to blend in with an entirely new culture maybe one that's completely disconnected from the internet or any other civilization that you're connected with and just completely shut this thing down a related idea could you put on like an ai mustache or whatever i was you know those old-timey glasses with the fake nose mustache do one of those but with ai where it can like

seamlessly transform you into president obama or whatever and say hey i'm a new team member joining you i'm liaisoning with this team instead because this other person has died reasons i don't know whatever yeah they've died by the way how did the last meeting end was there anything strange that happened yeah did you guys notice anything weird i no reason for asking and then And if they say nothing weirder than President Obama being the QA manager, then you're safe. Otherwise, then at least you know. Yeah, this is tough because if you offended the whole team and you don't like them already and you think they're annoying, there's probably no ally you can ask that was on the meeting to say, hey, did you hear me say anything that I shouldn't have said? And if you do ask that, maybe they'll think, well, yeah, we kept a list throughout the whole meeting of all the stuff you shouldn't have said.

and you'll find out it's worse than you thought. It's way worse than you thought. I mean, the other possibility here is that this team is so accustomed to being annoying and not useful that they're like, oh, yeah, we hear this all the time. Yeah, I hope not. That feels bad for that team. Yeah, well, they have a reputation as being annoying and not useful.

Yeah, I wonder what team they are. Like, are they, maybe there's some kind of, like, team that sort of has audit authority over your decisions. like I could see like a QA or ops team or security team that's sort of like they serve a purpose for the business but to you they feel like an impediment. I mean my first my first thought immediately goes to HR like that's probably the team. Yeah. Second the second thought is one of these non-functioning security theater teams they're like our job is to make sure that you all do whatever we say. Yeah. Oh no it's going to be a it's going to be a procurement security team

not just a like a software security team it's going to be like hey we need to buy a service from a third-party vendor and this is the team that sends out the sock to questionnaires yeah ask them about the locks that they put on their server racks and you're like this is like a yes i don't know what locks they i don't know they're probably in the cloud yeah but we need to know what type of locks they have on their server racks in the cloud please pick from one of the following brands the approved brand of locks on server racks yeah oh oh man i have this reflex in me to like always this drives my wife insane where i always try and when it's other people telling me something

i always try and look the other side when it's me i'm completely right all the time i don't have to look at the other side but like i'm i'm i'm immediately thinking what are what are all their incentives and tasks and i don't know they're probably doing the best they can they probably have to deal with like someone buying tractors and someone buying ide's but they only allowed one questionnaire transformers and yeah and they have these like 15 different frameworks that they have to meet that you've never even heard of and i don't know i don't envy their lot jameson you are let me just say your charitable attitude here is misguided it's it's wasted i have i have responded to so many of these security questionnaires

as a b2b sass product owner yeah let me just tell you these people did not deserve your charity there's there's also all these products that spin up that are that claim to answer all these questionnaires for you by by saying well just put in your information here and then you send them a link to this app instead but the problem is all these questionnaires are different and they all ask slightly different things they want to know all the same information but it's like i don't know yeah this is just a hard problem anyways that's not what this question is about what do you do oh can you send i mean i mentioned a fake ambassador that is just you can you send a real ambassador someone to go in and figure out if they heard you yeah i don't know how you do that

without raising hackles i mean what are you trying to do are you just are you just trying to make sure that your anxiety has 100 basis to plague you for the rest of your life yeah that's true i mean maybe you just assume that they heard you and yeah that's already the worst case scenario right yeah but i think you act differently if you know that they heard you because then you have to do something to fix it or you can do something to fix it whereas if they didn't hear you and you do something to fix it then it might raise more problems than it solves yeah maybe like if you come in with this big apology and they say what what are you talking about but now we're really curious about what exactly you said because boy it sounds so bad yes this might also be one of

those situations where you know how people say like the animal is more scared of you than you are of it they're talking about like snakes and yeah yeah sharks i don't know if they're talking about yeah anyway this could be the case where it's like look you really did have a bad experience with this team they wasted your time they were annoying and not useful and you actually expressed that and if they heard you they're probably like oh crap we burned a bridge we didn't do a good job in fact this might be the only time this team has ever gotten honest feedback about their contribution now i think you're being too charitable where i think if this team hears that their their force fields immediately go up like being defensive yeah the enemy is attacking us like i i don't

if they're one of these teams that is generally viewed as annoying and not useful they probably feel like justified slightly adversarial relationship already with people are kind of worried like uh people don't like us or or these i don't know we have to deal with these peons that just don't get our vision or whatever so yeah maybe i think it's unlikely that if they did here it'll cause some deep introspection to say oh maybe we are the problem and this feedback will make us change it's true i feel like our question asker here is probably a people pleaser like the fact that you feel bad about saying this that you may have hurt this team's feelings tells me that's probably the kind of person you are which just to be fair jameson and i also are oh i would feel

