Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 499: Should I quit my solo dev job with a sports team and senile seniors

Episode Date: February 9, 2026

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I’m a new listener to the podcast and work as the sole developer for a sports team, which is the only company I’ve worked for sin...ce graduating from university 8 years ago. I listened to episode 493 while clenching my teeth as you told a listener to absolutely not take the job with the European football club as a solo developer. Yikes! While I feel I have continued to grow my skillset in my role, I’m now feeling vulnerable about having no professional experience working alongside other developers or on large-scale applications. I feel very conflicted about leaving my current company. I have a respectable developer salary for the (non-American) low cost of living area I’m in, have a great manager, and have built up a ton of good will and trust within the organization. I get all the freedom I could ask for to make design decisions, implement devops practices, try out new technologies, and make mistakes. I also find the work interesting and there’s always something else to do! I’m a little scared of the horror stories that I hear about the real dev world and don’t want to take my current situation for granted. I would really appreciate guidance on what you think I should do. I have clear skill deficits in certain areas, but would have to give up a lot of liberties with a role change. Listener Brian asks, My job is mostly okay, but could be better because of the people in it. I joined a greenfield project a few years ago as my first software engineer role after transitioning from other data work. I grew up with the project and improved my engineering skills. A year ago we hired two new people. They had relevant experience and seemed to know what they were talking about in the interview, and had five & ten years of experience (aka, more than me). Onboarding the first few months was whatever, BUT they’ve never really improved afterwards. They turn in work that has clearly not been tested or does not meet the ticket’s requirements, barely review PRs and have never (!) left any comments/feedback, and despite their level (senior+). I don’t really trust them to work on anything more than the smallest, simplest stories. I’ve provided specific feedback in PRs and in performance reviews (sometimes very low-level and specific, and sometimes very high-level about guiding questions or principles), but nothing’s changed. I’ve felt frustrated, drained, and confused - why is it such a struggle to get someone with an entire decade of development experience to turn in a straightforward PR? One other teammate has admitted (privately) that some work was sloppily done, which is consoling but otherwise I’m not sure if it’s bothering others as much as it does me. They’re offshore so maybe it’s just a communication thing? The rest of the team has been on the project since the beginning so maybe we’re poorly set up for new devs. I have high standards for myself and others and I’ve always been the most junior developer on the team and am new to the senior role. Am I just being a perfectionistic jerk? Is that a bad match for (essentially) junior teammates? Should I just reset my expectations and accept that their level and years of experience don’t translate into high performance? Thanks for any insights.

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Starting point is 00:00:00 it takes more than sycophantically being told you're absolutely right to be a great engineer this is soft skills engineering episode 499 i'm your host dave smith i'm your host jameson dance soft skills engineering is a weekly advice podcast for software developers who are just so tired of being right you've known you were right your whole life and now every prompt reinforces that Even your mistakes are right. There's nothing wrong with you. No human is wrong. My system prompt tells me no human could ever be wrong.
Starting point is 00:00:40 Oh, what a weird time we live in. Dave, should I thank our patrons? You absolutely should. You are absolutely right to recommend it. Okay, I will do it. Now I'm just thinking, could this show be replaced by an LLM? I know you can make voice, you can voice clone people. Surely there's enough content in our backlog.
Starting point is 00:00:59 where you could feed it all the content and then say, do a show like this show. Yeah, definitely. It's coming for all of us. But while it hasn't hit yet, I'll thank our patrons. Thank you to these folks that contribute at the level where we shout them out every single week.
Starting point is 00:01:12 Thank you to Old Man Yells at Claude. Open parentheses, and then the actual literal single open parentheses. Parenthesis. Yes. Joel, Jamie Sundance. I like it. That's my dastardly alter ego.
Starting point is 00:01:29 Go ahead and run your own mail server. What are you, chicken? My actual name on LinkedIn is Yami Debugging in the Dark County, the mobile development ordinary first of his name. Quote, or one equals one drop table meow mix. Jacob Shandling. Larry Ellison. Oh, wow.
