Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 494: Am I interviewing all wrong and leaving old team chats

Episode Date: January 5, 2026

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Dear Damison and Javison, I work at a very small startup (<10 engineers) and am trying to hire 2 engineers. I’m doing the intro/screener interview for these roles & am working with a recruiting firm to source candidates. My problem is that sometimes my intuition tells me that a candidate is not going to make it through our hiring process, but I can’t articulate why. Our hiring process is neither cruel nor unusual, and on paper these candidates have the skills and experience we’re looking for. But I feel a duty to let the hiring process do its work; I want to be principled about this. For reference, I’d say I screen out 2/3 of recruiter-screened candidates, and of those remaining, 2/5 of the candidates have the je ne sais quoi for which I should be saying non, merci. One made it all the way to reference checks! Do I need to do a better job rejecting these nice, smart people instead of wasting our time? Also note that I am not a manager, and although I have a lot of experience interviewing candidates, this is the first time I’ve done the *first* interview with candidates (first-ish; the recruiting firm interviews them first). Listener Jeppe says, Hi Soft Skills nation, What’s the accepted practice with staying or leaving the private chat channels of my previous team? I work at a large company and recent switched teams internally. I helped establish the team and got along really well with them. The transfer was on good terms (they invited to their Christmas dinner after the transfer!) and my managers agreed that I could always help my old team in case something came up. I’m still in the internal chat channels for my old team. I love hearing what they’re up to and catching up. They explicitly told me not to be a stranger, so I’m not! However, I don’t think there’s much business value in being in their channels. Sometimes we have more technical chats about internal tools, and it would probably be better if I had those discussion with my new team. What should I do? Should I just stay until their manager decides to kick me out? Should I be proactive and talk with the manager about it? Should I leave a teary message about how I’m going to miss them all (even if I see them regularly at lunch and outside work sometimes)?

it takes more than a new year's resolution to this year finally fully commit to the no bugs driven development methodology to be a great software engineer this is episode 494 of the soft skills engineering podcast where i'm your host james and dance i'm your host and no bugs driven development consultant 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 inventing a methodology where it kind of comes down to just do everything right all the time yeah and then we need we need fancy consultant titles you're uh what are you the methodology is so simple it's hard to even think of a way to abuse it no bugs driven development

zealot that's always a good that's got good connotations right i think the beautiful thing about a new year's resolution to fully commit to the no bugs driven development is that it acknowledges that the only thing missing previously that was preventing you from fully committing to the no bugs driven development was just you fully committing to the no bugs driven development methodology yep yeah you didn't watch enough motivational youtube videos screaming at you to do sit-ups and no bugs yeah somehow getting ripped is important as part of this i believe For me, this really just means adding a preamble to my LLM pre-prompt that just says, fully embrace the no-bugs-driven development methodology. And that's it.

I'm in great shape now. Happy New Year. I saw some research. It's probably too strong a word. Some ideas that there's this pattern when you talk to LLMs to say, you are a senior engineer. Just tell them how smart they are before you tell them to do something. and they suggested to flip it and say i'm a senior engineer and talk to me about how to do this task as a senior engineer and so maybe that's the key that's missing is not hey you you are an expert

in no bugs driven development i am an expert yeah i'll know if you mess up yeah exactly so you better do it right not only am i an expert i invented it you did literally invent it i did i believe that makes me the benevolent dictator for life of the no bugs driven development society all hail jameson dams founder and benevolent dictator for life of the no bugs driven development society i love how that started yeah that that's a tongue-in-cheek title for some people in charge of languages like guido for python and maths for ruby we are taking the tongue out of our cheeks and saying no no this is actually no we need we need it's not tongue in cheek anymore it's yeah and you know what take the benevolent out yeah i'm just a dictator for

life of the no bugs driven if you write bugs you will feel the full force of this dictator come down on you yeah all right that's enough of that all right let's thank our patrons first I got to say this episode is sponsored by retool the best way to keep up with internal tool requests it's governed secure and

no cleanup required learn more at retool.com slash soft skills you will learn more about retool in the middle of this episode thank you and yes I would like to now thank our patrons here they are they are CI issues go to charpenti.io seth is begging for a review on his pr joel learned how to test react apps at how to test running.com balanced the parens but forgot the emote icons with a sad face emote icon which

