Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 488: How do I survive in a culture of optics and jira slacker

Episode Date: November 24, 2025

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Hey Dave and Jamison, Big fan of the show — listening from Portugal! (Proof that even across the Atlantic, software politics are universal.) I’m a tech lead, and lately I’ve noticed a culture where people seem to care way more about how things look than what actually gets done. It’s like the appearance of productivity matters more than real impact. Honestly, it drives me nuts!! I know politics are part of any organization, and way more in a leadership role, but this feels excessive. As someone who values substance and solid engineering, how do I deal with or influence this kind of culture without losing my sanity (or turning into one of those “optics-first” people myself)? Thanks for all the insights and laughs. Kudos from Portugal! Listener Charlie says, I’m fresh out of college at my first software engineering job. Several months ago I was appointed the accessibility champion for my team. I proposed a few items in the quarterly planning session, but I think it wasn’t enough. My project manager called out our whole team, but I think it was mostly aimed at me. I’ve been struggling with creating Jira cards, shaping with the team, writing a11y guidelines, etc. It’s tedious and I’m not really familiar with this kind of work. How can I get better at the “other stuff” besides just writing code? P.S. I volunteered for this responsibility 😩

it takes more than making an mcp server that has a tool call for each instruction in the x86 architecture and hooking that up directly to your cpu so you can have computers run the computers to be a great software engineer this is episode 488 of the soft skills engineering podcast where i'm your host jamison dance i'm your host dave smith soft skills engineering is a weekly advice show about all the non-technical things that go into the technical field of software development i'm just thinking about this so you've heard of like twitch plays pokemon right i have not heard of this oh this was the thing a while ago this is one of my favorite things on the internet there was a live streamer who hooked a stream up to a they had a computer screen showing like

a game boy emulator and they hooked chat up as inputs to the emulator so everyone would like scream a b start whatever or like nonsense into the chat and then it would try and interpret those as like inputs to enter into the game boy to try to get it to play pokemon and eventually it sort of kind of succeeded it turns out this is like infinite monkeys smashing at keyboards yeah yeah i feel like you could i don't know now i just want to do this i'm sure you could do something with this like hooking up an emulator just letting an ai do execute machine code on this emulator what's it going to do i do not know it's very interesting to think of the all the other compute that's being used to drive those instructions yeah maybe it will run an emulator

yeah how many how many gigawatts of electricity to very poorly like crash while trying to run a factorial function or something weird rube goldberg machine yep uh that's not what this show is about dave do you want to thank our patrons yes i do big thanks to those that are contributing at a level on patreon where we shout them out every week they are ci issues charpente.io software was a mistake next name comma but the best mistake we ever made learn react testing at how to test front end.com beta test compiler cache nice one anyway use neverendingstorypoint.storypointer.com so i can just when i thought i was out they pull me back in and then what's that oh yeah that's the italian it's like the italian i don't know finger italian

hand raise gesture with your thumb touching your four fingers or all four of your fingers palm up two of them boy it takes forever to describe emojis they're very efficient a picture really is worth a thousand words okay i fight actual fires as a hobby because it's so much less stressful than my tech job my actual name on linkedin is yami debugging in the dark canny the mobile development ordinary first of his first of his name quote or one equals one quote or one equals one drop table meomics jacob channeling would you rather write all your code in german or only use emojis in your pr descriptions and comments the missing semicolon christy the world's okayest programmer noah laphart every time james jameson laughs a

new ai model is born got another one 2000 open parentheses daniel remsburg nick molyneux if the service org uses a subsurface org and the controls at the subsurface org are necessary. Pretend it's not. Javier Gonzalez, Chewy, Ted Timbrel, a single open paren, Dan from DroneDeploy, never is not just a creator on Mars. I like chicken, I like liver. Meowmix, Meowmix,

please deliver. Dave, you said you might come to the Swiss Python Summit, but you did not eventually. Kyle Boss, Ken Sita, that guy over there, Jenny Kim, the Stochastic Parrot, Ira Chan, Jonathan King, beautiful functional user documentation, knock knock. it hasn't been continued yet i think we did knock knock last week too that's part of the joke yeah will angel was a guest on episode 276 of the federal tech podcast software's episode for a