horrible i have done something like this and have felt horrible so yeah it's paralyzing it's terrible it's awful but this other team is not likely to be a people pleaser or else they wouldn't be such an annoying and not useful team like yeah that's fair yeah if they were like really conscientious and yeah thoughtful and so they they probably do not give a crap that you said what a waste of time about their meeting i don't know i'm just imagining how much worse bureaucracy can be if the people in charge of it want it to not work smoothly for you yeah there's so many little levers you can pull or things you can push on to really meet the the letter of the law even more so yeah that maybe that's how that's going to be your clue like did they hear you you're going to

find out the way you're going to find out yeah does it get worse are they even more annoying exactly measure the mean time to response on your emails to them i don't know get like an ai to record the video next time and analyze their facial expressions i mean you could really obsess about this and i think it'd be super healthy for you to just go all in yeah yeah you know the word i'm thinking of is ruminate yeah i need to ruminate about this maximize rumination yeah that's how we process emotions yeah we just think about them over and over and over and don't do anything about them people talk about meditation and how that's healthy and it ends in the same suffix as rumination so i think that it's probably just as healthy yes

no no i'm not in a catastrophe spiral my mantra is just oh no i'm screwed that's just what i repeat to myself to meditate this is how i this is how i calm my anxiety it's stoicism i just think about what's the worst that could possibly happen and that's all i think about i think i read cliff notes of some marcus aurelius thing that's what i got out of it think about what's the worst that could happen stoicism one okay we haven't talked at all about like what do you i mean if you're in this meeting that's regularly attended that's a giant waste of time there's not really any details here but we haven't pushed on what can you do about that problem like can you attack the root problem which is not that you maybe said something

unmuted in a meeting but that you actually have to waste a ton of time doing this annoying useless stuff at work yes true can you talk to a manager can you do some prep to head off questions can you like i don't know maybe maybe that's a more useful way to channel your your potential anxiety about this is, well, maybe I'm, maybe I've offended them. How can I minimize the pain of dealing with them in the future? I mean, one way to make them not think about the words you said about them is to make sure that they get a lot of pain delivered to them from upper management by complaining about them. Yeah. They won't think another thought about you. Yeah. I would probably talk to my manager if I felt like I had to deal with this team regularly and they're annoying and

not useful if it is some kind of like corporate governance i imagine this is a big company hopefully there's not an annoying not useful team at a really small company can't afford them and there might not be a ton to do if it's like well yeah they i don't know we have to be pci compliant and so we have to meet with them whatever it is but i think it it is you might be able to get some perspective from your manager your manager might be able to deliver feedback through the secret corporate back channels or whatever that might end up impacting them in some way they might be able to strategize with you on ways to make it less annoying and more useful yeah i don't think you would have to say hey i think i said holy crap what a waste of time to them in the meeting but i

guess it depends on what your relationship with your manager is like you could i mean that might be a fun thing to strategize and laugh together about in fact yeah like speaking seriously one i hope just listening to us talk about this and laugh about it might help you feel a little better because we've all done this where we put our foot in our mouth. We said something that we were thinking, but it's not socially acceptable to say out loud. I have a vivid memory of doing this

when I was like 11. It's never left me. I mean, I've done it since then too, but. But that's the first one on record. I started young. Yeah, I was in like a church meeting. Oh man. And you're like, this is useful or useless.

I think I literally said boring out loud because I thought it'd be really funny. And then everyone just looked at me and stopped and stared and i i melted into a pile of goo nice you were channeling your homer simpson and it just didn't work out yeah i i thought i was really cool and pretty funny and i thought it would go over better somehow but jameson this guy's an adult whoever wrote this question so what are you trying to say oh not that i've stuck my foot in my mouth well have we answered it just about i would say

find a trusted confidant that you can talk about this. Because I think like Jamie was saying, you do have two important problems to solve. One is this team sucks, and they are causing your work life to be bad. And that's wasteful. That's bad for the company. You can tackle that problem if you want. And the way, of course, you tackle that is by figuring out what needs to change about this team and trying to exert some kind of influence to make that change. Again, we've said this before, but put yourself in the shoes of the owner of this business. What would you want to happen if you owned the business and you felt like some of your spending was being wasted due to teams, processes, organizations that are not working. Okay, great. Now set that aside. The

second problem is how you feel about this. And that can be tackled with a completely different approach. And I really think there are two really good approaches to tackling this problem. One is find a trusted confidant that you can talk about, preferably someone who's not connected to this team who you can talk about your feelings with and say, I said this thing. I don't know if they heard me. I feel so terrible if they heard me. I'm a people pleaser. Help assuage my guilt and feelings of badness. But the other solution to this problem is just let time pass. Time has a way of making these things fade into the distance. As far as your feelings are concerned, it will eventually not feel so bad. Yeah. Oh, and I said there were only two things, but there is a third.