Starting point is 00:01:43 Oh, hi, Larry. I assume this is the first step in a furious legal assault upon the podcast, but joke's on you. You merely have Earth lawyers. Good point. We are space lawyers. We're ready for you in orbit. coffee is for closures
Starting point is 00:01:59 the missing semicolon Christy the world's okayest programmer soft skill at creativity contest earn 400 real talk 800 Frank advice 6,000 peso my mind
Starting point is 00:02:12 or 900 you're off better quitting your job oh I get it real yeah that's the that's a currency in Brazil hey eyes Franco's
Starting point is 00:02:22 isn't that or Franck's not Franck's that was a dictator no franks yeah peso euro okay got it all right real 400 real impressive an llm would have gotten that faster new year new you get project ops with fly true.io nick molyneux embedded engineers treat assembly the same way typescript engineers treat javascript javier gonzalez chewy ted timbrel oh boy okay this is a hard one three closing parentheses and then open paren followed close
Starting point is 00:02:56 paren and then the words by a single opening and then a single closing parenthesis wow stretching our ability to say things and then a new a different patron which is the single opening parenthesis character oh boy this is what they pay the big bucks for dan from drone deploy never is not just a crater on Mars flamingo emoji I like chicken I look liver me Alex Alex please
Starting point is 00:03:19 deliver Swiss Python okay well measure text span with beautiful is better than ugly explicit is better than implicit simple is better Kyle boss Kenzie Dodds Jenny
Starting point is 00:03:26 Kim the stochastic parrot Ira Chan Jonathan Kings and I beautiful functional user documentation I don't understand the patrons on this list that don't change their
Starting point is 00:03:34 name regularly what are you even doing oh a call out perfect Chuck Norris formerly will angel Ragnar Brayden Keynes John Grant Brittany Ellick
Starting point is 00:03:45 and close parenthesis and then a single closing parenthesis what a poetic way to end the list parenthesis has lost all meaning to me and I can't tell
Starting point is 00:03:54 which one is the singular and which one is the plural oh my god if you want to just infect my brain with insanity or have your name read out every single week
Starting point is 00:04:03 or both or both yeah click support us on Patreon do the thing we will do our thing and the world
Starting point is 00:04:12 will become more filled with whimsy which is incredible i feel like you're a little insensitive to people whose actual given name on their birth certificate is opening parenthesis yeah or larry ellison oh how they mocked him growing up though you're named after that famously litigious oracle guy haha yeah well this episode is sponsored by retool the best way to keep up with internal tour requests It's governed, secure, and no cleanup required.
Starting point is 00:04:44 Learn more at retool.com slash softskills. More about Retool later. Do you want to read our first question? Yes, I do. This comes from an anonymous listener who says, I'm a new listener to the podcast and work as the sole developer for a sports team, which is the only company I've worked for since graduating from university eight years ago. I listened to episode 493 while clenching my teeth
Starting point is 00:05:08 As you told a listener to absolutely not take the job with the European Football Club as a solo developer, yikes! While I feel I have continued to grow my skill set in my role, I'm now feeling vulnerable about having no professional experience working alongside other developers or on large-scale applications. I feel conflicted about leaving my current company. I have a respectable developer salary for the non-American low-cost-of-living area that I'm in. I have a great manager and have built up a ton of goodwill and trust within the organization. I get all the freedom I could ask for to make design decisions, implement DevOps practices, try out new technologies, and make mistakes. I also find the work interesting, and there's always something else to do.
Starting point is 00:05:53 I'm a little scared of the horror stories that I hear about the real dev world and don't want to take my current situation for granted. I would really appreciate guidance on what you think I should do. i have clear skill deficits in certain areas but would have to give up a lot of liberties with a role change listen we just say words no one's supposed to have their the words affect how they feel about their job you've i feel like this is we've we're reaping what we've sowed we said words and now someone is dissatisfied with their job and i don't know how i feel about that oh crap you would think that we get we would get paid for people uh changing jobs but somehow we've
Starting point is 00:06:34 not figured out how to tap into that yeah we've been hoisted on our own petard hmm well you did it jameson i'm gonna just hand all the responsibility to you you took someone who was perfectly happy at work i know and now they can't see the info hazard why did you do this do you have no care whatsoever much like the necronomicon we talked about Lovecraftian, Eldritch Horrors a few episodes back, and we all learned together. There's some knowledge that's bad for you, right? Yes, yes. Knowing that Jameson and Dave think that you shouldn't take the European football club job as a solo developer has ruined, has made your life worse.
