Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 471: Why does my junior engineer do so little and I fell asleep in a Zoom meeting

Episode Date: July 28, 2025

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I’m a senior developer on a small team, and I’m feeling frustrated with a junior developer I work with. They’re smart and perfectly capable, but they stick very strictly to the confines of their assigned work. They’ll finish their tickets, but unless they’re directly asked, they don’t offer to help with other areas, pitch in on shared responsibilities, or step up when the team is trying to work cross functionally. This engineer seems content to stay in their lane and do “just enough.” I know they’re junior, so I don’t expect miracles, but I expect some initiative. This is most frustrating because it’s a small team and it often feels like we’re working with half of an engineer when they disappear into a corner and leave the pressing issues for the senior developers to handle. How can I encourage them (or maybe push them a bit) to see the bigger picture and contribute more to the team’s success without coming across as bossy or micromanaging? Is this really my responsibility to fix, and am I expecting too much of a junior? I had my first day yesterday as a senior developer and dozed off at an hour meeting at the end of the day today. The meeting was about planning the next year on a zoom call with the leadership I was following in the beginning but at some point they started to talk in something I can‘t really understand(to excuse myself, I had had mant meetings throughout the day and still new to their product). I should’ve turned off my camera but I kept it on while I was definitely zoning out and got my eyes closed few times. I am so embarrassed and don’t know what should I do and feel. I like this new workplace and people so far but should I already look for another job? Help!!!

it takes more than monitoring five simultaneous cursor chat sessions to be a great engineer this is soft skills engineering episode 471 i'm your host dave smith i'm your host jameson dance soft skills engineering is a weekly advice podcast for software developers who want to completely abdicate their job to computers the dream is uh at least somewhat within reach if you do if you do web programming i'll add that caveat oh for now not so good at low level stuff but good thing i program for the web where there are 800 million layers of abstraction and the top one is easily googleable with a large corpus of training data yes should i thank our patrons i was hoping you would that's part of why i invited you to this

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small team and i'm feeling frustrated with a junior developer i work with they're smart and perfectly capable but they stick very strictly to the confines of their assigned work they finish their tickets but unless they're directly asked they don't offer to help with other areas they don't pitch in on shared responsibilities or step up when the team is trying to work cross-functionally this engineer seems content to stay in their lane and do quote just enough i know they're junior so i don't expect miracles but i expect some initiative this is most frustrating because it's a small team and it often feels like we're working with half of an engineer when they disappear into a corner

and leave the pressing issues for the senior developers to handle? How can I encourage them or maybe push them a bit to see the bigger picture and contribute more to the team's success without coming across as bossy or micromanaging?

Is this really my responsibility to fix? And am I expecting too much of a junior? Is this my responsibility to fix? I do think part of the responsibility of being a senior engineer is to mentor and train juniors. So kind of, maybe it might even be in your job responsibilities it depends on the place but i often see that in career ladders or

job descriptions or whatever you are not accountable as much as your manager or the junior themselves but yeah yeah i think there's something there is my responsibility to fix am i expecting too much of a junior so i think there's a few different shapes of junior engineers and one of the shapes is kind of like the precocious excited know-it-all maybe a bit too gung-ho like chainsaw through the code base with the newest blog post that they read that they're super excited about the opposite of this person port everything to a new framework on the weekend that no one else knows like and they don't also know but they don't know anything so they know it as well as everything else yeah and this is this is kind of the opposite of just like do what you're

told exactly and not anything more and i feel like great engineers often come from great senior engineers often start out as like excited juniors and i i don't know i don't know if i've seen a not excited junior turn into a great senior ever oh interesting maybe i haven't i'm sure it happens and i haven't followed every career of everyone i've ever worked with so maybe i maybe i've worked with some but i i don't know it just feels like this is the wrong shape unless they change their their shape a little bit i'm trying to think of the great senior engineers that i know and i'm trying to disprove your i'm trying to find a counterexample to your claim that great senior engineers come from over eager ambitious excited junior engineers like most of

