Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 497: Patronizing perf reviews and can't get anything done as a tech lead

Episode Date: January 26, 2026

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I’m a relatively new people manager and I really struggle when it comes time for performance reviews, or even regular praise or critical feedback in one-on-ones, because I can’t help feeling like an adult “talking down” to another adult, regardless of whether the feedback is generally positive or critical and instructive. Something about it all seems so patronizing to me. How can I approach this stuff with a different mindset? Hello D & J! Quick one from your biggest fan!! This week (Tuesday 6th Jan 2k26) I was promoted to Tech Lead of our team. In my new role, I have done no work *cries*, I’ve spent all my time assisting team members, unblocking QA, dealing with ad hoc requests from product/stakeholders…. I asked the previous tech lead is this what they did? They did! And they said spent their personal time to complete stories assigned to them. Is this really what a tech lead does?!?!! Helpppp

it takes more than undoing bad database migrations by editing schema in production to be a great engineer this is soft skills engineering episode 497 i'm your host dave smith i'm your host jameson dance soft skills engineering is an advice podcast for software engineers whose schema we are live editing right now the mental schema we actually go straight to production here you know how it's it's like there's some saying about how it's not the it's not the crime it's lying about it that gets you or yeah i've seen some great jokes about that something about that like you get indicted for lying to federal officers more easily than for all the secret naughty stuff you did that got them interested in you there's probably a similar thing like this it's it's not the bad

migration it's the attempted cleanup after that's probably much worse for causing outages maybe maybe like i bet the worst outages are more likely to be in response to trying to fix something than just breaking something in in the first place yes surely someone would know they should tell me yeah i would love it if they would yeah i gotta 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 soft skills you will learn more about retool in the middle this episode dave should i thank our patrons i was hoping you would all right this is a shout out to these folks who contribute so much joy and also money that we shout them out every single

week thank you too let me just share my screen okay can you see it does the subservice org do rubens or is it just cold cut joel learn how to test react apps at howtotestfrontend.com bounce the prens but forgot the emoticons sad smiley you can't fix stupid but you can put it in a container and hope for the best my actual name on linkedin is yami debugging the dark candy the mobile development ordinary first of his name quote or one equals one drop table meow mix jacob shandling bork bork bork eat your little salad piggy and don't forget your hairball donut what does that mean no idea i won't let some hairballs stop me from eating a donut i don't know if that's a reference or just someone trying to see if i'll say stuff and i guess you found out

the missing semicolon christy the world's okayest programmer will angel replaced chuck norris with a renamed copy of himself may all your new year's resolutions i'm looking at the order i'm pretty sure that's not will angel's actual patreon name so it's kind of becoming true the legend of will angel spreads that guy's amazing may all your new year's resolutions come true as long as they're nick molyneux embedded software engineers are software engineers too javier gonzalez chewy ted timbrel dave's myth single opening parenthesis damn from drone deploy never is not just a crater on mars flamingo emoji i like chicken i like liver myomics myomics 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 kent c dodds jenny kim the stochastic parrot ira chan jonathan king's nigh beautiful functional user documentation you're my favorite customer nice will angel jameson i think you stopped sharing your screen and we can't see it nice the nightmare is i've been secretly sharing my screen for like oh my god 12 years straight yes deploy drone from angel will braden canes john grant britney ellick at the words closed parenthesis followed by a single closing parenthesis thank you thank you all for your support of the show your support of us and if you want to join them you can go to softskills.audio click support us on patreon any amount gets you an invite to our slack team and

enough of an amount gets you a one-time or weekly shout out and we love it when you do that we do dave do you want to read our first question yes i do this comes from an anonymous listener who says i'm a relatively new people manager and i really struggle when it comes time for performance reviews or even regular praise or critical feedback in one-on-ones because i can't help feeling like an adult take talking down to another adult regardless of whether the feedback is generally positive or critical and instructive something about it all seems so patronizing to me how can i approach this stuff with a different mindset hmm that is a great question do you feel this way dave i i totally feel this way it gets me oh it's like the number one reason that i have