I actually have heard a great technique because this is a broadly applicable solution, but ultimately what's going on here is you have some negative emotions i mean you said your spirit left your body and you're typing this question with the husk that remains so you feel you well we don't know maybe the spirit left the body because it was so happy i mean i don't know the husk that remains is the husk because all the joy is out sprinting around the world in in yeah this is a sign of a negative emotion and negative emotions have a purpose and you can actually help those negative emotions solve their purpose or fulfill their purpose and move on by recognizing them, saying out loud the names of things you're feeling. That's step one. Step two is deciding

what you're going to do about it, if anything. Sometimes what you're going to do about it is just say, look, I just wanted to name them and let them go. And then step three is actually do something about it. And if you execute those steps, I have found that you can process even the most nasty, painful, acute negative emotions effectively. But if you don't do that, then they'll just linger in you for, well, ever since age 11, I guess, Jameson. How many years have you been? oh not enough yeah not enough years yet i do think i'll add a fourth thing which i guess we've kind of done which is laugh about it i think it helps me to think back on stupid or regretful things i've done and laugh about them more than just gaze into the mirror in agony and say i can't

believe i did that if i if i tell dave and say i can't believe i did that it feels a lot better than yeah just like running my hand through my hair pulling hairs out saying oh no that helps me a little bit yeah all right dave do you want to read our next question yes i do this comes from an anonymous listener who says i am almost two years into my software development career a few months ago i was moved to a team where i was the only front-end developer my team responsible for maintaining a large legacy angular project and building a new internal react tool to support the machine learning engineers at our organization our organization hired some contractors to help with building the new tool, all of which have the same or less experience as me. Our project

manager is not engaged in our project. He is on multiple teams. I have to communicate with our customer, gather requirements, create user stories, and QA the contractor's work. This is not the type of work I am particularly good at or enjoy. This is on top of me being the de facto front-end tech lead. I am struggling, all caps, to keep up. I can only do a little bit of work on our project each iteration, and doing required maintenance of the legacy application has become very difficult to do because of how little attention I am able to give it. I don't want to do

all the other stuff. I just want to write code. What should I do? There's a lot of eyebrow-raising stuff in here. Almost two years in, front-end tech lead, that is an eyebrow-raising thing to me. A bunch of contractors that you're QA-ing for is also eyebrow-raising. I mean, it's

eyebrow-raising in the specifics. I guess the broad strokes are like, yeah, everywhere has stuff that raises eyebrows, but still it feels like i guess this is what the question asker is literally saying but it feels like you are in over your head you are not in a well-supported environment to do great work that you enjoy this almost exact same scenario happened to me minus the contractors i i was very young in my career i was actually about one year in and i kind of got accidentally foisted into this tech lead role and uh i hated it um it was terrible i stopped coding almost entirely because i was just

doing all this administrative and management stuff and uh my solution was i quit that job yeah it's the old reliable it is it is really early in your career to not be writing a lot of code exactly if you don't want to move in this direction already and even if you do if you want to move into like tech leadership whatever air quotes around that you need it's still too early yeah you you need to write a lot of code early in your career that's right to really yeah like broaden your skill set you need to write a lot of code and you need to live with the consequences of writing that code for more time than what you have before you can be an effective tech lead i think well so quit that's option option zero i think it's always there option zero the default

there is like an option zero prime which is tell your company you're going to quit because this is not the job that you want to do and you're going to go find a job where you can do the job you want to do yeah yeah your project manager it sounds like i mean roles are different everywhere it feels like there's this is more like a manager manager role than a project manager role there is some project management involved but you're not only moving the project forward you're you're like coordinating work with all these teams and there's a lot of solutions to make all these individual problems better but if the core problem is no one is going to do all this stuff but you then the solutions all involve a lot of work that also isn't coding one of the problems that might

be easiest to solve is struggling to keep up if you have a capacity problem there's all this stuff you have to do to move the new project ahead and all this stuff you have to do to maintain the old project i think it is perfectly acceptable to say hey i cannot get to this stuff in the time that you're expecting either you need to change the expectations or we need to change something about how time is allocated because here's all the things i have to do here's how my time is being spent and there's just not enough for me to like manage this new project and meet our deadlines or timelines for this old project i think that's useful to the business because either it tells them the reality maybe they're expecting that things are going faster than they are and and

if you tell them hey they're not that's useful it can change their expectations so maybe maybe the answer will be well just do your best it's fast enough whatever that might take some of the pressure off or maybe they will shuffle things around to put more people on whatever is the most important thing but i think that's that feels like the maybe the easiest one of these to tackle is not resolve everything so that you can focus only on coding but to resolve the problem of hey i just have like way too much to do in the time that it's expected of me i think you you just have to say that so that people can have clear estimates of when stuff is going to be done and if those estimates are not what they want then the answer is cool we like put more people on it then i i

