Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 506: I hate my job with AI and my team-mate thinks I suck

Episode Date: March 30, 2026

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Hi Djavison, I’ve heard y’all say something along the lines of “this is the most exciting time to build software” in a few recent episodes. I’m glad that has been your experience and seems to be the experience of many others. But for me as someone 5 years into the career who is, thankfully, employed—I can’t help mourning a job that no longer exists. Obviously, there are still lots of us with the job title “software engineer” that create software. But, what I originally fell in love with doesn’t really seem like a thing you can get paid to do anymore. I now spend most of my development time reviewing code and making sure things work. Which feels way less rewarding and way more soul-sucking. Maybe I’m just nostalgic for being a more junior developer, but it’s obvious that our jobs have changed forever and will continue to evolve. So, my question is: How can I get excited and feel passionate about this new way of doing things? I am a senior team lead with 10+ years of experience. This is the first time I’ve had a team mate that clearly disrespects me. I have a Middle+ teammate who is technically perfectionistic and openly says I’m doing a poor job and that basically he doesn’t see me as an authority. He says I am not as devoted to technical excellency and improving the project as he is, and that I ignore his opinions, which is his term for not having the same opinion about tech stuff as he does. He doesn’t see the big picture and thinks he’s the only person on the team trying to make the code better. But the worst part is he never admits he’s wrong. I had to scramble to fix a bug he created when we caught it right before release, and he accused ME of introducing it! My manager know what’s going on, but I feel terrible about it. I have many different projects and responsibilities. I can not be as devoted to the codebase as he wants. Plus, I am not the architect and nor should I be. I see that it demotivates him (like the person in the 499th episode), only in this question I am the senior. I know my weaknesses and I am working on them, I don’t think I can address his feedback. More than that, I’ve always tried to maintain a good relationship with him and always gave him the freedom to work on tech stuff and develop his skills. But what to do when your child has grown and is now unthankful? 😂 Thanks for your advice!

it takes more than juggling side projects to be a great software engineer this is episode 506 of the soft skills engineering podcast where i am your host jameson dance i'm your host dave smith soft skills engineering is your weekly advice show about all the non-technical things that go into the technical field of software development like how do you multitask for fun not just for work yeah yeah how do you have too much on your plate not just at work yes yes is 506 an http status code variant also negotiates oh my gosh well that's not one i've i've encountered every day don't know what that means dave do you want to thank our patrons just what i thought yeah 506 is such a low number that i thought i would have known it yeah but yeah this one is rocking

me content negotiation related errors it feels like you can really tell that uh http was built a while ago and it has its own implementation in practice because so many of the status codes seem like some of them seem uh like they they i'm sure it's an 80 20 thing where most of the requests on the internet get like five different status codes yeah oh yeah all these never used ones for parts of the spec that are just collecting dust yeah and some of them are uh it seems like some of them were they would anticipate this would be a problem but then it turned out not to be needed yeah it turns out we just don't have that many teapots on the internet so right not as many as expected okay yeah i will read our page patreons now here we go uh this week we want to say a big

thank you to those that are contributing at the level where they get a weekly shout out and they are everyone according to interpol comma no really brian wolford is still in germany angel wood seth angel i thought this was a funny name but you didn't laugh now i feel self-conscious jamie sundance go ahead run your own email server what are you chicken bach bach my actual name on linkedin is yummy debugging in the dark cammy canny the mobile development ordinary first of his name jacob chandling admits that shame is a powerful motivator and so has changed his patreon name again bada bing bada boom who's sucking on that broom it's mr bezos the missing semicolon christy the world's okayest programmer will angelica cath or be okay with this unsolicited

third-party shout out i wonder and then the greatest will angel of all time consisting of slashes pipes and underscores and the letter g and the number three yep nick molyneux embedded engineers treat assembly the same way typescript engineers treat javascript javier gonzalez chewy Ted Timbrell, I like chicken and I, I, yike, yiver, but the difference between an uppercase I and a lowercase I, can you de-yiver? A single, a single literal open paren. William Angelson, Dan from DroneDeploy, never is not discredited on Mars. Let me go emoji. I like chicken, I like liver, meow, mix, mix, mix.