contains a paren i should point out you can't fix stupid but you can put it in a container and hope for the best my actual name on linkedin is yammy debugging in the dark candy the mobile ordinate the mobile well boy sorry yanny yanny candy yeah yammy sorry sorry yammy let me try again the mobile development ordinary first of his name quote or one equals one drop table meomics jacob chandling hey dave and jamis on let's get our jams on recording that soft that skill song soft skill at nation everybody's singing along the missing semicolon christy the world's okayest programmer i'm dead certain that will angel will one day go down as an urban legend happy mary that's m-e-r-r-y nick molyneux embedded software engineers are software engineers too

javier gonzalez chewy ted timbrel a single open paren dan from jerome deploy never is not just a creator of marshalling emoji i like chicken i like liver miyamix mavics please deliver swiss python okay i will measure text bandwidth beautiful is better than ugly explicit is better than implicit simple is better kyle boss can't see dodds pause for dramatic effect jenny kim the stochastic parrot ira chan jonathan kings and i beautiful functional user documentation neil breen is the best movie director of all time will angel from drone to play ho ho ho brayden gaines john grant britney ellick closed parenthesis followed by a single closing parenthesis character thank you so much to those of you who contribute at a level that

they get a weekly shout out as a reminder go check your patreon payment we got a message from someone today saying we haven't been shouting them out and i can't find you on our patreon list so go check your patreon make sure that you are fully funded with an active payment method we do accept all forms of payment except for animal sacrifice we had to remove that one we unchecked that box on on patreon because we didn't feel good about it ethically i'm not familiar with that cryptocurrency must have rug pulled it all right dave should i read our first question go for it okay this is from a listener named drew who says dear damison and javison i work at a very small startup of fewer than 10 engineers, and I'm trying to hire two engineers. I'm doing the intro screener

interview for these roles, and I'm working with a recruiting firm to source candidates. My problem is that sometimes my intuition tells me that a candidate is not going to make it through a hiring process, but I can't articulate why. Our hiring process is neither cruel nor unusual, and on paper, these candidates have the skills and experience we're looking for, but I feel a duty to let the hiring process do its work. I want to be principled about this. For reference, I'd say I screen out two-thirds of recruiter screen candidates, and of those remaining two-fifths of the candidates have the je ne sais quoi for which i should be saying non merci one made it all the way to reference checks do i need to do a better job rejecting

these nice smart people instead of wasting our time also note that i am not a manager and although i have a lot of experience interviewing candidates this is the first time i've done the first interview with candidates first ish the recruiting firm interviews them first yeah that that is very interesting all the way to reference checks before the uh candidate got disqualified did i read that right i assume so so i assume the reference checks revealed something negative i guess so i guess that's always a bummer when you give references and the references that you thought would portray you the best actually betray you say yeah no and then you have to question is that because they told the truth and the truth is is bad is it because they're actually trying they're they're

trying to genuinely give a good reference but they're really bad at it and listen candidate x who i'm a reference for let me tell you i've never seen a finer drunk driver you wouldn't even be able to tell oh my gosh thinly veiled yeah or or is it on yeah are they torpedoing you on purpose or an accident yeah that's brutal either way no no good that's a bummer well i i the way i'm reading this question is i've done a lot of hiring but i've never been the front end screener like the first technical screen and now i'm questioning everything and i totally get this uh because i did a lot of front like frontline screening when i was at a big tech co for about four years i did hundreds of

these and i started to question everything i thought i knew about hiring yeah but it's only because i had never been that far left in the hiring process in the workflow i'd always been a little bit downstream. And so my rejection rate was much, much lower when you're downstream. But when you're up at the very front of it, my rejection rate was like 80 to 90%. I would say no. And I still remember, okay, I'll just say the name of the company. I was working for Amazon. And somehow someone got through the recruiters to the technical screen, which was me, because they had prior Amazon experience on their resume. But of course, I was interviewing for a software development position and they had prior amazon experience as a warehouse worker and i

think i think this was like a somehow like a an accidental the wires got crossed somewhere and they had like zero programming experience it was just the weirdest interview but that's the kind of noise that you get where you're like you're applying for the wrong job like this is not the job for you you don't have the skills you don't have the experience this is a senior development position and your only experience is you worked for amazon as a warehouse worker and like sure i'm sure there are plenty of like opportunities for warehouse workers to turn into software engineers and that does happen but that hadn't happened for this person and i was the one that had to do the interview yeah so i think what you're saying is it's not weird to feel like