that i was so hesitant to get into formal leadership the reason being it feels uncomfortable to you to be in this hierarchy kind of over other people yes exactly that is it sort of this like well and who am i to i don't know i'm just i'm just dave like yep i'm smart and good at stuff but no i'm not a superior being is this yes what is it behind that okay i'm gonna just throw out yeses and nos as you're talking yes i hate the idea of creating a a sense that i am somehow superior to someone else i hate that feeling and i can actually remember the moment when i got over a big part of that feeling and it was i was sitting down with my team and i was feeling really reluctant to give them clear and concrete direction because this feeling for me it even

extended into the realm of just like hey what should we work on or how should we do this task you know it performance reviews and things like that are like a next level challenging but it was something like yeah i don't know we had to make a decision and i i wanted something built a certain way but i didn't want to tell them i wanted to build a certain way i wanted them to figure it out by reading my mind and me like like i'll just talk about principles that i think are valuable and then you decide because you're adults you're on equal footing with me you you shouldn't be told how to do your job which by the way are all things i appreciate in a boss yeah i like that i like bosses giving me kind of parameters and then it's just like you go go free reign within these

parameters and use all your creativity and all your effort to do a good job anyway i was really struggling with this and finally one of the team members says to me dave we want to do this the way you want to do it and we just want to make you happy and do do it the way you like and i was like, oh, they want me to give them clear and concrete direction. They want to please me and it will make their lives easier and happier if I just step up and be the leader that they really want me to be. And that completely changed the way that I view this question. So you're helping them by being clear. Does that sound right? That's exactly right. The important thing is that clarity, they crave it. Your team members crave clarity. And actually being kind of a spineless

leader, and I say spineless, kind of unwilling to commit, unwilling to say something's bad when you think it's bad, that actually sucks to work with. And so, I don't know, these two thoughts really changed the way I approach it completely. I guess I didn't say this explicitly, but I also feel this way it feels weird for me to put myself in this what seems like an artificial position over somebody and and who am i to tell you whether you are good at your job or not i don't know you're not you're not a child but i have had similar realizations that actually i need to get over myself and it is helpful to have more clarity and it's not helpful if i truly don't care, it's still helpful to have some clarity just as a way to move things forward. And the worst

result is I actually do care. I just don't say it clearly. And then I have to go back and fix stuff or deal with it afterwards when I wasn't clear enough ahead of time. Yes, I totally am with you on that. In fact, as I think back on the leaders in my life, whether they're people I've reported to or whether they're like customers in an organization, the ones that were the most demanding and the most clear and the ones that embraced this hierarchy the most were actually the ones that I appreciated the most as well. But there's a trade-off there. And the trade-off was I knew I was not on level footing with them. I knew that they were not my friend. They were just a different role in my life. And yeah, like occasionally we would like joke and talk and

have a little bit of a friendly relationship. But when push came to shove, that friendship was absolutely not going to get in the way of getting this job done and getting the clear instruction from them. And I think as a leader, you kind of have to be okay letting go of that because you just can't be buddies with everyone on your team to the same degree that you can with someone who doesn't write your paycheck yeah i also think it in a way it feels like you are protecting yourself by not giving clear positive or negative feedback because if you don't do that you you're not risking being wrong right if you if you say directly this thing that you did was wrong and it should have been done in some other way if you maybe struggle with conflict or like making people

happy you can imagine a bunch of ways that that could mess up and ways people could argue against that and maybe they have some good points and like you are making a claim that could potentially be falsified in some way and if you just leave things vague and ambiguous you're not you're not doing something that could be wrong that's right you're not doing a positive action that could that could uh positive action is the wrong way to put it i don't know you're not taking an action that could later have been could could be looked back on as as this was the wrong thing to do or say that's right and it can feel safer instead you're looked back on as a coward yeah you just you just left people to hang and especially if if you're talking about performance