Starting point is 00:07:18 It's like a meme that infects your mind and makes the other ideas in your head sad. yep we uh we need to provide you with some amnestics which are a type of drug that wipes out memories oh my about targeted memories and just blip out that little section where you listen to our show and then you'll be happy again we should sell someone amnestics to remove the last episode but then they forget they listen to it and they just re-listen to it and then they buy another round of amnestics and it just repeats forever infinite revenue stream oh yeah yeah it's like planned obsolescence where your phone mysteriously breaks every year except the book you read gets wiped out from your brain yep yeah and then make reading the book makes you want to
Starting point is 00:07:58 buy the medicine yeah this sounds like there's a joke on twitter from a while ago in my book i invented the torment nexus as a cautionary tale it's an author talking about their sci-fi book and then tech company says at long last we have created the torment nexus from the classic sci-fi novel. Don't create the torment nexus. I feel like we're in that phase right now. We're developing the cautionary tale, the joke, and then someone will make those real. Perfect. At long last, I can now optimize shareholder value with the amnestics. I was reading this question and I was thinking when the person said, I'm free to make mistakes. I just had this snarky remark pop into my head because this person's a solo developer with no peers to look over their shoulder.
Starting point is 00:08:40 and as soon as i read i'm free to make mistakes i thought and some of them you even know about because there's no one else to tell you you're doing it wrong and i think that's right at the heart of why we i prefer and i think it's better for developer growth to prefer to work with other developers yeah my reaction to reading this was i am just some moron saying words did you know anyone can just talk into a microphone and put it on the internet oh there's no well what about that process yeah what about that government certification we had to get before we could go live on the air on the so-called air only gives good advice certification yes that's right i was talking to my brother-in-law about the podcast a couple weeks ago and he said
Starting point is 00:09:26 so what what kind of qualifications do you have to help you and he meant it good-heartedly did Did you just laugh hysterically? Yeah, I did it. That's my qualification. I started doing it and I didn't stop. It didn't stop. And this is 499 episodes later, the police haven't stopped me.
Starting point is 00:09:47 Yeah, and the cops can't do nothing. I think my overwhelming reaction was, if you like your job and don't want to quit it, then don't quit your job. Oh. And my opinion about it matters less than your lived experience with it. the fact that you really like your manager is important. And I think it is likely if you quit
Starting point is 00:10:07 your job, you will grow a lot technically in your abilities. And some of that growth may come through pain. And it is also likely that you will end up in a place where you are less happy overall. And that is part of the growth is realizing things that made you happy at your previous job that you don't have now. But you also will learn a lot about working with other engineers and i don't know important skills but it is true i don't know i think dave it sounds like you're thinking your your career is going to be better off if you leave i think so so we've had this discussion before on the show where we say if you stay too long at any one job your marketability and skills will suffer generally i'm not saying every case and of course you can
Starting point is 00:10:50 find exceptions to this rule unless you work with dave or i yeah in that case stay forever all of our teammates actually better yes don't quit but besides that besides that yes the point i'm making is that on average most people their first job out of college is an amazing eye-opening learning experience and i think we've mentioned the monty hall problem in this scenario before where the chances that you chose the perfect job your first time are very low and the chances that you pick the perfect job your second try are one out of n minus one because you already tried one of them And so your chances improve a little bit. But more importantly, exposure to a diverse array of options in the way engineers work is one of the most valuable growth patterns that I've found for two reasons. Number one, you get to see new ways of doing things. And number two, you get to exercise that part of your brain muscle that learns new skills from scratch. And that's a muscle that can definitely atrophy and is the most important muscle. I mean, just look at the upheaval that the software development industry is going through right now with AI.