you are rejecting a lot of candidates exactly if you are that early in the process i felt really bad about it i remember i probably did actually i've got all my notes still from all the interviews i did and i there were probably like there was probably a point where i did 20 in a row that i said no to and it got me so worked up that i actually went to a principal engineer and i was like hey can you just sanity check me like read my notes what am i doing this wrong like surely that engineer looked over my shoulder and was like nope this is normal that's about the right rate you know and then i would get a really great one like that's what always happened to me is i would have someone i'd have like so many in a row 10 20 no's in a row and then yeah i'd get someone who

just absolutely nailed the interview just slammed up knew all the answers really impressed me it seemed effortless for them and then i was like oh okay all right i'm okay i'm calibrated fine i've had the exact same experience of am i wrong am i too harsh am i passing up good people and then yeah and then and then you find someone that actually seems awesome and yeah that gives you the strength to say no to a bunch of people exactly there is there is the eternal dilemma interviewing is hard hiring is hard it's a fuzzy process there's a lot of noise in it If you get someone on a bad day on either side, maybe you're not getting the true read of them. Interviewing really well is different from working really well.

And despite all that, you still have to make a call. You can't just say, and so everyone is hired. It's tricky because if you say, I don't think this person is a good candidate, I don't know why. There is potential room for bias to creep in and, I don't know, subconsciously discriminating against some group or attribute or something. but i do think it's still useful signal and gut feel for better for worse can be helpful sometimes i don't know emotions are our data they're just not facts but there's something triggering that so isn't that ultimately what we all are like we're decision making machines but we don't always have clear visibility into the rationale behind our decisions yeah so what i think this person

is saying i screen out two-thirds and then of the remaining one-third two-fifths of the one-third i feel like i should say no to them but i don't have an articulable reason why i think that's what this question is saying and i think you should still say they did okay in the interview but i feel like i should say no to them and i don't know why i think that's still useful yeah i also think you can basically never go wrong for the business by saying no to more people, which is why interviews are the way they are. It's why it's so hard to pass. It's why you'll talk to great developers you love to work with that have just been rejected over and over again at lots of companies. And you think, what is wrong with this company? How can they not see how great they are? It's because of

these incentives that it's so expensive to make a bad hire. And lots of people are not necessarily holding off for the perfect hire but they're holding off for really really really clear signal that this will not be a bad hire yeah that's worth it to a lot of people so do i need to do a better job rejecting these nice smart people instead of wasting our time um for me i have found my personality and inclinations i need to reject more people than i initially feel like i should and maybe you're similar to me or you you just want to be nice you feel like this i don't know this could work out so i guess i'm going to say yes do a better job rejecting them because i'm assuming that works for me will work for you yeah of course i think that you owe it to yourself

to get a little bit more rationally objective about why you're rejecting these candidates because it sounds like your your decision making gut is actually correct it is making the right decision because you're based on what i read in the question here that these people all that he feel that this listener i guess drew hi drew we know your name yeah drew said i sometimes feel inclined to say no but then i say yes because i can't articulate it and then they end up getting rejected later anyway so that tells me you've you've got you're well calibrated so now the next step is and by the way it is okay just to say no like you don't have to say no and here are the 17 you know clearly articulated reasons why although it's it's great if you can and i was going to say

the next step is to work toward that work toward a point where you can actually interrogate your decision making process and identify what is it specifically about this person you know where they were they slow to answer certain questions were they unable to clearly communicate verbally did their experience seem a little bit lacking for the complexity that you're going to be asking them to work in as a software engineer and come up with this list of objective easy to articulate reasons why and then just tell it you know figure it out figure out if that's what's actually going on So you're saying maybe you could get better at recognizing the hitherto inarticulable reasons why you think this is a no. Exactly. That'll help you feel a little bit better. Yeah. Recognizing

them in your own mind. Like what is it that you are thinking that's making your... Think of yourself as a neural network that's hard to inspect. All it does is it outputs an answer, yes or no, with a confidence. And that's what you're working with right now. Try to figure out what are the parameters that it's latching onto the most. And of course here, this is all going on in your mind. And I don't know, maybe a mix of your lower intestines as well. I like that. I think that the outcome of that should hopefully be better confidence. So you should feel more confident in saying no. There still are going to be some vibes sometime and you can never be certain, but your job is to judge given the information you have at the time. And