reviews and critical feedback or positive or negative stuff sometimes it isn't necessarily that you are just so much smarter than them and you see things with your awesome galaxy brain that they don't sometimes it's literally just the role that you are in if you are looking at more parts of the organization even if they could potentially do as good of a job or better in your shoes they're not in your shoes and so you still do see things that they don't and if part of what you struggle with is i don't feel like i'm necessarily just like better better at their job than these people and thus i can tell them here's how you should be doing your job um you still have as part of your role, the responsibility to give feedback to them and the perspective across

different teams and parts of the organization to see some things that they might miss. Yeah. They expect it from you. Yeah. And some of it is also even just as a human, right? It's easier to... An outside perspective is useful. And you, as a person that doesn't know the story that they are telling themselves in their head, might be able to tell them about the impacts of things they are doing that they have not noticed either for good or for ill right maybe if they are very nervous or or have have a hard time speaking positively or noticing positive things about themselves they they might just have this story in their head about how this thing they did broke everything or was was not worth it overall and and you can counteract that by giving

positive feedback to it's not just here's the thing you did wrong what you should have done differently so that helps me feel uh like i'm not patronizing it's not that i i'm just this wise goober that knows anything it's that i spend my time in different ways and see different things and maybe you would see those same things if you're in my shoes but yeah i'm still providing value to you yeah exactly i i have a few thoughts to share on this as well one is there's a quote that i've heard that i really like which says if you don't have enemies you don't have character and it kind of goes back to what you were saying where it's like if you are indecisive don't take a position on things then no one can agree with you and no one can be your enemy but it also means

that your team like we were saying before doesn't have direction they had they lack clarity and you're not really doing a big part of your job second thing i was thinking was that people who don't struggle with this i actually kind of wonder about them you know like imagine yeah imagine the extreme opposite of this situation yeah you don't mind talking down to people you don't mind sharing negative or critical feedback and you don't mind giving performance reviews like you like all these things that to me sounds like either a superiority complex or an empathy gap and like both of these things are not good in my opinion but that's the kind of person who i think wouldn't struggle with it so i guess that's a long way of saying congrats for feeling this way because this means you have

a good heart you're a decent human being so i just say good good for you yeah i bet that the folks that you are supposed to give feedback to i bet they would not feel weird i bet they're not sitting that meeting thinking who is this person yes tell me this performance review and often i feel like the thing that's been the least clear to me over my career is what does my boss think about me i just wish i knew more clearly yes how they felt about the work i was doing for good and for ill yeah it's always useful yeah whether you like it or not yeah i also think that you know like just hearing you say that jameson it's like yeah you you should be honest and embrace the fact that your team members they don't see you as on the same level as them in every way and i don't

mean to say they think you have more moral worth or something or more like ultimate cosmic value what i mean to say is they know that you have levers you can pull that can drastically affect their life and so for you to not be honest and upfront about that and not acknowledge it does them a disservice it's like the michael scott school of management where he's like so obsessed with having everybody love him but everyone kind of has to walk on eggshells around him because they know that he's a weirdo and he could do some strange stuff and mess up their career. Not acknowledging that is actually just as harmful as being too critical or embracing too much the hierarchical differences. I like it. And then I do have one tip. So to help ease into

the role of giving regular praise, because that's one thing that caught me by surprise in this question. This person says, I'm new to people management and I struggle when it comes to giving regular praise. And I'm like, okay, that's interesting because giving critical feedback and performance reviews, that's hard for a lot of people. But giving praise usually comes a little more naturally. So that tells me that you're kind of hypersensitive. So here's a tip for using language that doesn't feel like you're talking down to someone and giving praise, but instead expresses the way you feel. And that is the language of gratitude. Instead of judgment, you can express gratitude. So you can say things like, wow, I really liked the way you wrote that

code. Thank you. Thank you for lifting our code base. Or wow, that customer really appreciated the feature you built or the bug you fixed. On behalf of that customer, I just want to say thank you. Thank you very much. Let that be your praise at first, instead of just like, you are our number two out of ten developer praise receive praise you know just say thank you and i think people really they'll love that yeah it's like a like a handshake instead of a head pat you did such a good job on your art project is that that's the thing i say to my kids which is different than i also say thank you to my kids i guess i'm not only patronizing to them just sometimes but it is different than than thank you so much for helping with this