can't just not do all this stuff unless you tell me don't do all this stuff exactly this kind of situation tends to arise because you are a highly capable person who can pick up extra work and not complain about it and maybe you're very agreeable maybe you're a people pleaser like the last caller and the business doesn't know that you are absorbing a cost. So you are now the victim of an externality in economics where there's actually a need that needs to be filled here, but it's not being paid for. Well, it is being paid for,

but not in the form of salary to someone who wants to do the job. It's being paid for by you absorbing it and picking it up. And so, unfortunately, like Jameson said, that means it's the business's job to reallocate the resources so that this problem can be solved. and it sounds to me like they tried to pick up a new project without fully funding it who among us hasn't done that though i know right it's a tale as old as time surely this will be easy yeah surely it won't take that long that's yeah i do that every single day so businesses do also i totally

agree that it's that this at this point in your career i would say it's not going to be a good long-term strategy or even a short-term strategy to allow all of this project management and administrative to crowd out the more technical aspects of the job you want to do so i would definitely find a way to get rid of it i think to soften the doom and gloom that to be clear i still feel this way you should you should be coding more you are learning stuff and growing and stretching and that's part of the pain you're feeling here is is it's it's hard to manage all this stuff it's a lot harder now when you're earlier in your career but i think you are learning some skills that will benefit you later on. I think the most effective individual

contributors that are really senior can do all this stuff. It's not necessarily their role all the time, but they can coordinate a lot of work and deliver a lot of value for the business in ways that aren't just writing code. So I think you can look at this as maybe a detour from a focus on writing a lot of code but one that will serve you well in the long term it's it's uh something i think you need to get out of qa the contractors work i mean this just means you care like i interpret that to mean that you could i could take that a few ways one was just like i literally use the product and test it to make sure it's working at per spec but another way is just like i review all their code i'm course correcting them and either way this just means you're you're

the kind of person who really cares about the quality of the work and i think that that predicts really great success in your professional life yeah i you have to do it but it just sucks that you have to do it yeah exactly someone has to do it ideally they would also qa their own work but they're contractors man it's just not how it goes yeah it's not not the incentives they have you don't hire contractors to bring in high ownership high responsibility people who figure out how to do it all you bring in contractors to do jobs yep you bring them in to say we need this thing done real quick and in a way that we can spin up and spin down they're the cloud of people exactly and and it's like part of the literally part of the contract is they may not be here and

so they are just not incentivized to care about the long-term quality of this thing yeah well your project manager is not engaged on multiple teams dave you were you were saying the business needs to reallocate stuff you know your project manager might be incorrectly thinking well everything's going fine anonymous has got it under control so i i can afford to not spend as much time on this project exactly and so you could advocate for more of their time on it you could say hey this is this is going to fail unless you it needs more of your effort here like I am stretched too thin you've been you've been paying attention to other stuff but I am going to raise my hand and say come help me out more because it's it's not sustainable the way it's going

I think that might happen they might also be stretched too thin I mean everybody kind of is but you still can advocate to them directly. They're probably the person in the question that I see that's the most positioned to help you. If they can do a bit more of this work, that'll take some stuff off your plate. Yeah, that's true. It's true.

In fact, this stuff should ultimately be their responsibility and it's possible they don't even know you're doing all this. Yeah. They just think, wow, it's crazy that I was just right. I just sat down and did a bit of work at the beginning of the project and that was all the user stories and requirements.

Everything else just worked out. I'm an amazing leader. Yeah, I just did such a good job setting it up. And maybe that's how this conversation starts. It's just like, hey, I just want you to be aware of how I'm allocating my time. Since you're responsible, you own my time and you should have input on where my time is being allocated. And then they go, whoa, you're doing project management. That is the correct conclusion.

How do we change that? Yeah. And if their answer is, well, we're just going to hire a project manager who doesn't know anything about software development, you might actually be going from the frying pan into the fire. So be careful about the solution. Could be worse than the problem. Well, have we answered the question? I think so.

Best of luck to you. Despite it taking you away from being deep in the code, I think this is a useful experience to have still. You learn stuff from hard situations, no matter what they are. So I think you'll be better for it. All right. What can people do

if they want their own questions answered? Go to softskills.audio and click the ask a question button. We thank each of you so much for your wonderful questions that flow in every week. We appreciate the steady stream. I wake up every morning and the first thing I do is review your questions.

Just kidding. I don't really need to do that. I am set up to pager duty. I just get woken up in the middle of the night by a klaxon every time one comes in. Every question pages Jameson. Jump for joy. Yes!

Another one. The bell basically doesn't stop ringing on Jameson's pager duty phone. Yep. Thank you. We will catch you next week. We'll be right back.