Starting point is 00:11:59 And if you are unwilling or unable to pick up on the new trends, it could be really hard for you. That's been true for the last 25 years that I've been doing this. And so I recommend that everybody consider, strongly consider changing jobs after your first job after a few years. And eight years at this company is starting to be right on the edge of too long, maybe already into the too long land. Well, I feel like I'm being ruinously empathic. You're the tough love dad, and I'm the, I don't know, the cookies and hugs mom. Like, oh, just do whatever makes you happy, dear listener. And Dave, you're like, no, you got to grow.
Starting point is 00:12:40 Well, if you refuse to hear, man, that's so crazy. One of life's great paradoxes. If you refuse to grow, you will eventually be unable to be comfortable and happy. Because eventually you'll find yourself unable to get a job. and this job will eventually end. It'll either end because you get fired or laid off or the company will go in a new direction or something, or something will happen.
Starting point is 00:13:00 And if you're unwilling to adapt and grow and learn new things, you will be less marketable and it means your next job could be materially worse. Staying comfortable too long will, you're kind of in a local maximum. Yes, you're on the top of a hill. Shake out of it. And you're gonna roll off it down into the valley.
Starting point is 00:13:17 Yeah. I think that's the case anyway. And the sooner you can become comfortable with change, learning, and growth, and find joy and happiness in that, the better off you'll be. But if you find joy in repetition, joy in the familiar, and just comfort, then you will have none of it. Well, have we answered the question? I mean, I think so. But I do also, can I go against myself for just a moment? Absolutely. I hate the thought that someone has a lovely job that they enjoy. And now they just feel anxious about it because two idiots with a podcast said something
Starting point is 00:13:53 about it. And so the fact of the matter is your circumstances are probably very extenuating. Very extenuating is a dumb way to say it. See what I mean? Just a couple of idiots here. What I'm trying to say is there are many factors in your life that we are unaware of that makes us unqualified to comment on your specific case, which is why when we give advice, our number one job is to make you laugh. And then when we fail to achieve that, our second job is to try to give as broadly applicable advice as possible, given the most common sets of circumstances that the advice can apply to. And that's what I'm speaking to here. So it is quite possible that your job is wonderful and you should spend the rest of your professional life working at
Starting point is 00:14:36 that company for this sports club. And I would be thrilled for you if that is the way that you ended up choosing to spend your life. Yeah. So there you go. Both sides of my mouth. See? Okay. Big idiot. Now you're speaking with your whole mouth. That's right. That's the problem. If you don't speak out of both sides of your mouth, you're only speaking out of one side and then your face looks, you kind of look like you had a stroke. Exactly. And you sound kind of weird. That's bad. A little muffled. I want to be as clear as possible, so I speak out of both sides. Exactly. 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.
Starting point is 00:15:14 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
Starting point is 00:15:43 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'd get a real production ready app with proper permissions built in. Your teams get unblocked
Starting point is 00:15:55 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 slash soft skills and see how other engineering teams are democratizing app building without creating
Starting point is 00:16:19 chaos. Because we could all use a better way to handle internal tools. Sometimes you just need to retool. Go to retool.com slash soft skills. All right, Dave, should I read our next question? Yes, please go for it. All right, this is from a listener named Brian who says, My job is mostly okay, but could be better because of the people in it.
Starting point is 00:16:37 I joined a Greenfield project a few years ago as my first software engineer role after transitioning from other data work. I grew up with the project and improved my engineering skills. A year ago, we hired two new people. They had relevant experience and seemed to know what they were talking about in the interview and had five and 10 years of experience, aka more than me. Onboarding the first few months was whatever, but they've never really improved afterwards. I love, it's got to interject.