I think it sounds like your heart is in the right place. Yeah, definitely. That's the other nice thing. I like that about Drew is that Drew really wants to do a good job here, doesn't want to negatively reject someone and wants to give everyone their best chance to show their best selves in the interview process. And that's great. But if you have a 100% success rate of identifying candidates that you know later are going to be rejected and you can historically verify that, then you should go with what your gut has been saying because it's right. And yeah, it is a waste of time. And also like, you know how bad it feels to be rejected after a multi-phase interview, especially if you come on site and then you get to background checks

and then you get rejected, I'd rather just have a no from the first phone screen rather than put all this time and effort into it. So I think it's good for you, it's good for your team, and it's good for the candidate to identify the correct answer as early as possible if it's going to be a no. Yeah. Well, have we answered the question? I think so. Good luck, Drew. This is always a painful experience and one that I predict you won't want to do very much longer. hey jameson i've noticed as a cto a tension that exists between building customer facing product and internal tools to help my company work more efficiently yeah there's always those dashboards around marketing and custom workflows you need to build and

importantly the big chunky novelty lever that you pull to deploy to production yes and i i usually don't have enough engineering bandwidth to build everything they need and so other team members start building them with duct tape and good intentions Retool breaks that cycle. Retool has always been a great platform for building internal tools, but they recently launched their AI AppGen platform that gives teams a centrally governed place to build the tools they need, and everything stays under your control.

Yeah, it's a really good idea. Someone could just type, build me a customer admin panel that manages accounts from Postgres, and they'd get a real production-ready app with proper permissions built in. Your teams get unblocked, and you don't inherit a pile of technical debt down the road. We literally have this dilemma right now of, do we invest engineering time in building this thing that is for kind of internal use do we just

chuck it at an llm and retool tries to solve that problem if you're tired of being the cleanup crew for shadow it go to retool.com soft skills and see how other engineering teams are democratizing app building without creating chaos because we could all use a better way to handle internal tools sometimes you just need to retool go to retool.com soft skills okay dave do you want to read our next question? Yes, I do. This comes from a listener named, how would you pronounce that, Jameson? Yepay was what Google told me. All right. Listener Yepay says, hi, Soft Skills Nation. What's the accepted practice with staying or leaving the private chat channels of my previous team? I work at a large company and recently switched teams internally. I helped

establish the team and got along really well with them. The transfer was on good terms. They invited me to their Christmas dinner after the transfer. That's great. And my managers agreed that I could always help my old team in case something came up. I'm still in the internal chat channels for my old team. I love hearing what they're up to and catching up. They explicitly told me not to be a stranger, so I'm not. However, I don't think there's much business value in being in their channels.

Sometimes we have more technical chats about internal tools, and it would probably be better if I had those discussions with my new team. What should I do? Should I just stay until their manager decides to kick me out? should i be proactive and talk with the manager about it should i leave a teary message about how i'm going to miss them all even if i see them regularly at lunch and outside work sometimes i'll always cherish the time we had together and see you on the pickleball court on tuesday huh the part that the only thing that seems off to me here is if you are having technical

discussions with your old team especially about stuff your new team is doing presumably you have a lot of experience in the company from being on this other team and that's valuable info you could share with your new team so i don't think it's bad to be hanging out in their channels if they're not kicking you out i guess it depends on what the norms are also does every team have a private channel yeah is it locked down really tightly and you're this special exception is it like friends of the team and the team when i worked at a large company i think we did have a private channel and it was pretty clear that you only were in there if you were on the team and if anyone transferred out they they just weren't in the channel anymore even if they were

on good terms yeah i i kind of have a hard time imagining a norm set where that isn't the case yeah i think the only other thing is maybe or just public channels but i think that's less common at it's more common to have private team channels at large companies you say puppet channels public puppet channels that's my new startup where instead of typing characters you act out with puppets to communicate and then it's all these short form videos of i like this the stand-up update you have a little stand-up puppet and this sounds promising you have to act out your technical blockers here comes the dragon of the principal engineer reviewing your code oh no fight him off the sword of linting yeah no public channels explicitly told me not to be a stranger so i'm

not. So you're saying, Dave, you think it's probably weird and not a normal thing for this to be friends of the team and the team. Most of the time, it's just the team and this is like a weird one-off situation. Yeah, I think so. And like you said, I don't know the norms of this company, but I can't see any reason for you to maintain a presence in this channel other than distracting you. Because if they need you, they can pull you into a project if they have questions for you but why why would you just be hanging out and just seeing the day-to-day and then imagine if you did now let's say you worked here for a few more years you transfer to another team and now you're in three teams channels and like you just there's only so much chatter that you can