my claims it's very off the cuff not thought out or researched at all but i don't know it just kind of feels right yeah i mean it's truthy yeah yeah i think part of the job of a junior is to you have to immerse yourself really deeply in everything and know that there's a bunch of stuff you don't know yet and are gonna mess up or not have all the context but if you're just kind of waiting for the context to be handed to you you you will never pay off the investment pay off which investment like the business's investment in hiring more junior person because hiring anybody is an investment they're not going to be a net positive usually yeah for a while until they're trained up but especially a junior where it's they don't have past experience that they bring it's

it's just they both have to learn kind of the common skill set and the specifics that everyone has to learn when they start at your workplace so i think it's fair to say you you should expect more initiative from them so do you think it's possible to change someone from i just do enough and I'm not excited about this job and I don't naturally like bias toward trying to help with more things than what I've been assigned to into a person who is the opposite of all those things? I want to believe. I'll put it that way. I think it probably depends on why they are a bit siloed off or not diving in. If they have the interest in technology and software in general, but maybe they're really shy or maybe they i don't know maybe they've had maybe they had a bad experience

at a past job and they're sort of like trying to come out of their shell or you know like if if it's if it's there but buried under something else then you can maybe work with that to kind of unblock them from what is holding them back or if you're like a really good coach in a disney movie about a sports team you could probably do it yeah for sure maybe you need to watch more of those movies like the guy in friday night lights or whatever yeah a leader of people that can give good speeches. Yeah, so it probably depends. I mean, they have to want to do it. I mean, to me, the human characteristic we're talking about here is, well, I'm going to generalize this, but whatever. That's what we do here, right? The characteristic is ownership,

the attribute, I should say. This person doesn't seem to feel ownership. Gosh, I don't know. I have another interpretation, which I'll share in just a minute, but they don't feel the ownership like, oh man, if I don't do this, no one will. Or boy, I wish I could help make this team better, or I wish I could make our product better. And, you know, it's just, it sounds like it's just my job is to show up, punch the clock, get the ticket to do the tickets and punch out. And so, I don't know. I just, if truly this is like an ownership gap where you're like, look, I come to work to do the job I've been assigned. And if you want me to do more, you need to tell me to do more. I don't know how you like bake that out of someone. If that's kind of the expectation

they bring to the job. Yeah. I mean, you could tell them, I mean, like this is more of a manager conversation, but the manager could say like, look, hey, we give you these tickets, but we expect you to do more than just the tickets we assign. We expect you to have insight and we expect you to go proactively find things that are valuable that I'm not seeing because I can't see everything. I don't know. I mean, they might not know enough to do that. The part that unless they're directly asked, they don't offer to help with other areas, pitching on shared responsibilities or step up when the team is trying to work cross-functionally. Maybe they don't feel like they can yeah like i'm they're like look i am barely i am barely holding on by the skin of my

teeth i'm i'm clinging to the edge of a skyscraper with my fingernails just to do the tickets i've been assigned how could i possibly offer to help yeah so some of that stuff i think you could it sounds like you are expecting them to do this and they are not and you could get it you could you could address this by clearly stating your expectations hey we have these shared responsibilities we all go on call or whatever i don't know we all take turns releasing or being on the support queue or whatever these shared responsibilities are and good news it's your turn you're on call this time and and we're here to help you so ping us if you get stuff that you don't know how to work with but like you you could just directly state that that won't it probably won't switch

them from now you're just telling them help with the shared responsibilities but it's at least a little bit better yeah now now i can go from not doing anything and feeling fine about it to not doing anything and feeling bad about it i guess yeah i don't know i could see this meaning a lot of things maybe it's like and we're when we're talking about product decisions and and we've got this product team that we discuss things with but the engineers throw out ideas and then they're just kind of sitting there waiting for someone to tell them what what just what they should build You know, there are some interesting techniques where you can get people to engage. Because this is essentially an engagement problem, right?

Like you've got a junior developer who's not doing things you want them to do proactively. And for some reason, you don't want to go just tell them, hey, do these extra things. You want them to figure it out on their own, which is a great, great outcome. Well, I recently listened to an interview that I'm only halfway through because it's six hours long. But with a famous software engineer who everyone will probably know who I'm talking about when I just say the meta here. But this guy said he learned with open source that the best way to get people engaged in your project is to not put out a perfect project. So, like, if you have a new open source project, you're launching it. Intentionally put some mistakes in there, things that are obviously wrong.