Starting point is 00:17:02 i love the what whatever was whatever yeah this tells me how old this person is yeah answer not as old as me they turn in work that has clearly not been tested or does not meet the tickets requirements barely review prs and have never with an exclamation mark left any comments or feedback despite their level which is senior plus i don't really trust them to work on anything more than the smallest simplest stories i've provided specific feedback in prs and in performance reviews sometimes very low level and specific and sometimes very high level about guiding questions or principles but nothing's changed i've felt frustrated drained and confused why is it such a struggle to get someone with an entire decade of development experience to turn in a straightforward
Starting point is 00:17:45 pr one other teammate has admitted privately that some work was sloppily done which is consoling but otherwise i'm not sure if it is bothering others as much as it bothers me they're offshore so maybe it's just a communication thing the rest of the team has been on the project since the beginning so maybe we're poorly set up for new devs i have high standards for myself and others and i've always been the most junior developer on the team and i'm new to the senior role am i just being a perfectionist jerk is that a bad match for essentially junior teammates should i just reset my expectations and accept their level and years of experience don't translate into high performance thanks for any insights this is very interesting this sounds like one of those
Starting point is 00:18:25 harsh life lessons where years don't equal what's the right word ownership accountability yeah attention to detail all the things that you thought come naturally as you age and gain experience do not yeah yeah you can have six months of experience 20 times in a row exactly exactly six months of experience 20 times in a row oh that is such a good visual jameson i love it i feel like i've often seen so there's definitely a there's a lot to learn when you're onboarding to a new job and i've absolutely seen people be less productive early on than they are later but i do feel like you can tell pretty quickly if they have great taste or if they're very careful or if they think deeply like you can separate from their knowledge of the system
Starting point is 00:19:19 you're working on you you i mean you just know more about them than you do in the interview because you're actually working with them and how they respond to feedback and what they do and challenged and so i think there is a tendency to look at onboarding and say well they're just onboarding so we can't really tell how they're going to turn out but i think you can tell what trajectory they are on pretty quickly and then it's not always true and sometimes you get some wires crossed or whatever but if someone is not a great communicator and struggles to check their work and it has to be told things multiple times in onboarding that's probably not going to be solved by learning the code base better you know i guess i'm just pushing back on that specific part
Starting point is 00:20:00 onboarding the first few months was whatever i think it's still a signal yeah yeah the first few months is when you expect to be impressed like oh wow great idea yeah they're bringing in new energy new new experience they bring in new processes and they're experts on a thing that you didn't even know you could be an expert at or yeah that's a good way to put it onboarding is when they should impress you with the quality of their skills not the breadth of their knowledge about the system that they are now trying to learn yeah exactly exactly and eagerness typically you know yeah yeah you can tell they're pumped to be there now we're faking it really well yeah Exactly. I wonder if this person was part of the interview process and it was like,
Starting point is 00:20:43 oh yeah, they were super low energy during the interview, unpassionate, unexcited. They gave minimalistic answers and we hired them. And now they aren't proactive. They don't give good feedback. They're low energy. They don't do very much. I wonder if this was already visible in the interview. Well, I wonder if it was the opposite too, if they were part of the interview and they seem to know what they were talking about in the interview. That's what Brian says in the question. So maybe they were just kind of impressed by interviewing an engineer that has more years of experience than they do. And you've learned a valuable lesson, which is that it's very
Starting point is 00:21:19 easy to be wrong about an interview. Yes, it's true. Now, I want to latch on. There was one word in this question that I think gives away the root cause of what's happening here, or at least the category of problems that's happening here. I'm curious, Jameson, if you latched on to the same word that I did. Should we say it on the count of three? Yes. One, two, three. Offshore. Yes. Yes. That was the word. So I'm going to make some inferences here, but offshore often means contracting through an agency and the contract mentality, it is very, very, very hard to find an agency full of contracting developers who take the kind of ownership and excitement to the level that this person seems to want.
Starting point is 00:22:05 I don't, I'm going to, if it's truly an agency with contract engineers, their only job is to get through tickets, get the tickets done, get in, get paid, get out. And I have had very minimal success with offshore agencies in finding people who bring the level of ownership. It's kind of like renting a car versus owning a car.