Yeah. And look at what it did. Thank you so much. I'm not going to fire you today. Yeah. And your reward is you get this next problem. Sweet. 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 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, there's a really good idea. Someone could just type, build me a customer admin panel that manages accounts from postgres and they 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 all right should i read our next question go for it this is from a listener named leon that was my grandpa's name maybe this is my grandpa hello dnj quick one from your biggest fan this week i don't know why okay i'll just read that my brain is stuck on this like it says a specific date but i don't want to read the date because then it tells people when we pick this question but i don't care so i'm gonna read it go for it this week tuesday the 6th of january 2026 i was promoted to tech lead of our team in my new role i have done no work well cries

i've spent all my time assisting team members unblocking qa dealing with ad hoc requests from product and stakeholders i asked the previous tech lead is this what they did they did and they said they spent their personal time to complete stories assigned to them is this really what a tech lead does help it's so interesting to me that you said i have done no work and then you proceed to list a bunch of work ah how do you think that stuff happened before you did it somebody did it assisting team members is work it's just not the work you want to do yeah exactly yeah i've done no work that i enjoy which appears to be building stuff myself yeah and i'm gonna say that there are some tech leads who don't do any personal individual contributor

code contributions i would say that's probably less common but there's a spectrum and i think most tech leads probably still do a bit of it it makes sense to me that as a new tech lead you are not doing any of it because you are picking up a bunch of new stuff you weren't doing before and you're probably not as good as it at it as you will be in the future so it's probably taking more of your time you probably don't have a good sense for what proactive things do i need to do to make sure this work goes smoothly instead of just what fires do i need to go fight right now and i think what will probably happen is as you get better at this you will be able to have some more time that's discretionary and maybe you choose to spend that writing code because that

still feels like the right thing to do it could be that you decide to do other stuff too instead but i think the fact that you're a new tech lead in this role it does make sense that you're just running back and forth yeah this is this is the worst it's going to be and i say worst because it's just the work you don't want to do yeah but i also should insert here jameson on behalf of everyone who has been a tech lead and everyone who is a tech lead we salute you and the short answer is yes this is what a tech lead does yeah do you have a a snappy definition for a tech lead roles are so vague and fuzzy and company dependent sits on the throne of skulls of the previous tech leads is that the main yeah are you the tech lead because you defeated the

previous tech lead in physical combat nice now you have some kind of totem from them you have like their ear on a necklace around your neck or something anytime someone gives you crap or disagrees with the decision you hold the ear up to your you say what's that oh i heard from the previous tech lead that they think your idea is bad and then you frighten people into submission whisper it soothingly into it yeah yeah develop an aura of insanity i think that will help you get more individual productivity no one will come to you for help again yeah assisting team members unblocking qa dealing with i think your job is to make the team productive whatever that means for the business they should get the right stuff done faster than they would have without you

and you should take some time to be proactive i mentioned this briefly but i think it can be easy to look at what is happening right now and what do i need to do in order to make what is happening right now go more smoothly this person is blocked this person misunderstood these requirements this part of the product is underspecified this qa ticket doesn't have the right description etc but it's easy to get two heads down in that and not look at what can i do now to make the next couple of weeks more productive that's a trap that i can fall into sometimes yes it is and you will you know i think sometimes people see this softer side of the job and they're like oh this is terrible it's not writing code it's not fun and i'm super slow at it and it just takes all my time

but don't forget there was a time in your professional life when you were also super slow at writing code and doing all the technical tasks that you love to do and feel faster at and so you can get faster and better at these things with time maybe implicit in this question is just a standard issue in tech, which is if you're good at your job, you often get pushed into more responsibility and more responsibility is often not the same kind of stuff you were good at earlier. So if you just despise this kind of work, that would be useful to discover. And then you need to figure out, well, how do I, how do I step out of this tech lead role? But I think a lot of the stuff associated with a tech lead is also associated with very senior individual contributors