Please deliver the original Swiss Python Summit on the second, sorry, on the 22nd and 23rd of October, 2026. Oh, man. I didn't look at my calendar. Kyle Boss, Kent, C. Dobbs, this podcast was recorded at 1969, 1231, 2359, 59Z, or earlier. According to my records, that time does not exist. Jenny Kim, the Stochastic Parrot, how many angels can Will Angel will if Will Angel can Will Angels? That's a great one. Ira Chan, Jonathan Kings, and I, beautiful functional user documentation, should angel.

Should angel, would angel, will angel. It feels like you're trapped in elementary school and you ask, like, can I go to the bathroom? And your teacher says, I don't know, can you? And you say, will I? Should I go to the bathroom? Please, I? Mayn't I?

Mayn't I? Vote now at vote.williamangel.net. It's a thing. It's live. vote.williamangel.net oh my gosh oh it's actually a pretty nice UI too

it really gets to the point looks good you can stuff the ballot just so you know yes you can and I did I gotta balance out the ballot a little bit here

okay when this goes you gotta make the fraud look believable exactly I can't stuff it uh oh oh I

oh I got I just got an error message Did you get the same error message? Yeah, I did. It said, whoa there, you vote like a bot. Take a breather and try again in a minute. But not before I was able to stuff the ballot with a few extra votes.

All right. Thanks, Will Angel. All right. Dave's rap name would be DaWordsmith. Nice. Brayden Cain's John Grant, Brittany Ellick. Closed parenthesis followed by a literal closing parenthesis character. All right, Jameson.

Let's read our first question. No more lollygagging around. I will, Angel. uh this is from jake the shaken hi the javison i've heard y'all say is that our celebrity couple name our ship it doesn't doesn't yeah it doesn't roll off the tongue quite as much but uh i've heard y'all say something along the lines of this is the most exciting time to build software in a few recent episodes i'm glad that has been your experience it seems to be the experience of many others uh the question doesn't end here so i am assuming there's a big but but oh there it is

for me as someone five years into the career who thankfully is employed i can't help mourning the job that no longer exists obviously there are still lots of us with the job title software engineers that create software but what i originally fell in love with doesn't really seem like a thing you can get paid to do anymore i now spend most of my development time reviewing code and making sure things work which feels way less rewarding and way more soul-sucking maybe i'm just nostalgic for being a more junior developer but it's obvious that our jobs have change forever and will continue to evolve so my question is how can i get excited and feel passionate about this new way of doing things oh yeah yeah you you and millions of other people i

think have the same question i have the same question despite i think being on the more optimistic and excited side of ai software users yeah i okay let's i'm kind of thinking like how how could we understand this new world there's actually been there have been uh what's the category of story jameson where it's like a it's like a tall tale with a moral fable a fable okay yes fables have been written about this exact kind of thing where somebody develops a skill and then someone else comes along and develops technology to make that skill or be able to perform that skill 100 times faster and people feel bad about it and they write fables about it what's the one with the guy who swings the john henry yeah there you go the john henry fable

like john henry is famous because he's really good at swinging axes and he could cut down trees faster than anybody else and then someone came along with the steam powered axe thing it was an axe that and steam came out of it it was axe powered steam yeah yeah got it okay it was like a train or something and the train would come through and chop tree i don't remember yeah anyway i guess the reason this story is even around or known is because of this exact sentiment that the thing i was really good at and really enjoyed is now being commoditized okay I

just went to Wikipedia because I also could not remember the details but he was the steel driving man because he was hammering in oh that's right it

wasn't I know yeah steel drills into a rock to make holes for explosives to blast the rock for constructing a railroad tunnel I thought I thought he was building the

railroad with like hammering the ties in but it wasn't yeah I thought he was laying track is it same I mean I'm sure there's been a million different versions but

that's Paul Bunyan oh I always confuse John Henry and Paul bunion but are they kind of the same story there's probably a version of paul bunion with like a tree cutting machine too or something i don't know oh maybe not maybe paul bunion is just just a lumberjack so there was a drilling machine a steam-powered rock drill i think he dies in the legend according to wikipedia oh crap he drives steel so hard that his heart explodes oh my gosh well yeah i guess I don't know if there's a lesson there, but I guess the story here, and I think Jameson and