And he's like, every time I do this, I get a lot more engagement from the community and I start getting contributors right away. But if it's already looking really good and everything's polished and there's no rough edges, I don't get as much engagement. And I think this is also true on engineering teams where you're all getting paid as well. Because what will happen is if you have a leader who's basically got it all together, the senior engineer seems to have everything under control, always has an answer for every question, always is predicting the next thing, and is ready with tickets and is ready with designs. it kind of can leave, even though you're doing a good job, it can kind of leave no space for less experienced people to flower, to blossom into a more proactive ownership-y person. And that might be what's happening here. And so I would probably assess the culture that you as a senior developer have created on this team and say, have I left room for people to step into the void and contribute?

Or am I like so aggressively effective at everything I do that people are like, well, Why would I step on your toes to even go out of, you know, go out of my lane? I have felt that way. I felt like there's no room for me to contribute because at a particular job, there's a particular person that just knew everything instantly forever. And someone would ask a question, there was a discussion and just the answer would come fully formed from their brain through their mouth. Right.

Immediately. Yeah. I both appreciated their skill and wisdom and also was at times frustrated because all like my job was just to sit there and have them tell me the answer yeah in every every time we were together in a in a technical discussion not a lot of room for you to even think yeah my brain no work good so think slow um which i don't know business is probably fine with that like well we got the answer faster good yeah who cares but yeah it does feel i almost want to say demeaning it's not demeaning maybe it is a little bit like what am i here for just to yeah do the

thing you tell me to i mean another way to say it is that you're not tapping into the full potential of all the team members yeah and there were there are definitely some problems that i would not have been able to come up with a good answer to but they did this for every problem not just those problems and i'll tell you what like when i was a junior developer some of my most what's the word what's the word for when you're you have opportunities to grow and formative yes so is that the right way to say that some of the most formative opportunities for me sure form that's like my formative years like the years that formed me and influenced me a lot maybe yeah that's probably the right way to say this but some of the most that some of the biggest

opportunities for me to grow into the senior engineer that i eventually became happened because there was a distinct lack of direction and leadership. And I just thrived in that environment because it forced me to engage my brain and really think about the problem. Like we talked about theory building, programming is theory building in an episode or two ago. Yeah.

I've been thinking about that a lot, actually. I printed out the paper and I've been reading it. Oh, it's so good. And what he says is right. And actually that same interview I just listened to, same thing. This interviewee says, as you type the code of your program,

That is the muscle that must be exercised in order to develop your skills as a software engineer. And I think the same thing is true in this kind of world where as you are exposed to opportunities to grow because there's no one else there to do it, you feel the full burden on you. That also develops your seniorness. And in the absence of that, you just kind of turn into a robot that just takes tickets off the queue and hands them over to QA when they're done. Yeah. And maybe that's all they want out of this job. And if so, then at least, you know. But this is not the type of trajectory that sounds like they will grow and develop and become a great senior engineer if they're just waiting, not pitching in, not digging into other areas, not providing feedback or saying, oh, I want to learn more about that or help with that. or yeah yeah so i'm going to give my final answer now so the answer i give what i would do in the situation it depends on how close of a relationship i have with this junior engineer if we are close and comfortable with one another and they expect me to provide mentorship and leadership then i

would go straight to them and i would say hey i have noticed a pattern in your behavior that i think is going to hold back hold back your growth in your career and it is that you only seem to do exactly the tasks assigned, and you don't take other opportunities to do better things. I want to help you grow into that. And I'd love to talk about why that's happening. And then, of course, that's going to open the door to a discussion. And the discussion will be, what are the reasons for this person acting this way? And you might, you know, you'll learn, there's 100 different ways I could go, and you'll have to figure out where to go with it from there. Now, having said that, if I'm not that close to this person, I probably don't want to put

the burden on them of knowing that the senior engineer on their team thinks they're not pulling their weight. And instead, I would probably go to the engineering manager and I would say, hey, I see a mentorship opportunity with one of the junior developers on our team, who I think has more potential than what they're tapping into. And it's kind of, they're kind of wasted, not just in how we extract value from them, like some kind of cold corporate machine, but them feeling more fulfillment in their work and being able to be a better member of our team i'd like to mentor them can you help me navigate how best to do this you know and and maybe the manager will say oh actually in their employment agreement it says they only have to do the tickets that we assign them you