Starting point is 00:22:23 You know, it's just a different mentality. That I think is probably what's going on here. Yeah, so you're saying it's not necessarily a communication thing because they're in a different country or from a different culture it's literally their incentives are very different than if they were full-time employees of the company and that could be part of it i think i agree with that what do you what do you do about it though so if you find yourself in a situation where you feel like you have really high standards they're not being met and especially
Starting point is 00:22:50 by people you think should be pushing you i don't know they might make more money than brian they might maybe not depending on where the kind of how the geography works but i could see that being somewhat disenchanting and extra frustrating beyond just the normal frustration of working with someone who you feel like is not great at their job. Yeah, it's true. This can be bad in both directions. Are you being a perfectionist jerk? No, I don't think you're being a perfectionist jerk to say, hey, you should be doing a better job than you are. And when the better job that you expect them to do is like, give me comments on my pull requests and actually ship code that that meets the specifications in the tickets like yeah that's basically table stakes yeah if they
Starting point is 00:23:31 are contractors i guess no matter what their business relationship with you is like if they're offshore or contractors they might even report to a different manager i've seen that where there's sort of parallel structures and they kind of smoosh together at some higher level you might not know maybe they're not even supposed to give pr reviews pr reviews pull request review i was trying to make sure i wasn't saying atm machines wait what does the r stand for again in pr there's sometimes legal requirements to keep a certain distance between contractors and the rest of the team or maybe they just have different things that they're judged by in performance reviews oh wait no it says performance reviews in the question yeah this makes me think they
Starting point is 00:24:13 are full-time employees because i don't think you give performance reviews to contractors oh that's a good point but how would they have had performance reviews after just a few months i don't know no it says a year ago ah okay it's been a year so okay and then yeah maybe we are just okay so that's going to pivot my thoughts from contracting to maybe there's a cultural barrier here yeah even if they're i mean i've worked with people like this who were not offshore and it was hard it was demotivating and the most excited i've and happiest i've ever been at work was working with people that I felt like were the opposite of this, that pushed me
Starting point is 00:24:50 and that were challenging me to be better and showing me I could expect more and expecting more of me and excited to do the work and excited to improve things. And yeah, it sucks to, it feels like it saps the energy out of you to kind of have to guard the code base against other people messing it up.
Starting point is 00:25:11 And then you have to guard your own energy because I'm sure most software engineers do not want to take on the job of like making sure someone else doesn't ruin stuff for everybody. Yeah, it can be so painful. And I'll tell you what, when I was a little bit younger, well, let's see, 14 years ago, I worked on a team with almost exactly this scenario. It was a developer, offshore developer as well through an agency in my case. And just, it was actually even worse than this because the skills were so much lower than we needed to do that it was like every feature we had them build turned into like six new bugs and every bug we had them fixed turned into at least
Starting point is 00:25:50 one new bug and it was just over and over and over and every code review it was just like oh man you've done this the wrong way it's like i still remember i have like this memory burned in my brain where we were it was a web application it was rendering an html template to the screen and if the user had inputted a double quote as part of their text in the thing they inputted that it failed to escape it correctly. And it was just like the classic escape problem. And then it got into the database wrong and all this stuff. And I remember I,
Starting point is 00:26:16 because the time zones were so, you know, like out of sync, I submitted the bug. I woke up in the morning to a code review with the fix. And the fix was they fixed that bug to where double quotes worked, but they broke it by replacing the attributes with single quotes. So now single quotes don't work.
Starting point is 00:26:32 And I'm like, ah, Single quotes are even more common in user input. You've just swapped out one bug for an even worse bug. And I'm like, oh, so painful. And I remember at the time, I got so frustrated with it, I finally tried to convince my boss to say, look, we need to let this person go. And my boss just would listen but not do anything, just could not get it, couldn't figure out why not. At this point in my career, I was probably way worse at articulating actual situations than I am now, but just could not make it happen.
Starting point is 00:27:02 one of my older co-workers was also getting really frustrated. And he went to our boss and he said to him, listen, I would rather have you pay this developer and have them not commit any code than to have them on the team because having them write code actually makes everyone else slower. I was like, whoa, that was super harsh. But the next day that developer was like, go and I was like oh yeah it sounds like a heartless story but let's not forget I was the coward who couldn't actually get the firing done so I'm not the heartless one in this story I'm the good guy yeah also let's remember this person was in the wrong job yeah you know it's like they just were they were doing a job that and no matter how much coaching we gave how much correction we
Starting point is 00:27:45 offered they just weren't getting better and it's like yeah they needed they just weren't quite skilled enough to do this job and there was plenty of other jobs where they could be successful and I still remember that to this day like it's burned in my memory I even remember the person's name still 14 years later so is the moral of this story go try to get them fired?