I have an advantage here because we've kind of molded our careers in recent years to be a little bit more focused on the results in the business and a little bit less focused on the craft of writing code. And that's just because we went into management, into leadership roles. And so what that means is that we've we deliberately chose to pivot our focus to be less about writing code every day and more about the results of that code and that's the story here like it's the same story of of john henry where he actually didn't care about laying track faster or i guess he kind of did but if he really cared about it he would have figured out how to run the steam locomotive you know like but instead he was insisting on swinging that those tools himself and and i don't know if

i'm if i'm articulating this clearly no i i think i get you i think you're saying that beloved folk hero john henry is a fool and he deserved what he got if i if i got this wasn't exactly what i was shooting for but no i i i think the yeah the point you're making makes sense that the downsides of not being able to directly be hands-on in the code aren't as down if you weren't already directly hands-on in the code as much anyways because you were doing managing is that part of what you're saying i think so um it's kind of like i'd already focused my attention on it and so i'm all i'm just like i'm nothing but happy because i mean it's a little part of me that's sad because uh i do love just solving a good coding problem there's something so fun and satisfying about that

and all of the challenge has been taken out of that for the most part i'm also really happy though because i i have over the years i've grown increasingly frustrated with how long it takes to do simple things yeah like oh let's just build a login form it's like that should be like a one minute job but it's always more because it's like oh you i typed the code wrong oh syntax error all right oh i use this library but it wasn't quite right and i have no it's gonna take forever to replace it this is all this dumb stuff that just takes forever in the coding process yeah and that stuff is all gone for these trivial tasks or tasks that should be trivial that took hours and now take minutes and part of me just loves that it is a change though i mean i agree it's

it's it's so rewarding to see stuff happen faster and when i i already wasn't writing all the code by hand so now if i am working with a team of engineers and also a bunch of ai i'm still not writing all the code by hand but a bunch more is happening it's not as different for you and i as it is if you're kind of hands-on ic where you used to be writing all of it yourself it didn't i mean that changed a little bit the more senior you got as an ic you spend your time in meetings and designing more and so i wonder if if i don't know the distinguished principal mega engineers feel this differently because i think it was less likely that they would just go into a cave and type code by themselves for a long time but certainly kind of junior mid senior level where

where a lot of your time is hands-on keyboard. That's way different. Yeah, for sure. How do I get excited and feel passionate about it? I have discovered that I used to enjoy code review when it took up the amount of time it used to take, and I am struggling with it now. You and everybody else.

It's true. I'm having the same problem of dealing with the next bottleneck. I'm excited to figure out what we do to solve this because it doesn't feel like just keep going is a great solution. but i have found new joy in it's easier to do meta work and engineers always love doing meta work it's like it nerd snipes you it's in the past it used to be hard to justify to tweak some corner of the build system because it was wrong or you know add these special linting rules but if that stuff steers ai now then i think it's easier to justify you'll get better outputs you'll spend

less time reviewing it and finding manual mistakes and it's kind of all the stuff we've said in the past about if you have processes and standards the more you can encode them into deterministic rules the easier they are to enforce you don't if if you don't want a junior developer writing code that way make a rule that's i mean this is one class of ways to do this meta work but that's a way you can still be producing technical output it just is higher leverage now yeah for sure it's still not i mean writing a lint rule is not as fun as like building a product from scratch yourself though too so yeah for sure I have noticed that and this kind of goes I don't want to hopefully I'm not kicking a dead horse here or kicking a dead blue ox in the case of

the Paul Bunyan story yeah I do think that there are categories of engineers and it's pretty clear which category people are in based on what they enjoy and I think some people might straddle the categories but and they are people who enjoy writing code and that's category one category two is people who enjoy producing products for others to use. And yeah, I think you can take joy in both, but a lot of people I think go one way more than the other. And I think if you're in the people who enjoy writing code category, you are going to have a bad time in this new era because that's just been taken from you. Yeah. If you care a ton about craftsmanship and the kind of, I imagine someone sitting in a wood shop and kind of hand sanding a chair.