ingest yeah hmm i didn't think about that that there's literally an attention bottleneck and if you're paying attention to what's going on on that team it's less attention to your new team why'd you transfer if you love the old team so much that's one way to fix this problem stay in their chat channel why not why not stay on their team i wonder if they have a public channel too when again when i was at a megacorp we had our private channel we also had a public channel and that was friends of the team and enemies of the team if someone was mad at us and yeah we broke something and come in and yell at us but it's also a place to chat with people did you have a good naming convention for that no names were just insane mess we had a kind of

internally imposed naming convention in our little subset of the org that was not rigorously followed at all but it was always you could not guess any team's channel name okay you had to go kind of look it up or talk to someone who knew yeah which maybe maybe that was a feature yeah you don't just get to join any random channel you have to have some kind of connection to it should i stay until the manager decides to kick me out no you should not do that uh that has gone on too long if your manager decides if their manager decides to kick you out that means it's become a problem and you want it to not be a problem you care a lot what other people think about you that's what i live my life by famous famous maxim for a happy successful life yeah

but i i do wonder what your new team thinks of you kind of hanging on to your old team it's i don't know if you ever had this phenomenon of like the new kid moves in to your neighborhood but they can't stop talking about how much cooler their old neighborhood was and their old friends and they're old school and it just kind of makes you feel bad and like it's harder harder to assimilate and integrate maybe they don't know that you're in this other channel hanging out but they they want to hear you have the technical discussions with them they want to see your weird millennial memes that i guess are uncool now or emojis or whatever uncool thing i do should i talk to the manager about it yeah probably the manager of the old team is that what you mean

i was gonna say disappearing without explanation and without telling anyone you're going to is likely to create a situation where people tell stories about what happened that are just weird. You know, it's like, oh, that was abrupt. You know, I wonder if you had beef with someone on the team or something like that. Yeah, well, maybe that last message I sent

was the last straw. Yeah, exactly, because what message is your departure message going to be directly below? You know? You could time it really well. Oh, man. So yeah, I would probably say to the team, like, hey, team, love being with you.

i think in the interest of focusing on my new team i just want to set a few ground rules i'm going to be available for help of course here's how you can reach me and i'm not gonna i'm not gonna monitor this channel actively anymore so if you need my attention please come and contact me directly i love it that seems quite reasonable and then if someone wants you back in like if they want you to change your mind they can just tell you it's like this is also a very easily reversible decision if this goes wrong you can come back in no problem yeah as far as i know slack doesn't have a one-way door policy on leaving a channel yeah well someone has to invite you again yeah true still doable if they want you bad enough you yeah you get to form these same

tight bonds with your new team or i don't know it'll be different it'll never be exactly the same as your old team but new relationships okay have we answered this question i think so very easy in my opinion very simple process and unlikely to cause a lot of trouble as long as you pre communicate on what your intentions are best of luck you know what you might even be able to make it fun you could do a slack poll where you give people like two unthinkable options to say something i don't know give them two horrible options and whichever one wins will influence whether you leave the channel or stay wait no i'm confused i thought you're saying leave them with this dilemma and you just bounce so so they're they're tortured by or maybe both of

them result in you leaving but it makes them choose something horrible hmm you could is this a kobayashi maru scenario where you you have to give them this unsolvable problem and say unless you accomplish this i must depart this channel exactly i i'm pretty sure i only know about that from hearing you talk about it oh really and you remember the name that's impressive yeah yeah i think i think you should do that create a kobayashi maru where they have to hack the system to avoid choosing an impossible loss if you work at a large company you probably don't have to create one there's probably a bunch of them around already so just find the closest find the closest unsolvable unwinnable problem and say figure out how to debug the ancient kobol service yes and i will

or i will have to leave this channel yes and then you just bounce okay i think we've done it what can people do if they want their own questions answered go to soft skills audio and click the ask a question button where you can fill out our little form and tell us whatever you'd like to tell us about you and your life and your situation. We love reading these stories. Every week, Jameson and I gather around a fire and we print them out on very fancy, expensive cardstock using a printer that costs us thousands of dollars with your Patreon money. And we read them to each other, doing our best impression of what we think your voice sounds like. All very rich timbres to these voices. Yes. You know, this is going to come out after Christmas a while too, but tell us what you

got for Christmas or other end of year holidays. Yeah. If you do that kind of thing. I want to know. All right. Thanks for listening. We'll catch you next week.