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patreon and if you give enough we will read your patreon profile name on the air or whatever you change it to that is safe for work running gags get you extra laughs maybe maybe the knock knock one is knock knock who's there knock knock like it's part of the joke oh we said who's there and they said knock knock again yeah oh boy i like the banana banana banana orange you glad i didn't say banana one maybe that's it yeah that's we'll see we'll see i mean i i never know i honestly would never have predicted the comedy that has come out of our patreon list i'm absolutely in love with it all right jameson you want to read our first question yes yes i do and so i will i only do what i want to do it's a good life actually i think that would probably be a bad

life yeah eventually yeah to the question from an anonymous listener they say hey dave and jameson big fan of the show listening from portugal proof that even across the atlantic software politics are universal. I'm a tech lead, and lately I've noticed a culture where people seem to care way more about how things look than what actually gets done. It's like the appearance of productivity matters more than real impact. Honestly, it drives me nuts. I know politics are part of any organization and way more in a leadership role, but this feels excessive. As someone who values substance and solid engineering, how do I deal with or influence this kind of culture without losing my sanity or turning into one of those optics-first people myself? Thanks for all the

insights and laughs kudos from portugal uh yes we had mobile first internet first ai first now we have optics first i'm assuming optics first predated all those though oh yeah i mean maybe not when it was just like the pure basement dwelling physicists working on those giant machines flipping toggles there's probably some politics around that though too oh for sure i don't know politics are just it's an emergent phenomenon when groups of people work together it seems like just the default it emerges when there's more than one person and yeah it particularly emerges when most of those people are not engineers and i think you call it politics if you don't get your way if you if if you get your way it's just people working together yeah

exactly great things are happening here yeah what a dynamic exciting workspace where everyone is focused on the right things namely getting what i want yeah oh well i mean if optics is the name of the game one way to really get things done right is to lean in go buy yourself some really expensive expensive clothing maybe some really flashy accessories like a crossbody bag covered in gold plate or something that's the hip new gen alpha fashion statement the gold plated cross body bag maybe get something more rare than gold though i don't know platinum is platinum more rare than gold i don't know probably or just like some collectible item like a like a lego minifig from the 80s yeah it's like some foil pokemon card or something i don't know if i believe it but the ai

summary lists several metals that are more rare than gold so i guess one of those einsteinium it's actually radioactive steinium i mean is are these going to be like surely there's things in the periodic table that you can't actually get in real life you have to like have the large hadron collider yes work for 20 years then you get one tiny yeah atom of it yeah get put that on a whole backpack full of those theoretically possible only ever artificially created one-time elements use those to make your your backpack exactly mate your backpack is literally made of an of a radioactive isotope that has like a four-hour half-life yeah it's good for one day hmm what should they do okay they've done that it didn't work no that just started an arms race everyone

else also got their own radioactive isotopes there are other problems now in this workplace as well but hair loss i've noticed still politics yeah despite the fact that we're all dying from radiation poisoning there's still politics yeah which which absolutely makes sense i i think it's partially a coordination problem people want different things how do you decide what to do if if there are all these different groups that are advocating for different things there's incentives here what gets rewarded and promoted that's what people will do they're kind of vying for scarce resources sometimes visibility is important because the organization or leadership higher up in the organization literally does not know what is happening in the organization without

deliberate effort to say look at this thing i did this thing this project exists they they presumably have some inputs that they are watching but there's a ton of stuff happening that they don't know about also so i think you could benevolently look at this as attempts to inform leadership more about what is going on and it it could appear annoying and political to you but also maybe it's just providing them with more information maybe they they just didn't know this project was a thing or didn't know it was important or or and it's it's hard to say hey i'm working on this important thing without it appearing vaguely political because it's pushing out something else presumably in in this limited attention span or brain space yeah i you know i've

noticed that politics are more prominent in a in a vacuum of facts or in a vacuum of like business value uh that's a bad way to put it like critical information that people look at and go oh wow that's useful in the absence of that i think politics fills the void and let me let me give you an example. At my current job, I showed up a few years ago on this job. And one of the things that I was very keen to look into was our hosting costs. And so I went through every line of our AWS bill and I categorized every line item as either fixed cost or variable cost. You know, like, does this cost scale linearly or does it have any relation non-constant to our volume of usage or does it scale? Does it not? Is it fixed almost regardless of our usage? And I went through

it and then I created a nice little spreadsheet where I quantified all that. And then I divided it all by our usage. And I came up with a unit price for the service that we provide. And I showed all this with a nice little spreadsheet and I put it in front of the executive team and they were just like, whoa, we have never seen this. It took me about an hour, maybe two hours to read through the whole bill and put all the numbers in. And it's given us something really useful and i noticed this kind of weird political dynamic that happened as a result of that whereas previously people would speak and it kind of mattered how passionate they spoke or how charismatically or how energetic they were while speaking in the executive room but when i