and if you need 30 000 chairs you don't do that you do that for fun or if you're some world famous designer but it's we've had this struggle of is software is it a science is it engineering is it is it art is it labor and it's kind of yes to all of them depending on where you are and what you're working on but i think a lot more it's going to be like manufacturing yeah a little bit less fun yeah but then you get to build the factories which is different fun yeah fun for different people yeah yeah i've noticed the same thing that people are really people who who value the code and the beauty and cleanliness and organization of the code itself are sad and the puzzle the puzzle solving aspect too yeah it's not it's not just a craft it's kind of like i'm

solving puzzles yeah and the people who want to do a thing are generally really pumped because they can do things faster and do more things yeah so what that ends up looking like is business people vibe coding slop and launching companies faster yeah and i think i think a lot of engineers resent that yeah i mean there is the trope of the cowboy coder and some of the motivations that go into that cowboy coding is you really want to deliver a thing as quickly as possible right now because somebody wants it or you feel great shipping stuff or whatever the incentives are and you can cowboy code so hard now you can have an army of cowboy coders so it's it's an exciting time to be a cowboy coder i guess i'll put it that way how can i get excited and feel passionate

about this new way of doing things i have still found plenty of puzzles to solve they're just not at the lines of code level i talked earlier and this is not an original thought by any means but how review is now a bottleneck that is an important puzzle to solve and some of the solutions could be technical in nature some of them might be process organization or whatever but there there's still plenty of puzzles to solve that can deliver value that require you to sit and think and do more than say what do we do to solve this robot and it's kind of like i mean developers have automated away jobs for a long time and then they go do other jobs and you can kind of say well maybe this part of what i this class of work i used to do mostly i don't do it as much by hand anymore so

what's the next thing i can do that's higher leverage that's that's rewarding to me i gotta say the code review thing is a pain in the butt someone's going to solve that problem though and i think what's going to happen is exactly what you just said jameson is that there there actually are huge classes of problems that are super important to solve and in my opinion really fun to solve but they're mostly in the product realm or in kind of the architecture realm and by architecture i mean like system design and fault tolerance and security and scalability and things like that but these are fun problems and you can't just like write a prompt to solve those problems you have to really think hard yeah and to me i love them i love those problems and then

the other realm is like product problems where you're like how are users going to experience this product and it turns out not everyone can do that well in fact i think people do that well are very very rare yeah and so as engineers i think we have this opportunity and yet the other thing i take hope in is that even though this we are in an awkward awkward moment of our industry it's awkward in so many ways first of all there's new bottlenecks like we spend so much time reading over ai slop code reviews like it's just such a pain i hate that qa has become a bottleneck as well for us design has become a bottleneck for us because engineers can crank out code so fast So we're in an awkward stage. And I think that you have to believe that given how fast AI has gotten to the point that it is now, I mean, I still remember very clearly November of 2022, when ChatGPT 3.5 launched with chat.openai.com.

and everyone was like, what the crap? And I felt like, wow, we just walked through a door and we're in a new world now. And that has been true. You know, we're now three and a half years into that world. We are just barely getting started. I think we're just barely figuring out what this stuff can do.

And so I think if you fast forward 12 to 24 months, our jobs are gonna be very different from what they are now. So this too shall pass. And I don't mean that we're going back to the old way, but I do mean that a lot of these problems will get solved because there is a ton of money on the table to solve them. And that is what moves the world in the tech industry.

I feel you though. I mean, I get nervous sometimes too because by luck, I happened on a career that paid very well and was very stable and somewhat prestigious depending on who you talk to. And writing software was a good time in from 2001 to 2025, we had a good run and it certainly changes a foot.