know you know who knows right that's why i say if i'm not close to this person and i and i i don't have the ability i don't feel like they would tell me the full transparent reason why they're acting that way that's why i would go to the manager and see if there's some ulterior thing that i'm just not aware of yeah i mean i wonder what motivates them maybe you can dig into that a little bit what are they what are they after and is it really just a paycheck and so then you kind of know it's going to be a little bit more top down and i think your manager it needs to be a bit more involved in in pushing them but maybe maybe they want to learn new skills or build something great or have an impressive thing on their resume i don't know it might be

something you can you can tie some some motivating factor you can tie back to to things that would help them this is all pretty fuzzy stuff though i don't think there's a super clear answer i i do think i would an easy very explicit tactical thing to do is say here are the shared responsibilities on this team list them out on call i don't know bug queue whatever they are and even though the ticket is not assigned to you. I want you to take part in this rotation. It'll help you learn stuff more. It'll help share the burden across the team. And we're here to support you if you have questions. Yeah. I would definitely do that. I don't think there's a downside to that. It sounds like you maybe need a culture document that says, here's the culture we have on our team and

describe some of these proactive things you expect people to do. Yeah. It might be more clear to you as a team member than to them as a new person, both new to the team and to the industry. and then i do all the stuff that dave said nice okay have we answered this one i think so good luck okay this uh should i read our next question i almost presumed to just go read it and that was going to be very rude of me i know i one of my favorite things about you is how polite you are sometimes and you have my express permission to read the next question ah thank you then i will this is from a listener named new hire i had my first day yesterday as a senior developer and dozed off at an hour meeting at the end of the day today the meeting was about

planning the next year on a zoom call with leadership i was following in the beginning but at some point they started to talk about something i really didn't understand to excuse myself i had many meetings throughout the day and am still new to their product i should have turned off my camera but i kept it on while i was definitely zoning out and my eyes closed a few times i am so embarrassed and i don't know what i should do and feel i like this new workplace and the people so far but should i already look for another job help oh my gosh falling asleep in a zoom meeting with the camera on crazy that's the whole point of working from home camera off you've squandered you squandered the key benefit which is you can take naps not on your first day though

probably not if you have wall-to-wall meetings but and and probably not during a meeting and yeah i don't have i ever fallen asleep during a meeting i probably did at a megacorp but i think it was a well it wasn't really meeting i definitely fell asleep we had these like holiday shifts where we just had to staff like a war room in case something blew up and i had my speakers on and i fell asleep from like 2 to 5 a.m yeah because i don't know like my co-workers not not enough to just hang out and talk i assumed if something went wrong then people would be saying stuff loudly yeah turn up your speakers real loud yep but i don't think i've ever fallen asleep in a meeting where anyone in like a meeting meeting maybe i'm asleep right now maybe this is all a dream i mean

i've had people fall asleep in person in meetings i don't know what's worse like fall asleep on the zoom call i'll sleep in them i did okay one time i uh i worked for a company that had a client in it was a university in south africa and we went to go visit them which was cool but also i think probably the most it was a far off time zone and a long long long long trip to get there so i definitely fell asleep in some of those in-person meetings because i was crazy jet lagged and then i flew home and never saw them again so maybe you could do that just never just always keep yourself muted from or camera off from here on out then they'll never know if you're asleep or just camera off there was a horrible accident and my face is now the blank zoom screen so actually

my camera is on just very closely like a tight crop on my face and it just looks like this how big was this meeting that's an important question was this like a big all-hands meeting it was a call with leadership planning stuff for next year is this like 50 people then they probably didn't notice especially with zoom kind of like highlighting who's talking yeah it was a small group or if they said something maybe someone was like ah hello they're asleep yeah and that'd be rough i think yeah the saving grace here might be the limited number of thumbnails that zoom shows on the screen at once and if you just happen to be off the screen it's good chance you were if you had more than whatever the number is and depending on the highlight settings on the