put that data on the screen it kind of didn't it became very clear that it didn't matter who was speaking or how passionately they were speaking they were just like oh that's like real information like this is real business critical information like these are our unit economics and it changed the way we talk about everything it felt like i mean i'm sure it wasn't like an overnight change but you know this is kind of how i roll so i actually resonate a lot with the with the caller or the question asker here because i don't care about politics which i guess another way of saying i'm not good at politics but i am good at getting to the heart of the matter and finding real evidence for actual information and decision making. And I found that

the more I can put that articulately in front of people, the less politics plays any part at all. I'm thinking of the largest company I ever worked at. And there were often lots of politics involved. And I think you're right. The most political times were where it felt like the consequences and outcomes were pretty divorced with any impact on reality. Like, i i guess i'll give a counter example the least political time i was a giant retailer and there was this giant graph of like how many purchases are happening on the website yeah a second and incident happens the graph goes down all of a sudden hundreds of people hop on the zoom call and are talking about how do we make the graph go up yeah what happened

how do we fix it yeah not political yeah and then afterwards there's an assignment of blame whose department is responsible for the lost revenue caused by this and then becomes incredibly political again because it's no longer people working together for the shared, super clear, very objective thing. It becomes territorial and defensive. The incentives are totally different. You're not incentivized to fix something.

You're incentivized to defend yourself. Oh, that's so interesting. What a really cool case study. It was wild. these people who like 10 minutes previous i mean i say that hyperbolically but like moments before we're just laser focused on moving this graph back to normal and the only thing that mattered was the actual solution you know it's like who cares where the idea came from if it works it works right and it was super clear yep and suddenly there's no graph to move up oh that's

when the politics come out unfortunately there are some things in corporate life that are fuzzy and are scarce resources you're competing for if you're doing promotion cycles or raises or things like that. That can become quite political because you're all competing for a scarce thing. Everyone has different incentives that they're advocating for their own team, presumably.

And I don't think there's a great solution for that. But I guess maybe an answer is you need to step back enough until you find something you all agree on. Is there context about what this is? I'm assuming this is something related to like roadmap or what yeah what what you work on sort of or who gets credit for what yeah the appearance of productivity matters more than real impact exactly can you show real impact can you

measure it in some way probably not is the answer but if you can you'll probably win well i mean politics tend to manifest during decision making and they tend to manifest in really important decisions that affect people deeply and that's when defensive techniques come out to try to prevent harm to you yourself and your team you know and so it's very interesting because simultaneously the least political place and the most political place i worked for was also a gigantic tech company like the one you're describing and it was the least political because it was a very results driven culture and it almost didn't matter who was presenting the thing if the thing was grounded in a graph and a metric that that mattered it it was like i don't

care what political clout you have if you show the results on a graph that goes up or moves in the right direction then so it's like instant credibility but at the same time there was also a lot on the line because people here tend to be very highly paid and the higher up levels in the org chart were very highly paid and so as a result of that there was a lot of incentive to move up the org chart which suddenly means you can you can weaponize any system right and and as it definitely was on occasion. And maybe a better way to say it is that some people knew how better to navigate a culture of impacting results than others did. And I can tell you for sure, the classic put on a friendly smile and be really nice to everyone did not work here. Being everyone's friend had

nothing to do with your success at this particular company. So I guess my point is twofold. Number one one way to cure politics or to remove politics ah geez remove politics not even close right one way to reduce the influence of politics on your day-to-day life is to inculcate a culture of results orientation where you have numbers and facts that are rewarded more so than who you know and what you say but the counter the counterpoint to that is even at an organization where i have seen this maximized this culture there was still politics across the board huh there's something about scarcity right i i don't know i think that's got to be related to it you're disagreeing there's scarcity if if there was enough money to go around so everyone just got paid the super mega

ultra senior director level it probably would not feel as political but there's competition and scarcity i think there's still something about zooming out until you find what you agree on It sounds very vague and tacky now that I say it, but there's got to be some shared mission. And the more you can agree on the shared mission and that you're all working for the same thing, I think the easier it is to work together on that and work through disagreements on how you implement that shared vision. Another thing I've seen help is you can help dismantle this sense of scarcity. if if it's very important to recognize who does a thing you can be really good at recognizing other people and that sort of lowers the temperature people lower their hackles they lower their guard

a little bit when they don't feel like well my my credit will be stolen and if instead it feels like there's an abundance of credit because we're really good at recognizing the great things that other people do i love it it feels so much easier to just chip in because maybe maybe you won't toot your own horn well enough, but somebody else will say, oh, this part was done by this person. I love that so much. I think that's a really great point, Jameson. When people learn that the pie is bigger than they think and giving credit to someone does not preclude giving credit to someone else or does not harm someone else, I think that goes a long way to create a culture where you can celebrate impact instead of vanity. If it's really intense, there might be sort of a

prisoner's dilemma here where defecting is playing politics and you you you get more if everyone cooperates but if everyone except you is very good at giving other people credit and you defect and say great i will take all that credit you give me and also only give myself credit like you're still counting on some good behavior and goodwill and and hopefully you are an environment that that can happen in but it's possible for this to not work if if you're kind of the only one doing it And everyone else is just ruthlessly trying to benefit from it. But I don't think most places are like that, honestly. Yeah.