It feels like if I just want to put my head down and write really good code, it might be harder and harder to find people to pay me to do that over the next few decades. So I agree with you that it is both exciting and scary. It is scary. It really is. I guess you didn't directly say scary in your question, but I think that's some of it under the question.

It's there. It's scary and laborious and monotonous and painful, right? Yeah, and you used to have to throw away technical knowledge and learn new frameworks and learn new languages and you'd switch companies and be a different product domain. There was always new stuff, but it was more similar than this change is. Yes, yes. Going from iOS to writing PSQL, you could still squint, and that's in one set of work. It's like one category. yeah yeah that's a that's a chunk of the venn diagram i guess have we answered the question

i don't know if we've answered it i just i felt like we needed to commiserate with this question asker for a while just to say like yeah we feel you literally everybody that isn't actively working at a company selling ai coding tools is in the same boat though that's exactly right oh boy not building machines to build shovels to sell to the shovel to the to the miners yeah then yeah if you're just selling shovels then then you are thinking about the same question too yes yes and i think we're gonna we're gonna get a lot more questions about this but one thing that wasn't mentioned is all the hype and i kind of feel like the hype might be the worst part of this because not only is your job kind of turning into a more monotonous labor

intensive job in some ways but also you feel this constant pressure yeah to be like oh are you not using the new Claude Sessions feature so you could control your coding environment through Telegram. Like, what are you even doing? I'm like, that came out yesterday. It came out yesterday. Someone has already started selling a course on it.

Yes, exactly. They started vaguely tweeting about how their life as a developer and their process is totally different. They've achieved this new optimized thing. And if you ever go back and look at those people, most of them, they post a GitHub repo and it's like it's like a prompt hey i just wrote all of this yeah it's a read me and a prompt i'm

like you guys yeah you just tweeted a lot i am so i gotta okay i'm gonna rant i promise i'll keep this brief i am so sick of the twitter posts of people talking about how revolutionary this new workflow is and then other people retweeting that crap i'm just like first of all this is all ai slop second of all i know you aren't like actually getting the benefits you claim you are because i work in this every day and i have a team of like 30 engineers working in this every day and no and we're all using the same tools buddy it's not like you have some 50 million dollar llm that you trained in your basement like we know you don't have that technology so we've all got this and there are no magic prompts but and we're all working on it and and i gotta tell you you're

full of crap and i just i'm so tired of these these posts it actually makes me want to get just completely off the internet when i read this garbage yeah okay rant over apparently i had some heavy ones this podcast was started by a by a rant so was it really yeah wasn't it i feel like we've ranted about grumpiness about like career advice at one point and then we said well and we'll do a better job and then now we're here i remember our podcast charter being we have to do something until ai gets good enough to make our jobs suck and then we can stop obviously i remember yes 10 years ago we you know we started before we started the podcast in 2015 we said two years from now a paper called attention is all you need will be released and then seven years later i will

realize oh there's stuff people have been building things on top of this for many years and then yeah we knew yeah we knew it was coming we saw it clearly didn't want to freak you all out yeah why why dress rehearse tragedy isn't that what they say yeah yeah uh just to muddy the waters even more i totally agree there's tons of hype and i i feel the same disgust and also fear of like but what if it isn't and i am missing out yeah there also are regularly uh little drips of new advances that i find genuinely useful and helpful so part of the stress is like if it's all hype you just ignore it all and say someone 10 years from now will tell me what is good about this if it's all high quality you just pay attention to all of it but it's a mix there's

some great people that tweet great stuff there's some people that tweet only slop sometimes people the same people do both things and announce both things and try stuff out and yeah are very pumped about it and it's hard to evaluate whether it works or not so they genuinely believe this is great and then they realize later oh this wasn't as good but it is helpful to feel like you're a few months behind if you're trying to keep up with everything that that explodes your brain or mine at least yeah it's frantic yeah it is frantic it's worse than javascript fatigue certainly oh way worse the velocity is like 10x yeah i mean the yeah javascript fatigue was only front-end developers mostly and this is much bigger and it was like a new framework every like