it's just maybe more tightly scoped to this specific team as a tech lead and as a i don't know a principal engineer at a large company you're going to be doing a lot of the same kind of stuff just at a bigger scale and so maybe even less writing code time than a tech lead so this is a useful time to examine your career and what kind of things you like to do versus what is just unfamiliar and you don't feel comfortable with or good good at yet and maybe you'll discover hey i do really like this stuff yeah maybe i want to go into management or i hate it and i want to step back into just purely writing code or i like this but i want to stay as an ic and i want to figure out how i can scale that impact without having people report to me yes i think that's a really

good perspective and also you can learn to enjoy the fruit of your work by looking at what the team produced under your direction and feel great about the overall things that got done, even if it wasn't your hands on the keyboard writing the code at the same time. Yeah. I think that's a really cool thing because the fact of the matter is, while orchestrating a team of engineers, the overall team output will be generally, unless things are going really bad and maybe you're a terrible tech lead, but the team's output will generally be a lot better than what you could have produced alone. And you can take satisfaction in that and not just, hey, I spent time looking at code today and I like it. And I tend to equate that idea to jigsaw puzzles. It's like, do you

come to work to solve jigsaw puzzles? Or do you come to work to produce results that the business or the team or the organization needs to produce? And I think a lot of engineers actually come to work to solve puzzles. They like puzzles. They like fitting the pieces together. They like finding solutions to problems they don't really care that much about the business but as you move into a more of a leadership role the results of the business and team are actually the thing that you need to learn to derive enjoyment from not just the the process of solving yeah well have we answered the question probably not this is going to be a hard one and it might just take time to learn there is one other thing i could add though for leon which is learning how to allocate

your time and assign tasks is a really important project or an important skill for a tech lead for example we've got a tech lead right now on our team who has over the last year been learning how to delegate and people say delegate like it's some kind of like silver bullet solution like oh you're overworked i know what to do delegate but that's kind of like saying oh you don't know how to create a software i know what to do just code it you know it's like yeah i got to learn how to do that. And delegation also takes practice and learning, but learning how to say, all right, this part of my job is not a high leverage part of the job. I am going to assign it to a team member to contribute to this or a rotating group of team members. So they do this

part, maybe bug triage. Maybe it's putting story points on tickets. Maybe it's a weekly kind of like ticket grooming cleanup session, you know, figure out other ways for people to do that in your place. And maybe you take turns doing it as well. This will have a lot of wins for you. First, it'll give you more time to do some of the jobs you love, which, by the way, as a tech lead, I think you do need to stay close to the code and the technology or else you will become an ineffective tech lead over enough time. But also, it'll help your team members level up and contribute in new ways that they haven't been able to contribute to. And so a tech lead on my team has been doing this, and there are now two little mini tech leads on our team that we can assign important work to do the technical design, to create the tickets. and it's great because now we have coverage when someone is out sick or on vacation

and they like it. Like, I think they look at that and go, oh, this has been really cool for me. Like, I really own this feature now because I did all the design for it. Every time I talk about delegation, I feel like a fraud because I should probably get better at that.

It's hard to get good at delegation. Yeah. It's not easy. Yeah. It's just fun to do stuff. I know. The problem. That's the problem.

Well, now we've answered it. Surely. Surely. There could be nothing more to say about this. Yep. I expect no more confusion about tech leads just in the industry going forward because of this. Fully resolved.

I refer you to our previous comments. All right. What can people do if they want their own questions answered, Dave? Go over to softskills.audio and click the ask a question button where you can fill out our little form. And we really want to say how much we love and appreciate everyone who has done that. And I'm not saying that to put myself on a higher level.

I'm just saying it because I'm truly grateful to you. Just like our manager. I am just a little more grateful than Dave, however much grateful he is. Slightly higher level than me, you would say? Yes. Yeah, I would say so. Very humbly, I would. Yes, you would.

All right. Thank you for listening. We'll catch you next week.