All right. Well, did we answer this question? I think so. Who should get more credit for this question being answered, though? Obviously you. I agree. All right. I'm going to make sure that our boss, our mutual boss who we report to, knows that.

The shadowy head soft skillet. Yes. The lore grows. The master skillet. yes dave do you want to read our next question yes i do okay this comes from a listener named charlie who says i'm fresh out of college at my first software engineering job several months ago i was appointed the accessibility champion for my team i proposed a few items in the quarterly planning session but i think it wasn't enough my project manager called out our whole team but i

think it was mostly aimed at me i've been struggling with creating jira cards sharing with the team writing accessibility guidelines etc it's tedious and i'm not really familiar with this kind of work how can i get better at quote the other stuff besides just writing code p.s i volunteered for this responsibility crying face emoji uh this is one way to get better at it volunteer for it i mean you've taken a good first step lots of people just never do it so you are feeling the painful stretching of growth i believe oh yes it is kind of weird i mean it doesn't really say in the question are you the accessibility expert because you volunteered or advocate i should say because you volunteered are you passionate about accessibility and know stuff about it hopefully

i could also see this as they sort of just chucked it at somebody and said go do accessibility things and didn't really, I mean, there's a whole deep technical domain of accessibility separate from scheduling and planning and organizing work in general. I'm going to assume that you have all that on lockdown, but maybe you don't. And if you don't, you should have some help with that. That's not, I don't know, that's not an easy thing to just pick up. Yeah. So I wonder what exactly the team was called out for here. I interpret it to be like our accessibility work is half-baked or something like that. Yeah. Or not getting done fast enough. I mean, it's like the person feels called out and then

says, I've been struggling with creating Jira cards, shaping with the team, et cetera. So I'm guessing that you're probably stuck and you don't know what to do to get unstuck. And now I think you're about to get introduced to the muddy, dirty artwork that is getting teams to do things, especially when you're influencing without authority which is invaluable i mean a good good time to bounce off this problem when you're early in your career because you get to see totally how hard it is yeah and i remember reading once a great article i don't even remember what it's about but i just i do remember one particular part of the article i think it was a rands in repose article do you remember rands in repose yeah i used to write a lot all of his stuff yeah

Yeah, me too. I don't even know. Yeah, I haven't followed him in a long time, but I'm pretty sure it was Ranz. It might not have been Ranz, but I think it was. He wrote an article about how they were going to incentivize the team to do something. And he was working with a product manager and he said, hey, let's create a leaderboard where we give points for engineers who accomplish certain things and we can put these points up on a leaderboard and people can see how many points they have. And the product manager was like, okay, well, what do you get for the points? And Rans just said, what are you talking about? The points are for the points. We're engineers. Like we want the points. You get a bigger number of points. Exactly.

And I think it was just, it was a cool insight into motivating teams of engineers. Because I think if it was, you know, if it was a sales team, just points on a leaderboard, they'd be like, screw your points. Where's the money? You know? Yeah. And those points are exchangeable for how many dollars? Exactly. But engineers are like, sweet, I can't wait to put points up on that board, that meaningless board that gives me nothing tangible except for the points, which I like.

And so I just, you know, this is a little bit of a segue into my actual suggestion, which is that people make progress when they feel incentivized to make progress. And teams, it's like you have to make the progress and the incentive really, really clear for an entire team to rally around an idea. And that is what you're trying to do here. and unfortunately this person is pushing a boulder because the nature of this work is something that teams have been failing to do correctly for decades and that is making their applications fully accessible i can't tell you how many teams i've been on just trying to push this sisyphus boulder up the up the hill and having it come back down every day oh it's just it is such a hard job so as someone who's fresh out of college and they've been tasked with doing

this, it almost feels like a cruel joke. But regardless of whether it's a joke or not, your first task is to create a progress board where the team can see how they're doing and then set a goal on every schedule. So whether it's quarterly or maybe you do every sprint or something, you need to have a goal and your product managers need to be on board with that goal so that team members can get work allocated to move that leaderboard up. Now, it doesn't necessarily have to be competitive like with points, but it does need to be a target on the board that the whole team can rally toward. I think there's a precondition here that maybe I don't see creating Jira card shaping with the team writing A11 guidelines. Hopefully it's clear to you what