Starting point is 00:28:05 I think the moral of the story is that if it has gotten to the point where you think these team members cannot do this job sufficiently well and you would like to have them not be on the team it's not as straightforward as sometimes you might think
Starting point is 00:28:18 to just go tell your boss hey they're not very good yeah you might have to find just the right magic incantation i have a couple more thoughts to articulate one thought is it has never been easier to turn in an enormous volume of work that hasn't been tested and doesn't meet the tickets requirements with llms you know what they're good at turning in untested work and kind of not drifting away from the tickets requirements I feel like the value provided here is pretty commoditized. And if you are or begin to use LLMs to enhance your software development, boy, is it dangerous in the hands of somebody who is not careful or conscientious or very good at steering agents to be careful and conscientious.
Starting point is 00:29:09 And I suspect they are not based on this description. The other thought I have is I haven't seen anything here about, how do I put it? It could be an issue with them just caring more and not the lack of skill. It's possible, not likely, I think, in this situation, but it is possible that they are able to test carefully. They just don't. And they are able to review their work and they have the brainpower and the capacity to do it. They're just not doing it. and an even more remote possibility is and they will change if someone coaches them the right way
Starting point is 00:29:46 i think your path forward is to tell a shared manager your your boss your boss manages them as well or i mean you should tell your boss about it if this is making your work life worse you should let someone know because something should happen they should be coached about it maybe a change needs to be made, which is, I guess, a very soulless way of saying they need to be fired, which feels more honest to say that. So I should probably not say these vague euphemisms anymore. Or it's possible that they are doing important things that you don't see, or that the company is just willing to put up with the trade-off. They do enough work that seems valuable to the company that your frustration and annoyance is not worth stirring things up.
Starting point is 00:30:32 and it's also possible that the company is not aware how frustrated or annoyed you are it sounds like you have talked privately with one teammate about some of the sloppiness here this is the kind of thing that leads people to quit and if you're awesome at your job which clearly you are because you listen to the show that could be really bad for them it's possible they would not make that choice deliberately so i do think the best thing to do here is talk to your manager about it, express your concerns as here's the impact I think this is having on my work and the speed of the team. Can we talk about what we can do to improve it? I think it's also fair to say like, Hey, I'm frustrated by this and it's affecting me at work. Can you help me with that
Starting point is 00:31:11 as well? But I think sometimes your frustrations don't make it back to a level where people who can decide things notice. And that's the least that you could do. Does that make sense? Yeah, totally well we answered the question i think so it's a tough situation to have an underperforming team member especially if your manager isn't really doing anything about it it doesn't seem to care really really challenging i have rarely seen this situation result in engineers turning it around yeah i feel like the most the most common thing is it just drags along yeah and nothing happens and then the next most common thing is better people quit and then maybe the after that like the next most common thing is they get fired but i that's pretty rare maybe this
Starting point is 00:31:58 tells you a lot about my coaching abilities but yeah uh i think it's hard to coach just care about doing a really good job just do a really good job that's hard coaching to deliver which is a bummer of a way to end this question yep such as life so it goes yep such as life and we like sometimes it's a bummer that's what you come here for that's right to be bummed out and walk away frowning or to know hey i'm not in that situation thank goodness and if you are in that situation you're not the only one so look everyone's happy okay all right you cheered me up i got a smile on my face dave what can people do if they want their own questions answered go to soft skills the audio and click the ask a question button where you can find our handy dandy little form
Starting point is 00:32:41 and fill that out. You can give us as much or as little information as you want and we want to thank you to everyone who has filled out those questions.
Starting point is 00:32:48 Every week they pour in. It's like pouring warm chicken soup directly into my soul when my soul has a little cough and it just feels so good. Now your soul's
Starting point is 00:32:58 sloshing around. Mm-hmm. And warm. All right. Thank you for listening. We will catch you next week.

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