i don't know year or something and you could actually count them all on two hands for the most part back then anyways we just talk about not yeah let's do that let's read our next question okay all right this one's for me right yep here we go this comes from an anonymous listener who says i am a senior team lead with 10 plus years of experience this is the first time i've had a teammate that clearly disrespects me i have a middle plus teammate who is technically perfectionistic and openly says i'm doing a poor job and that basically he doesn't see me as an authority oh oh my gosh he says i am not as devoted to technical excellency and improving the project as he is and that i ignore his opinions which is his term for not having the

same opinion about tech stuff as he does oh okay sorry this is crazy he doesn't see the big picture and thinks he's the only person on the team trying to make the code better but the worst part is he never admits he's wrong i had to scramble to fix a bug he created when he caught it right before release when sorry when we caught it right before release and he accused me of introducing it my manager knows what's going on but i feel terrible about it i i have many different projects and responsibilities i cannot be as devoted to the code base as he wants plus i am not the architect and nor should i be i see that it demotivates him like the person in the 499th episode i went back and read this question it was it was a junior who said like my seniors aren't

doing anything basically they don't leave code reviews they don't test their code they they produce crap okay and then he goes on to say only in this question i am the senior okay almost done i know my weaknesses and i am working on them i don't think i can address his feedback more than that i've always tried to maintain a good relationship with him and always give him the feed the freedom to work on tech stuff and develop his skills but what to do when your child has grown and is now unthankful thanks for your advice oh oh my gosh this is hard there's some disturbing music coming from their bedroom they come out and their hair's all weird you maybe glimpsed a tattoo peeking out from under their shirt sleeve oh man strange smells teenagers

are growing up. I like the he doesn't see the big picture part because I'm assuming that you as a senior team lead, you think a lot about business context and coordination with other projects and the timelines and trade-offs of polishing code more and being technically perfectionistic. And that's part of why you are more seniors

because often businesses will get more done and make more money if they think more about getting more done and making more money instead of just technical perfection. But I feel like I could squint and see a way where this person becomes a great developer. And maybe that's because I at one point was grumpy about mean old business people and thought I was technically perfectionistic and smarter than everybody around me. It was like a path, you know? Yeah. In part, I mean, even though some of this, and then i don't want to say that you're suggesting this but some of this is natural for people to get a little bit i don't know maybe not totally natural if you're really

passionate about software and really junior and don't know a lot i i feel like there's a common shape of like really strong opinions that aren't well vetted because you don't have a lot of experience and you like certainty and you think you're smarter than everybody you just got to crush his spirits and humble him and then he'll yeah i don't know it would suck to work with somebody that just thinks you do crappy work and doesn't understand why. Yeah, it would suck. I got to say, I have. I have. OK, can I can I confess something? Yeah, I have shared this on the show before this story, but it was a big wake up call for me. I was a well-intentioned but obnoxious young engineer and I was a bit of a know-it-all without meaning to be. I was just very excited

And I was also very high ownership. So when people would come in and like move my cheese, I would get kind of upset, especially. And I also have this problem. This has been a blessing and a curse, but I have a problem where I do not respect authority. Like I don't care if you are my boss. I'm going to critique you when you do something stupid. Now, I've seriously tempered this over the years, but about a little over 10 years ago, maybe more like 15 years ago, I had a boss and I was very disrespectful to him and I didn't realize it. and I was kind of like this guy in this question where, what did he say? Openly says I'm doing a

poor job and basically he doesn't see me as an authority. That's what the question asker said. That described me with my CTO at this company about 15 years ago. And what would happen would be like CTO would come in and voice an opinion or give direction, but I wasn't involved in the decision-making. And I would undermine him by saying things like, yeah, well, I'm going to talk to him about that because I don't think that's right. But I would say it to other people not to him. And rather than talking to him being like, hey, can we talk about what you've chosen here? I would just go and talk to others. And I think subconsciously, I was actually trying to undermine him and trying to establish myself as the dominant personality on the team, because I