zoom client good good chance here you no one saw you i was okay working at the same megacorp It was the middle of the day, U.S. time, and someone from India was online on one of the calls. It was an incident, and they were trying to help respond. And there were about, there were like 150 people on this call. Oh, my gosh. It was one of those insane, giant corporate calls that there are like three people doing work and a bunch of people there because it seems like they should be. And this person had their mic on, and they started snoring so loud. and uh everyone just kind of laughed was like ah it sucks they're up here they're up at 3 a.m

their time and i don't think anyone cared at all i don't know i probably wouldn't say anything or maybe if i worked with someone that was running the meeting maybe i'd apologize and just say i'm sorry i was i was so tired it's my first day and i i don't know whatever hopefully you don't fall sleep regularly yeah at work so hopefully there's some explanation imagine i'm just kind of putting myself in the shoes of the of the listener here it's like eight hours first day end of the day all this like foreign topics that you just i don't know man that stuff that's easy to put you to sleep so i have sympathy for you but i agree jameson i would probably go to the person who is running the meeting and just kind of bare your soul i mean this is this is actually one of those

great opportunities i think where you can say to someone i did something wrong i'm apologizing to you and you can win a ton of of credibility and clout i think when you go to someone and apologize for doing something wrong and be transparent about it i think now this might be one of those cases where it's that it's that uh charmed life experience that we have where it's never come back to bite us yeah as long as you work with good people right yeah and not a bunch of monsters but really like this could be an opportunity to say that chances are they didn't notice but i mean you can say like look it was eight hours this is all new material to me you were talking about stuff this year out i promise you i'm super interested and engaged and eager but

i just want you to know i did doze off for a moment and i apologize i'll make sure that doesn't happen again yeah and that's probably the end of it yep that sounds pretty reasonable and then if you can demonstrate you are paying attention the next few times yes i don't know there's all the like corporate dance of asking performative questions don't just waste people's times time but there are ways to indicate like i am present i am here camera on is one of those ways yep camera on eyes open eyes open but yeah i don't know type of thing in chat or you take notes or i think taking notes is good and show your hands so they know you're not multitasking that's kind of a different thing but also what you can do is wait wait wait i want to go back to that show your

hands so they know you're not multitasking is that a thing that's the thing i do huh if i really want to make sure people know that i'm totally focused on them i will put my hands on camera so they know that i'm not like clicking around you just hold them up in the air like you're being like you're being arrested or i like the idea of you just kind of waving them around wildly i couldn't possibly be multitasking while my hands are doing this 90s techno ball dance thing this is active listening yeah literally active interesting another technique you can do to show that you're engaged is you can take notes, like Jameson was saying, and then after the meeting, go to the people in the meeting, and this is something you can do when you're new, and ask them questions

about the things that you heard that you aren't familiar with yet. Acronyms, terms, domain-specific stuff. When I'm new at a job, I love to keep a little notebook of all the new things I've heard, but don't know what they mean yet. And then when I get someone's time, I can say, hey, I was in this meeting with you, and I heard you use this term. I looked it up. Here's what I found out about it is this right like am i off base here and that will be like indirectly showing that you are definitely not asleep yeah yeah and they expect you to ask questions you're new trying to learn stuff that's a i think that's a good thing to do in general when you knew is ask questions and yeah i think usually people are too afraid of asking dumb questions like hey you

kept saying this word and everyone nodded like they knew what it meant and i have no idea what i don't know that whole i don't know what that whole thing even is what what is the icarus initiative i feel like every company has one at some point if they become large enough yep i get that it's important and we're defined on our q3 deliverables and the fate of the world rests on it and and like what even is it yeah i think that sounds good i mean this makes me recall a an earlier question about the person who said this was such a waste of time at the end of the meeting i know it's so great i feel like you're in a much better situation much better much more sympathetic and less offensive yeah that was a painful one yeah i think it's okay i think you'll come out

all right i agree you could also just do the do nothing technique and hope no one saw you do nothing and it'll probably be fine yeah but i don't know that's not my that's not my mo i would probably take this thing by the horns and proactively try to resolve it just in case someone saw and if you do nothing there's a chance you'll fall asleep true you're not you're not being active yep okay have we answered the question i think so good luck good luck what can people do if they would like their own questions answered go to soft skills audio and click the ask a question button thank you from the bottom of our patreon infused hearts for everyone who submits questions we love seeing your questions and they keep the show going thank

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