progress looks like. And if it's not, that feels like step one. What I'm wondering is, are you looking at your app and looking at the stuff you know about accessibility and you just see this gigantic gap and it's hard to imagine how you would possibly make progress because it's so it's so inaccessible i assume that's the state of your app because that's the state of most apps yeah part of what you need to do as the accessibility champion is advocate for what is the most impactful or important stuff to start with it's very overwhelming to say how do we make this app accessible the finish line is it's asymptotically far away yes you can never actually crossed that finish line yeah it's much easier to say i have looked at our application

i've created i don't know these 15 issues i've ordered them in impact and here's here's the top five things i think are causing the most pain and let's work on these and then we can reevaluate yeah maybe even categorize them i mean people love simplifications like people love abstractions that can help them reason about big lists of things to do like if you put a list of 1200 accessibility issues in front of the team they'll be like i can't even start that list because it's so long but if you can say things like oh actually we only have seven category 12 issues you know where you just make up a category you know good news is the accessibility guidelines already have categories so that's kind of cool yeah or severities i should say but also you know your app so you can actually

create impact scores based on how much use a certain area gets you know if there's like some cobweb filled corner of your app that gets touched every six months it's like that's probably not the place to start for accessibility it's probably the place to start is the front page you know whatever that is but anyway now we're getting into like how to actually do an accessibility program but what really matters is that your team knows that you have prioritized this work by impact and you have a mini finish line where if you can finish the following x number of things they will materially improve the accessibility posture of your app and that is a win that a team can sink their teeth into and get to that finish line very hard to do and i think a lot of

I think a lot of very like low tenure engineers feel super intimidated by this kind of problem where they're like, oh, I'm going to get this whole team. They're like, all these people know more than me. And somehow I have to like motivate them to do this stuff. But I would say, don't, don't let yourself slip into that mindset. Be confident because you've done your homework. Get the data in front of this team that shows which things will be the most impactful to fix and create a plan and put it in front of the team. Look, they can oppose it if they want, but let them at least have the opportunity to tell you like oh i don't like this plan because x y and z reasons but if you just kind of sit there stuck it's just going to look really bad for you this is

also an opportunity i'm assuming by the fact that you're the accessibility champion you care about accessibility and the default state of product roadmaps and quarterly roadmaps is is zero accessibility thinking or work true so if your product manager is calling out the team for not being on top of accessibility that's awesome that means you have some support from the business to work on this and usually it's the opposite you're fighting for support you're saying we we have to work on this and some cruel money man is saying no no we must extract wealth from the blind people by punishing them so you somehow somehow that's better i think you're in a good spot the fact that you have some pressure to do something about this is pretty great yep i think having clearly

shaped cards and writing guidelines is important good news i think chat gpt could help you do a pretty good job writing accessibility guidelines oh yeah if there's ever like writing tasks you're procrastinating you now have a default floor of like at least you can do a chat gpt level job at it might not be good enough all the time but boy is it yeah it's often better than nothing yeah for sure i don't think there's a way to get better at it without just doing it and seeing what people are confused by though sometimes you just make it make a card assume it has all the required information and you see someone else struggle with it realize how much stuff is in your head that is not in there another option is maybe you work at a place where the expectation is everything

is very rigorously scoped out and very carefully detailed thought through and written down on a jira card yeah you could also put some more of that responsibility on the the doer i guess if that is keeping you from making these cards and making progress you could leave them pretty light and and at least you'll have some artifacts and then you work on them with the team to fill them out together or you leave them light and and just say the person who implements this gets to do a little bit of extra homework as well i've pointed out the general shape of the problem where i think you should go and you go figure the rest out draw the rest of the owl yeah draw the rest and then you draw the owl yep perfect first find the drop down and then make it accessible accessible yeah

leave that part to you steps 2 through 54 are your responsibility i wrote step 1 and 55 yep well have we answered the question i think so good luck good luck motivating a team for your first time and influencing someone without authority so you're up you're in for a great experience and look at it as an opportunity to learn and grow and you will not be disappointed yep all right what can people do if they would like their own questions answered go to soft skills.audio and click the ask a question button where you can fill out our little form we thank you to all the people all the lovely people all the future soft skillets who fill out that form every week. We really appreciate reading your stories, hearing your questions. It is the life

blood, the metaphorical life blood that keeps the show going. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much. We will catch you next week.