really didn't want this guy in leadership to come in and mess with our stuff. So anyway, he pulled me aside one day and just as gently and lovingly as I could possibly imagine, gave me the feedback about what I was doing. And it was so gentle that it actually took me days to realize he was critiquing my behavior. He said to me, Dave, I want to tell you a story when I was much younger and you actually remind me of myself a little bit back then. And I'm like, that's like clue number one that I missed, right? Like that went right over my head. He was like, I undermined the authority of my boss at this company. And it was really harmful to the team because he lost credibility and i created a rift in the team and we had a hard time being productive as a result and i'm like wow

really really cool that you noticed that about yourself you know it's just so dumb and uh yeah literally like two or three days later i woke up in the middle of night and i just my mind flashed back to this conversation that i just described and i was like he was talking about me like now i get it and um this person needs that moment in his life he needs to understand that the team functions as a unit because of some of these structures that have been put in place and when he goes around just chopping these structures down it can be really harmful to the team now he might even be right like let's not let's not completely discount that yeah but the way in which he delivers that correct information can still mess up the team yeah

so if you can create a moment for him where he wakes up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat realizing that he's causing all this trouble that's what needs to happen you couldn't have been that obnoxious if you if you realized this and listened well well i mean later i figured it out later but what what did you do about it what what what was the outcome of that besides realizing he was talking about me did you go talk to him about it apologize change your behavior what what happened it's been so long i don't remember if i if i talked to him about it but i might have i'm i was all i'm also pretty i'm a pretty big joker at work so i might have stepped into his office and been like hey lauren remember that story oh crap i just revealed his name oh we can edit that

no it's fine he's awesome he he's nothing but great so anyway um whoops anyway i did i did stop in his office later i think and i was like hey remember that story you told me i just realized that was about me i'm gonna do better because i am i'm also a big people pleaser which is kind of a weird conflicting part of my personality that is yeah that's an interesting contradiction yeah weird right people pleaser except if you're my boss yeah exactly respect you then isn't that weird yeah i'm a little weird in that way anyway fascinating i i definitely changed i changed a lot and i'll tell you what happened not too long after that i did get into a formal management role and it just completely changed the way i see the world to be the one in charge there's such a difference

between critiquing the one in charge and being the one in charge i mean you feel this right james yeah it's like ronnie coleman says everybody wants to be a bodybuilder nobody wants to lift no heavy bleep weight and then you squat 800 pounds and scream lightweight baby if you're ronnie coleman actually 800 pounds are you freaking kidding me yeah yeah he he was mystery olympia like eight times in a row or something he was insane he was also a policeman so he would there's some pictures of him in a squad car with like i don't know 16 inch biceps or something like imagine that guy rolling up to your domestic dispute okay ronnie coleman could squat two of me while i'm doing my max squat i really like that way of breaking it down how many daves can you squat while he's doing

his max squat yes yes uh anyways now now to add that now that we have that helpful color yeah what do we do what's the advice here so you you have tried to be kind to him you have tried to let him work on tech stuff to develop his skills and he's repaying you by being mean and thinks you're bad at your job but i don't see here giving him feedback this meta feedback about hey you have really strong opinions but they're not always right and you need to be open to that and or hey i understand you really want the code to be as clean as possible we cannot always do that and when you push for it in this unhelpful way it actually makes it harder to work together as a team or yeah i'm trying to think of this pretty blunt and very short the goal is to have

the long inception style conversation that makes him wake up three days later and say wait a minute the message has reached me it has pierced my heart in a way that uh now it will change my life instead of uh just tell him don't do that and then he rolls his eyes because he already thinks you're bad at his job and doesn't respect you. Yeah, exactly. I have known people who are really good at sitting down face to face with someone and just delivering the most poignant, actionable feedback in such a way that they still feel like they're on your side. And it seems like most of the time they strategically deploy this feedback in the form of a question. I think they do two things one and they're both questions question number one is ask the person permission to share

with them something that i think will be really helpful but is a bit of a professional critique or feedback and then once permission is is granted their brain switches into a mode it's like a bit flips where it's like i can now accept the information that you're about to share because i just gave you authorization and then the second one the second question is is going to be situation dependent but the person i'm thinking of his name's ben fantastic leader he would sit down with people and say hey bob jake whoever this is why are other people on the team telling me that you're so difficult to work with you know things questions like that and um and it's it's like you give an you give an air of curiosity because you are genuinely curious about the

answer to this question and you have to be very like you have to be a master to do this well i've never actually tried it because i've watched him do it and i was like wow this is like leonardo da vinci levels of of craftsmanship here but i think if you can genuinely get to a place of curiosity to understand this person and then ask them why the way they are why they are the way they are or why they do the things they do yeah you might be able to at the same time make them realize what they're doing and also have them tell you something that helps you understand them better. It's been a while since we talked about the fundamental attribution error. I'll bring it back. This is some mere earth psychology. It's also been a while since we talked about our space

credentials. So psychology is a field that you need lots of studying to be good at and practice, much like law. And we don't want to get in trouble on earth. But we are experts in space psychology and space law, which is not licensed, coincidentally. We cannot get in trouble for practices there's no bar we will bring yeah yeah there's no bar to pat well there is a bar it's just in space yeah we have been there and we can't no you can't see the proof because it's also in space yeah you would have to get to space first and we can show you then yeah we left all the proof in space um shoot anyways not a psych not an earth psychologist but i believe the fundamental attribution error is basically you attribute your actions to your internal motivations but you only

see other people's behavior and then you kind of tell stories about their motivations actually now that i say that a lot i don't think that's what it is but it's something to that effect we'll never know well if only there was a way but there isn't my computer's already recording it couldn't possibly look up information yeah no that's too much to ask it's busy no and i i think your team member is doing this much like you probably are in many ways in other areas of your life but he's he's seeing stuff that you do and saying what a moron he isn't making good technical decisions he's pushing out crappy code for the business it's because he's bad and doesn't care and he's bad at his job yeah and it's not that it's you have other internal motivations

and pressures he's not aware of and trade-offs and skills and and you need to get him to understand that otherwise he will be a middle developer for a long time a middle plus he sounds hard to work with right like yeah this isn't someone you want to hand an important project to yeah and maybe that's part of the stick you can use like hey for you to grow in your career you need to understand there are it's there's more than just the purity of the and quality of the code yeah what do you think my what do you think i'm optimizing for it's not the quality of the code because you you know that you as you publicly accuse me of as yes as you have declared what what do you think my motivations are why why would i do this and they're just like i don't know besides i'm a

because you're an idiot yeah yeah yeah i don't know i don't know the right way to get that through to him and i'm sure someone who's responsible or dealing with me is having the exact same conversation about me right now like why would he how can i get him to see that i i don't know But actually, ironically, maybe you can put them in charge of a project. Say, good news, you're responsible for the successful delivery of this project. You will be susceptible to all of the business pressures and come see how it's done. Yep. Maybe. I like it. These are hard conversations to have, meaning they take courage to do. Yeah. And the reason they take courage is because people can respond badly to them. Yeah. And the success rate is pretty low. So if you try to talk to him about it and it doesn't go well, usually it doesn't change people's lives. That's the default. They say, that was a weird conversation. Back to criticizing my boss. But sometimes it works. Have we answered it?

I think so. This is definitely one for the record books. By which I mean, it's not unusual. It's not like a record-breaking situation. It's just that these people, you will encounter them over and over where they are causing all this pain and suffering but don't know.

Maybe they do know. Maybe they just want to watch the world burn. Yeah. Maybe they're right. I don't know. One last final change of opinion that I can sneak in before you get into the question. Yeah.

Maybe there are things you could get better at, but also he's not helping with that. saying you suck is not helpful so all right what can people do if they want their own questions answered dave go to soft skills.audio and publicly declare how much we suck by filling out our form you can just critique us yeah we're not even going to be there to defend ourselves so there's no harm to you no risk it's like a risk-free trial of venting all your frustration with us just type whatever you want in that form you're also welcome to tell us about work situations you want advice on that's i guess that's an option too but just go click on the ask a question button and then

you can vent everything you've ever wanted to vent right into that form yep all right thank you for listening we will catch you next week